Sharp-shinned Hunter

My, what sharp shins you have. Note a fortuitous blade of grass for comparison.

In the wilds of,...my front yard, the hunter became the hunted. Cliche, but true, all conveniently presented on a grassy lawn with no obstruction, and anough time to grab my camera.

I was just arriving home, when I heard a violent screeking, and looked over to see a small hawk pinning a starling to the ground by my doorstep. In no mood to share her prey, she flew over to the neighbor's yard, where it became evident that this was one starling no longer singing its foreign songs, and the racket was the hawk's victory chant.

Mine! Mine! Mine!

"She?" Probably, based on the word of the Fish and Wildlife biologist who I sent these photos to. Juvenile, perhaps. Smaller than a Coopers, which would make it a Sharp Shinned Hawk in these parts. A native culling a flock of invasives. One down, thousands to go.

Hawk struck starling a few times for good measure, but was not really eating it. More of a dance: lowering its wings over the kill, flipping it's tail up, turning, stamping. And screaming all the while. She kept an eye on me lest I look too hungry, but kept it up for 66 seconds (thanks, digital camera for the time-keeping) before...

No bird for you, alien feline.

This is just one of the neighborhood cats (the ferals mostly fall to coyotes, I think), but to watch it come in, fast and low, ready for a pounce after the run, was to see the hunter that lives in most house-cats. It came out of nowhere (OK, probably the alley behind me), answering the dinner call. Was it like me, thinking it heard a bird in distress? Or have the cats learned the hawk's "I killed a freakin' starling!" song? This unwild-cat was probably not ready to hunt the hunter, but would steal a starling if it could.

This time, it could not. But it did make me wonder about how this works out on the big scale. I mean, a huge flock of starlings in the fairly open setting of single family homes placed at about 8 to the acre in 1950 may (despite their European roots and havoc wrought on native birds) be a boon to the bird-hunting hawk. But how many times does the native raptor make a kill only to have it taken away by a cat? Or, how much of a hawk's time is spent eluding pets hungry for yet another hand-out? The massive toll of cats directly killing wild birds has only recenltly become clear (billions, by the way, if not billions and billions), but what about the effects of harrassment and competition on native predators?

Late arrival, eating nothing.

Off on a tangent, as usual. But in deference to the internet (for once), I did want to post some cat photos, and also to rant about something. Maybe cats have little or no effect on hawks' well-being, and although it could be said that the human tendency to clear forest, erect power-pole perches, and attract rodents (and scads of starlings) could benefit some raptors, our net effect is not so kind, what with overall habitat loss and diminishment of the native prey to which they adapted since time immemorial. Our footprint stomps out more native species than the cats, and after all, they would not be here without us, or hera and feral without our cavalier neglect.

Hopefully, by now, nobody is even reading this post. The hawk-photos were the point. The cat-blogging? Not so much.

Mission Creek, Flowing Again

Once upon a time, Mission Creek (or whatever its name was then), flowed into the Sound just north of Olympia Town. Then some people bridged it, and then some other people dammed it, making a sluice-gate where they could capture the salmon foolish enough to enter.

Then, decades later, some other other people got funding to remove the dam, to open Mission Creek once again to Budd Inlet and the Puget Sound.

Inland finally flowing into Budd Inlet

This is "restoration," which earns its quotation marks because it follows not the historically  or archaeologically or LiDARly documented channel, but instead an engineer's plan. Doing so meant digging into an archaeological site, which had been written off by archaeocrats as less-than-significant. (As it happens, some of that site was salvaged, as described here under the keyword "Mission Creek".)

You're looking at high tide, not stream flow.

So now the stream flows free,...at least as far as East Bay Drive. Maybe the beautiful shell beach will persist, or maybe not. Restoration is a guess what used to be, and a gamble on its return. Contractors get surveyors to show them where the 3:1 slope gives way to the 1:1, and work accordingly. One entity satisfies a mitigation requirement, another satisfies grant requirements, and another gets a truckload of archaeological data. But now the machines are gone; the work is done and paperwork is being wrapped up. Tides and waves, rains and freshets will get to work, re-sculpting this artificial natural estuary.

