A Walk at the Equinox

I didn't mean to mark the vernal equinox. I just got up early and headed out, as I do most mornings, because that's all I really want to do any more--go out. I go out into the fields and find my friends.

You can look at the time stamp on this photo of the moon setting and there it is, 6:29 AM March 20, 2017. At the exact moment of the vernal equinox, I was standing in the driveway with the rising sun before me and the setting moon off to the south. And I thought, man, it doesn't get any better than this, that sun throwing pink and tangerine around to the east and the moon slipping down in sherbert lavender, way over there, to the south. What is it doing over there? Will you look at that! So I took a photo of it, not knowing that I was recording the equinox moonset, the exact moment of the day that night is equal.

And that's how I know there is something watching over me, something rich in magic. It guides me like a Tickle Bee, so I show up for the moments I need to experience. 

7:19 AM, March 20. The meadow is aglow. I know the cloud cover will soon coalesce and close over again. That's mornings in March, and one reason I get up and out. If I'm to have only one audience with the sun, let it be as it rises.

I also get out because I need to get my poo-mail. Bobcat, very fresh. Oh yes, very fresh and shiny.

Wild turkey, fresh, too. There's corn nearby, so there are deer and turkey and bobcats too.

I walked another 20 minutes and found some deer, but they caught my scent first and all I saw was white flags waving and the tha-dunk of heavy hooves on duff. I much prefer to spot them first. 

I see this older buck most mornings. I haven't named him, but I know him to see him. He is one to stand still and watch me from behind the trees. He is very savvy, and knows how to duck behind trunks and drop below slopes to avoid being seen. By now it was 6:50 and I was well into my morning.

I lingered around the far haymeadow, the one with the sweeping curves, for another hour or so, watching whatever came my way. By now the sun had that quality of coming from under a low lid. I knew it would soon disappear for the day, as it seems to always do in an Ohio Valley winter. But for now, this first day of spring, it was raking across the greening winter wheat, and I was soaking up as much as I could.

Laughing, crazy, over the field came two pileated woodpeckers, one passing like a bullet through budding branches. I love how these big birds fly, powering so hard, then gliding, wings closed to their startlingly light bodies, cutting the air like the head of a javelin. Reveling, I know, in the surety of their passage, propelled by a few powerful wingbeats, then cut loose to coast.

 

I know they must enjoy themselves because they laugh the whole way. I thought about the one road-killed pileated I'd picked up, fresh, and I remember it was like picking up a plastic beer stein. It's got you fooled, looking like it would be heavy as leaded glass. I remember thinking, "Why, there's nothing at all to it. It's all wing, a little muscle holding them together."

By 8:01 I had walked all the way back home to find Pinky and Flag just visible out in the pale little bluestem, that's fading so fast with spring sun. Look closely, and click on the photos to see them well.

Their coats are fading, too, soon to drop and be replaced with summer red. I am looking forward to that.

I messed around back at the house, getting ready to go to town to run a bunch of errands, to reprovision after being gone for a week. Chet needed a vet visit, too. So I packed him in the car and headed out the driveway, only to find a bundle of black and white rags snuffling around in the meadow. I turned around by the mailbox and headed right back to the studio for my big camera. I will not miss playing with a skunk. My errands could wait.

I've been playing with skunks lately. There are so many skunks this year.  This makes me happy, as I adore them. I asked Phoebe why there might be an overabundance of skunks this spring. Her eyes flew open wide and not missing a beat she answered "Cicadas!" I knew then that the magic passes through this child, too, straight from the equinox moon and into her marvelous mind.  This one who, when she was about 6, pulled me out to see a silvery checkerspot butterfly because it was "diffwent fwom the pearl cwescent." Yes, of course, she's got it. Turkeys, bobcats, skunks...all bred and raised on the great bounty of periodical cicadas that rose up and then rained down on us with clattering wings last spring. 

Skunks are peaceful creatures. They eat when they're hungry. They don't look at their watches. 

Skunks don't have to be wary. Their weapons are always ready.

And yet all they want to do is dig and eat and find other skunks to mate with. The last thing they want to do is stink the place up. I respect skunks, but I don't fear them at all.

I creep closer, staying low. Soon enough the skunk comes to, sensing me near. Smelling me, most likely, for they don't use their eyes much, and they seem not to pay much attention to soft footfalls drawing near. He sniffed the air.

And he looked right at me. Please click on the photo, and admire the white base of each tail hair, something I hadn't seen before. He's fancy!

And with that, he trundled into the nearby woods, wanting only to celebrate the Equinox alone. Not even knowing what I was celebrating, I'd done the same.

Get out there. It's all waiting for you.

Sneaking Up on a Buck

The canoe, Lois, is my cloak of invisibility. When Marcy and Shila told me they'd spotted a buck bedded up on a steep slope, under cover of trees, I paddled quickly but silently over. Gave a few strokes, drifted motionless ever closer, then hung onto a snag to anchor myself for photography.

He was unperturbed by my presence. I was not something to worry about, floating in a small boat out on the lake. 

That's how I like my deer best: Unperturbed. Not simmered, seared, sauteed or with a side of wild rice. Unperturbed.

Quietly grooming himself.

Arising, preparing himself for an afternoon's foraging. He'll be a five-pointer. 

Those velvet antlers itch. A well-placed sharp hoof does the job. 

Thus groomed, he's ready to go. 

And I am blessed by his presence, by witnessing his toilette, his peaceful reverie, which becomes mine.

Such incredible beauty awaits those who float silently. These multicolored birds with their raiment of bronzy green and wine. Who could dream such a beautiful little heron?

Death to minnows and frogs, life itself to me.

The work of a pileated woodpecker in live wood, excavating for carpenter ants. These huge rectangular holes open out the ant galleries, and the pileated sits there lapping the larvae, eggs and adult ants up as they run by. 

