Voices in the green

Spring brings on a kind of fever. People here in Connecticut are transformed. The many months of hunkering down and being solitary are a hazy dream. People have started saying hello in the street again. And smiling. Actually smiling. The nature reserve in my neighborhood is overflowing with baby squirrels. Squirrelets. Warblers are zigzagging out of the tops of the oak trees like so much popcorn. Baltimore Orioles are singing their bell-like song and appearing in the top branches like yellow-orange flames. Thrushes are creeping in the undergrowth. Catbirds are chortling and chattering and just plain showing off. They are such born performers. They don't flit away; if anything, it's almost as though they dance a little closer to soak up all the attention.

The sounds of the migrant songbirds overwhelm my brain. I try to keep track of the buzzy trills, the ethereal swishy songs, but they come from all directions -- and now that the trees have leafed out, there is just so much green. This time last year my mate spotted a Blackburnian warbler in this park and showed it to me. It's a tiny firey orange and black bird, and seeing it made me gasp, so incongruous and unexpected those colors were amidst the leaves. I want to see that bird again. I want to get that rush again. It's my drug.

Today, my mate, who has ears like a cat, picked out a Blackburnian's ear-splittingly high-pitched yet thin voice out from everything else. At last, I would see it again! The call was coming from that tree, that great big oak tree. I stealth-rushed to it; I stared up. I bobbed and weaved to look through branches. No, wait, was the sound really coming from that other tree? Creep, creep, creep . . . wait, that tree . . . It became a kind of madness. It was up there somewhere singing and singing. I had to see it. But I would never see it. Just green, a wall of green. Bless that little Blackburnian up there doing its thing, gracefully failing to cooperate with my desires.

Spontaneous combustion!

For the friends who read yesterday's blog (and actually made it at least halfway through*), I have to note with great excitement that spontaneous combustion made the news today. No, not the News of the World, but an actual real news outlet, the BBC. And I am doubly excited because there is an Australian connection: A bloke in Warrnambool worked up so much static electricity on his way to a job interview that he caused a fire in the office building and one of the firies (that's "firemen" to those unfamiliar with the Australian passion for taking the gravitas out of every possible word) mused that he was carrying such an electrical charge that he could've . . . spontaneously combusted. Awesome! (I am ten years old again.) The question I am now left with is: Did he get the job or not?

*Yay, someone made it at least halfway through!

Ugly/beauty

There is so much beauty to be had in even the most repulsive surroundings. Nothing is ever all ugly. The most exotic, the most gorgeous birds could care less that they're standing in a post-apocalyptic-looking hellhole. Actually, it seems to be that the places that are the grossest and most disgusting to human beings provide a bounty for birds. I have watched ducks in wasterwater treatment plants. Pond weed doesn't get this green without a reason.

I have gazed upon birdlife at the dump in New Haven. The furry outline left behind by a dead deer, seemingly melted into the ground--or perhaps spontaneously combusted, a possibility I was strangely obsessed with as a child--was just an added bonus.

I have stumbled through a desolate patch of dead frozen cabbages in the depths of winter looking for interesting sparrows. Well, for any sign of life, really.

On Nantucket Island, people stroll along the quaint cobblestone streets shopping and having Herman Melville fantasies. They miss out on the garbage dump, possibly the stinkiest and most toxic garbage dump I've ever experienced. Really disturbing-colored stuff was seeping up onto your shoes out of the silty mud everywhere you walked. And they apparently have a lot of explosives to dispose of on Nantucket.

The past Sunday found me at Sandy Point, by the harbor at New Haven, on the sand and mud right next to the sewage treatment plant. Apparently it's a good place to find shorebirds.

I've read about medieval notions of medicine and how doctors used to think that diseases were caused by miasmas, or nasty vapors in the air. And walking out along that sandy point and breathing in little sips of air, as if that would somehow save me from the foul stench, I truly grasped how they made that connection. I didn't have my camera. Try to imagine that you are about to direct a movie set in a post-nuclear landscape and are on a quest to find the ideal location, and then you go to bed and you dream of the perfect location.

This day there was little except for the usual parade of gulls, an armada of Mute Swans, and about six American Oystercatchers. I love those little black and white and vermilion fellows with their crazy long bills for winkling molluscs out of their shells. But I could go somewhere scenic to see those.

