Jungle Dawn Chorus
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.
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, in the Amazon of Peru, 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.
Swept into this stream, cradled by my boat, I feel embraced by the land as if at a big family reunion. Every bit of me is there, a perfect meditation that is not focused in on my breath, but out on the breath of the land. What is that? The sound, hollow, almost mystical, fills my bones and I lean back in the raft as I flush downstream in the silty river. And then I remember what our guides told me: the sound that is so deep is not birds, but howler monkeys.
At home in the Hudson Valley I bird mostly by ear. Once the spring leaves come in it’s hard to lay eyes on a bird so learning the bird songs is necessary if you want to know who is stopping by on your driveway or singing near the feeder or sliding out of the reeds in the Tivoli Bays. But the denseness of leaves in the Hudson Valley is a joke compared to the jungle where the green is often so dense it blocks out all light. In this denseness birds thrive, and I know they are out there: the songs punctuate the air. There is no attempt at harmony here, no overall tune, but rather it’s every bird for himself, a great crazy medley that leaves me delighted and baffled.
But on the river: you do get to see things, the little birds, the Water Tyrants, that come to the river’s edge for some water, a bug, a slap of sunlight. Or the Yellow-billed Terns that course up and down the river. Or the Amazon Kingfisher, cackling away on a fishing expedition. Hoatzin fumble about in the bushes, so clumsy, then pose for a photo.
Mid-float I arrive at a sandbar where on a drying log Sand Nighthawks are roosting for the day. I pull onto shore, and shove myself out of the boat (which is leaking just a bit, so it’s become soft; I do a bit of repair work with some duck tape and have faith it will get me back to the station). I walk close enough to the birds to see clearly and to take photos but I don’t want to disturb their day-time snooze, which looks, through my binoculars, like the perfect morning meditation. Are we all meditating out here, at peace with the self and the land?
Soon, the sun rises, more birds sing, and then I hear a motor on the river and it’s Paul, our guide on this trip. He’s in the long wooden boat with his mother, who is making her first trip to the jungle. “Isn’t it great seeing your son in his proper habitat?” I joke with her. But it’s not really a joke: Paul belongs here just as the Tapir and the Jaguar do. And I think it’s sweet that he’s taking her out for a morning boat ride. But that’s not his goal: he’s checking on me. Paul is the best of guides, letting people do what they want to do, giving us our freedom here in this big place. So I have to wonder: have I really been out here so long that even Paul has become curious of my whereabouts? I have. A float that should have taken an hour and a half has stretched to four hours. “You good?” he calls across the water, thumbs up.
I nod and smile and give a thumbs up that says, “More than good.” Excellent. Never been better. Happy. And off he goes to leave me with my happiness.
Four hours of meandering, of observing, of delighting. Four hours during which I am not thinking about breakfast that waits for me, or the mess that our country is in (in fact, for two solid weeks I had not a single political thought, which is a shift for a MSNBC junkie), I am not over-thinking a small heartache. And if none of these things matter, than neither does time, an hour just like four. And perhaps space either, the land here infinite, the land here precious down to a grain of sand.
Shorebirds!
Of 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.
Of 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.
The wind funnels through the Vly like a natural wind tube, making paddling a challenging event. For the past few days white caps flecked the Hudson River and trees knocked back and forth, leaves in gold and red splashing to the ground. Peter explained that the Vly would be even rougher. Still: I wanted to go. Early in the day Peter texted “If you went out today we’d have to put you in an institution.” I laughed and hoped the wind would settle. It didn’t. The idea of paddling into that wind alone I could face, but I knew that the wind would make identifying the shorebirds that much more difficult, if not impossible. I didn’t want to attempt that alone. “Ok, let’s go, but be prepared,” Peter conceded.
