great blue heron in flight

I was in a dream when I heard my name, “The Sacramento starts in Mt. Shasta, up by where Rebeca lives.” I had fallen asleep during our tour of the rice fields only to come back to the living when I heard my name. Then I saw it on the right, I gasped. X saw it too, “there goes a great blue heron.”

At that moment I didn’t know that the great blue heron would dictate the rest of the day, rather, had already dictated the day and much of the night and perhaps the rest of my life.

encounter each other

at the outer edge of desire

with almost hopeless mercy

and a reservoir

of mutual respect

~Maria Popova

And I remembered that piece I wrote about you and a great blue heron I photographed at the Sonny Bono preserve, which was published in the Winter Tanager.  It was the only piece I’ve ever written that my mother has ever liked, she said it must have been nice for the person it had been written for. I wanted to say, I don’t think he cares one way or the other that I wrote something so nice for him.  What would X think if someone wrote such a nice piece about him and a great blue heron?

“Does anyone want to sit up front and I take the back?” I asked the passengers in the back of the truck.

“You don’t like sitting here in the front?” asked X with a tone I was not expecting, as if to say, what, you don’t like sitting next to me? The Great blue heron had spoken.

risk every safety

and every constant

for a single sunbeam

of wonder

a golden reflection

of a larger life

in the pure stream

of the possible

~Maria Popova

“I like sitting here, but I wanted to give others the chance to sit up front.” I told him. And I guess I had set the tone first, when we met the night before. I knew immediately who he was, I have been reading about him for years, admiring his work, so before he could say anything I had said, “Hi X! I was totally thinking about you on my drive down here, seeing all those red winged blackbirds, and I wondered if there were any trics among them.”

As we drove through the rice fields, we were looking for ones which were still flooded providing habitat for fall migration. “Is that one of them? The one where all the egrets are?” I asked.

X probably thought, dumb girl, she doesn’t even know what a flooded rice field looks like. “That is actually an alfalfa field.”  

The day progressed but the great blue heron had worked its medicine. At dinner time, I turned fifty, the Dodgers won the World Series in the most dramatic of ways and we walked on into the night bar-hopping until everyone left but X and I. But it was late and the bars were closing and we had to be up early so we walked back towards my hotel. I thought of a Neko Case song, City Swans

You linger just a little long,

I see your gun is drawn with the safety on

You can walk me back to my hotel like it was home.

I said he could stay so he wouldn’t have to drive back to Sacramento and be back again at 6 am. “It’s a huge room,” I said, “I can call the front desk for a cot. I have extra brand-new toothbrushes and clean t-shirts with raptors on them.”

“Thanks, but I snore when I’ve been drinking.” He said. As if I wasn’t many whiskeys in and would even notice. But perhaps he was thinking of my position and his position and how it wouldn’t be a good look, or maybe that didn’t matter one iota because then I thought of another Neko Case song, Curse of the I-5 Corridor:

Baby I’m afraid, but it’s not your fault

Maybe I should go home alone tonight

“See you in the morning for the bird walk?” He asked.

“I probably won’t make it to the walk tomorrow,” I said, “I have a friend maybe coming to visit in the morning. His schedule is crazy, so we never get to connect.”

“Okay, well, have fun with what’s his face, your friend.”

And the great blue heron bent his knees and took flight like they always do when they’ve been startled. The single sunbeam of wonder had vanished, the clock had struck 12, I turned back into a pumpkin and I knew I’d never see X again.

And you were knocking at my hotel door at 7 am like it was Sunday mass. And you left within the hour through the back door like I was sin.  The golden reflection of a larger life reduced to 45 minutes in a town off the I-5 with no ties to either one of us because there really are no ties between us just fleeting moments up and down the interstate when the planets align.

Orbit is so easy, you haven’t gained a day
We’re two self-fulfilling prophecies
Who don’t even have each other
Not that we would ever get away with it

*lyrics from City Swans by Neko Case, The Curse of the I-5 Corridor by Neko Case.

Until the hunter

I come sit at the bar and it’s already the bottom of the first, but I couldn’t get away from the office in time. It’s the Tigers @ Seattle elimination game of the ALDS. And as much as I am into the game…I see it.

As a birder, my mind is trained to see a break in pattern. As a woman, my mind is trained to find an exit and never blink.

Someone from across the restaurant was watching me.

The lady next to me, her husband and I talked while we watched the game and I discreetly watched the stranger not-so-discreetly watching me. When the room would get crowded, I’d lose sight of him and in one of those times, he was in front of me trying to get my attention: “I just came to tell you that those glasses look really good on you.”

