Ecotone

Lately I find myself rather like Thoreau, surveying all the farms (for I live in farm country) and appraising their assets while daydreaming of living in the country.  I drive slowly along the dirt roads, making offers, retracting them, testing the soil, pondering the foundations of the houses, orchestrating deals and undertaking renovations in my imagination.  

A glance in the rearview mirror sobers me up: the zigzagging tire tracks of my car would suggest to anyone that I am driving drunk or at the very least impaired.  Which, in a certain sense, I suppose I am:  impaired by imagination, impaired by nostalgia for a vanishing land.  Old abandoned farmsteads capture my fancy.  I muse: which place shall it be? what house seems ideal? if I woke up in the morning here, what would it be like?  These places just need a little TLC and duct tape to make them viable.

I do not wish to farm.  Indeed, if I see crops on or near the abandoned farmhouse, I quickly as possible return that land in my imagination to pre-ag days of prairie or mixed prairie plantings—grasses, reeds, scrubby bushes and twisty stunted trees.  “My” land would need to promise habitat for inhabitants other than me.  Ideally, the territory would be mixed: gnarly oak forest for the deer, a pond, slough, or pothole with reedy marsh full of cattails for the ducks, geese, and songbirds, and open savannah for the harriers to hunt and perform their sky dances.  An ecotone is exactly what I’d like.  An ecotone is a border zone, an area where two distinct habitats butt up against each other.  The grassland brushes up against the forest, and a marshy pond acts as a great resource for animals of both woodland and prairie zones.  The biological diversity of this transitional zone is great, greater than that found in either woodland or prairie on its own.

I particularly adore the Northern Harrier, a hawk I would never have noticed had I not moved to the Red River Valley some 19 years ago.  Even then my prejudice against the flat aspect of the land prevented me from noticing the harrier until nearly 13 years later.  And until the last month, I did not know what to do next with my growing interest in this fascinating hawk.  October found me in the basement digging through a box of my late father’s books.  Way always leads on to way when one sorts through books and after finding the book I came for my hands lit on a copy of Irish Nocturnes by  essayist Chris Arthur from Northern Ireland.  I started to read Arthur’s essays that morning, fascinated with his meditations about the corncrake and the kingfisher, and mesmerized by his handling of memory and time.  As I read his words I asked if could write more carefully about birds, too.  Could I pursue the harrier not only with a camera but also with words? And as way leads on to way, reading books led me to internet research about the harrier and yet another writer from Northern Ireland, Don Scott, and his fabulous monographs on the hen harrier. 

The harrier in Ireland is a rare creature, rather like the fabled unicorn.  Many people have never seen it.  Scott’s scientific research in The Hen Harrier -- In the Shadow of Slemish highlights the threats to harriers in County Antrim, N. Ireland:  merciless persecution by humans, overgrazing by sheep, loss of marshland and moorland due to agricultural practices, peat cutting, and wind turbines.  My own photographs reveal comparative practices in the United States that threaten our harriers.  Here are only a few of the potential threats to harriers and harrier territory:

Wind turbines, while generating energy, often kill birds who cannot see the white blades against a white sky:

Grazing from farm animals disrupts land that the ground-nesting harriers require:

Pumping water out of marshlands drains territory that the harriers require for nesting and hunting:

Cutting down and burning shelter belts decreases biodiversity in harrier country:

Burning sloughs to increase available cropland decreases biodiversity and reduces nesting and hunting territory:

Burning cattails near a slough to gain 20 feet of cropland takes away ever-diminishing requirements for a bio-diverse community:

The very ecotone zone that fuels my fantasies and fosters biological diversity is under threat.  In the upper Midwest, it sometimes seems that it would suit folks fine if the entire territory were put into endless agricultural fields relieved only by massive oil fields.  Damn the badlands, the prairie potholes, and the few stands of trees and shelterbelts left over from CCC days.  Flatten the land out; eliminate ecotones; banish diversity; view the land as only a commodity.

While harrier numbers in America are still high, they are on the decline due to habitat loss as a result of human activity.  The threats to harriers are equally threats to us all.  Way will lead onto way as my harrier watch changes under the influence of the work of two very different writers from N. Ireland.  I will write more carefully in the future, and I will continue shopping like Thoreau -- the only kind of shopping I intend to do on Black Friday in America.

