My morning visitors, just beyond the kitchen door, were two parrots. I was lured outside because I heard their incredibly loud squawking and wondered what was going on. There they sat, happily chatting or gossiping.
At some point they got fluttery, hopping from position to position on the telephone pole.
Suddenly a pair of acorn woodpeckers made themselves known – I had completely overlooked them on top of the pole, because I was so taken with the parrots.
Aaaaaaaaaaand: attack. Victorious. Parrots fled.
In case that was not enough excitement, my lunchtime visitor was coming by to check out if I had maybe dropped some food, while eating and reading my email at the same time. No luck. She disappeared disapprovingly, picking up the last few peanuts I had offered the ravens (who will soon be featured in another post.)
But that’s not all: around 5 pm this bobcat appeared, and I just happened to have the camera in hand sitting on the patio, to catch her. She left promptly, soundlessly.
Tell me, how can this year get any more magical? We’ll see. I will be returning to this ranch in November.
I am back in Portland, doing lots of catch-up errands after a month away, and sorting through a number of interesting California adventures that still need to be written up. Hope to get back to regular rhythm soon.
Here is music from the land of the parrots, Brazil.
There have been rich moments during my stay at the Californian Zorthian Ranch, in the course of daily wanderings, or, for that matter, having my coffee on the patio.
Pigs come by and want to be scratched, or, alternatively, bite your ankles (luckily I was warned and the single culprit is easily identifiable.)
Scout the cat visits regularly, and a small dog named Chicken pretends to be fearless.
I have mentioned the owls before, and have come to realize that the entire soundscape is a reenactment of my childhood, on another continent, in an equally rural surround: Goats, cows, roosters and chickens, peacocks, the occasional horse, crows and multiple songbirds – old traces of “home” reappear from some deep place in memory. Except my village did not have Los Angeles or the likes, one of the largest cities ever, attached, but was a truly isolated. I listen to warblers, finches, mourning doves, and am stunned by the arc that my life has taken, from the sugar beet fields of Western post-war Germany, to the San Gabriel mountains in Southern California, with multiple land mark locations in between. So many new beginnings, so many adventures.
How best avoid being eaten: mayflies hiding on lizard’s head….
Next to the rich moments there are magical moments. If you stand still enough for long enough, you can actually watch a pair of tiny wrens build a nest inside some of the discarded machinery. Every time they deliver a twig they serenade, “Look, world, I did it! One more stick to make it a home! Eggs next!”
Gathering twigs
Oops, dropped one
A triumphant trilling after twig deposit in that wheelhouse.
Most moving was the birth of two little goats, literally a stone’s throw away from my porch. I met them not even 24 hours after their birth. Aptly named Chocolate Milk and Brownie by the resident five-year-old, they are exploring their world, trying to persuade their mother to nurse them, for which she has little patience. They romp, they sleep, they are so cute that it brings tears to my eyes, when really, I am not the most sentimental.
Birth: we – I – tend to overlook the enormity of creation, the possibilities of new beginnings, when the world events draw attention so much more frequently to its opposite: death. I have been thinking way too much through the trauma of real wars and our participation in it through acts of commission and omission; the suffering of women condemned to death through new abortion legislation (it is estimated, that over 1000 women each year will dye of ectopic pregnancies alone in Arizona after the lates court rulings that sets the state back to 1864) or reviewing art so completely focussed on the imagination of war action and outcome, as I did earlier this week.
Hannah Arendt ‘s words come to mind, as ever a reminder that we need to fight off a sense of defeat or resignation.
“With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance. This insertion is not forced upon us by necessity, like labor, and it is not prompted by utility, like work. It may be stimulated by the presence of others whose company we may wish to join, but it is never conditioned by them; its impulse springs from the beginning which came into the world when we were born and to which we responded by beginning something new on our own initiative” (The Human Condition176-7).
The concept, as she devised it, is called natality. It does not simply describe the fact of being born. It embraces the potential that is inherent in birth, a potential that needs to be converted into action to make a difference or some impression on the world. (There are lots of other concepts attached as well, including the way we can and must connect with others, for political action that is part of shaping the world, but that would lead us to far away from my main point.)
