One of these things is not like the other

We have a new visitor in Milford harbor -- a Pied-billed Grebe. After four years of walking by the harbor every day, you just don't expect to see something different, but there it was all of a sudden a couple of weeks ago. Boink. It popped up from under the water, looking like a rubber ducky compared to the Mallards. And it's stayed around. Now that the weather's getting cold, it's sidling up to the Mallards, coasting along with them. You would think that it might try to do its best to just get along with everyone -- but no, not only is it trying to be a duck, it's trying to be the alpha duck. I saw the cheeky bugger lean forward and bite a female Mallard on the tail, seemingly just for the hell of it, and then dive immediately under the water, leaving just a ripple -- and a confused Mallard turning to look behind her -- in its wake. It was such a soft, fuzzy, fog-advisory Milford day, everything just looked like a Turner painting.

Spot the dinky little interloper

Cue "Jaws" music -- going in for the tail bite

Who? A grebe? You crazy.

Mallards really are beautiful.

What bird are you?

Ruby-crowned Kinglet
by Dan Pancamo
via Wikimedia Commons

You can tell a lot about a person by their favorite bird. I just might start up a birders' dating agency, my algorithm centered on one question, "What is your favorite bird?" There are the bold-hearted Chickadee people, taking on all comers, big or small. The Great Egret, graceful, composed, deliberate in its actions. There are the Starlings, garrulous and social. Belligerent, possessive hummingbirds.

(Yes, I am totally anthropomorphizing. I think part of what makes birds so appealing is that they are like a canvas on which we can project human qualities, while we're simultaneously in awe of their avian, distinctly nonhuman, abilities.)

Soon after moving to Connecticut -- my first fall, colder than any winter I'd ever known -- I was living in a quaint, well-to-do New England town like a postcard that had been breathed into life. My apartment was above that of the only drug addicts in town, so there were raids and my address made it into the local paper's police blotter every second week -- but on the plus side, for a couple of weeks in fall the tree outside the living room window became like the best type of Christmas tree: one decorated with Ruby-crowned and Golden-crowned Kinglets.

The Ruby-crowned instantly became my favorite bird -- it was something about their incessant flitting and wing flicking and their eye ring, so much like the Silvereyes I loved when I was a child. It was something about the way they look both hearty and vulnerable.

I was sitting in the living room one day when -- thunk! -- what looked like a squash ball bounced off my second-floor window. Kids playing, I thought. But then I thought, what if it was a bird? I ran downstairs, and there was a Ruby-crowned Kinglet, dead, on the ground beneath the window. I was about to walk away, feeling a little shaken, when I thought, "What if it just looks dead? Would it hurt if I at least tried to warm it up, just in case?" The wind was howling and the sun was close to setting, and if it wasn't already dead, it probably would be soon. So I bent down and picked up the stiff bird. It didn't appear to be breathing. I sat on the ground, enclosing it in both hands, and I felt scratchy and irritable and sad. There always seemed to be a truck idling loudly out front of the downstairs neighbors, and yes, there it was, churning exhaust in my direction as little baggies and cash were exchanged through the window. For some reason, that damn truck and the little baggies and the cash were what tipped me over the edge and made me feel weepy holding my window-crash victim.

And then I felt a slight movement against my palms. The bird was breathing! It began to stir, so I opened up my hands. It looked up at me; I looked down at it. A tiny, dull olive-green bird. At that time of year in Connecticut, people often walk past a whole flock working the undergrowth -- flitting from branch to branch, catching insects -- and don't even realize they are there. They're unobtrusive; they live their life on the down low. You barely see the male's ruby crown unless another bird really presses his buttons . . . and then appears flash of crimson, a tiny feather flag of agitation that pops up. That's when you know that there was something dramatic lurking beneath all along.

This bird hopped up my arm, so light I could barely feel it. It's legs were thinner than toothpicks. It sat on my shoulder for a minute to two, catching the last remaining rays of sun and gathering its wits, and then it called once in my ear -- jit jit -- and was off on the wing, back to the tree to rejoin the flock.

There was a Ruby-crowned Kinglet here,
about a millisecond before I hit the shutter -- honest.

And here.

Oh, and here.

Things I am grateful for today

• Autumn air, which smells of sunshine and dry leaves and dreams deliciously dissolving into memory.
• Seed pods scattered all over the sidewalk, which crunch under your every footstep and crackle in a way that makes you feel like a child again.
• A fish crow making the weirdest mewling sound, so that I looked under a hedge for the kitten that must be there, then around the corner for the mother that must surely be pushing a baby on their afternoon walk, and then finally at the roof line above, and the crow looking down at me, making this soft, plaintive sound.
• Three young yellow-crowned night-herons that swooped into a part of the harbor I have never seen them in before, silent and gray like stealth warplanes.
• Funky Duck, the mind-bending hybrid of mallard and who knows what else, still bobbing around with the mallards as you did all summer, somehow fitting in with them though you are double the size and have those crazy white spectacles.
• An osprey standing in the shallows bathing and drinking as though it were on holiday from the swooping diving flapping fish-snatching hawk life, staying there so long that I began to rehearse in my head the phone call to a wildlife rescue service about this injured, defenseless osprey stuck in Milford harbor.
• The man at the dock who didn't make me feel like a fool when, thinking I was all alone, I laughed out loud as the osprey shook like a dog and took off, then shimmied mid-air, realizing the job of shaking off those droplets wasn't as complete as it had thought -- clumsy and awesome all at once.

Serpentine bird

Everywhere you look on the Daintree River are sinuous lines, no straight edges. Mangrove roots and trees and vines tangle together. Green tree snakes tangle themselves around branches like tiny garden hoses. And the Great-billed Heron has a neck like a serpent, with a life of its own.

