Staying Out of the Way

or Resting Lightly

Sometimes you're just not the one who matters, and so you just don't move.  When untamed lives that are not rabbits come to a tiny, urban garden, you do your best to efface yourself, and let them experience the garden as if without you.  Photos?  Forget them.  They're not important.  The slightest gesture toward your camera, even the subtlest tilt of the lens, is enough to spook a shy being.  It's better not to move.

Hummingbirds aren't particularly "shy beings," but they have their limits, too, the moments when they forget the roar of gargantuan hunger and remember vulnerability.  The black-chinned hummingbirds have been gorging on the agastache in the big urns this summer—the ones arm's length away from the Adirondack chair, with flowers that overhang the footrest.  The hummingbirds are often so close that the cool breath of their wings blows over my feet.   I try not to move when they're that near, but my idea of stillness is not theirs.  Some change of expression, some tiny change, will make them look up in startlement and vanish.

Perhaps to such small birds the line that seems delicately drawn to me, the fine hair between blithe unconcern and precipitate flight, is wide and nuanced.  The light speed change between feeding and fleeing may be a measured, thoughtful process to them.  The lift of a finger, such a small motion, spans the full length of their bodies.

A hummingbird's-eye view of hummingbird mint (or licorice mint, or sunset hyssop, Agastache rupestris)

At a distance details blur together.  When hummingbirds feed at the gaura in the central bed, it's hard to tell the young of either gender from the adult females.  They look remarkably alike in any case.  From inches away, though, you begin to wonder.  You see peculiarities of behavior—experiments, moments of clumsiness—that tell their own tale.  A bird will aim at a flower in a light wind and miss, several times running; it will try buds that haven't opened, insistently, perplexedly.  It will poke at the gap between a flower and its corolla, and then back off, and look, and look, through first one eye, then the other.  It will poke at the gap again, before finally finding the opening it seeks.  Its round belly will drag on the flowers below it, like a keel scraping on the shoals.  It will rest in the desert olive for minutes at a stretch, and not fight the next hummingbird that comes along.  It will feed briefly, and then find its perch to rest again.  A bird that does all those things...is most likely a fledgling.

One was feeding at the agastache recently when my toes, a foot and a half away, twitched involuntarily.  The bird startled.  Hovering, it eyed my feet in a fascinated, speculative way.  Were they a danger?  Were they edible?  Its head tilted from one side to the other.  I don't know what conclusions it came to, except the one about inedibility; I don't believe it ever made a mental connection between my toes and the rest of me.  And how could it?  Five feet seven inches of human are a lot for a bird to grasp all at once, when it doesn't really need to.

Last week for the second time (that I know of) a flock of blue-gray gnatcatchers descended on my desert olives.  They're almost as tiny as hummingbirds, only round like a ball, with twitching tail feathers and a thin, sharp bill.  They speak to one another constantly, and they move constantly, like the gnats and small insects they eat, like fish darting in an aquarium.  Their colors are subtle variations on gray flannel, lighter on the belly, darker around the crown.

Flycatchers, too.  I've seen them a few times, half again the size of the gnatcatchers, with the same restlessness under less pressure.  Their tails twitch gently as they perch or flit from branch to branch, from tree to tree.

These new birds are all probably migrants, just passing through on their way south, but I'm (almost) as thrilled as if they were nesting here.  The garden is beginning to attract Birds-that-are-not-finches, truly wild birds, no matter how briefly.  The desert olives have grown taller, their crowns broader.  They offer more in the way of shelter and safety; they attract a better class of bug.  But I have no pictures to offer of these moments of presence.  I only have memories shaped vaguely into words of that instant when your breath catches and you freeze, while shining black eyes look brightly from every tree, less than your own body-length away.

Desert olives (or New Mexico privet, Forestiera neomexicana)

You are irrelevant to these small lives, and rightfully so.  You mean them no harm.  You aren't going to hunt them for food or throw stones at them for wickedness.  You wish them well, but any good you've done them is indirect.  You've planted and nurtured the trees; you've let the sand cherries grow like weeds; you've kept the bird bath filled and clean.  You've laid the groundwork—and then you've mostly gotten out of the way, and let life get on with it.  But birds don't know these things.  They don't have the luxury to weigh degrees of harm and good.  They can't risk trust, they can't take the long view.  You will never be able to tame them, or show them likelihood, or accustom them to human presence.  So you try not to be a noticeable presence at all.  You just don't move.