We have the choice to act, in whatever minimal ways, as creatives, or educators, or supporters, or by providing mutual aid. We can run for something, or we can donate, we can plant trees, or hold others in their grief. We can decide what we focus on – Death? Birth? – to allow us to preserve a semblance of sanity, or to generate sufficient rage so that we refuse to give up.
I have not yet read a recent book by Jennifer Banks, Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth which came highly recommended from the L.A. Review of Books. Banks’s case studies include Friedrich Nietzsche, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Sojourner Truth, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison and Hannah Arendt as well, looking at the centrality of the topic of (re)birth in the authors’ work. It’s on the list! When I have time to read again, that is, away from the temptation to hang out with the baby goats and photograph the wrens.
Books have always been my source to screw up the courage for new beginnings. They modeled the worlds that a bored or lonely child would consider open, just a step needed to enter a new universe. Who cared that I probably understood only half of what I read, way too early, from the classics of Russian and French literature to the German canon of the Greats, from Heine to Mann. I know exactly what triggered my Wanderlust, though, at age 9 or thereabouts: a book about chasing white Rhinos in Africa, on a land rover trip from Algiers to Cape Town. I never made it to South Africa. The Zorthian farm is enough.
““Precisely the least thing, the gentlest, lightest, the rustling of a lizard, a breath, a moment, a twinkling of the eye – little makes up the quality of the best happiness. Soft!” – Friedrich NietzscheThus spoke Zarathustra
I learned some days ago that a new gecko species, discovered in India, was named Cnemaspis vangoghi because the blue coloration evoked Vincent van Gogh’s iconic “Starry Night” (1889.)
Nothing quite that fancy to be found around here, but, in truth, I consider all of the lizards beautiful, and was tempted to name this dotted fellow below Lizard Kusama. If Yayoi Kusama, the princess of polka dots, had the least bit of humor, she’d probably be pleased, given that she specializes in weird, as The Tate once claimed on their kids’ page…
Lots of artists have attempted to capture what is special about these little reptiles, representing their respective mythologies, trying to depict their biological features, or using them as symbols for an array of concepts. In ancient Rome, lizards were a symbol of death and rebirth, given that the animals hibernated in the winter months and reappeared in the spring. The Etruscans believed that lizards went blind as they aged but could regain their sight by bathing in bright sunlight, making them a symbol for light and heat.
Maria Sibylla Merian Lizard with eggs and hatchling, butterflies and banana plant. (1705)
Native American tribes created lots of lizard representations across the U.S, both as petroglyphs and pictographs. Their shapes are also a dominant feature of Aborigine art from Australia and New Zealand and folk art from Mexico and Central America.
Leonardo da Vinci used them for stage settings.
Leonardo da Vinci Allegory on the Fidelity of theLizard (recto) (1478)
Scientific treatises of the Middle ages mixed fact and fiction.
Konrad Gesner, Historia Animalium Liber Ii : De Quadrupedibus Ouiparis (1586.)
Some artist quite often added them as small details to larger compositions, here one of my favorites for its color.
Paul Gauguin Vairumati (detail) (1897)
Some were playful,
Paul KleeEidechse (1926)
some were constructed,
Maurits Cornelius Escher Lizard (no.25) 1939
and some are simply allegorical.
Joan Miró Le lezard aux plumes d’or (1971)
Lizards’ rustlings are ubiquitous here at the Zorthian ranch where they abide in abundance. An old, abandoned piano on the patio is home for quite a number of them, begging to be photographed. Although none of these images can live up to what one of the most brilliant Mexican photographers, Graciela Iturbide, has captured across the decades, they, or perhaps the moments when they were captured, are of the quality – little, fleeting – that makes for the best happiness.
That said, do check out Iturbides‘ work – it is phenomenal.
Graciela Iturbide Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas (Our Lady of the Iguanas), Juchitán, México. (1979.)
