5:33 a.m (sunrise thirty-five minutes earlier than April 13, my last entry). 46 degrees, wind SW 2 mph; rainy morning, soupy ground. Sky: heaven and Earth (at least in my valley) one, seemingly infinite, anastomosis of rising fog and lowering clouds, threads and tubes of moisture rising and falling. The sound of water trumps the sound of birds. Splashing, gurgling, purling toward the marsh. A background chorus of gullies and intermittent streams. Permanent streams: full, loud and, surprisingly clear. Wetlands: visibility and detail rain-softened; hints of green amid a landscape of tired brown; main channel swelled, spills across the marsh—the silence of the birds. Two mallards cut reflected evergreens, hillside impressions in their wake, a knockoff of Renoir and Monet. Peepers peeping, trilling, a protracted breeding season far beyond the date of the last wood frogs. On deck: pickerel frogs, American toads, gray treefrogs, green frogs, and, finally, bullfrogs, bloated Buddhas calling from the edge of deep water, all mouth and belly propelled by large, edible legs. Pond: dancing raindrops, concentric circles, and hen merganser that I mistake for a stick (until she flushes). Dogs soaked, no apparent interest in duck.
Good to be home. The airports felt like many other Americans had the same idea I had (not necessarily visiting Casey and Becky in Grand Junction), but . . . let's go somewhere, anywhere. American Airlines announced every fifteen minutes that failure to wear a mask above your nose unless eating or drinking may result in a lifetime ban flying with them. Terminals announced federal fines for face-mask non-compliance up to five hundred dollars. Everybody seemed to be either in a good mood or sound asleep.
Some flights were nearly empty; others packed like cans of sardines. American Airlines served nothing, even on longer flights from Phoenix to Philadelphia and La Guardia to Dallas.
Sad to say goodbye. Amid Vermont, rain and snow and shutouts to winter, Colorado, warm and bone dry (of course). Indian paintbrush and claret cactus in bloom. One life bird: sagebrush sparrow, running across a dirt road between patches of gray-green sage, tail up like a miniature roadrunner, flanked on both sides of a narrow sandstone valley by red walls etched and painted by the descendants of immigrants. Bighorns. Pumas. Lightning. Stylized people. Circles and lines . . . and a lasting tribute to the tenacity and endurance of human expression.
Beyond the bassinet: at seven weeks, my granddaughter Isabelle may not have fully appreciated the petroglyphs and pictographs (or the hurried sparrow). I kept her bird list, Birds Seen While I Slept or Nursed, which included nattily feathered loggerhead shrike, a pair of vesper sparrows, black-headed grosbeak, and clouds of singing and rummaging white-crown sparrows, traveling minstrels headed north. Also, two desert bighorns perched on a precipice—statuesque in the pure evening light.
Back home, broadcasting in the rain: ovenbird and broadwing. One monotonous, the other piercing.
Yesterday: Pair of flickers excavating a nest hole in standing dead aspen. Junco, mouth crammed with grasses and pine needles, close to the road, refuses to leave. A nearby nest? Along the edge of the pond, common yellowthroat singing on a grapevine. Blue-headed vireo, branch to branch, sluggish as cold molasses. Chipping and white-throated sparrows in the front yard. Phoebes and robins on eggs (if not chicks). Pileated and red-shouldered yoked to nests, conspicuous by their vocal absence. Turkeys and owls evening duet; appeared to be answering each other. At dawn, one less Tom . . . the sportsmen and the birder should be friends.
Last year, May 5: bitterns calling in the reeds, tanagers in the oaks, the woods drier and greener. Spring 2021, the DNA of a new year.
Sitting home on this rainy morning, wet and chilled, I think of Casey and Becky and Isabelle's infectious smile. Already her newfound horizons have expanded. May they never stop.
Welcome back from your Isabelle visit--loved this sentence: "I kept her bird list, Birds Seen While I Slept or Nursed." What an adventure awaits beyond the bassinet--may you share much of her journey.
And glad you could add a sagebrush sparrow to your list, especially in the setting of the petroglyphs, "a lasting tribute to the tenacity and endurance of human expression." ! Here's "Hands" by Robinson Jeffers that honors these ancient peoples--in his case, near Big Sur CA:
Inside a cave in a narrow canyon near Tassajara
The vault of rock is painted with hands,
A multitude of hands in the twilight, a cloud of men's palms, no more,
No other picture. There's no one to say
Whether the brown shy quiet people who are dead intended
Religion or magic, or made their tracings
In the idleness of art; but over the division of years these careful
Signs-manual are now like a sealed message
Saying: "Look: we also were human; we had hands, not paws. All hail
You people with the cleverer hands, our supplanters
In the beautiful country; enjoy her a season, her beauty, and come down
And be supplanted; for you also are human."
https://www.bigsurcalifornia.org/esselen.html
Welcome back, Ted! I missed you. We travelled too - FLA - and yes, it was odd to be in airports and packed into aircraft with SO MANY other people after 13 long months of near-solitary confinement under Covid-era house arrest in a quiet rural oasis. Springtime features so many simultaneous migrations, transitions and the frenetic greening and growth and nesting... taking my own first walk here "back home" to re-calibrate and orient to May in the forest yesterday was comforting/familiar after horizons were broadened. Yet Dorothy may have had it right: "there's no place like home." Perhaps in order to better appreciate, we must leave. I think the Phoebes exhibit sheer joy on the first day they return to our sugarhouse eaves. Was it Wallace Stegner (?) who said - to paraphrase - we see a place best when we first arrive and then when we leave it for the last time. Thinking of your own impending transition from Coyote Hollow. Best wishes.