The morning fog, so moist and comforting, has been replaced by dessicating Santa Ana winds and unrelenting sun.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.
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