Pelican Lessons

Everybody's got "the story."

For some folks--most famously Oprah these days--it's the "aha moment," that wonderful instant in the cosmos when a vital, incredibly important, life-changing realization strikes and the heavens part and the world divides into "before" and "after" and the path ahead becomes suddenly clear.

Before the "aha moment" entered the modern lexicon, it was the "Eureka moment," inextricably linked to Archimedes jumping out of his bathtub a couple of millenia ago and running naked down the street with excitement at the recognition of the concept of water displacement, which was a very big deal.

Well, "aha" and "Eureka" moments are great and all, but there's something beatific and divine and let's face it, bland and rather undramatic about them in the long run. I think "aha" and I think celestial energy and light flowing down from the heavens to shed enlightenment without irritation or effort or sweat or rueful discovery.

The story I'm sure everyone has lurking in their past and marking another important fork in the road has a bit more of an edge and a definite learning curve to it.

I think of it as the "I knew it!!" moment. It's that flash of genius when you realize that you've been listening to the wrong voices (sometimes your own), ignoring your own insight and intuition, turning a blind eye to the truth. It's that moment when a wife's discovered her husband was in fact cheating and the lipstick on his collar really wasn't hers; the good advice of friends wasn't nearly as good as it seemed; and that little old lady who lived down the lane really was running the drug ring you suspected but just couldn't put your finger on why, or get past the smell of her gingerbread cookies wafting into the street as you passed.

The "I knew it!!" moment sometimes come with a tinge of regret, often comes with a "once bitten, twice shy" moral, and always comes with the conviction that listening to your inner voice is the most important counsel you'll keep from now on. It can appear while you're laughing out loud, crying with disappointment, or having coffee with a tart-tongued buddy. And despite our best intentions, if we're slow learners, we can even get more than just one.

In my own case, I'll admit to being denser than a gourmet cheesecake at times and I have several of these road markers along the way. The most portentious, serious, highest stakes incident involved ignoring that "inner voice" in favor of taking one more run at a wood fence on a tall horse against my better judgment, and ended up with an ambulance, lights and sirens, a backboard, a whole lotta pain, and the words "you have a broken back" to ponder for the following three months in a body cast.

But I'd rather not use that reference point most of the way, when all I really need to think of are...pelicans.

The road to revelation was a two-lane ribbon of asphalt that ran through the Horicon Marsh. I was passing through on a long drive from the courthouse where I work to the University of Wisconsin-Madison where my daughter was receiving an award of some sort that came with a very nice dinner. With no time to spare, no binoculars or field guide in the car, and no hiking clothes either, I still stole ten whole minutes to explore a three mile driving loop through the marsh that caught my attention as I drove the scenic route recommended by a cop I work with. So I'd rather watch birds than people. Sue me!

I drove deep into the marsh and far from passing traffic, and parked the car by a boardwalk that ran directly into the marsh. I stepped into a world of water and nature and trilling sounds and wonder. As the late afternoon sun shimmered on the water and illuminated the tall vegetation beyond, there were myriad takeoffs and landings occurring around me, splashings and wingbeats and fluttering sounds. Something white caught my eye, and I stared in wonder as three huge white birds soared in from the periphery and came in for a landing past where the glimmering plane of water was interrupted by rushes and cattails and an air of mystery.

I stood, transfixed and mesmerized until they disappeared. The golden sunlight shown on gleaming white feathers with wingtips tipped in inky black. From my far-off vantage point, there was a joy and and an ease and a lilt to their flight as they circled and floated and finally landed gracefully in the reeds, well protected from prying eyes. These birds were huge. They seemed the size of hang-gliders, easily the biggest birds I'd ever seen.

And there was a flash of something familiar to them. For just an instant, I thought "pelicans!!" And then reason and rationality set in and I shut that thought down. "Nah," I thought. "Couldn't be." Too big by far, entirely wrong in color, a thousand miles from the Georgia shoreline where I was used to seeing them skimming the waves and the palm trees overhead like prehistoric throwbacks before alighting by the dozens on a sandbar in the Atlantic.

I got back in the car, drove the rest of the way to the awards dinner, and wondered all night and for days after what exactly I had seen. Could they possibly be whooping cranes? I knew that a few of these rare birds had been sighted recently somewhere in the marsh, and that seeing them was like finding the birdwatcher's Holy Grail. Could I have been among the chosen few?