A hummingbird had come to the agastache fresh from another part of the garden.  A white petal of gaura had fallen on her head and rested there as she hovered and fed.  She flew from one flower to another and another, wings moving faster than vision, that wrinkled white petal perched on her head like a lace cap.  The sight could have been comical, but it wasn't.  The petal sat too lightly on the feather-light bird as she fenced just as lightly with gravity.  She was graceful and deft; the long tubes of hummingbird mint barely moved as she tapped them for nectar.  An adult, not a fledgling.  She had mastered the art of lightness.

Appleblossom grass (Gaura lindheimeri 'Whirling Butterflies')

A lot of gardening is about heavy lifting—the bags of mulch and potting soil, the shovels full of dirt and sand and amendments.  A lot of it is about labor.  No more than to maintain a mown lawn, but still, labor:  weeding and dividing, pruning and transplanting.  Paradoxically, the goal of all the hard work is to rest lightly on whatever earth we have.  To make a big impact, perhaps; to concentrate nature with an intensity even she might not manage on her own, and create safe conditions for wild things that compensate for losses elsewhere.  But then to step out of the way whenever possible, and let life get on with it.  We work for the sake of those moments of held breath and awed stillness, when we try to be patio furniture while a new bird perches inquisitively in a young tree.  We want to enjoy the nectar while not disturbing the flower.  We want to master the art of lightness, to our own scale.

The lightness of a fallen petal on the head of a hummingbird.

Of Crocuses and Cranes

or A Pang at Parting

They're leaving.  Last weekend as I sat on the patio the sandhill cranes were circling overhead, riding the thermals to gain altitude, one small flock after another joining the rising spiral in a sky streaked high with cirrus clouds.  All the while they were calling out, but their normal creaky purr sounded remote, as detached as an echo, as if their thoughts were already elsewhere.  Abruptly, the haphazard circles broke apart and stretched into the trailing limbs of a V.  The cranes locked on to magnetic North, and in a few minutes they were gone.  A little later a new flock appeared, circling, calling, distant, the hive mind already focused on summer nesting grounds.

The cranes are heading north a little early this year, I think.  I often hear them around the third week of February, but just a few, the early scouts rather than the main troops.  This wasn't the vanguard, though.  It was the full migration, a morning's worth of cranes, and not the only one.  They're leaving.  Last week I heard them go overhead by the hundreds; yesterday I heard a few flocks go by; today a few birds.  By now they may all be gone.

A mess of sandhill cranes, in the circling and mixing phase, February 2012, from my garden.  Not an inspired photo, I'm afraid, though if you're interested in sandhill cranes it might be worth clicking through to see the birds full screen.

Their departure is one of the few pangs of winter's passing for me.  I almost always take a trip down to the cranes' winter quarters at Bosque del Apache or thereabouts over Presidents' Day weekend to bid them farewell.  This year I wasn't able to manage it.  Instead I kept vigil from the patio, with crocuses for company.  It seemed fitting:  the fall-blooming crocuses had joined me in welcoming the cranes last November; how right, then, that the spring bloomers should be present to see them off again.

Funny.  In the last post I talked about crocuses nestling among the pebbles in the garden's settled beds.  The central bed, though, is still in the throes of re-planting and is largely empty and unmulched.  A small patch of crocuses there has come into bloom in the open space under a young Agastache rupestris—and it is actually blooming as a patch.*  With these flowers, blossoming on bare earth, I'm not so much aware of happy nestling and groundedness as of the way they reach skyward, stretching with all their might toward the sun.

It's as if they, too, want to travel with the cranes, as if roots and gravity are impediments, as if wanderlust burns hot inside them, and they ache with the desire to fly, to be away, to look over the garden walls to the next hill, and the one after, and the one after that, with the horizon always one siren song beyond.  It's as if they feel the pang of being left behind, the walls closing in behind them.

Bernardo Wildlife Area, NM, February 2011

The way that I do, too.
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* If you want to join me in jumping up and down for joy, I won't stop you.

When you're tired of my exploring different ways of looking at a crocus, please do say so.  I don't have to reach thirteen (and won't, I promise).  In the meantime, don't miss Jean of Jean's Garden's post on different ways of viewing forsythia.  It's fascinating and delightful both, and strikes home for anyone who's ever experienced a dull, gray winter.  (Most likely, that would be you.)