Then, while trudging back to the car, there was a plum-colored blue blob standing on the sand. A Great Blue Heron--no, it was a Tri-colored Heron. I had never seen one of those. That's because you don't, apparently, ever see many of them here. I think I actually gasped. It was the most elegant, graceful, improbably plumaged creature you could possibly hope to see while attempting not to gag because of a pesilential miasma. Utter anthropomorphizing on my part, but to me it looked like it was all dressed up for a formal dinner dance. Ready for the breeding season with a sweeping swatch of white plumage at the back of the neck. The three colors so subtle in the late-afternoon light: soft  blue, creamy white like good vanilla ice cream, and a reddish blush on the neck. It was to be but a fleeting flash of beauty. Up it rose on its chopstick-legs, and it was gone--briefly mobbed by gulls as it departed--out to roost somewhere for the night.

Photograph taken by Dori, Wikimedia Commons

Ten minutes in the park

It's spring! Ten minutes in the park this morning: The Red-winged Blackbirds are back, conkareeeeee. Robins are cheerily-cheery-upping. White-throated Sparrows are singing in their quavering little voices like something from an old dusty record. Cardinals, Northern Flickers, Downy Woodpeckers, screaming Bluejays. A Cormorant flying fast and low to the water. The squirrels are running around everywhere like crazy, chasing, fighting, clutching acorns. And there was a Red-tailed Hawk high in a tree, quitely devouring one squirrel that didn't run quite fast enough today.

In praise of the ordinary

Planning is overrated. I had plans to go out this weekend with my new little audio recorder to try to capture the sound of spring: the first Red-winged Blackbird that has returned to Milford harbor and has been down there in the reeds calling, calling, calling. He'd come back to crystal blue skies and gradually warming days, and his calls had filled me with such joy because they mean change and growth and color will be here any day now.

So of course when I planned to go out and try to record him, we were slammed with a wall of weather: 36 hours of unrelenting rain and brutal gales that left a few people dead, their cars crushed by trees. I would give you a listen to what the tempest sounded like from my porch, except that I can't get this damn thing to upload the file. Imagine the inside of Mawson's hut in Antarctica.

I finally ventured out this afternoon when it had calmed, but all the birds had very wisely cleared out. Except a pair of Mallards--there's always a pair of Mallards. Oh, and a shrubful of House Sparrows--there'll be House Sparrows at Armageddon.

Bored after being cooped up so long, I went for a drive to West Haven--and there they were, the birds. (Suddenly the name of the place made sense.) It wasn't the kind of birding that takes your breath away because you see something rare. It was just all the usual suspects there, as far as I could tell.

Except for a funny-looking goose. My point-and-shoot camera doesn't do this lovely goose justice. It was just majestic looking, to my eye. I watched it for ages, mesmerized by the soft caramel-colored patterns on its neck, the white blush on its face and rings around its eyes. This was no goose I had seen before . . . but no, it wasn't some rare find. It was a hybrid. A mishmash. A mixture of a Canada goose (they mostly inspire a yawn or a curse but little else) and just a plain old domestic goose, I'm guessing.

But to me it was just gorgeous, as astounding as any rare or noteworthy goose I might have hoped to find with my binoculars. Just the product of ordinary goose genes. Just an ordinary goose. Long live the ordinary!

Fantasy birds

Things have been so gray of late. Interminable dark skies, frozen earth. It is a lonely, hard kind of a winter this one. The economy is still miserable no matter what the statistics say; my health insurance premium just tripled, which makes the petty sniping in Congress even harder to stomach. But I escaped last week. I was in Guatemala, a country as beautifully strange as its name.

And there at last I found my fantasy birds, all living amongst lush green fleshy plants, on rich volcanic slopes. Often I couldn't even see them, but only hear them calling to one another from deep within the greenness and the mist. Emerald Toucanets barking like dogs. Long-tailed Manikins that sounded like the sweetest clearest bells. Violaceous trogons doing a hollow haunting staccato sound.

My eyes found it hard to adjust to all that green life after being so accustomed to fields of white and bare twigs against a flat gray sky. But when I did catch a glimpse of one of these birds, it took my breath away.

Greens, turquoises reds, oranges, and yellows so rich and lustrous it didn't seem possible. Outlandish crests, extravagant trailing tails. Bright flashes of surreal shapes and hues flitting through the leaves so that at first I thought I had imagined them, dreamed them while awake.

I usually find it frustrating when I go birding and hear birds calling but can't find them, or when other people see a bird and I can't. But here, with an orchestra of bird calls all around me, big old trees, tangling vines, and the promise of seeing a flash of color and wing at any moment, I just didn't care. It was all beauty. And it was a source of joy knowing that I would never see some of the incredible birds that I could hear calling from behind towering stands of bamboo or across the other side of a densely forested valley. Here were the birds of my dreams living out their lives in secret. This was their kingdom.

Snow tree

My favorite tree, look at you now.

Will there ever be birds on your branches again?

Seems impossible.

But then, the silence of the snow is beautiful.