dispatches

Balancing acts

It is spring back here in the Northwest. I came home to daffodils and the current bush in bloom and the pear and maple trees in leaf. Today at the Fill the sky was full of swallows, which made me inordinately satisfied. The swallows are back, which tells me that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the world is still set right. There was a lot of migratory activity, way too many Robins around to be local birds, and the ones on territory were having a fit chasing off the clueless out of towners. The winter ducks, like the Wigeons, are still thick, but there are big rafts of Bufflehead in the lake, and I saw a group of Ring-necked Ducks, which I have not seen all winter.

It is an interstitial moment in my busy spring schedule, between work last week in Chicago and week after next in DC. The last assignment is delivered. I can work on other projects, but it seems far too much time is generally taken up with managing the files. Just making sure they're all in their triplicated places and up to date. For my off site storage I use internal hard drives that I've replaced with bigger ones, which means some of my data is scattered across drives as small as 60gb. They're old style IDE drives, formatted for PCs, and I've been having a time making sure I still have a means to access them. My last external drive box bit the dust and I replaced it with a nifty USB to IDE cable, but for some reason the Mac is balking at reading these drives, or at reading more than one in a row.

I have a stack of newer SATA drives, since I've upped the capacity in my Mac Pro, and I have a decommissioned Drobo that once held four drives, and that seems to no longer have a place in my backup regime. It's going on Ebay. The Drobo is problematic and slow—I once tried to use it to back up one of my full terabyte drives, and it took 29 hours to transfer the data. Then I used a SATA cabled box, and it took under two hours.  So now all my data fits on seven hard drives, ranging from 250 to 1000gb. These will live across the street at my mother-in-law's house. 

So long as I don't spend entire days at these tasks, and I can get out and count the ducks and do my Daily Photo, life is in balance.

I'm not alone

Finally, I learn that I'm not alone in my rant about incongruent bird sounds in movies. I am in a darkened theatre, engrossed in the story and the reality on the screen in front of me, and suddenly, there's a bird sound that has absolutely no place in the scene. I am jolted out of the artistry, and I am mad. For an industry that takes such care at getting period details right in Jane Austin re-creations, why do they overlook, say, eastern Blue Jay calls in a scene that takes place in the California redwoods (Kinsey), or the cry of a Red-tailed Hawk whenever a Bald Eagle flies by? Don't they care?

Here is a Washington Post article that let me know that I have a lot of company in this regard. It begins:

"In James Mangold's new blockbuster Western "3:10 to Yuma," the first time we meet Ben Wade, played by tough-guy actor Russell Crowe, he is making a natural history sketch of a bird just minutes before carrying out yet another murderous stagecoach robbery. The scene establishes Wade not only as a complex character, but as a savvy birder who takes the time to document what is surely the first and only sighting in the United States of Africa's augur buzzard."

Warblers in Wisconsin

I had thought to blog about this trip chronologically, but the impressions of the moment have overtaken that intention. I am in Door County, Wisconsin, in between Chicago assignments (University of Chicago last week, Illinois Institute of Technology later this week). I am supposed to be working on the UC files. The birds are proving more compelling.

For someone from the West Coast, the landscape of the upper Midwest is, well, tame. Dramatics are not going to be in the picture, except, perhaps, with weather. It would be nice to see some dramatic weather this trip, so long as I don't have to fly through any of it. But it is breezy and clear.

It is bird migration season, and it could be more dramatic than it is. Bad weather would help. With clear skies the birds fly through all night and don't stop off. Were a cold front to come through at just the right time, say, just before morning, one could see a dramatic fallout of birds. Especially on a lakeshore, and doubly so on a peninsula. That is why I decided to perch myself on one for the duration.

Nonetheless, the birding today was not bad. It was superb by West Coast standards, where we have a barely discernable passerine migration, in contrast to the vast tide of birds that wash across the middle and eastern parts of the continent twice a year. I went to a state park at the tip of this peninsula, and heard a lot of chickadees in the forest. When I would annoy the chickadees with a “pishing” sound, I'd gather the flock around me. Within it would invariably be a warbler or two or three.

As I spied an American Redstart, then a Red-eyed Vireo, then a Myrtle Warbler. I turned and found two other birders watching what I had brought in. Ron and Marianne joined me for the next two hours, they with their superior knowledge of the CFWs (confusing fall warblers) and with patience equal to mine to sort through each flock of chickadees along the trail.

