Clowns of the Forest

Acorn Woodpecker; Meladerpes formicidorkus

Acorn Woodpecker; Melanerpes formicivorus

So I'm playing around with planning a kids Nature Club, ideally to be offered at the Library.  It's something that I am actually pretty excited about and it's been fairly motivating for me.  A loose outline of the idea would be to get the kids each a nature journal, talk to them about different ways that they can experience the wilderness and all the different media and modes that they can use to express what they've encountered and how they've felt with subsequent meetings allowing them to share what they've seen and made while giving interpretive guidance on narrower subjects such as birds, geology, trees and forests, etc..  The idea would be to encourage them towards a creative interest in the wilderness and to subtly instill a deep wonder in and care for the natural world and the desire to become better stewards of such an integral part of our community.

In this spirit, I thought it might be a good idea to teach myself to draw in a more realistic mode than my usual cartoon mess so that I could talk at least somewhat convincingly about the ways in which one can improve one's skills from even abysmal beginnings.  Above you will have seen my first attempt, knocked out in a few minutes between extemporizing to visitors at E.T. about the beauty of the Lake.  I picked an Acorn Woodpecker for its impeccably well-defined lines, thinking this would make it simpler.  It did, and at least I was able to put forth something that was at least identifiable as  the species it was intended to depict.  I thought I'd put it out here as kind of a marker of my first attempt and as I practice and hopefully improve, I can loosely document my progress and have some tips I can share with kids.  So check back in... 7 years... maybe... and you should see some fairly passable bird sketches going on.

That little Woodpecker I drew just looked a little sad and uncomfortable though, so I figured I would research a bit of its Life History in order to practice evoking a little of the bird's natural personality in my "art".  Combining this with my own personal observations when I took the above picture I came up with something that I think makes rudimentary steps, at least, towards portraying the Acorn Woodpecker's relationship to the world around it including it's unfailing sense of style and personal struggles with a social drinking habit slowly creeping into early stage alcoholism.  Nature really can be unforgiving at times.

Acorn Woodpecker; Smoothanerpas formicivelourus

Placerville 4/24/15

Female Bushtit; Psaltriparus minimus

In an overcast lunch hour break from out-of-town meetings I could forgo my food and just slip out the door, going hungry down a roadside slope into tangled vegetation, through tall weeds, past barbed wire and across the limbs of a tree long since downed, into a small clearing. Nearby might be a homeless bed in dense undergrowth and a feeling of forgotten life on the margins of something half understood, close to daily life but far removed. There I could stand under a foreign tree and watch little yellow-eyed birds flicker among the budding twigs of a shrub I cannot name. A scrub jay might call out from where I had entered this space, which could be a calling back from a world no one knows I left or a scolding reminder that I don't belong to this overgrown side either. It would be easier than going back to stoop under these low branches and trail down through the knee-deep grass of a hillside, past a lone snag riddled with the work of birds, through an impromptu gate ripped in a rusted fence and into the bright and noise of a crowded parking lot.

    Out in the human open I would feel less a wanderer and more a stranger, drifting down sidewalks where others are hurrying.  It would be a relief to cut across lawns under the oak trees where squirrels are busy stealing acorns cached by woodpeckers who call at them in anger and swoop with little effect.  This conspicuous feeling would draw me on though, and down a curving dirt road which trails along past thorn bushes where mockingbirds sing and a cat, black, feral and thin, sighs away, at my passing, into a pile of rock and concrete debris.  On past a disused shed, around piles of wood slash and dried out bush trimmings, I might come to a kind of rest alone in the open where an abandoned warehouse barely stands there on the other side of a wide ravine which is choked with vegetation and scattered with trash blown by the wind. Here, at the edge of several places, I might encounter a small, quick species of bird I had never seen before and wonder if they feel this too-- this tenuous solitude and this free but restless spirit. Do they seek these places out the same as me or do they simply enjoy the indirect protection from predators one finds in a closer proximity to humans?  Their appetite and need for safety certainly leads them most places but their heart must also pull them forward just as mine does for me.  In the end, I suppose these places help my spirit as well to avoid its own predators and perhaps this is something else we share-- species more comfortable with the ambiguity of the borders between.  And upon returning, as I will have to, who but those little gray birds with their tiny black eyes and all the other small things out there would know the lonely world I have returned from and just what I have kept with me from that place?

