Nature Show in the Yard*

My, what sharp shins you have. Note a fortuitous blade of grass for comparison.

In the wilds of,...my front yard, the hunter became the hunted. Cliche, but true, all conveniently presented on a grassy lawn with no obstruction, and anough time to grab my camera.

I was just arriving home, when I heard a violent screeking, and looked over to see a small hawk pinning a starling to the ground by my doorstep. In no mood to share her prey, she flew over to the neighbor's yard, where it became evident that this was one starling no longer singing its foreign songs, and the racket was the hawk's victory chant.

Mine! Mine! Mine!

"She?" Probably, based on the word of the Fish and Wildlife biologist who I sent these photos to. Juvenile, perhaps. Smaller than a Coopers, which would make it a Sharp Shinned Hawk in these parts. A native culling a flock of invasives. One down, thousands to go.

Hawk struck starling a few times for good measure, but was not really eating it. More of a dance: lowering its wings over the kill, flipping it's tail up, turning, stamping. And screaming all the while. She kept an eye on me lest I look too hungry, but kept it up for 66 seconds (thanks, digital camera for the time-keeping) before...

No bird for you, alien feline.

This is just one of the neighborhood cats (the ferals mostly fall to coyotes, I think), but to watch it come in, fast and low, ready for a pounce after the run, was to see the hunter that lives in most house-cats. It came out of nowhere (OK, probably the alley behind me), answering the dinner call. Was it like me, thinking it heard a bird in distress? Or have the cats learned the hawk's "I killed a freakin' starling!" song? This unwild-cat was probably not ready to hunt the hunter, but would steal a starling if it could.

This time, it could not. But it did make me wonder about how this works out on the big scale. I mean, a huge flock of starlings in the fairly open setting of single family homes  be a boon to the bird-hunting hawk, but how many times does the native raptor make a kill only to have it taken away by a cat? Or, does a hawk have to spend much time eluding pets hungry for yet another hand-out? The massive toll of cats directly killing wild birds has only recenltly become clear (billions, by the way, if not billions and billions), but what about the effects of harrassment and competition on native predators?

Maybe the impact of cats on raptors is tiny. Maybe I could find out if only I spent another few minutes searching the internet. But, I will not, because I suspect that the data are, even if they exist, apt to take more than a few minutes to find. Besides, the main point of this post was to share some photos of a nature show in my yard. These shots were zoomed like hell on a cheap digital camera, but they came out pretty cool, I thought. Sometimes just having a camera handy beats hours of waiting with fine photopgraphic gear.

* Adapted from a post at Land Before Me.

Wings Over Cascadia

This past May, not that long after the snow had left, I arrived in a Cascadian meadow. Too early for camas and yampah, ground still pretty squishy, so I was jumping the gun relative to the traditional calendar that has drawn people up here since forever ago. But, this was when the opportunity arose, and I took it.

Likewise for the sandhill crane pictured here. What I've heard is that one or two show up at this meadow in any given year, but no breeding occurs. More likely, in the midst of migratory flight, it looks down upon this island of grass in vast forest, and swoops in for a closer look, a rest, a meal. The meadow is welcoming enough that it may stay the season, stop the flying and settle in on ground thinly peopled, a nature preserve in fact. Ironically, this meadow is the handiwork of millenia of human handiwork, a home occupied each summer while people dug roots, raced horses, traded, and did whatever else, including at some point setting fires that maintained this non-forested Cascadian oasis.

May may be early for the human foods (that I know of), and full flower is still a month away, but for the other creatures life is in full swing. Foliage and flowers have the small flyers flitting from plant to plant. This swallowtail may not be rare, and it takes no talent or acuity to find one, but I still feel fortunate to have seen so many of these fluttering paintings.

Some are more subtle, and the closer you look, the more you see. This moth appeared to be a caterpillar-pillaged leaf when I first saw it. Eventually, it grew uncomfortable with my gaze and took off on tattered wings while I stood, nearly stuck in the muck. 