Let It Be

In early October I read a story that made me angry.  And I am still angry in mid-October.  A woman in Fort De Soto Park in Pinellas, Florida, was seen and photographed riding a manatee, one of the country’s largest, most gentle, and sensitive mammals.  The endangered sea giants are threatened by habitat pollution and destruction as well as by injury and death from jets skis and boat propellers.  The Florida Manatee Sanctuary Acts are strict and specific:  the woman committed a second-degree misdemeanor by jumping on the manatee and enacting her own ride-with-the-dolphins fantasy.  She has since turned herself in, claiming ignorance of the law. 

I have recently re-read Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac with my ecocriticism students at the university.  Leopold argues that as humans we cannot help ourselves:  we have to “cherish and fondle” wilderness in order to know about it.  In the process, we ruin it.  Leopold insists, however, that we must start helping ourselves.  That was in 1948.  People desire closeness to and possession of animals, and then the problems begin.  To cherish and fondle is too often to harm or eradicate.  We fondle some species right into extinction.  If the animals we wish to “cherish and fondle” turn the tables and initiate contact with us, or dare to lay a hoof, paw, or wing on us, eager citizens and authoritative entities line up to poison, slaughter, and otherwise eliminate them.  The largest animals (and birds), especially the apex predators, get the rawest deal of all.

I pursue animals, and I always question what I do.  I have tagged along with pheasant hunters in a desire to learn about both dog and bird, but my solo hunting is done strictly with a camera and my five senses and always within reason.  I try, as Barry Lopez suggests in Arctic Dreams, to hunt by “hav[ing] the land around [me] like clothing.”  More often than not the camera dangles by my side while I strain my eyes for a close-up that will never end up on a data card.  The shots I do take have resulted in an impressive gallery of animals, birds, amphibians, and insects running away from me.  My desire to understand and get close to nature has netted me the best portfolio of nature’s butts in the area. 

                                 

Often animal fear is palpable.  Ever since I read Jon Silkin’s 1975 volume of poetry The Peaceable Kingdom, the words from his “Prologue” ring in my head.  In Silkin’s interpretation, humans had a choice of two paths to follow.  When the flood came and everyone went pouring into the ark, the humans chose “the bad dark” path, and the animals took refuge with the knowledge “that human beings will hate them wherever they go.”  Silkin’s argument requires that the reader accept a number of challenging claims about Christianity, animal consciousness, and the uses to which humans have put the natural world, but it is a persuasive reading nonetheless. 

The words ring in my ears when I see baby rabbits paralyzed with fear and deer bounding away as if the Hound of the Baskervilles was on their trail.  Then there are the snapping turtles too heavy to run but rearing up, jaws agape, facing young children whose parents have taught them that it is alright to harass the turtle because it is inherently vicious and hungry for human flesh.  And then there was the porcupine frozen in fright, looking over its shoulder at me and uttering a small cry that I could not interpret accurately.  At that, I felt mortified, backed away, and walked away.  Barry Lopez’s insistence that animals are inherently mysterious and deserve to be granted their privacy told me to let the porcupine be. 

                               

Animals act according to ages-old survival lessons that are both instinctual and passed down from generation to generation.  However, I wonder if Silkin isn’t right, if there isn’t some special regard in their dark eyes for the human species.  Silkin imagines another path for humans, but it is clear that we haven’t found that way yet.  The woman riding the manatee is certainly one human who has little regard for animals and no awareness of their need for privacy and freedom.  That an animal is there for her exclusive amusement is the height of condescension, arrogance, contempt, and disrespect even while grounded in profound ignorance.  Perhaps she indeed has too many “ride with the dolphins” or “use-it-or-lose-it” fantasies operating in her underdeveloped understanding of other species.  Unfortunately, she is not unique. 

