Nature

Tales from the Backyard

Nature, Politics
May 17, 2024
2 Comments

Yesterday I had a few visitors in the backyard, which suited me just fine. I figured ending the week with tons of pictures rather than ever more words would do us all good.

You know me, though. Words snuck back into my head – words, alas, that refuse to make their way into print in this family friendly blog. So use your imagination as to what I was thinking when I learned that the North Carolina Senate voted along party lines Wednesday to ban anyone from wearing masks in public, even for health reasons. House Bill 237 would extend to everyone, not just protesters towards whom this ban is of course directed, to wear medical masks.

A proposal to amend the bill to ban hate groups — explicitly the Ku Klux Klan and Proud Boys — from being allowed to wear masks in public, which the law currently allows them to petition for (!), was shot down by Republican lawmakers with no debate or explanation, as were calls by Democratic lawmakers to amend the anti-mask bill to protect people who want to wear masks for health concerns. So for immune-compromised people like me there is now the additional worry to either be arrested for wearing a mask or risking infection that can basically kill you. Not that I will ever see North Carolina again, but how many people who live there and can’t leave will be affected? and how does that not violate Federal laws, like the Americans with Disabilities Act?

“The federal disability law requires governments to provide people with disabilities equal access to government programs, services and activities — including public transportation, schools, voting precincts and town meetings. Banning masks could diminish access to those kinds of services to people who are covered under the ADA, such as cancer patients who may need to wear a mask due to a weakened immune system, disability rights advocates say. It could also limit their day-to-day activities.” (Ref.)

I wasn’t the only one watching the deer decimate the apple trees and then leisurely chew cud while resting on the grass, ignoring a cacophony of noises – my dog barking his head off, the Thursday Pickup garbage trucks circling the neighborhood, and my neighbor using a chainsaw to deal with the winter windfall. Be glad to have these pastoral scenes without the sound track!

The crows watched as well, eventually doing some up and down flying maneuvers to get their own luncheon, served on my balcony. Up and down triggered the notion of upside-down, another image eliciting a number of words in my head, “We’re living in a FARCE,” among them.

The upside down flag, a symbol for “Stop the Steal!” used by Trump supporters, was apparently flying in front of Justice Alito’s home. According to the New York Times, the flag was up in January 2021 for multiple days, while the court was still contending with whether to hear a 2020 election case. We are, of course, still waiting on two other cases to be decided by the Supreme Court, involving the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, including whether Mr. Trump has immunity for his actions. So far, no recusals.

Concerned neighbors took the photos and informed the Court at the time – what say you, Justice Roberts? We do know what Justice Alito had to say:

“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

Isn’t it funny how Supreme Court Justices are completely fenced off against the dealings of their wives, while the sitting President is supposed to be responsible for alleged misdeeds of his adult son? Just wondering.

Here is a crow’s reaction – you may use your imagination once more.

If your blood pressure reacts like mine to these news, here is the perfect music to bring it down.

Spring, the umpteenth look.

Art, Nature, Poetry
May 6, 2024
3 Comments

Nostos
There was an apple tree in the yard —
this would have been
forty years ago — behind,
only meadows. Drifts
off crocus in the damp grass.
I stood at that window:
late April. Spring
flowers in the neighbor’s yard.
How many times, really, did the tree
flower on my birthday,
the exact day, not
before, not after? Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Substitution of the image
for relentless earth. What
do I know of this place,
the role of the tree for decades
taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from tennis courts —
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

by Louise Glück

Gustave Caillebotte Apple Tree in Bloom (1885)

I do not agree with Glück’s assessment, “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.” We look at the world – able to see it – a million times, if we only move about with intention. Or share in the wonder expressed by next generations. Or allow art to be more than representation, pointing us to the beauty inherent in the real world. Maybe we can’t return to the exact childhood tree, but there are plenty apples around.

In some funny way, the title of the poem, Nostos, makes that very point, doesn’t it? The term comes from ancient Greece and refers to the homecoming of the hero after a prolonged absence (one of the main themes of the Odyssey.) Not remembered, but re-experienced, connected again, the world seen, not just recalled. If it was only about a particular childhood garden, it should have been Nostalgia, the combination of Nostos /homecoming with the word Algos/pain, although nostalgia most often descends into this sentimental wistfulness that I can’t stand.

