Snowy Owl

 (Photo by Trude Hurde by permission)

Yesterday, I drove 15 miles from my home in Tustin, California to see a miracle, a Snowy Owl that has been hanging around a Cypress neighborhood for a couple of weeks now.  There she was, sleepily preening atop a suburban roof, looking down occasionally at the crowd of tripods, cameras, birders and neighbors delightedly watching her.  I say "her" because the dark barring on her snowy chest, back and, particularly, wings, indicates a female, but it is possible that she is actually an immature male.  This is just one of the many mysteries of how an Arctic species landed in the Southern California urban jungle.

At first sight, you are amazed at her sheer size--just about two and a half feet from talons to the top of the head.  She has immense, yellow eyes; they are a clear indication that she hunts by sight as well as by hearing.  Her seemingly blasé attitude toward the multitudes below her is unaccountable.  What does this world look like to an apex predator, accustomed to hunting across the frozen tundra for lemmings and hares, nesting on snowy rises and enduring sub-zero temperatures?  It is easy to anthropomorphize such a Muppet-looking bird and forget that she is a raptor at the top of the food chain in her own environment.   Her species fly hundreds of miles in search of food, following rodent irruptions and exploiting the available food sources.  Right now, given sufficient prey, she should be mating and brooding, but there are no other Snowy Owls here.  Snowies don't interbreed with other species, so for this year, at least, she will remain alone.

The people below murmured together in wonder.  They smiled and those who had brought children delightedly pointed her out.  Cameras clicked constantly.  One guy shot film from the roof of his van.  Local news trucks turned up as did the police, politely but firmly, ordering everyone out of the street.  One couple had come from San Francisco to see the owl, another from San Diego.  Every time she moved or ruffled her feathers, the crowd gasped.

It is wonderful to see how engaged and thrilled people were at seeing the owl.  It reminded me forcefully of how I came to be a birder myself.  I was working in Atlanta in February 2000 when I started taking my lunch over to Power's Ferry along the Chattahoochee River instead of at my desk.  While eating my sandwich, I would squint at the flocks of tiny, yellow-butted birds flitting through the trees above my picnic table.  After a few days, I bought the world's cheapest pair of binoculars.  I noticed enormous blue-gray birds standing guard in the reeds along the river, then furry brown, ratty creatures building nests of twigs right in the water.  Next day, I bought a terrible field guide and a couple days after that, ran across a park ranger, who explained.  At fifty years of age, I had finally seen Yellow-rumped Warblers, Great Blue Herons and Muskrats, all common species.  In less than ten days, I was getting up in the dark to bird the Chattahoochee for an hour before going into work.  I was hooked.

Twenty-two years later, I finally saw one of my nemesis birds, a Snowy Owl, not in Alberta or Alaska where I had searched previously, but almost in my backyard.  She is a physical manifestation of the world of Nature that exists, often unseen, all around us.  I hope that for some of those who flocked to see her, she will be their "Spark Bird" as the Yellow-rumped Warbler was mine.  I wish that revelation to everyone.  Happy New Year!

Palimpsest

When I was a little girl, I loved to spend the weekend with my grandmother.  We would walk the old neighborhood where she lived in Santa Paula, a sleepy, agricultural town in the Santa Clara Valley of Ventura County.  Granny would recount stories of the people who had lived in the Victorian and Craftsman houses.  She knew their names, their pets, their relationships and failings.  She wove their histories into overlapping stories that covered generations, Canterbury Tales of love, deceit, forgiveness, crime, courage and passion.  Layer overlaid layer as the years passed, new tales superimposed on the old like parchment scraped of ink, ready to reuse, but with faint stains bleeding through in places.

I am now the age of my grandmother when she told me these yarns.  I am back in Aix-en-Provence, far from that drowsy town in California, yet as I walk these much more ancient streets again, the old feeling of double-vision returns.  I see the winding passages that lead from the wide Cours Mirabeau with their trendy boutiques and faintly beneath, the Medieval cobbles, ghostly monks, scurrying merchants and lower still, Roman soldiers and fountains.  Above these imagined images, are my own memories of two, previous visits, my personal history of cafes where I shared l'apero with friends and markets where I shopped for aubergines and oranges, felt the bite of the Mistral and sipped hot, mulled wine in the Christmas cabines.

The scene is familiar and exotic at the same time; the palimpsest is clean and smeared simultaneously.  As I look back on my life, my travels and adventures, the same strange blurring occurs. It is not that the bottom layer is obscured, but that the lavish layering of experience like an illustrated manuscript with lively marginalia adding dimension.  "So, this is age," I think.  I had hoped for wisdom, but this is not bad.  Puzzling out the stories beneath and above provides an almost, but not quite, psychedelic richness that challenges and invites me to see the follies and foundations, a few triumphs and some tragedies. Time is a river that flows always onward, but memory, like vellum, is blessedly faulty and human.