Gold Miner Jim

With his grizzled whiskers and the resonant timbre of his voice he could have been Sam Elliot's brother. He was 60 if he was a day, dressed in scruffy cowboy boots, jeans, and western hat, and a shirt that looked like one of the old H bar C or Panhandle Slim work shirts that my grandpa wore in the 50s. The shirt was a heavy weave, too heavy for the warm summer days of late. There was a little tear in the shoulder seam and more than one stain down the front. He smoked a cigarette outside the old log hotel’s open front door and cast a look every now and then at his aging yellow Labrador retriever.

Last night he hadn’t acknowledged us, although we passed him in the bar and hallway often enough. He helped himself to beers from the big upright cooler. Finally he gestured for a whiskey and settled into the leather chair by the fireplace to read a book while the dog slept at his feet. We stepped over his dog and sidestepped his outstretched legs to get through to the outdoor deck, but he acted as if no one else was there at all.

 

 

The log hotel advertised itself as haunted, and we like to stop at haunted hotels. We booked room 17, the room where the long-dead lady who wore lavender perfume sometimes still walked.  The rich, dark wood stretched from floor to ceiling. 

 

 

That night I lay in the log bed, not sleeping and not smelling any lavender.  The windows were thrown open to let in the night breeze, and through the screens I could see the deer wander into the yard, crook their long legs, and curl up by the creek that ran behind the hotel.  The hotel proprietor had told us with pride that the creek never froze over in winter, never flooded, and never changed its level.

 

 

 We’d eaten dinner in the log hotel dining room (appropriately called “Logs”), and the yellow lab had dozed outside in the grass.  His partner in the worn western shirt stood smoking, rocking from foot to foot and looking out across the little town. In the dirt parking lot robins, mountain bluebirds, and Western tanagers scavenged for pine cone seeds and insects in the waning Montana sunlight. Man and dog ambled into the tall grass, scattering the birds but not the two deer near the church. The deer are so tame in the little town that they don't run away. They blink languidly at people and dogs, kids on bikes, slow-moving pick-ups, and they keep nibbling tender grasses and flowers.

 

 

The next morning at breakfast he was walking the floor, helping himself at regular intervals to the coffee pot.  When he emptied the pot, he made a fresh one. It was our topographic map spread across the table that attracted his attention and must have announced that we weren't swift travelers. That got him talking.

"They call this ‘the treasure state,’ you know. Montana's full of gems and precious metals.  The treasure runs everywhere in currents and pockets and twists and turns all through this earth.  They found two foot gold veins once, but there's smaller veins right beneath your feet, the size a man could easily handle.”  His fingers traced a few paths on the map, and he nudged a plate of toast to the side.  “If I find even a 4-5 inch vein right in there,” and he pointed vaguely, “well, I'll be OK.  I’d get a couple young guys to help me haul it out."

The hotel was his "headquarters," a place with a soft bed and endless cups of coffee.  The Scapegoat Mountains in the southern part of the Bob Marshall wilderness area were his gold hunting grounds.  Many days it was just him and the dog, grubbing about in the rugged landscape, then resting on a rock or against a tree, the sound of birdsong and the wind their only company.  Oh, he’d be alright, he told us again.  One of these days soon he’d hit that vein. 

 

"It takes some doing, you know, and you have to be careful out there.  I like a .44 myself." He tapped our map briskly. "Be careful where you two are going, and be sure to carry your bear spray."  When he said "bear spray," he nodded at us and sounded just like Sam Elliot if he were to say "sunset" or "horse thief,” each syllable enunciated nice and slow. "Up there in the Yaak, lots of people hide out.  They’re off the grid.  Take this pretty scenic route, ok, and be sure to stop at Liquid Louie's."  He seemed to regard the bar as the last and greatest outpost of civilization. It warranted as much description as the elusive caches of gold deep in the earth.

We loaded our bags into the car and thanked him for his time and conversation.

“Now,” he said mysteriously, his eyes glinting in his leathery face, “I’m not running a business or anything, but if you’re not in a hurry I could take you to my mining grounds . . . for a little fee.”

We drove past Liquid Louie's, a most unprepossessing-looking dive, at 10:40 in the morning. We didn't stop.

 

 

What You Lookin' At?