I pondered the mystery for the next few weeks. Called a Department of Natural Resources warden I worked with on occasion and asked his advice. Where had I seen this trio, he asked. We weren't entirely sure that the area of vegetation was a customary place for whooping cranes to nest. Had I thought about the possibilities of trumpeter swans, he wondered. What about herons?

I stewed over the puzzle for weeks, reaching out to other birdwatchers with little satisfaction. The optimist in me really hoped that I'd seen a trio of whooping cranes. What an accomplishment!! What bragging rights!! But as I thumbed through my well-worn bird guides, I realized that this couldn't be the answer. Whooping cranes would have the same silhouette in flight as the slightly smaller sandhill cranes I could identify in my sleep--a vaguely alien form, as though you took a goose and added an element of elastic to it, neck strangely thin and elongated, long legs trailing out behind like twigs. I'd caught just a fragmentary glimpse, but there was an elegance of movement that could not be denied. Just like a few bars of Beethoven's Fur Elise can be mistaken for nothing else.

Likewise for herons--the size was off by a lot. What I'd seen was enormous. And the more I looked at the descriptions and listing for trumpeter swans, the more I recognized that the flight pattern was wrong. The birds I'd seen soared and glided and flew with a playfulness that swans and geese, I knew, just didn't have. If you've ever paid attention to a goose in flight, you know that it's a big-ass bird. There's a lot of meat to haul from one point to the next, and there's no room in that equation for burning fuel to have fun. A goose reminds me of a C-130 transport plane--it moves a lot of weight, and flies in a no-frills straight line.

I had reached a dead end. The mystery was still alive and well, but I was all out of leads. I tried to push it out of my mind.

A few weeks later, though, I was back at the marsh, this time for a leisurely morning of hiking and bird watching, a sanity break in a busy life, a battery recharge at the font of nature. Sneakers on and binoculars looped around my neck, I walked, and I sat, and I kept an eye out for another glimpse of those white visitors. No luck. As I finally heading home I took a different route, one that ran past the wildlife refuge's main visitor center. I stopped in, looked around, stepped out on the deck and looked out at the marsh spread out before me. A ranger was working in the office, and I put the puzzle to her. Explained the inspiring thrill of the sighting, the inquiries, the ponderings, the frustration.

"I'll bet they're white pelicans," she said.

WHAT!!!

Unbeknownst to my local expert fifty miles away, the Horicon Marsh is a summer breeding ground for thousands of white pelicans. I hadn't even known they existed. I'd simply asked the wrong person for advice. The ranger showed me a postcard in the gift shop. Sure 'nuf, they looked right. I ripped through my bird guides to the section on pelicans I'd never thought to open, and there it was, in black and white and full color. With a wingspread of nine feet, no wonder I'd thought they were the biggest damn birds I'd ever seen.

And with that, I smiled, even laughed a little. "I knew it!!" I thought in triumph.

And now as I blunder through every day since then full of judgment calls and leaps of faith and decisions big and small, if I need a little validation for the idea of trusting my gut, I just look back at a warm spring afternoon on a Wisconsin marsh, and think...

Pelicans.

Squirrel Mercies

I have changed the steps of the dance.

The bird feeder sits on the back deck, in square view of the window over my kitchen sink, as it has for the past twenty-five years or more. The feeder is now cracked and weatherbeaten, as is the deck that it sits on, attached by a brace of wood . And if I'm going to be perfectly honest about it, okay, I admit I've developed a few lines and creaks of my own in that time frame too.

The feeder has a hinged roof, and the simple design contemplates that two panes of plexiglas contain the sunflower seeds that I could pour in from the top every few days, refilling the tank when the level gets low. I have long since abandoned that as an ideal, ever since the neighborhood raccoons discovered that by ripping out the plexiglas they could access the entire cache of seeds at once. Usually in the middle of the night. It would drive the dog--my first dog Muttsie, followed when she passed by Shadow, then by Rocket, then Bandit--absolutely bonkers. In fact the racoons broke one of the two panes, rendering the entire assemblage utterly useless for storing anything but a cup and a half of sunflower seeds at any given time. 

This winter has seemed particularly harsh and brutal, and so I've taken up the duty/challenge/gauntlet of stepping out on to the porch every frigid morning to set out a cup or two of "hulled" sunflower seeds for the birds. I buy this pricey variety of seeds because they comes with the hard black shells removed. It makes an easier meal for a number of birds that wouldn't otherwise come to the feeder. Cardinals and goldfinches can easily crack the whole seeds open with their strong beaks. Nuthatches naturally would have to work at it a little harder. 