“Certain desert areas have a distinctive and subtle charm, in part dependent on spaciousness, solitude, and escape from the evidence of human control and manipulation of the earth, a charm of constantly growing value as the rest of the earth becomes more completely dominated by man’s activities. This quality is a very vulnerable one …. Nowhere else are casual thoughtless human changes in the landscape so irreparable, and nowhere else is it so important to control and completely protect wide areas.”
– Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr in a 1928 survey for the California State Park Commission.
And here I thought almost 5 hours in the car to get from Los Angeles to Borrego Springs, CA, was a long stretch. Take the amount of time – decades and decades – it took to establish the nation’s second largest state park, the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, and the drive was but a blink of an eye. Beginning in 1927, a group of visionaries tried to protect several desert areas for future generations, alert to the destruction of natural habitats by encroaching civilization that parceled up open spaces. Fierce opposition by many interested in economic development stretched out the process across years and years. For once, those concerned with environmental and ecological preservation, prevailed. Since 1974, some 585,930 acres (237,120 ha) of the Colorado Desert, located in San Diego County, are now protected. (For a riveting account of the history of the fight to create this marvel, go here.)
The desert lies along the western margin of the Salton Trough. This major topographic depression with the Salton Sink having elevations of 200 ft (61 m) below sea level, forms the northernmost end of an active rift valley and a geological continental plate boundary (Lots of earthquakes with high magnitudes, every 5 years or so.) (Ref.)
Imagine a large bowl of badlands, surrounded by mountains, with the Vallecito Mountains to the south and the highest Santa Rosa Mountains to the north. The badlands, ancient lake basins, are the result of both, erosion and sediment deposition over 5 million years. what you are seeing is literally what the Colorado river excavated from the Grand Canyon. The eroded and pretty much plant-less areas make it easy to see the dipping layers of siltstone and sandstone. They are filled with fossils, and populated by big horn sheep, neither of which I glimpsed during my visit. What I did see was breathtaking beauty of wide open land, cloudy sunrise, and the tail end of the wildflower bloom, providing endless delight to the searching eye.
No wonder that eco-tourism flourishes here at this time of year: the population of Borrego Springs, where I stayed, increases by about 580% in peak wildflower superbloom season, an increase from around 3400 long term residents to around 200,000 tourists. According to the government’s park survey, 932 plant taxa belonging to 387 genera in 98 different families documented within the park. The plant family Asteraceae (sunflower) is most abundant with 135 taxa identified. Rodents, hares, rabbits, fox, coyote, mountain lion, bighorn sheep as well as many species of snakes make up the fauna.
The region was home to two Native American groups, the Kumeyaay and the Cahuilla for thousands of years, semi-sedentary residents of certain favored locations or base camps. From there they would travel to outlying areas seasonally to harvest food resources and to avoid inclement weather, like winter snows. Leave it to the forces that be to name the park instead for sheep (Borrego) and a colonizing explorer, military officer and politician, 18th century Juan Bautista de Anza.
The progressive vision to protect open spaces was not matched by progressive visions in other domains either: when César Chávez came to Borrego Springs to support local workers who wanted the National Farm Workers Association as their union in 1966, they tried to chase him out of Borrego Springs by not allowing lodging or camping in the usual spaces. He and the union organizers eventually camped at Borrego Palm Canyon Campground, the start of my hike last week, with a lone supervising ranger defending their rights against the town folks who loathed the idea of unionizing workers.
The hike, starting at 7 am with an otherworldly light bathing the landscape, went up to the palm canyon, at my speed taking about 4 hours there and back.
That left a spare hour to visit some additional strange sights, before the threatening rain storm set in. (It dropped over 2 inches in 24 hours for the L.A. region.) In reversal to my earlier complaints about the length of time, these 5 hours felt way too short!
