Housekeeping
I’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.
I’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.
In the same way that our careless ways are revealed to us in the roadside so too does the river tell our dirty story. Stuff collects under the ice, in the snow that laces the edge of the river. Released, it travels about, along with logs and sticks, stumps that have floated free from land. There’s no other way to say it: yesterday the river was a chocolate mess.
There’s something invigorating about this mess: I have something to do. It was Marjory Stoneman Douglas who wrote “It is a woman’s business to be interested in the environment,” she wrote. “It’s an extended form of housekeeping.” She wrote The Everglades: A River of Grassin the Rivers of America series, transforming the way people view this land from a treacherous miasmic swamp to a beautiful river of grass.
And I hate to say it, but in my case, she’s right: I love picking up garbage. One minute the shoreline is littered, then it is clean. My work is fast and obvious. In this political climate having that sense of small accomplishment seems essential, gives me energy to embark on the larger house cleaning issues.
As my friend Kate and I paddle the river south, past Magdalen Island, then Cruger and into the South Tivoli bay I see the Cormorants V-ing north along the river, I see the Osprey perched on the channel marker. I delight in the Green-winged Teal that flushes when we enter the Bay. But I also take note of the plastic barrel, the Styrofoam, the jugs and buckets bobbing about in the water, the logs that I must miss lest then flip me over.
I can’t wait to get out and sweep these things out of the river. And so I look forward to Riverkeeper Sweep, now in its 6th year. On May 6, thousands will take to the shoreline picking up trash. We’ll all be house keeping the earth. In Tivoli we’ll be tidying our shoreline. Come join us—surprise yourself with how satisfying a clean house is.
Patience
When I got the call of the baby Pileated Woodpeckers I dropped everything to drive over and see them. The Pileated Woodpecker is our largest Woodpecker (except for the Ivory-billed, which I am sure is still out there). It cackles its way through Eastern hardwood forests, and was clearly the model for the cartoon Woody Woodpecker. To see babies would be a dream.
When I arrived at Tatjana's house, perched in the woods and surrounded by newly leafed hardwood forest, she was sitting outside on a blanket, her seventeen-year-old cat, a beautiful dark calico, draped calm across her lap. The cat had had a seizure a few days before and since then had been limp, not eating and only drinking a little. Tatjana had done nothing in the intervening days but hold her cat, speak to her, comfort her. Both appeared peaceful.
“Dying is a long process,” she said kissing the cat’s head.
When I got the call of the baby Pileated Woodpeckers I dropped everything to drive over and see them. The Pileated Woodpecker is our largest Woodpecker (except for the Ivory-billed, which I am sure is still out there). It cackles its way through Eastern hardwood forests, and was clearly the model for the cartoon Woody Woodpecker. To see babies would be a dream.
When I arrived at Tatjana's house, perched in the woods and surrounded by newly leafed hardwood forest, she was sitting outside on a blanket, her seventeen-year-old cat, a beautiful dark calico, draped calm across her lap. The cat had had a seizure a few days before and since then had been limp, not eating and only drinking a little. Tatjana had done nothing in the intervening days but hold her cat, speak to her, comfort her. Both appeared peaceful.
“Dying is a long process,” she said kissing the cat’s head.
Tatjana led me a short ways down a trail behind her house.
“Look,” she said, pointing toward a dead tree, one hundred feet into the woods. And there, poking out of an almost perfectly round hole in the smooth, barkless trunk, was the head of a baby Pileated Woodpecker. Everything about the little bird head was a Pileated in miniature: the striking red crest, the dark eye line, the strong chisel-shaped bill. I could see its bill partially open, but I couldn’t hear its baby pleas for food.
I left Tatjana seated on a blanket in an opening, while I slipped into the woods, and stood behind a bush, with a great sneaky view of the baby birds. I watched as one baby extended its tiny head toward the world, retreated and another head emerged. I cheerfully took photographs for perhaps ten minutes, then content—no thrilled—with my Pileated Woodpecker time, returned to Tatjana.
“Oh, no, you’ll have to wait,” she said, nodding back to my cover in the woods. “Wait till the mother comes.” Tatjana is a Buddhist who sits in meditation for hours at a time so I had a sense that I was going to learn a new level of stillness. I returned to my cover with a tiny wooden stool and settled in.
