Once upon a time, I did a lot of writing about birds, birding, and birders. I even published a little book of these story/poems, and occasionally I am still asked to read from it at birding festivals. That was then though, and, as my travel schedule has gotten more complicated, that is, as I have spent more time at more festivals doing more birding, I have written less and less. This is my attempt to fix that. I figure, with a platform, I might be inspired to do more writing again, about birds, birding, and birders. So, I will start by posing the little story/poems and images that make up the body of The Kingfisher, and then, hopefully, go on from there with a new series of Kingfishers. Watch this space.
The Kingfisher: why?
February 10, 2009 at 9:25 pm (birders, birding, birds, Kingfisher, nature, poem, story)
That’s All That Matters : Sawed Off Song
February 15, 2009 at 7:12 pm (birds, Kingfisher, nature, poem, story, Thrush)
That’s All That Matters
The crow, undoubtedly harassing a perched hawk,
is a dirty dish rag imitating the dive,
the stoop,
of a bird of prey.
He rises so like a falcon,
then just folds his wings in on themselves,
flops upside down and drops.
It’s not elegant, but it gets the job done,
and I have a feeling,
from my general observations their behavior,
that that, pretty much, is what is to be crow.
Sawed Off Song
The Catbird and the Robin outside my window
patiently saw off their songs,
working the wood of melody, apparently,
with dull tools, by feel, in the 4 AM dark.
It might be a competition:
song carving or cord wood stacking, at the county fair.
The thing is, saw as they will,
they don’t seem able to make a chord between them….
A month later now, and the Robin has dropped out,
too busy these days feeding young, I suppose,
to the compete in the dawn cordage.
Still, the Catbird saws on, nothing daunted,
persistent, consistent, still, and
forever, seeking that elusive chord.
Longeared Owl
February 15, 2009 at 12:10 am (birders, birding, birds, CBC, Kingfisher, nature, owl, poem, story)
Longeared Owl (digital confection)
Longeared Owl
That whole area back behind Maine Audubon’s East Point Sanctuary,
the no-man’s land of thickets, rock, and little marshy pools
between the point proper and the gulf course,
is criss-crossed with deer trails.
When you come to the end of the Audubon trail
there is a sign that says to turn back, but,
being a Christmas Bird Count,
and at least semi-official business,
(and besides, only once a year) we didn’t.
The deer trail takes right up where the groomed trail ends.
Obviously the deer don’t respect the boundary anymore than we did,
though, as trail engineers they leave a lot to be desired
(or maybe it’s just that they aren’t designing for humans)—
anyway, the trail winds through ever thicker brush,
aspen and pin cherry and sumac, and narrows,
closes right in, climbs rock ledges that,
with a dusting of snow and week old ice under it,
posed a serious challenge.
We were pushing up a little rise,
puffing just a bit as the trail crept around
a dense little yew tree, when J. looked back
over his shoulder and just about came right up out his boots.
“Longeared Owl”
It’s hard to shout in a whisper but J. managed
(being a birder of some experience, and having mastered that art long ago)…
“Longeared Owl right here in this yew tree.”
“Where?” I shout-whispered as I climbed up to him.
“Right there.” and I turned, and after some rapid mental gymnastics
as I sorted the tree for something, anything recognizably owl,
looked directly into the eyes, just below me now, and not six feet way,
buried in next to the trunk, deep in the greenery of the yew.
He was “stretched up” the way they do when alarmed,
with his ear tuffs erect above that amazing face,
like a feather orange cut in half and laid open,
with yellow eyes deep in the black upright bars
outlined in white on either side of the beak:
a mask through which this intense intelligence,
this arresting attention, looks out.
Emily, who had been busy tallying the birds on her
clipboard and lagging a bit behind, was coming up the rise now,
just abreast of the tree.
“Longeared Owl.” J. whisper-shouted at her. “Turn, and look right beside you.”
“Where? What? I don’t see.”
And, of course, you wouldn’t if you didn’t know
exactly what to look for.
Even I, who have seen them often before at a distance,
had had to adjust my expectation of size down several notches
before the owl resolved out of the branches and yew bark
a this point blank range.