The clouds formed an appropriately dramatic background for an unexpected piece of art, a humongous, corrugated steel sea serpent crawling through the desert. I could not but marvel at the strangeness of the sight and, truth be told, at the skill of the designed and steel welded creation by sculptor Ricardo Breceda. However, there was something odd about plopping some 130 creatures in to the landscape, with people and cars crawling around them like ants, with few of the sculptures true to this natural environment. I mean, elephants and camels? Dinosaurs and tigers? The whole thing was the idea of Dennis Avery, the late land owner of Galleta Meadows Estates in Borrego Springs, adding free standing art to his property and, I guess, attracting tourists this way. and if that’s what draws people to the region, exposing them to the barren beauty of the desert for most of the year, more power to them!
Music reflects John Luther Adam’s view of the desert. Quails and sky reflect mine.
You have to be on the lookout – otherwise you miss all the action!
Going: yours truly, driving to L.A. for the next month or so. Dispatches are in the cards, but not on a regular basis! I am hoping for a few Art on the Road adventures, though.
Coming: spring.
At least that’s what it looked and felt like yesterday near the Columbia river when the sun finally broke through, and little puffy clouds made the sky delectable.
Lots of kestrels,
other birds pairing up, or calling for mates
Buds and first shoots emerging,
and the landscape on the cusp of exploding into color, with a few saturated spots already showing off.
Hard to imagine California can beat that. But then again…… stay tuned.
Since I didn’t burden your brain with much text today, we might as well stretch it with some unusual music from Australia. The album title translates as Now; the singer is one of few remaining Butchulla songmen, singing in their endangered aboriginal language.
Today is International Women’s Day. I should probably be writing something about the rights women fought for, gained, have threatened and lost. About women in Gaza who lose more than just whatever rights remain to them, losing their families or even their lives. The women in Afghanistan who no longer have access to education, much less choices to thrive in anything other than the domestic sphere, if there. The women of America whose reproductive rights and bodily freedom are under an ongoing assault. And then we are faced with a reply to the SOTU address by a Republican Senator from Alabama, who sits at her kitchen table (where women belong ?) with a cross studded with diamonds around her neck (in case you forget the goal to make this into a Christian nation after all), all drama queen, stage whispering with fake tears in her eyes, how” illegal” immigrants are murdering our wives and daughters, painting a picture that might as well have come right out of The Handmaid’s Tale.) One might wonder how someone who says sexual assault is the worst thing that can happen to a woman, is encouraging Americans to vote for a convicted sexual predator.
For the sake of sanity – yours as well as mine – I will instead write about the most glorious sights I encountered this week, providing some diversion from our political reality. Some 40 minutes north of Portland, in the state of Washington, runs the Lewis river, emptying into the Columbia which in turn joins the Pacific. At this time of year there are runs of smelt that make their way from the ocean, up the rivers, to their spawning grounds. These small fish from the family Osmeridae live most of their lives in the sea, and when I consulted wikipedia to learn more of them I encountered this: smelt tastes like smelt. Good to know.
The runs vary in size, with climate change making a large, negative impact already. Across the last years, recreational fishing for them in many regions of the Pacific Northwest was severely regulated, they were so scarce. This year the Fish and Wildlife Administration offered people permits for their dipping nets that were only open for a couple of single days.
The bald eagles who congregate at the confluence of the rivers benefit, of course, when they don’t have to compete with fishermen for the increasingly smaller number of prey. The sight was spectacular. In a landscape straight out of a 17th century Flemish painting, they congregate on trees by the hundreds. A steady coming and going, dipping in the water, then hanging out with their lunch on various snags or branches.
Many of them circling higher than I had ever seen them. I first thought those were vultures, joining the feast, but no, all eagles, many of them juvenile who still have brown feathers instead of the symbolic white heads and tail feathers. Lots of courtship acrobatics in the air, with males and females, mating for life, eventually tumbling down in pirouettes, gripping each other’s talons before landing for the fun to begin.
To see the most amazing close up shots, done with professional equipment that I cannot match, by a nature photographer, Mike Schultz, who really stands out, look here. The pictures are from 2021, when the smelt run was bigger than today.
Images by Mike Schultz
My equipment might not live up to these standards, but my enthusiasm sure did. Standing in sunshine, if cool, listening to the sounds of these birds, as well as the sea lions joining the hunt, my heart simply lifted. There was no pretense, no play acting, no hidden agenda, no political manipulation – just nature doing what it does, surviving the day, planning for future generations and protecting them, being in the moment, rising.