Other not-to-be-missed participants are b-a-g at Experiments with Plants and HolleyGarden at Roses and Other Gardening Joys.

Thirteen (or Fewer) Ways of Looking at a Crocus

or Comparing Apples to Apples

The poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, by Wallace Stevens, uses blackbirds as a kind of touchstone for different perspectives.  The birds are a recurring theme, sure, a point of departure, but also a way of testing moods and images against something constant.  When I was in grad school for music history, every year the composition students were each asked to write music for a stanza from the Thirteen Ways.  Their group concerts (called things like "Twelve Ways of Looking at Six Ways of Looking at a Blackbird") were always among my favorites—I loved seeing how such different perspectives, such powerful individuality, could spring from the same material.

Crocus chrysanthus 'Cream Beauty'

A friend of mine who teaches English starts his writing class every year by asking students to describe an apple.  Sometimes they get stuck:  how many ways can you say "roundish" and "red"?  Then he offers suggestions:  the role of apples in family traditions (Mom teaching me how to crimp a pie crust,  and telling me about dinners of apple dumplings during the Great Depression); in seasonal rites (apple picking on a crisp, New England autumn day, fresh-pressed cider from a roadside stand); in the garden (showers of apple blossom petals, their scent filling the air; espaliers stretched against a wall; underplantings of daffodils); in the ecosystem (the soothing drone of bees, the gnawings of codling moth larvae, the barely bitten apple discarded by squirrels); in legend (forbidden fruit, apples of gold, dwarfs and evil step-mothers); in the economy (the complex journey from orchard to table).

His point is that even something as simple as an apple isn't self-contained or shut off from the world.  It exists in a web of interactions.  Suddenly my friend's students don't know how to stop describing an apple.

C. chrysanthus 'Blue Pearl'

In some ways, gardens are full of endless variety and wonder.  In other ways, the same things tend to happen pretty much every year.  (Not that that isn't also a source of wonder.)  After my first year of blogging I found (and still find) myself stuck every so often—in a tiny garden, how much really changes from one spring to the next?  What remains to be said?  The bulbs come up, and I take photo after enthusiastic photo of the crocuses...which look remarkably similar to the photos upon photos of crocuses I took last year, which look an awful lot like the ones from the year before that. 

Because the crocuses haven't changed.  They just keep blooming in the same way (even if they are three weeks early) and in the same places as they always do.* 

So far, my primary way of looking at a crocus is a gleeful one:  "The crocuses are blooming!  The crocuses are blooming!"  It's a lot of fun, actually, but I wonder what would happen if I set myself the challenge of finding some new ways, too?  Probably not thirteen of them—that seems a little excessive—but more than one.  If your crocuses or some equivalent are up and running and you feel like taking part in the More than One but Fewer than Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Crocus (or Some Equivalent) Challenge, please do, and please let me know about it.  Don't consider it anything as formal as a meme.

It would just be nice to wonder how to stop describing a crocus.
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* This is not a complaint.

Watering Holes

or Birds of a Feather

When you turn on to New Mexico highway 247 in the little town of Corona, this is the sign that greets you:

U.S. Highway 285, 48 miles away.  The next event on this road isn't a town.  It's an intersection, and the next intersection—the very next time you see a cross-road—is 48 miles away.  (Bonus:  you can't get lost on NM 247.)  Not even a little county road meets you until then, nothing but the posts and crossbeams marking the dirt road entrance to a ranch here and there.  You might meet another vehicle somewhere along the road.  Then again, you might not.  You'll see small herds of black Angus lying in the blue grama grass and cholla or congregating around a stock tank; you'll probably come across some pronghorn antelope grazing.  Crows, hawks, yesterday even a badger (a badger!); toward evening maybe some mule deer.  But people?  Likely not.

The scenic route between Albuquerque and Dexter, in the southeastern corner of the state, zigzags along various roads through some 200 miles of low mountains, high plateaus, and scrub desert.  It reminds you what a large, empty place New Mexico is:  2 million people in an area larger than Poland—and half of them live in Albuquerque.  In the ranching areas heading south, there's a lot of open rangeland, and not much else.  When you do come to a town, the parking lot at the local watering hole is usually full.  Folks drive for miles to meet in company over a green chile cheeseburger and a drink, to enjoy being social animals for a while.

