Cabin Journal

My Failure as a Bird Watcher

    By the standards of most bird watchers, I’m not very good. I don’t have a life list, and I refuse to drive 100 miles to see a rare gull that has been blown 600 miles off course, just so I can say I saw it.
     In fact whenever I’ve tried to chase down reports of rare birds, I’ve never found them. Instead, I always found something else, something that proves to be more interesting and amazing. I’m firmly of the opinion that you can’t really search for birds, that the best thing you can do is be in the right place at the right time and sit back and see what happens.
     Two weekends ago, a friend and I were driving around looking for birds that have recently landed in Boulder County on their migration routes, but we were coming up empty-handed. In Eldorado State Park, we were told that a prairie falcon couple were nesting on Redgarden Wall, which we could see from the Fowler Trail on the opposite side of the canyon. Hiking up the trail, we saw a lot of climbers but failed to find the falcons’ nest or any sign of them. Instead, what we saw were swifts, one of the fastest birds in the world, hundreds of them flying above the canyon.

    The more we watched, the greater numbers we saw, so at times they resembled a sea of gnats, so thick you could hardly see the sky behind them. When we sat down to watch them, the sky was full as they circled round and round the deep canyon in great, sweeping arcs, while the canyon echoed with their chirring noises. It was one of the most spectacular bird events I’ve ever seen—and totally unexpected. 
     At the cabin, I’ve been watching a house wren (above and below) that had its nest here last summer, in a birdhouse on a fence just five feet or so from where I sit, on the other side of the window, working at my laptop. From my unique “perch,” I’m able to watch the comings and goings of this bird and see bird behavior that most people don’t get to observe, as well as hear its beautiful song, unless you have a bird nest in your backyard and you can sit for hours and watch.
    For the past two weeks, I’ve been watching it sing on its perch, and assumed it was singing for a mate. I even worried that it wasn’t attracting one. But Wednesday I saw a second wren stick its head out from the birdhouse, and then I saw the two of them flying off and bringing back dried stalks of grass to construct a nest. I’m happy, because the cycle of life that happens every spring has begun again.
That’s my kind of bird watching.

Coming Home

    When I got back from Scotland, Boulder’s spring seemed a pale imitation of the lushness of Great Britain where, in mid-April, all the fruit trees were flowering and daffodils covered whole hillsides. As a tree lover, I am in awe of Britain’s trees, which are three to four times the size of Colorado’s, with huge, spreading limbs that form canopies over parks or, more romantically, over numerous churchyards where gravestones from the 16th and 17th century are covered with moss and lichens (below). In comparison, the crabapple tree in my front yard, which lost most of its blossoms this year to our late snowfall, seems thin and paltry. 
     It took me a few weeks to get my head turned around to where I was seeing once again the Boulder I love. I kept wanting to go back to Scotland, to its rugged coastline and castles and old fishing villages, now tourist towns, that seemed so far removed from the real world. I wanted to absorb all that sweet humidity.  
    When I went to my mountain cabin last week, I followed spring up the from the plains, where the trees are turning green and the fields are thick with new grass; to St. Vrain Canyon, where the aspens are just starting to leaf out; to the high mountain valleys, where the snows still deeply cover the high peaks. In the yard around my cabin the grass is just starting to emerge and the pasqueflowers, those wonderful harbingers of spring, are like small purple lanterns among last year’s leaves and pine needles (below). 
    Compared to Great Britain, spring in the Rocky Mountains is thin, a tender reed among much harshness. On Friday morning, snow was being blown from the top of Mount Meeker, even while the sun was shining. Yet spring’s fragile hold hasn’t prevented the wildlife from returning. This week, the house wren that took up residence last spring in the bird nest near the side of the house was singing his heart out. Nuthatches were climbing up and down the ponderosas. I saw chipmunks, ground squirrels, even the dark Abert’s squirrel in the front yard. But most amazing to me now are the frogs.
     Water is running everywhere, in places I’ve never seen it before, as all the snow on the high peaks melts. I found little streams coming down the hillsides, running alongside the road and forming watercourses in the meadows. Taking advantage of all this water, the frogs seem to be everywhere, trilling their hearts out.
     In Scotland, aside from the hundreds of birds, there is little wildlife, most of it exterminated in favor of the sheep who rule the land. Recently, attempts have been made to reintroduce otters, and there is talk of bringing back beavers, wiped out more than 400 years ago by those who wanted its fur. Yet here in Colorado, and most of the West, we have beavers, mink, porcupine, deer, elk, moose, bobcats, mountain lions and bears. We have wildness here, real wilderness.
    At the cabin, the moon was full and I walked out and down the road  at night to listen to the frogs. During my two weeks in Scotland, I never heard frogs. But here they filled the valley, sent their ripples from end to end. And from the other side of the valley I heard the call of a screech owl.  And I remembered what I loved about Colorado: that we haven’t domesticated the mountains but have been able to keep human intervention to a minimum, that we have deliberately set aside places where animals and nature are protected. That there’s still wilderness.