In those hours I logged more warbler species than even exist on the West Coast, it seemed. Bay-breasted, Nashville Warbler, Tennessee Warbler, Black and White, Orange-crowned—the list kept growing. Along with a Ruffed Grouse. a couple of Thrushes (they appear to be moving through big time right now), and some Swans on a rocky peninsula across a small bay.

The NWS is forecasting a weak cold front to come through tonight, about 1am. I think I'm going to go to bed early.

The urban ecosystem

The season has tipped into the slow time for birding. On our walk around Green Lake this morning, we managed a paltry 13 species, and that had to include some “junk” birds like Rock Dove and Starling. We couldn't even raise a Robin or a Red-winged Blackbird or a Pied-billed Grebe. Everyone is busy molting (the ducks are shedding their spring finery for drab eclipse plumage) or hiding from the heat. The Tweeters birding listserv is thinner than usual—the birdwatchers have been driven from the scorched earth of Eastern Washington, and the fall shorebird migration is just beginning and nothing rare has shown up yet.

Yesterday morning we were breakfasting in the patio and heard the crows screeching even more vociferously than usual, and nearby. I investigated, and saw them dive bombing the neighbor's tomcat, as it released the young crow it had in its jaws. The crow hopped away, with one wing dragging, hobbled across the street, and, after several tries, made it up and over the curb.

Throughout the day the parents were unrelenting in their defense of the crippled offspring. The crow made it back into our yard, making it off-limits for us. I had no inclination to tend to this bird, as I am not sentimental when it comes to wild critters in general, and have a respectful antipathy towards crows in particular, as they exist in numbers far larger than they would without our intervention in the natural landscape, and they take a great toll on other native birdlife. The best I could have done for this wounded crow would have been to capture it, wring its neck, and put it out of its misery. But that would have risked being identified as the enemy of these crows, and I would have no peace ever again. Some time ago, my neighbor was thusly rewarded for freeing a baby crow from having gotten its head stuck in an Adirondack chair, and got dive bombed for years afterwards anytime he left the house. Just him. Corvids are profoundly intelligent, can identify us by individual, and have long memories.

The mortality rate of fledgling birds is about 90% or more. Nature is not in the least sentimental—that is strictly a human construct. This morning the neighborhood is quiet. There are no crows calling. A raccoon probably dispatched the youngster overnight, which is how I expected this to end, and how it should have. Cat, crow, raccoon, human. Predator, prey, scavenger, witness. These were the actors in this minor event in the urban ecosystem.

Back to life

Young birds are everywhere. It seems early this year, but everywhere I look I see newly fledged birds. Half the swallows at Montlake are now hard-to-identify brown jobs. The local House Finch family sits on the wire, outside our dining room window, two begging youngsters framed by two harassed parents. The chickadee nest across the street has emptied and the family lives at the bird feeder now. I walked up to one at the feeder, obviously a young bird, that didn’t know how to regard me. "You, big. I’m supposed to fly now, right?" But it took so long to think it through that I was a couple of feet away before it scurried off in full alarm mode. I saw my first fledgling crow today on my run, which means it’s the beginning of the season of the vociferous, incessant, strangled begging cry, and the mid-summer power failures as the young crows immolate themselves by shorting out the power transformers.

There is nothing like the power of bird observation to bring one’s attention into the here and now. The other day I came back from an errand at the local shopping center, in a foul mood from the crowded sidewalks and long lines to pay for my purchases, and my absent minded abandonment of my last purchase at the counter, which I remembered halfway to the car, so I had to thread the crowd again, steaming, to recover the book I bought at B&N. I pulled up to the house, and heard a crow alarm call, and overhead were two crows trailing a young Bald Eagle. A little further east were two adult Bald Eagles, soaring aloft in a thermal. I stopped, stared, and the stress melted away. Life is not so bad when you arrive home to Bald Eagles over your house.

Other realities

I’ve just completed a big processing job, and the last thing I wanted to do today was stare into a monitor. I couldn’t make myself go to work, so I went for a walk instead.

I ended up at Green Lake, somewhat serendipitously (my usual mode—I never know what I’m going to do until I do it. The other day, Robin was with me on an errand. We had several choices of route. We discussed the best way to get there, and yet, at an intersection, I went another way. "It’s a wonder you ever committed to marry me,"she said, exasperated again.)

