Category Archives: Field Notes

For centuries amateur naturalists have kept field notebooks. These are excerpts from my own nature journal–a hodge-podge of observations, bits of natural history, questions to ponder, insights and experiences.

Field Notes, The Backwoods

Reversal

       Walking into the backwoods last week to check the heron’s nests, I was suddenly aware of what an intrusive force I was in the forest.  The herons have ignored me on my visits to the rookery–in spite of the thick layer of leaves that telegraphs my every footfall.  Maybe they are too busy with their courtship rituals and nest building, or too high up in the cottonwoods to be worried about me below.  I don’t know.  But last week as I neared the pond, a red tailed hawk circled over my head–again and again–clearly annoyed by my presence and staying well clear of his nest.  Then a rawkus squawking of two geese on the pond who swam away from me–craning their necks over their shoulders to scream their unrelenting annoyance.  A pair of mallard ducks fluttered out of the water and scurried behind a tangle of bushes as I came in sight.  A chipmunk scolded from  a tree and a raven joined in the cacophony.  I was clearly unwelcome here in the midst of all this spring mating and nesting.

We are usually the ones who feel intruded upon by wildlife: the racoons in the garbage, the chicken stealing weasels and coyotes, the flower nibbling deer, the tunneling ground squirrels and gophers.  Even the hole pecking flickers who make swiss cheese of the siding and interrupt our sleep with their drilling on stove pipes.

But this time I was the intrusive, unwanted wildlife disrupting the ravens, chipmunks, geese, ducks and hawks.  And it made me acutely aware of the ripples I send out into the wild world as I pass through it.  I think of these as “my backwoods.”  But they aren’t really mine at all.

Field Notes, The Backwoods

The Rookery

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      It was one of those mornings when my to-do list was weighing me down with its shoulds and have tos.  I was overwhelmed by the shear number of them, making me snuggle deeper into the covers and feign sleep.  But I could hear the clattering in the kitchen of my husband starting his day and I poked my head up to stare out the window  into the backwoods .  My planning for the day was suddenly interrupted by the pterodactyl form of a heron weaving its way through the sticky buds of the cottonwoods, then another and another until finally I had seen seven great blue herons making their way north, toward the hundred acre wood next door.

Instead of getting up and feeding the dog, emptying the dishwasher, checking my e-mail, I threw on some clothes, grabbed my camera and headed out the door in the direction the great birds flew.  I waded through the tall frosty grass to the fence where the  lace work of spider webs wove between the barbed wire.  I passed the pond where a red tail hawk circled low over the water and looking up I saw in the distance a huge stick nest in a cottonwood tree.  Climbing over the fence into the hundred acre wood I saw another nearby and then another.

Twenty one nests in all, and a flurry of activity.  Pairs of birds clustered around some of the nests, or one bird sat in the nest while another sat on the branch, standing guard.  At one point a third heron approached a nest and was driven away with a great deal of the croaking squawk that sounds so incongruent from these elegant looking birds.

This lone heron then circled over another nest and the resident male stretched its neck out in the gesture that clearly meant come no closer.

 

Wandering around under the nests I came across a broken shell.  The pale blue of a robin’s egg, it was the size of a large chicken egg.  I looked above and saw a nest that was clearly in the early stages.  The male heron flew in with a stick his mouth, offering it to the female who placed it carefully in the nest.  I wondered if their nest had fallen and they had had to start over, but there was no sign of scattered sticks near the broken egg.

 

 

 

Higher up in the same tree another couple had apparently finished the work on their own nest.

 

 

 

After spending several hours watching the activity in the rookery, I reluctantly returned to my own nest to get to work on those chores.

I didn’t back out to the rookery until this week and by then the activity in the rookery had quieted down considerably.  Peering into the nests though, you could just see the beaks of the brooding birds.  The eggs take 28 days to hatch.

With a clutch of 6-8 eggs, only two or three will survive.  And on the ground, near where I found the first broken shell, were two more.  Was it predation by an eagle?  A racoon?  Or had the mother heron knocked the eggs from the nest when she turned them?  Egg turning is a crucial process because the egg has to be kept evenly warm and the embryo on top, so the chick can develop fully in the shell.

The cottonwoods are beginning to leaf out now which will make viewing the nests much more difficult.  But I plan to keep track of the activity in the rookery and will be heading out for the next two and half months until the fledglings are ready to fly.  Just another thing to add to my to-do list.

 

 

 

Cloudspotting, Field Notes, Reading Nature, The Backwoods

Cloud Spotting

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22 degree halo

 

While we wait for the flowers to come up, we can turn our eyes to the sky and indulge in another game of identification, Cloudspotting.  This example is a 22 degree halo seen in the Cirrostratus clouds.  This type of cloud is composed of a delicate layer of ice crystals and the halo is made by sunlight refracted by the crystals.  Cloudspotting can turn the most mundane trips around town into a real naturalist’s adventure and there are several books that can heighten the experience.