Saint-Denis

North of central Paris, almost at the end of the No. 13 Metro line, there is a cathedral that rivals the more famous Notre Dame for medieval grandeur. I first read about this church in my Western Civilization class forty years ago. It is almost the first, truly Gothic cathedral, built by the famous Abbot Suger in the 12th century. Unlike Notre Dame, however, it is not crowded with tourists jostling each other to snap photos, making it a delightful Saturday outing even in July.

Once, the church was an adjunct to a great abbey, but the French Revolution swept all of the cloisters away. One of the two towers of the facade crashed down in the 1800's, giving the building an endearing, lopsided look. You can see how early it is--there are no flying buttresses like the lacy extensions on Notre Dame that stretch out from the exterior walls like air roots. St. Denis is an altogether heavier building. It does not, like Chartes, appear ready to leap into the sky. Neither is it a dense, earthbound Romanesque church, squatting possessively on its foundations. It is visionary, but without all the details having been worked out yet.

Because it takes so long to complete a true cathedral--more than a hundred years--you can see the 13th century innovations superimposed on the the basic design. If you go into the crypt, you can even see the few remains of the Carolingean church, dating to before Charlemagne in the 7th century and at the very bottom, the 4th century Roman basement where the remains of St. Denis and two other saints once rested. Medieval pilgrims used to walk a circuit around the tombs, sometimes on their knees. Their pennies enriched the abbey and allowed Abbot Suger to build his dream.

Inside, the basilica has become a repository for the tombs and cenotaphs of French royalty, going back to Dagobert, a Dark Ages, Merogovingian monarch. As royal lineages died out and Capets followed Valois--sometimes militarily--they brought or created their predecessors' funeral monuments to St. Denis. It was a way of proclaiming that the new regime was the legitimate successor of the old. It is roughly similar to modern American political parties laying claim to being the "true" inheritors of the principles of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or the ancient Roman kings claiming descent from the hero, Aneas. It makes for odd juxtapositions, like the thoroughly High Medieval sculpture of Clovis and Charles Martel, who lived 300 hundred years earlier and certainly never wore the elaborate mail and jointed armor their images depict.

It doesn't stop at the Middle Ages. Louis XVIII, almost the last, faint gasp of the Bourbons, had two, life-sized statues of his brother and sister-in-law, the doomed Louis XVI and his foolish wife, Marie Antoinette, placed in the cathedral in very pious postures. He was underlining his descent from the Ancienne regime, although it did him little good. His brother, Charles, succeeded him for a few years, but monarchy was dying in France.

It was fascinating to roam among the various monuments, some elaborate, some humble, and realize that Sainte-Denis is France's lumber room of rulers, a kind of funeral attic. The centuries are jumbled together; glorious medieval stained glass next to garish, 19th century "restored" windows. Renaissance doublets mix with Medieval curt hose. It's all a glorious confusion and gives history a very human face.

And on top of all of that, there is that gorgeous light, pouring into the cathedral from the windows.

Darwin's Test Tube

"Iconic," you read, when you bone up on the Galapagos.

"Amazing."

"Stunningly beautiful in a stark, primitive way."

It's all true, of course. The Galapagos are all that and more, but what struck me like a zen stick alongside my head is how trusting, how positively confiding, the animals inhabitants are. They appear to have little or no fear of people. A Galapagos Mockingbird hopped right up to my foot on Genovesa Island as if I were some interesting new tree. It then proceeded to accompany my group of bemused, fellow-birders for fifty yards, hopping beside us or leading the way until finally losing interest.

On Santa Cruz Island, three-foot-long Marine Iguanas lay unmoving as we carefully walked around and between them, piled on the sand like a collapsed huddle of footballers. A male Galapagos Sea Lion challenged us to the extent of walking toward us on the shore until we parted to let him pass, whereupon, dominance established, he threw himself down in our midst and streched langorously. On Isabela Island, the endangered Mangrove Finch perched 18 inches from us when our guide, Peter Freire, played its song from an iPod. A Floreana Mockingbird from the Island of the same name landed on my friend, Martha's, head! Everywhere we have sailed in these enchanted islands, it has been the same. The animals are completely nonchalant at our approach, even when we are within a few feet of their nests. It is almost unnerving how relaxed they are with us.

Of course, Nature suspends her laws for no one. We saw a Short-eared Owl casually snag a Wedge-rumped Storm-Petrel right out of the air when it flew fatally close to the owl's perch on the lava. One nip of its bill on the back of the neck and the Storm-Petrel was dinner. We watched Magnificent Frigatebirds, those pirates of the air, swoop down repeatedly on Green Sea Turtle hatching in the sand in the late afternoon son. Virtually all sea turtles are endanged, but in the Galapagos, they are protected only from human beings and other introduced species, not from their natural preditors. I doubt that many hatchings from that nest survived to reach the ocean.

