cacawphony

There is a spring-fed wetland on Reed campus the terrier and I like to visit. It is tucked into a shallow canyon, shaded by deciduous trees and gussied up with snowberries, Indian plum, and Oregon grape. There is always some kind of critter action here: nutria nibble on water weeds; woodpeckers hunt for grubs. Dabbling ducks paddle with their dandelion babies in the spring. Herons stalk the shallows, striking yoga poses of stealthy severity.

Once Amy and I noticed a lakeside bush trembling, alone among its fellows. As we watched in bemusement it tipped slowly sideways, still quaking, and began sneaking off through the underbrush, stage right.  Once it reached open water we could see the determined beaver jerking it along, and then were charmed when a little head poked up from the water behind a fallen log and a pint-sized beaver offspring joined its parent in reducing the bush to a leafless toothpick.

So the terrier and I like to come poke around the wetland to see what’s happening. She mostly sniffs and occasionally tastes things; I mostly look (binocs optional, though tricky with a leash in the other hand) and listen. Last week, though, we were both on alert from the moment we entered campus. Not far off, among the dormitories and towering maples, a tremendous din was happening. It roared featurelessly in the distance until we rounded the corner of the path heading to the lake, whereupon a mad cacophony enveloped us — an absolutely over-the-top ruckus: imagine, say, a truck full of heavy-metal cicadas, blowing shofars and hitting the jack brakes.

It was a maelstrom of crows.  Raucous, furious, screaming crows. A great mass of them, at least a hundred, diving and seething around a huge  sweet gum tree right next to the path.

The terrier and I had opposite impulses. Being bigger, I won. Once I’d reeled her in and tucked her, scrabbling, under my arm, I headed for the sweet gum tree. The crows veered and gibbered deafeningly in the branches above us and I couldn’t help but duck down.  I tried to mention something reassuring to the terrier but no one could hear anything above the pulsing chaos of sound and she wouldn’t have believed me anyway.  The crows intended to sound pissed and dangerous, and they succeeded.

And no wonder. Standing near the sweet gum’s trunk I could peer straight up into the heart of the tree, the epicenter of the corvid storm, and there it was, the devil itself: a great horned owl! The mob of crows screamed curses, careening past the predator’s face. The owl, stoic, hunched on its branch, unblinking. The dictionary embodiment, you could say, of “unflappable.”

Drawn to the bedlam, a small crowd quickly gathered below the tree, staring up at the motionless owl. Strangers murmured to one another, marveling. Joggers removed their headphones and borrowed binoculars from the bird nerds. A man declared he had lived in Portland all his life and never before seen a great horned owl. The terrier decried the insanity but had to settle for sanctuary in my armpit. The crows carried on harassing the owl with deafening screams; the owl managed to look both resigned and dangerous.  Once it looked down at us and we all jumped.

But the poor terrier was utterly unsettled and at last I relented and led her away, across the lawns and down under the bridge to the water.  She spent the next fifteen minutes looking nervously over her shoulder before settling in to pouncing and sniffing. We circled the lake and after a while I could see that the crows had decamped and were dispersing in grumbling groups all around campus.  Rain clouds drew together and the light grew dim; soon the terrier and I were the only ones left in sight.

We made our way around the lake and back through campus past the sweet gum tree, where I paused to pay owl reverence, ducking under the lower branches for a last, hopeful look. The grand bird was still there, coin-eyed and cat-eared, steadfastly ignoring its dwindled honor guard of ten heckling crows. So I stood for a while with the last of the watchers, a tenacious woman with binoculars and good rain gear, mutually enraptured by this owl. It was something like being in the presence of a minotaur: a nervous kind of improbable, ephemeral luck in sharing the air with something so unlikely and magnificent. Then the skies opened up, and I took a last dazzled breath, and the terrier and I, soaking wet, ran for cover.

invisible raccoon

The me-first terrier and I went walking at the Reed wetland yesterday.  Evidently someone else had been on the boardwalk just before us:

At first I was irritated because the wetland is supposed to be a protected wildlife area, yet people always let their off-leash dogs lollop around in the water, mashing plants and snails and leaving big muddy tracks all over the boardwalks.  But then I took a sharper look and saw the delicate fingers on these paw prints…

I’ve seen raccoon tracks in the mud here in the spring, but never had such a tantalizingly recent clue!  I froze, and while the terrier patiently nibbled at a bent stalk of grass, I looked carefully all around… but, somewhere nearby — perhaps snacking on freshwater snails — the raccoon stayed cannily hidden from view.

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© Deborah Gitlitz and Practicing Noticing, 2009.

dink-a-dink-a-dink

I took a walk this week through the neighborhood where I grew up.  Up the hill and around the bend, past the place with the sour cherry tree in the front yard. Past the house of the woman with the yellow labs, whose daughter used to babysit for us.  Past a hand-stenciled sign in a garage window, wobbly capital letters declaring “I LOVE CAPITALISM” in red and blue marker.  Around the corner that used to dead-end in a thicket of brambles and forsythia, where I once had a fort with a secret stash of pencils and peanuts.