Usually in fall the place you find Peter is in a field, searching for sparrows migrating south. His persistence pays off: every year he finds good sparrows. But this year he decided to focus as well on the Vly, a forgotten bit of swamp and woods where he and his wife recently bought a piece of land. Early in the season he saw good shorebirds, at first the usual then some amazing finds like a Stilt and a Bairds. After a lull a rush of birds once again. The birding community buzzed with excitement over his finds.
As I slid my kayak into the shallow muddy water, Peter pointed to the far shore where it looked like the land itself was moving. Birds! This is one of the great delights of shorebirds, the way they animate a seemingly empty landscape. The place was alive with birds, four Pectoral Sandpipers, a Dunlin and a Lesser Yellowlegs pulled worms and danced through the muddy flats. “If you take a few strokes, you’ll coast up on the flats and can get close,” Peter said. This too is one of the joys of shorebirds: they are often less skittish than other birds, so intent on a meal they trot in front of you, careless of danger.White-rumped Sandpiper
The sun rained down and white clouds scudded across the sky along with Crows on a mission. We pushed out of the sheltered cove where we had launched and through a patch of phragmites. On the other side: the wind tunnel. The wind plowed in broadside, knocking me in the face, freezing my hands that gripped too tight around the paddles I feared might sail off.
We both hunkered down, shoving out into the water, past muddy flats that emerged to ground my slim boat. I looked up to scan for birds from time to time, squinting into the sun that reflected off of the water, the water lilies turning brown. And thought: there’s no placed I’d rather be then there, pummeled by wind looking for shorebirds. “What we won’t do for love,” Peter called into the wind and I laughed: indeed.
Peter stopped paddling, his kayak skidding south with the wind as he put his binoculars to his eyes. “There!” Peter called, his face lit up, “A Black-bellied Plover!” A new bird in his long list of shorebirds found at the Vly. A bird never recorded before in this odd, special spot.
I found it hard to breath, whether from the wind or the excitement of the birds I couldn’t say. I tucked my paddle between belly and knee and wobbled my binoculars to my eyes. Sure enough, there was the plover, long necked with that petit black bill dancing around with his shorebird cohorts. The bird, unlike us, seemed unperturbed by the wind as it went about his plover business of finding food. Had this bird or other plovers ever before visited this lonely swamp on migration? Or was it that no one had before had been silly enough to venture out and lucky enough to see it?
This is what intrigues me about birding: for all we know about birds, and migration, for all the eyes and ears out in the field recording what we see, there is infinitely more that we don’t know. That is a good enough reason to go out and get knocked around by the wind.
“We’ll never know,” Peter said in answer to my questions.
But what I’m sure of is that every fall from here on out Peter will be combing first the fields for Sparrows, then the Vly for Shorebirds. And I will continue on my quest to get to know this group of sturdy un-shy birds with long legs that pepper mud flats and shorelines carrying out their secretive, magical lives.
Wood Pile
Through the winter months when my friends are going to the gym, taking yoga or pilates, I’m cutting wood. It’s my gym, my church, my movie night. Last year I had a few trees taken down so that from the top of the ridge where my house perches I have a pocket view of the Catskill Mountains. I felt badly about cutting what were mostly beech trees, so like the hunter who decides to take a deer and eat every part: heart, liver, thighs and knees, I decided I should use this wood. The difficulty is that these trees are down a hill and all I had was a little handsaw.
I cut my logs about eight inches in diameter, and about 36 inches long (it is never, however, this precise). This part of the cutting is the most satisfying, a sort of meditation on an outsized game of pick up sticks. What will drop easily? What will I have to support, and what will fall if I take this piece here? I pile these in one place and carry them up the hill. It was during this phase that a young friend, Remi, pointed out I should be using a better saw. A little research later and I had a Silky Katanaboy, a work of art that slices through wood like butter.
Through the winter months when my friends are going to the gym, taking yoga or pilates, I’m cutting wood. It’s my gym, my church, my movie night. Last year I had a few trees taken down so that from the top of the ridge where my house perches I have a pocket view of the Catskill Mountains. I felt badly about cutting what were mostly beech trees, so like the hunter who decides to take a deer and eat every part: heart, liver, thighs and knees, I decided I should use this wood. The difficulty is that these trees are down a hill and all I had was a little handsaw.
