Birding Before Dawn
The beaver slapped its tail, a heavy thunk with purpose, and a ripple of laughter, nervous and surprised wafted through the group. “That gets the adrenalin going,” I said, though no one needed to add to the jangle of excitement. I’d brought coffee and banana nut muffins. “Susan, why didn’t you tell us you knew how to bake?” someone asked. “Because I can’t,” I said.
We were a cheerful bunch—seven students from my class on writing about birds at Bard College and three friends who were willing to get out of bed for a four in the morning bird event. We were out to hear the dawn chorus on Cruger Island Road, a muddy causeway that splits the North and South Tivoli Bays that edge the Hudson River.
I’ve been on Cruger Island for the dawn chorus many times; there is no place I’d rather hear the world wake up. An orange almost-full moon disappeared behind the Catskills as we stood in silence except for the hum of a barge on the Hudson in the distance. Students whispered to each other and one spotted a satellite coursing across the sky and I wondered: would this be a special morning, would they find it magic, as I did? Or might it be a dull dawn chorus, something they would regret rising so early for when they still had finals, papers to write.
The beaver slapped its tail, a heavy thunk with purpose, and a ripple of laughter, nervous and surprised wafted through the group. “That gets the adrenalin going,” I said, though no one needed to add to the jangle of excitement. I’d brought coffee and banana nut muffins. “Susan, why didn’t you tell us you knew how to bake?” someone asked. “Because I can’t,” I said.
We were a cheerful bunch—seven students from my class on writing about birds at Bard College and three friends who were willing to get out of bed for a four in the morning bird event. We were out to hear the dawn chorus on Cruger Island Road, a muddy causeway that splits the North and South Tivoli Bays that edge the Hudson River.
I’ve been on Cruger Island for the dawn chorus many times; there is no place I’d rather hear the world wake up. An orange almost-full moon disappeared behind the Catskills as we stood in silence except for the hum of a barge on the Hudson in the distance. Students whispered to each other and one spotted a satellite coursing across the sky and I wondered: would this be a special morning, would they find it magic, as I did? Or might it be a dull dawn chorus, something they would regret rising so early for when they still had finals, papers to write.
And then the birds started, first a Catbird leading the charge, a Great-blue Heron flew over, a dark quiet silhouette, then a Marsh Wren tuned up. In the distance: Barred Owl, a Robin, Red-winged Blackbirds. It wasn’t until a Screech Owl arrived, landing in a tree but twenty feet away at 5:03 that I felt a ripple of pleasure, that collective sense that this was going to be a splendid day. By 5:30 one student was crouched looking into the reeds to spot a Least Bittern, and that was soon followed by a Common Nighthawk bat-winging through the cerulean sky. Four Bald Eagles contemplated the morning sun in nearby trees, one adult to three young, and a brown Raccoon made its way into the woods with a tasty treasure.
To take young people out to see this world we live in: I can’t imagine anything more important or fun. Every week I began class asking what they had seen and every week at least one or two would say: I saw nothing, trapped behind a computer, in the library, in a book. These are serious, hard-working kids. I saw that by teaching a class that required them to go out and look, to write about what they saw, gave them permission, encouragement to do what they don’t have time to do in this busy world.
I always get a little sentimental at the end of a semester, fond of my students, our lively and warm conversations, and because this class involved lots of time in the field I’ve gotten to know these young people. I like them. Admire them. And so, full of that sentimentality I can write that to look in the face of a young person who has heard his first Black-billed Cuckoo sing in a marsh, to stand next to a young woman following a Merlin zinging across a clear sky, full of hope and promise: this is to live this life, this is to love this life.
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.
Sandhill Cranes
When 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.
When 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.
To see the birds there in Canada, on their migratory path south, perhaps to Wilcox, was to witness one of the great events in the natural world. Scientists have spent a lot of time studying migration, and still it remains a half secret (some aspects of how birds navigate are understood). I like this. I prefer when we don’t know, the natural world remaining a wondrous mystery, something to appreciate rather than master. Whenever I encounter a migrating bird—spring and fall—I marvel over the intersection of our lives. How was it that these Cranes, on their precarious path south, had landed here at this campground by a northern lake and that I had as well? The odds seemed fantastic. I already felt lucky that I had managed to spend the night in a clean, quiet, beautiful campsite, now I felt double lucky that it came complete with Cranes.
This, it turns out, is my favorite sort of birding: to travel some place beautiful and to be surprised by what I find, what I see, what I hear. If you bird in this way—with no expectations, with eyes and ears open, ready to see what you can—you can never be disappointed. The disappointed birder is the one who goes out looking for Cranes and doesn’t find them. That I wasn’t even hoping for, or expecting the Cranes, made it feel not like a bird sighting but a miracle sighting.
As I pulled out of the campsite, a woman who had been photographing the sunrise, shared a smile and an appreciation for the Cranes. “Keep an eye out when you drive West,” she said, “there are fields of Cranes.” And she was right.
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.