Darwin's Test Tube, this hot house of genetic drift, has not changed much since the Voyage of the Beagle in 1835. To survive here, animals must be able to out-compete or out-run their neighbors. We, the aliens, are not the enemy because, mercifully, we are not allowed to be, but that is not the same thing as being protected from the law of the survival of the fittest. Magnificent Frigatebirds, Short-eared Owls and Galapagos Hawks have to eat the same as Mangrove Finches and Green Sea Turtles. In the end, it's not about the survival of the individual, but the survival of the species. It's something we Homo spapiens would do well to remember.

A Moveable Feast

The ants are coming! The ants are coming! Far from striking fear into the hearts of birders, army ant swarms are longed-for events because they bring out the antbirds. Army ants, contrary to the 50's adventure and horror movies of my youth, do not consume everything in their path, such as cows, horses and the occasional tourist. They are out for insects,larvae and invertibrates, although if the odd egg or infant bird falls into their path, well...that's another matter. Their prey will naturally try to escape, leaping, flying or running as fast as it can, only to fall victim to the various antbirds that specialize in following the swarms.

Last week, my friend, Martha, and I, along with six other birders and our guides, encountered one of these ant swarms crossing our trail. Within a few minutes, we went from seeing a few columns marching across the mud to a generalized melee spreading across the rain forest floor. In their midst, dozens of bicolored and ocellated antbirds were dancing about, swooping down on caterpillers and other, many-legged creatures trying to escape the enslaught. The bicolored antbirds' strategy was to perch horzontally about a foot off the ground on twigs and vines, scouting out the ground below, and then diving for the scurrying insects. They would flare their tails in excitement before they dropped like raptors onto the kill. The ocellated antbirds had a different and more methodical approach; they poked at the leaf litter, tossing it aside ruthlessly to expose the fleeing bugs and pounced on them. Occasionally, there would be a brisk exchange of territoriality and the ocellated antbird, a weightier opponent, would chase the bicolored antbird away.

We watched the show in fascination. The antbirds were beautiful and terrible and innocent. They blindly addressed their own need. Once, a plain brown woodcreeper appeared opportunistically to take advantage of the harvest. The ants spread out across the trail like water spreading from an overflowing tub. Then, slowly, the swarm moved off into the deep brush and the streams became trickles. The antbirds followed like pilot fish snatching morsels of food from the mouth of the shark.

We always think of Nature with a capital "N" as motherly, benign and all-knowing. Seeing the ant swarm and the camp-following antbirds reminded me that it's small "n" nature, clever, thrifty and unsentimental. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is safe. Nothing is predictible.

Panama City

There could hardly be a greater contrast than between Paris and Panama City! I'm just back from a morning 's birding the grounds of our comfortable hotel beside the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal and the esplanade along the water's edge. Magnificent Frigatebirds glide above like a dozen black-and-white kites. Orange-chinned Parakeets chatter as they egg-beat their way across the skies so clumsily that they look as though they might fall at any moment. The air is filled with bird song and construction hammers and salsa music from portable radios and casual shouts or greetings from the hawkers and taxi drivers who work the hotel district. It's tropical chaos.

Tomorrow, eight of us depart for Burbayar Lodge in eastern Panama. Other than my friend, Martha, I haven't met any of the other birders, but we will get together tonight for dinner. It's always fun when bird nerds meet. Lots of tall tales of birds seen and birds missed. We are all hoping to see a particular bird for our Life Lists. For some, it's Panama's national bird, the Harpy Eagle, which has a seven foot wing span and snatches monkeys from the canopy for dinner. I'm hoping to see the shy and lovely Agami Heron, which skulks along the edge of forest streams. My experience is, however, that what we see is unpredictable, but always fascinating.

Last year in western Panama, we saw the stunning, Lattice-tailed Trogon and missed the common, Sulphur-bellied Flycatcher. We repeatedly saw a Three-toed Sloth, which has the blank visage of a cartoon character--somewhere between Mr. Bill and the smiley-face emodicon. There's just no telling. Not knowing what is coming next is part of the fascination. So much of our lives is pre-programmed and scheduled. In the rainforest, everything is moment-to-moment. Maybe something wonderful is waiting around the next corner of the trail. Maybe nothing lies ahead but heat and mosquitos. You just never know. It's not television. You can't TIVO it and replay it at a more convenient time. As Aldous Huxley once wrote, it's "here and now, boys, here and now." And really, what could be better?

Il fai froid! Saturday in Paris.

