Simple Pleasures

I just had one of my best bird experiences ever.

I've been paying attention to birds since I was pretty young, but I rarely go out and seek the rare ones. I tend to marvel at what's nearby.

I'm very happy that I got to see a Long-tailed Jaeger once, when it was lost in Mono County, and I was very excited when my husband (decidedly not "a birder") identified a Heerman's Gull along a path a bit west of Monterey Bay Aquarium. But mostly, I revel in the air-coasting of Turkey Vultures, and the way the American Robins fill my yard every March, and the markings of the hundreds of Cedar Waxwings in our local trees (they have a wheezy, tuneless song that is irrelevant given their gorgeous fancy clothes).

I like birds for learning about what they do. I like being able to spot a Western Scrub-jay without glasses on (my glasses, not the jay's) from the way its short swooping glides bring it down from a tree, and I like knowing that we have Black Phoebes because we're near a stream, and they eat bugs (they're at the local dog park for the same reason: flies love those trash cans!), and I like knowing that though the Cooper's Hawks in the neighborhood might be after our chickens, the Red-shouldered Hawks would prefer our pocket gophers. Our garden is grateful for Red-shouldered Hawks.

Today's event was both wonderful for its commonness and what it told me about basic bird behavior, and exhilarating for its sheer wonderfulness.

I was out in the driveway collecting mail, and as usual, our rooster jumped up onto the chicken pen's gate to let me know he was Still The Man. He crowed, and I said "Hi, Rooster," then over my head, in the tulip magnolia tree, a male Anna's Hummingbird began his squeaky territorial chirping. It's fully spring here, so the hummingbirds are nesting, and Anna's Hummingbirds are the kings of the "Gerroff my LAWN!" attitude. (I remember reading an article years ago in Smithsonian magazine describing the hummingbird migration in Arizona. One ranger at a state park told a visitor that if hummingbirds were the size of ravens, it would be unsafe to go outside. When a visitor exclaimed about the belligerent males, "They're so sweet, and so tiny!" he replied, "Yes ma'am, they are tiny.") I noted to myself that the rooster and the hummingbird (also a rooster, in his tiny way) were doing the exact same thing, crowing at the entire world to say that they were indeed The Man.

I couldn't see the hummingbird (no glasses on, and he was in a tree with hummingbird-sized leaves and blossoms), but when he flew over to another tree and began to chirp there, he was obvious. The sun was behind me, and as he moved slightly on his stick-end, he flashed with an almost inorganic magenta, the refractive feathers on his head and gorget throwing photons back at me. And then in a flash, he went up, up, and vanished. I kept my eyes on him as long as I could, but he was, it seemed, nearing escape velocity.

Anna's hummingbirds have the most amazing behavior. Sometimes they swoop down in huge, steep parabolas, making a sort of … ding? bing? musical pop? at the bottom of the dive. They'll fly up, out of sight, then down. I've seen them do this before, from slightly to the side, watched them form the parabola shape. But this time it wasn't quite overhead, I craned my neck up, staring directly at the sky, and the bird quickly became a dot, then disappeared. I knew he had to be diving in a moment, but where?

Then bam! or rather BING! Right over my face! The bugger had dived at my head as I stared and I never saw him. They are very, very fast. From the sound's direction and volume and the sudden bzzt! of wings, I estimate that the vertex of his dive was 2 to 3 feet over my head, and that's close enough.

My heart pounded, I clasped my hands to my chest and said, "Oh BOY!" The little hummingbird was up again, and gone.

It's quite easy to make me happy, really.

Hummingbird Diving In Action from Science News on Vimeo
Photo on top from Alan Vernon.

Geographilia as a calling

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Originally uploaded by gman8.

In the early nineties, I took a geography lab from the best geography teacher I’ve ever had, at the best community college I’ve ever attended.

The class was sheer fun. For our first field trip, he asked us each to find cross country skis or snow shoes, then brought us up to Lassen Park in April, when the road was still closed by deep snow. We’d spent some time learning how to take field notes, find directions, and other elements of geography field work, and when we arrived at the park, someone asked, “Is there anything special we should be noting?” He replied, “No, really, I just wanted you to see what Lassen is like before the road opens.”

It was quiet, and everything was white. The fumaroles steamed from underneath the snow. He warned us about the hollows that melted out around the fumaroles, capped by snow, and told us about participating in the rescue (because he works in Lassen back country rescue, did then, still does) of a man who had fallen face down into a pit, and would suffocate down there if someone couldn’t get their face down there and provide him some rescue breathing until help could arrive to pull him out, which was considerably later.

He pointed out mountain chickadees by their calls, and explained the geology of the mountain. The joy he felt in this snowy park – his place, which he knew intimately, and wanted to share with us – was palpable to the point of magic.

Everything about that class, and its prerequisite basic physical geography classroom course, seemed to be because the teacher thought it was cool, that he wanted us to see these neat things he thought were cool. From him I learned how rare the Mediterranean climate type is, and he shared with us that he first settled in the Sacramento Valley, in the sixties, because he crossed the Sierra and saw a redwood tree and a palm tree growing side by side, and was charmed. When we learned about weather patterns over and currents within the ocean, he told us about his summer fishing in Ireland, when a hurricane in the Caribbean managed to send lobster pots up the Irish rivers. He spent a big part of one class playing us an NPR show about people who had been struck by lightning and survived.

That magic hooked me. That magic sucked me into geography as a field, something I could do, rather than a dry high school course where we figured out adiabatic cooling rates.

Geographiles would be a lot better off if more people who are captivated by the magic would actually teach it, write about it, and share what we love. Perhaps that’s a call to action.