I think about vision more than I used to now that my once keen eyesight has more than lost its edge in middle age. Romantic era poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge spoke frequently of the tyranny or "despotism" of the eye and how the sense of sight dominates us. Coleridge was right, and even so, it is sobering to realize just how sight-dominated many people are. They often value such limited types of sights that they don't really see what the world has to offer.  My own ever-dimming yet still dominant sense of sight prompts me to reflect upon Americans’ oft-declared desire to travel and experience the outdoors.

People expect a lot out of their road trips, vacations, and nature in general, and if nature doesn’t put out they are annoyed. They want non-stop adventure, grand vistas, huge spectacles, and large wild animals. Last year I set up my spotting scope on a marshy lakeside in Yellowstone National Park. There were at least 15 different species of ducks, grebes, herons, cranes, and geese feeding, sleeping, shepherding babies, and otherwise thriving in the protected park environment. I hadn't been there two minutes before several campers and motor homes rattled up behind me. "See any bears?" was the collective query. I replied in the negative and started to list the birds they could see, but before the third species I heard the camper doors slam and engines start.

The little stuff just doesn’t attract so many folks. On days when it rains or snows in the Tetons, Yellowstone, Yosemite, or Glacier – any national park or “destination” site, really -- a chorus of agonized cries about ruined vacations echoes through the nation.  The Going-to-the-Sun road in Glacier is often still closed in July, but people act as if Nature screwed up and didn’t deliver the goods.  However, if you simply look down instead of up (where those horrid clouds are) the world is still full of wonders.

Look right between your feet at the ground. Notice the variety of plant life and the types of soil and rock around you. If it has been raining, you are in for a treat. Rain intensifies hues, and the overcast sky shields small rocks and plants from the sun and its tendency to wash out color.  Look at this salamander, fresh and green in the rain.

Don't discount that apparently brown, empty, or soggy landscape. Odds are it is just teaming with life and variety. 

Keep in mind, too, that you haven't seen it all before.   No matter how many places you’ve been, one patch of green turf or grassy dry hillside is not like another.  For every five hundred of my students who groan that North Dakota, South Dakota, it’s all the same, it’s all boring, I hear from one who says, no, two miles away in any direction the dirt and birds and plants and animals all change in subtle ways.  Bring your focus in close.  The mariposa flower, often called the Sego lily, blooms abundantly over the sites of the fallen dead in the battlefields at Bighorn and nods serenely on dry cliffs in the Black Hills.  It has a cousin in the open grassy areas of the Yaak valley to the northwest. If I had not bent down to take a closer look I would have assumed that it was the same Calochortus nuttallii I had encountered on my other rambles. But while nuttallii’s petals are smooth and silky, Calochortus apiculatus in the Yaak has petals that are covered with what look like fine hairs.

The petals look like furry little cat ears.

What if the same bird lives at home and also in faraway places on a road trip? Many people are bored, and demand that nature be more attentive to their need for new and entertaining sights. Once again, much is missed in adopting this attitude. I have renewed respect for a bird I have seen all my life: the robin. This creature can live anywhere from arid desert to cherry orchard to damp rain forest. Noticing the ubiquitous robin can also teach you about the endless changes in landscape across this country and the conditions under which the robin must feed, find nesting materials, and raise young.

The ruffed grouse, too, is a bird that I have seen so many times in Minnesota and  is also in high mountainous Montana country.

Just as in Minnesota it comes out after a rain to pick at the plants by the road side, but surely it must eat somewhat different things at this elevation?  Surely its nest is made of different materials, and surely its young eat slightly different things.  Montana is not Minnesota is not North Dakota is not Michigan.

Then there is the spruce grouse. I had never seen one before I visited the Yaak valley. Apparently, many people, including avid birders, literally overlook this bird not only because they do not look down but because they look for the bright moving target rather than the quiet motionless one. Here is a female that I saw ambling slowly through the grasses and flowers by the side of a dirt road high in the Yaak.

The male had discovered her, too. Here he is, in full courtship display in the bend of the road near the female. Not at all perturbed by us or the idling car, he ran hither and yon and never deflated. On our way back down the mountain an hour and a half later he was still there.