Oak Titmouse; Baeolophus inornatus

A photograph I might never take

Sometimes I have recognized in these dim, late-winter woods a deep sense of quiet neglect. It is as if the spirit of the forest had nodded off in waiting for spring and, now sick with dreams, it is unable to find its way back out of its long, twisting burrows. All the little eyes that find themselves outdoors absently watch as the soft, light snowflakes drift through the pines in a fitful breeze. There is an awareness of something going gently feral within yourself-- an inner forgetfulness which lets us slip away from ourselves as easily as a book might slip out of a sleeping hand onto the damp bed of pine needles beneath us.

There is the great, constant, monotone shifting of pine branches rising and receding overhead and in the stillness between these breaths one can sometimes hear, close by, the faint clatter of willows and the sound of cold, clear water flowing away down the creek. A small hawk is perched low and puffed up in a somewhat protected limb. One wonders how it is able to soothe itself, alone among those wavering branches or if it even has to try. There is that vigilant, raptorial boredom in its eyes. In its bearing, an intimation of a life lived between the blood of its meals and punctuated by the glory of the skies turning through the tips of its wings. There is an understanding of the lonely things it must do to feed itself. Its beauty is stark and removed in the graying light as the woods sink again into a less ambiguous sleep.

Seeing the World in Two Ways

"At one time I was interested in birdwatching, and I noticed that when I saw a bird for the first time I couldn't really see it, because I had no formal arrangement, no sense of pattern, for it.  I couldn't remember it clearly, either.  But once I identified the bird, the drawings in bird books and my own sense of order arranged the image and made it clearer to me, and I never forgot it.  From then on I could see the bird in two ways-- as the fresh, unpatterned vision and the patterned one.  Well, seeing death nearby is very like the first way of seeing."

Harold Brodkey , This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death

a quote from a book I did not read which came to me via

Johnathan Rosen's The Life of the Skies 

 

This idea of seeing the bird in two ways has been powerful for me as I extrapolate it out into my life. For me, it is the idea of seeing the actual physical bird, it's beautiful feathers, grace of movement, and its way of life in front of you. It is seeing this while knowing the bird's life history and how it's tied to the world around it, understanding the reasons for its behavior, and seeing the underlying qualities that make it what it is. It means knowing something as much as we are able to both in heart and mind. In this way we can understand it as another form of life in the world and thereby understand something of ourselves and our connection to the wilderness.

We can expand this idea out into the wider world as well. Seeing this little snowflower we can know that its brilliant inflorescence belies not only a larger life under the soil but also the fungus that it leeches from and the root systems that live in tandem with that fungus, together holding and keeping healthy the soil. Daydreaming to the patterns in the clouds, we can understand them as the patterns of ice crystals shaped by winds high above us-- a seeming randomness out of which comes such diverse beauty. As we look at a hawk and it looks back we can imagine how it sees us with its acute and  tetrachromatic vision.  We can make sure to keep the heart asking as many questions as the mind. What icy wind has blown across this mountain face, what cool rivulets and rushing streams, what beating sun and slow trembling of earth?

In thinking of how trees grow and the workings of apical buds, distance between limbs, proximity of trees and so on, we can know something of the life of individual trees. We may not be able to tell what cracked this crown or limb, when this gall was formed, how long since lightning struck this tree but we can see them in a similar way to how we see the faces of others. A face wrinkled with lines from laughter and joy, kind eyes with dark circles around them, smiles with an undercurrent of sadness, old scars and twinkling eyes. When we know a person's life, these things become visual cues that connect our knowledge with our emotions, that prompt us to sympathy and empathy. This is how understanding leads us to kindness, compassion and love. To understand at least part of what something is in the world must be the only way towards a deep love for it whether we're talking about a person or a creature, or the land itself. I can look at your face and say that it's beautiful as easily as taking a snap shot at a vista point around a beautiful bay. But, when I know what your life has been and I have shared some of it with you, then I am able to see these things in your face-- what the weather and the world have done to you and for you, where you were born, the places where you were broken down and the happiness and peace you knew in your calm weather. With humans and pets we call this friendship, love, kinship, family and a thousand things besides. With the wilderness we are more subdued and call it knowing Natural History, going for a walk, and keeping our eyes well open. 

