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.

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.

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.

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.

Spiders from Mars, or Thereabouts

A week or so ago, the kids and I lit out for upper elevations, thinking we might pop out above the clouds. Instead, the whole region sunned up, but still, we breathed air rarified and clarified, closer to the stratosphere. This is a good thing about living an hour or two from high mountains; just the promise of being able to escape the humid press of sea level for montaine lightness and light, just that promise is release enough from the wet winter. 

Until it isn't, and you head for the actual sunny above, or at least the snowy hills. 

So we did. 

And up around a few thousand feet above sea level, where foreshortening makes you believe you are near the summit even when you ain't, life lightens. And we walked on diamond-sparkling snow. Further from roads, flitting across snow where snags and boulders and rushing water make the Summer going tough. Onto snow banks piled by Pacific moisture kissing Cascadian peaks.

And there we saw spiders. My older daughter spotted them first, at first with something like the disgust she has when she sees them on my humble abode's ceiling. But then, with wonder, maybe even respect, recognizing that spiders were living, ambling about, on snowfields thousands of feet above sea level. 

At first, I was amazed at spiders who make a living on alpine snowbanks. Then we noticed that they were legion, and there was no food in sight. Maybe these were just unfortunate arachnids, hatched who knows where, drifted on silken strands for miles, maybe across the Pacific, only to land on a cold food desert. Birthed in a barn, berthed on a wind, and barfed onto an unfortunate end unless they could fend for themselves on less fortinate drift denizens or make it to the nearest tree just a few thousand steps away.

Steps on chronosomal legs (seriously, look at that picture, is it anything less or more than overlapping XX pairs linked by a thorax?), trying to implant their genes on this mountainside. Maybe from eggs in a South Puget lowland barn, maybe from the coast, maybe from some cat from Japan,...maybe the Spiders from Mars (there does appear to be a leftward tilt). Don't laugh, recent studies have shown that the upper atmosphere is replete with ballooning spiders. Maybe not interplanetary, but if I were a sneaky extraterrestrial, I might very well seed the upper atmosphere with large numbers of tiny beings. It beats having to face off with Will Smith, or have to deal with Jeff Goldblum at all. If, a few hundred or thousand spider generations from now, we find ourselves subject to a highly evolved cadre of arachnidean overlords, my progeny may wish I had been in a more stompy mood that February afternoon when the alpine sun shown so beautifully on the snow-spiders...

Bifurcation. No, It A Crew Fib.

Ah, homophony and loose spelling, you make palindromic(ish) titles possible.

But you cannot make them make sense. I do wanna talk about bifurcations, though. There's one in the photo above, which is in hills above the Columbia River at a couple thousand feet elevation, roughly. Fortuitous snowfall and gratuitous editing render this bifurcation as a Y on the hillside, a game trail splitting. The top one goes higher, and the other goes...


I don't really know where it goes. It passes an outcrop right about where hillside and horizon cross paths, and sometimes outcrops expose chert, which was useful for tools. But it probably heads into the draw, closer to cover and water. 


Anyway, the paths part ways. Archaeologists like myself and others who look at how humans and other animals use the land pay special attention to bifurcations in trails. Why does it split here? Do the two forks head to very different resources or destinations, does the point of separation show any signs of being a site, a spring, something else that would draw in beasties and bipeds? 


The forkal focal point is also a pivot. A bifurcation, viewed from the other direction, is a convergence. In the photo, two trails merge to one, headed to the Columbia. Heading up, the trails appear dendritic, branching to deer hide-outs and springs, root grounds and rock sources. Going down, they flow like tributaries, rivulets meeting to form creeks, streams, and rivers dumping into the big river at a village or fishing place. In the root season, trails headed out in various directions, allowing women to disperse to the many places they could dig. When the fish ran, the men could converge at the falls and pools where they were most easily plucked from the flow. 


Backing way off, getting the eagle's view, "bifurcation" looks too simple, and not just because of the palindromic perspective shifts. The parted ways may meet again. The paths up from the river do not simply branch and branch again. There are intersections, three and four-way splits, convergences and divergences of human and game routes. The bi- and trifurcations, once you are removed from their tangle, look more like nodes in a web, neurons in the collective animal brain. Each a dumb switch, maybe, but together a brilliant chaotic topology. The binary split/merge options of the trail-bound perspective become something more.


So, having branched off from my original tidy premise, I sputter to a halt. Trails do that sometimes.