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Bird Photography

The Pear Tree revisited.

I figured I’d offer some reassurance at the beginning of 2024: YDP will be as eclectic as ever, as haphazard in what gets picked up and woven in with the rest of what fills my brain, so that you can rely on at least one thing remaining the same in your lives.

For a start it’ll be some thoughts by the Italian Marxist Antonin Gramsci, a poem by Ruth Awad, a Lebanese-American poet who is also a tattoo artist and an insurance manager who collects rescue Pomeranians, and some views of my pear tree. How is that for a mix?

House Finches

Regular readers are familiar with the pear tree, and its neighboring hawthorn tree, seen from my chair where I hang out when my body – what else is new – vetoes the plans for various hikes and outings yet again. It is where I found myself last week, amazed at the variety of birds who kept me company this late in the season, a humming bird included.

Anna’s Hummingbird

It gave me time to reread Gramsci, in particular his apropos musings on (not) celebrating the New Year. I don’t share his sentiment of hating the occasion, although I don’t love New Year’s either. At my age, frankly, one of the thoughts that is inescapable when you are feeling lousy and the numbers change from ’23 to ’24, is personal: will this be the year I die? After all we lost a lot of friends this year – here is an Oregon ArtsWatch list which included a mirror photograph I took of Henk Pander during our Mutual Portraits project, a close friend enormously missed.

But Gramsci sets me right in the rest of his one page-proclamation: you want to focus on continuity and spirit, not on breaking points and final balances, filled with resolutions that you will not keep.

“I want every morning to be a new year’s for me. Every day I want to reckon with myself, and every day I want to renew myself…..I would like every hour of my life to be new, though connected to the ones that have passed.”

Song Sparrow

In one of the stranger deliberations I’ve read in a while, he also hopes for the arrival of socialism in order to jettison the celebration dates handed down by the ancestors. I guess it would give us something to talk about, shared hopes for differing reasons….

Thrushes

Not so sure what I would talk about with today’s poet, Ruth Awad, whose work, as far as I’ve read it, lacks the balance of emotionality and intellect that I so crave. If that sounds condescending it is not meant to be – there is much to be said for the offerings of the Ruth Awads or Maggi Smiths of the world, embraced by contemporary readers for their accessibility and courage to be sentimental. If it keeps an interest in poetry alive, so be it.

I mean it.

Black capped chickadees

The poem below, published in The Atlantic at the end of the year, drew me in, though, for one specific sentiment, expressed in the last words:

“…if only you’ll let he world soften you with its touching.”

To let the world soften us, or even better, to comfort and fill us with occasional awe at a time when we tend to harden from fear and/or sorrow, we have to attend to it. The “world” is all around us, easily, constantly available, no extravagant or even local excursions needed. You just have to sit and look, birds perching in the pear tree, reminding us of an existence not governed by dates, or resolutions, just renewal from hour to hour, here, now, in 2024.

Gramsci’s theory of Hegemony, a strategy of power pursued through cultural work, can wait. So can my knitting. Or folding the laundry. I just look at the birds. It is healing.

White crowned sparrow

Reasons to Live

Because if you can survive
the violet night, you can survive

the next, and the fig tree will ache
with sweetness for you in sunlight that arrives

first at your window, quietly pawing
even when you can’t stand it,

and you’ll heavy the whining floorboards
of the house you filled with animals

as hurt and lost as you, and the bearded irises will form
fully in their roots, their golden manes

swaying with the want of spring—
live, live, live, live!—

one day you’ll put your hands in the earth
and understand an afterlife isn’t promised,

but the spray of scorpion grass keeps growing,
and the dogs will sing their whole bodies

in praise of you, and the redbuds will lay
down their pink crowns, and the rivers

will set their stones and ribbons
at your door if only

you’ll let the world
soften you with its touching.

by Ruth Awad

Chestnut backed Chickadees

Music today is conducted by a guy named Birnbaum – pear tree – the enchanting second movement of Schubert’ Symphony #8, the Great.

Here is the full version with a different orchestra, Mallwitz conducting.

Nuthatch

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Mothers and Daughters

Walk with me. No, scratch that. Stand with me. Because that is what I have been doing, standing, ever so slightly frustrated, at the edge of flooded roads, hiking paths, and wetlands, with no way in. This is what the start of the rainy season looks like in Oregon. By February, if the winter has average amounts of precipitation which you never know these days, it will be worse.