My sister and brother-in-law's house is a watering hole in its own way.  Their home near Dexter is the kind of place where strays drift in with the tumbleweeds and needlegrass:  cats, dogs, skunks, waifs in general, and the occasional sister looking for a Thanksgiving dinner.  You can be assured of a good meal and good company (human, feline, and canine), and hey—if you ever need de-worming, well, they probably have something for that, too.  A holiday done right is also an oasis of sorts, a pause in your journey through the year, a chance to flock together with others of your kind and be refreshed.

I've been thinking about watering holes because of the more-or-less traditional, day-after-Thanksgiving excursion that my sister, my nephew, and I made to Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge along the Pecos River east of Roswell.  Like the Rio Grande's Bosque del Apache, the wetlands there are the winter home to snow geese and sandhill cranes—possibly record numbers of them this year, as the continuing drought in Texas sends waterbirds elsewhere.  During the day they go off to feast in cornfields, but when the sun begins to set they return to the shallow waters that keep them safe from night-time predators.  Only once have I seen a sandhill crane alone, and it was standing sentry (or had maybe been put in time-out).  They are highly social creatures, impressive in numbers and in their apparent singleness of thought and purpose.

When I returned home from the holiday and went out to the garden, I startled a trio of goldfinches, which had been perched forlornly on the empty birdbath making little "tsk"ing sounds.  They don't ever bathe in the birdbath, but they do drink from it; I'm not sure what other water sources they have in the neighborhood.  Cleaned and refilled, the birdbath now welcomes them to congregate on the rim of its garden-variety wetland once more. 

And here I am, playing on the World Wide Web, that watering hole extraordinaire, where we flock together to meet in company and enjoy being social animals (of a kind) for a while.

If nothing else, driving through the desert does fixate you on water...

Mistaken Identities

or Comedy Tonight

For low-brow humor, it's hard to beat well-placed weeds.  Not that weeds are usually knee-slappingly funny all by themselves, but it turns out that they're mighty fine prompts for funny behavior in others—as good as a ladder and a bucket of whitewash to a clown.  When I wrote last month about wanting to see what would happen if I let an unexpected evening primrose (Oenothera biennis) go to seed in the middle of the desert olive tree where it's been growing, my expectations were really pretty feeble.  I mean, I thought that perhaps new seedlings would come up in other unlikely places.  Is that lame or what?  What's actually happened is that the primrose has turned my little garden into a nonstop Vaudeville act that has had me laughing for weeks.

The primrose itself is about six feet tall, growing up through the ten foot desert olive.  Its stems stick out through the tree branches at unlikely angles; on random days they bloom at the tips.  (I've been taking some plants out, so the ground in the photo is embarrassingly bare.)  The upper stems blend into the tree—even those of us who know what we're looking for don't find it easy to tell where one ends and the other begins.  For those like, say, the two families of fledgling lesser goldfinches who hang out in the trees and who haven't yet learned that things are not always as they seem, it's flat-out complicated.

The thing about a tree branch is, it's sturdy.  When you're not entirely sure of your wings to begin with, sturdy is good.  But when you land on what you expect to be a sturdy tree branch and get a flexible primrose stem instead, things can get a little slapstick.  Down bob the stems—whoops!  Frantic flapping.  Up bounce the stems—surprise!  More frantic flapping.  Squawk!  Squawk some more!  Bob, bounce.  Equilibrium returns at last, and then along comes one of your siblings, to land on that nice, sturdy "tree branch" with you.  Bob, bounce, flap, squawk. 

Over the last few days, the goldfinches' balance has improved.  They've learned that the primrose stems have tasty seed pods, and all is well again.  Perhaps half a dozen of them, juveniles and adults, are seated on the stems or in the tree at a time, yellow feathers radiant, looking like fluttery primroses themselves.

Make that scruffy primroses.