Behind a weathered good-neighbor fence I could hear a voice calling, “Come by! Come by!”  The yard was on a slope, the road slightly higher, so in places I could see in.  A woman in a grey jacket addressed a corner of her yard: “Come by!  That’s it.  Good boy.”  Surprisingly, three small heads appeared, one after another like white beads on a string, and three domestic ducks hove into view, hurrying single file from the corner of the yard.  Comically businesslike with their drunken good posture and tidy white suits, they dink-a-dink-a-dinked across the yard, a trio of hasty waiters.  Eventually, behind them bounded a big black dog, looking less like he was herding them than simply joining in, but the woman called out, “Atta boy! Good boy” and the procession disappeared from my view again.  I waited a few minutes while the woman tried to organize her dog again, but it seemed like the ducks were better trained: as soon as she called out “Come by!” the dog wandered off on an errand of his own, but the ducks, unflustered and efficient, turned around and marched right back the way they’d come.

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© Deborah Gitlitz and Practicing Noticing, 2009.

hawk

Early October in southern Indiana.  A sharp, sunny day, blue-perfect.  The towering sycamores alongside the road have just begun to rust; burgundy dogwoods dot the understory. At the blinking yellow light we turn off the old highway onto the two-lane toward Zelma, narrowly squeezing past a farm truck. The back road twists and dips like a wooden roller coaster past 10-acre cornfields and snippets of wood and mire. We go slowly to avoid the ditches and maybe that’s why we see the hawk.

It is lying on its back on the ground, one wing askew beneath it, still. In a flurry we stop the car and I lean out the window to get a close look at its powerful, curled claws. There is no blood but it must have been hit. Mom peers across me and we marvel at its talons and beak, sorry but thrilled to have the chance to see the gorgeous predator up close.

And then it turns its head and looks right at me.

Gears shift in my stomach and I lurch from fascination to dismay. The hawk is alive. Is it mortally broken or simply stunned?  The road is a series of shoulderless blind curves; we cannot linger. The hawk watches me with dark eyes as we pull away.

We are not equipped to handle a wounded hawk.  We don’t have gloves in the car, nor a blanket, nor the know-how.  I am ashamed to find myself scared of its wildness, its predator’s weapons, its unreadable eyes. But I can’t stand to do nothing, and Mom remembers the name of the local wildlife rescue people, so we call home for the number and then I make the call.  Of course the agency is woefully understaffed by volunteers; I get the recorded message:

Thank you for calling. If you have a wildlife emergency, please leave a message and one of our volunteers will return your call within two hours.

If your wildlife emergency involves raptors — such as hawks, eagles or owls — or waterfowl, press 1.

If it is after 8:00 and your wildlife emergency involves a raptor such as an owl, hawk or eagle, put the raptor in a box with air holes, keep it somewhere warm and dark overnight, and bring it to us in the morning.

As if it were that simple.  Two hours is too many, but I leave clear directions to find the hawk, and my phone number, and we continue on in the sunshine between the maples and hickories till we come to the familiar gravel lane to our friends’ cabin.  In these dear woods we spend the day hiking, hunting for fallen persimmons, eating lunch on the porch swing. No one calls me. I am always wistful to leave this place, but today I am edgy, nervous to see the end of the hawk’s story. We follow the narrow road to where the hawk had fallen, carefully marked in our memories: past the deer carcass on the right, the leafy pond on the left.

The hawk is not there.

Did someone pick it up?  A coyote; a local taxidermist?  Just maybe, a wildlife rescue volunteer?  Or did the hawk manage to blink its dazed eyes, retract its splayed wing, and stumble through the air to the safety of a nearby branch? I hope so. I want it to have been tucked up against a tree trunk, slowing its breath, gathering its wits. Still with us in this world. Hungry.

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© Deborah Gitlitz and Practicing Noticing, 2009.

September snapshots

September 6: Back from the Montana ranch. I miss listening to the two great horned owls calling to one another at dusk.

September 8: Hooray for neighbor-friends: the loaner of a car when mine’s battery died; the loaner of a battery charger and help setting it up; suggestions about how to dehydrate my sudden bounty of pears and the loaner of parchment paper to get started…

September 10: Mmm, pear butter…

September 11: Picked the tomatoes, blanched their hides off, made them into soup, and ate them.

September 12: Having seen my otherwise mild-mannered niece play water polo all day, I resolve never to be alone with her in a dark, flooded alley.

September 19: off for tapas with baby Satya.

September 20: Will try to replicate the roasted fig salad at home.

September 20, later: Steamed the bejeezus out of two overgrown string beans and ate them. They were delicious.

