Santa Cruz Island (at Scorpion)
From February 15 through the 23 I was on the California coast taking stills, video and making recordings of wildlife. I acquired a great deal of material, the product of which will be either heard on my segment of Living on Earth or posted here at Salt Marsh Diary over the next 5 or 6 months (it will take that long to write everything that needs to be written, and to edit sound and images). Of this work, the most concentrated and unusual material by far comes from Channel Islands National Park, this year celebrating its 30th anniversary. To say these islands are “gems” is to tarnish them: No diamond, no sapphire or emerald ever shone this bright. You will find a small sample of what I saw below. This is just a quick survey, but feel free to share your thoughts.
Mark Seth Lender March 1, 2010
Elephant Seal Combat [males]
Coming this week: Juvenile Elephant Seal; Elephant Seal Threat Vocalization [female]; Channel Islands Fox
And MORE: Photographs of Southern Sea Otter taken well north of the Channel Islands in and around Elkhorn Slough, Monterey Bay.
Mountain Bluebird, wings beating time, follows the wire down the line. Her flight, a path that plies just above the barbs with which (in our pedestrian desire) we strive to set apart, cedar from silage; sweet corn from forest mosses; Nature from what we nurture: Untamed darkling wood, ungovernable rocks and rills from cows and fields in crop or fallow as they should. We divide. But when it comes to Mountain Bluebirds, Temperance on the vine, we consign what Bluebird seeks to find, nest boxes, arranged every twenty poles like pulses like hollows of the human heart.
Bluebird has come to depend upon our hand this to provide. Vindictive as we are against what is unkempt, our dread, our fell hand bringing the woods to their knees with two-man saw and chain saw. But insects still abound in the clearing and beyond at the green edge of what survives. And Bluebirds thrive.
Bluebird at the cross fence convenes with caution. First to the bleached twig with its empty pinecone. Then to the twisted pair of tines, shining, galvanized against weather sure to arrive. Though pressed by shortness of season, Bluebird hesitates. In her beak are beetles, cracked fluorescein green and crushed violet blue (though their legs and sometimes wings motor on in dumb refusal to the truth). She waits. Then comes to rest on a lichen-crusted tree, gray and yellow-green, unintended compliment to her cyan-washed Cerulean. She pauses. But now her Significant Other stands nearby, her guard and her decoy (Her muted hues a non-compete against his feathered lightning). Like a bolt from the blue he grabs that sprig of mullein just off to the side, it sways as he lands, his tail spread wide. He stretches his wings. Surveys the scene three-sixty degrees and while the world eyes the bright light of him… quick to the nest, she tips in.
Only two babies inside but they make quick work of the parcel she brings. No murmurings of motherhood (work is all she sees in them). Nor has she come for adult conversation: Through all her going, and coming, not one small word between her and him. She exits unceremoniously. He watches, his interest his only admonition. Fending off from the lip she launches into thin blue air, that collect call of the wild, answered in mime, quick-time, with care. Bluebird toes the line!
January 23rd, 2010 in
Spring |
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Upon Reflection I
In the glass-calm morning the wading birds come walking, with their long feet talking, tickling at the bottom as they stop, then stride. In robes of whitest garment, like supplicants seeking salvation, for a eucharist of fishes they abide, and the crucifying beak as yellow as their eyes. Upon the glistening surface, in the rose-red rising, of the sun still yawning, their impervious reflection is transparent as a sigh.
They lean forward as if listening. Do they hear the creatures whispering? Through the ripples that are glistening like the sin of pride? The milli-peded seaworms, over weed and rock and sponges, toward the bright and deadly shallows, ticking as they glide? Now the White Bird hunches over plains of wave-ridged sandspars, where the underwater shadows are no cover for what hides. Pity them, the White Bird harrows towards the bottom like an arrow there will be no tomorrow where the long shaft drives.
