The Day of the White-tailed Kite

I just circled today's date in the calendar and named it The Day of the White-tailed Kite. This truly amazing bird was spotted at least a thousand miles from home, in Stratford Point -- the first documented sighting in Connecticut, and one of the only times it's been seen in all of New England. Who knows how or why this bird arrived, or how long it will stay -- it's normally found in Florida and the Gulf states, or on the West Coast and in some Southwestern states. It perched in a tree in the meadow, flew sorties around the point, and hovered searching for mammal snacks, looking to my eyes like some kind of predator angel.

These photos are by Frank Gallo, director of the Connecticut Audubon Society's Coastal Center at Milford Point -- a man who runs like the wind when there is a rare bird to be snapped.

The calls went out, the crowd soon gathered.

Things I am grateful for today

The drab little brown female House Sparrow I just saw having a dust bath that could only be described as gleeful. / That there was a local family so generous that a hundred years ago they donated a tract of land near my apartment as a bird refuge. / The fact that robins sound like flutes, and are everywhere. / That there are people who care about baby birds that have fallen out of trees. / Northern Cardinals providing a vivid flash of red in the garden when you least expect it. / That Chickadees and Titmice always seem to go together as a package deal. / And that I just had to stop at an intersection in the middle of downtown to let geese cross the road.

(Drawing of female House Sparrow by Wilhelm von Wright, 1810 - 1887) 

Home

Imagine if any treetop could be your home. The migratory songbirds flying all night on fast-beating wings are citizens of the treetops. The Canada Warbler I see on a wooded path beside a harbor on the Connecticut shoreline is just stopping over on its long journey from South America. We have chopped down so many trees that this bird is lucky to have found the habitat it needs. And yet for this moment in time, maybe just this one day, this patch of woods is home, the place where you eat and rest and simply live. The bird is alive in this moment, thoroughly inhabiting the space, its own feathery body, and this moment. Imagine if every room you walked into could feel like home. If you could carry home with you, inside your skin. If every moment you were truly alive, not constructing elaborate plans in your mind about your next footstep, but knowing that instinct will lead you to where you need to go.

Pic: National Geographic, Vol. 31, 1917

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.