That day, I meandered a mile or two. Not exactly trudging, but not flying either. The clouds of tiny insects, flocks of birds, and solo flyers all took their travels into a third dimension. This little plain of grass surrounded by mountains opened up a patch of sky so they could fly free under a warming sun while in the dank woods beetles crawl.

He's Back

I feared that this day would come. The day I would learn what had happened after I hit that wild turkey. Now, years after running afoul of (OK, afowl into) the feathery one, the memory rarely visited and suffering a loneliness akin to that which inhabits most nursing home rooms, it all came back. Five years? Something like that. Three kilomiles? Yep. Singling me out among the largest of south Puget sound crowds? Uh huh.

The turkey never forgets. Where the good seeds are, when the tasty bugs emerge, what other creature has started a blood feud by wasting a wattly relative. [Oddly, from a human perspective, turkeys do not hate hunters, being firm believers that killing for food is all right with the Creator.] Kill a turkey and walk away, and all his brethren hold the grudge. Hurt a turkey and don't finish the job, and it will dedicate the all of its remaining life to hunting you down and killing you.


The turkey I ran into back in the oughts was probably trying to kill himself, but that does not mitigate things, and probably just makes it worse. All of the Meleagris genus are proud by nature, and are loathe to admit to the kind of weakness that would lead one to erase itself. Ergo suicide by automobile, which is rarely provable, and with the least bit of luck appears to be an accident. 

When I hit that one, it disappeared, no carcass, no blood. When his cousins found him later, he made up a story about an evil human, not just heedless as their kind usually are, who had actually sped up to hit him. At once, they all vowed to find me and kill me. Or peck at my balls. Or wake me up at all hours with their incessant inane gobbling. Something, they all agreed, something must be done to avenge this callous act of assault on the galliform brotherhood.


I had no specific knowledge of this, but of course suspected it. I chickened out (to use a phrase invented by turkeys, it just so happens) before wandering too far off the road to search for the broken bird, uncomfortable at facing it and its ilk on their turf, and satisfied myself replacing certainty with hope. After so long, with so many miles between me and the scene of the accident (I almost wrote 'scene of the crime' there), the hope had grown like moss over the incident, engulfing, obscuring and softening it. Invisibilizing it.


But not erasing it. Not altering its fundamental reality. Not precluding the opposite reaction to the action (damn you, thermodynamics). And so the other day, as I sat watching the Procession of the Species, I came eye to beady eye with consequence.


The Procession is a parade in which Olympians dress up like some species, real or approximate or even imagined. I've written about it since starting this blog (hit the Procession keyword below if you don't believe me, or are in the mood for more strangeness). But the eerily accurate rendition of Meleagris gallopavo gave me pause right away. Nobody is that meticulous, that un-whimsical. Even more than with the slime mold from last post, I immediately suspected that this was no costume, but a species camouflaged as a human in an animal costume. 


And sure enough, he stared me down soon after rounding the corner. An onyx eye, a black bead that doesn't look like it could focus so intently on one point, boring into my soul, accusing me, promising vengeance. And the sucker was humongous. A lot of pounds and a lot of years have passed in turkey time, but I recognized the look, the visage I'd last seen slamming into my windshield. There was an instant where I could sense some discomfort--I am the one who knows his suicidal shame--but before I could stare back, it was gone, replaced by a cold glare.


The crowd heard "Ahhhh-gobgob-gobble-ubble-ubble-ubble." I knew the call was directed at me, "I'mmmm gonna-gonna kill you you motherfucker." Not then, not in front of the crowd. He was just letting me know he was in town, making me see that he'd been working out, getting buffed out and ready to do more than peck ineffectually. 


Looking into that turkey's eye, I could see that the bird I'd seen back at Reedy Creek, so empty of gusto and so full of le nausee, ennui, and various other francophonic malaises, had been unalterably changed. If only to wreak vengeance, this bird now has a reason to live.

