First it was the Trumpeter Swans in Yellowstone, something fascinating and familiar about the erotic curve of their elongated necks and the graceful way they used them to reach submerged river grasses without moving their bodies. And then the slow, sensual way those bodies wobbled and swayed in the water as they tread beneath the surface with their feet to loosen more vegetation.
One crisp, sunny September day I sat with the camera for an hour on a bank along a secluded oxbow enjoying the beauty and tranquility of the scene before me, a pair of Trumpeters working their way downstream as they fed, snow-capped peaks in the background, miles removed from bustling park roads, seemingly generations removed from bleating politicians.
Next came the Salt River Merlin that inexplicably became an “appointment” bird though the species had been one of the few raptors that had avoided my camera pretty much throughout my birding life. A wild, half savage man of deep forests in Arthurian lore, “Merlin” suggests magic and malice in a complementary package of wisdom and power. The raptor on the Salt, apparently a young female of the Taiga subspecies, seemed familiar with the legend
For three mornings in a row I photographed her as she arrived, as if on cue at sunrise, and then made forays out over the mats of Mosquito Fern on the water’s surface where dragonfly pairs were ovipositing. I marveled at her success rate as she returned more often than not to a favored perch atop a cottonwood snag with Blue-eyed Darners in her talons, proceeding to eat them the same way every time, head first, shucking their wings to the wind. These were mornings lost in the moment, a field birder’s fever dream, not a political thought in mind.
Then it was on to the elusive Yellow-throated Warbler, astonishingly beautiful in the contrast of black mask and golden throat, tantalizing in the singularity of its vagrant migration amidst the horde of expected Yellow-rumpeds, so many time zones and biomes removed from its normal wintering grounds. Recency bias be damned, this interloper to our desert palms and mesquites could arguably be North America’s most stunning warbler.
I spent the better part of a week, sunrise to lunchtime, pacing, chasing, and glassing an area the size of a playing field, catching fleeting and mostly unsatisfactory glimpses of our peripatetic but retiring visitor, constantly harassed as it was by the Yellow-rumpeds. Until one morning, just at sunrise, it magically materialized right in front of me on a palm frond. Ten seconds, one frame. The very essence of what it means to be a birder.
And for the finale, a week before the cultural inflection point of the century, we were sequestered in the warm, humid breezes of south Texas where the transparent border and the incessant rattling of the spectacular Green Jays are always reminiscent to me
of the tropics. Plumage and personality make these jays the best reason for a birder’s quick trip to the Lower Rio Grande Valley.
On our last afternoon as I sat on a waterhole, I was privileged to watch a family of Green Jays coming, going, squabbling, and establishing hierarchy, all culminated in one landing on a foraging Javelina’s back and beginning to pick off parasites. The camera was busy, I was enthralled, and the impending denouement of a decade of cultural discontent never crossed my mind.
I do my homework, I vote, I feel my humanity, but I refuse any guilt about carrying a camera to the river instead of a protest sign to a rally. Maybe back in the day, but
I’m in my third act now. I’ve played my part for my species, but now I’m studying other species. Now I’m just celebrating this birding life. If America is not as great as the vision we had of it sixty years ago, I’ll find my peace on an oxbow’s edge.