But as entertaining as the finches are, they are just the warmup act.  Our star comedian is this young fellow, a black-chinned hummingbird:

Doesn't he look gullible sweet?  He's spent quite a lot of time exploring the garden the last couple of weeks.  After making the rounds, he comes to rest on the lowest branch of the olive by the patio, maybe five feet from where I sit.  He makes himself comfortable:

Lately he's been trying—successfully, so far as I can tell—to impress this little charmer:

A hummingbird needs some serious feeding to support all that activity.  Fortunately our hero is an enthusiastic, undiscriminating eater.  He has been taste-testing every blossom in sight—the 'Wild Thing' autumn sage (at last!), agastache, gaura, dwarf plumbago, 'Blue Twister' allium, arugula, basil, the primroses...  The primroses.  To the hummingbird, the primroses grow on what is apparently a primrose tree.  And there are two other trees just like it in the garden.  He checks them over regularly for flowers.  He doesn't find any.

What he does find is a lot of goldfinches.  Primrose-colored goldfinches.  In the "primrose" trees.  If they are primrose-colored in the primrose trees, they must be primroses, right?  You can practically see the "Q.E.D." flashing through his mind.  He dives in enthusiastically for his dinner.

And lo and behold, his dinner objects.  When I wrote last year about a hummingbird trying to feed off a goldfinch, I thought that was a fluke.  Apparently if you're a goldfinch it's just an occupational hazard.  As the hummingbird—not a quick learner—tries to sip at every single finch, each one swats him away with the kind of bored irritation you or I might use on a housefly.  But some of them are still sitting on those flexible primrose stems, which the swatting sets in motion.  Bob, bounce, flap, squawk.

They've been performing this routine at least once a day.  Sometimes the squawk comes before the flap; otherwise they don't really vary the schtick.  Is it wit?  Is it irony?  Is it subtlety?  Well, no.

But when you want a good laugh, sometimes you just can't beat a pratfall.

Talking Points

or Unending Melody

Songbirds are a talkative lot.  They're always so busy communicating that you wonder how they ever manage to find time for nesting (warble) and feeding (tee-yee, tee-yee) and mating (warble, warble) and egg-laying (tseep) not to mention (arpeggio) raising (trill, trill, trill) young (tee-yee).*

Take Lesser Goldfinches, for example.  They're summer residents in this part of New Mexico, and I always hear them long before I see them in spring.  Their voices have a distinctive timbre, the tones less pure than the American goldfinch, a little more raspy, a little more plaintive.  They are the smallest of the finches, and the meek sigh in their two-note call suggests that they know it.  Two pairs (at least) visit the Nyjer feeders I've set out, enlivening the garden with their singing.  One of the males in particular likes to go through his whole repertory twice before he dines;  the others settle for calling frequently to one another—checking in, perhaps, with a re-assuring tseep to say, "I'm over here, still no cats in sight."

Although goldfinches chatter a lot, for the most part it doesn't seem to be empty chatter (though we could debate about that show-off male).  Last week, though, as I was lying on the sofa by the living room window, I heard a quiet running monologue going on—so quiet that I wouldn't have heard it if the window hadn't been open.  I looked out to see a female goldfinch alone at the feeder two feet away, eating with abandon and twittering softly about it to herself the whole time.  She did enjoy those seeds.  She stayed for quite a while, munching and murmuring, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase, "the appetite of a bird." 

I've seen and heard her a few times since then.  She'll arrive at the feeder with her mate, who soon gets spooked by something and darts off.  Our heroine doesn't go in for "flock think," though.  Instead of startling she pauses, looks around, assesses the situation (her judgment seems to be rock solid), and then happily settles in for the long haul.  The commentary begins:  "Oh, this is good.  Mmm, yes, that was a tasty seed.  So is this.  I wonder if this next one will be—yes, yes, very nice.  Oh, and there's another one.  Delicious!"  And on and on, seed after seed.

She is very round.

I like to think that she's the same finch I wrote about last year who had an unusual encounter with a hummingbird.  There's no reason that she should be, but then, there's no reason that she shouldn't.  Really, how many plump lesser goldfinches with minds of their own and a knack for getting the feeder all to themselves can there be in one small neighborhood?

Well, not being that much of a bird watcher, I can't say for sure.  But I like to think it's just one, and that she really knows how to have a good time, one joyfully celebrated seed after another.

And another and another...

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*It's like a Wagner opera, only more cheerful.  The first (and only) time I watched Tristan and Isolde I wondered how the lovers ever did anything worth getting in trouble over when they were so busy squawking at each other the whole time.