And I have reason to hide.

Cool Ease



Once were glaciers. There still are, for now, just not this low, not this south. But their tracks reach halfway down from the pole, evidence of past sprawl.

For a long time, "glacial" has meant slow. A glacial pace excruciates and frustrates, witholds fruition until long after you've lost interest. To some it's majestic, stately, an inspiring slow march across ages.

Of course we know that to be bullshit now, and although the concept of glaciers as slow may hang on among english majors and other metaphor junkies, scientists who've studied this kind of earth artistry now know just how fast a glacier can move. In our warmed atmosphere, they can break up quickly, mile after mile of what appeared to be a solid block of ice fracturing, sliding, turning into mush in a single summer. Beneath their stoic mantles, river rush and rage. And in the cores that remain solid (for now), strata of long-fallen snow tell about sudden onsets of ice ages, rapid accumulations, quick thaws.

Here in the northwest, especially in the sere interior, areas bare of towering forests and other rock-swallowing greenery, geology speaks of other glacial speed. Glaciers here once held enormous lakes, icy fastness damming inland seas. As the climate warmed, water sought the weak points, runnning off the top, tunneling through cracks and voids, shimmying beneath, pioneering trickles searching for opening to turn the vast potential energy of the impounded water kinetic and free. Lake Missoula, about 200 miles long and holding something like 500 cubic miles of water, let rip and carved out the canyons we call coulees. Rock formations downstream held back water for a time, but the lake drained in a couple of days, and rock cannot hold up to that forever, a couple hundred square kilometers of it gave way, turning the once broad expanses of the laval plateau into a tracery of coulees grand and miniscule.

The floods happened when people were still a new and naturalizing species in the new world. I can see them, living in a good spot along the river, enjoying the bounty of an unspoiled landscape, and then feeling the earth shake, hearing a roar, and then being wiped out by a wall of water. Throughout the Columbia watershed, the best human habitat was ripped apart. The archaeologist in me weeps not just for the people who were swept away, crushed by boulders, and drowned, but also for the earliest sites, obliterated. (Of course, there must also be some sites, located in a lucky lee or a high bench that only got a blanket of sand and silt, where entire Pleistocene camps must have been buried intact.)

But once the ice sheets ceded the lower latitudes and no ice dams held more potential cataclysms, the coulees remained. Over time, the interior dried out, and the canyons became oases, protecting streams and ponds from wind and sun, collecting mountain snowmelt, thunderstorm runoff, percolating rain of yore. 

Above, scabland lava, sagebrush, fields of glacial till. Deer instead of mastodons, solitary sage grouse instead of sky-darkening flights of fowl.  Beautiful in its way, and far short of desolation, but plenty of dessication to go around. People traversed this country, hunted some, found patches of roots to eat, but it was sunburnt and windswept.

Far better to retreat to the protection of a coulee. Here there was water, and waterfowl, and all the critters who come to drink...and feed the people. Here grew moisture loving plants that could not survive up top: food, medicine, fiber, mats, and so many materials vital to the organic age. Here was escape from the relentless wind, a place where fire can be tamed and live in a hearth and that had more wood to burn in the first place. Here, flood-ripped canyon walls exposed tool rock, flood deposits made easy picking for cooking and sweatlodge rocks. Here, labyrinths well known to locals afforded escape from marauders, ambushes for hunting, secret and secluded spots for communing with the spirits. The great coulees, Grand and Moses and others, became highways as bipeds grew in number and eventually reintroduced horses.

Cool. Ease.

Wild Turkey

So I said maybe I'd write this next, but that turned out to be the penpenultimate post relative to this, which of course most of you will find first. In any case, what follows is my fuzzy recollection of a story I wrote a few years back, based on a harrowing journey and a desire to channel HS Thompson (if not the duller truth):

I was 15 minutes short of Bowling Green when the wild turkey kicked in. Maybe not as scary as a swarm of bats, but a hell of a lot heavier and thus capable of more damage. But I'll get to that.

