The dawn chorus in the jungle has a particular bass beat, like a deep wave washing through the dense trees, or like the earth itself is exhaling. What is that, I wonder. I’m sitting in a dinky plastic pack raft on the Las Piedras River, cradling my camera, and straining to see something in the green on green on green that lines the river. I’ve set out with three others on this foggy dawn float, but they are already a bend and a half down the river so I feel alone. Alone with the caiman lounging on the sandy banks and the Pied Lapwings tip-toeing along the river’s edge. Alone with the Parakeets that flock across the river, screaming their destination and their joy. Alone with the Sunbittern and the Hoatzin, birds that seem created from an artist’s fantasy of a bird. Alone not at all.
Read MoreOf all the fruits: cherries. Of all the months: October. Of all of the holidays: Thanksgiving. Of all of the birds: Rusty Blackbird. But--of all the groups of birds: shorebirds.
All birders have his or her favorite group or family of birds: the raptors in migration or the sparrows in a field. For many it’s easy: warblers in spring. For me, it’s shorebirds. Perhaps because I do associate them with water, the shore. Perhaps because I have spent so little time with them, the birds here in the Hudson Valley uncommon except in migration and even then there are few. Perhaps this group of birds retains a certain mystery because they are so elusive to me. And so when my friend Peter started reporting big numbers of shorebirds—a dozen Pectoral Sandpipers, a White-rumped Sandpiper, plus over forty Snipe at the Vly, a swamp in the northern edge of Ulster County, I had to go.
Read MoreWhen I first heard the rattling call I was walking along a small lake in Ontario, east of Sault St. Marie and West of Sudbury. I’d been driving my little camper for eight hours, after getting up in the lovely Two Rivers Campground in Algonquin Provincial Park. Since I was tired and since it was late in the day I thought: you are hallucinating. There can’t be Sandhill Cranes here in the far north in early September.
When, at 3 in the morning, I again heard that distinctive call I thought: this is a dream, no cranes.
In the morning, I emerged from the cocoon that is my little camper and scanned the range of RVs in the tidy campground, the set up mobile homes for those who came through the season, the more portable campers that were there a night or two. My eye was drawn to a bird feeder tempting in Goldfinch set up near one of the mobile homes. And there stood two cranes. Not plastic statues of cranes, as you might imagine in such a campground, real winged, breathing birds. They tip toed as delicately as a long-legged bird can, inspecting the short grass and only half-wary of me and a woman walking her dog. Cranes. In Canada.
I’ve always seen Sandhill Cranes in Arizona, the desert, and so think of them as birds that love the heat and dry. They fly into Wilcox, east of Tucson, by the hundreds, thousands, landing and taking off all flailing legs and wings. But there never seem to be actual collisions. I’ve stood, mesmerized by the loud, purring sound of the birds, and by the sheer numbers, all come to spend the winter there where it’s warm, where there’s food.
Read MoreI’d like to think that people who eat Stone Blue chips (as I do) don’t throw the packaging overboard or out the window of a speeding car. But it seems they do. I picked up the wet and silt covered bag along with an empty Gatorade bottle, a plastic coffee container and other stuff that littered the Tivoli landing. The debris washed up on shore shook me and made it near impossible to get my boat into the water. I spent twenty minutes picking up trash before I could slide my kayak into the water on my first paddle of 2017.
In spring, snow melts and the roadsides are revealed for what they are: dumping grounds for people’s stuff. Some is overt, like the trash bag tossed that then bursts or is torn apart by a hungry raccoon. But most are items casually flung from a car window. I like to undertake a thought experiment: I picture myself sailing down the road in my Subaru and I toss a Ginger Ale can from the window. I can’t do it, even in my imagination.
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