Taking Flight

or Against the Sun

Perhaps it's because I'm usually there on winter afternoons when the sun is low enough to catch in feathery seed heads and dried grass stems, or perhaps it's because those afternoons glow for weeks in my memory, but I always think of days in the bosque—the wooded area along the Rio Grande—as backlit days, seen against a scrim of radiant light.

I had heard some sandhill cranes fly over the garden on Saturday, headed due north, so high that they could barely be seen—so high that they weren't just moving from one cornfield to the next but had to be set for the long haul.  They were probably just the vanguard of the migration to come, but in the next few weeks the cranes will be taking flight in earnest.  I will miss their creaky purr once they go—they are among my favorites.  So, wanting to see them once more before they leave, I took advantage of the three-day weekend to spend an afternoon at the Bernardo Unit of the Ladd S. Gordon Waterfowl Complex about 50 miles south of Albuquerque. 

The cranes were there in the thousands.  The thousands.  I cannot get over the sheer numbers of them.  With my car parked on a dirt road between wetlands on one hand and a cornfield on the other, I sat on the hood for over an hour and—I can't even say "watched" them.  I experienced them flying past from pond to field.  A grouping of a dozen, then another, a few odd strays, another dozen, perhaps a hundred birds a minute.  A brief pause, enough for a handful of breaths.  Then another series of small groups, another hundred birds.  A pause.  Another group, stream after stream after stream.

And all the while that purr is filling the air, first on one side, then another, from one V higher up, another farther out—and then suddenly a group flies past in silence, so that you can hear the air whistling through their wings, beating with each downstroke.  Their shadows play along the ground, while light shimmers off their wingtips against the sun; the red spot gleams on their foreheads.

A little later, from a bird blind overlooking the wetlands:  the cranes can't see me and are no longer veering to one side or flying high in wariness.  I am surrounded by rushing wings and that primal, throaty call.  The thrill of wildness runs through me—heart leaping, I find myself wanting to shout, "Yes!  Yes!  Wait for me, I'm coming!"

(Fortunately, they are just going to the next corn field, and I can follow in my car.)

Later still, between wetlands and cornfield once again, I am waiting for sunset—a sunset free of telephone wires and rooftops and antenna towers.  Shortly before the sun skims the horizon, the curfew sounds from every voice at once, not only from the cranes but also from ducks and geese and songbirds and crows, a free-for-all of a warning bell.  The fields take flight as bird after bird returns to the water side of the road to roost, their silhouettes dark, almost shapeless against the lowering sun.

At one moment, overhead I can see all their different models of flight at once:  the frantic wingbeats of ducks, the air singing shrilly around them; the Canada geese flapping just as frantically, but on a larger scale; the steady thrum of the cranes, their wingtips turned gracefully upward even as they struggle for more height; a flock of blackbirds rising and falling in clouds, like the day's ashes blown on the wind; and above them all, a lone hawk circling, its wings from the distance looking perfectly still.

In a haze of gold, backlit by the sun, the cranes are returning home.

The Thrill of the Chase

or The Leaves Are Always Yellower on the Other Side of the Bosque

Yesterday I found myself singing Steel Rails, one of my favorite Alison Krauss songs:  "Steel rails, chasin' sunshine 'round the bend, winding through the trees like a ribbon in the wind."  I love that image of chasing sunshine—the gleam of sunlight on the railroad tracks always just ahead of you, the endless promise of brightness just ahead.  Yesterday was a sunshine-chasing kind of day.  The weather was so gorgeously warm and fine and the cottonwoods so deeply golden, that a certain itchy-footedness set in.  I ended up heading down to Bosque del Apache, a nature preserve about 85 miles south of Albuquerque, following the ribbon of cottonwoods along the Rio Grande all the way down I-25.

When I've been to the preserve before, it's been in the dead of winter, usually on a vacation day in the middle of the week, and the place has been quiet and empty.  On a beautiful Saturday shortly after the arrival of the sandhill cranes, snow geese, and other migrating birds, it was busy with life of all sorts:  serious birdwatchers, including a pair with binoculars bigger than their sunhats; serious photographers with tripods and lens hoods, including one whose setup was practically bigger than his car (and who probably found me, with my little point-and-shoot, equally entertaining); serious bicyclists bravely eating road dust and looking happy about it; not-so-serious families entranced by shimmering dragonflies; totally unserious teen-agers riding in the back of a pickup truck; serious joggers looking uncomfortably warm but virtuous.  Ostensibly, they were all there for a particular purpose, but at heart I suspect that, like me, they were really out there chasing sunshine.  (The joggers may even have caught up to it.)

