Bird Cloud

  It was a big thrill when I saw a white-faced ibis near the front gate where there was irrigation overflow. The ibis stayed around for weeks. A few days after this sighting I was sitting near the river and saw two herons fly to the bald eagles’ favorite fishing tree. They were too small to be great blue herons, and did not really look like little blues. A few minutes with the heron book cleared up the mystery; they were tricolored herons, the first I had ever seen.10 By the end of the month American goldfinches were shooting around like tossed gold pieces despite another cold spell.

  Suddenly it was mid-June and noxious weeds—leafy spurge, cheatgrass, hoary cress, Canada thistle—grew everywhere. Nests were full of young birds and the predator birds, who had hatched their young earlier, had rich pickings. Even a raiding great blue heron flew over pursued by smaller birds. My Game and Fish friends Ron and Andrea came to float the river. Andrea was doing an eagle count and they were clearly abundant in this river corridor. As we approached the east end of Bird Cloud’s cliff Andrea spied a parent prairie falcon and four young, all lined up silent and quiet, rather resembling a quintet of Egyptian mummies, on a ledge above our heads. I hadn’t dared go near the fence across from the big nest for fear of forcing the goldens to abandon, but I could see now that they had two big chicks in the nest. And this month was marked by the appearance of an insect I had never seen before—Eremobates pallipes, a.k.a. wind scorpion, a resident of deserts and the Great Basin. It was straw-colored, about three-fourths of an inch long and very much resembled a scorpion although it is not poisonous. It will bite if disturbed. It feeds on small insects, so I caught this one and put it outside hoping it could catch mosquitoes. More likely it made a snack for the myriad of hungry birds rushing around outside.

  I came back from a wonderful week in Capri in time for a hot, dusty Fourth of July, rather a red-letter day for many young birds taking their first flights. I walked down the road to the east end, pleased not to be cursed by the parent goldens. One of their big dark chicks had found a narrow shelf with an overhanging ceiling not far from the nest and there it sat, harassed by—who else?—the prairie falcon. But even young goldens are tough and fierce and the falcon departed. When I got back from my walk I found some bird had dropped the corpse of a large nestling on the deck, white downy feathers, wings not fully fledged, the head gone. I thought it might have been the chick of a great blue heron or sandhill crane.

  The drought was bad, very hot and dry day after day and no rain for a long time. The grass cracked and broke when stepped on and it was too hot to sleep at night. Wind scorpion weather. The James Gang was still not finished with the siding and the weeks dragged on. But during the final night of the month it rained, easing the terrible heat buildup and reviving the land. I opened the front door for the damp, delicious air and to hear the eagles crying on the river side and the sandhill cranes in the bull pasture. The kingfisher, a bird we don’t see very often, sat briefly in the bald eagles’ fishing tree, the cause, no doubt, of all the eagle screeches. The rain triggered an explosion of insects, especially midges which rose in clouds above the willows on the island and the river. In the evening twilight countless hundreds of swallows flew through them at high speed with their mouths open, resembling predator fish slicing into a knot of terrified herring.

  The respite was brief. A hard, hot wind dried out the lettuces in the garden, tearing petals off any flowers not made of steel. But the young eagles, both bald and golden, loved this heated air. They and their parents were all soaring and zooming, trick-flying, mounting high and then rolling down the air currents. At one point I could see seven eagles flying above the cliff at various altitudes, some so high they resembled broken paper clips.

  The wind died away and one evening a friend came to dinner. We sat outside enjoying the gathering dusk. A lone goose flew downriver, honking. The silence of late summer descended. We sat saying nothing, hearing nothing. Then there was a loud HSSSSHHHH! sound as a goose landed in shallow water. A full moon rose, transforming a jet contrail into a comet, and the river glimmered through the trees. It was a lovely evening until we noticed something ridiculous that made us laugh. The James Gang had installed underground water sprinklers and dotted around in the grass were small valve covers, about four inches across, each with a nickel-size hole in the top. As my friend and I sat in the moonlight we watched one little head after another pop out of the holes in the valve covers—mice! A wee head would show, a mouse would emerge as if it were a sewer worker coming up through a manhole, and the rodent would scamper to the edge of the deck and dive under, followed by another and another. We counted ten mice coming out from one valve cover. The James Gang was not amused to hear this and stopped up the holes in the covers with wine corks.

