The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

February 26, 2022

Yesterday, I heard that characteristic thump against the window.  On the porch brickwork, a hermit thrush lay on its side, perfectly still, except for the gular flutter of feathers at its throat.  I lifted it into my hands and carried it inside, aware that the feral kitties are also tuned to the impact sound of small warm bodies against glass.

“Did you bump your head?” I asked the thrush, holding it until the stars cleared—assuming bird brains function the same as mine when a sharp blow sloshes blood out of my capillaries and the resulting lack of oxygen causes the neurons in my visual cortex to spontaneously fire.  (It happens.  More often than I like.)

Maybe it’s more than an assumption. A belief that we are the same.  The task of the nature writer is to find the words to bridge the gulf between the otherness of nature and what it means to be human.  Words that show us there is no “other.” 

“We live not in a world of things,” says William Bryant Logan in his book, Spout Lands, “but of neighbors.”

A bird in the hand.  I felt a powerful connection to this world of neighbors.  An engagement I seek, probably too much and too often.  “Like that time in Hawaii,” the wife reminds me, reading over my shoulder, “when we saw that sea turtle and you jumped into the ocean and scared it away.  Or that time at Madera Canyon with the bear...”  (She’s still angry about that one.)

Sure, studies show over and over that contact with nature can make you a kinder person, happier, more creative, even.  But what I have is more like a fixation (zoomania?).  The birds, the snakes, the toads and frogs, all the strange and wonderful creatures we share space with on the planet, I want to touch them all. 

Sometimes it’s not a closed window but an open door. Like when this Green-tailed Towhee hopped into my office.

Or this Dark-eyed Junco explored the laundry room.

Sometimes it’s a Ring-necked Snake in the road.

Or a Mountain Kingsnake.

Sometimes it’s a Canyon Treefrog in the pond.

Or a Gila Monster (Ed Abbey’s “fat, beaded bag of nonchalance”) in the irrigation box.

Or a Tarantula on the front steps.

Or sometimes it’s just an awesome Vinegaroon anywhere in the yard.

The past is too nebulous to pinpoint exactly when the natural world poked and slimed its way into my imagination.  But it was sometime in the innocent years when mystery defined everything about the world.  Today, I strive to reach to that childhood place where my astonishment at the mundane swells until, as my friend Alison Deming says, I become exhausted by the euphoria.

My engagement with nature crowds my earliest memories.  Picking wild blueberries.  Catching gopher snakes. Carrying toads in my pockets.  Filling my Radio Flyer with minnows from the creek.  It is how I raised my daughters.  It’s how they now raise their children.  As Middle Daughter says, “Every child needs muddy toes and lizards on her face.”

Yes, this is my granddaughter.

Thanks for subscribing! Your generous support keeps me writing about and photographing this amazing world right outside my back steps. Much more to come!