There’s been a Robin outside the window who starts singing a little after 4am every morning. Everytime I think, I should really get up early and go birding. (I have less charitable thoughts too, like, I wish that guy had not picked a territory so close to our bedroom window.) At 5:30 the cat decided it was time for us to get going, by doing laps around the bed. "It’s light outside, guys! Time to get up!" Robin (the wife, not the bird) threw her out and closed the door, where she whined and scratched for another hour. I think I’ll go birding, I decided.
There’d been some compelling reports on Tweeters the last few days. Migration is in full swing. Peeps at the Fill, Cassin’s Vireo and Wilson’s Warbler at Discovery Park. I drove the half-mile down the hill to Montlake Fill, stopping for coffee and a scone to go at Zoka.
I tend to come here more in the winter, when the branches are bare and I work on my "stick pictures." Now the Fill is lush and green. This is an old garbage landfill that for years had a wild, abandoned look with mountainous blackberry bushes. It has always been a birdy spot, with some occasional spectacular rarities dropping by on migration. Now it’s been cleaned up and wildlife-scaped for more open landscape birds (Savannah Sparrows instead of Song, for example).
The rafts of winter ducks were gone from Lake Washington. There were just a few lone Mergansers and Bufflehead sharing the lake with the crew boat practice, and in the ponds the residents were in—Shovelers, Mallards, Gadwall, with a few migrant Green-wing Teal. On the opposite shore I saw three peeps—Least Sandpipers. I am missing the big shorebird migration this year on the coast (in a five day period a significant chunk of the world’s population of Western Sandpipers stops off in Gray’s Harbor), so this will have to suffice.
In a snag I heard the chatter of a Tree Swallow, and saw a bright blue male at a nest hole. Opposite a Downy Woodpecker silently worked the trunk. A Yellowthroat sung from a nearby alder, in a different dialect than I’d heard before ("Witch-a-DEEE, witch-a-DEEE").
I have decades of memories of these birds, of where else I have been, and what station in life I found myself when I first knew them. The Tree Swallows remind me of my time at Long Point on Lake Erie, monitoring a grid of a hundred Tree Swallow nest boxes as a field assistant. The peeps recall remarkable flocks of shorebirds from Bowerman Basin, and my depression over how that habitat has degraded and the populations have plummeted since I came to know those birds in the early 80’s. A bird call is a mnemonic to my history, and to landscape and weather and the sensation of standing in the wild, or not-so-wild, environment and being aware of my place in it. I see a bird, and I know where I am. It connects me. To place, to myself.
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