The first thing is to understand that the wild turkey in question was not the precious brown liquor, it was just a bird. Freakish to be sure, improbable as an H. Bosch creature, like an old whore appearing in a hallucination to augur the coming bad trip. Wattly and despite desparate splashes of blue and red make-up, indisputably a gray-skinned minion of some dark spirit. But I'll get to that, if I have the courage.

Anyway, there was no booze involved, because I was driving alone, and that would have been irresponsible. If memory serves, in those days I was more into the poor man's speedball: tylenol 3 and a fistful of sudafed. Comfortable and relaxed, yet at the same time alert and prone to stomping on the gas whenever my heightened senses told me there was not cop. But I'll get to that, too.

This was a run I'd done before, working on a landscaping peroject in Maryland, taking 301 to avoid the interstate and its arterial flow of trucks, dipshits, retirees on their endless north-south migrations, and of course dangerously wasted individuals. 301 is one of those backroads that dates to that brief halcyon when engineers had successfully pulled out the meanders and straightened the roads, but had not yet discovered the completely soul-less interstate. Now, when the general public is afraid to leave the madding lemming crowd, uncomfortable venturing too far from the corridor of Chevrons and Cracker Barrels, such roads are magical. Long lonely straightaways, and in the Virginia portion of this particular road, it is mostly in-betweens, few stops and towns, and hardly any other cars. Lots of woods, a stripe of sky above and ahead all you need to navigate, the contoured pavement pulling the wheels just where they should go.

In other words, a road that lets you think if you want to, or maybe just to speed like hell.

And here, south of the little town of Bowling Green, there is a great place to do that. You crest one of the ancient folds in the land, and before you is a luxuriously long straightaway, a mile down to Reedy Creek, then a mile back up to the next high point. You can see right away if there is a cop lurking, and this time there was not.

So I hit the gas. Not to get anywhere faster, not to prove anything or compete or even have anything to tell about later. Basically just to get that feeling of acceleration all the way down, then the g-force hitting at the bottom, as I swung through the trough and up the other side.

And then flying. Alone, feeling weightless and silent, watching the stripes shooting by and always missing me. Ethereal.

Ephemerally, as it turned out. On the far side of the approaching creek was a big gobbler, the sight of which knocked me from my high speed reverie. A large bird looking like he wanted to cross in front of me.

I slowed.

He slowed.

He looked like he'd seen me and though better of playing chicken. He stood still, looking at me, blinking stupidly and flashing that ridiculous eye shadow.

With the bird stopped, I stopped stopping, and hit the gas again. "Get past before he changes his mind, what there is of it," I thought.

In my state I could practically see every muscle in those drumsticks flex as he broke into a run, took off, and cracked the windshield. In the final instant I could see those eyes again, but this time there was something else, something behind the vapidity. Sadness, despondency even. And that was the true terror, worse than malevolent bats, a suicide most fowl.

A big bang, and then he was gone, replaced by a big spiderweb of cracks. Fortunately, the glass held together. I pulled over a little ways up the hill, inspecting the damage and foraging for any edible bits. None to be had, not even any trace of the bird, no free meal.

'Wild' Turkey

There was something on the radio yesterday about turkeys (big surprise), and how the domesticated ones, even those "introduced" to the Americas, descended from species that evolved in the Americas. It being NPR, they noted that southwestern tribes had domesticated the wild birds once upon a time. Not turning turkey lore on its head, but at least it was a nod to native people on a day that fills some of them with ambivalence, others with fear and loathing, and still others with turkey.

But a nod is but a gesture, and in fact the focus dealt more with a common trope: species brought near extension, then rescued by modern wildlife management. Recovered to the point that these birds occur well beyond their supposed ancestral range. Although the main goal of reintroducing wild turkeys was primarily to establish populations of game birds that outweigh the lead shot it took to bring them down, the story was presented as on of environmental success. Yay.

