Golden Crows
I know this blog is supposed to be about birds, but I haven’t been birding lately. I’ll start again once the migration begins. In the meantime, I’ve been writing about other things. My new article in Norther Beat News is about placer mining. Sticking with the theme – gold – I include a shot of a crow in the golden evening light (mirrored) that I especially like. Sometimes, the light is just right.
Leaving the present, and terrible, international situation for a bit. Thinking of more pleasant things….
For us, going to the tropics has been out of the question for the past two years-like a lot of people, I guess. Darn pandemic! We’ve certainly missed those evening breezes coming off the Caribbean, and the smells of Latin-American food being cooked down the beach somewhere. One night, in desperation, we even watched that Jeff Bridges movie from the 80’s, the one shot at Isla Mujeres and Tulum. We ordered in Mexican food, drank a few bottles of Sol, and had fun picking holes in the plot. Still, it’s not quite the same.
At least, I can rummage through my pictures of tropical birds. These are from Costa Rica, from the Cloud Forest at Monte Verde. The more observant reader might notice that not all images are of birds. Well, any port in a mountaintop storm.
On that trip, V and I spent a few nights at a lodge near the Cloud Forest Reserve. Our driver, on his first run ever, checked google maps, and picked what was likely the worst road in the region to get us there. When we arrived an hour or so after the regular van, we were as well-shaken as a protein drink. Later on, we took a (guided) jungle walk at night, which came complete with tarantulas, little rivers of Leaf-cutter Ants, a ghostly Olingo high in the trees, and sleeping Trogons.
The next night was so windy that we thought the roof of our bungalow was going to blow off. At dinnertime, we huddled in our puffer jackets eating pasta and drinking Red Tapir Ale, thinking fondly of the beach we’d left behind at Playa Hermosa. Our birding tour of the Cloud Forest almost didn’t happen-the guide being afraid that jungle trees might fall on us. In spite of rain and wind, however,we ventured out and ‘got’ our ‘target birds – the Resplendent Quetzal and one of the loudest birds in the world, the Three-Wattled Bellbird (hard to see, but easy to hear).
Cloud Forest Night
The Dancing Men
****************
They have faded into the valleys,
Those Kings who sipped
the thin mountain air
like gods.
Only we, the
Dancing Men remain in the high city,
waiting, waiting
for our own Gods to release us.
Prisoners still, we linger
on these misty pathways above the clouds.
MC 2001/2022
*The Dancing Men are 300 or so stone carvings of captives at the ancient Zapotec city of Monte Alban. Most look contorted, as if tortured and mutilated, and are thought to represent captives, most likely of high rank. Unfortunately, I can’t find the pictures I took of them.
Just wanted to share my article about the Nechako River in northern British Columbia, and actions by local First Nations to restore this historic waterway. I spent many years living on, or near, the Nechako, and have a great affection for this beautiful river.
I’ve spent a lot of time searching for the Glaucous Gull. This Arctic visitor shows up on the west coast semi-regularly, but I just could never seem to, as Owen Wilson says in The Big Year “nail that sucker.” And I’ve really tried, really tried. I’ve gone to windswept Oregon beaches in January, landfills in March, Goldstream River with its spawned-out salmon lots of times. I followed up every report, within reason. I even spent the better part of a day at a sewage lagoon in Duncan, afraid to leave, but punished for staying, if you know what I mean. My reference picture might have been part of the problem–it’s possible.
In any case, I finally caught up with the culprit at Goldstream, the place where I had tried so many times before. indeed, the first bird I saw when I pulled up to park was the Glaucous Gull! The river was very high, drowning the more recent remains of spent Chum and Coho, and keeping all gulls close to the picnic area. My young bird was tugging hopefully at an almost bare fish skull, and getting very little sustenance from it, or so it appeared.
I must say that the bird didn’t closely resemble my reference pic except, maybe, for the beak, so I couldn’t really be faulted. That’s what I’m telling myself, anyway!
Finding my bird, after so many failed attempts, had a curious effect. The marvellous sense of birding adventure that consumed me when, six of seven years ago, I rejoined the hobby had suddenly returned. I even posted a picture of the subject on my bulletin board! So, although it took awhile – “thanks Pal!”
Garafraxa
exhales dolomite,
the dusk-deepening, stone breaths
of this steel-hard species of limestone,
where
Hart’s Tongue and rare orchids
survive in the cracks and crevices
of coral reefs marooned,
ages and ages past.
Of pre-things left behind
Now,
dampened under northern light,
and broken by northern ice.
I’ve seen limestone in other places,
hotter places,
where the rock
blazes white beneath the sun.
Pharaohs used to plate their tombs with limestone
pyramids made white-bright with limestone
you could go blind from that limestone;
no one ever went blind from dolomite.
The Garafraxa Road loops over the old reefs,
a ragged ridge of tomb-grey skeletons,
once swarming stuff
that hated winter and hated ice
waiting, without patience, until the poles move
little by little,
hoping,
perhaps, that
when all of us are gone,
the warm oceans will return
to drown these fields
where, for a hundred years,
farmers’ children stooped a thousand, million times
to fill stone boats,
to build stone fences,
around their Garafraxa farms.
I had a friend once, killed by dolomite.
He fell, and a great squared tower stone
fell after him, and crushed him.
In those casual days
such things happened more often,
Towers built by forgotten men
to burn rock
into lime,
abandoned,
square towers made of blocks
of dolomite,
all loosened through age,
standing like castles.
Richard, climbing there in the evening, alone.
His father tied him to a wide plank, I heard,
and, harnessed to it, dragged his son home
desperate against death, long ago.
Afterwards,
stonemasons took those towers down
to save other boys from falling
the fatal blocks cut up and used,
no doubt,
for tombstones,
in the cemeteries,
along the Garafraxa Road.