September 22: Tonight saw not only the amazing Chapman swifts, but also three of Jupiter’s moons, all in a row!

September 24: Spent the afternoon with my concussed niece, keeping track of the size of her pupils (happily, they kept matching).

September 25: Duking it out with a recalcitrant poem.

September 27: The dog was in a sweetly frolicsome mood today.

September 29: I am so very fond of kale.

September 30: Thai food makes a nice oncology chaser.

Luminous blue variables

I got an A+ in Cataloguing in graduate school.  What I mainly remember about it is amusing myself by writing a persuasive paper called The Principle of Scattered Cats. I amused my professor, too, and she tried to lure me into abandoning Youth Services to join the ranks of cataloguers.  It wasn’t my path, but for a moment I was tempted.  The thing that nobody stops to appreciate is that there is a lot of room for creativity in cataloguing.  Also there is very little supervision. But cataloguers are quite ethical and passionate about their work, so they mostly use their power for good.

And they really do have power.  Cataloguers wield the power of bibliographic taxonomy.  You may have written it, but a cataloguer will decide what it’s about and how people will find it.  She will decide when to subdivide a topic like, say, “Feral children” (a favorite subject heading I came across in my first job) into useful specificities: for example, “Feral children – terrestrial” as opposed to “Feral children – aquatic.”  She will try to figure out the main point or themes of your book, who would be interested in it and why, and then she will create the paths linking prospective readers with the hidden treasure that is your book.  She will do all this according to exact and minutely detailed rules, snugly fitting your unwieldy dissertation on (say) the lucid dreams of  manatees into the searchable scaffolding of Library of Congress (or Dewey) classification where lovers of manatees (or dreams) can find it.  If you have written something so novel, on a topic so undocumented, that no existing terms can describe it, your cataloguer will devise a succinct new descriptor just for you.

If you have ever flipped or scrolled through a library catalog you know the Dada-ish pleasure, the serendipitous poetry, inherent in the conjunction of certain subject headings.  Who knew, you muse to yourself happily, that entire books were written about “Church work with cowgirls”?  Or “Cookery (earthworms)”?  Or “Folk dentistry”?

The internet being what it is, and library students being what they are (diligent, web-adapted, drawn to the absurd, and of course good-looking), there exists a (rather stripped-down) student wiki devoted to listing some of the more startling subject headings. For example:

• Canned meat — poetry
• Death in bookplates
• Mud lumps
• Odor control — Minnesota
• Yoda family

and the mysterious and poetic:

• Luminous blue variables

which will be the name of my next award-winning poetry collection, garage band, or gardening experiment.

You can nonplus yourself with many other delightful subject headings at Wacky and Weird Subject Headings.

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© Deborah Gitlitz and Practicing Noticing, 2009.

snippets about swifts (plus zebra bonus)

I was watching the marvelous Chapman swifts tonight with a bevy of volunteer naturalists (and several hundred other people, all kitted out with picnics and binoculars and large sheets of cardboard for sliding down the hill).

Several accomplished birders (including Audubon employees and volunteers) were among us.  Some observations and a few nifty facts new to me:

There are several reasons the Vaux’s swifts mass together into a giant flock before migrating:

1. To share body heat.
2. To teach dumb young orphan swifts what to do.
3. Safety in numbers: so many whirling bodies present a bewilderingly shifting target* for any predator birds.

Every night a Cooper’s hawk and a peregrine falcon zoom dramatically out of the trees to try to pick off a swift.  The falcon, which is a powerful sprinter, streaks across the field, seemingly out of nowhere, bursts through the whirling crowd of swifts and is gone, sometimes with a swift in its claws.  The Cooper’s hawk isn’t quite so speedy, so its preferred approach is to perch ominously on the rim of the chimney until the desperate swifts give up circling and try to plunge past it to safety, whereupon it pounces (unsuccessfully, more often than not).

The eyes of occipiter hawks (such as Cooper’s or sharp-shinned) change color as they mature, from yellow to orange to red.  The Cooper’s hawk lurking on the chimney tonight was a red-eyed grown-up.  (Me too, but that had more to do with allergies.)

Swifts may look like swallows from afar, but they are actually in the same bird family as hummingbirds!  Unusually, hummers and swifts both derive power from the downstroke and the upstroke of their wings when flying.  (Hummingbirds flap in a figure-eight pattern.)  And both birds have teeny-tiny feet that are no good for walking.  Hummers can perch, while swifts can cling to vertical surfaces (for example, the inside of a hollow tree or its urban stand-in, a chimney).

It takes about 40,000 swifts to fill the Chapman chimney.  They estimated about 6,000 swifts night before last.

They migrate to northern South America.  If life is so great there, why don’t they stay?  Not enough land mass: not enough bugs (and too much competition for them).  Swifts eat a lot of bugs.