And everywhere around me, the kwirrk and churr and constant pas de deux of the Snag Kings, the Woodpeckers to Beat All Woodpeckers, the Flying American Flags, my darlings the red-heads. Raising up their young by the dozen in this Nirvana for birdwatchers, deerwatchers, heronoglers. North Bend State Park. You really must visit.

Pileated Woodpeckers in Flight

There are so many beautiful things to see from our towertop. I always take my big camera rig (Canon 7D with 70-300 IS L telephoto lens) because something lovely nearly always flies by. I've pulled the summer and fall's collection of flying pileated woodpeckers from my stacks and logjams of photos.

Since I'm usually up there in the morning, and the pileateds are most active then, I get these fabulous backlit creations winging by. This is a female, as evidenced by her blackish forecrown.

They give me plenty of warning, because pileated woodpeckers don't do anything without yakkin' about it. Cuk cuk cuk cuk cuk cuk cuk 

This is a male, with red running all the way to his nostrils.

Seems like there's not a whole lot of upstroke, but a lot of downstroke in a pileated's cycle.

I revel in the backdrops, almost as much as in the beauty of the bird. Virginia pines make a splendid screen. Another female. You getting it?

A bomb, a bullet, her wings pulled in, just slicing the air. These birds do not soar. They must flap all the time, but they rest in between flaps and let their momentum carry them. Wingbeats of a pileated under way are actually pretty slow--there's a lot of silence between the notes.

In the mist, a planted row of white pines behind her. My gosh.

Seemingly brushing the top of the tulip. 

All stretched out, her wingtips flaring upward as they bear her weight. 

And shooting downward as a hen rockets across our meadow. Wow. The tower is good good good for looking down on birds. I like to look down on birds now and then. Light's better.

Headed east, coursing our north border. It's a watercolor, for sure.

One of the nicest images, I think. Must paint this.

Would I had time to paint everything that tugs at my heart. A storm front in the evening, from towertop, our raggedy old meadow stretching and curving like a cat.

And a cotton candy sky.

When you read this, I will be making my way the nine hours to Cornell's Lab of Ornithology. I'm giving the Monday Night Seminar there at 7:30 pm on October 29. There's a big storm coming (Hurricane Sandy comes north, meets Arctic air, does a do-si-do, creates epically bad shizz) that might have other plans for me and my little Subaru. Wish me luck. And come see me if you're near Ithaca. I always have loads of fun at the Lab. From reading about it with reverence as a kid to going there to give a talk, well, it's been a long, strange trip. Fun, too.

Crime Scene Photos

Toward evening, I happened on another thing you don't see every day. I've never seen it, in fact--evidence of a crime that is vanishingly rare, even in our birdy woods.

A big bird, black and white, met a violent end here. I can't imagine that pileated woodpeckers,
huge and wary as they are, very often become prey.

Blood sheaths on most of the wing and tail feathers indicate that the bird was in heavy molt, and probably a juvenile. The white areas have a faint lemon-yellow cast, something that I've seen on the only other dead pileated woodpecker I've seen--a roadkill.

My first hunch, that an owl was to blame, proved incorrect. When subduing and processing large prey, which can take many minutes or even hours, raptors generally relieve themselves a few times, and this one was no exception.

But instead of dropping its feces straight down in a puddle as an owl does, this raptor ejected them forcefully, creating a line of whitewash. Lacking goshawks in southern Ohio, my best guess on the killer would be a Cooper's hawk, and if I had to hazard a guess as to its sex, I'd say it was a female, who'd be big and bold enough to tackle such outsized prey. Of course, an opportunistic red-tailed hawk might take a pass at a pileated woodpecker, too, so I can't rule that out. We have nesting redtails nearby, but no Cooper's hawks that I know of, and this happened in August, a bit early for the fall accipiter migration. I'd hoped to find perhaps a feather from the predator, since long struggles with big prey often knock a few of the hawk or owl's breast feathers loose, but the hawk left only its whitewash for me to puzzle over.

Hawk it was, though, and we are one pileated down from the brood that was raised on our land this summer. Though they were a daily fixture before, I haven't seen a juvenile pileated around the yard since finding this crime scene.

Today, I am blogging outside, sitting under the four Virginia pines we planted in 1992. They were tiny, only 8" tall, and now they're 20' or more, and almost as big around the middle as I am. I listen to the crickets and katydids, the chirrup and mutter of dozens of birds, and the slow kuk kuk kuk of a pileated woodpecker.

In other news, The Swinging Orangutangs gig on Friday night went wonderfully. We held down five hours of music with only three short breaks, and the sets flowed as freely as the beer at the Marietta Brewing Company. The place was packed until almost 2 AM; we started playing at 9 PM. I was so proud to be there with our band, working hard at having more fun than you could imagine. I was proud of our product, and the four long, intense rehearsals that it took to get back to gig readiness. We tackled and conquered the nitty details of arrangements and vocal parts and just exactly where the guitar solo comes in and how many times the guitar twangs before the riff...all the work that goes into making a tight band. We're like a five horse team, throwing our weight into the harness and pulling together. At one point during  "Burning Down the House" I turned around from the microphone and watched Andy's flying drumsticks and Clay's strong but nimble fingers, a blur on the bass strings; I looked over at Vinnie with his gorgeous sinewy leads on guitar; at Jess, filling the room with her keyboard and her flawless voice, and then over at Bill, fronting us all with strong and melodic guitar, voice and his unique, irreverent and hilarious personality, and I thought, yes, this is it, this is as good as it gets, that is my husband right there, and I am grateful to be here, standing on these sore old feet, sure of my own voice and ready to sing the frat boys, all young enough to be my sons, to bed.