The birds were different than during my typical winter walks. Lots of swallows, six different species, I counted. When I’m looking at birds in public, I feel like I have the key to a different, more exotic reality than the civilians around me. No one else noticed the Yellow Warbler singing from the top of a tree, or the Warbling Vireo singing from the depths of another willow. Someone else ought to have noticed the Osprey, 200 feet up, make a spiraling dive into the lake, grab a foot long fish, and then struggle to contain it as it flew off to the East. But the two men walking by me never looked up.

I felt something similar as I photographed around the lakeshore on my walk, this view into an unseen reality. Why this spot, and not another? What captivated me about this arrangement of dense brush? Sometimes it is birdsong that draws me, and then a photograph that keeps me. There’s one dense area on the south shore of the lake, that always creeps me out a bit when I wander there, and then I get confirmation of my creeped-outness by the condom wrappers littering the ground. Another brushy spot on the northwest side, where the water is almost always calm, has a completely different feel for me, nonetheless, on a bench was a pair of woman’s high heeled shoes, a red brassiere and a flowered top. How did she get home, I wondered? Shoeless and topless?

"What are you taking pictures of?" the barista at the coffee cart asked. "Oh, stuff,"I said. "Landscapes, I guess."

Remembrances of birds past

The morning fog, so moist and comforting, has been replaced by dessicating Santa Ana winds and unrelenting sun. My hike yesterday was in the wind and the bright, in the Simi Hills at the Sage Ranch Park. It’s interesting how landscapes feel like they either touch something deeply personal and familiar, even if they are foreign, like the coastal scrub and sycamore groves of the coast, or feel alien and exotic, like the wind-seared sandstone of these hills just 30 miles inland. Maybe it’s just weather, and the wrong ions in the wind. What I had been looking forward to, and missing because of the wind, was the birds of a new environment. This landscape was bereft of birdsong.

I hauled along the Xpan on this hike, and boy, was I rusty. I have become so fluent and unconscious with my seeing through the digital that it was a shock to erect a tripod and compose a skinny rectangle through a rangefinder viewer again. With color negative film I have a chance at capturing the extreme dynamic range of this landscape (that dratted sun again) at which digital fails so readily. As it was, however, my exposure ratio between the formats was about 10 to 1, and I didn’t even finish out the roll of film.

I came into a sheltered riparian area, and there, finally, were the birds. Familiar ones now, House Finches and Oak Titmice and Lesser Goldfinches, and then, a song from long ago: a Canyon Wren. I remember this bird from my desert years, and there is nothing like a bird song from another time to take me back, to recall all the times and places this descending cascade of bell tones was in my life. Bird song is the ultimate mnemonic for me, as powerful as scent.

On the way home

I’m driving to the airport, waiting at a downtown stop light. A silhouette in the air catches my eye—not a pigeon, says the piece of my brain that registers such things. Quick, steady wingbeats, long tail, round wings, and tiny: a Sharp-shinned Hawk. It wheels around and passes over me again, level with the roofline of the 10 story buildings. I crane my head to look up through the windshield. The light has gone green, and the driver behind me patiently waits for me to gather my wits and move along. Were this New York and not Baltimore I would have unleashed an orchestra of horns behind me.

An hour later, and I’m waiting for my connection. The sandwich shop in the Newark airport has as its ambient soundtrack a kind of music I can describe only as "Grey’s Anatomy" style: plaintive, repetitive lyrics about loss and yearn, in a mellow minor key, backed by piano, suggestive of meaningful looks of ambivalence in the characters’ eyes during the closing minutes of the episode. It seems to be the common music of public spaces these days.

Darn. It used to be that you could cop a free wireless signal outside the Continental President’s Club on Concourse C. No more. Now it costs $8 to log on through Boingo, anywhere in the airport. Regarding wireless I turn into one of those obnoxious computer libertarian types who think all content and access should be free. Of course, they seem to avoid considering how the content providers (I’m one of them) get paid or how the infrastructure gets built. But dammit, $8 to check my email and post a blog entry is too much.

I started this post about birds because it seems indicative of a necessary quality for a creative professional. The work doesn’t cease when you’re off the client’s nickel. What I bring to bear that my clients value is a depth of attention and the ability to respond instantly to what I see. You don’t turn that on or off—it needs to be cultivated. My birding is probably symptomatic of that attentiveness—no matter what else I am doing, if I am outdoors I am noting what bird sounds I’m hearing, or what is flying by, and identifying it. Walking across Mt St Mary’s University the other day with my minder, I mentioned how her campus is full of Downy Woodpeckers. I’d heard a dozen of them that morning, and seen several. "What? You’re kidding! We have woodpeckers?"