[At least it was not that tired old thing about Benjamin Franklin nominating the gobbler to be the US bird, instead of the imperial icon the eagle. And I cannot expect them to know the story of my uncle, who would step onto his porch each morning and greet the resident flock with a hale and hearty "Senators!"]

What it did not mention was that the wild turkey, even thousands of miles from the pueblos where it lived in domesticated form, was not strictly wild. Native people managed their populations, and having hunted the fowl for millenia, had to have exerted some selective pressure that altered  its evolutionary trajectory. Clearing for gardens (and for that matter, growing corn), shifting from plot to plot, and controlled burning all contributed to good turkey habitat, and the abundance of this bird in 1491 had a lot to do with how how Algonquin and other people lived. Just as the decline had a lot to do with how Anglo people lived.

But enough about that. You clicked on this because of Wild Turkey the drink, the kickin' chicken, the amber river that took Hunter Thompson to his muse. Or maybe because you thought I'd include that gonzo piece about a wild turkey that I've hinted at. Maybe I'll do that next.

Morning Coffee Beat

I must be getting t be an old guy, because I go to bed and wake up early, a couple hours before I did for the past few decades.

Or maybe I just like the morning still. The earth be-dewed and hovering in that pause between breaths.

Out into that I go, steaming cup o joe in hand. Something called "Organic Love Buzz," and even though that reeks of hammy marketing (covering for a blend of whatever leftovers are lying around the roastery), it's really good. A couple of gulps and I can feel the warmth start to convect through my body.

What birds are singing, I don't know. The songs are familiar, though, and they are that first exhale of a new day. Maybe one reason I get up this early is to hear these songs, savoring the narrowing range my aging ears are hearing these days.

The crows must've been hitting the espresso, because they swoop in whooping it up, calling a meeting way up in the wild cherry tree. Jays and a bevy of little brown birds show up immediately, and fall in with the crows' scolding, all of the feathered ones bent on harrassing something, maybe a cat, something threatening in the parabolic darkness of an evergreen. Veins now caffeinated, I nearly join in, but we have new neighbors and I'm not quite ready to come out as a crazy.

The little ones yip while the jays squawk and the crows settle into a rash duet. "Kah! - Kaw!" Bird bodies bobbing, heads jabbing. Thashing the unseen interloper with an aural assault. (If I were more literate, I could allude to some coked-out jazz experiment gone bad, but I aint.)

The little ones skip out and jays like to spread squawk all over their territory, so before long it's down to the crows. Maybe still hassling some intruder, but to my ears slipping into a nice groove. Calls and responses in cadences alluring (alluding to jazz riffs I cannot name, but have heard as sure as the birdsongs). The beat fluid, emphatic quickening and then slackened coasting. Backbeat leapfrogging up front now and then.

The stillness is gone, but not shattered. Birdsong primed the pump and the crows hit the throttle. Night's ebb done, day's flow begun.

So yeah. That's good coffee.

More Birds

Protection Island, in the Straight of San Juan de Fuca.
Septemb er 2008.

Geese coming around Diamond Point. Protection Island in background.

Gulls at the Protection Island Wildlife Refuge. Olympic Mountains in background.

Mmm. Guano.

Those cormorants again.

Piling Up the Work

So yeah, I mentioned the pilings, which I love to hate. A few years ago, the gov decided that removing pilings would be a priority for her, since they leach creosote into Puget Sound, the Straight of Juan de Fuca, the Pacific, the Columbia, and the rivers and lakes that make this such a water wunderland.

Removing pilings with docks on top and boats tied up ain't so popular, so the government's preferred prey are the wasted wharves, decaying docks, punky piers, and derelict dolphins. Historic preservation law being what it is (which is, anything 50 years old or more is "historic"), I get to review these to learn whether they are significant, and if so, what the state intends to do about it. So I swoop around in GIS space, investigate archives, and surf the infonet.