MC 2021
The window sashes, once eggshell white,
have faded to cracked and curdled cream.
Memories of Moorish Spain
sleep in the peaks and arches of these windows,
now softened by time and the Caribbean salt air.
Likewise, the stuccoed walls,
tagged with graffiti,
assaulted by lianas and ficus,
have crumbled in places.
The gate of sapote wood gleams darkly solid
In the bright Mexican morning,
while an aggressive sun bleaches the lesser wood to spectral gray.
Not long for this world, this old queen of the avenue
Succubi of broken masonry and twisted rebar surround her,
ravenous building lots, chewing up the old ways
and disgorging money.
She waits her turn, a still substantial ghost,
one of the walking dead, so to speak,
half-hidden by those walls
with their cascades of bougainvillea—
scarlet, foam-white, shocking pink.
The polished gate still protects one sanctuary,
a vain hope,
like the studded door to an tenth-century English abbey
surrounded by Vikings.
Then, from within, an antique lock clashes,
the massive gate trembles and opens.
Two Maya women in embroidered huipils exit and open their parasols
The elder, her hair wound in a tight bun,
wears a heavy gold necklace and pendant earrings.
A shawl of watered olive silk loops under her right arm
and across her left shoulder.
A heavy jade bracelet flashes green on the arm of her daughter-companion,
Reminders of an earlier time,
these two,
Like nobility, taking in the morning air, on their way
to church, perhaps,
towards the clanging bell.
While,
elsewhere along the avenue,
bars and cafes rattle open,
and construction workers
buy their breakfast from bicycle carts.
MC, 2001
Remember
when the lightning
sent you down
the Great Pyramid at Cobá,
and a hard tropical rain obliterated
everything, even the jungle.
A real tempest, that one.
Thunder loud enough to crack stone,
Lightning too,
flashing through the black nimbus
like a semaphore
opening and closing,
light under dark, light under dark
We ran shivering
from the old VW
into a café
with too much window
and too much draft,
Remember
To the east,
the trailing light of shooting stars
and the pale rind of the beach
we can scarcely see each other,
talking philosophy, or some nonsense
enjoying the last of the day’s heat,
up to our necks in the lake
above us, spirits of spangled water
and deeply-rifted space,
one softly dark entity
keeping pace with the Summer Triangle.
With Vega, Altair, Deneb
Only here,
this planet, this place
In all the universe.
Right Now.
Gosh, the things you think about
Swimming at night, beneath the stars,
At Sauble
MC July 22, 2021
Butchart Gardens is famous, and it’s one of Victoria’s premier attractions. But I knew of the Butcharts long before I came west. The Butchart mansion on 5th Avenue in Owen Sound, Ontario, was a block away from my boyhood home. It had, maybe still has, an indoor swimming pool. I remember once tramping through the snow to the front door in the hopes that I might sell a subscription to the Toronto Telegram.
Even after many, many years, I can still remember smelling chlorine through the half-open door. I probably wondered what living in a real mansion would be like. To be able to take a swim at home rather in the the minuscule YMCA pool – that would be something! Of course, it probably wouldn’t have worked very well in our 2 bedroom apartment behind the factory, but I would have been up for a try. Incidentally, I don’t believe I sold a subscription. Nor did I ever see the inside of the grand house. The Butchards, I think, were long gone anyway.
The Butchard Mansion
Even then though, I knew about the Butchard Gardens, later called The Martins. They were a few miles out of town at Balmy Beach. It was a long bike ride for a 12 year old so I never got there. I hadn’t yet heard of the west coast version. No reason I should.
A few years ago, I finally visited The Martins. It was May. I was birding along the cobbley Georgian Bay shoreline and then, almost accidentally, I was there, walking among the ruins of a grand idea from another time. Half of the real estate had been stripped way by winter ice and freak high water, the there was more recent damage. Winter storms on the Great Lakes can be fierce.
Winter’s Fallout – The Martins, Georgian Bay
About the Butcharts. The brothers, Robert and David, were born in Owen Sound in the 19th century. They ran a hardware store on what is now Main Street (2nd Avenue East), and ranked among the town’s “contemporary and go-ahead merchants”. Solid, likely Presbyterian, moderately well-off. Then they found that marl from a nearby lake bed could be converted into cement, a product in great demand in Canada’s developing industrial heartland. The discovery was huge. Soon, the Owen Sound Portland Cement Company was making some of the best cement in the country. They also shipped the product in bags rather than barrels. This innovation made the Butchards wealthy.
Marly, no longer industrial, Shallow Lake
Rich now, Robert built the mansion with indoor swimming pool on 5th Avenue and lived there until he and Jennie left for the west in 1904. His brother David stayed in Owen Sound and built something grand too. I’m not sure which of the imposing west side Owen Sound houses was his. Jennie, of course, created the Gardens at Tod Inlet near Victoria, BC, but David also created a Butchart Gardens at Balmy Beach on Georgian Bay. I wonder about this family obsession with ‘Gardens’, and where the idea came from.
The Martins
In any case, the Owen Sound establishment, with its Italian Garden, Sunken Garden, tennis courts, swimming pool, and many other features, was an important tourist attraction until, one winter, unusually heavy lake ice carved away a big chunk of the property. After Hurricane Hazel destroyed much of the rest, the Gardens were finished.
It rained while I was there. Forlorn, a strange, almost haunted legacy of what was once one of the country’s largest cement fortunes, it seemed the last glimmer of the Jazz Age world of the 1920’s. I suspect the property has now been developed; it certainly looked ‘ripe for the picking’. I’ll check on it next time I’m ‘home’. Since this blog is about birds, well, I saw only one on the property, a Common Merganser. The sun flashed out for a millisecond and lit him up, and then it started to pour.
Bird Noetz 