Arizona Birds, From Small to Mighty

 Sometimes it's kind of nice not to know what to expect. My Sedona birding experience was pure, untroubled by any consult with a field guide whatsoever. Heh. This is how I package my laziness. As purity.
I couldn't make this little fellow anything other than a blue-gray gnatcatcher, though my memory was whispering, "Maybe it's a black-tailed!" Of course I didn't know at the time to look under the tail for white spots (black-tailed) or a big white outer panel (blue-gray). But it sounded like a blue-gray, so I'm going with that. Happy to be corrected here. This is hardly an unequivocal shot, I know.

One of the totally cool things about birding in an unfamiliar place in August is the preponderance of new fledglings, all vocalizing. I'd hear this random chewp or teryew repeated incessently, and think, "Well, if I were back East, I'd say that was a baby grosbeak." Which is how I identified this baby blue grosbeak, by that and the hard metallic chink! his parents were voicing.

 When identifying fledglings, just wait around. A parent will come soon enough and give you the big hint.

The most vociferous of them all were baby tanagers, which I knew were around from their distinctive nasal teryew  call. I thought, "Hmm. That sounds like a baby scarlet. Maybe it's a summer." I'd never been around enough breeding summer tanagers to know their juvenile location call. This is the incessant call they give to tell their parents where to bring the groceries.

So cute, and so awkward, this wing-fluttering summer tanager babe. His bill is stained with blackberries, which were the most easily available things his parents could find with which to stuff him into silence. I'm guessing at his sex from the bright orangey yellow coming in on his breast.

 

His mother was an even olive-yellow, but Dad was already slipping into autumnal patchwork green and tomato-red plumage.

 

I kept hearing a very chickadee-like ser-dee-dee-dee high in the treetops. I was delighted to find it coming from a bridled titmouse. I wasn't expecting that!

 

 I suspect this to be a bird of the year (this year's young) with its rather short crest and dark cheek.

It swung upside down to inspect some insect damage on a rolled, yellowed leaf. That's what titmice and other gleaners do--look for holes and webs and little rolled shelters that caterpillars use for houses.

 

It pecked into the rolled leaf and found something good, probably a caterpillar that had pasted the edges together with silk and lived inside the roll.

Then, to my amusement, the leaf it was pecking at came off in its foot, and the bird clung there for a few moments, holding the leaf like a parrot would, while clinging precariously to another.

 

 "Did I just see what I thought I saw?" I wondered, and reviewing the shots, I had! That was cool. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing so many young birds learning their trade in the shade of the oak-clad canyon. I was glad to be there. I had tanked up on water and felt better, and I was readying myself for the climb when I greeted two women, older than me, who were headed toward the vortex site. One had an oxygen tank in a bag over her shoulder. I felt a pang of sympathy for someone who had to carry her air supply with her wherever she went. They were from Tulsa, and they were coming here to spread the ashes of a friend at the vortex site. Once again I reflected that this place, Sedona, attracts people for reasons of spirit.

We talked long enough to realize that we had a lot in common. Finally, keeping in mind the building heat and my new friend's oxygen pack, I said, "You'll never believe where I'm parked." I gestured up over the rimrock and said I'd be climbing it to get to my car. I  told them how I'd found my way down into the park.  "You'll need this," the first gal said, and reached into her pack to put an ice-cold bottle of water in my hand. I refused it, saying they'd be needing it. "We have more. You need this. Take it!" She literally made me take it. I put it to my lips, intending to take just a sip, and drained the entire bottle in one go. Wow. That was so good. It felt like life itself. I went to the hose tap and filled it, and drained that, too. Only on the third fill was I ready to hike back up to my car. I thanked her again and again and we parted. Guardian angels, they were.

When I got to the top of Slick Rock again, there was someone waiting for me. A turkey vulture swooped silently in, very close.

Again and again it passed by me, legs dangling in the hot air, taking me in as I was drinking it in. "You are such a fine bird," I said. "You're my totem bird. Thank you for coming to see me. Do you think you could fly over by the big rock so I could make a picture that shows where you and I are?"