Back to spring: In today’s images, spring has returned, after a long absence. So has this viewer, in my annual exploration of spring’s bounty, seeing it afresh. And so have paintings, that are not molding in museums, but here, in front of our eyes, conveying a shared appreciation of this season. Forget memory! Here are this week’s perceptions, on walks punctuated by heavy rains and sudden reappearance of the sun.

Max Beckmann SPRING NEAR SÜDENDE (1907)

Hawthorne blossoms shimmered through the trees, or exploded in full view.

Dwight William Tryon Spring (1893)

David Hockney Hawthorne Blossom Near Rudston (2008)

Cows were curious as to what I had to offer…

Doris Lee, Blossom Time, 1959

Plants unfurled, echoing van Gogh’s brush strokes.

Vincent van Gogh, Green Wheat Fields, Auvers, 1890

Meadows exploded with Camassia, and other early spring blooms, many reminiscent of rockets, all shooting towards the light.

Janene Walkky Common Camas or Camassia quamash (2013)

Ruth Asawa, Spring, 1965, lithograph

Then there are the fruit tree blossoms, holding up their own against the orange bloom,

Vincent van Gogh Orange Blossoms (1890)

Claude Monet Spring (Fruit Trees in Bloom) (1873)

Walking through the woods was a green, dripping, wet experience, then sunbursts the next minute.

Abbott Handerson Thayer Landscape at Fontainebleau Forest (1876)

Did someone say birds? Ducklings! Orioles, yellow rump warblers (butter butts!), kill deer, wood ducks, geese, barn swallows and purple martins all showing off.

Magnus von Wright Mallard Ducklings (1841)

Tracey Emin Believe in Extraordinary (2015)

AUDUBON bird Red-Breasted Nuthatch Purple Martin (1890)

Even the turtles came out.

The only thing I could not find were these:

Franz von Stuck The sounds of spring (1910)

Maybe they went that way.

Music captures it all.

Bear Divide

A friend sent a poem this week that had me thinking ever since. I was riveted by the way it palpably conveys loss, the way it captures how pain can suddenly emerge in the most mundane situations, and the way it contains phrases that are incredibly well forged, “a noticeably notice-me-I’m-nature nature sound.”

There Are Plenty of Angels,
She Said in the LADIES

in the rest area LADIES on the road to
Terre Haute. Plenty of angels, she said again.
But not one, I’ve heard, not a single one
will mission to the fade as it does to the darkness.
A stall door latched. Her bag got hung.
Seen that sign, back west a ways?
The one on the warehouse, in a movie marquee?
Blessed Hope, it says. Blessed Hope, she said.
It’s meant to be a sign from heaven,
but hope’s, I’d say, more a human invention,
like freeways, she said. Funny word, she said.
They call ’em highways when you pay to ride ’em.
Mama’s buried off one in Missouri. Had her
forty years and forty days on earth.
And the day we did it was a noisy day,
all out-o’-doors like a day at the beach:
the tearin’ down sounds of the sun and the wind,
clouds and trees, grass and stones,
a noticeably notice-me-I’m-nature
nature sound. Mother never did care much
for nature. Enjoyed a sunset well enough
Those shameless ones like colored candy,
those ones can look like wall-to-wall
in a Cineplex foyer: pinks and purples, reds, she said.
It was so noisy, anyway, that day
even the birds shut up for once.
Or got their singin’ drownded out.
But I could hear when the box hit bottom:
Get on with it, is what it sounded like to me—
She had dried her hands on a paper towel—
I’m done here.

by Kathy Fagan

From The Paris Review, Issue no. 129 (Winter 1993)

I experienced a noticeably notice-me-I’m-nature nature view a few weeks ago, and was thinking that my own mother and paternal grandfather loved nature, as do my children and now the next generation who partook in the views of that day. Somehow that shared affinity softens loss, since you can always recall the joyful moments when you were inseparably linked in awe.