First is The Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds by Gavin Prector-Prinney. He gives detailed descriptions of the different kinds of clouds and their subspecies, like the wispy Cirrus clouds or “mare’s tails” outside my window just now. It also includes interesting tidbits like the history of the meteorologists in Bergen Norway who first worked out the complex science of the development of rain clouds, and the Chinese scientist Zhonghas Shou who is using the appearance of certain cloud types as a short term earthquake predictor.

If you want to share this experience with kids, Tomie De Paola’s The Cloud Book is a great introduction. He describes the basic cloud types, mixing elementary scientific information with the mythology of clouds and the popular sayings that have been used for centuries to predict weather. “When the fog goes up the mountain hoppin’, then the rain comes down the mountain drippin’.”

To take your cloud spotting to the next level The Cloud Collector’s Handbook, also by Pretor-Pinney, gives you a field guide and a “birding list” in one. Each type of cloud you find and record is worth points. Living in Missoula it is easy to get 15 points for the Stratus that lay low in the valley on inversion days, and you can pick up another 5 points for getting above the clouds and seeing their undulating upper surface.

Very young children can join in the fun as well with Eric Carle’s Little Cloud, a great book for encouraging the age old game of spotting different shapes in the clouds.

Finally, check out www.clouds365.com where you can share your finds with this online cloud appreciation community.

This book review will appear in the Montana Naturalist Magazine, spring issue, put out by the Montana Natural History Center

Field Notes, Haiku, The Homestead, Wanderlusting

Tracking a Wild Life

We begin at the derelict packrat cabin. Slowly we plod up the overgrown road. Our snowshoes tangle in the branches of the downed tree as we struggle to get over or under it. There are 15 of us. The oldest is 85 and grew up on a ranch before plumbing and electricity. The sturdiest is 78 and was raised on a Mennonite farm. She knows the ways of self-sufficiency. She is followed by her husband. He has spent 37 summers in a lookout tower watching the top of this mountain for a spark of fire. I am the youngest, struggling to learn what these fellow hikers have known all their lives.

intrepid guides
wear a deep path through new snow
I follow their tracks

On the saddle the trees open out into a meadow. A chipmunk alerts the woods to our presence. A raven cackles overhead. The transmission lines which cut through these wild woods whines with power for towns all along the Montana Highline. To the east the Rattlesnake Wilderness flows around the base of Stewart Peak.  To the southwest the city of Missoula creeps up the sides of the hills.

divide
between two worlds
we catch our breath

We mill around the clearing until we find three sets of tracks slicing across the snowfield. Four large rounded toes. A three lobed heel pad. They are as large as the palm of my hand, with a leading toe that lines up with my middle finger. No nail marks. The print of a tail drag.

 

 

wild eyes peer
flash of tawny fur amid the trees
a squirrel or…

 

 

 

 

 

A storm cloud shadows the meadow. We cross over to the opposite slope and begin our decent. From here there is no straight path down to the old homestead. We wander through the tangle of mountain ash and serviceberry bushes. We duck under canopies of Douglas Fir and step over deadfall.

cocked heads
snowshoe hare tracks
in unblemished snow

At the bottom of the draw we go to inspect the ruins. Hopes and dreams stacked in peeled logs that cave in from the center. Through the window frame an aspen tree grows in the middle of the barn. The decaying timbers, cut in 1911 to shelter the inhabitants from the elements now rot in the rain and snow, feeding the undergrowth that is reclaiming the homesite.

 

single broken wall
thin divide between
the wild outside and in.

 

 

 

This piece is in the form of a haibun.  Haibun tells a story, mixing a short prose piece with a haiku.

Field Notes, Ground Truthing, The Homestead, Woodscraft and Lore

Learning to Boil an Egg

Photo by Sharon Dill

 

Last week I hosted the Tuesday Hikers annual winter cookout at the homestead.  I felt honored to carry on the tradition Lois began many years ago.  And I felt privileged to share this special place with my wildland family.  Despite growing up in the mountains cooking over fires, there is always something I can learn from my “elders” in the group.  Like cooking a hardboiled egg in a paper cup in the fire.  Carol taught me this trick–fill a dixie cup with water, drop in the egg and set it on the coals.  Incredibly it doesn’t ignite.  Only the lip of the cup will catch fire and burn to the water line.  The egg will boil in the water and after 10 minutes or so you have a perfectly cooked hardboiled egg.

It was a stunningly clear day and from the meadow where Ted and I had set up the fire pit you could see the receding mountain ridges to the west.  Gene, who has been the fire lookout at Blue Mountain for 37 seasons has an aerial map in his head and he was able to instantly identify Petty Peak and the Cabinet Mountains shining white in the far distance.  I envy this mental relief map he has of the region.  I can look at a topo map and get my bearings.  I can download satellite pictures of the area and have an overview of my place in the world.  But these are only snapshots.  Gene has a dynamic and deep knowledge of the landscape that comes from years of watching its constant change.  He has seen storms come in across the peaks and where the clouds tend to lay low in the valleys.  He knows where rain falls the heaviest or misses the lowland in the rain shadows.  He has seen the changing face of the mountain peaks as the snowline recedes, the cloud shadows pass over, or the aplenglow hits in the late evening.  He knows these ranges in a way few of us ever will.  I hope as the years pass I will come to know this small slice of the Lolo Range through the same attentive and intimate acquaintance.