  By the tenth of August I could see a nervous change in the avian population. Flocks of birds seemed to be forming, bunching up. Two ravens came to the cliff and flew around their ledge nest site of yesteryear. Were they the old residents checking out their once-happy home? I thought so, because one of them had a white spot on its cheek which I remembered had distinguished one of the earlier residents. When I first noticed it I thought of Ernest Thomson Seton’s Silverspot, a crow with a similar mark. And one of the crows that foraged in the tidal pools in front of our Newfoundland house also had a white spot on its left cheek. So perhaps such marks are common among crows and ravens. If these were the old residents they must have been disappointed as the cliff was alive with falcons and eagles and red-tailed hawks. It was now a predator cliff. Of course ravens are no mean opportunists themselves, and the only reason to think of them as victims of the prairie falcon was my fondness for corvids.

  A few mornings later a bird with an ineffably beautiful song woke me. I had no idea what it was and it was not visible from the high bedroom windows. I tried to identify it from birdsong CDs without success. It was the harbinger of a nasty little frost, a complete surprise, that killed the tops of my tomato plants and beans, scorched the zucchini and cucumbers. I didn’t realize it but the surprise mid-August frost would be an annual event at Bird Cloud, striking just when the garden was approaching high ripeness.

  At the end of the month the James Gang set off for their annual camping and prospecting trip on Mount Antero in Colorado. Before they left Dave and Deryl planted thirty new shrubs. As soon as they were out of sight a robin began an inspection tour on foot. It walked up to and around every new plant and stone, closely examining each. The entire inspection took about fifteen minutes for the shrubs at the back of the house. Of course I don’t know, but I suspect that robin was memorizing the good and bad qualities of each of those plants.

  On the first of September, while making coffee in the kitchen I glanced up at the cliff and saw the big tawny-red mountain lion walking along the top. It descended to an area of outcrop above and to the right of two huge square stones balanced almost on the edge. It was impossible to see this area from the top. Three weeks later, just before dark, I glassed the cliff and the colluvium piles below and noticed a large round rock on the debris cone that I couldn’t remember seeing before. The telescope revealed it as a dead deer that had apparently fallen from the top of the cliff. Falling off a cliff was not something even the most addlepated deer would do. I surmised the lion had chased the panicked deer over the edge, and until dark I kept peering through the telescope, looking for the lion to claim its kill. But the lion did not come.

  The next morning two ravens were on the carcass but unable to break through the hide. As I made coffee I noticed that the ravens were gone, replaced by thirty magpies and two coyotes. It took the coyotes half an hour to break through the hide. The bald eagles perched nearby, waiting their chance, and several ravens also waited. One of the coyotes departed. There was no sign of the lion. By midmorning the remaining coyote, bloody-muzzled and gorged, waddled away reluctantly. The magpies moved in. The most cautious diners were the eagles and ravens who waited until after eleven for a turn at the deer. The first coyote returned with two friends
and all three began to tug the carcass toward the edge of the colluvium pile, a drop-off of about ten feet. By afternoon the carcass was no longer in sight, now fallen into the brush below where perhaps the lions would claim it. The renegade thought now occurred to me that perhaps the neighbor’s cow that had fallen off the cliff the year before had been chased to its death by the lion.

  In the first days of September the prairie falcons left, and the next week the ravens were back. I heard a heavy croaking when I went to the garage, so close it sounded in the garage. The bird was likely perched on the owl roost Gerald had put at the east end of the house. (Some visitors complain that owls keep them awake at night.) Were the ravens just checking things out? Had they come to spend the winter?