That morning we drove from Altadena, CA north into the San Gabriel mountains. Clouds of lifting mist weaved in and out of the valleys, giving the scenery a mysterious, fairy-tale look.

Ceanothus covered the hills in differing shades of blue, occasionally punctuated by yellow tree poppies that looked like sun confetti.

Our goal was the Bear Divide, a location on the Pacific Flyway, the north-south migratory route that connects Alaska to Patagonia for innumerable migratory birds. The San Gabriels provide both rest and food for the flocks, who tend to seek the specific passage way at the location that we drove to.

The corridor which allows passage at relatively high altitudes, was discovered by chance in the spring of 2016. Brought to the attention of the folks at the Moore Lab at Occidental College, a systematic monitoring of the migratory flocks started soon after. (Everything I learned, including the statistics, I found here.) In 2023 they counted 53,511 birds of 140 species from February to May, (the return trip for the birds seems to happen somewhere else) with some mornings as many as 20.000 birds recorded. The sheer variety is stunning.

The lab uses the help of citizen scientists, local birdwatchers and volunteers, to help with the observations. As it turned out, we chanced on a group of volunteers with the USFS who were netting and banding birds the very morning we arrived.

The nets are erected in the mornings and inspected every thirty minutes. They catch birds without harming them, who are then banded with a very light metal ring around a leg that provides numbers for scientists all over the world to report on flight routes, durations, survival.

The data reveal helpful information about birds’ responses to changes in environmental conditions and ecological shifts across the world. If that made me feel good, something else lifted my soul even more: seeing son and toddler rejoice beyond the sheer fascination with the procedures, sensing their appreciation of the world around us (if only lifting every single pebble or bug on the path as behooves a 14 month-old) reminded me of my own happiness during nature walks with my mother or my Opa. Little is lost. Much lives on.

Orange crowned warbler

Highway restrooms: I no longer fear you! When hope is met, who cares if it’s a human invention!

Music today from the Bowerbird Collective. The video alone is worth it.

Of Deer and Depletion

Nature
Apr 29, 2024
4 Comments

Walk with me, on a rain drenched Sunday in the Pacific Northwest. First we trudge through my garden – have the galoshes ready.

These are columbines, some of the early bloomers in spring, dainty as they come, and, as it turns out, a delicacy for wandering visitors. As are the apple trees.

These are deer. They have made daily appearances in the yard for the last week, and as of Sunday afternoon, when I am writing this, there are no more columbines. Blossoms completely depleted. Disappeared. Digested. Man.

I have a choice: mourn the destruction of my flora or celebrate the fact that I look out of the window to see four frolicking creatures, feeling at home, at a location that is a 15-minute ride from Portland city center.

You can see the remnants of the destruction of the winter storm – still a lot of windfall around.

True to form I do both, and then I go visit a friend’s wondrous garden that is carefully deer-proofed and full of spring’s signifiers: growth that is tender, soft colored, dripping with wetness and sending out tendrils and shoots to claim the next cycle of life.

It feels like walking through a watercolor painting when you look at the bloom.

The tree peonies proud like queens,

Just the maple leaves show sharp, contrasting rims, but they, too, are softened by their unfocused surround, enveloping them with diffused light.

They come in so many different colors

Such beauty – let it help start the week on the right note, grateful for what is, not what’s been lost. Now tell me what I should plant that the deer won’t eat….

Here is a romantic period Ode to Spring by composer Joachim Raff.

No ode to the deer, but grudging admiration.

WHAT A DAY

Nature
Apr 23, 2024
2 Comments

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.

(Re)Birth

Nature, Philosophy
Apr 12, 2024
4 Comments

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 Condition 176-7).

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.

Music today is a 1902 symphony called Rebirth.

Little Lizards

Art, Nature
Apr 4, 2024
1 Comments

““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 Nietzsche Thus 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 the Lizard (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 Klee Eidechse (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.)

Graciela Iturbide Lagarto (Lizard), (1986)

Music today by Sibelius. The Lizard, of course.

Desert Beauty

· Exploring Anza-Borrego Desert State Park ·

History, Nature
Apr 2, 2024
3 Comments

“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.

Coming and Going

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.

Diversion

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.