“Thank you.” I said going back to my game, but no longer able to fully concentrate because I was watching him going back to his table and resuming his dinner. I noticed the seat next to me opened up and I thought, ‘someone come sit here before he does.’ But no one ever came and when he finished his dinner he came to sit next to me.

He wasn’t a bad looking guy at all, but kind of young…thirties maybe. I wanted to watch the game and he wanted to know all about me. And to everything I said, he would say, “it’s all perspective.” And I kept looking at him wanting to say, ‘I don’t know what the fuck that means in this context, but it’s stupid.’

He said, “are you a cat lady, huh?” He wasn’t guessing, he knew because he stared at all of me so intently when he thought I wasn’t noticing. I know he saw the cat scratches when he touched my tattoo, “do you have any more ink?”

He had one more beer and left. I was glad that had been that. But when I got up to leave some ten minutes later and came out I noticed he was lingering in the parking lot.

As a birder, my mind is trained to see a break in pattern. As a woman, my mind is trained to find an exit and never blink.

I casually walked back toward the hotel as if I needed the light to see my phone. But he intercepted me. “Hey, can I get your number so we can go to dinner sometime.”

These days, you have no out when they ask for your number because they always call it in front of you and make sure it’s ringing. When he put me in his contacts, he spelled my name correctly. Of course he did, I saw him looking at my credit card committing my name to memory when I was paying my tab.

Driving home, I kept checking my rearview mirror.

When I got home to watch the rest of the game I thought I should have been more rude and made it clear I was watching the game. I should have made it clear I wasn’t being shy or coy, I was just not interested. I should have made it clear I only like intelligent men. I should have hid my accomplishments as a single independent women and pretended I was married to some hot firefighter my age and that’s why he wasn’t there. I should have gotten up to leave when I noticed the seat next to me opened up. But why should I change who I am and what I’m doing because of some fucking man I don’t even know?

I went on to watch a crazy 15 inning game where Detroit was finally the one to blink first and lose the ALDS to Seattle, allowing a single from Polanco which brought home the winning run 3-2.

where were you when I was still kind

just a water treader

waiting on the line

How was I to know that a city I’d never been to, would have so many ghosts waiting for me. How was I to know that at this point in life that’s all there is. Ghosts.

It was the concert venue and its resemblance to The Greek Theater in LA, it was Josiah, the opening act, who talks and looks like a recent lover, it was the town, Jacksonville, Oregon next to Medford where J, a lover I still think about often, escaped to after we lost touch, it was Gregory Alan, the main act, who I have seen in the desert before. The desert I love and I’ll never see again. It was the current lover, whose ghost is kinder to me than he could ever be. It was the ghost of who I was before half a century snuck up on me. It was the ghost of my youth and immortality.

Master and Hound

Turned circus swinger

How was I to know that all those ghosts were waiting for me to bring out so much anger in me and then I thought of my lover and his lips saying “I love you” but his actions holding all disregard for me no matter how I ask.

Can you shake it up

just once for me.

your little globe just so we can see

The snow blowing around your hands

His little globe I don’t fit into.

But if you get drunk enough, you forget past and present ghosts so I walked into a bar closing the door on all of them.

~Lyrics from Master and Hound by Gregory Alan Isakov

The Horse Fire or Migratory Patterns

Friday was the seventh anniversary of the Carr Fire, and as it has been all the years I’ve lived here, a vegetation fire ignited close by. It’s as if the land remembers and its memories become hot embers which ignite a fire all over again. It happens for us, why couldn’t it happen for the land?

This time it was the Horse Fire 2 miles south of me. Air attack was quickly deployed and I watched them make drops. I started my evacuation routine, which is a list taped up in my pantry composed in order of importance, of course, depending on the time I have. It may seem silly to adhere to a script every time, but if you’ve ever had to leave everything behind in ten minutes, panic can set in and things are forgotten. I adhere to a script about everything, every time because panic always sets in. Perhaps it’s the immigrant in me.

I wasn’t here seven years ago when the Carr Fire burned this house down, but I remember the fire well as I sat in my Downtown LA condo. I would have never in a million years thought I would end up living on a Carr Fire lot, bearing witness to the resilience of the land and just how fast it would all return. I shouldn’t be surprised, we all know that ash is the best fertilizer. Our ancestors did.

