Bonaparte's gulls

Deborah came up to go birding with me one Sunday in the middle of April, and we meandered north on country roads, always looking for the gravel roads, to the Muskegon Wastewater facility. It was one of the few bright sunny days in a spring of cold, dreary and often rainy weather. But the wind was very strong so birding from the car made sense.

We saw 40+ species but three sightings were especially memorable and all were at the Wastewater.

The first was the Ruddy Ducks. There were hundreds that day and we saw them on the far east side of the east lagoon. Ruddies are small ducks with bright baby blue bills and white cheeks in breeding plumage. This day there were several distinct rafts of them, probably 20 to 30 in each group, and they were in wild water with significant waves that were splashing and crashing against the rocky bank along the perimeter road. The ducks mostly had their heads and bills turned and tucked into their backs, and they roller-coastered up and down and into the wild waves with ease, very visible with the strong sun throwing light over the birds and the unruly water.

We then came to the protected northwest corner of the same lagoon and saw a grebe, which in grebe fashion was repeatedly ducking its head under water for several seconds while searching for food. I first thought it was a pied-billed but the bill was thin, not fat. It was underwater so much that we had to watch for several minutes and Deborah suddenly noticed its eye was red and then she suggested that the "golden ears" might be waterlogged which is exactly what was happening. We were close enough to see this once we figured it out. So we added Eared Grebe to our day list. This is a bird that is usually seen west of the Mississippi and "rare in most of the east" so that was another birding moment to be remembered.

And then, our favorite: We had driven slowly west and had seen a pair of terns out on the west lagoon, but they were too far to ID. Still, I had black heads on my mind and as we were coming around the bubbling ponds, I saw a tern...for a second, but then realized it wasn't a tern but a black-headed gull. Most of the gulls in Michigan are either the large Herring gull or the similar but smaller Ring-billed gull. We had had good looks at both earlier in the day.

Bonaparte's migrate through Michigan to breed in Canada. And, along the way, they stop for a bit on shorelines, lakes and sewage lagoons. We watched and were absolutely giddy as we saw them dip down toward the water and literally run across the surface on their red feet. Several times. Like dancing ON the water. I called them Jesus birds. They are beautiful gulls, with all black heads, black bills, grey wings, white bodies and red-orange feet. They are graceful, smaller than the Herrings and Ring-bills, even smaller than a crow. We were exclaiming with delight as we watched them repeatedly touch down, never settling on the water with their bodies, but always just pattering along the top for a few seconds. Like who WOULD want to settle into a sewage lagoon?

Our last bird of the day was a Great Blue Heron flying over US31 just north of Holland...always stately as they flap across the sky with trailing legs, great wings and S-shaped neck.

The next morning, we had planned to go to Warren Dunes as Deborah was headed back to Indianapolis but it was snowing! Instead we went out for coffee and happened on Dave, to whom we told our mink/weasel story. This was a strange brown critter, acting goofy, that we had seen on one of the gravel roads from yesterday. It would run along the shoulder seemingly oblivious of our presence and then stop and start, finally crossing in front of us and then burrowing (we guessed, although it was hard to figure out what was happening) into a hole right at the road edge. We could almost have touched it. Dave thought it might be a mink. A few days later, I saw what looked liked a similar animal scurrying through the water and reeds near the "waterfall" bridge on the Stu Visser trail. This one had something in its mouth and was moving fast and with purpose. Two mink in a week?

The Last Stand by Nathaniel Philbrick

Custer, Sitting Bull, and the the Battle of the Little Bighorn....

"Custer and his men were last seen by their comrades galloping across a ridge before they disappeared into the seductive green hills. Not until two days later did the surviving members of the regiment find them: more than two hundred dead bodies, many of them hacked to pieces and bristling with arrows, putrefying in the summer sun."