The end result may not be exactly what was there before, but it's a heck of a lot better than the dam and culvert that blocked Mission Creek until a month ago. There's a free-flowing connection to Budd Inlet instead of a 3-foot concrete tube--creatures will find it much easier to drift, swim, and crawl in and out of the estuary.

Eagle in Flight

American Eagle, Carefully Skirting Canadian Airspace

There are plenty of eagles in the Northwest, but seeing them hasn't grown dull. Instead, ubiquity makes it easier to appreciate the uniqueness of some encounters. Rather than a generic "I saw an eagle!" exclamations, stories emerge. A pair of eagles having conversation in their surprisingly little-bird voices. One hunting bird, hovering and eyeing a fish I could not see. The shrieking cacaphony of a gull flock as a massive eagle dove in an nabbed one of their cousins. The slacker eagle on a pile of gravel at a port, doing nothing in particular for as long as I could stand to watch.

I really like watching them fly. Even from a great distance, when size is hard to guage and the bird is nothing but black silhouette, the strength is evident. Neither as the crow flies, nor as the heron slowly flaps. A few times, I've seen them carrying fish. After capture and liftoff, they tend to grab the fish with one talon in front of the other, orienting the fish fore and aft in a streamlined grasp.

Usually, the eagle is too far off or too long gone by the time I get out the camera (just missed getting one passing 40 feet overhead last week). But a few weeks ago on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I got the shot above. It had something, but not the usual fish grasp. I viewed the shot, zoomed way in, and saw this:

 

Un-lucky duck.

Alligator Lizard

A few times this year, I worked at a place where Alligator Lizards were a common sight. For an instant, anyway, until they saw me and darted for cover. Then one day there was one that just sat there watching me, and even let me lean in close for a photo or three. Watching wildlife watch me is becoming one of my favorite pastimes.

I won't write about them as if I knew any more than anyone else can find online. I don't even know which species this one is. But I do have these photos.

Tidewalker 2013

Remains of an old fish trap in Squaxin country.

In a week or so, there will be another few days of fairly low tides, but already the minus-3's are a memory. I didn't get out for as many as I had hoped this summer, but I did manage to explore in Birch Bay on Memorial Day, to train some people in the extreme south Sound the next month, and spend another day on another bay in the north Sound.

Clamming near Chimacum

While everyone else is out clamming, I'm wandering around looking for fire-cracked rocks and fishtraps. Some of them tend to be suspicious: a guy in an orange safter vest, taking notes and shooting photos, not digging clams. Must be a game warden or regulator or something. But if I don't approach and ask to count their haul, or if I make small talk and then move on, they just think it's weird, an incredible waste of time. I'll admit that there are times when I'm walking by siphon after squirty siphon, leaving tasty clams in the mud, getting nothing but wet.

Following the clammers is a good strategy for tidewalking archaeologists, though. They dig holes and turn up the sediment, giving me a view. It's a less controlled version of the "shovel probes" that provide the bulk of archaeological subsurface data. From our chats, I often learn about what shellfish do well at a spot (a proxy view of traditional subsistence), and sometimes hear about artifacts people have found while digging the intertidal. Seeing the number and extent of holes from any given low-tide day also helps put in perspective on what an "intact" archaeological deposit is below the high water mark.

Fertility in Lummi Land

Truth is, I don't find a lot of archaeology doing this (although finding the occasional fish trap more than makes up for the usual monotony). Plenty of other things--like this mass of eggs stuck to a rock, or the Van Gogh swirl of eelgrass, or a boulder coated with colossal barnacles--plenty of amazing sights distract me from the lack of sites. A day hitched to the rythm of the tide, timing a walk to skirt the furthest reach at the lowest of ebb, movinng ahead of the flow and covering as much ground as I can, a day in synch like that can be deeply satisfying. Some days, the water is reflecting blue sky, and others everything is a cold metal grey; both have their appeal. Even when a cold rain pelts, I know that in an hour or three, the tide will push me back, I'll get in a warm dry truck, and drive back to a hot shower.

