I have been hoping for lazuli buntings this spring. I’ve been watching for them since I saw one 17 years ago mixed in with the lesser goldfinches in my feeder. I wish I knew what complicated formula of weather, food, and whimsy brought them to my yard that spring. Surely it will repeat itself again. Things do repeat in nature, both randomly and with reason. So, I wait.
My thoughts on lazuli buntings, I got to to thinking about one of the first essays I had published in a literary journal. I remembered that my mind was on flashes of blue feathers then as well. I pulled it out, re-read it, and laughed. I somehow think my spring fever is novel every year. Yet, this essay reads like I wrote yesterday, except that my relationship with The Red Queen, the hawk that steals the show is this piece, has a much longer and sordid history now.
I hope you enjoy it and will forgive me for not writing something new this week. ❤
From the University of Colorado at Boulder literary journal, divide
, 2008.
Turning Tide
Nature has gotten the better of me this spring. I can't get anything done. Even in my practical moments, writing at my desk, some party favor of a bird flutters by and I'm sunk for the next two hours; trying to photograph it through the dirty windowpane, trying to find its likeness in a field guide, wondering why it's here, if it will come back. My home office has two walls of windows and the spring migration swirling around me is irresistible.
I've always watched birds and I’ve never seen anything like this year’s avian swell sweeping through Banning, California. Most of the birds are common, but their numbers make them an uproar of commonality. There are mourning doves, mockingbirds, crows, ravens, black phoebes, house finches, English sparrows, starlings, mountain and Stellar's jays. Even at night the barn owls wake me up, courting and calling out boundaries. If this wasn’t enough, birds I’ve never seen before, “life list” species began to appear.
Even if I had spotted them every spring of my life, it would be impossible to ignore the bright orange splash of a flock of grosbeaks scattered with the seeds below the feeder. I've seen yellow-rumped warblers, American goldfinches, black-throated gray warblers and the most amazing, a lazuli bunting. He hit my office window like he wanted my attention, although he most likely was chasing a mayfly or a leafhopper. He was a flicker of blue so bright and alien that I rubbed my eyes and thought I caught glimpses of him even after he was gone.
It made me think of Yeats and Lapis Lazuli, a poem about finding tranquility in the midst of chaos. Yeats was staring at a statue etched in lapis lazuli as he pondered the way inward. Carved in stone or crafted in feather, I think the lazuli for us both was the same. The trick is to focus on some small rapture. The goal is to have a place from which you can stare and so, I’ve been watching and staring.
The other morning when I walked out to feed my loft of pigeons I found a splash of fresh and dark bloody droppings on the chain-link fence. I wondered what raptor had sat there, what sort of blood had it sipped and then passed through its gut, this dark horse of the migration? Of course there would be some hawk bringing up the rear to the spring tide, but the thought was unnerving. It made me think of the migration as an endless journey of escape, the bird forever fleeing. It reminded me that there is no real safety, not in plaster and lathe, not even if it's stood for eighty years. In America we would call my house historic, but I can see outside. I know my home and my life are no more than a shifting dune in this California desert. It's left me breathless and grasping for permanence.
I was staring from my office window at a seed-focused grosbeak today when it was swept from my view by a red-tailed hawk. She was a goliath, the grosbeak barely a few feathers showing between the talons of one knotted foot. Hawks that size don’t catch songbirds - that’s what I’ve heard from my falconer friends. We hunt with hawks and falcons and think we know everything there is to know about avian predators and their prey. We think we know wild, but we don’t.
The hunt at my feeder was different from the symbiosis of falconry, I’ve tried to replay it in my head and realize that even though I was looking, I experienced the moment rather than seeing it, too primal of an instant to do anything but react. I only saw red and know I'll never forget that limited vision of her tail, an unexpected meteor, and then a smattering of crimson across my view. Perhaps there is nothing more to see than the tail, human eyes are too weak to take much more in, the mind filling in the blanks with blood. I think I understand those auburn feathers in a way I didn't before. As the jarring cries of the grosbeak in the raptor’s feet confirmed that neither of us saw her coming, I know I understood my own weakness. That hawk is a better predator than I'll ever be; exquisite and terrifying. She cured my spring fever. I won’t be looking out my windows again anytime soon.