Cabin Journal

Not So Nice Nature

I was sitting on the back porch at the cabin, delighting in the sound of the hummingbirds that had just returned. They were zooming all around me, their tiny engines revved, when I saw two of them fighting in the air, locked in combat. These small, brazenly colored and feisty birds never fail to entrance me, but when they brought their fight to the ground, I was reminded that nature is not all cute and charming antics but can be a fight for survival.

One of the males was on top of the other (below), with its sharp beak pointed into the other’s head, while the other struggled to get free. This must have gone on for at least 10 minutes, enough time for me to make two separate trips to grab my binoculars and camera. Watching them close up, I was convinced the dominant one was going to kill the other one, and I could no longer watch the flailing, helpless body of the victim, so I left. But when I came back out about 10 minutes later, both had gone.

What likely had happened was some kind of battle over territory or females. When the stronger hummingbird subdued the weaker one, the strongly delivered message was something like: stay away from my territory and away from my female.

Later that afternoon, a friend and I were hiking on the Fern Lake trail in the park, next to the Big Thompson River, full with snowmelt. On our way back, across the creek I spotted what looked like a large white fern straddled against the tree. Then I saw a pile of bleached bones nearby and realized the fern was actually a rib cage dangling from the pine.

There’s a plausible explanation for this. After mountain lions kill their prey, they stash them in a place hidden from view and not easily accessible to other meat eaters—the branches of a tree work well. A deer is too much to eat at one time, so the cougar drags the carcass up to the higher branches and returns for several meals.  When it’s sated itself, the birds and rodents descend, and when they’re done, the insects will eat what’s left, until finally what remains is just the stark white bones.

It all makes sense, and yet the sight of the dangling rib cage in the dark woods, next to the swiftly moving creek, is haunting, another example of how nature swiftly and heedlessly does what’s necessary to survive.

That night, I heard a coyote across the valley. It sounded like a young one yipping, alone, because no other coyotes echoed its cries. Maybe it was just the mood I was in, but I imagined that its parents had abandoned it or maybe been killed, and this youngster had to fend for itself.

Or maybe that cry just reflected the pain of a world that sometimes seems heartless and cruel.

Spring Blows in on a Wing and a Breeze

I arrived this week at the cabin to find pasqueflowers sheathed in ice and crumpled over in some posture of resignation (below). They had been buried under 28.5 inches of snow that got dumped two weeks ago. Unfortunately, I wasn’t here to witness the storm, but when I arrived a week later, I could barely get in my front door because of the huge piles of snow that had accumulated and slid down from the roof.

I thought then that the ground-hugging purple flowers, the ones that herald spring, had met their natural end, but I hadn’t counted on their resiliency. They must contain some kind of natural de-icer or maybe it’s the fine silky hairs that insulate them. As the sun warmed the ground, the flowers revived, a little battered and worn, but with their heads held high.

In the mountains, early spring has arrived in some kind of rush, everything returning all at once. The South St. Vrain Canyon Creek, all winter an embarrassing trickle in the huge channel created after the 2013 floods, has now become a full-fledged stream, rightfully taking its place among the canyon walls.

On the Twin Owls trail, the usually hard rocky ground is squishy and soft, a perfect sponge for new vegetation, although the new ferns prefer the protection and shade of boulders. Seedheads dangle from the aspen branches (above), and the small creeks are running—clear signs of spring. These streambeds are empty nine months of the year, and only come to life in spring as water finds its way from the top of the peak down through the creases in the earth, some of them just a low patch of grass. These are rivulets of water that you could step across, not the huge churning rivers, so their sounds are intimate, soft and melodious rather than roaring and fearsome.

I can’t think of a nicer sound, unless it’s sweet trill of the house wrens that just arrived. Two weeks ago I first noticed the white and gray swallows, when they were doing their aerial dances in the side yard as I sat at my computer; last week I heard my first hummingbird and frogs. In the background now are the soft rushing sounds of Tahosa and Cabin creeks, full enough with snowmelt that I can hear them from the cabin, running fast and brown.

All winter, I wait for these tangible signs of spring, but when I went out one morning to greet the day and view the massive white block of Mount Meeker, I felt something else, something less solid, something that aroused all my senses and put me in a spring mood more than the creeks or frogs or swallows. It was a warm breeze, not the fierce winds of winter, but something soft; it spoke of ease, of relaxing instead of fighting the weather. I could put away my winter jacket and the snow shovel, uncover the back picnic table, do nothing but sit on the front porch and take a deep breath. I'm on easy street now.