Chasing sunshine:  tracking down the perfect day that's just beyond the next hill, the perfect photograph with exactly the right light, the ideal turn of phrase that's on the tip of your tongue, the cottonwood tree that's so golden it takes your breath away, the ducks (there is no elegant word for a duck) that might, perhaps, just on the offchance, for a few seconds, have their heads out of water.

Of course, the whole process can also be pretty pointless—an exercise in dream-chasing when reality is perfectly satisfactory.  As one of our "sorbet-colored sunsets" (as a local writer likes to call them) poured through the driver's side window on the way home, I found myself wondering what I had accomplished, other than to tire myself out when I could have enjoyed totally adequate—nay, the exact same—sunshine in Albuquerque, where we also have a plentiful supply of cottonwoods and as many duck bottoms to look at as anyone really needs, with a lot less dust.



I guess sometimes you just want the thrill of the chase.

In Which We Are Excited By Birds

or A First Time for Everything

Oh, what a confusing subtitle:  we haven't even gone anywhere yet, and already we are off track.  To clarify, this is not the first time I have been excited by the sight of birds, even though I am not a bird-watcher.  I may not spend my days standing in dense woods looking with binoculars up into the tops of thickly foliaged trees for a tiny brown speck of avian life with a distinctive eye-ring, but if birds conveniently come and present themselves, I am happy to admire them.  Every year at about this time, some of my favorite birds pass by, and the first sighting of the season is always cause for celebration.  Actually, it's not the sight that's so moving at all.  It's the sound—but we're getting ahead of ourselves again.

I've been thinking about the difference between "autumn" and "fall" for no better reason than that...well, frankly, for no particular reason at all.  When writing I usually prefer "autumn"—I like its look on the printed page, its sound, and the fact that it isn't focused as wholeheartedly on leaves as "fall" is; besides which the bonus little "n" at the end is just so charming.  Perhaps because the preferred word here in the US has changed over the years from autumn to fall, autumn always seems to suggest the antique to me in ways that resonate fittingly with the year's aging.  On the other hand, I love that "fall" is really a verb.  Fall and spring are such active seasons, when we move rapidly from growth to sleep or back again to growth; it's only right that they should both be represented by verbs.  Summer, on the other hand, may look like an active season, but it's not a season of change in the same way.  It is a season of surface activity that window dresses only one primary event:  the growing season.  And winter—the other noun season—is of course a time of lying fallow and of rest.

For some reason I've been especially aware this year of the little events of fall.  (Maybe that's a useful distinction between a verb and a noun season:  the difference between activity and events.  Summer has lots of activity but very few events; fall has less activity but events a-plenty.)  I've been aware of all of the lasts, certainly:  the last hummingbird, the last basil harvest, the last use of the swamp cooler, soon the last early morning coffee on the patio, and hopefully the last of those endless "waterbugs."  But more so all of the firsts:  the first wolf spider seeking shelter indoors, the first moment that it's cool enough to plant garlic, then flowering bulbs, the first golden cottonwood leaf, the first time I reach for a jacket, the first lighting of the furnace pilot, soon the first frost, then the first killing frost, possibly someday the first snow.  All of these mark the progress of the season until we find ourselves knee-deep in autumn.

But my very favorite first, the one I start anticipating from the moment the rabbit brush blooms, is the first time the sandhill cranes fly over.  Thousands upon thousands of them winter here in New Mexico, whether along the Pecos River at Bitter Lake Wildlife Refuge or on the Rio Grande, most notably at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge but even here in Albuquerque at the Rio Grande Nature Center and the Open Space Visitors Center (and anyplace they can find a cornfield in between).