When I go in search of birds, I romp down trails, slog through wetlands, work may way through meadows—I go to the birds. But this spring I’ve tried for stillness, for standing or sitting with patience in hopes the birds will come to me. Now here I was with the perfect opportunity to refine my patience.
For the next hour, I watched as one baby bird head emerged, scanning the woods, looking and listening. Then it would withdraw inside the hole, which appeared but five inches in diameter. For a moment the show would stop, then a head would emerge. The little birds as well had patience, waiting for so long between meals.
I could smell cut wood and incense, could hear crows meddling in a nearby oak tree, and at the bottom of a small hill, a Red-eyed Vireo carried on, entranced with its own voice. I sat propped on that uncomfortable wicker stool not more than a foot high, binoculars and camera at the ready. Waiting, waiting. I didn’t realize that I no longer felt my left leg, until I no longer felt my butt. I stretched with as little motion as possible.
Suddenly both baby birds craned from the nest hole, as if they might tumble out, crests alert. Food! The mother or father arrived, forced its long, thick bill down the throat of the little ones. Feeding was a bit of a violent affair. The parent fed the young, then sped off. I had waited an hour and twenty minutes; the feeding lasted less than a minute.
I returned over the course of the next five days, to bring food to Tatjana as she, with tender patience, sat with her cat, and to check on the Woodpecker babies. It was hard not to think of how life and death were colliding there on that wooded hill. Tatjana looked tired but alert. The cat slept. The baby birds were soon gone, fledged, impatient to get into the world.
Enjoying the Spectacle
I wasn’t ready for the mass of screaming gulls, or for the piles of Horseshoe Crabs along the shoreline, the males riding tight to the females, tails spiked toward the overcast sky. With each wave, another batch of horseshoe crabs washed up on Reed's Beach near Cape May, NJ, and what ensued was a wave of screams and hollers, whistles and hoots, a frenzy of the Laughing Gulls and Herring Gulls, and those remarkable little shorebirds, the Red Knots, fresh in from Tierra del Fuego.
Cape May is always good birding. On my few visits there, I’ve always left a bit dazzled by the sights. Once was a flock of hundreds of Sanderlings swooping the shore, landing, then circling out to the ocean in a choreographed movement that took my breath. Now here I had stumbled onto one of the great events of migration, witness to more feeding gulls and shorebirds than I had ever seen on one slim beach.
I wasn’t ready for the mass of screaming gulls, or for the piles of Horseshoe Crabs along the shoreline, the males riding tight to the females, tails spiked toward the overcast sky. With each wave another batch of horseshoe crabs washed up on Reed's Beach near Cape May, NJ, and what ensued was a wave of screams and hollers, whistles and hoots, a frenzy of the Laughing Gulls and Herring Gulls, and those remarkable little shorebirds, the Red Knots, fresh in from Tierra del Fuego.
Cape May is always good birding. On my few visits there, I’ve always left a bit dazzled by the sights. Once was a flock of hundreds of Sanderlings swooping the shore, landing, then circling out to the ocean in a choreographed movement that took my breath. Now here I had stumbled onto one of the great events of migration, witness to more feeding gulls and shorebirds than I had ever seen on one slim beach.
I felt lucky to be witness to this as I had read about, heard about how the Horseshoe Crabs come to shore for a few weeks in May, lay thousands of eggs—up to 80,000 each— enough for the shorebirds and enough so that the horseshoe crab continues is prehistoric life. Unless. Unless the horseshoe crab is taken to extract its blue blood—which is used to produce a remarkable healing agent, Limulus amoebocyte lysate (LAL). These Horseshoe Crabs are returned to the waters, most surviving. But many others are gathered by fishermen and cut up to use as bait for fishing in the Delaware Bay. Mature female crab populations dropped by 86 percent between 2001 and 2003 due to this take. The correlation in Red Knot populations was quick and evident. Between 2000 and 2002 the populations of Red Knots dropped by 50%. How was it that the spectacle of such abundance in front of me was, in fact, a story of loss? Of decline? Unaware of all of this at the time, I let the sounds and smells of all the birds wash over me. I just enjoyed the spectacle.
