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.

In the Owls' Lee

According to today's Washington Post, Owlsley (I cannot help pronouncing it that way) just died. He was the guy who manufactured vast quantities of acid, kick-starting whatever it was that roiled up in late-1960s America. Although this was not one of their featured stories (in fact, I could not find it on the home page), it was among the Top 5 Most Popular stories. Nearly 50 years later, the psychedaelic flashtershocks can crest where you least expect them.

I was not part of that. LSD is too powerful for mind like mine. But for Owsley fans few photos of Mount Baker from the southwest tip of the peninsula that is the northwest tip of the Lower 48. You can rest assured that within the frame of each shot, there are hundreds of owls and probably quite a few Lees.

Or, how about realizing that as you gaze at the mountain, this is right behind you?

Pristine?

Oak savannah, pasturized.

Sometimes, my work brings me together with folks trying to do something called "restoration," by which they mean bringing the local ecology back to it's allegedly natural state, returning the pristine conditions pre-dating human intervention. Like the romantic ideal of Noble Savages, the concept of a totally natural, pre-human landscape is a concoction of minds less sophisticated than they conceive themselves to be.

Fortunately, the effects of Homo sapiens are clear enough in the NW environment that most ecologists recognize it, even if they are not quite ready to let modern humans interlope in preserves. Glaciers covered most of Washington until humans traipsed there, or pulled their umiaks ashore. As the ice retreated, human influence advanced across the land and sea, changing them. Many of you may have read that the Clovis people swarmed over the continent, killing and eating Pleistocene megafauna, perhaps extincting those camels, mammoths, and their ilk in the process. 

But meat ain't sustenance enough. There are vitamins and minerals, trace substances that don't show up in flesh, and people have always recognized that, or we would not be here now. So people pick shoots and dig roots. They gather weeds and harvest seeds to suit dietary needs. In a land where people showed up in glacial aftermath, it defies plausibility to believe that historic plant communities (and the animals that fed upon these) are the result of some pristine proces unsullied by the human touch. The touch that grabbed food and spread seed.

In the maritime Northwest, and in swaths of the interior, meadows and prairies have existed for thousands of years because humans spread fire to keep forests at bay. Savannahs had roots and oaks because people liked to eat carbs and acorns, because people had a hankering for the flesh of small and large four-leggeds with similar appetites.

So it strikes me as odd when "restoration" projects are based on the concept that the human influence should be eliminated. Often as not, the prescription is based on a floral community known from the late historic period or from a testbook, rather than the plants that actually occured on a particular piece of land. In the charcoal of an ancient campfire and in the pollen that fell between plank houses, the material remains of the actual environment is there to be seen, but I'm not sure if this record has ever been consulted.  

To admit that a landscape is not pristine is not to say that the place is defiled, just like not all people who've lost their virginity are craven whores. People in many places, the Northwest among them, learned how to nudge the ecology of a place toward a stasis in which large primates could eat well and the water, fungi, plants, two-leggeds  and four-leggeds could all get along. Sure, some natural successions were cut short, some species prospered at the cost of others, but this no less true in places where humans don't tread. The fact that archaeologists have found camas ovens buried thousands of years before foreigners strode in and found flourishing camas prairies suggests that a balance was achieved. 

Why then would newcomers presume to march in and insist on a "natural" landscape that locks out humans?

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...

Fall Furrows

It seemed to this urban-dwelling sporadic observer that the wheat came in a little late this year. So it was under an Autumnally enlightened sunset that Route 2 treated me to a beautiful furrow show. Some people hear and speak a mass, others light something or other at a temple, and rumors hint at a thousand other rituals fearsome or enticing. My own thousand rituals include this: shooting straight as an atlatl dart across loessy plains, following the sun homeward as it's last rays summon every modest rise and dip, relieving the land of its be-dulled flatness and waking colors whose brevity and intensity capture a beauty hidden by the rays of the livelong day. 

Lest only my prose be purple, I add this photo.

The flow from day-yellow through all the flame-pallete licks of orange-red and purplescence to night-blue, this refusal to sit still or reduce itself to on/off digitized dichotomy, reminds me that the world's hard margins are illusory. At the edge of day and night, dark and light dance, sitting still only in the snapshot, not the reality. The penumbral Cascades spill across the Plateau, light kisses one side of a furrow as the other yawns toward slumber, the observer is hard pressed to pin down a pivot point. The wind often slackens, there may be an instant of weightlessness as the boundary is transcended, but to look for the apex of the curve or that tick of the clock that switches from day to night is to kill the ritual. The odd photons Brownian bouncing through the dark cast the strongest light, even if they are hardest to see. 

The sidewise gaze of light late in the day and year catches the ripples that hide under mid-day sun. Waves appear, embodying the songs of the landscape, from the basso profundo of Tahoma and the full symphony of Cascadian peaks to the lilting riffs of loess. And then, atop it all on the loessy lands either side of Moses Coulee, the furrows plowed by man like grooves in an old vinyl record in numbers sufficient to go platinum on the charts, top of (and feeder of) the pops. Some of it bland and straight as formula Top 40 can be, but othertimes looping hills and meandering dales, whorling like the fingerprint of Coltrane or Hendrix.