A gift.
Music today is Chopin’s Heroic, dedicated to all women who are, having no other choice. And fitting for the eagles as well…..
I so, so, so long for spring. I guess I have to wait for April…. when in other years magnolias were already in bloom in early March.
Morning – is the place for Dew –
Morning – is the place for Dew –
Corn – is made at Noon –
After dinner light – for flowers –
Dukes – for setting sun!
by Emily Dickinson F223 (1861) 197
Magnolias, not unlike those captured in the photographs, were planted in Dickinson’s garden over 150 years ago, species not native to the region. By now they have migrated, to neighboring towns and from there up North, with climate change making it possible for them to survive in habitats not native for them.
Looked at it the other way around, should gardeners help non-native species to survive by adding them to regions that now have temperatures and water conditions suitable for them? They are doomed to die in their original habitats, after all?
Natural range shifts have certainly been documented by living beings that are able to move to preferred locations, like birds, insects and mammals. Historically, those migrations would have brought plants with them, in the form of seeds traveling via droppings, or clinging to fur and the like. But the species that would have dispersed the magnolias – the mastodons, giant ground-sloth and other mega-fauna – are extinct.
Here is the dilemma: on the one hand you might cheer the survival of a species under changing climate conditions, and go all in to give it a horticulturally helping hand. On the other side, though, many new species might then contribute to the decline and disappearance of those that are truly native to a particular region, themselves stressed by the new climate conditions. After all we know from biology research that a species’ risk of becoming invasive increases with the distance of its historic native range from the region it is colonizing. (Ref.)
I have no solution. Let’s just look at these pictures from other years, harbingers of spring, and enjoy them. We have to take joy were we can find it in these dark, wet days, and blooming trees are among the most joyful things I can conjure.
Music offers a spring song from Dvorak’s Poetic Tone Pictures – with a few others from that Opus thrown in as a bonus for being brave and cheerful!
Some folks by the name of Chad Crabtree and Brandon Woods in Eugene, OR, founded a small literary magazine last year, fittingly called Arboreal. Their titular choice was linked to their own names, but also to the notions of “going out on a limb” – presenting new and surprising work, and “evergreen” – the idea that art is timeless. I have found the occasional interesting new voice there, but also benefitted from the editors’ knowledge of poetry in general. A real enrichment for the literary landscape.
Today’s selection of poems, for example, came from one of Crabtree’s recent essays, called Rooted in Verse: Our Favorite Poems About Trees which I went back to after I had seen an unusual tree last week, a 300 year old Sitka spruce that is called the Octopus tree for its shape that lacks a center trunk but has unfolding tentacle-like limbs.
I picked the Brooke and Larkin poems because they both dwell on the fragility of life, the darkness that is impending, the hopelessness that sneaks up on you when you consider the fleetingness of it all, loss and mortality – but then they both rise to a version of hope, the possibilities of peace or new beginnings. I think that’s what we need: hope and the possibility of dawn or spring (or even a permanent cease fire), even if they are delivered by the minor poet, but golden poster boy of romantic lyricism, Brooke, or the major poet of dark snakiness and sarcastic leanings, Larkin. On average, they got it right this time!
Pine-Trees and the Sky: Evening
I’d watched the sorrow of the evening sky, And smelt the sea, and earth, and the warm clover, And heard the waves, and the seagull’s mocking cry.
And in them all was only the old cry, That song they always sing — “The best is over! You may remember now, and think, and sigh, O silly lover!” And I was tired and sick that all was over, And because I, For all my thinking, never could recover One moment of the good hours that were over. And I was sorry and sick, and wished to die.
Then from the sad west turning wearily, I saw the pines against the white north sky, Very beautiful, and still, and bending over Their sharp black heads against a quiet sky. And there was peace in them; and I Was happy, and forgot to play the lover, And laughed, and did no longer wish to die; Being glad of you, O pine-trees and the sky!