The other time of deep low tides, in the middle of the night in the middle of the Winter, is dark enough that I can rationalize not going out to archaeologize. I make no claim to being anything other than a fair weather tidewalker. Other than flaunting the small chance that one day I'll wander into some mud and get stuck as the tide comes in, there's not much swash or buckle to it. Mostly, there is no excitement, but some day I'll find an amazing artifact, and the few fish traps that have revealed themselves when the tide lays low have been professional reward enough. Someday, though, I may need to bring a bucket and come home with some clams...

It's the Water(shed)

Thanks to stevenl on olyblog for posting this down-Deschutes shot. He thinks the postcard dates to the mid-1970s, a time when the Olympia Brewing Company still ran strong, and was so proud of it's beige industrial sprawl they issued this image, rather than the charming old brick building.

Olympia's motto, of course, was "It's the Water," and we do have great water, our artesian wells are famous, delicious, and clean. But surface water is an other story, a sad one, as this shot illustrates.

In the foreground, the Deshutes River, in summertime flaccid flow. Could just be a dead-calm day, but I feel like there's an oil sheen. Maybe not.

As far as the river is visible, the brewery takes up the right bank. Since I'm too lazy to track it down, I don't know what they may have flushed into the river as part of normal operations, but up until about the date of this postcard, when Dick Nixon signed the Clean Water Act (what a liberal!), people and corporations did dump all kinds of things in the water. All this view shows is a treeless bank and acres of impervious surface, which when the rain kicks in will dump huge amounts of runoff compared to what the natural watershed would have, not to mention the sediment, railway grime, and other trappings of civilization.

Which the river then delivers to,...Wait, I cannot see. It disappears on the other side of the Capital Boulevard bridge, past more brewery buildings, over the spillway...I mean Falls, and finally past the old brew house, Olympia's most famous ruin. There's a park on the other bank now, and the old brewery is abandoned. You can kid yourself into thinking it's returning to nature as long as you deafen yourself to the I-5 din.

But really, the Deschutes is about to empty into Capitol Lake. Or, as stevenl calls it, the Fetid Lake Of Doom, or FLOD. Flotsam and sediment from the watershed settle out here. In fact, the muck contains the remains of Little Hollywood (Olympia's Depression-era Hoovertown), and before that a literally marginalized Chinese community, I think. The artificial lake relies on a dam that transformed the original estuary into a pond (yep, the reflection of capitol and trees sure is pretty) with a sluice being the only way out. So the estuary gets buried and eutrophies (yep, the low tides and summer algae blooms sure are ugly).

The postcard more or less hides The Isthmus, site of many a battle in this millenium. Positions on Isthmus development cause the city council to change, parts of it were Occupied, it is home to Olympia's second most famous ruin: the Mistake on the Lake. Walk around the lake, and you'll see signs explaining various positions in the Debate of the Lake: dredge it, restore the estuary, do nothing...There is no sign saying "Isthmus be Hell."

Meanwhile, the lake keeps filling with muck, and the water keeps flowing into Budd Inlet. The head of Budd is divided into West Bay, which is where the Deschutes comes in, and East Bay, which is where a culvert let's loose what's left of Indian and Moxlie Creeks. Most of the city between East and West is built on dredging spoils and fill.

West Bay is undergoing a transformation these days, as the buildings and piers of yesteryear's manufacturing concerns disappear. Some of it is undergoing restoration, as far as a railway embankment can be restored to a natural state. But people are not about to abandon the waterfront entirely, ceding it to nature. So pockets of "beach nourishment" gravel and chained-down "large woody debris" have to coexist with armored shorelines in a state that I will now call Percivaltory, after Percival's Landing on the waterfront.