I cut my logs about eight inches in diameter, and about 36 inches long (it is never, however, this precise). This part of the cutting is the most satisfying, a sort of meditation on an outsized game of pick up sticks. What will drop easily? What will I have to support, and what will fall if I take this piece here? I pile these in one place and carry them up the hill. It was during this phase that a young friend, Remi, pointed out I should be using a better saw. A little research later and I had a Silky Katanaboy, a work of art that slices through wood like butter.
Once my lengths are cut, I carry them up the hill. Or in a Tom Sawyer move I get others to carry for me. I am rich in young people in my life, and whenever they visit I say: want to come see my woods? As if it might be the greatest treat. Only I referred to the section of woods where the trees lay for the taking as my elk hunting ground. No one thought this as funny as I did yet still everyone has brushed into the woods with me and hauled his or her share of log
Back at the house, I cut them into three lengths and split and stack. All of this takes time but I found that an hour or more a day (I tried not to let the cutting take over, become a day long obsession, which it easily can) and it starts to add up not unlike writing a book that with an hour a day becomes whole, though with the book it’s less obvious and when I write often I have to take logs back down to the woods. Bring them back up. Return them. It’s a lot less linear. For this, wood cutting, splitting and stacking is infinitely more satisfying.
If I have resisted the obsession of cutting, the whole process of my woodpile is an obsession. And it’s not just my woodpile that absorbs my attention. When I drive the back roads of Dutchess county looking for birds I often pull to the side of the road when a particularly beautiful woodpile comes into view. And by beautiful I mean what my woodpile is not: ordered, as if the stacking itself were an art form.
When I write in my journal in the morning, large notebook flat on the wooden table, my grandmother’s fountain pen (yes, I am that much of a cliché of morning journal writing) at the ready, the lines start to drift. Inward. So that the left-hand margin of black ink slowly bellies in, like a gentle bow of a river. My woodpile is similar, only it bellies out, like someone who drank a bit too much beer. A few months ago during one of our many winter storms, it collapsed. A woodpile must rise straight, and I worry that straight lines are not a part of my DNA.
What is my DNA? I can find out, it seems, so easily. But this is what I know from family history. My mother’s father was Swedish, my mother’s mother French. On my father’s side American back through too many generations. Probably British. Is it the Scandinavian in me that wants the woodpile (the Norwegians are obsessed with wood) and the French in me that makes it a messy pile?
In the summer months, this messy pile toasts in the sun. I look at it with satisfaction and friends admire it and ask: why don’t you get a chainsaw? Why don’t I write my journal on my computer, which would be so much more efficient!? Because inefficiency is a luxury and one I love more than a fancy hotel or a four-star restaurant. When I am curating my woodpile I write sentences in my head. I think things like: having a chainsaw is like having a gun; both will go off in ways you don’t expect or want. No matter how careful you are. My inefficient wood time is my greatest solace, my silence, my friend. And there’s a side benefit: I am both strong and warm, all through the winter.
Now in the summer when I don’t need my wood to burn, into and onto this toasted woodpile snakes, sweet garter snakes, have arrived. It looks like a young family, growing, molting, eating whatever dares to trespass into their domain. My messy pile is their castle. And this messy writing is now my first blog post for the summer, a return to writing, I hope about the adventures in everyday life.
Once More to the Lake
“In talking to others, I have come to believe that . . . some lonely spot, some private nook, some glen or streamside-scene impressed us so deeply that even today its memory recalls the mood of a lost enchantment.” So writes Edwin Way Teale, a mid-20th-century nature writer. For Teale, he can never return to those “lost woods of childhood.”