Festivals—weekend-long, even week-long—mark their arrival.  We love our cranes.  (Correction:  those of us who are not farmers with cornfields love our cranes.)  Their call—a kind of creaky purr—is one of the most wonderful sounds I know of (if you choose to click the sandhill cranes link above, be sure to listen to the recording).  To hear it from dozens of throats at once and then look up and see these large, graceful, delicately-boned birds circling hundreds of feet overhead, glinting silver in the sunlight, riding the thermals to gain altitude, or flying in a slow-winging V (with none of the frantic flapping the geese engage in), is to become homesick for the power of flight.  When I hear them leaving in spring I am always smitten hard with wanderlust; hearing them arrive in fall, on the other hand, is a kind of homecoming.  It is lovely to live in a place where autumn signals not only the departure of life but also its arrival; I suspect, however, that the appeal of the cranes lies also in that homing signal, received just as the days are closing in and the temperatures are dropping and the neighbors light their first piñon fire of the season and we all want to be nestled someplace warm in any case.  At such a time, anything that radiates "homecoming" is bound to be welcomed with fervor.

I heard the first cranes last weekend.

Now it's really fall.

Fool's Gold

or When Instinct Goes Awry

My friends, we are gathered here today to laugh at the foibles of youth.   I don't know about you, but when I was young, I felt endlessly like the protagonist in a Victorian era British novel—the kind where the main characters spend most of the (very long) book doing embarrassing things while an all-knowing narrator tsks pityingly at them.   (And somehow, I was certain, everyone else in real life was the all-knowing narrator.)   Well, now it is our turn.   We are the all-knowing ones, laughing (gently?) at the well-intentioned errors of the young in this "Tale of Two Fledglings."

A family of Lesser Goldfinches has recently found my thistle feeders (which deserves its own "Hooray!").   Even a couple of weeks ago, the fledglings would feed as a mutually supportive group, but as they've grown older they've become squabbly and aggressive.   The least aggressive one in this family usually waits until all the others, which have been fighting for the best perches Keystone Kops-fashion, have been spooked by some spurious danger (usually me) and flown off, and then enjoys having the feeder all to herself.   (Query:   Who's actually the sensible one here?)   This quiet, unassuming, well-fed finch is one of our protagonists.

The other is a newly-fledged black-chinned hummingbird.   For the record, let it be stated that for most hummingbirds, the following equation is always in effect:   "Bright = flower? = edible!"   Hummingbirds love the warm colored flowers, especially red ones, but also pink, orange, and yellow.   The emphasis seems to be on color; the hummingbird definition of "flower" is a little more nebulous.   If you live anywhere in hummingbird territory and have ever worn a hot pink top outside on a summer day, you have probably had the experience of having a tiny bird hover in front of you wondering whether it has just struck the mother lode.   (And nothing makes your own big, overwhelming project suddenly seem do-able like having a 2-inch hummingbird speculatively eying all 5'7" of you and planning its dinner menu.)

The other day, our little goldfinch was sitting at the feeder, having patiently outwaited all her siblings.   Being a cautious sort, she wasn't actually facing the feeder but rather the wide, scary world, and her sunny golden chest was facing into the morning light, gleaming brightly and cheerfully.   The young hummingbird flew by and, seeing this vivid yellow object, put The Hummingbird Equation into action.   Much to the finch's consternation, the hummingbird hovered in front of her and tried to feed, poking her delicately with its long bill and "sipping."

What astonished me most was the odd level of understanding on the finch's part.   She obviously wasn't frightened as she would have been by a predator; while she was clearly uncomfortable with being someone else's feeding station, she wasn't about to give up her own.   Instead she shifted her feet unhappily on the perch and made odd little distress calls ("I'm fauna!   I'm fauna!   I'm fauna!").

The hummingbird drew back a bit and tilted its head in a "Well, that's unexpected" kind of way.   But when you're young, you're used to things being unexpected and are more likely to chalk confusion up to inexperience than, say, to faulty judgment.   Shaking off doubt (what would the finch know about it, after all?), the hummingbird approached to feed again, at which point the goldfinch just kind of lost it and started flapping its wings and darting its beak emphatically in the universal language of "Oy!"   The hummingbird finally caught on, did a clear double-take, and high-tailed it away.   (The goldfinch settled its feathers and returned to the thistle feeder.)

I've seen what I'm sure is this particular hummingbird again, always when the family of finches is feeding.   It flies straight up to them and then suddenly looks like a cat caught in some foolishness:   Who, me?   I was just going to check out this... yeah, this bit of... Well, I'll just be going, then.

It makes human youth look so easy—at least when we were teens (unless our childhoods were unusual indeed) we never had to prove whether we were animal, mineral, or vegetable.