In the postcard, it looks like there may be log booms in the bay. No more, although the POO (Port Of Olympia) is hopping, putting trucked-in logs on trans-Pacific ships. The watershed's wood (state timber excepted) flows all the way to China.

Nevermore

Corvidae are pointellism-resitant

I posted this shot, unaltered, earlier, somewhere. That day, a family of crows were pecking at the Virginia piedmont clay, reddening their beaks toward some unkown end. Cranking up the saturation on this shot makes it both more magical and real. I like the way the crow holds it's form while the leaves blottify. The leaves come and go, but the crow sticks around, her young and then his perching and pecking through woods dancing from growth to decay and back.

Ravens don't like having their photos taken, so I got no nevermore. The evermore of the common crow is enough for a non-poet, dirt-digger, woods-walker.

Camas Fields Forever

For two weeks in a row, I've been blessed with fieldwork in a sublime Cascadian meadow. This last time, I encountered other western Washington folks who'd made the trip top see the legendary camas bloom--the place is so famed for this blue lily that it's common name is Camasland. Last week was the time to see the bloom at its peak, when the flowers are so thick that swaths of meadows turn blue; I offer these photos (which are pathetic  stand-ins for the real scene) to those who missed the day. Explorer accounts back to Lewis and Clark speak of camas meadows that appeared to be lakes, although to my own eye (connected to a mind that demands less sense) the biggest areas of camas looked like pools of sky, complete with fluffy white clouds of American Bistort.

Camas is just the best known of many plants in this meadow that are important to native people. This meadow is a treasure to the Wenatchi and other tribes that came here generation after generation, congregating in large numbers to harvest the roots, socialize, and later light the fires that kept the meadow from reverting to forest.  The soil is black from thousands of fires, dark rich testament to centuries and millenia of tending to this special island of meadow in the Cacadian treed terrain.

While the blue may look more like sky than water to me, the camas lily appreciates lower, wetter ground, which means that sometimes it lives in the silt of relict channels and silted in streams. Camasland is a flat meadow within a bowl of forested hills, and the stream that winds through it has meandered here and there over the years. The photo above shows the faint blue of camas in one of those old channels, with the yellow flowers and larger foliage of balsamroot on the banks. Difference in elevation between these zones is only a few inches, but that's enough to nurture quite different vegetation on each. The meandering blue is an echo of a stream, a channel living forever.

This landscape is special to modern people as well. Years ago, the state decided to conserve the ecosystem here, and set aside most of it. There are rare species involved, but the place is special also because of the abundance and cultural importance of some of the more common species present. Preserving this place forever means that the ancient yet fleeting beauty of a wildflower meadow will not become a housing subdivision (the fate of most prairies west of the mountains) or some other modern development that will be fleeting compared to the natural and cultural history of Camasland, but which could do irreversible damage.

Some Salish Sea Beaches

Where the Straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca meet the Sound of Puget, the tides rushing in and falling out swirl round myriad peninsulae, islands, and rocks. On the rise, they reverse the course of even the mighty rivers twice a day, pushing into inlets and sloughs, fjords and marshes. As streams and rivers deliver sediment by the daily mote and occasional landslide, as bluffs calve and slump down to the shore, the tides grab rock and sand, smudging it around each cliff and dune, softening the drop into the deep. Carbon in the forms of leaves, seaweeds and logs rides tides and storms to the high water mark, adding to the littoral, the liminal that separates and unites land and sea: the beach.

Slow that story down, stretch each hour to a millenium or two, and it plays out with tides of ice. Glaciers carved out much of the sea, drowned land under grinding flows and ebbs. Each advancing lobe plows deeper while the sheer weight pushes the bedrock down. When the climate warms, the glaciers retreat, barfing collosal slurries of meltwater, rock and grit as they do. Freed of the weight and exposed to Northwest rains, the land beneath rebounds and erodes downstream. Sometimes, the glacial pace speeds up with a rushing river beneath the ice, or collapse of an ice dam that unleashes great lakes all at once.