Red Knots are an extraordinary shorebird. In Moonbird, the writer Phillip Hoose describes the migration of this little shorebird with a red chest that makes its way with "luck, navigational skill, and physical toughness" from southern Argentina to the Arctic every year. The bird of his story—B95—is banded in Tierra del Fuego in 1995, and was most recently sighted in March of 2015. This little bird flies 20,000 miles a year—so in its nineteen plus years of life has flown the equivalent of flying to the moon—and back.
When B95 was banded, scientists estimated about 150,000 Red Knots existed. Now, 25,000 fly the globe. This means that in this one bird’s lifetime, populations have dropped 80%, making its long life even more exceptional.
I did not look for B95 as the birds swept the beach. I stood, slightly dazed by the raucous, as the gulls hovered over the water, then plummeted, wings raised as they hushed to the ground and began foraging between the Horseshoe Crabs. A flock of Red Knots raced by without stopping, little bullets with red chests on a mission to somewhere. The Horseshoe Crabs looked liked war-torn soldiers, barnacles clinging to the base of the domed shell, spikey tails pointed high as they tumbled in with the waves. Some of the Horseshoe Crabs flipped over, spindly legs helplessly clawing the air. I wanted to run out and right them, but the beach was cordoned off, protected by a volunteer. “At night, we go out and flip them back over,” she explained. For now, the beach was for the birds. All of those birds.
Gambling
I write this sitting in the town of Pahrump, outside of La Vegas. So this is a rich perch from which to think about gambling. I always say I’m not a gambler—I’ve bought a Lotto ticket or two but I wouldn’t know what to do in a casino. Yet the truth is, we all gamble all the time—when we decide to take this job and not that one. When we decide to go to dinner with this person we will fall in love with and not that person. If you leave money out of the definition of gambling, replace it with, for instance, birds, then it reads like this: playing games in order to find birds. I gamble in this way all the time.
I write this sitting in the town of Pahrump, outside of Las Vegas. So this is a rich perch from which to think about gambling. I always say I’m not a gambler—I’ve bought a Lotto ticket or two but I wouldn’t know what to do in a casino. Yet the truth is, we all gamble all the time—when we decide to take this job and not that one. When we decide to go to dinner with this person we will fall in love with and not that person. If you leave money out of the definition of gambling, replace it with, for instance, birds, then it reads like this: playing games in order to find birds. I gamble in this way all the time.
When I left my motel in Lee Vining, California, I wasn’t thinking about gambling on birds. I was revisiting the past. In 1980 I hitch hiked with Michael, my boyfriend at the time, to Lee Vining. We camped by the tufa towers of Mono Lake and dreamt of the summer to unfold before us rock climbing on the granite domes of Tuolomne Meadows. I am a bit haunted by that summer, the one I refer to as “the best summer of my life.” And it began in Lee Vining. I wanted to walk through a piece of that past.
As I strolled down a creek side trail I soon snapped out of my daydreaming. A Dipper could be frequenting this stream, I realized. And so I went on high alert, in hopes that one of these gray, cheerful birds would sing for me. The Dipper, often called the Water Ouzel, was John Muir’s favorite little caroler, and in his day, not a stream in the Sierras was without one of these songsters. I scanned the water, knowing a Dipper bobs about, but in general presents as gray on gray, as polished as the rocks in the stream.
As I looked for the Dipper, it made me focus outward and I started to see the lovely small canyon: sandy soil, running water, rock outcroppings. Not part of my memories, but more beautiful. And as I admired the world, I noticed a…Christmas tree bulb in the tree. I pulled up my binoculars and looked at the round, speckled little owl. A Northern Pygmy Owl. I stopped. The owl swiveled its head, showing its large “eyes” on the back of its head, then turned to look at me again. It sat, nonchalant, unaware how it had cheered my day.
After spending time with the owl, I bid him goodbye on his happy perch and continued on. Soon after, I heard the song of the Dipper, a musical medley that rose above the movement of the creek. I scanned the water for this joyful little bird, and found him bobbing in the creek.
I had not gambled, and yet I’d still won. Maybe I should gamble on not gambling. I often feel as if the birds I stumble on are the most special—special because I saw them and special because so utterly unexpected. Unexpected, just like the adventures of that summer spent in Tuolomne in 1980.