But it ain't all desk jockeying. People being what they are (which is large bipeds fond of seafood and navigable channels, as long as they are not too far from fresh water), piers tend to pop up in the same places where the First People landed canoes. So I consult the tide auguries and take to the mudflats to look to see whether the piles were driven though ancient sites. This being work, I don't dig clams, or even grab crabs (like at the Dungeness Wharf above.) Mostly, I find junk that people toss off docks and boats, but now and then there is the thrill of fire-cracked rock.

Then, there are the trips out to watch other people work, in case artifacts turn up stuck to the pilings. Also to look around again in case there's something on the shore. Or maybe it's just the fun of watching giant cranes on barges. Grrr.

If anyone tells you it's just to avoid the office, the spend time on the placid Puget, they're mean and don't understand the rigors of nautical archaeology, which include frigid wet wind, diesel stench, and hostile birds. Not just the gulls, which can poop twice their own weight every day, but also the cormorants, those reptilian devils whose penchant for perching on pilings and gulping young salmon all day is maybe a more urgent reason than creosote to get rid of pilings. If you don't believe me, ask any fisheries biologist familiar with the emperiled Columbia salmon runs and the concomitant cormorant population explosion.

Not all of the birds are vicious, at least not to humans. Like this osprey, feasting on something. (OK, maybe also a salmon, but ospreys lack the dinosauric creepiness of cormorants.) Lots of eagles, too. A few months ago I watched one dive into a flock of floaters (gulls) and fly away with one in it's talons. Cool show, and not taking any food off the tribal table.

The Life Aquatic

A big (2.5million acres worth) of my job is to deal with cultural resources on State Aquatic Lands. Some places, like this, are only submerged when the tide is up, and my work is possible with the aid of rubber boots if I time it right. One thing that made it easy to take this job is that the people I work with understand earth's rythms--tides and snowfall and all--and act accordingly. Like when they planned the big statewide cultural resource training, they looked at the tide charts first, because they wanted to take people to sites like this one. Which consists of the remains of a fish trap (see the two lines in the mud, converging on the channel?) Originally, the lines were palisades that let water pass through, but not fish, which would converge on a little gate, where people would scoop them up. So when people tell you the Northwest tribes were "hunter-gatherers," keep in mind that sometimes the gathering involved development of infrastructure and resolution of territorial claims.

Of course, I work for a bureaucracy, and I don't get to just run around in tidewater mudflats looking for fishtraps. Sometimes I get to run around mudflats looking at pilings. There is a big project to remove creosote pilings from Puget Sound, but it happens that some are old enough to be historic, and I need to find out which, and document them before they get pulled from the mud (creating the "giant sucking noise Ross Perot talked of). The pilings here, by the way, are basically a corral for logs,, where they would be dumped off a train, awaiting a water voyage to a mill. And it ain't all as easy and fun as it sounds; I will have to go deal with Pile-preservationists, who think that these creosoted voices of the past must be preserved.

And then there are the days when I spend little time on actual water. The first happened on April 2, which dawned cloudless and calm. I drove 3 hours through Seattle and on north, and boarded a state launch at Anacortes. A short run brought us to Secret Harbor (really), on one of the few San Juan Islands that has not been developed. Or not much, anyway. Looking back out of secret harbor, you are treated to a view of Mount Baker, if you are so lucky as to arrive on a clear day, which I was. The photo is lame, but maybe you can sorta see what I mean. Beatific day, by any account. We saw seals, eagles, herons, starfish, kelp, and tolerably few bipeds. Fortunately, the Department plans to restore the ecosystems around Secret Harbor in the wake of logging and some development. Even More Fortunately, they won't just jump into restoration without considering cultural resources, and I will be forced to do further archaeology there in the meantime. Even More More, in walking around with the eco-guys, we figured that the digging I'd like to do to see what the archaeology is will be useful to them in determining what it is they want to restore.

So while I do not live the Life Aquatic like Steve Zisou, I'm doing okay.