In the dead of morning, when the dawn comes yawning, with her lids shut tightly still the pink light blinds. In the season of departure, in the dulled heat spawning, when ibis, and osprey toward the south’rd drive, does the White Bird think of leaving? When she does will there be grieving or joy among the heathen? In their low and caste-out corners where they lie, are they mob or are they mourners? Does their anger rise in chorus, do they love life or deplore it as they die? Oh the sea worms struggle madly, the crustaceans clicking sadly, do the flat fish give in gladly when their troubles subside? Do they kiss the claw that grabbed them? Is it vengeance that will have them? Is it justice or bloodlust they take in stride? Will the beauty of beholding be denied?
From tall grass egrets watching see the equinox approaching through the storm clouds’ broken awning, over ragged seas. What is Great Egret thinking? Is he tearing or just blinking as he sees the fishes shrinking from his rough and throaty cry? The irrelevance of martyrs, Great the Egret who is smarter, the ruffling of the fletching as his great wings rise, into the faded rainbow of the sky.
Did creation blunder? Is it god or only thunder? Will it pass or blast asunder? We contemplate and wonder at a rising tide. Will it carry us or drown us, who will witness, as we flounder? Is it dust or is it ardor the soul inscribes, in the end all magnificence is lies, in the end only Nothingness survives; cleave to the sight beyond your eyes.
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Author’s NOTE: The above piece, and the one following are based on the same observations but presented in very different styles. I would especially like to read your reactions to either or both, and why. Please leave your comments. Thank you! - Mark Seth Lender
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Upon Reflection II
White as the whitest China porcelain Great Egret strides down the giddy shore, the waves chuckling and tickling at her long-toed feet. She steps, and stops, and seems to contemplate though the depths are not deep but callow. Every morning when the tide is just so, flat calm and low enough to wade (yet water enough to shade her presence from those who would avoid her) she appears. With a snap, the feathered parasols she dangles one on each arm lift and carry her there, and there. Each sentry point divines another edible. Each day just after dawn a different comestible (depending on season and heat and phases of the moon). Each time the inshore waters hold a different guest each varied quest (depending if you swim or if you stand) ending in fear, or satisfaction.
Plunk!
Another seaworm meets his Maker, though he twists and writhes, his millipeded appendages tractoring against the terrifying air.
Clip!
Sanddab scissored between the yellow blades of Egret’s bill will settle in the sand no more, his paired and flattened eyes at the limit of their floundering.
Clunk!
The hard casing of crustacean caught in his glassine shell, antennae streaming, the muffled screaming now only a bloating in that long white throat which no one else can hear…
Great Egret (the common wisdom goes) kills only because she can. Not self-aware. Soulless as the Homunculus of Prague, quo dam, she no more looks at her reflection than it regards her. That in the still and perfection of late afternoon only Gravity knows copy from original. Is it true? That Egret is merely simulacrum, an automaton of computation all Ones and O’s or at most the random alphanumeric of genetic code? Blind as a punch card, life not striding but only stumbling out the everlasting door? And of the fish? What streets of current, what corridors of seaweed does he navigate? What citadels built of thermocline and halocline does he understand? Or is “Fish: Swim-swim-swim.; Fish: Swim-swim-swim,” the constant compass that directs him, unknowing of Her who will kill him.
Stab! Grab!
A wayward Tautog, the mottling of his skin mauve and raw umber exactly as the chiaroscuro of bottom weed and patchy light where he lives and breathes - done in - by skill and speed and a voracious tenacity that will eat, him, whole.
Kneeling and grabbing or leaping and jabbing all comes to the inevitable plunge, the harpoon still hot from the gun, expunging on almost every strike whatever thing Great Egret sees that’s fit to swallow. What wallows, what swims free, what clicks and snaps among the eelgrass and sponges all sums to a bloody-minded solution.
Each day a different quest, a different ending (in satisfaction, or in fear), is Emptiness as Empty as it first appears? The Tao of Egret: Unchanging and Severe.
November 21st, 2009 in
Summer |
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