Still plenty of landscape, fall color and birds there for appreciation. Photographs from 3 outings combined across this week. The herons and egrets sure loved the flooding.

Happy to have you around today, particularly the literary types, since I need help to understand something. A title that I have trouble with, of a poem by Andrea Cohen that was first published in 2012 in the ThreePenny Review. I rather like it and think I’ve have a handle on it overall, if not the issues it raises. Yet, the title???

The Committee Weighs In

I tell my mother
I’ve won the Nobel Prize.

Again? she says. Which
discipline this time?

It’s a little game
we play: I pretend

I’m somebody, she
pretends she isn’t dead.

—Andrea Cohen

The waterway on the left is a footpath, usually!

A seeming interaction between mother and daughter ends with the revelation that the mother is no longer alive. With that new perspective we understand that an issue of self-worth, expectations, and appreciation (or lack thereof) continues to be salient for the daughter even after the source of those sentiments is no longer around.

It begins with achievement and why not go for the top of the heap, the Nobel Prize. Will receiving the prize satisfy a parent? Will receiving it for the umpteenth time make a difference? No word of praise, no explanation of delight, no pride expressed towards the achieving daughter. Just a matter-of-fact question about the discipline, as if to check that in the hierarchy of the Nobel you’ve climbed the ladder. Maybe physics is more important than literature, maybe the Peace Nobel Prize is the epitome? Is anything ever enough?

That sense of having to perform, yearning for acknowledgement is so ingrained that the game has to be played with an imaginary parent, or one that only carries on in one’s imagination, in perpetuity.

Duckies!

One the one hand, it is scary to think that we, the parents, who inevitably have messed up across our children’s life time, will have made such an impact that it cannot be shaken, even if that impact is based on perceptions that don’t need to be entirely true. Maybe our children assumed us to be much more demanding than we actually were or meant to be.

Goldfinches

Brown creeper and downy woodpecker

Flicker

On the other hand, it is frightening that we, the children, will never be free of these psychological binds, conjuring our parents up in endlessly empty gestures of imagined appeasement. And then encounter repeat performances of lack of appreciation. In essence telling ourselves in this inner monologue/dialogue that we are simply never good enough.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is DSC_0045-2-1024x681.jpg

But then again, maybe the desire to please speaks of love, of a connection that we thought would hold if we are mutually recognizing players. The poem certainly gives agency to both, daughter and mother, in the sense that both are presented as “pretending.” Yet the expressed sense of inadequacy, framed by a mother’s refusal to recognize, overshadows, for me everything else.

Or maybe it all means something completely different, what do I know.

But who is the committee that weighs in? Nobel prize is associated with committee, but don’t we assume “weighing in” refers to the current vignette of mother-daughter interaction? Is she awarded a prize for keeping the memory of her mother alive, warts and prior hurt and all? Help me out!

Turned color of blackberries, hazelnuts, wild currants, hawthorn and dog roses.

Here are some comforting thoughts about remedying what we’ve wrought, (or at least acknowledging that sometimes remedy is necessary,) words encountered in a post by a friend of LeGuin’s:

“I think that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.”

~Ursula K. Le Guin

(From: The Other Wind)

Fish for lunch…

Music today is a sweet debut album of a young singer, Kara Jackson, who reminds me of Joni Mitchell half a century ago. The topics, if you listen closely, are very much concerned with self worth, fearing or defying expectations set by society, struggling as a woman to find her own personae. But there is also a song about the loss of a loved one (unfortunately over-orchestrated/ Why does the earth give you people to love) that is quite moving.

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Views from the Road – from Amusement to Awe.

40 years ago on this day my mother died suddenly and unexpectedly. I was a continent away and had to scramble to get home for the funeral. I thought I’d never get over the grief. I did, though. Whatever deep-seated sadness remains is certainly more than balanced by the gratitude to have known unconditional love and been given gifts galore: an interest in all of what the world has to offer among them. She was an intrepid traveler, and nothing escaped her eyes, no matter how mundane. Her moods could swing from amused to serious to fearful to exuberant in the shortest amounts of time and I see myself in that as well.

Mt. Shasta with no and very little snow 6 weeks apart. New crops planted now that rain has started.

Fall colors have arrived.