Custer and his men died on June 25, 1876, and this book tells the story well. If anyone has an iota of curiosity about Custer and/or Sitting Bull, or about the treatment of Native Americans in this period of history, or even about men who march into battle, then this is a book to be read and enjoyed. The men become real and distinct individuals, with their personalities, their accomplishments and their frailties. The topography, the weather, the horses and mules, the night camps, the rivers, Libbie Custer, the huge Indian village on the west bank of the Little Bighorn....and the stunning outcome. Of course, ultimately the Indians (specifically in this story, the Lakota and Cheyenne) lose, starting with the massacre at Wounded Knee.

There are nearly 100 pages of notes at the end of the book. While there have been hundreds of books written about this battle, Philbrick "relied primarily on Native accounts" for the final battle, and he explains why in these notes. Also in "1983, fire swept across the battlefield, providing a team of archaeologists and volunteers with the chance to comb the site with metal detectors and analyze what they found." Philbrick himself, who lives on Nantucket, visited the battlefield three times.

I found very interesting the part Reno had in this tale: his ill-fated charge on the morning of the day of June 25, 1876. (Custer's whereabouts and intentions were unknown to Reno at the time who was south of Custer, but the rolling hills prevented a long view.) Reno actually crossed the Little Bighorn, was easily routed and fled back across the river. He survived but his life did not go well as he was blamed by many for what happened to Custer, and he continued to drink heavily.

There is the remarkable story of Peter Thompson who also survived, was awarded the Medal of Honor for bravery and subsequently lived and ranched in Montana.

I read of Custer's Civil War exploits. Philbrick says that "Custer was something more than the harebrained thrill junkie of modern legend. Over the course of the war, he proved to be one of the best cavalry officers, if not the best, in the Union army."

Sitting Bull's story is also told, although not as much is known about his life. "With the collapse of the buffalo herd came the collapse of the Lakota." Sitting Bull could not sustain their way of life. He sought asylum in Canada but in 1881 he "surrendered to American authorities" and for a decade or so, he was a curiosity, a celebrity, but he was often humiliated, discouraged and sad. He asked at one point, "Can I be any lower than I am? Once I was a man, but now I am a pitiful wretch..." In 1890, he was killed by a Lakota policeman, Bull Head, from the Standing Rock agency.

Custer was a complex man. Philbrick skillfully teases out the threads of his life and presents a thoroughly compelling and honest portrait of this hero (or villian) depending on one's point of view. Philbrick seems to wish only to tell this famous story as close to the facts as he possibly can.

Again, I found the book fascinating....not at all boring.

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow

Ahh...this is a sad, sad story, but beautifully written. A young Swedish girl, Nella, meets a black American serviceman, Roger, in a bar. They fall in love and have a family, but things go awry, very, very badly. When the story opens, Rachel (their daughter) is coming from Chicago to live with her Grandmother and her Aunt Loretta in Portland, Oregon.

Rachel's story is revealed slowly throughout the book, and it is also a book about what it means to be biracial, what it means to be uneducated, poor, addicted, what it means to not surrender pride and a sense of self worth. But it is not predictable; it is not full of cliches.

There is also Brick, aka Jamie, aka James who grew up in the projects in Chicago and who runs away when he is 11 years old, whose mother is a prostitute who turns the TV on loudly when the men are over so noises from the bedroom are not as obvious. One day Jamie sees what he initially thinks is an egret fly past his window. He has a Roger Tory Peterson field guide and is captivated by the flight and freedom of birds. But it is not an egret; it is a family.

This book is mostly about Rachel going through adolescence while living with her Grandmother, and it is about her insistence that "color" not define her, and about her wish to "take the long road" and not get drawn into provincialism either through the attitudes of those around her or by making wrong choices. To her the long road means she can do anything she chooses in life instead of accepting the constricted options of her Grandmother's world; she can go anywhere she wants. She also has to somehow preserve her sense of her parents and understand what has happened to her.

When I read a book like this, I learn and understand a bit more about the very complex fabric of the psychosocial blanket that covers America and Americans today, and it helps me try to be a better person.

The book is "the winner of the 2008 Bellwether Prize for best fiction manuscript addressing issues of social justice."