  On the eighteenth the first bird to fall by flying into a window of this house did so at dusk. It was a lesser goldfinch. I left it on the deck and in the morning it was gone—I hope because it revived. Many birds knock themselves out and then come back from apparent death rather groggy and confused, but alive. The big, handsome northern flicker is an aggressive bird that often hurls itself at its reflection, falls like a stone, lies on its back with its feet curled up for a while, opens one eye, gets shakily up and staggers through the air to a nearby branch where it spends an hour or two thinking black thoughts—and then flies into the window again.

  The days were shortening and the light on the cliff was changing in hue. At sunset the cliff glowed in the amazing color of the flesh of the Hubbard squash, a deep yellow-orange. I began to think about the winter, knowing I couldn’t stay at Bird Cloud after the serious snow started. Yet I planned to stay as long as I could.

  Once more we were unwilling hosts to a mess of cows, these from upriver. They trampled and ruined Deryl’s freshly seeded lawn. Two years later the imprints of their hooves were still visible. We got a fencer to put an emergency hot-wire around the island which was the cows’ favorite place, and arranged with the new fencer to take on the job of enclosing the north shore along the river and the island with buck fence. Cows will try to push through a wire fence or even leap over it—these big animals can jump rather well when they want—and have more respect for a sturdy wooden buck fence.

  By the twenty-seventh most of the migratory birds were gone. I remembered an earlier September when some friends and I had camped at the top of Green Mountain where we could look down at the Red Desert and make out the old stagecoach road and a few bunches of wild horses. We hiked around, noticed quite a few hawks, and by midmorning realized that the hawk migration was in full spate. Hundreds of hawks flew over us that day, swiftly, seriously intent on getting away. Also intent, not on getting away, but on filling up great pantries with pine seeds, were grey jays. They would cram seed after seed into their pouches and then take them to their secret caches. One smart grey jay, trying to pack in more than his crop could hold, hopped (heavily) to a little pool of water in the top of a boulder, took a few sips to wet down the seeds, and resumed gathering.

  By mid-October most of the birds had gone south. The meadowlarks were the last to leave. The golden eagles were somewhere else, though probably in the area. The bald eagles were involved in a major undertaking—the building of a new nest in a cottonwood closer to the river and closer to our house. One eagle flew in with a double-talon bunch of cut hay, likely swiped from TA hay bales. This new nest, unlike the old one, was highly visible. I worried about people who floated the river in summer. Not so many years ago local ranchers killed eagles on sight, even fish-eating bald eagles. What were the birds thinking? Did they plan to fish from the nest? Of course, this eagle pair has showed they are more interested in river traffic and what we are doing around the house than in privacy and isolation. As with humans, in the bird world it takes all kinds. It should be excellent eagle watching for us, even when the leaves are out. For weeks they hauled materials in, much like an avian James Gang, mostly sticks and a dangerous length of orange binder twine that could tangle young birds tramping around in the nest. They took breaks from the construction and went fishing at the east end of the cliff, something they would not do when the goldens were in residence. But were the goldens really gone? There were a few days of rain and wet snow that made the county road a slithery mass of greasy mud.

  On the first of November I walked along the river fence line in the evening and as I came abreast of the big nest the scolding “Get away, fool!” call came from the cliff. The goldens were in their bedroom niche.

  Colder and colder the days, clear and windless, the kind of day I have loved since my New England childhood. The rough-legged hawk, a visiting stranger in these parts, came hunting over the fields. The bald eagles did something unusual—they chased it furiously, asserting their territorial rights. The hawk fled. The new nest looked large and commodious. The day after Thanksgiving a Clark’s nutcracker appeared briefly on one of Deryl’s shrubs, but it had dark markings on its face like a small black mask, and looked a little like a grey jay though the body and wings were utterly Clark’s. I saw it for only a few seconds before it sprang away, but it seemed that very often I saw birds that are subtly at variance with Sibley’s illustrations.