But of course.  The bird turned and took off for Cathedral Rock.

Then it circled back.

I was left with an enduring image of its guardian spirit, watching over me as I fumbled my way through its desert home, heading back to my car.

Spirit Light

I wish I could convey to you the richness of having this audience of readers, of all that you bring to me. You might think that I'm just dishing out the content and you're taking it in without giving back, but oh, you do give back in so many ways. Lucy from Minnesota has helped me figure something out that has been puzzling me. Well, I'll never truly figure it out. At least I hope I don't. There should be things that pass understanding.

I remember a long time ago a reader wrote me to suggest that I take Free Will Astrology off my list of Useful Links. He thought it made me look kind of wifty, and he preferred not to see me as such. Hmm. I do believe there's something in astrology, however they've recalibrated the calendar. I feel like a Leo. I know Bill's a Pisces through and through. Liam's a card-carrying Scorpio. I love to guess people's signs based on what I've observed. I believe there are compatibilities and dysfunctions that can only be explained by the stars.  And what's wrong with any tool we might employ that helps us better understand our fellow human? Just because it's nothing anyone can prove doesn't mean it lacks validity.

The older I get, the more willing I am to believe that there are Unexplainables in this world. Things that no one can quantify or predict, results that can't be reproduced. Phenomena. For me, it's all part and parcel of listening to the little voice inside me, the one that tells me to look there right now! or get out that door before I miss my appointment with the merlin who's perched, waiting for me just around the bend. The one that tells me what a baby bird might need in its diet to thrive, or what might be going through someone else's head at any given moment. The voice that tells me what I need and how to get it, whether it happens to be a missing mineral or inner peace that I'm lacking. The more I dampen the big voices all around me, the ones that tell me what I should be doing, the better I hear the little voice, the one that connects me to the Universe.

So this churchyard has been calling to me, this building high atop a hill, one that's suffered the indignity of having a water tower plopped right in its front yard, and magnificently survived it. It stands, unheated and alone and miraculously unvandalized, year after year as unseen hands sweep it and let the birds out and mow its little cemetery and stack the unknown headstones when frost heave and mowers displace them.

I think Waxler Church has never been more beautiful than the morning of December 28, when the sun finally burned through our permacloud and set it in stark relief against a turquoise sky.

I prefer to photograph it from angles where the water tower doesn't show, but I see it bombed the photo above, sticking its face into the right margin.

The oldest stones you can read date from about 1840, and most of those are auf Deutsch.

I wander about, finding children, like six-year-old Earnest. Someone still puts flowers on his grave. Who?

I find my neighbors, who are both still alive, and am comforted that they will rest here eventually. 1974 doesn't seem that long ago. Married on DeLoris' birthday. Sweet.

I stand amazed before the stone of Lester and Linda, at the scene of bucolic (ox-filled) fields, Linda watching Lester atop his tractor, a dog by her side. I knew them both, slightly, the way one knows country neighbors, to wave to and sometimes stop and chat with. I'm touched by the intricate engraving on the stone, the way the tractor's clearly identified as a Deere. 

Linda told my neighbor Beth that Lester came home one day from working in the field, sat down in his recliner, and "his heart blew up." She lived in the little house for 14 more years, selling fresh brown eggs from the hens in the big pen beside it. I remember once when her Hereford bull got out and allegedly knocked down a mailbox on our road, and its owner brought a frivolous lawsuit against her, the way some people will, defying all logic and decency, just wanting a fight for its own sake. Yep, go after the widow who's trying to run 30 head of cattle by herself, atta boy.  Linda went, head hanging, door-to-door, asking for character witnesses. I helped as much as I could, writing a letter to the judge in her defense. None of that's on the stone, but it's inside me, and I think about it as I kneel by their stone. None of it matters now, but it mattered then, the case of the Errant Bull, the Widow and the Litigious Neighbor.

