The Life and Times of the Plume

I woke up very early this morning, around 5AM or so, before the dawn began to widen her grip on the world.  I must be more bird than girl these days.  The cool of morning felt tremendously refreshing after a hot, sleepless night.  I poured myself out of bed, onto the plank floor, and walked directly out of the house where the world was edged blue and just beginning to ache with the first leaping of light.  I went walking with Tater Tot, up the ridge behind the house.  On the far side of this ridge is a cottonwood with a snaggy crown, the kind hawks like to perch in, and rightly so, as it allows them an unhindered view of the fields below.  This morning, perched in that bony old river drinker, was a red tailed hawk.  I could see his silhouette inked black against the dawn.  I walked up the slope to get a better look at him and check for feathers on the ground beneath his perch.

As I drew near the cottonwood, I spooked a doe from her bed, she bounded out across the meadow, stopped, and turned to watch me from a distance as I tooled about beneath that tree.  Someone has been irrigating it, there is a hose running just slightly underground to its roots.  I’m glad someone has been caring for it, it adds so much beauty to the edge of this meadow as the slope is mostly bare but for large groupings of sage and bunch grasses.  In the middle to lower branches of the tree I noticed a nest and thought it strange it was built so near to the ground.  I kicked off my flip flops and quickly climbed up the tree to check inside the nest to get an idea of what kind of bird built it but it was utterly void.  I did sustain a few more nicks and scrapes to my legs but I don’t care, they already look so terrible from hiking the river banks and wading while fishing that all my vanity has dissolved into resigned practicality.  I look a bit like a six year old girl who frequently falls off her bicycle.

But for one small grouse feather, I made my way featherless and back down to the gardens, watered all the vegetables and then walked out across the upper pasture to the other hill that is colonized by ponderosas.  The largest pondi of the group has a beautiful, wide and gnarled crown.  Four feet off the ground, I can see where someone wrapped the trunk in a coil of barbed wire some time ago.  The tree has grown out and over the metal in most places — nothing can contain the spirit of a ponderosa pine onces it gets to growing and standing tall.  I bet that loop of barbed wire, just under the bark, feels a bit itchy.  I bet, on moonless nights, this tree reaches down a branch and gives itself a good scratch around its midsection, when everything is sleeping.  I’ve seen the owls use this tree as a perch and I often check the ground beneath it for owl feathers.  Today I found a crow feather, one more grouse feather and eight northern flicker (red shafted) feathers.  Either a flicker frequents this tree or died beneath it and the wind and I are slowly exhuming it’s plumage.  I have found fourteen flicker feathers here now in three weeks time.

As I made my way back to the house, the sun was just capping the East side of the valley and the birds were begining to stir.  I stepped inside the house, put a kettle of water on for coffee, uncovered the bird cage and fed Titus who was in his usual morning frenzy.  After making him a birdbath, I opened the French doors to the deck and was delighted to see and hear a small grouping of cedar waxwings in the apple tree.  Titus, hearing his own language trilling in through the open doors, set about singing back and hopping wildly about on his perches, it was a bird jamboree.  I can’t imagine what the waxwings are saying.  It’s probably something like, “It’s a beautiful day, I’m a dashingly handsome bird, let’s go find some berries my darling bandit friends.”  I always wonder what the animals are saying to each other.  I also wonder if they know how beautiful they are.  I wonder if they stare at their own reflections in the rivers and lakes, oblivious to the world around them, blinded by their own beauty…that’s the sort of behavior that will get you eaten by a bear.  I suppose the vain ones are always eaten first, in that being vain takes away from your awareness of the world around you.  It’s survival of the fittest, not survival of the prettiest.  It’s probably best to be beautiful and clueless about it, in the human world too.

The forecast for today, last I checked, was 102F with chance of thunderstorms, I hope they’re wrong about that.  This heat is exhausting.