Emily simply couldn’t see it.
“Right there in the tree…” said J. and
in his enthusiasm, in his understandable eagerness
to share the miracle, he reached out
with a huge blue gloved hand and pointed.
The owl exploded out the backside of that tree
like a muffled shotgun and was off on silent wings,
fleeing what it must have taken for a giant
attacking blue jay.
He ghosted out over the frozen marsh pool
to disappear in the aspens on the rise on the far side.
Emily was left with just an impression of retreating wings, and, of course,
a hunger.
“Did you see it?” she asked,
over and over while we asked her the same,
but we all knew what she saw would never satisfy.
We set out again, Emily in the lead now,
on the branching deer trails, chasing a better view.
J. saw it fly again as we came up the rise above the aspen
so we abandoned the scopes and tripods
to track it over toward a stand of big furs.
There, it seemed, we lost it for good.
There are just too many places for a master of
camouflage like the Longeared Owl to hide back in there.
It seemed hopeless, so we, reluctantly, turned back,
Emily dragging her feet all the way,
and J. apologizing every minute or so for pointing.
We stopped in a little overgrown gully to look
over the habitat one more time
while J. explained why Longeared Owls are so fond
of this kind of thick twisted growth next to open country
(a marsh, hay fields, or, in this case, the gulf course)
where they can hunt mice and voles by night,
and told about his experience the past winter with the
communal roost in northern Massachusetts that attracted
birders for a few months there, how he had had to hunker right
down and peer through the branches to see a cluster of Longears
packed in around the trunk of a tree,
and he was demonstrating, squatting low, bringing his binoculars up,
when he interrupted himself…
“I think I see it.”
And there it was, impossibly, right were he was looking,
back in against the base of black cherry, again, just at eye level,
somewhat obscured by the poplars in between,
but clearly visible not 20 yards away.
There he was...
Emily got her glasses on it.
“Oh yes.” but both J. and I knew there was better to be had.
He scurried back to retrieve the scopes, and,
after some jockeying to find marginally open lines of sight,
we got the owl to fill two different 20 power views.
Incredible!
The big 80mm scope I was packing gave just the owl’s face at 40x,
every feather full of texture and attention
as the owl turned his head to track sounds we couldn’t even hear.
We spent a good half hour there, when we should, more properly,
have been counting Chickadees, or back along the coast
numbering the Herring Gulls and Eiders,
but we simply could not break away.
The owl held us in it’s gaze.
The owl held us with the delicacy of its plumage,
the detail of its feathers,
the tawny oranges and rusty browns,
the black and white accents,
the feathers skirting its toes and talons,
the hook of its beak…
but mostly it held us with its unlikely presence,
with the wonder of seeing it at all,
of seeing it twice
when we were more likely to have walked right by both times.
Oh, there was a sense of accomplishment
(mostly on J.’s part), a justifiable awareness
that skill had something to do with it,
that it takes a trained eye, a focused and knowledgeable attention
to see the unexpected, to see what’s really there—
but it was more than that…
It was the quiet elation of being admitted
to the owl’s world,
of coming out of ourselves, of being touched,
of being blessed, by what we have no power over,
no purchase on—
of being granted what we had no right to expect,
what we could not, in good conscience, demand,
or even ask.
Grace held us—
the knowledge that where we stood was a holy place,
a place of grace, and that the owl had lead us to it,
had opened it for us, had shared it with us.
Is it any wonder we were reluctant to leave?
And now, always, in our minds,
is the knowledge that back there,
behind the East Point sanctuary
where only the deer are supposed to go,
there is this holy place,
and an owl that watches over it,
and that, if you went there again someday,
you might find it,
or, then again,
you might not…
We are reminded that grace
is alive in the world and waiting
to happen around any turn of the trail.
Blue Grosbeak : Robin
February 14, 2009 at 1:22 am (birds, Grosbeak, Kingfisher, nature, poem, story, Thrush)
Mr. Blue
Blue Grosbeak
Mr. Blue Big Beak sings from the tippy top of the tree
tipping his morning head back, throat swelled,
launching his song from his silver crossbow—
blue to make the sky blush, blue to shock the eye,
blue to soak the soul.