Great-billed Heron, Daintree River, Queensland, Australia

This is Australia's biggest heron, and then its bill is over-sized in proportion to the rest of its body. Shy, skulky birds, they lurk, standing like statues, waiting to stab passing fish.

We had all but given up hope of seeing this bird after a couple of hours on the river. We'd had Wompoo Fruit Dove making their spooky wollocky-wom-pooo call, Papuan Frogmouth so much like tree bark, Little Kingfisher flitting, impossible to photograph. But no Great-billed Heron, until in the gathering gloom, what seemed like one of the muddy, twisted tree roots unfurled great wings.

The photos I took where you can see the bird in all its plumage somehow don't capture the essence of the bird. Sometimes truth gets lost in the details. It's in silhouette that you can see its Great-billed Heron-ness. That gigantic bill, that snaky neck, the predator crouching like a cat.

Sunset, Daintree River, Queensland, Australia

Egrets, I've had a few...

The whole time I was in Far North Queensland, the lyrics from The Go-Betweens "Cattle and Cane" kept running through my head in a loop. Coming from Brisbane, I especially loved that band because in the '80s who else sung about being in our corner of Australia?

I recall a schoolboy coming home
Through fields of cane
To a house of tin and timber
And in the sky
A rain of falling cinders

I was scared even of fireworks when I was little, yet I remember the sight of a whole cane field ablaze by the side of the road when I was on holidays seeming awesome and cool, not frightening.

The railroad takes him home
Through fields of cattle
Through fields of cane

Home. It was weird being back in Queensland, because it at once felt so normal -- as normal as the sight of my own hands and feet -- and so exotic. Trees that look like roots and vines that look like trees, not worrying all that much when it's red-bellied black snake that crosses your path because at least it isn't a brown or a taipan or a tiger snake, having to brake in the middle of a winding road for Brahman cattle that look like they just wandered off a Delhi street, and the Cattle Egrets that follow them everywhere, eating the bugs the cattle kick up in their wake.

 

This species is expanding everywhere in the world that land is being turned over for grazing. They came to Australia from Asia, and multiplied like crazy. Their huge numbers in Far North Queensland are a sign that the ecosystem is out of balance, that too many trees have been cut down for hamburgers -- yet even environmental mistakes can make a beautiful sight. The egrets fly in great numbers down the Daintree River each night to roost. I can't blame them. When I think of true stillness and peace, I think of the Daintree River. (Well, I think of those things and giant crocodiles.)

Rainbow Bee-eater

The thing I love most about watching birds is that exciting moment of confusion as the eyes and brain try to make sense of a random flash of color, to resolve it into something knowable. A burst of blue-green from the corner of my eye; we're near a pond; this is Far North Queensland, Australia. A kingfisher? No. Brain flips rapidly through the rest of its files . . . images remembered from a field guide . . . Rainbow Bee-eater!

Rainbow Bee-eater, Centenary Lakes, Cairns, Australia

These are not rare birds, but they were to me, as somehow I had never seen one before. For twenty minutes or so, Frank and I watched as it flew precise sorties, to pluck dragonflies from the air and return to its perch to dash the insects against a branch before gulping them down. It was gorging itself. So many dragonflies were meeting their doom that I lost count. It seemed the bird couldn't possibly fit anymore in its tiny stomach, yet somehow it kept going.

At first glance, the bee-eater is like a gorgeous piece of jewelry, a decorative folly of iridescence and tail streamers. But to an insect, it's a killing machine. Beneath all that finery is a nervous system wired to hunt. This bird sat on its perch in a state of complete alertness, scanning for any movement, and it almost never missed its target, many metres away in midair and invisible to my weak human eyes.

I love this bird's name. Rainbow Bee-eater, Rainbow Bee-eater, Rainbow Bee-eater. So improbable sounding. Yet for once, this bird has a name that actually makes sense (shock!) as it does eat bees. It eats wasps, too. It rubs them against branches to get rid of the stingers and venom glands.

Nature Conservancy Digital Photo Competition

I wish I could take a photo like this. For that matter, I wish I could have even been there just to see this.

Northern Saw-whet Owl; Megan Lorenz/2010 Nature Conservancy Photo Contest Runner Up

And this.

Great Egret; Graham F. Owen/2010 Nature Conservancy Photo Contest Runner Up

These are two of the runners-up from last year's Nature Conservancy Digital Photo Competition. You have until September 12 to enter this year's competition. This is what the folks at TNC say:

The Nature Conservancy is holding its 6th Annual Digital Photo Competition. This year, it's easier than ever to enter using your Facebook log-in info - http://photocontest.nature.org/ or through The Nature Conservancy's Flickr Group - http://my.nature.org/photography/flickr.html.

Original digital photos that feature the natural wonders of the lands, waters, plants, animals and people around the world are all eligible for the competition.

This year at least 35 photos will be selected as honorable mentions and finalists, and our online community will vote for their favorite images to determine the winners. The grand prize winner will be featured on the cover of the 2013 Nature Conservancy calendar. Proceeds from calendar sales help support our many programs to protect wildlife and their habitats.

Photographers will retain the rights to all their submissions. This competition is open to all photographers age 18 years or older regardless of residence or citizenship, as long as the laws of their jurisdiction allow participation. You can find more details at http://my.nature.org/photography/rules.html. Photo submissions must be uploaded by 11:59 pm PST Monday, September 12, 2011.

The Nature Conservancy do some pretty incredible things. I love the fact that they are starting to grasp that urban nature is important, not just majestic mountainsides and forests. And this story about how a teenage boy went from being in a homeless shelter to doing environmental work in the Ecuadorean Andes was so compelling that I had to borrow the TNC magazine from my therapist's waiting room. (I'm returning it next week . . . oh, and subscribing to the magazine . . .)