All air attack was released from the Horse Fire and the fire was put out without incident. I watched the planes fly south towards the municipal airport where they’re deployed from. As the plane sounds cleared, I heard the song of my latest migrating guest on the property, an ash-throated Flycatcher. He’s so elusive, I hear him all day long, but he never let’s himself be seen by me. These days, I’m as elusive as the Ash-throated flycatcher himself. I try to get a glimpse of him just the same as I chase his song with my binoculars around the property, my older rescue Miles never once leaving my side. After I give up trying to see the flycatcher, understanding he doesn’t want to be seen, I head back inside with Miles right there with me. He seems so watchful of me that I have to ask, “What is it, Miles? Why are you taking care of me? Are you sensing something is going to happen to me? Am I going to die?”

He answers with his big watery black-button eyes, but I don’t know what he is saying.

I fucked off to Reno

And I had to leave that place

as well as that damn city

home to all the stress that

I’d bring me

So I packed my words

of lost and hurt that I made

And I fucked off to Spain

Cuz the skies are clear in Barcelona

For the first time in a long time I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night thinking about code and deadlines or fires and how it’s my fate to live with a broken heart forever.

And I’m tracing your face

With words to a page that I found on the plane

But the skies are clear in Barcelona

When you spend as much time alone as I do, you seem to forget you are a person and that you are part of the world or that you were once beautiful in that world, but my friends reminded me and we laughed so much making up for twenty years of not having laughed together and only over text. But I’m not going to lie, I feel so strange around people these days, but you would never know it.

Heading back your way

Heading back over

To that cold shoulder of Ontario

And this morning when I woke up I was ridden with anxiety and dread and vertigo, but I had to get it together because I needed to drive back. I would close my eyes and think of the picture of you, you sent me the night before and the sight of you calmed my breathing, stopped my hands from shaking and allowed me to get ready. I popped a motion sickness pill for the vertigo and I drove back home to the cold shoulder of what is now my quiet life where the skies are so clear. They’re the only thing that keeps me here.

Lyrics: Barcelona by Ten Kills the Pack

this spring migration

Just when things felt so stagnant, even the upcoming spring migration, it has managed to surprise me. Every migration is so different.

Out of five Western Bluebird eggs, four hatched and fledged last week. And as I wondered if I should clean out the nesting box, I noticed mom and dad flying over there again so I checked. They are going for round two. It made me infinitely happy to have helped bring four bluebirds into this world. And maybe there will be more now.

Black headed Grosbeaks took over my backyard so much so that I ended up taking the feeders down, there was too much going on. I never thought birdsong would come to give me anxiety, but it did. After taking down the feeders, the grosbeaks moved on in their journey towards their breeding grounds in Alaska. I had never had black headed grosbeaks. I also have a group of brown headed cowbirds in the backyard, and they kind of unnerve me with their call, which to me sounds so electronic. Like there are robots calibrating their software loudly in my backyard. And I’m also worried they are going to take over the nest of the bluebirds and force them to raise their eggs. I wish they, too, would move on. But where do Cowbirds go? I actually don’t know.

Another unprecedent flock which I now have is Cedar Waxwings. I have dozens of them eating my mulberries. They are so illusive, I’ve never quite gotten a good look at one in the wild. So I stalked them and held my breath beneath the mulberries to catch a glimpse of them, and I got a picture I was very happy with.

The hummingbird I dubbed Fearless never returned and Xeronimo is the new bully. But he’s not as territorial as Fearless was, in fact, I had one week where I couldn’t make nectar fast enough for all the hummingbirds passing through. A few Allan’s in there, too and though they are the most aggressive of the hummingbirds, they behaved.

I spend my weekends with my camera and my binoculars, and who would have ever thought that would be enough for me, to live alone amongst the animals in silence.

awaiting better conditions

We’re not having a very successful nesting season. The house finches abandoned their nest before laying any eggs and the Western Bluebird eggs should have already hatched, but haven’t. I’m still hopeful because of something I recently heard from one of my fellow Audubon Board members. She told me that if birds don’t deem conditions optimal to feed their newly-hatched chicks, they will deliberately delay the incubation process by sitting on the eggs less. But to me, conditions are optimal. I left all the leaves and grass clippings so there’s lots of bugs, and the weather, the weather is perfect. But birds know best.

I left for San Francisco and when I came back, all the hummingbirds had already moved on, and with my year-round resident Anna’s Hummingbird, Fearless, having been overthrown and exiled by the others, I’m left with no hummingbirds at all. I felt bad for Fearless, but then again, he shouldn’t have been such a bully.