Mr. Black Eye.
Mr. Masked Man.
Mr. Black and Blue.
Mr. Blue Grosbeak in his glad suit this morning,
collects the light of the tree-tops and fires it off in his song.
Robin
I don’t think I’ve ever lived this close to a Robin before.
He begins, this third week in July, just at ten past four,
right outside my window with more enthusiasm than music,
as though he could make up in volume
what he lacks in skill.
Still, it is a cheerful sound and with such
obvious good will that I find
I can’t resent his efforts,
even an hour before daylight.
Flock of Gulls: Canada Geese
February 13, 2009 at 12:40 am (birders, birding, birds, geese, gulls, Kingfisher, nature, poem, story)
A Flock of Gulls?
When you see gulls flying in formation
you have to wonder, “What’s up?”
Most of the time they don’t even appear to like each other.
They steal each other’s clams and garbage,
eat each other’s eggs, squabble over every inch of beach,
each patrolling his or her territory so fiercely
it becomes a mystery where baby gulls come from.
A flock of gulls is a contradiction in terms,
doesn’t happen, so when it does you have to wonder,
“What’s the deal? Did some one knock over a dumpster
behind Burger King in Summersworth,
did two garbage trucks collide on I95,
or is it just so early in the morning
they haven’t remembered their gulls yet?
Or maybe I’m mistaken altogether
and what I take for a flock is really
a desperate race; maybe they fly in
apparent formation only because
each bird is beating his or her heart out
to get ahead of the others,
busting a gut to be the gull
that gets to the garbage first.
Canada Geese
Okay, so it’s another “V” of Canada Geese,
silhouetted against a gray cloud-closed sky.
The air this morning, soft and moist for
the first time after weeks of hard arctic air,
does promise great things, bud and leaf,
fiddleheads uncurling in the woods,
a flood of warblers, bright and burbling song,
following not far behind.
So maybe I can make that flock of honking geese
the spear-head on the spear held in the hand
of the advancing spring.
Talk about mythopoetic.
Oh, I know, some of you are saying,
“these are Canada Geese we are talking about here.”
“The menace of a million golf courses,
the single greatest living source of nitrogen pollution
in a thousand urban lakes across the nation,
rapidly approaching nuisance-bird status.
But once the sound of their coming,
harsh and high, was the trumpet of spring.
The sight of them arrowing the air,
the beat of their brave wing to the north,
lifted hearts and quickened pulses,
spread grins of anticipation and renewal across our faces.
Go ahead, admit it. You still feel it.
As long as we can still see and hear
the herald of spring in the ungainly goose
that waddles across our yard and
eats our daffodils and fresh asparagus spears,
there is, I will believe, still hope…
for both us and them.
Arctic Loon : Loons in Winter
February 11, 2009 at 11:40 pm (birders, birding, birds, CBC, Kingfisher, loons, nature, poem, story)
Arctic Loon
I spent the weekend trying to find and photograph the Arctic Loon.
Three of us saw it, a week ago Friday, off Parson’s Beach
on the Christmas Bird Count, and reported it,
put it on the internet even,
not realizing that there were no confirmed records of the bird
in the Western Atlantic.
Oh, everybody knows they are here,
haunting our beaches and the mouths of tidal rivers every winter,
a few birds at least, passing for Pacifics
(which is what they would have been,
or at least what we would have called them,
until wiser heads decided, not so long ago,
that the ones without chin-straps are a different species);
they’ve been reported since the spilt,
but no one who really knows the bird
(from experience in the Arctic or the Pacific)
has seen one, and there is no photograph,
so our sightings are suspect until proven otherwise.
Sunday, the sand of Parson’s Beach grew tripods,
bristled with spotting scopes, as birders,
mostly up from Massachusetts,
walked the beach in groups of two and three,
pausing here and there to sift birds out of the heavy chop.
Not ideal conditions.
Still, the Loons, we agreed, were all Common or Red-Throated.