*Speaking of a bewilderingly shifting target, here’s a bonus zebra fact: Naturalist James asserts that zebras have stripes for the same reason that swifts travel in mobs: It’s not so much that stripes help an individual zebra blend in with some (black-and-white?) grasses.  Rather, the stripes on a crowd of jostling zebras make it difficult for a predator to figure out where one zebra leaves off and the next one begins.

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© Deborah Gitlitz and Practicing Noticing, 2009.

man-talk at The Bull Thing

*

Names of some bulls at the Lincoln County Fair Bull Thing:

• Bodacious
• Novocaine
• Major Infraction
• and… (my favorite) Sourdough Surprise

Colorful lines uttered by the rodeo announcer at The Bull Thing:

(Regarding the challenges of bullriding) When you got 2000 pounds of humpbacked bellerin’ beast at the end of your arm…

Let’s get that hoppin’ hamburger out there!

Did you see the athleticism of that bull?

I’ll tell you what, you might as well call him Butter because he’s – on – a - rolllll, my friends!

He was kickin’ a steak outa that bull!

(During Cowboy Poker, where four guys sit around a card table placed on the dirt, trying to be the last to keep both hands on the table while a bucking bull rampages around the arena) This one didn’t even like his mother!  And he came from a very generous family… His mother gave milk!

Whoa, look out there, that’s a large farm animal makin’ a bee-line for your be-hind.

(Regarding a roped, furiously bucking bull being led from the arena) Looks like a pit bull on dental floss, don’t it?

Hey, Dylan Peterson, ya left yer ID at the Grizzly Chew booth.

water fountain tiptoe

August 19.  6:00 p.m. and the temperature was still an airless 95 degrees.  Rather than dining on watermelon and ice cubes and then keeping very still in the basement, I had evening plans that involved an architectural-walking-tour/birthday party in the baking cement heart of downtown.  The birthday boy had exhorted his guests to wear or bring something that sparkles in the sun. I was the only one who appeared to obey this injunction, but my outfit — a kind of Bollywood Liberace look — had enough bling to cover the entire party, so it worked out. (Sadly, I have no pictures of my blinding outfit, but sequins and rhinestones accounted for 85% of it.)

our dapper tour guide

downtown Portland on a hot night

How to cool off on a 95-degree downtown day:

1) You might try panting.

2) Wear gloves, of course, but do cut the fingers off; in this heat your leather vest may be worn with shorts.

3) Stay hydrated.

August snapshots

August 2: Plumberry jam – and I think it’s setting up!

August 3: Fretting bourgeois-ly: Here I finally decided that 6 years was long enough to live with the ratty plywood countertops (hygiene: extremely questionable) and now I find that Wilsonart doesn’t have any retro counter laminate options! Why the obsession with faux stone?

August 3, later: I appear to have gone on a long walk and chatted with all the neighbors with a big smudge of dirt on my face. Not one of them mentioned it. You’d think it’d be a conversation starter.

August 5: I had never before heard of a birthday tradition called “Cake Fight.”

August 7: Outdoor table suddenly collapsed.

August 8: Sang my happy guts out with a bevy of charming people in the back yard tonight.

August 10: Disgruntled by the snorfly onset of a summer cold. Curses. I thought I’d made it through the summer.

August 11: Ventured into the rain to see if the radishes have come up yet. They have not, but one can’t be too despondent as they were only planted yesterday. Used the momentum to plant fall chard before dark.

August 11, evening: Not looking forward to spending another night as a mouth-breather.

August 13: Snorfle, snorfle, hack, hack.

August 13, later: Domestic science: it turns out that if you water your spider plants more often, the fronds get perkier.

August 15: Now that I have seen the price of Felco pruners, I am extra double bummed mine walked away from the front porch.

August 16: Bicycles, blueberries, ballads, bonnie lads and lasses – a splendid afternoon.

August 17: I am unreasonably proud of my week-old radish sprouts. But they are do darn perky and winsome!

August 19: Evening plans involve walking around downtown in the 95-degree heat. On the plus side, I’ve learned that’s a LOT cooler than 106.

August 19, late: I was the most sparkly person on any given street downtown this evening.

August 20: Eyes bugging out and the final report still hasn’t finished itself. Cursey.

August 22: Blackberries: picked ‘em and jammed ‘em!

August 23: Musing about ways to combine nature literacy with early childhood/family literacy.

August 24: Watered the garden, inventoried the seedlings (radishes zooming along, kale perking up, chard a slow third) and accepted the dog’s invitation to play a rousing game of Noseball. (Her nose.)

August 25: Have happily eaten tomatoes with every meal today.

August 26: One more report and one more booktalk to write and then I am free to start packing for Montana.

August 27, 5:27 a.m.: Sooo earrrllyyy…

August 27, 5:58 a.m.: … aaand we’re off! Montana, here we come!