Work Song by Ivan Doig

Mr. Doig has written another novel of Montana, this one set in Butte in the early 1900s. Anaconda runs the town because it owns the copper mines, which tunnel under the town. Butte is known at that time as The Richest Hill in the World, and one day a young man gets off the train there hoping to reverse his fortune (which lately has been running from the Chicago mob and rejection in love).

He lives in a rooming house with two retired miners (Hoop and Griff) and a widowed landlady. His name is Morrie and he first works as a "cryer," someone who goes to wakes as a representative of a funeral home. While he does well as a cryer, it isn't exactly his life ambition, not to mention the real possibility of becoming an alcoholic. Morrie loves literature and he soon leaves to work at the public library for a curmudgeon named Mr. Sandison. He also meets a former pupil, now a teacher herself, who is engaged to a union organizer. He reluctantly becomes involved in union activities, has various adventures and eventually (but not particularly credibly, IMO) facilitates the creation of a "work song" that will help organize the miners into a more cohesive, committed and effective force against Anaconda.

There is flirting with his landlady, along with descriptions of Butte and the miners' lives; there are threads of a scrawny, neglected young boy named Russian Famine, of the library and Mr. Sandison's past and of shadowy "goons" always threatening Morrie.

It's not the most compelling novel I've read lately, but it does touch on a period of history in labor relations, specifically, those in Butte and it had the pace and gentleness of old-fashioned novels.

Just one excerpt at random: "These hardened miners had sifted into the library basement one by one or in pairs; several had brought their wives, weathered women in dark-dyed dresses usually worn to weddings, wakes and funerals. Life on the Hill was written in the creased faces staring up at me in my blue serge, and I needed to tap into whatever inspiration I could find, without delay."

(What I have wondered before is why Doig lives in Seattle and writes about Montana...but perhaps he DID live in Montana at one time. He certainly respects the English language and is fine writer.)

Birds: An April Morning

April 14, 2011 to be exact. Most days I walk the mile-long trail along Pine Creek. Usually, in the spring, the mid April and early May days bring FOY (first of year) birds as they migrate and stop in this preserved green corridor with its variety of habitat.

Today, the woods were FULL of Ruby-crowned Kinglets and Myrtle Warblers. Both birds were almost certainly just passing through to their more northern breeding grounds so to see dozens of them flitting about was delightful. Kinglets are either Golden-crowned or Ruby-crowned. I have seen both species several times, but lately, the Ruby-crowned have been predominant. On the Rubies, the "crown" is a tiny red slit that is usually nearly impossible to see, both because the bird is often high in a tree and because kinglets are frenetic! They truly seldom are still for more than a second or two. But they also don't seem to mind the proximity of humans and will just keep moving through the brush or shrubbery or trees, stopping and starting, moving from branch to branch or even to the ground at times. They don't spook and disappear as many birds do when threatened. Kinglets are tiny round balls of bird energy. They have noticeable white areas in front of and behind the eyes, white wing bars, tiny slim bills and are just over 4 inches long. I often was looking DOWN on them as they foraged, nearly always seeing their "seldom visible" red patches.

And then the Yellow-rumped Warblers, which were also numerous. The group known as Yellow-rumps (butterbutts) was officially "split" in March of 2010 into Myrtle warblers (those in the east) and Audubon warblers (those in the west). The throat is white in the Myrtle and yellow in the Audubon. (This taxonomic splitting has the benefit of increasing one's life list pretty easily.)

All the warblers are lovely, small and active birds, just a bit slower and larger than the kinglets, but not by much in either category. The Myrtle male has yellow patches in four places: both sides of the breast, the top of the head and the rump. It has a white throat, white wing bars, white belly with some black streaking and is mostly dark grey-blue and black elsewhere. Very pretty. I stood on the bridge and watched a male sit on a branch over the creek, not more than six feet away: just the bird and a background of moving water. These perfect moments are one reason to become a birder: the emotional thrill and a brief suspension of time with the utter certainty that life is fine.