So, I’ll but the scope and a camera and the big lens
in the car this morning and haul it back and forth to work,
at least for the next few days, on the off chance
I’ll be able to snatch a second of daylight to check the beach.
There is, they say, a big storm with high seas due in mid-week.
It is not as though I had a reputation to uphold or anything, but I know what I saw.
If nothing else, I’ve learned more
about the identification of winter plumaged Loons
this past week than I learned in all the years before,
than I knew I didn’t know.
Maybe, given the vagaries of weather and
the mobility of loons, that will just have to be enough to satisfy me.
Loons in Winter
The loons break water rising from their dives like bubbles,
bursting out of the ocean with a great flapping of wings
and stretching of necks as though at the absolute end of their breath…
and yet, a moment later they are floating, necks arched low,
eyes below water, hunting, for what seems like forever.
Suddenly their heads come back like a hammer
and they dive,
driving through the water,
to come up with a crab caught crosswise in the bill.
They toss their heads and turn,
clicking bills like chopsticks
making a black and white sinuous slide
of the neck to swallow,
gulping the crab down,
legs dangling out the sides like noodles.
On a calm day they sit offshore and look at me,
head on, eye to eye, bobbing in the swell,
(or maybe it is the sky’s reflection in the lens of the scope they see…)
whatever, we are tethered together by our mutual regard,
separated by 50 yards of icy water and
the necessities of our separate species,
but kin in our curiosity.
Of course, I am the one who goes to the Loons,
not they to me.
I brave the frozen beach, the bitter wind,
numb fingers, icy toes, brittle cheeks and
the ice that forms like frozen drool in my beard
just to be there, to see and be seen.
I must be quite a spectacle.
Oh well, we always knew loons, in their own element, have more sense
than birders.
Why We Do It: CBC 1999
February 10, 2009 at 11:49 pm (birders, birding, birds, CBC, Kingfisher, nature, poem)
So, we stand in the dusky woods,
half way between the huge bush-hogged clearing
around the FAC automated navigation beacon and Alewive pond,
just where the second growth birch and poplar give way to big old pines,
at the end of long day in the field, getting too long now,
with sore feet and tired eyes,
(counting birds all day for Audubon along the coast,
the annual Christmas Bird Count, a good day, an exceptional day so far,
with the Arctic Loon off Parson’s Beach to spice it,
so rare here we will have to prove we know what we saw,
and the Barrow’s Goldeneyes off Strawberry Island
where we spent too long comparing with the Common’s beside them,
just because we could, just to learn the birds,
and a futile search for the Carolina Wren that’s been
coming to feeders behind Mother’s Beach,
Cardinals and House Finches for color,
Tree Sparrows, Goldfinches, Great Crested
Cormorants hung out to dry on the buoy tops off Middle Beach,
flotillas of Eiders and Oldsquaws, Surf, White-winged, and Black Scoters,
and more Mallards and Herring Gulls that we honestly want to count)…
and only now, as the light fails and the cold gathers in for night,
getting inland to the rest, the neglected end, of our territory,
racing the twilight for what we know will be our one last stop.
We play a tape of a Barred Owl, hoping against hope that one will answer.
There, way off there, maybe, and maybe only a dog barking.
And Emily (11 this year and on her second count) and I take the tape player
and walk on toward the pond while Jay stops to answer nature’s call
at the edge of the wood road there,
and we are no more than 20 yards on when Jay,
fighting his zipper and the layers he has on to keep warm, calls,
pitching his voice low, urgent to reach us without scaring it off,
“Barred Owl, right here in this tree above me!”
and we turn and hustle back, and there it is, on a branch above his head,
not 12 feet up a poplar, looking down at us, come to our call,
so close I am not even tempted to raise my binoculars,
and Emily in her excitement squeaks like a mouse
and it is off on its muffled wings across the road and into the pines
where it sits and looks at us,
(saying nothing, though we play the tape again several times)
through a little window in the branches for as long as we stand there,
and Emily gets her glasses on it and we fill ourselves
with this unexpected twilight benediction of Barred Owl.
The Kingfisher 