Blue

Steller's Jay- Cyanocitta stelleri

       At Explore Tahoe, I am currently working on some sheets to complement a childrens' “Discovery Table” and both add some dimension to the information already given and give my coworkers and I some interpretive tools to help reach out to visitors. In researching, I came across two facts which I paired with the above photo and connected like this:

 “Is this Bird Blue?

 While a Steller’s Jay does have a beautiful blue coloring, the blue is not actually a pigment or natural color of its feathers. If you were to hold one of its feathers up in front of a bright light, it would actually have more of a brown color. This is because the blue is a “structural color” meaning that it’s caused by microscopic patterns in the feather’s physical shape. These tiny shapes help to absorb all but the most easily scattered, low-wavelength light which happen to be blue and violet. These two colors are then reflected back out. Our eyes are much more sensitive to blue than violet, so the Jay appears blue to us!

This is similar to the reason why Lake Tahoe has different shades of blue. In the lake’s case, light is absorbed by tiny particles in the water and the water molecules themselves. The deeper the water is, the more light is absorbed as it travels through. The more light which is absorbed, the darker the shade of blue that appears to us.”

       These are beautiful facts to me not just for what they impart or for the elegance of one idea helping to answer two loosely connected questions but for the many other questions they can open up. We know what causes those feathers to appear blue to us. How do they appear to a bird who can see farther into the ultraviolet range? Why those colors there on the Jay's wings and not on its head? Why these iridescent patterns at all but why in places with such uniformity within species and such stunning diversity across species? Why should they look pleasing to us as well? What do these things mean to the birds themselves? They have been proven to have an effect upon mating but why did they evolve in the first place? Evolution as a theory can teach us how these patterns may have evolved but as yet cannot incorporate quite why they have evolved as opposed to other and simpler means to the same ends.

        On the whole, nature doesn't do simplicity. There are simple concepts and patterns within it that we can grasp but its complexity is so great as to be almost indescribable except as evidence of a greater order which we cannot yet understand. This is what Wendell Berry describes as “a music so vast that no one hears it except in fragments.” We can grasp these small parts but must always keep in mind that they are just that, parts of a larger order that we cannot as yet fully see.

        The mind needs these mysteries. Just as we can partially explain these patterns in bird plumage, we can partially explain the intricacies of the brain as a series of chemical impulses. This knowledge can have serious and beneficial effects in finding treatments for mental disease and disorder but how can it ever hope to account for how the mind and its already dizzyingly complex array of emotional shades interacts with the seemingly infinite complexity of the world around us and the other minds around that to create such nuanced and relatively exact communication as we see in works of art from the great on down to the most simple. This is still the realm of the creative mind and can still only be apprehended in parts by the artistic spirit. This is part of the essential nature of art and creativity: To give us the mental, spiritual, and emotional tools to be able to understand more deeply the facets and obscure connections of the world around, inside, and between us. We can analyze great works of art but it would take lifetimes to understand precisely where it came from out of the complex currents of history, society, personal history, emotional intensity, abstract expression and so on. To say nothing of the question of how exactly it is able to bridge that gap and resonate with its audience in all of their own endless and ever-changing complexity. And then to attempt to talk about these things coming about from a base of simple chemical impulses. It seems futile in one sense, but its very nature as overwhelmingly boundless mystery is sustaining to that constantly hungry imagination within us. We may not be able to explain the complexity of bird plumage and our own form of art and dreams but we can dream pointedly and endlessly about them. These huge mysteries create wellsprings of questions which the mind can play at and which can carry us onward into a deeper understanding and connection with ourselves and the beautiful world around us.

To be made small

"As so often on spring evenings , no birds sing near me, while all the distant trees and bushes ring with song.   

Like all human beings, I seem to walk within a hoop of red-hot iron, a hundred yards across, that sears away all life.   