Right now I have an hour in Newark before I board my flight home. I need a Daily Photo—maybe it’s here. Or perhaps I’ll see something on the flight. At any rate, it’s a useful motivator to keep my eyes open.

Pecho amarillo

I described to Robin the bird we were about to see. A Tropical Kingbird has landed in Magnussen Park, and the birding listservs are abuzz with the news. "Oh, a pecho amarillo. We saw those all over Costa Rica." Ask a local there what the name of a bird is, especially if it’s yellow. "Pecho amarillo," they’ll answer. Yellow chest. All yellow birds are pecho amarillos.

But I’d never seen one in North America. I have a bird list. I keep a count, at least on this continent. I try to maintain a humble attitude, in public anyway, about it. I claim to not know how many birds are on my list. I’m above all that. I list, but I don’t care that I list. Yeah, right. It’s really a way to be superiorly snobbish. What did I do the first thing when I got home? I opened up my Excel spreadsheet, with the official ABA list of North American birds, and ticked off Tropical Kingbird (Tyrannus melancholicus) with a checkmark. Come to think of it, I haven’t updated that list to include the 47th AOU supplement of North American birds. They split a couple species (Blue Grouse into Sooty and Dusky the most notable) so I may have an armchair tick coming.

But back to the Kingbird, blown in from who knows where. They’re an occasional vagrant in Washington, usually on the coast. I’ve been wondering when all these storms were going to blow something interesting our way. To see one, and count it on your North American list, one typically heads to Nogales, Arizona, and hope the bird hops across the border. What a treat one landed a mile from my house.

We parked and wandered behind Building 11 at the old Navy base on the north end. I spied some sparrows, and started working through them. Two women, with a spotting scope, headed my way with a quick, hopeful step. "Nope, I’m looking at sparrows. Haven’t seen it." I didn’t need to be any more specific than that. They knew why I was there, I I knew what they came for. From the other direction came another pair of birders. "It flew this way. It’s across the road." A moment later, we spied it, conspicuous on a snag. Thank goodness this is a kind of bird that likes to be seen. I looked at it through a scope. "Yep, there’s the notched tail. I sure wouldn’t have ever seen that on my own. I would have just called it a Western Kingbird." I never find rare birds on my own. The way I find rare birds is I look for suspiciously large groups of birders.

One of the artists from the craft fair next door came by. "What’ya looking at?" A bird that doesn’t belong here, we answered. "How’d you find it.?" Robin explained to him the process of how people find rare birds. "You look at birds and go, usual suspect, usual suspect, usual suspect, wait. That’s different." It was the most concise summary of the process of birdwatching I’d ever heard.

There is no bad weather

It took us 3 hours to drive the 70 miles from Seattle to Olympia in Friday rush hour traffic. Robin was giving a song and dance the next morning at the regional EMDRIA association meeting, and we mistakenly thought we’d save some time by driving down the afternoon before. It is not for nothing that Seattle’s traffic is rated the 2nd worst in the country.

While Robin talked about couples’ therapy, I went to Nisqually Delta, one of my favorite places on the planet. It was blowing and pouring rain still, as it was the night before--the November storm season is upon us. My belief is that there is no bad weather, only insufficient clothing, and I enjoyed a 3 mile walk birding and photographing. A Peregrine Falcon flew about and worried the ducks, so there was a lot of action in the air. The Canada Geese overhead cackled a high, almost chirping call, which indicated they were the small Cackling race from Yukon Delta, in for the season.

Soon I was lost in "stick picture" reverie, which I now mostly shoot digitally. Someday I need to start printing this stuff, and see how it holds up to the film versions. I have an exhibition opportunity in January, and perhaps that will be the impetus.

It’s funny how, after shooting so incessently for the past three weeks on the road, I am not sated. There is no "enough," or even any sense that there is a capacity that can be fulfilled and completed. If anything, the wheels are so well greased right now that it seems the most natural interaction to my environment to be one of photographic investigation. Anything less would feel incomplete, and to not have a camera with me here would feel deeply unsatisfying.

There is the problem, though, of managing this flood of images that appears to be unstoppable. I am way behind, and I see no end in sight.

You can see the morning’s results at my Flickr page.