Things are shifting for me and I don’t know if it’s good or if it’s bad, and I must admit I’m taking the unsuccessful nesting events as foreshadowing. It would have put me at ease some to see that the property is still a thriving ecosystem generating life and promise.

Things are getting strange, but like the birds, I’ll lay low and sit it out until conditions around me are better, and if I have to move on like the Finches who left a fully built nest for something better, then I, too, shall move on.

Today, I am an Imprinted Bird

I woke up feeling ruined and unwanted having been touched by the wrong hands. Like a baby bird who has been bird-napped and put back, and its parents shun it for the rest of its life because it’s been tainted by the smell of humans. Imprinted. Incapable of living a proper bird life again. Unable to love your own kind, unable to hunt for food, in some cases even unable to fly because you grew up around humans. Even though the belief that just touching a bird alienates it from all birdkind forever more has been debunked because birds don’t have a keen sense of smell–except for Turkey Vultures–today, with me, the myth stands. I am that imprinted bird. Ruined, tainted and unwanted.

I was imprinted by a lover who took me though he knew he couldn’t keep me. It didn’t matter to him that for years of his enjoyment, I would be ruined. I suspect he thought me devoid of feelings and figured it wouldn’t matter much to me if he condemned me to a life of solitude. And most days, I’m fine with my destiny. But sometimes the pain that comes with the absence of him sneaks up on me no matter who is in my life, like invisible hands open my chest and rip my heart out. My chest caves and I can’t breathe and I start to cry. No, lover, I am not devoid of feelings. I never was. You just wanted me to be.

And now I’m an imprinted bird and today I feel it in a big way so I went to the bar to cheer myself up and the power went out.

I made more sugar water instead

I dreamed a little dream not even worth dreaming. Made my own pretty hate machine and made more sugar water…for the humming birds, that is. Boys on my left side, boys on my right side, and you’re not here. Not here, like spring isn’t here but wanting to but giving in to Winter because even love birds must sign prenups, darling. The birds are anxious, they are mating, building nests and just when it warms up, we get a storm again. I thought the storms were over so I planted some citrus trees. Three days later it snowed. ‘I sent them to their death,’ I thought. It turns out they survived.

I have a war of hummingbirds outside my window and in my head, and it gives me great pleasure to witness the bully hummer, Fearless, be dethroned after several years. It took an army, led by another Anna’s Hummingbird I have dubbed Jeronimo. He has face markings which look like war paint. War paint he needed to defeat Fearless. Jeronimo, Serafina and a few other Anna’s females have taken over the feeders and fight Fearless every time he goes to a feeder. Lola the cat and I watch.

Everyone is excited about the Big Bear Eaglets and I’m happy so many people are so invested, but I want to warn them. I have seen it a thousand times on bird cams and in real life. I’ve had to clean out so many dead birds from Western Bluebird nesting boxes. And some folks felt so stupid for crying and being sad when E1 died. I have cried and gone into depressions after birds I watch on bird cams die, many times. It’s okay to care so much about the birds even if they could give a shit about you, I’ve made a life of it just fine.

To be honest, I’m not ready for spring though the birds and the boys and the bears and the blooms all are.

the demands of the season

Every sunrise he sits atop the burned digger pine and screams the screams of a desperate lover. He screams so loud, it wakes me even with the double-paned windows. After a while, the subject of his pleads flies to sit next to him and they fly away together, the red of their underwings disappearing into the blue sky.

“It looks like we’re gonna have Flickers nesting on the property this year,” I tell the dogs.

To me, I say, “well, it’s that time when everything feels the need to find a mate.”

And I’m no different than the birds who feel the demands of the season except I never do anything about it because there is no one I like. But this time, since I’m allowing myself to dream another dream after that one bad situation, there is someone I kind of like. But a dream is all it is. I would never act on it, and neither will he. He just circles me as a Turkey vulture circles a dying doe. “What are you running from?” I ask him noticing he never stops circling.

So he tells me his inner most yearnings like the Northern Flicker does every morning at my tree, and I listen.

“What are your demons?” He asks me. I laugh. “Oh, I have them.” And I stop there because it’s not a conversation to be had where we are, and we’ll never see each other anywhere else so the conversation ends there. I would be lying to you if I didn’t admit that I’m really attracted to him and that nature is kicking, but I’ll let it pass and live vicariously through my birds, watch them fall in love and build nests. I will go on all spring and summer monitoring their nests and turning over the data. And that will be that.