And frost once you crossed back into southern Oregon.

She would have enjoyed the roadtrip that brought me to L.A. and back, all 3.400 kilometers in a small car, with frequent stops to take in roadside attractions. She loved to drive, as do I, which is a blessing since I can no longer fly. She would have exulted in meeting the newest generation, named Lina in her honor, who will perhaps – hopefully – see the world with the same wonder as her predecessors.

Same view from a slightly different angle 6 weeks apart – beginning of October, end of November, pains now flooded.

Today’s photographs are selected to describe the range from amusement to awe. Here is the absurdity of a Potemkin village mimicking a Western town, a playground for children adjacent to a diner off of I 5 near Kettleman City, with Bravo Farms proudly displaying their collection of old signs, surely ignored by the kiddos who are overly excited to be released from the confines of their carseats. (Be warned: inside the restaurant, it is a zoo, with shooting arcades and proud display of gun imagery, overpriced and greasy pulled pork sandwiches, and noise levels that aim to deafen your remaining hearing capacity.)

Maybe they should reconsider their choice of beverage?

The second set was taken at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge. On my way South the first white chested geese had arrived.

On the way North, 1000s of Ross geese had reached their destination, ready to stay in California for the winter. Seeing this abundance of beauty is one thing, hearing it is another – the sounds are indescribably moving.

I picked today’s music accordingly – migrating swans and other birds can be heard in the background.

Mud hens congregate in front of the geese

And since that was the only serious piece I could find on migration, there is another Swansong , Schubert’s Ständchen transcribed and transformed for piano by Liszt – one that was played by my mother at bedtime, right below my room. Love is nigh.

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A Curtain of Clouds

Walk with me. Make sure you bring the rubber boots which I, as per usual, forgot on Monday.

It was a spectacularly beautiful day along the Columbia river, with cloudscapes encouraging all kinds of fantasies and re-interpretations. They also made you wonder what would appear if you lifted them. Were they hiding Mt. Hood, or Mt. St. Helens, or would a peek of Mt. Adams appear? Those speculations relied, of course, on the general knowledge that those mountains are situated in the approximate location you were staring at.

What happens when you lift clouds without having the faintest idea what the background will reveal? Pleasant surprise, useful information, or a wish they’d hung in the air forever given what you discover?

These thoughts were rumbling since I had just read a fascinating new paper by two Yale psychologists, Woo-Kyoung Ahn and Annalise Perricone. In essence their research looks at the consequences of providing genetic information to people, information concerned with their potential susceptibility to mental disorders like depression, Alzheimer’s disease, alcohol abuse or eating disorders. (I’m summarizing below.)

Would you like to receive that information? Hand it over, hey, all knowledge is good! Allows for personalized treatments, specific interventions! What could possibly go wrong?

A lot, as it turns out, and not always what you’d predict. Information can harm you, and curiously enough, both the kind of information that confirms genetic susceptibility to a disease or its opposite, the reassurance that you don’t have the genes that might contribute to a problem.

Let’s say you learn that you have an elevated genetic risk of living with depression. Would you change your behavior in ways that might affect the emergence or severity of the disease? As it turns out, people generally don’t. That failure to do so is closely connected to our general misunderstanding of how genes work: most of us think they are immutable, that we can’t change anything about their expression. “Genes are destiny,” is the assumption. This mistaken belief is called psychological essentialism, where genes are believed to provide the essence for the characteristics observed in a person. Take height, for example. People tie a person’s height to their genetic make-up – never mind that an environmental manipulation, the absence of presence of sufficient nutrition, can stunt growth in any given individual.

Now add prognostic pessimism, our general belief that mental disease is pretty resistant to treatment.

“The extent to which one believes that one’s mental disorder has a genetic origin is positively associated with the extent to which one believes that mental disorders are untreatable or inevitable . For instance, the more individuals with depression attribute their symptoms to genetic factors, the more pessimistic they are about their own prognoses.”

Once you’re in this loop – knowing you have an elevated genetic risk and doubting treatment efficacy, the clinical consequences are dire, since your negative expectations will affect the treatment course.

However, we are able to intervene if we teach people about the malleability of genes, and how genetic expression can be counteracted, even shut down, with environmental interventions. Learning about this, people actually become more optimistic about the prognosis. Lots of clinical programs now use that kind of education to help people understand that genes do not mean a certain destiny.