The Beauty of Reality

    

 

    

    Traveling, like life, is never what you expect.
    I just came back from a two-week trip to Scotland, a place I had wanted to visit for a long time. All the pictures in glossy photo books and calendars showed a place that was wild, almost unearthly, like nothing I had ever seen: intensely green hills with nothing to break the green except for a castle or the ruins of a church, often enshrouded in mists. It looked improbably romantic.
    And yet my first look at those hills, from Loch Lomond north of Glasgow, showed brown hills, not green, and even worse, hills that had been shorn of their trees. I could see the evidence in front of me: pockets of trees in the creases of the hills, places where logging operations couldn’t get to easily. In the next week, I saw even worse: clearcutting where the stumps and waste products were left on the hills, a barren wasteland devoid of any life. And this was on the island of Skye, in the inner Hebrides, a place described by travel writers as enchanting, with the highest peaks in Great Britain.
    One should never believe the images on postcards. I knew that, yet this went beyond mere distortion, emphasizing the beauty over the plain.  We were lucky enough to stay one night in a B&B that had its own small library, including one (the title of which I’ve forgotten) that seemed intent on debunking some of the myths about Scotland (many of those myths involve the bravery of the Scots against the English, but that’s another story).
    Scotland was once covered by a huge forest, the Caledonian forest. I had read that before, but I didn’t know that, once the forest had been razed for lumber, it was kept that way by the thousands of sheep brought to the island to be raised for their wool and food. In the process, not only were trees the victims, but thousands of people (known as crofters) were pushed off their land, so the gentry could use the land more profitably to raise sheep. 
     When we were there, it was lambing season on Skye, and there were sheep everywhere. I fell in love with the sheep, who have a sweetness about them. But sheep eat everything, even the shoots of new trees, and those long, unbroken expanses of green everywhere are not bits of wilderness but the direst result of sheep eating everything and everywhere. 
    And yet, once I accepted the fact that this wasn’t the place I imagined it to be, that there wouldn’t be men in kilts playing bagpipes on every corner, I started seeing Scotland for what it was: the amiable sheep, almost comical in their thick fur and skinny legs, with lambs running on the boulder-strewn slopes; green hillsides dissected by old stone walls and the occasional iconic whitewashed house; and the ocean penetrating deep into the land, fingers of water that went on for miles. I found harbor towns that were beautiful beyond anything I imagined, that spectacularly faced the sea and rows of almost hidden islands. Reality sucks, according to the bumpersticker, but it also opens your eyes and your heart.

Photos starting from top: northwest corner of Isle of Skye; Portree, Isle of Sky; cemetery near Broadford, Isle of Skye; sheep on Isle of Skye; and, below: on the road to Elgol, Isle of Skye; and Eilean Donan Castle on Loch Duich.