Someone has planted a landscape rose next to a stone. Wisely behind it, because those roses have growth power to burn and would soon overtake and cover the stone. Looking closely, I see the tattered remnants of last summer's nest in the upper right branch of the bush. From the materials and placement, I surmise that this nest belonged to indigo buntings. It's a classic bunting site. They usually choose a shrub so small and spindly that no predator would think to look in it for a nest. The other choice would be field sparrow, but the materials suggest bunting. Perfect. I want to come back in spring and listen for their song, confirm my hunch that a cocoa-brown female bunting sat her speckled blue eggs in this nest.

I wonder whose stone it might be, so I move around to take a photo.

Ada Louise Hune. She passed in 1947 at the tender age of 15. This bit of information hits me with a wallop, I with my grace-filled 17-year-old daughter still sleeping in her bed at home. I photograph the stone and linger, thinking about how perfect it is that an indigo bunting would raise its family here, with Ada below.

When I get home and upload the photos, I'm startled by what I see. Yes, I was facing into the light, and it was low early morning light, but I've taken probably 4,000 photos with this little gizmo and have never had my iPhone react to light in this way. A shimmering rainbow orb hovers before Ada's stone. I haven't Photoshopped it. I don't even own the program. This is it, just what the camera saw. As I look at it, I'm filled with wonder and joy and peace, as if Ada has somehow managed to send a message from beyond, as if she's thrilled I noticed her and her bunting nest and stopped to linger and think about her, wonder who she was. My nose starts to sting and my eyes well up at the thought. Something has happened here, but I don't know, can't say what. Something. The little voice is speaking.

And then just a few days later I get a letter from a reader, Lucy from Minnesota, who lost her husband in the last year and as it was happening wrote to tell me how much this blog and especially the antics and voice of Chet Baker meant to her and her family. She'd read his Facebook status updates to her husband Arch, and even after he lost his ability to speak, she could tell how much they brightened his day. Cavendish, their Boston terrier, still looks for Arch in his office each night before they go to bed. That's how we met, through Lucy's letter of gratitude those months ago. I was deeply moved that Chet and I, with my silly way of channeling his thoughts and desires, had had a small part in making Arch's passing a little gentler for Lucy and their two beautiful kids. You never know who you touch when you reach out. It's invisible, but it's there nonetheless. I feel it.

I hadn't shared this photo with anyone yet. I hadn't written about it, either. It was locked up in my mind. In her letter, Lucy unwittingly gave me a key to understanding what might be happening here. I'll quote  her.

" I don't share this with a lot of people, but I see "spirit lights", and sounds like you do too. (Well, I am not aware that I do, but my camera seems to!) We really miss Arch's human energy and being the family of 4 our kids have always known. Seeing lights is not the same as a warm hug or a heart to heart conversation or a shared laugh but at least you have some reassurances. 

"When you and Chet posted the blog about visiting the country church I kept re-reading it. Not only because it was so perfect, but because I saw so many sparkles and orbs on and around my phone I couldn't clearly see the words. You really woke the dead on that one. Your thoughts were wise, and sometimes funny, and the parishioners must have been delighted by Chet's return(?). Lord knows where that fella was before he chose the ZT family. I wanted to message you right away, but it was our last day on the island when I read it and we were busy still taking things in. Anyway you probably were aware you stirred things up a bit and I think they all got a kick out of it. I look forward to future visits you and Chet might make to that lovely cemetery and church and really hope the RainCrows get to play there. I think the spirits do too. "

Wow. Could those be spirit lights around Ada Louise's stone? I never even knew there was a name for them. Perhaps someone with experience in the paranormal can look at this and tell me. Lucy?? I just know that there's got to be a reason burial grounds are sacred across cultures and centuries. Something's happening here. I feel the Waxler Church and the people I know there calling out to me. Not in a spooky weird way, just in a "come see us" way. A good way. Like they enjoy the new living energy I bring to their resting place. Like they like to hear me sing in what was once their church, and just maybe still is.

Turkey vulture totem feather, mystery message from above, lit now by the morning sun. I have come here to see this, the light of this hour.

Whatcha lookin' for, little man?