Unfortunately, even if we are able to help people look more confidently at a future where their genetic risk is not all that counts, we have so far no comparable mediations of how they look at the past. When people learn that they have a genetic predisposition for depression, for example, they start to interpret their experienced symptoms as much worse than they actually were. Study after study show memory distortions of the severity of symptoms once you learn about your genetic risk. That exaggerated belief, of course, affects one’s expectation in therapeutic efficacy, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

___

What about learning that you do not have an elevated risk for a particular condition?

That, too, can produce harm. Let’s say you enjoy drinking, or eating, in ways that border on abuse, or so you fear. Receiving the results from your genetic test that you do not have an elevated risk for Alcohol Abuse Disorder or Eating Disorder can now become a risk factor, as you think you’ve been given green light to continue or even increase your behavior. The feedback affects your interpretation of the seriousness of the harm you might expose yourself to, a false reassurance that can have disastrous consequences.

Lifting the clouds of ignorance? Maybe not.

The birds didn’t care, one way or another. Flocks of snow geese huddled in great masses against the wind.

Sandhill cranes starting their track north.

Harrier hawk, hungry as always,

bald eagle surveying his kingdom,

and ibis and herons doing their thing,

all just on autopilot as their nature demands. No mediations required. No pessimism to optimism. Just BEING.

Debussy on clouds for your listening pleasure.

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A Dream within a Dream.

Last blog of 2022.

Comprehensive retrospective? Nope.

Prognoses for 2023? Nah.

Capturing once more the beauty that surrounds us and respond with loosely (if at all) related musings? Let’s try.

If you are lucky enough to be present when a flock of snow geese gets spooked and you look at them through the very circumscribed lens of your camera, you sometimes experience something strange. Some of the geese are still ascending while others are descending already. If you loose track of who is who – easy to do from far away in the chaos – you perceive a strange undulation – as if the same thing is obliquely going up and down simultaneously, the laws of physics abandoned. For a split second you question the reality that surrounds you, fooled by a perceptual illusion.

A related question has been debated since times immemorial: what is reality and how can we be certain we perceive it correctly? It is on my mind because of the current glut of suggestions in both the cultural scene and computer science, that maybe we are mistaken about the reality we experience. Maybe, just maybe, we all live in a simulation, a computer game if you will, in which we are just puppets playing within the structures set by code, installed by some advanced beings somewhere in the universe. Frown all you want (as I do) but there are some serious, smart philosophers out there thinking through this possibility.

Honestly, watch Netflix, and there is the simulation hypothesis, if you click on 1899, a German series that is even darker and less comprehensible than its predecessor, Dark. (Actually, don’t, not worth it.) Or turn to the bestseller lists. The NYT raved about “Sea of Tranquility” by Emily St. John Mandel, the simulation hypothesis was the basis of the plot. (Again, don’t, I thought it infuriatingly superficial, never getting to the interesting question, much less providing answers about the concept of living in a simulation. An alternative would be a book on the same topic, The Anomaly, that I found more clever by far earlier this year.)

More seriously you find even respectable thinkers and philosophers captivated by the idea, frequently debated in academia and tech/computer science circles. (Link below gives a graspable overview.)

Episode 25: David Chalmers on Consciousness, the Hard Problem, and Living in a Simulation

So why this sudden preoccupation with it, decades after The Matrix offered the proposal that we are all dreaming our existence while stuffed into electronic boxes, our bodies mined for whatever the advanced evil civilization that is holding all of humanity captive, needs for their purposes? Why this emergence of Longtermism, whose prominent adherents often subscribe to the simulation hypothesis?

Why seriously engage with a hypothesis when it cannot be tested and so far there has been zero evidence to support it? If we live in a perfect simulation there is no way to get outside of the game (that is one of the problems that all these movies and books simply ignore.) Only from the outside could you judge if something is real or not. This is already the trap Descartes, wondering about our perception of reality, was caught in. His way out was to postulate that innate feelings and thoughts are pre-determined by God, and as a result, an individual’s perception of reality is in fact defined by God. Therefore, it cannot be the wrong one.

