i saw a bird

and other ramblings in black and white

American Birds, by William Lovell Finley

I will try to narrow down the details and get to the part that makes me happy and ashamed all at once.

A fledgling crow tumbled out of the leaning lopsided Doug fir behind our house, the one that, just the day before, had been tagged by our local utility district with a yellow Vegetation Management Pruning Notice: side pruning 1 fir.

The crow baby landed amidst a flock of wild turkeys congregated in the shade, and the baby’s parents were not happy. If you’ve heard crows in distress then you know they can go from hello is that a peanut on the ground? everyday caws, to the apocalypse-is-nigh all caps CAWS. So I went outside and there baby Craven was, sitting in the pine duff under the Doug. Yes, I name animals, trees, rocks; again, not a scientist. The turkeys scattered, though one young hen gave baby Craven the beady eye before hustling to catch up with the flock; her name is Cyndi with an i if you’re wondering.

It’s hard to think what to do when a fledgling is staring up at you, the nearest branches are way up there, the utility company is coming in “2-4 weeks” which is could be anytime service provider-speak for not anytime good or convenient, and said fledgling’s parents are cawing up a ruckus; losing their shit is what I would have said if the Cravens were a human mom and dad and freaking out to beat the band. The issue was, oh, lots of contenders: Tony Soprano, the neighborhood heavyweight tomcat, the feral cat commune down the way, and so forth. I picked up a branch, bent down and held it out, and baby Craven hopped aboard.

That is the part that made me, continues to make me, selfishly happy. Baby C looked at me and did not caw a peep. I slowly raised the branch to eye level. It stared back and waited, as if I actually knew what I was doing and had a plan. If you’ve had a child you know just how rare these moments become, in short order.

And now the ashamed chapter: I wanted to keep it. I imagined becoming that lady with the crow on her shoulder wherever she goes. I imagined re-fashioning those cute and wholly ineffective chintz cotton masks I bought on Etsy in the early days of the pandemic into little Craven pants (see earlier: losing one’s shit). I thought about Mozart and his starling and no, Baby C is not a starling, but there might be something between us, the way a musical wunderkind learned a thing or two from a bird friend. I thought about William Finley and the photos of chickadees on his felt hat, the young flickers clambering out from their high-hole to scramble up and down his coat.

I thought about the cats inside my house going bat-shi& (that word again!) scrambling for a fly in the window and thought, what am I thinking?

I am a mother and it is mothering season: nerve-wracking season. Turkey poults in the yard that started as a six-pack of tumbling fluffs beneath their mother, now down to one. The goose family that’s been camped out on the side of the road now missing one parent and most of the goslings. There’s already too much sorrow. I’m no baby bird kidnapper.

Here is what baby Craven sounds like: try to imagine the caw caw caw of the parents as a whaa whaa whaa. It’s been a loud two weeks. Baby Craven can fly now, and yesterday I watched it teeter high up on a branch in the dead pine next door, hopping from limb to limb behind one of its parents.

On the river a raven once presented me a piece of cardboard with a hole pecked clean through the middle. It followed my boat from the sidecanyon where I’d shooed it from our lunch table after it stabbed a slice of cantaloupe and ferried it’s half-moon slice to a boulder. I cleaned up the lunch mess and went for a hike, and when I climbed back into my boat there was the cardboard on my seat cushion. I do think it was a gift. I think, anytime we see one, while these wild blips of feather and beak and wing are still around, is a gift.

I didn’t take this video but someone who knows I’d be happy to watch it did. Suggested viewing: eyes open, then eyes closed, then squint and the blurred bits become something altogether else. Eyes closed and just sound is a wondrous thing too.

I bought some of the new Ansel Adams stamps. The one of the Tetons and the Snake river makes me homesick for the part of Idaho where it rubs up against Wyoming. The mountains make you feel like you’re anywhere but there, but when you drive past the Spud Drive-In with its giant potato it’s as there as there can get.

I think about the places I used to roam and feel a two-way pang: lucky to have been there in the past when I was, knowing that forever USA is, if anything, a place that’s never been easy to foresee.

forever usa

At my first river job, on the Chattooga River (it forms the border between Georgia and South Carolina), I took rolls of 35mm film from my Minolta to the local camera and film shop on Main Street in Clayton, Georgia, still clinging to photojournalism dreams. One day the shop owner pulled open a drawer, rummaged through wads of yellowed receipts, and pulled out an original Adams photograph. He’d received it from Ansel in a swap for film “sometime in the 40’s.”

In the Divorce That Shall Not Be Named, my camera was with me when it all went down, but the photojournalism dreams circa 1977-1990 ended up locked in a storage unit in that same town.

My only consolation is wondering if they eventually landed at the dump where that Ansel Adams most likely also went: when he showed it to me, the old man said he didn’t particularly care for it.