6:38 a.m. 68 degrees, wind WSW 2 mph. Sky: a disheveled blanket, blue-gray, torn and frayed; powder blue through the holes, a slow northeast drift. Permanent streams: rained for less than an hour last night . . . not that the streams noticed. Wetlands: rain and overcast have deepened colors; tan reeds grade toward brown; brown reeds darken and, across the marsh, the wall of maple and ash, a saturation of red and yellow, become an otherworldly pronouncement of the proximity of ordinary and extraordinary, like the transformation of a caterpillar to a butterfly. The dogs, insensitive to color, nose to the ground, are more interested in the essence of passing deer than to a Frederic Edwin Church landscape. Pond: floating leaves coalesced into islands, each arrayed with raindrops, equally spaced beads, a mathematical sprinkle that plays host to an inverted world. Macro and micro celebration, a free inspirational display. And, birds migrate through the vibrancy of late September . . . I almost feel the Earth tilt.
An ethereal and ephemeral season: many ashes leafless, gaunt branches rake the sky; along the road, parallel windrows of rust and umber leaves organized by passing cars, a dying light; red oak begins to blush.
Five noisy crows in the pines, perch in the open. A catbird in the alders flies to a pine limb directly in front of me, calls four times, drops out of sight, its voice, like summer weather, lingers on.
A reminisce, September 28, 1978: West end of Fire Island, east of Democrat Point. Best birding day EVER. Thousands and thousands of flickers and tree swallows. Clouds of robins. Butterflies, dragonflies, and, at dawn, dozens of red bats. Uncountable numbers of warblers and vireos. Cormorants and loons above Whitman's, endless inbound urge of waves. Nearly six thousand hawks passed my lookout on a dune in front of the Fire Island Lighthouse, many at eye level. Lines of hovering kestrels, rufous tails spread. Merlins ripping flight; several turn hapless warblers into rains of olive down. Monarchs on their way to Mexico pause on my knees, my shoulders, my head. Three thousand kestrels. Two thousand sharp-shinned hawks. More than three hundred marsh hawks. More than three hundred merlins. A handful of Cooper's hawks. Two peregrines (it was, after all, forty-two years ago). Many, many unidentified raptors. Just Jimmy Mirejack and me, alone and along with a watershed of birds, the dunes to ourselves.
I was so moved by the day, I wrote a piece for Long Island Magazine, the Sunday supplement for Newsday. Two years later, I brought Linny to my sand dune. A crowd of people milled, binoculars in hand. They called themselves F. I. R. E. (Fire Island Raptor Enumerators).
They had read my story and organized. Still going strong, F. I. R. E. built a railed-observation platform to protect the dunes, which was essential. My lesson learned; keep sensitive locations vague. Through the years, rattlesnakes, goshawks, among others, profited from that sad lesson.
September 28
Gray Atlantic, driven by September winds
eats the summer beach.
Sand dunes bleed Virginia creeper
streaking crimson across their faces.
A gentle breeze whispers from the northwest
wafting a multi-colored robe of monarch
butterflies from a twisted cedar.
A flock of sandpipers, tightly packed,
flash black and white, flinging
down the beach, bound by a single mind.
A blue-gray pigeon hawk slices the wind
on scimitar wings, as a luckless warbler
explodes into an ephemeral rain of olive feathers
A thousand voices shout autumn.
Thanks Ted
Thanks. Where are the progeny of those tens of thousands - still winging past the same observation point? Where is Jimmy Mirejack (and who?) and how many people visit the exact same spot today? Sometimes we don't see where the ripples lead from pebbles we not-so-idly toss into the pond.