A boreal chickadee, more predictably found near a cluster of suet feeders in prior winters, would be welcome if I could hear any chickadees at all, but this time hardly a one calls out throughout the afternoon, and no wheezy boreal chickadee voice this whole winter long. The boreal is shyer than the every-day black-capped chickadees, much more selective of its habitat which is typically bogs, and--could it be--prefers to stay away from ourselves, the bipeds that talk and lift binoculars at them. Yesterday I noted only the chet-chet of white-winged crossbills calling from one to another sky-high somewhere where there may have been a view of cones on firs or spruces.
It's become significant to me how much oftener, if it happens at all, I see my wild four-legged kin from the road where I'm driving than I do anywhere I happen to be walking. Or if I meet a big mammal from a trail I'm walking or skiing it goes by in a flash, like the cougar silhouetted off to my right in post-sunset forest by a river, or some low brown animal or other deep in grass beside me on a fishing afternoon. Cars quietly coursing a county road or driveway seem to be more trusted since the other creatures know they don't, by nature, swivel around suddenly or leave the road but to keep their bearings, though risk may intensify if a car stops at any point. What wild animals make of ATVs probably fits parameters of its own.
In any case rare creature-sightings come as surprises in places to any degree wild or worked over by human industry, like bird rarities dropping in on suburban lakes or farmers' mud flats. In the Anthropocene Era, the geological time period that mass human activity is said to have launched beginning with the atomic bomb in the mid 20th century, every shy outnumbered animal a person sees can be thought of as having some human influence brought upon what it breathes or circulates through its tissues or what perils it dodges. But if it lives, rejuvenates itself, bears offspring and risks showing itself off to respectful gawkers like ourselves, it's made some adaptation to our ever-growing takeover of earth. For those of us excited by novelty and resilience in the animal kingdom, hope for these creatures endures.
Right about now, their struggle seems inexorable, since too many business-immersed people making up corporations consider little as important as the mandate of growth in profits, theirs and their allies; in the age of water drawdown, climate collapse, pandemic and famine there can only be a crescendo and a collapse on the large time scale. Nothing grows forever on a finite earth; the faster the would-be subduing of nature, the sooner and more abundant the repercussions. All kinds of living things, meantime, are moving to where fear or new atmospheric conditions sweep them. We have exotic plants and animals, and we have extinctions where wild beings were stranded in the only homes they knew.
The mixed-media art piece shown above, Pecking Order in the Collapse of Seasons, was drawn from an initial scene in grittiest downtown Duluth, Minnesota where imported, naturalized bird species like the English sparrows and the Eurasian tree sparrow shown on the wall commingle in the breezes, in the wake of confused, abbreviated seasonal phenomena, with stray plants that will grow in the poor soil at the footings of a parking lot, or out of cracks, plants whose seeds were borne from nearby beaches or farms or gardens way inland. Sorrow yet wonderment at all kinds of transitions out across the natural world amid the chill of this past winter attended this work in a corner of my latest home in Floodwood, MN. Dried clippings of last year's weedy fruit and flowers served as my models. The piece is 12 x 9 inches or 30.2 x 22.7 cm. unmatted, and is painted in watercolor and pencil on cold-press 140 lb. watercolor paper.