One of the best ways to truly see the outdoors is to put away the camera. I enjoy taking pictures, but I agree with Barry Lopez when he “feel[s] uncomfortable about the way photographs tend to collapse events into a single moment, about how much they leave out.” Sometimes you just do not observe well when you are snapping pictures. I set aside times to use the camera and times to put it away and rely on my eyesight and memory. Here are two shots that captured images I would rather have observed firsthand than recorded and later perused on a computer screen. The first is of a deer standing in the grass. I did not realize till later that a second deer was there, too.  

Nor did I really notice the grass or the movements of the deer in relation to each other.

I was so intent upon capturing that "good shot" of this next deer in a wooded glade that I did not notice that she was missing half of one ear until I viewed the image on the computer.

What happened to her? Did she get into a fight? Did she have a lucky escape from a predator? I wish that I had put the camera down and simply watched her instead. And remember, sometimes the split second that it takes for you to snap a picture is the same split second that it takes for a bird or animal to run away. Would you rather observe the creature carefully or mess with your camera settings during that brief moment? I often opt for the former.

Last year I went to the Tetons. It rained all day. The clouds hung down heavily on the road. That was ok with me. My vacation wasn't ruined.  

The Home Not Lived In

The first night that I slept in the Yaak valley in northwestern Montana, I closed my eyes and saw the pattern of ferns on the floor of a mixed pine forest. The images were those of an old, smoky, foxed mezzotint, full of grays and browns and coppers. Typically, behind my closed eyelids before the drift into unconsciousness, I see formless granular shifting sands or that odd checkerboard of turquoise and grass green. Only a day into the Yaak and the place was strangely approachable, as if it could be home-like, though I hadn’t been there before. I have seen numerous types of forests in the USA, but not one like this.

Far from the Yaak I am back home in prairie country preparing for storage the fabulous coral mushrooms that we picked with a couple named Ginny and Paul. "Come with us!" they said, and we did. They didn't know us from Adam but wanted to share with us what they thought would be the unique Yaak experience of gathering the forest mushrooms, a regional delicacy. Ginny and Paul live in the Yaak but work on industrial equipment all over the world and in the states. They had just returned from a job in Romania. During the summers and autumns they harvest the bounty of the area: mushrooms, huckleberries, deer, and grouse.

Paul doesn't believe in bear spray, so he strapped to his side a big .460 with a scope on it and dove into the Yaak's dense forest with us in tow. The coral mushroom looks like coral, hence its name. It is also called a brain mushroom. It pushes up through the dark forest floor, and the forest duff of pine needles, lichen hairs, and loam clings to the convolutions of the fungi.

We picked the younger firm ones, the ones with the whiter flesh. The older, browner ones are a bit past their prime. The deer and snowshoe rabbits had gotten to a few of them first, but there seemed plenty to share between animals and humans. The forest smelled good, and here at home the mushrooms smell good, fresh, and clean, too. After sautéing and freezing some mushrooms, and slicing and oven-drying others, I have not washed my hands because I want to relish the smell of the Yaak forest for a little while longer.

The Yaak has the ability to make the well-appointed home in the city seem strange and alien. I am not entirely sure why this is. For many people the Yaak valley would be a disconcerting place. Airplanes seldom fly over that Pacific Northwest forest. People do not walk around with their eyes glued to their cell phones (no service in the Yaak). There is no entertainment industry, there are no billboards, there are no river cruises or water parks, no coffee shops, no McDonald's, no movie theaters. A neighbor often lives ten or fifteen miles away. One would be hard-pressed to find employment, and one rarely sees a policeman or state trooper unless there is a manhunt in the woods. And the woods are dark, dense, damp, and steep. Some people would find them spooky and scary.

But there are other qualities that prevail. The woods are not so much spooky (although it would be unwise to underestimate them) as rich and hypnotic. We spent hours driving on dirt roads at 5 mph, never seeing another soul. The trees themselves are quiet, saturated in green, and mesmerizing, a closely packed variety of pines, firs, cedars, and larches, as well as birches and aspens. Birdsong is loud, fluting, and caroling.

We stopped at snow-fed springs, parked the car smack dab in the middle of blacktops and two tracks that saw no other cars, and walked on the soft ground, listening to the run-off, trailing our fingers in the icy water. In a square foot were a dozen or more types of flowers, mosses, ferns, grasses, and lichens.