It happens so often that I get a glimpse of a bird, hope for a better look and then the bird pirouettes as if showing off, or steps into the open or disappears briefly but reappears soon, closer and in better light. Not always but often enough. So it was with the Myrtles this week.

I walked along and watched an elusive Rusty Blackbird work the creek edge. Last year, Deborah and I saw a blackbird moving along the creek, with quite different behavior from the Brewer's Blackbirds and, after investigation in several bird guides, we learned about Rusty Blackbirds and their declining populations. So I've been on the lookout for them.

There were also Brown Creepers, tiny mottled brown birds, moving up tree trunks, usually noticeable first by this movement. They work up a tree and then fly (Maria says "flutter like a leaf") down to the bottom of another tree and start moving upwards again. Don Gorney told us they nest under loose bark. A Fox Sparrow rustled in the leaf litter. A Red-bellied Woodpecker called and was easy to spot as the trees are still bare of leaves.

I saw a Hermit Thrush twice that morning: The second time was back by the horseshoe-shaped pond and I watched it for ten minutes. It is grey-brown on the back with a rufous tail. It has spots on its light breast and has a robin shape. It flew to a branch at eye level not far ahead of me and flicked its tail up and then much more slowly lowered it, over and over...making an easy ID as this is a signature of the Hermit Thrush.

Wood Ducks, Mallards, Grackles, Red-winged Blackbirds, Cardinals, Blue Jays, Coots, Song Sparrows, Canada geese, Tufted Titmice.....

As I stood on the walk overlooking the one of the ponds, I heard twittering and watched catkins fall to the trail dislodged by Pine Siskins working in branches very near the tops of the trees. The catkins looked like tiny fox tails.

Life by Keith Richards

"It's now famous, my rule on the road. Nobody touches the shepherd's pie until I've been in there. Don't bust my crust, baby. It's written into the contract. If you come into Keith Richards's room and he's got a shepherd's pie on the warmer, bubbling away, if it's still pristine, the only one that can bust the crust is me. Greedy m________________s, they'll come in and just scoop up anything."

And so he writes....

This is a rollicking story of Keith Richards's rise to fame and fortune with the Rolling Stones. It's very entertaining. He is smart, vulgar, oddly sweet and talented.. Richards loves the Stones and gets miffed when Mick Jagger flits around, coming and going, but acknowledges that they've been together forever....like a marriage with ups and downs.

Anyone who likes the Stones would almost certainly like this book. It's funny, informative, a bit gossipy, and often (but not always) self-deprecating. He does ramble some through the last chapters as though he started to lose interest in this tale, or perhaps he said everything he wanted to say, or perhaps the book was long enough already.

What does come through, over and over, is his love and respect for music, especially for the blues and all the blues musicians from Chicago, Memphis, the Mississippi Delta....

And of course, one reality that defines Keith Richards: drugs. He does not shy away from how, who, when, and where. He is alive, he says, because he didn't escalate his heroin use and he always knew the provenance. Luck also, I am sure, was on his side.

There are stories of the songs and the concerts, the legal troubles, the women, his kids, his parents...his mates.

A few years ago, KR fell out of a tree in Fiji and ends up having neurosurgery in New Zealand. The surgeon, Dr. Andrew Law, says: "I got a call...from Fiji..saying they had someone with an intracranial hemorrhage, and it was quite a prominent person, could I cope with that? And they said it's Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones. I remember having his poster on my wall when I was at university, so I was always a Rolling Stones fan...." He survived and was "back on stage" in 6 weeks and doing fine....

Near the end of the book, Keith says: "I can rest on my laurels. I've stirred up enough crap in my time.... There's carping about us being old men. The fact is, I've always said, if we were black and our name was Count Basie or Duke Ellington, everybody would be going, yeah, yeah, yeah. White rock and rollers apparently are not supposed to do this at our age. But I'm not here just to make records and money. I'm here to say something and to touch other people, sometimes in a cry of desperation...."

Book: House of Stone by Christina Lamb

"The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe."