When I stand still, it cools, and slowly disappears."

      J.A. Baker, "The Peregrine"

To remember the world as an organism.  To feel it as a series of interlocking and interdependent patterns repeated on different levels and scales but moving, in a certain sense, in harmony.  "No more beastlike than manlike"

To understand the shifting climates, the dormant inhalations and brilliant green exhalations of its seasons as a kind of breathing.  To recognize in my own breath a smaller pattern mirroring a larger pattern and to be reminded that there is some place in the world for me where I belong.  "Not by your will is the house carried through the night.".  To go to nature in this sense to be made small again.  The comfort that comes from this smallness.

To walk a path or a trail.  To repeat a pattern in whole or in part.  To see in this a small ritual.  To move as best you can in concert with the life of the world around you.  To pay attention to your movements in its own and its movements in yours.  To move for a while as it has moved.  To fill one's head up with a great weaving of life and time, meaning and earth, water cycles and erosion, the plants and the animals, the death and the rebirth. 

To see a hawk gliding turns high above, ravens playing in the same early winter breeze, Flickers foraging in the ebbing brown of the meadow grass.  To see the chickadees flitting about the branches and to think of them surviving through winter and singing in the summer.  To remember the toughness and the joy in such a little bird. To see how a bird lives and to wonder at your own life as they fly on and away.

To feel the deep life and sustaining power of the world and to feel it as an outsider.  To feel the world slightly retreat at your movement.  To attempt to enter back into this greater pattern of nature with a gentleness of ceremony or ritual.  To wish to find that peaceful pattern of movement or stillness by which you would be fully accepted back.  To see your disappearance in a human sense as a form of acceptance in a natural sense.  To feel extended towards oneself not a forgiveness for a prodigal life but a willingness to let pass as all things do back into the patterned movements of the world and to find the joy in being so small.

Woods Lake

2010

2012

2011

"The tiercel glides up to the trees, like a shadow.  He calls once: a sound as final as the closing of a portcullis.  The glaring eyes squint up, and are sheathed in sleep.  The hawk puffs out his feathers, looking cuddly and harmless.  Only the armour-plated legs and the sickled toes do not relax, will never relax in life."
J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

      Since I started birding (about 3 1/2 years ago), I have been intensely interested and joyful on some level at being able to observe just about any bird-- even pigeons have their charm.   But to see a raptor holds something different altogether for me.  First off, I believe in symbols and signs and the strange resonance that they cause.  I don't necessarily mean this on a metaphysical level but I'm sure that most people have seen, heard and or experienced something at some time in their life which, on some level, immediately connected with them so strongly that they were stopped cold and made to feel as if something was communicating directly to them.  Maybe it was a beautiful painting or person, a song or scene in a movie, or a passage in a book that hit just right.  When this has happened to me, it feels as if something in the experience is hitting just the right frequency that my mind resonates back, as if it's moving in harmony with something and everything within is freed somehow and makes sense, if only elliptically.  What you experience may or may not have "a meaning" but there is deep meaning within it--the meaning we recognize in things that might never be explained or fully understood.  It is a resonance awake with mystery and wonder and the joy of ideas and emotions connecting in the mind to make sense of the world.

      For me, this is what the best art creates within you.  I've experienced it most often through literature, movies and music but also in drawings, paintings and photography.  It's rarer that it happens in the "real world" but all the more special for it.  It happens for me more often out in the wilderness than among people and out in the wilderness it happens most often when I am able to closely observe a raptor.  I'm not sure that I can articulate what it is about these hawks and owls and eagles- something about encountering such intense intelligence and life so different from our own but deeply recognizable.  I can say that it is calming, that my thoughts tend to immediately slow or stop until there is only a muted me there alone with the fierce dignity of a beautiful animal.