After a few days in such a place, the return home is an odd experience. I found myself driving to my local grocery store and feeling disoriented at an intersection I have seen thousands of times. Flashing signs and large billboards seem intrusive, people are preoccupied with their phones, garbage litters the streets, and homes seem to have altogether too many things both inside and out.

I don't mean to romanticize the Yaak or, worse, disparage my town and a Midwestern landscape that I have sunk into wholeheartedly and called home. The prairie is not less diverse or complex or beautiful than the Pacific Northwest forest. Indeed, it may be richer and more diverse in some ways. I mean only to identify differences, contrasts, and affinities, and perhaps to pinpoint a landscape far away that I would like to imagine as a home but that is not and cannot be. Surely, many of us have encountered such places.

Days later, the feeling persists. In the old film "Local Hero," the lead character, a business executive played by Peter Riegert, returns home to Houston, Texas, markedly changed from a business trip to Scotland and the rhythms of village life and ocean tides. From his apartment he makes a call, and the last frames of the film are of an outdoor phone booth, ringing, in the tiny Scottish seaside town.

Minus the story's oil refinery plot, I feel like that.

Babes in the woods

The phoebe eggs hatched on Sunday, June 3. It is now Thursday evening, an evening with wild wind and a temperature of 90. The guys are putting a subfloor into the artist's studio, and I have set up a folding chair in the woods. I soon learn that the woods aren't mine for the borrowing (which is the only kind of land so many of us can enjoy in 21st century America). As I get out my camera, I realize that the phoebes have alighted behind me in their favorite woodsy alcove, silently displeased. I move 20 feet away. Not good enough. They perch on dead branches, alternately eyeing both me and a hyperactive chickadee.

I pick up and move nearer to the artist's studio, abandoning the camera and contenting myself with a beer, the binoculars, and Van Morrison blaring from the guys' car CD player. One phoebe has already settled on the nest. It could be either the male or the female, for both will sit on the nest if the female permits it. Whoever it is rides a bit higher now, the babies having grown. Earlier I peeked at them with the mirror: five dark dove grey forms barely covered with light gray fuzz and curled together like sleeping puppies. Tiny orange-rimmed mouths helped me count.

My presence is not the only human-generated disturbance that the phoebes have tolerated. First there was the whole nest-moving episode. And before the female had a chance to lay eggs in her new nest, we took in a bucket truck to take down dead trees.

The phoebes flew to the slough and waited out the chaos there. We tried to be as delicate and unobtrusive as is possible with a huge truck and chain saws. When work commenced on the artist's studio a group of bright-eyed inquisitive little boys (children of one of the guys) were all agog to know what I was observing and how the binoculars worked. The phoebes flitted to the woods as I gave a tour to the boys, who chattered noisily in those stage whispers that children use when they are trying to be polite and quiet.

The wind tonight is a hassle and is ushering in black clouds. The wren's song still bubbles and cascades through the branches overhead. A redstart's ringing cry sounds in the neighboring oak. They don't care that Van is singing, too. Thunder murmurs in the west. The phoebe has chosen her nest site well. The babies are well protected from the strong breeze and hot sun.  She is off the nest now, and through my binoculars I see a tiny head surface above the nest's rim and then sink down again.  Seconds later downy fuzz ripples and settles into the depths of the nest. The babies have rolled over in their sleep.

Suddenly the sky darkens with rain, and I hurry to put all of my optics away.

June 12. I haven't been here since last week. Everyone else is inside chatting, and I take the opportunity to check on the phoebes. The babies now overtop the nest. They sleep the sleep of the just, sound as can be, all fuzz and a couple of beaks lifted skyward. The orange beaks are the only way to distinguish the individual birds. Otherwise, birds and nest merge together in perfect camouflage.

The parents chip, chip, chip worriedly, and I hear the gentle flutter of wings as they rush at the back of my head. I back off and set up the folding chair near the tree where the wrens burble as richly as ever.

