Woods Lake

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"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.

      

Dead Man's Creek- March 18th, 2012

                                                                                  

      Sometimes it seems like the world comes to you.  I decided to stop at the creek near Washoe Lake at the spur of the moment and it ended up being one of the most deeply memorable experiences I've had. It was getting late and intermittently the snow would gently fall though it wasn't too cold.  I saw some Say's Phoebes briefly at the start of the trail which was a first for me.  Heading up the trail there was the familiar feeling of a gentle loneliness that I get when I'm outdoors that sometimes allows you to fool yourself into thinking that things are happening just for you.  I walked down a path through the thin band of dormant trees lining the creek into a clearing and there was a Great Horned Owl perched in the magic hour sun.  I'm not an accomplished enough photographer to convey that light onto the photograph much less to make it convey the feeling of what it's like to be alone watching the eyes of a beautiful predator in the last brittle golden light coming over the mountains.  It brings you to the forefront of your mind so hyper-attentive that you almost connect with the animal, feeling its hunger and anticipation of a night of hunting and trying to will yourself silent and motionless as you feel its unease at your own presence.  To feel at once how this bird must terrify a mouse in the night and also an echo of the submerged fear that the bird feels towards you.  Eventually some movement I made overcame his tolerance and he flew down deeper into the thicket of willows.

     I tried to circle around up the creek to find him again and as I did I heard a call that sounded something like a monkeyish chicken and began to look for what was making it.  When I got too close, the Cooper's Hawk that had been calling flew out of the willows and landed on a tall dead tree.  I was able to get to a vantage point just quick enough to get a few magic pictures (to me if no one else) of his red eyes burning with the hunt or with agitation at me as the snow glided down around him.  Fierce and restless, in a matter of seconds he was gone from the small valley.

       I crossed the creek and came back down to look for the Owl again and just happened to look over into the trees and see camouflaged there, eye-level and within 5 feet of me, a small Long-eared Owl, a species I had never seen before.  I moved too quick in raising the camera and he flew down the valley into a thicker stand of willows.  I tried to keep in mind where I thought he had landed and came down the other side of the creek and saw the Great Horned Owl again perched low in a small clearing.  I took some pictures of him puffed up and looking satisfied and comfortable but quickly went to pursue the smaller owl.  I crossed back over the creek through the original clearing where I had stood watching the owl earlier and came down the other side of the willows.  I saw him fly before I got a view of him then I continued down so far that I had mostly given up on seeing the little owl when there he was, perched along the tangled willow border and staring intently at me.  Slowly, I took some photos and edged a little closer.  His eyes widened and burned maybe with fear or maybe with anger at my trespassing on his territory and then he was gone.  I felt bad then for having invaded the world of these creatures, so beautiful as to haunt me.  It is difficult to reconcile this desire to follow --as if in pursuit of some deep, hidden current of life and knowledge just outside the borders of your own-- with the desire to remove yourself from this dwindling world that belongs to others, to preserve this mystery untouched and whole and safe from everything, to wish that trails had never been made and that this secret other world would always remain so and only known to you through the regions of your heart and mind that subtly bear the memory of a time when your kind still wholly belonged there.  It is hard sometimes to feel the fear and agitation you stir in the places where you wish you could remain and to feel the damage that you have done to the peace around you.  It makes you think of your own relief at being alone and of the fear which raptors radiate to all the smaller ones around them and you start to feel as if you know something of the life of another.
                                                                                

Grover Hot Springs State Park- June 2, 2012

   American Dipper
     Cinclus Mexicanus
       Grover Hot Springs State Park, CA

"I came late to the love of birds.  For years I saw them only as a tremor at the edge of vision.  They know suffering and joy in simple states not possible for us.  Their lives quicken and warm to a pulse our hearts can never reach.  They race to oblivion.  They are old before we have finished growing."
                     J.A. Baker- The Peregrine



          
   
      
      It feels a bit off the mark to say that something has saved you when you don't feel whole and fully together but inasmuch as I can say it, I feel that watching birds and starting to understand nature have saved me.  I have dealt with varying levels of depression throughout my life and more acutely in recent years and some of the things that depression tries to tell you is that you're not a good person, that you're a failure, and that your life is pointless and not worth much.  On the day that this photo was taken I had been hiking with Layla which is something we had started to do a few years earlier to fight against the depressive moods in each of us.  Usually and ideally, I have found that being out in the wilderness frees my mind from dark thoughts and doubt and I feel at peace and very deeply alive and connected to something like the spirit of the world, at once myself and happily unconcerned with myself.  On that day, I was unable to shake the dark feelings.  I sat in the sun on the bank of the creek and only felt a vague misery that I couldn't get out from under.  As we hiked up among the boulders on the trail above the creek I could only think of throwing myself off of them and what would happen to my body afterwards.  These feelings weren't connected with any defined thought about myself or my situation, they were just a dimness inside that wouldn't leave me.  As I saw my mood affect Layla, I felt guilty and the feelings became stronger until we were at the base of the first big waterfall on the trail and I could only sit there and stare blankly at the dirt.  We sat for what felt like a long time then I tried to write in my notebook and everything was grim thoughts about the indifference of the natural world (something about the dwindling force of the water after it goes over the falls and slowly flows out to evaporate in the desert only to have to start the cycle over again) and then Layla asked if I wanted to go back.  I said we should at least go to the top of the first falls which wasn't much farther.  I was still tangled up inside when we got there and I just stood around and realized that I hadn't even tried to take any pictures.  And then I saw something dart out of a crack in the rocks of the waterfall and fly upstream.  I was afraid that I had missed it but the bird kept coming back to a hole behind the falls.  It was a male American Dipper and I suppose that he was bringing nest materials to the female (pictured above) who would sometimes come out and look around.  They were building a home in a waterfall!  Maybe that doesn't seem amazing to everyone but it was very heartening to me to know that two very small and seemingly fragile birds were living in a waterfall!  They dove into freezing water to forage for food like it was nothing and they lived in a waterfall!   

   As I realized these things I also realized that the depressive weight had gone almost in an instant.  I don't know why exactly it left me but I wrote later in my notebook "Reborn in Two Birds" and "Thank you Thank you Thank you".  I had the thought that these birds had their place and it was in a waterfall and maybe I have a place too.  We watched the Dippers for maybe 20-30 minutes and then hiked up to where the creek ran through some flat boulders where you could sit and drift your hands and feet in the water.  I touched the smooth granite under the cold water and thought about the cycles again but this time with a tremendous sense of wonder and peace to it. I thought of two constants of stone and running water meeting for centuries.  I thought of the beauty of things able to hang on and to thrive in this turbulence.  I don't have any definite ideas of what a soul is but I felt sure that mine would sometime return to that place just as the water returned and the birds returned and I told myself that I would only have to remember that when things went dark and lifeless within me that I was still there like the stone and that I would come back to my self like the watershed, like pumping blood and flowing life-- that it was all part of the same thing and it was okay.

      And often I still feel incomplete and lost--like I'm not where I'm supposed to be.  But I can remember these events and others like them that I've had outdoors and it helps me to orient myself.  I don't know that these are very profound thoughts but I remember how sustaining they felt at the time and it was me who thought them-- just an ordinary person who can't always figure out how to navigate daily life.  That feels like a saving grace to me and that explains a little of how I feel about going into the wilderness and why I sometimes wish that I could just go on out farther into it forever.