Christina Lamb has written a good book about the last 40 years in Zimbabwe. She alternates between the story of Aqui, a black Zimbabwean, who grew up in a village, marries, has several children and who eventually becomes a maid for white families, and the story of Nigel who grew up as a privileged white Rhodesian. The author chronicles the rise of Robert Mugabe as it parallels the lives of Aqui and Nigel and their families.

Mugabe is 87 years old (in 2011) and, while he started his rule with improving the quality of life for the blacks and reassuring the whites, that good will and those good intentions have long dissipated. Just last week I heard on NPR that Zimbabweans are the "least happy" people in the world. What makes this book compelling is the double narrative...the excitement and hopefulness of Aqui as she watched Rhodesia became Zimbabwe and Mugabe replace Ian Smith and then, sadly, her eventual disillusionment. Opposition to Mugabe was/is met with violence, yet much of the world (including the US) supported his government for years.

Zimbabwe lies between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers, and is bordered by South Africa, Botswana, Zambia and Mozambique. It is a beautiful country. Nigel and Aqui both grew up and still live in Zimbabwe but in very different circumstances, with very different histories.

As in Scribbling the Cat or The Last Resort, this book also describes the rogue war veterans, the white-owned farms, the poor villages and their subsistence existence, the government, its challengers, its political machinations and corruption and the eventual disenfranchisement of both white and black in today's Zimbabwe. These are sad stories whose outcomes are not yet decided.

Dzimba dza mabwe means houses of stone.

At the end of the book, Christina Lamb talks about The Great Zimbabwe: "...a mysterious series of walled circles, the remains of what had once been the greatest medieval city in sub-Saharan Africa....no one really know who built this place or why...the place has the same romantic feel as Machu Picchu. I wandered amid the stone walls and wondered what had happened to this great empire where more than 10,000 people lived until its collapse at the end of the 15th century...By summer 2006, inflation was above 1200% and...a family of five needed 22 million Zimbabwean dollars per month for basic goods and services. Life expectancy for women had fallen to just 34 years...The first deaths from cholera were reported in Harare and municipality cleaners began finding dead newborn babies people had thrown away because they couldn't afford to feed them...Just as the collapse of Great Zimbabwe remains an enigma, so it is a mystery how one man could so willfully destroy his own country. How could Mugabe, the man who seems at war with the world, be the same man who stunned everyone with his forgiveness and conciliatory speeches after independence [1980]?"

Wood Duck

This morning was damp and still chilly at about 40 degrees but still much better than 20 degrees as it had been all last week at 8 a.m. I figured the birds are migrating regardless of the weather so I walked the SV trail. I wasn't disappointed as I saw two FOY (first of year) birds: a very cooperative and handsome Fox Sparrow and a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker.

Since last week, I have been seeing at least one pair of wood ducks, and I was wondering where they might be when I saw exactly where the male was....perched on the railing of the horseshoe-shaped pond overlook. Usually, the wood ducks have been skittish and fly off as I approach. This male didn't and just stood on the railing for at least five minutes, at eye level. I got amazing looks at this spectacular bird. It is in the same class as the harlequin duck for unsurpassed beauty.

It is a geometry of asymmetrical and rich color patches, most of which are outlined by thin white lines. The bill has a black tip and is orangey-red but with a broad white splash. The face has a bold scarlet and gold V-shape which terminates at the top of the bill. The eye has a red iris and black pupil. The head is all velvety dark greens and brownish olives with more white lines dividing the colors into small, individual sections; there are teal blue areas on the back, dusty deep plum/rusty-colored patches, a few orange lines near the tail, a light cafe-au-lait on the sides, and of course the unique head with feathers hanging off the back, feathers with white streaks.

These colors in the grey gloomy morning were crisp and vivid. The feet were yellowish, easily seen as it perched. So, this was an antidote, pre morning coffee, banishing the blues of too much chill, too little sunshine.

Later at home, an Eastern towhee foraged briefly in my yard. It was a female and exactly fit the description of having "mild chocolate underparts and head." Nice.