Field Notes, The Backwoods

Eagle’s Playground

copyright Peggy Christian

Yesterday I was out in the backwoods, trudging through the weed tangled snow when I heard the unmistakable cry of an eagle.  It came from over my right shoulder and sailed into view on level with the tops of the cottonwoods.  It circled around, dipped and bobbed as if it were riding a raft on an invisible river current.  Landing on a nearby branch, it cocked its head toward the pond, then leaped off, throwing itself back into the updraft.  No wing beats, but it rode higher and higher, then circled back and came swooping down until the wind picked it up again.   I stood riveted, realizing the eagle was not hunting, but simply playing.  The body memory of flying from my dreams sent me sailing with him.  As I became absorbed in the sky, imagining myself into his flight, my camera hung forgotten around my neck.  A hundred great shots that I didn’t get of the eagle.

But if I had been trying to capture the moment, I don’t think I would have lost myself in that feeling of soaring so completely that when at last the eagle disappeared and I turned to go, I was surprised by the awkward weight of my boots as they pulled me back to earth.

Gary Snyder says: “To see a wren in a bush, call it ‘wren,’ and go on walking is to have (self-importantly) seen nothing.  To see a bird, and stop, watch, feel, forget yourself for a moment, be in the bushy shadows, maybe then feel ‘wren’–that is to have joined in a larger moment with the world.”

I think this is true sometimes of photographing birds as well.  We “capture” the bird in a picture, but in so doing, we end up with the viewfinder, and that intent to come away with something tangible, coming between us and the experience.  This was not a moment captured but a moment lived.

Field Notes, The Backwoods, The Commonplace Book

New Language, New Way of Thinking

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A friend asked me today, “Why a nature blog?  You are neither a scientist nor a professional environmentalist.  Why write about nature when there are already so many outstanding nature writers out there?”  And I had to pause for a moment and really consider her question.  Because it begs deeper reflection.  Why write at all?  In a world overflowing with at-your-fingertips information on any subject imaginable, why write about your own individual experiences, ideas and ruminations?  The blogosphere is already crowded with thousands of people chronicling everything in their lives from their adventures in travel and in the kitchen to the wonders of the landscapes they live in.  And in the face of climate change, fracking, species extinction, overpopulation, urban sprawl, etc.,etc.,etc. is it enough to simply satisfy my human need  to, as Dinty Moore says, “not just live year to year but to capture a bit of that life, to produce an enduring record of our better thoughts?”   In the face of global crises it does seem self-indulgent and rather ineffectual to write about my own small piece of Montana and what I experience there.

But then I recently happened to pick up The Abstract Wild by Jack Turner and in this wildly provocative book (pun intended) he suggested a possible answer.  He has a chapter on how the economists and economic language have co-opted our thinking about everything–turning the natural world and all living things into commodities and requiring everything and even everyone to be reduced to commensurate units, with money being the value of these units.

Being a linguist, I know how the language we use shapes our worldview, and I was intrigued by his argument that, “If we find we live in a moral vacuum, and if we believe this is due in part to economic language, then we are obligated to create alternatives to economic language…Enmerson started the tradition by dumping his Unitarian vocabulary and writing “Nature” in language that restored nature’s sacredness.  Thoreau altered that vocabulary further and captured our imagination.  The process continues with the labor of poets, deep ecologists, and naturalists.”

Perhaps the more blogs that work to restore the sacredness of nature, that explore our inter-relatedness and interdependence by giving us a new language and a new way of thinking, the more our consciousness will change.

As for what value a singe person’s voice has, I think back to my morning walk.  I had started the morning by reading Rick Bass’s The Wild Marsh and in the chapter on February he talks about the way the “wonderful bare ground” first appears at the base of the largest  trees and how the darkened trunks of those trees absorb the sunlight during the day.  “The absorbed heat in those blackened trunks radiates slowly back out across the snow, warmest on the west side, which is the part of the tree trunk that received the last and most intense heat of the day.”

Trudging through the tired snow, not only was I delighted to notice he was right, the bare earth was showing on the west side of the ponderosas, but then I began to notice as well that the cottonwood leaves sitting on top of the crust had begun to melt down, embossing the snow with leaf prints.  And in the pond the pine needles and leaves had melted their way through the ice, cutting it into a delicate filigree  The same principle had to be at work here.  It was that little thrill of discovery, of extending what I’d learned from reading Bass’s experience and finding my own example.  I have walked these winter woods for decades and never taken particular notice of this phenomena.  But now I see it everywhere.  And so perhaps, something you read in this blog will lead you to your own epiphany.

Books I Love: The Abstract Wild by Jack Turner and The Wild Marsh by Rick Bass