      The first Cooper's Hawk I saw was dead but it also brought on this intense feeling.  Layla and I were hiking, on a very windy day, up between Woods Lake and Winnemucca Lake on a trail that runs through old mining country.  About halfway up the trail you start to see decent sized pits in the ground made by the miners for reasons beyond my ability to guess.  One pit was slightly hidden by a bend and rise in the trail and I detoured over to explore it.  Mules Ear and Paintbrush grew around the rim and I wanted to photograph this scar being taken back over by vegetation.  As I came up and could see down to its floor, I saw the body of a hawk laying in a shaft of light coming through the trees, framed by the pit and bordered with wildflowers.  It was unnaturally bent as if fallen from the sky onto a bed of pine needles, its talons clenched and downy feathers moving with the lighter breeze that found is way down to that lower place.  The instinctual excitement of seeing a hawk mixed with the sadness of its death and the old fear I have had since I was a child at the sight of any dead animal.  It was like stumbling onto a secret grave of the forest, lonely and beautiful.

      I began taking photos while hiking in order to document our experiences mostly as a guard against my poor memory.  I constantly see things out in the wilderness that are so arresting as to be completely beyond my skill to convey in a photograph and I end up taking thousands in a year just attempting to get closer to that ideal.  So, even though it felt like something of an intrusion, I tried my best to record details so that I could remember.  Later, we determined that this must have been a young Cooper's Hawk, a species known for hunting at top speed even through dense forests, a behavior which results in fairly high injury and mortality rates as they miscalculate and slam into trunks and branches.  Judging from the strength of the wind and the state of the feathers, it felt to me as if the hawk must have crashed and fallen there within the last few days if not that same day.  It made me think then of all that had to happen for me to encounter that scene- all in both of our lives and the world that had to come together for me to be standing there looking down at a dead hawk and feeling thankful towards whatever had brought me to it.

      After a few clumsy benedictory thoughts for the bird, we hiked on.  We saw many beautiful wildflowers, a few birds, some ground squirrels and a gorgeous granite lake, but for me the center of gravity of that mountainside had shifted to the flower-lined pit and now revolved around the body of the fallen hawk.  As we hiked up and back past and down to our car and even when we got home, I had the desire to go back and make sure that it was still there, irrationally to stay and see that it would not be disturbed-- to preserve it for a reason I'm not sure I can explain.

      We went back a year later and I didn't say anything but what was drawing me was the question of whether the hawk would still be there and what state it would be in now.  When I got as far as the pit, I saw it still there though on another side of the pit floor, the body more decayed, the feathers matted and dusted with pine pollen but the talons still remarkably well preserved and clenched in the same position.  The wildflowers that year had begun to advance down the banks of the pit to just the edge of its floor and though I know that these things are more the work of fungus, insects and other forms of life, it made me think of this vibrant green of life coming slowly and sadly to take the hawk back into the earth.

        A year later I returned a bit earlier in the season and the pit was then a lonelier place.  The snow had thawed and pooled at the bottom of the pit which was overtaken by mosquitoes.  The hawk was still there but in an uglier state, now some half-floating, algaed mass of shapeless feather there in the water, a few of its tail feathers finally separated and floating on the clouded surface of the water.  You could just see down into the pool past the pollen and dirt and I could still see the clenched talons looking nearly the same as two years earlier and I wondered how long they would remain.  It reminded me of an idea I had read in a book by Gary Snyder where, in talking about trees, he wondered how odd it must be to die and go on standing there for decades and centuries in some cases.  I thought of how odd it must be for one's body to fade away, all reclaimed except for your clenched fists.  And then I thought about all the other hawks that would have died in the wilderness and wondered if all of those talons too were out there still sifting down into the strata of the earth.

      Once, in a rock shop in the desert, I saw the petrified talon of an ancient hawk on display. It was reconstructed from small joints so that I couldn't tell whether it had been clenched where it was buried, but at times I think of the avian fist of that Cooper's Hawk sinking down into that pit, merging then with the mountain and locked there, wildflowers blooming over it, other birds above singing in the pines and other hawks hunting them-- a great cycle continuing with only the smallest traces of its passing left sharp and curled and hidden away beneath the forest floor.

      I'm not sure what this really means but it keeps alive in me that sense of mystery and wonder at the world.  It's comforting somehow to think that there are things out there that I will never fully understand and that may never be understood, that exist on their own and for themselves but to which we are all still inextricably connected.