Instead of (a) God/ess who preordained everything, now we have some advanced civilization taking that place? Calvinism 2.0? Why would such a civilization waste computational superpowers on creating a simulation? What would the simulation be for? Why does it simulate consciousness, why stay within certain parameters, like the laws of evolution? Why create a place of misery and harm? And how do you deal with the problem of infinite regression, where every simulated world has potentially one above it, equally simulated into perpetuity – where is the endpoint? Back to a God/ess?

What does it buy us to engage with such a concept? Escapist fantasy? The hope that future life-forms are interested in us, some form of ancestor worship? Release from moral imperatives – if I have no free will, just like a character in Grand Theft Auto the umpteenth or Minecraft, why not engage in immoral, unethical or violent behavior without pangs of conscience? Giving in to ennui and lack of initiative because nothing can be changed, unless the puppeteers permit? Being so bored with your life that you do everything to find a glitch in the matrix as evidence that your life is not “real”? Having lost or given up on one religion, turning to the next one in disguise?

Let me know if you have the answers. Clearly the question of reality perception has been around for a long time.

Wishing you all a healthy 2023 with a grip on reality and dreams that are not turning into nightmares.

Music a favorite by Fauré, after the dream.

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Bird Bazaar

We were iced in for a bit last week, although thankfully not for long or as intensely as much of the rest of the country. Photography was restricted to what was available out of the windows, ample traffic given the cold. All those birds made me think of my unhealthy preoccupation with the demise of the bird app: TWITTER.

Nuthatches galore (Kleiber)

Scold me all you want (you know who you are), my time spent on that medium was not preoccupied with “doom scrolling.” It has been a source of information about politics I care about that would have been – is – otherwise unavailable. A lot of the European news are behind paywalls, and some not published in the main media at all, as for example a lot of the discussions among young, progressive Jewish voices in Germany. A lot of Black voices opened new horizons not easily accessible otherwise.

Twitter has been indeed a platform that allowed marginalized voices to communicate and to be heard, internationally it was the choice for many movements that were able to organize this way and get the news out. With the arrival of Emperor Musk, as many call him, although I prefer Elmo, the safety of those voices is endangered. Next to the monopolized print press in large parts of the world, a platform that allowed new collectives to form has now become the plaything of yet another oligarch, his whims defining the rules.

Plaything is too harmless a word – the site is now a weaponized tool that can wield large influence, not least over the upcoming 2024 election in this country. But it can also wreak havoc abroad. Major investors in Musk’s take-over of the company are Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Quatar Investment Company and Binance, the massive crypto finance company founded in China. They have been given special access to confidential company information. (Ref.) There is a huge worry that so far anonymous voices of dissidents will be outed, leading to their persecution. In Saudi-Arabia alone, 40% of all citizens are on twitter, anonymously.

As owner and CEO, Musk has removed the entire human rights team, as well as the team dedicated to disabled users, and the old content curation team which dealt with fighting disinformation. His next move was to ban the accounts of people publicly critical of him, journalists included. The re-admission of previously banned, extremist sites en masse has of course led to explosions of lies, racist and anti-Semitic tropes and disinformation, much to the satisfaction of the owner who encouraged voters to choose far right candidates during the mid-term elections. Just yesterday he tweeted, once again, a word that squarely panders to the extremist belief system that nefarious Jewish powers plan to replace the white US population with Brown people.

Flicker (Goldspecht)

Wren (Zaunkönig)

Importantly, and that is why I think I am so preoccupied with it all, there are no mechanisms that could curb the whims of an emperor. Maybe the financial chaos, with advertisers leaving as well as the important content providers, will lead to bankruptcy. But given that there is a network of unimaginably rich individual and state entities across the world that support his political ambitions, I don’t believe lack of money will be the downfall. Unfathomable riches of a few allow manipulation of public opinion and elimination of critics, quite literally.

Likely a hermit thrush, I learned, an unusual bird here at this time of year (Drossel)

Here is one of my favorite political reviews of the year that speaks to the choices the powerful have, reminding us of and analyzing a biting poem by Browning in this context, no less. Greg Olear’s column Prevail has been a recent discovery for me and a source of pleasure. So are the birds, to which I will now return, hidden behind the window frame, camera in hand.