On this trip west to Oregon, I have returned to my “lost woods”: Dune Acres, a small community in the Indiana Dunes, nestled next to Lake Michigan. Dune Acres is where my father grew up, and where he set his third novel, At The Shores. His father built a cabin there at the height of the depression, and he grew up between sand dunes and backstroking out into Lake Michigan. Summers, we visited the grandparents. For me and my sister, the Dunes were pure fun: popsicles in the fridge, games of cut the pie and flashlight tag with the neighbor kids, and sleep outs in the dunes. To return to such a magic place is, of course impossible, because those childhood days of no cares are gone forever. But the place itself: it was there and I wanted to see the changes. Better still: old friends opened their doors.
“In talking to others, I have come to believe that . . . some lonely spot, some private nook, some glen or streamside-scene impressed us so deeply that even today its memory recalls the mood of a lost enchantment.” So writes Edwin Way Teale, a mid-20th-century nature writer. For Teale, he can never return to those “lost woods of childhood.”
On this trip west to Oregon, I have returned to my “lost woods”: Dune Acres, a small community in the Indiana Dunes, nestled next to Lake Michigan. Dune Acres is where my father grew up, and where he set his third novel, At The Shores. His father built a cabin there at the height of the depression, and my father grew up between sand dunes and backstroking out into Lake Michigan. Summers, we visited the grandparents. For me and my sister, the Dunes were pure fun: popsicles in the fridge, games of cut the pie and flashlight tag with the neighbor kids, and sleep outs in the dunes. To return to such a magic place is, of course impossible, because those childhood days of no cares are gone forever. But the place itself: it was there and I wanted to see the changes. Better still: old friends opened their doors.
When I arrived, I crept down the main road that leads into the Dunes. My father used to pick up speed at this point, the roads his and familiar. We were tossed about in the back seat of the VB bug, then the Dodge Dart. But I wanted to savor the marsh before the woods, the curve on to East Road, the uphill onto Circle Drive. But the driveway to my grandparent’s house: shorter and really not so steep, and the house itself half the size of my memory.
I stood on the porch of my friends’ house, looking out on the wind tossed lake, white caps formed as waves rolled in. The lake extended to the horizon--I keep wanting to call it the ocean--and there met a pink, blue gray sky, a bank of clouds. The water was a gray green with a lighter green swatch far out. That always meant a sandbar, and when we were kids we used to swim or wade out, standing knee-deep a hundred yards into the water.
To the west and south, I saw the sparkle of towering buildings in Chicago. A few Ring-billed Gulls floated like balloons in the gray gray sky. I turned into the house to find a half dozen beds to choose from, a puzzle half made. My friends had clearly recreated this house so that their children could live with the magic of sand and water. The enchantment is not gone. Maybe Teale is wrong, maybe once a place is enchanted it is so forever, can never be lost.
On the beach, ice formed, small balls encasing sand. In the summer there were alewives that piled up, marinating to a stink in the hot sand. All these years later, I still wonder what killed those fish? I looked down at the frozen sand, remembering searching for “Indian beads,” small stones hollowed out in the middle that we could string together in a necklace. Then I looked up and almost laughed: so close were the smokestacks of industry in Gary, just down the beach. Had I ignored them as a child, splashing in the docile waves of the lake? The blowout, the rolling sand dunes where we played our finest games, did not take a day to cross but twenty minutes, side stepping all of the native grasses that have come in to secure the sand. Ecologically this is a good thing but clearly no children play in these dunes anymore. New houses crowded the edge of the dunes. Maybe Teale is right, the lost woods are lost forever.
I spent the morning catching up and reminiscing with my friends--no time had passed, the wrinkles there but our laughter the same. Then I walked out the road, still narrow and sand dusted. There, heard the plaintive cry of a Red-shouldered Hawk perched high tree in a tree. I realized I did not have any bird song to accompany my memories, not the coo of Mourning Doves or the dee dee of the Chickadee. And so here was my Dunes music: the cry of a Red-shouldered Hawk. Delighted, I watched the bird as it flew toward the lake, wing beats steady, gracious, bold. Maybe we create and recreate our own enchantments.