The phoebes are not used to me, so it takes them half an hour to return to the nest to feed the nestlings. Or, rather, nestling singular, for only one lifts its head groggily from the collective stupor they are in. In the meantime I have located the nests of two pairs of robins, one aggregate of grackles (it seems that an entire colony is feeding the nestlings in one nest), a pair of wrens, and a pair of purple finches. There are three other nests that I cannot identify. Redstarts, blackbirds, orioles, killdeer, barn swallows, nuthatches, chickadees, vireos, and blue jays all call from different parts of the slough and woods. More birds unfamiliar to me rustle and sing hidden in the underbrush and the leafy tree tops.

Now that the phoebes have adjusted to my presence, it is a regular tag-team effort between the parents as they bring insects to the nest of comatose babies. I have read that often the female will not permit the male to feed the babies, but this pair shares the task easily and equitably.  They hunt from the tree branches near the nest or down by the slough.

The parents must have stuffed the babies well during the day because they do not wake and clamor for food.

With very little effort it is possible to be taken into the more-than-human rhythms of life. Patience, the willingness to move slowly, and the ability to spend some time alone go a long way. I feel lucky that all of the birds so quickly return to their work and allow me to explore quietly the edges of where they live.

Homecomings

I discovered the phoebe's nest last year.  It was under the eaves of the shed and stuffed to overflowing with four babies who stared glassily with large doe eyes.  They were just about to fledge, and the next time I went to the nest it was empty.  No one remembers seeing the phoebes before last year.

The Eastern Phoebe is a small flycatcher with a dark head and back softening in color to a buff belly.  Its tail bobs when it sits on a branch, and its "fee-bee!" call gives it its name.  Like all flycatchers, the phoebe eats insects and is often a lively presence in woodlands and along sloughs and lakes where it will sit patiently and hunt bugs.  I have spent some enjoyable times watching a phoebe poised a foot above a body of water on a branch, only to zip out repeatedly to catch insects and then return to the same perch.

The farm shed on which the phoebe built its nest was once a garage on the old farm.  Later, when the old farm site was leveled to put in a highway interchange, the shed was moved to the present farm and became a place to store the riding mower.  This year both spring and homecomings came early to Minnesota.  A daughter who lives out west returned to visit and, as always happens with this family, the merest wisp of an idea soon turned into a big plan.  One minute people were inside chatting, and the next they were swarming excitedly over the shed and plotting to turn it into a small studio for the daughter to use for her art work.  When they concentrate on a project, it is rather like watching the kids from the Charlie Brown story surrounding the sad little Christmas tree.  Arms wave exuberantly, and the ugly duckling becomes a swan.

I step back, letting the clan imagine the shed as artist's studio.  From this perspective I see two parties appropriating the shed for the future:  the humans inside bustling about and a phoebe outside inspecting last year's nest on the north wall.  Phoebes are often in regular contact with human beings due to their preference for quiet farm outbuildings as nest sites.  This phoebe likes this particular location, and it is easy to see that it satisfies her requirements for a shaded site protected from the elements.  The rim of the nest is only inches from the roofline and thus sheltered from sun, wind, and rain.  Last year's nest is a bit battered, but nothing that a new coat of mud and greenery won't fix.

As I drive back to town I am uneasy for the phoebes. A word to the artist, and she pries the old nest off the shed. We hate to do it, but that wall is slated for major demo.

Very little stops a determined bird. Within days the phoebe has rebuilt the most glorious nest. The female is usually the one who builds the nest (the male waits nearby), and this one is a beauty:  a full eight inches tall, stuck all over with little mosses and lichens, and the cup lined with fine grasses.  Our hearts sink.  We feel like the worst petty thugs as we take down the nest.

The phoebe has not laid eggs yet, but she was clearly ready to lay them.  Is it too late for her to start over?  Have we ruined the pair's chances to raise a brood this year?  Rand has an idea.  Could we convince the phoebes that the old children's playhouse adjacent to the shed is just as good as a nesting site?

First Rand removes from the shed's exterior the hardware that has provided the ledge that phoebes need to support their nests.  He then nails a small piece of wood to the corresponding place on the playhouse.  We wait.

Days later we are elated and relieved.  The phoebe has rebuilt yet again, a more modest nest this time, and soon five small white eggs appear.

She sits on the nest.