  Near the end of the month a little warm wind pushed in a bank of cloud. A northern harrier coursed over the bull pasture, just barely skimming the grass, floating on and on in lowest gear, then landing in the distant grass, hidden from me. It rose again, higher, using the wind. One morning one of the bald eagles brought a hefty stick to the new nest. It was long and awkward, and to get it in place the bird had to circle behind the nest and trample it in from the back with the help of its mate. It was a really big nest. A few hours later a bold raven came and sat on the west branch of the bald eagles’ fishing tree, about twenty feet away from the male eagle. They both seemed uneasy. The raven pretended unconcern and stretched his wings. The eagle shifted from one foot to the other as if muttering “What is this clown doing in my tree?” The big female eagle came in for a landing and sat beside her mate, and as she put down her landing gear the raven took off.

  In the afternoon the wind strengthened after four days of calm and the goldens enjoyed it, rising into the empyrean until they seemed to dissolve in blue. It was like one of the Arabian Nights tales in reverse, the tale where someone fleeing looked back and saw something the size of a grain of sand pursuing, and a little later looked again and saw something the size of a lentil. Later still the pursuer resembled a beetle, then a rabbit and finally a slavering, demonic form on a maddened camel. But to my eyes the goldens shrank first to robin size, then to wrens, then hummingbirds and finally gnats or motes of dust high in the tremulous ether. Just before grey twilight the northern harrier returned, but strayed into enemy airspace above the cliff, and suddenly there were four ravens chasing and nipping. The extra pair of ravens came from nowhere, like black origami conjured from expert fingers. As darkness swelled up from the east a full moon rose and illuminated great sheets of thin cloud like wadded fabric drawn across its pockmarked white face.

  What a frisson! Turning the pages of a large book on wildlife conservation in Wyoming I came across a full-page photograph of our cliff across from the big hole where the young eagles stood on a sandbar and watched for little fish. The photograph was taken in the late nineteenth century and nothing had changed. Nothing. It looks exactly the same—as many places in Wyoming do. A few years ago Mary Meagher and Douglas B. Houston assembled a number of photographs of Yellowstone taken in the nineteenth century, then found the long-gone photographer’s vantage points and took new photographs to compare with the old.11 Changes, when visible, were subtle. In many cases the same trees—usually much taller and wider, but sometimes fallen—were still there. Almost all of the photographs were close matches with the present day.

  November fell through the floor and December began with the tingling, fresh scent of snow. Seven or eight inches fell. I had hoped this month would be snow-free, but it looked like that hope was dashed. Night after night I had bad sinus headaches, an allergic re
action to something—but what?—I had eaten. The bald eagles kept on fluffing up their new nest. The TA cows in the west pasture had a certain way of eating. They grasped a bunch of grass and with a sharp jerk pulled it sideways. I supposed that at this time of year it broke off rather smartly. The bald eagles liked to collect nest materials early in the morning. Just after first light I saw one swoop down on the cows, snatch up a clump of broken-off grass, practically from the mouth of the cow, and carry it to the nest. The early bird gets the mattress stuffing.

  I could not leave Bird Cloud until I finished the edit of the Red Desert book, but the snow and wind kept coming. There was little time for watching birds, and getting the mail or supplies was chancy. Usually I could put the old Land Cruiser in low and smash through the drifts, but in places the wind had packed the snow into unsmashable drifts and I got well and truly stuck on the county road. I tried to barrel through a five-foot drift that looked fluffy, small in comparison to the big piles that would come later in the winter, and ended up high-centered on a solid pedestal of snow, all four wheels off the ground. Once again the James Gang saved the day with shovels, cursing and a strong tow band. It snowed again just before Christmas, deep and beautiful snow that lay quiet in a rare calm. The hero sun came out for a quarter hour, then fell as though wounded. Eagles and goldeneyes were the only birds around. At dusk I skied down to the Jack Creek bridge. Mist rose from the river and the cliff seemed to be melting, the top floating on quivering froth.

  The next morning was very cold, trees and shrubs frosted with the last night’s mist. In the pre-sunrise light they took on delicate pink and violet hues. The cliff showed pinkish beige as if wearing a peach-skin cloak. In the pastures the black cows crowded around the haystacks, their coats as frosted as the willow twigs. The sun cleared the edge of the world and the wind shot forward, kicking the peachy rose snow hills into glittering explosions. Gerald came and broke a trail through the snow so I could get out, but I didn’t have anywhere to go. Yet.