Climb with me over the fallen trees in my immediate neighborhood, the park where I walk every day. Sink your boots with the most delicious sloshing sounds into the mud of the holes that the root balls left, and once again realize the power in nature. Bringing it all down.
Several speculations have been making the rounds why this particular ice storm did so much damage, and the given reasons probably overlap or interact. For one, the drought of the last several years has really stressed the trees and their root system. Secondly, the heavy rains in late fall saturated the ground, leaving the roots in unstable earth. Lastly, the storm that arrived two weeks ago had winds with gusts of up to 60 mph, winds that spiraled for some reason, encircling the trees, rather than swaying them back and forth, which apparently has more power (with even higher speeds those would be tornadoes or hurricanes, with a rotating function.) The ice then did the rest, its weight on the trees felling those that were unstable.
Hundchen not so sure about all of this
For counterbalance, here are a few of the soaring creatures that I photographed on Tuesday – with some others thrown in from previous January/February visits to Sauvie Island, just to marvel at the diversity of migrating visitors. Up they go….
Pelicans, Geese, Swans, Sandhill cranes, buzzards, kestrels. And then there were the bald eagles, cavorting, resting, chasing each other again, and finally getting some lunch.
That really is all for today, I simply do not have much stamina after these outings. But I do have an up & down song by Blood, Sweat and Tears from a looong time ago……
And since we’re already on memory lane, here is Earth, Wind and Fire – I guess all we’re missing is the ice that the storm brought.
When you are iced in for pretty much a full week, as we were last week, there is a lot of time to ponder disaster scenarios.
If 200 ft (61 meters) sequoias topple in your yard (sparing your house with a stroke of luck, while many others in the Portland area saw their houses destroyed or even human life taken) your vulnerability becomes even more the center of attention.
Several trees came down, this the largest – about half of it in view here.
When you have no power for 4 full days, as we did during temperatures in the teens, you focus on what can be done during even worse scenarios: the mega earthquake that is looming on the time horizon for the Pacific Northwest.
I am talking about all this for another reason as well: somehow the prolonged shut-in has also frozen my brain, and so I have no capacity to write about something more interesting. Humor me then with reading a few suggestions for disaster preparedness, and store the links to more detailed instruction for a time when you have room and interest to act on them.
Wrens in action (Zaunkönig)
The most essential needs will be water, food and warmth (See the FEMA instructions for quantities, per head.) Energy bars will do for a few days if you have no means to heat up other dried food. If you have pets remember some emergency rations for them as well (and have a sticker at your door that informs rescue personnel what animals live in your house – they can be ordered on line.) Camping stoves will be useful if a major disaster cuts you off for weeks on end. (And yes, I realize, it is hard to stash all that stuff if you live in an apartment.)
Robins (Rotkehlchen)
Having a bag that contains solid shoes, a change of warm clothes, basic toiletries, first aid kit and some spare meds that are essential, water and energy bars, is helpful if you need to leave for a shelter in a hurry. Flashlights that wrap around the head are useful since they keep your hands free. Include a whistle, so search teams can find you. Matches or lighter. Stash in it photocopies of your drivers license, your insurance name and number, and your prescriptions for medications. Spare power blocks and charging wires for your cell phone should be included.
Thrushes (Drosseln)
If you can stay in your (damaged) house, a cheap tent and sleeping bags come in handy to preserve body heat. We stayed warm(ish) this week and had no water pipes break because we have a wood stove in the basement that heated the adjacent area and kept the house overall in the 40s. Having a crowbar available helps with earthquake debris. A fire extinguisher is helpful.
Here is a website that offers the FEMA recommendations, with a few highlights for preparing the house/apartment, some relevant links for insurance and building codes, and a detailed listing of the risk to the PDX neighborhoods where we live.
Junkos and Towhees (Winterammern und Grundammern)
This week was a reminder that nature should never be underestimated. And now I’ll go and check out ads for generators…..
Photographs are self explanatory.
Chickadee (Kohlmeise)
Let’s make the music equally melodramatic as the weather: Sviridov’s Snowstorm.