On either scale, rocks and organics end up along the shore and on the floor of the Salish Sea.

Meanwhile, the sea sends up it's contribution. Creatures crawl up, seaweeds drift in and hold fast. All those rocks become covered with coatings of single-celled organisms, draped with flaccid primitives, crawled over by critters with exoskeletons, all while the clams and their kin burrow down and spit up sand (all of them poop, or die, or both, adding to the beach). On a low tide, the land normally hidden by the sea's glare and motion emerges, occupied over every inch in stark contrast to the plain plane of water we normally see on the calm Salish Sea. No wonder the local people have always said that when the tide is out, the table is set.

Set the table these days with these beach denizens, and you may find people saying that they ate already. Let Bourdain eat the barnacles, or that thumbheaded Bizarre Foods guy enjoy the salty cartilige-covered-in-slime texture of the limpet (well OK, Hawaiians will take the latter with gusto, but for the most part, moderns have narrowed down the list of edible shellfish to a handfull). But look at the species spread in many an old shell midden, and what you find is diversity closer to what lived on the beach than what a modern table holds. That's what happened when people needed the beach and it's life in order to live themselves; that's how it was before oyster and geoduck became conspicuous and expensive consumption.

Of course, seeing these old sites has become harder. More than a century ago, many were dug up and hauled away to burn the shell for lime, or fed to chickens to make their eggshells harder, or just piled up in dikes to "reclaim" the marshes that fed previous generations. Later, people took to armoring the shoreline, strangling natural beaches beneath fill and junk while what once stretched in front was washed away. People who believe that they own a piece of the earth want to build right up to the line, and in so doing wiped away that magical stretch of neither-land-nor-water that any good beach embodies.

For a variety of reasons, the Northwest has escaped widespread sea level rise thus far, but it will not forever, and future storms will wipe away the archaeology that could tell us how people adapted to previous changes in climate. A shift in the winds, a subduction zone quake, and the wisdom of millenia calves away, pulling certain kinds of knowledge out of reach. I've seen coastal sites that are within a few storms of disappearing entirely. Meanwhile, the agency responsible for archaeology has poured resources into studying buildings on the shore and promoting them as tourism magnets, with no perceivable effort to document and learn from the older coastal sites and what they could mean for our well-being and survival.

Beaches will always exist (they will replace the buildings when we are gone, surely as the tides will continue to flow and ebb), but the beaches that we can learn from, the ones that tell the stories of how people dealt with climate change or tsunamis, for example, are eroding, their creatures thinned to a faint shadow of their former abundance and diversity by the ongoing acidification and extinctions.

Coulee Climbs and Straightaways: Backroad Route 174, 17, and 2

It's been way too long since a backroads post. Now, as then, my route is anything but a back road to the locals, and I apologize for any offense they might take (and remind them that I am avoiding telling the general public about the really good backroads). It covers a fair stretch of Route 2, only a backroad compared to I-90, but to get right down to it, 90 probably does have 100 cars to every 1 on 2.

But let me back up a sec. Route 2 was the third leg of this trip. The joints of these legs: curving grades making their -scents (de- or a-) as the westward course confronted coulees and a river. Between the joints, longbones straight and narrow; straighter than the crow flies, lies the engineer's centerline. The surveyor runs due south, mile after mile, and Route 17 is born; turning 90 degrees west, he draws Route 2 to Waterville. Up north, Route 174 does bend a bit more, flexing to the landscape and paths discovered by creatures and the people that hunted them ever since the end of the Ice Age. 

Taking off out of Grand Coulee on 174 begins with a climb, and you cross under one of the primary electric umbilicals of the Power Grid. The towers march off on their line, and174 takes off through some pretty country, especially late on a warm Spring day.