Watercolor Spring

Excuse me, while I brush the sky

Seasons echo themselves. Not just from one year to the next, but deep in the -ness. Spring unfurls, hurls echoes of itself as the blooming of flowers, of leaves and  fronds, of eggs bearing Spring chickens and flower-scented air spurring mating season. At the fat fractal base, a reaching of life out onto the huddled greyscape of a temperate Winter.  Spring is Open(ing) Season.


As such, psychedaelians appreciate it, perhaps none more than here in the Northwest, where sunshine daydreamy days induce long blissful sighs from fabulous fuzzy mammals pleased to be free of wintry darkness and the dankness of wet season. Last week, I heard an echo of this on Grateful Dead & Friends, a show on KBOO radio.


Often as not, peoples' minds bend toward California when they think of hippies, and the Dead are at the Bay Area epicenter of this perceptual vortex . No arguing that. But furthur north than Northern California, in the Oregon of Kesey and the Washington of Hendrix, psychedaelia blossoms as well. 


Especially in Spring, to echo myself. From the southernmost tip of Washington, I drove up out of the Columbia valley with a Help-Slipknot-Franklin's prechoing out of the speakers. [That hyphenated thing is Deadhead shorthand for a three-song medley, in case you've not conversed with this tribe. Deadheads are also into encyclopaedic knowledge of their priestly class and lore, as evidenced this day in the DJ's question--the answerer of which would score tickets to a Furthur (ie, post Garcia) concert!--which was "What's unique about this Help-Slip-Franklin's?" I think the answer was that whatever show he was playing was the first time the Dead had played that particular combination, although the guy was open to there being other answers, 'cause competitive encyclopaedism doesn't have to devolve into fascism, man. But I digress.]


So as it slips into the middle of the medley, I settle into interstate pace on my instrastate drive, and the landscape flows by. Against the dark evergreen background, maples and alders and cottonwoods have appeared into the scene, watercolor reds yellows greens and in-betweens where a couple months before they'd been retreated into grey invisibility. Leaves and sheathes may not fit the saturated vivids we associate with the psychedaelic pallete, but ephemerality and life force are not to be dismissed as color flavorings. Splashed here and there on this quiet tableau, occasionally inexplicable daffodil patches and explosions of cherry blossoms make sure all is not subtle. Meanwhile, sunbeams and liquid clouds dance and share the sky, and the white stripes underfly my red Ford hood. 

By now, they're into Franklin's Tower, the last song. "Roll away the dew" refrains again and again on the recording, and you can hear the crowd. If you are experienced, your body feels the memory of that moment when unison converged on these few words of hope and emergence. Being peripheral to deadheadery at the time I heard this chorus in concert (if I even heard it at all, this  could be false memory talking), I think  I thought the words were "Roll away the doom," which works as an echo for sound and meaning, I guess. Better, even, if you like your watercolor with  some morning dew.

Oh Mylar

Washington boasts more geologic, biologic, and cultural diversity than most states. But like all states and throughout itself, there is the commonality of trash.

To this compunction of humans, none more than Americans, to this trail of lost things, abandoned stuff, and outright garbage, to these leavings I owe my livelihood. Even older, wiser cultures left traces, heaps of it in places where they congregated with more than immediate relatives and stayed awhile. We've come a ways since bottoming out on the burning Cuyahoga, but even in 2012, a great many under the spell of Mayan and Christian Apocalypse hucksters, we create trash day in and day out.

It used to be, garbage pretty much stayed around the house. Standard practice in Euro-America was to just toss stuff into the yard. Whatever didn't feed sow, fowl, or microbia got kicked around until disappearing into the brush and eventually the soil (because the microbia will get their way, nearly always). My grandparents were born on farms that dealt with trash by burning it, tossing it in an old cellar, or hauling it off to the swamp-edge of the field. I don't know this for a fact, but in between just throwing stuff out the back door and having it hauled or barged off to god knows where, it's a pretty safe bet that refuse didn't travel too far.

Over the 20th Century, urbanizing America took to hauling rubbish to landfills in some place without clout.  Garbage went global. Not for everyone, but post-WWII American cities extrude waste streams unequaled, eventually across international borders and into the deep blue sea.

And ever since about half past Reagan, into the deep blue sky. In the form of mylar balloons that travel the winds and land far from the crying kids who loosed them. Before mylar, there were rubber ones, but they lose the helium faster and disintegrate a lot faster once they come to ground.


I've seen the flash of a Barney balloon in sagebrush and deep in the woods. Mylar emblazoned with princesses and "Happy Birthday" and "Get Well Soon" and "I Bought You Something That Will Soon Be Trash" turns up everywhere. Most of the state is more or less downwind of the population centers, but I don't know that they all come from Pugetopolis. One day, it would be nice to find one from Japan, I guess. 


As long as future archaeologists are able to identify these as helium balloons, they shouldn't be too confused. Except maybe to wonder what sort of ritual or status display led people to release so many tacky balloons into the winds. If mylar proves to be durable over the long run, it may be another chronological marker of our post-Classic period, before crazy excess went back to being rare. 

There may be a fairly sharp end date for mylar balloons, since helium is bound to become more expensive. That's at least partly because alleged Democrat Bill Clinton signed a 1996 law privatizing the industry and forcing the US Government to sell it's stockpile by 2015. But don't worry, with Texans controlling the reserves and corporations running the show, what could go wrong?