Robins (Rotkehlchen)

My Last Duchess 

BY ROBERT BROWNING

FERRARA

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call

That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands

Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said

“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read

Strangers like you that pictured countenance,

The depth and passion of its earnest glance,

But to myself they turned (since none puts by

The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)

And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,

How such a glance came there; so, not the first

Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not

Her husband’s presence only, called that spot

Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek; perhaps

Fra Pandolf chanced to say, “Her mantle laps

Over my lady’s wrist too much,” or “Paint

Must never hope to reproduce the faint

Half-flush that dies along her throat.” Such stuff

Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough

For calling up that spot of joy. She had

A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,

Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,

The dropping of the daylight in the West,

The bough of cherries some officious fool

Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule

She rode with round the terrace—all and each

Would draw from her alike the approving speech,

Or blush, at least. She thanked men—good! but thanked

Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame

This sort of trifling? Even had you skill

In speech—which I have not—to make your will

Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this

Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,

Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let

Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set

Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse—

E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose

Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,

Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands

As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet

The company below, then. I repeat,

The Count your master’s known munificence

Is ample warrant that no just pretense

Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;

Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed

At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

Chickadee, Towhee and Junko (Meise, Winterammer, Grundammer.)

Music, staying with the topic, is Beethoven’s Emperor Piano concerto Nr. 5, played by the incomparable Ashkenazy.

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Slow Blogging

Yesterday was the first night of Hanukkah. The photo below appeared all last week in various Jewish publications, a timely reminder of how close light and darkness, faith and fascism existed in the past. Not surprised it resurfaced this year across many voices. It was taken by the wife of Rabbi Akiva Posner the last night of Hanukkah in 1931. They lived across from the NS headquarters in Kiel, a small Northern German harbor town, and were acutely aware of the rising danger. The family left Germany early, in 1934, and due to the Rabbi’s diligent warnings, the community of ca. 800 Jews in that town lost fewer than 1% to Nazi murder because they heeded the signs without complacency.

May the lights shine in remembrance, warning and consolation for those of us who celebrate this minor holiday.

***

Between the bustle of the holidays and the end-of-year fatigue my capacity to write in-depth musings is limited. Maybe the same is true for your capacity to read, but maybe not. Therefore my compromise for the rest of the year is to link to some texts that I found interesting, or funny, or meaningful – and for whom I had a nice challenge to pick appropriate visual companions.

We’ll start with something that today’s title riffed of: Thoughts on slow birding. The idea, in a nutshell, is to forgo the hunt for ever more, ever rarer species, but instead get your fill on what’s right in front of you out of your windows, at your feeders, in your backyard, on your balcony, the glimpses taken on your walks. Here is the link to the article that favorably reviews a book about just this topic, Slow Birding: The Art and Science of Enjoying the Birds in Your Own Backyard,” by Joan E. Strassmann, an animal behaviorist and biology professor at Washington University in St. Louis. If you have a bird enthusiast for whom you still need a present this would be handy, but spendy at $27.

The library has the book – wait time in Multnomah County is 14 weeks, however, which tells you something about birders in our communities!

Photographs of diverse sparrows, finches, robins, and one Rufus Towhee were all taken last week in my immediate surround. Slowly and patiently.

Music today is a sweet song of calm and peace from Beethoven’s late string quartets, Op. 135, to go with the “Let’s take it slow” motto. I chose that over the 5th Symphony, although it is claimed that the beginning notes were borrowed from the song of the song sparrow.

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Kestrel at Rest

The sonnet below was written 135 years ago, and none, none of the beauty that it describes has changed – a kestrel on a fall day, surrounded by the blues and golds of a blazing landscape.

The kestrel I photographed had his soaring and striding already behind him – I had been standing under trees dropping leaves and watching, when s/he came to rest. I don’t share Hopkin’s religious fervor – he was a Jesuit priest and actually dedicated this poem to “Christ our Lord” – but feel in complete agreement when it comes to embracing the beauty of fall.

I leave it with you for the days to come – I’ll take a break for Thanksgiving week and hope to return with more images of blue and gold-vermillion.

The Windhover

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple – dawn – drawn Falcon, in
his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl
and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, –the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1887)

And here is the sonnet set to music.

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Registered yet?

Given the marathon of two in-depth reviews last week I think I’ve used up (almost) all my words for October… let’s just quietly hang out on the beach then.

Afternoon soft light, winds sweetly teasing, tons and tons of gorgeous birds.

You think you could just sit there and bathe in the momentary peace and beauty. That is until you see the crab. Snatched by a pelican.