Coulee climb #1: Outta Grand Coulee (or is that Coulee City?)

The 174 - 17 junction is a fork no matter how you approach it, and there are yield signs, but the only vehicles I've encountered there are truckers pulled over for a rest. I usually do the same for a few minutes to rearrange the growing midden in my truck and stretch my legs with a walk through the empty intersection.

There's the mildest switchback ever ascending to the next plateau, and then straightest of  shots beyond. The road only makes sense if your concept of land is a grid. Until the last century, everyone traveled up and down the coulee (you know, where there's food and water), and you can still do it on RT 155, but once the land is cut into sections and quarters, and you need to get grain to market, a road straight through the fields makes sense. It's modern agriculture's umbilicus to markets for petrochemicals in and food out, laid down on the Cartesian Grid.

Tanks (for fuel? fertilizer?) and Elevators (for output) on Route 2.

After miles of wheat and linearity, 17 descends back into the coulee, not near the Grand Coulee the city, but the city of Coulee City, all of which may just be towns when it comes down to it. There are more power lines, although this is the lower end of Banks Lake, which is an irrigation reservoir than a hydroelectric project; they both depend on Grand Coulee the dam. Banks Lake and the canals flowing from it are the umbilical waters flowing onto the farms partitioned along the Township Grid.

Monotonously straight as much of this route may be, there are a few breaks that take my breath away. Like entering Moses Coulee.

Looking across the sage at golden cliff walls with cocoa talus skirts, I am in love with this place every time I see it. Luckily (and with some attention to timing), I have been through here many times in the fading afternoon, and every time, it is a blessing.

This last trip, on that big coulee-climb up from Moses, I shot out onto the top and into a straightaway pointing right into the setting sun. Beautiful, too, but also difficult driving. Glare in the face, windshield lit with dozens of bugsplats, each a tiny firework of captured sun in my eyes, scratch refractions, a haze of dust alight across it all, shiny tarlines on the road reflecting even more sun from the ground up.

Luckily, there was nearly no traffic, and what little there is is visible from miles away. Because I guess even Route 2, mightiest of the 174-->17-->2 run, is a backroad in the interstate age. Lonely straightaways where driving is as simple as it gets and you can take in the country, which is flat and clear enough that it passes at a stately pace, not much in the foreground to whip by in a blur. I'm pretty sure I was out of cell range for most of the trip, which also felt good, getting off the Communications Grid (even if I was confined to the road engineer's east-west north-south orientation).

Watching Bird Watching Art

"X never marks the spot." -Indiana Jones

This could be anywhere, but it is in Scottsville, VA. I just happened through, and it must have been Arts Walk or something, because here was this pigeon with an elaborate installaton.

Sure, what people noticed first was the massive scaffolding surrounding a large lone building, a brick of red in a crochet of scaffold rust. Especially nice against the Spring-greened dike and trees stretching out behind.

Then, perched in a pinnacle of empty panes, there stands the artist. In the crux of the X, smack-dab at scaffold-center stands an iridescent neck flanked by grey shoulders, rising from sleekness against darkness of the warehouse cavern. And atop this oiled rainbow of a neck, a head sharply grey, whetted by an eye piercingly orange, an orange borne of the saturatallucinated union of the brick and rust all around.

The artist glances one way then the other over and over, one eye always focused right on you. Nobody can explain how the pigeon simultaneously looks into each eye of everyone below, but it happens nonetheless. Meanwhile, the profile either reflects or parallels the pigeon's clever pecking of a pigeon-profile void in the pane to our left. Juxtaposition of the breast curve--a sublime, eloquent line depicting beauty all puffed-up and proud--with the shattered lines converging at the head (is that a woodpecker?) is nothing short of brilliant. 