And so every morning I am greeted by a mixed flock of hungry birds hanging out on my deck, giving me reproachful stares and impatient glances until I don gloves and boots and a down coat and emerge with the plastic container holding their breakfast. It is a colorful assemblage that settles down to eat between fluttery comings and goings--woodpeckers in black and white, buff and red; white and red-breasted nuthatches; cardinals; chickadees; goldfinches; snowbirds.

Other than a trio of babies that decided to check out the porch one night last summer, I haven't noticed any raccoons making midnight forays lately. Let's face it, the birds clear out the seeds I put out in the morning by lunchtime. However, there is the occasional squirrel...or even two...that stop by. 

I have long been entranced by the comings and goings of squirrels in the forest and on city streets, their chittering backtalk, the grace with which they jump from branch to branch, the way they run up and around a tree trunk like a stream of mercury. That they are intelligent and wily and resourceful there is no doubt. But for years they were scarce in my yard, and entirely absent from the deck. It was simply a matter of environment--when the house and the deck were both new, the forest where they lived was much farther away. Over three decades, however, natural succession has taken root. Small saplings have become trees, shrubs have migrated nearer to the edge of the yard, and the forest drew closer to the house. And so did the squirrels.

When Bandit was still alive, I enjoyed watching him chase them from the feeder and the porch. Bandit was what I sometimes called my "Lazarus dog," a chocolate lab/beagle mix with a bad liver who had come back from the precipice of death more times than I could remember. And despite his age, on his good days he was blazingly fast. And he loved to chase squirrels like greyhounds love to chase mechanical rabbits. 

We evolved a routine over time that relied on a pas de deux of pantomime and whispers. Once I spied a squirrel at the feeder, I'd duck out of sight and whisper "squirrel" in Bandit's direction. He'd spring to his feet and race me to the back hallway so that I could throw the screen door open like the starting gate at Churchill Downs. The squirrel would get a head start, of course, as soon as he heard us bumping around in the narrow hall, all elbows (mine) and wagging tail (his) but that never deterred Bandit from turning on the speed and chasing his prey deep into the woods. He never caught one, but we both appreciated the chase. It made me laugh with delight every time to see how much enthusiasm he brought to the pursuit.

Bandit eventually died, and in his place came Lucky, a wolf-sized border collie mix with even more speed, and a taste for wildlife. Rabbits in particular, but I think he'd eat just about anybody. I have literally wrestled in the snow over a frozen rabbit carcass with this dog, and I only won half the battle.

One day I decided to try out the "chase the squirrel off the porch" routine with Lucky, and he spooked that squirrel so badly that the squirrel ran right past the first couple of big trees with a slavering dog hot on his tail, and eventually found shelter in a third. 

The thought has crossed my mind lately that Lucky might actually catch one. The snow is deep, and his legs are long, far longer than the squirrel's. And I really don't want that to happen. And so I have entirely quit giving my dog notice at all.

And so this morning, as it has several times since winter started, I noticed that there were no more birds on the porch, and that a luxuriously fluffy tail and set of furry, squirrel-sized haunches completely filled up one side of the feeder. I went from window to patio door to get a better view, then back again. My movements must have given me away through the glass, because suddenly the squirrel perched himself at the edge of tray, nose facing toward the forest, one eye on the house. I tiptoed to the back hallway, and opened the back door, then the storm door. "Scoot," I planned to say, but in fact he was way ahead of me.

At the first sound and movement from the doorway, the squirrel launched himself off the porch as though he was parasailing from a cliff. Front paws outstretched, he glided downward a good dozen feet or more, his tail serving as a rudder in the wind. Then he caught solid ground and scampered away in lightning-like bounds toward the woods to the east, leaving pockmarks in the pristine snow cover from the house to the closest maple tree twenty yards away.

Safe at last, I thought with a smile...and then my eye was drawn upward as a red-tailed hawk with a notch in one wing soared into view from the west and began to circle the trees. Within the confines of the forest, I'm pretty sure that my little squirrel visitor will be safe for a while. In the long run, I'm not placing any bets on his future.

But at least, while I'm on duty filling and watching the feeder, I know he'll get a hard-earned meal once in a while. Even if he has to cross a no-man's land of bare, unprotected lawn, and then elbow the woodpeckers and chickadees out of the way. And from now on, at least, I guarantee there won't be a dog on his tail.