What comes to mind? The warming of the waters due to man-made climate change. (Or, as is also the case, issues of over-extraction and regulations that contributed to the extinction.)

The Alaska snow crab harvest has been canceled for the first time ever after billions of the crustaceans have disappeared from the cold, treacherous waters of the Bering Sea in recent years. The Alaska Board of Fisheries and North Pacific Fishery Management Council announced last week that the population of snow crab in the Bering Sea fell below the regulatory threshold to open up the fishery. But the actual numbers behind that decision are shocking: The snow crab population shrank from around 8 billion in 2018 to 1 billion in 2021, according to Benjamin Daly, a researcher with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. (Ref.)

It doesn’t help to see the loving pelican parent feeding that crab to junior. What comes to mind?

The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Index, which monitors 32,000 separate populations of species around the world, found that on average they were 69% smaller than they had been in 1970.

Here is a beautiful essay by Bill McKibben with the title A Fast-Emptying Ark – The World Grows Quieter by the Day. He spells out familiar causes – habitat destruction, climate change – but also offers an almost poetic lament.

And with my brain’s tendency for far flung associations, I think of birds bringing harm to other birds. In Oregon this month alone Canada geese, mallards and bald eagles carried the highly pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI virus) across areas where they can infect domestic poultry.

In Florida almost the entire bird stock of a small farm was killed by the virus brought in by an invasion of Egyptian geese – Hurricane Ian produced much standing water in which the virus finds good conditions to multiply. In this particular case, a beloved internet creature – the emu Emmanuel who used to be of “help” creating educational videos about farming – was also afflicted and the owners are trying everything to rescue him. I wonder if such a single instance of an internet celebrity – he really was and for good reason (his owner was wonderfully funny in talking to him) – might alert many people to issues of climate change who would otherwise be uninterested or uniformed.

Let’s hope the loss has some positive consequence attached. Including the insight that who we vote for matters for action or inaction regarding climate change. Voter registration deadline is tomorrow. There are only two states with direct ballot measures on the issue this year – California voters will decide the fate of Proposition 30, the Tax on Income Above $2 Million for Zero-Emissions Vehicles and Wildfire Prevention Initiative, and The Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Environmental Bond Act of 2022 that would allow the state to sell bonds to fund $4.2 billion for environmental improvements that, according to the proposal, would “preserve, enhance, and restore New York’s natural resources and reduce the impact of climate change.” (Ref.) But who governs states or legislates federally plays of course a huge role in general.

Enough. Let’s watch the pelicans cavort.

Or practice trios.

Soave sia il vento it shall be. The wind was indeed sweet at the beach.

Here is the full Cosi fan Tutte if you want to sweeten your morning, a production from Vienna 3 years ago.


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Unexpected Wonders

Walk with me. I’m systematically doing the rounds of all my special places that will close certain hiking loops after September 30th, to protect migrating birds. Wednesday I was at Tualatin River National Wildlife Refugee.

Fall already visible in the colors. Oaks turning red, yellow poplar leaves dropping, ponds green with duck grits, the whole landscape begging for water colors. Henk Pander, Erik Sandgren, where are you when we need you?

I had come expecting a few straggling flowers and was not disappointed. You have to imagine them bathed in strong smells of wild Thyme, Camomile and something quite sour, hinting at fall.

The usual suspects were still hanging out or taking off for a spin:

Cedar waxwings were stocking up in the Hawthorne,

And then there was this guy, out of the blue, having me stop in my tracks. An adult male harrier, otherwise known as a “gray ghost”, my learned neighbor told me when I asked for help with identification.

You know how during fire works they wait until the end for one final mega explosion? I felt that nature was celebrating the end of summer with a similar display – the pelicans flew over my head, landed in the water, circled and then spread out. Likely on their way down south. Just a stunning sight, and auditory experience, with their wings flapping so close to me.

Anyone with a tendency to anthropomorphize would swear he was grinning at me…

And yesterday off US Hwy 30, some mix and match of the traveling parties, ibises looking on :

The muskrat decided to get out of the way fast, camouflage and all.

Squirrel, on the other hand, was unperturbed, just watching the pelican show while nibbling.

I felt reminded by nature – and in turn want to remind the many people who are dear to me and having a rough time right now – that we aren’t done yet! Change is in the air.

Music is about the Equinox (9/22/2022,) the mood fit.

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