It's cold! I went for a ramble in the 5th arrondissement today and had to stop and buy another scarf to double twice around my neck just to keep the wind out. The 5th is Les Jardines district, named after the Botanical gardens east of Notre Dame on the Left Bank. It's at the very edge of the old Roman City of Lutece, but more about that later. My main goal was the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle or National Natural History Museum. My Aunt Margaret, a seasoned and delightful traveler, recommended it to me and such a chilly day seemed like the perfect opportunity for an indoor browse.

It's a wonderful space, a late Victorian fantasy of high ceilings, balconies and wrought iron banisters that twist themselves into stems and flowers and buds so organically that you can almost see them leaning toward you as you climb the stairs. It's a long building filled with skeletons--more or less modern on the first floor and ancient on the second. Giraffes tower over musk ox, yak, lion and turtle. Elephants and rhinos with wicked tusks and horns crowd whales, including the complete skeleton of an enormous southern right whale. I stood close to it, awestruck and thinking of the time I went out on a sail boat with my friends, Joyce and Tony Maycock, in Puerto Madryn, Argentina. Some curious right whales sailed right under our keel! They seemed pretty impressive at the time, their eyes rolling upward as they checked us out, but now that I can see exactly how big they were...well, I'm glad I didn't realize then that they were longer than our vessel by about 10 feet!

This was nothing to the second floor, however, with a full-sized apatosaurus. Okay, brontosaurus for those of us who grew up reading Roy Chapman Andrews' stories of his dinosaur-hunting expedition to the Gobi desert. And speaking of Andrews, who brought his own silver and china and changed for dinner after the long days' digging, I also saw a couple of Protoceratops andrewsi's eggs in a case. It was a strangely moving moment to see something I had read and been thrilled about when I was thirteen or fourteen. Until Andrews, the proported real-life model for Indiana Jones, discovered these eggs, no one had been able to prove how dinosaurs reproduced. It was a little bit of scientific and yet still quite romantic history before my very eyes.

I wandered about the district for awhile, discovering a carrousel with a carved dodo to ride on, long allees of polled trees leafless in the January cold, and the grand mosque of Paris. I had lunch at the latter in the blue-tiled courtyard, dining on a lamb tagine under a heater. The place was hopping with Parisians of all faiths and flavors, so I think I stumbled on a local secret. The tagine was terrific and the waiters were fatherly. I was seriously tempted to try the hamman or baths, as the prospect of an afternoon of steam was very appealing, but I heard the call of Roman ruins.

Now Roman ruins to me are a bit like catnip to my cat, Izzy. I just can't resist. I had read in my trusty guidebook that the remains of the old arena were not far away. Sure enough, after only two blocks, I came upon Rue de Arena, a promising development. Sadly, however, there is not much more than the footprint left. You can see where the sloping tiers of seats rose on two of the four sides of the oval floor of the arena, although only one small section still holds seats instead of a grassy slope. It is small; particularly if you have ever seen the arena at Arles or Nimes. It needs all of your imagination to visualize crowds of Romans and Franks pushing into the seats, vendors selling food and drink, and gladiators and animal handlers performing in the pit. Joggers trot through and families pushing prams take the short cut between streets. Rome and Lutece, the Roman name for Paris, seem more distant than the mammoths in the Natural History Museum.

I finished up the afternoon with a stroll down the Rue Mouffelard, ending at the 15th century church of St. Medard. Rue Mouffelard runs along the edge of what was once King Phillip Augustus' city walls. (Think Timothy Dalton as the handsome, young King of France in "The Lion in Winter." I'm sure the real Phillip looked nothing like him, but one can dream.) As it slopes toward the Seine, it becomes crowded with specialty shops selling cheese and chocolate and pastries. (I succumbed to a macaron framboise or raspberry macaroon. These are nothing like our cocoanut lumps, but consist of two outer layers of merange as light as an angel's breathe surrounding a thin, intensely tart layer of raspberry jam. Need I say more?) There was an open-air market at the bottom of the street in front of St. Medard. The church is famous for being the 18th century site of spontaneous healings preceded by strange convulsions and religious ecstacy, but today it is as quiet and restrained as a dowager wearing Chanel.

I stepped inside the late gothic church and immediately found myself in the middle of a christening. A baby boy was being initiated into the faith and not caring for it very much, snuffling and squirming in the priest's arms. Everyone was singing and the music, unpolished and beautifully authentic, filled the vaulted ceilings. Other visitors, intent on prayer or lighting candles, scuttled past and I joined them in a side chapel. I could hear the service continuing, understanding just enough French to realize that the congregation was now singing the 23rd Psalm. It was lovely to get a glimpse of Parisian life that did not involve restaurants or museums or shops--just a family coming together to celebrate the arrival of a new member.