Meanwhile, above and to the right, we see Pigeon's nod to the landscape. A mountain profile appears in the broken corner pane. Sophisticated as this installation surely is, a moment of simple representational art is not beneath it. A certain amount of self-mockery appears to be part of this Scottsville aviant garde piece as well: the artist's feet are a hilariously awful color. Just as the eye-orange clinches the artist's brilliance as a colorist, the scaly alcoholic-clown's-nose colored feet establish this pigeon as a humorist.

So, Bravo Scottsville Pigeon. You took a ruin and made it a font of creativity. You showed us that Pigeon-Americans are not just garbage-scrounging winged rats, and I think you showed those snooty NY birds a thing or two about real art.




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Blue Ridge: Distant

From Spy Rock, on a clear and slightly hazy day.

Same shot, blued up a bit.

Blue to da max.

Blue Ridge: Close

Beyond time to plant corn, according to oak leaves larger than mouse ears.

The second week of April in the Blue Ridge mountains in this wild year of Winter-straight-to-Summer, buds responded to the 40's to 90's weather by exploding. I walked through woods in their last gasp of long visibility, canopy emerging.

And flowers, too. Roadside redbuds blossoming ahead of their understory kin. Other flowers I do not know on branches above the fading daffodils strewn in the woods.

Meanwhile, the less glamorous trees flicked a fleeting beauty, befire getting on with their biomassing.

 And their Virginia creeping.

Meanwhile, in civilized clearings of the foothills, imported Asian magnolias danced, tossing off petals into the heated air.

Flowers and leaves battled it out to adorn the water color sky.

The tulip poplar began it's year of display.

A grave-side hawthorn stood guard, stark against the sky in these days before flower and foliage soften its profile.

The orchard trees beckoned bees.

And ornamentals let it be.

Belle blossoms pealed.

Buckeye foliage unfurled.

And sumacs shouldered their way in.

Bird, Watching

I've been in the Eastern US for the past couple of weeks, spending some time in woods just waking up from Winter. Just about a year and 3,000 miles from the Watercolor Spring post, these woods have a similar open grey lattice, dappled lightly with the colors of emerging leaves, but here there are so few evergreens that you can see much farther. 

In the forests and orchards, birds abound now, and I could not help but watch them. Long ago, I worked for a local Audubon Society, running a small bookstore and learning about birds as I went. I never became a Birder, that species of naturalist obsessed with amassing the longest "life list" of species observed, often as not, through massive and expensive scopes. Yes, I've seen some cool birds in remote and exotic locales, but mostly because I was working there, not because I'd planned a trip to see the birds. If the bird is pretty, or doing something interesting, it doesn't really matter to me whether it is rare; what it eats or is eaten by--how it fits into it's ancient or adopted ecology--ends up being just as important as whether it qualifies as a rara avis.

So, this one was worth watching. It's a thrasher (a species that sticks in my memory because of it's punk-sounding name and it's virtuoso voice), neither rare nor far afield. I sat in an orchard on the Blue Ridge, appreciating the blossoms when it's rusty back came into view. Unlike most birds, who know to dart away or duck behind a branch as soon as the camera comes out, it just sat there while I took a shot, and another, moved around to get a better view, and even when I stepped closer. For about 15 minutes, this continued, and it was aware of me, but not inclined to take flight. It was watching me as much as I was watching it.

Later on, wandering through the woods, I came upon a family of crows, also wandering through the woods, pecking through last Fall's leaves. Through long experience with jealous farmers and rock-wielding boys, they made sure one was always watching me, and kept their distance. No unobstructed posing, no sitting still while I got closer. But also, no stopping what their foraging sweep through a Virginian forest floor. Like the guard pictured above, they were hitting the ground hard enough to poke through the leaves and into the red piedmont clay. Like the sentinel pictured above, they kept their beaks open, but said nothing; maybe they were cocked and ready to snap up bugs, maybe they were panting away the heat. 

My limited bird brain cannot say for sure what the thrasher or the crows were doing. All I know is that they watched me watch them.