This humid and uproariously green May-become-June have brought more subjects to my attention than I can currently cope with, but there continue to be tomorrow, next week-end, the days left out within the current week and all the times ahead. An adventure I had intended on and followed through was to find a Connecticut warbler in the Sax Zim Bog, a designated important bird area just a few miles northeast of where I live. Locating the song that resounded from a territorial adult bird out the open windows of the car was none too hard as I rolled along where these uncommon warblers had nested in the most recent years. The song led me briskly out of the car, into rubber boots and over a flooded ditch into a forest completely upholstered with mosses, all beset with pores of rain and snow-melt probably safe for a person to drink, and in little armadas along my way, more lady's slippers than I had ever seen before. All proved to be the variety known as stemless, occurring in cream tones more or less pink-tinged like cheeks or noses, or else uniformly pink like any fleshy body organ you think it most resembles.
Back from where the lady's slippers flourished one Connecticut warbler held onto a branch about twenty-five feet up in a tamarack. Skipping incessantly from perch to perch is what most warblers seem to do on descent from their migration, when most people see them--but this bird sat presiding. In due time I sorted him out by the long yellow taper of his body, running almost to the tip of his tail feathers, after I'd passed minutes searching straight up with the binoculars. He would peer at me at length, strange invader that I surely was. Our friends the birds, both the common kinds and the hard-to-find, watch us at least as often as we watch them, I believe. Pressure from approaching birdwatchers is a well-known source of stress to many birds. But today's Connecticut warbler was, I suspected while I stood there, largely unworried since his nest was somewhere else, probably lower and further back in the bog judging by his hourly disappearances that way; meanwhile I was either stumbling around or standing just below his singing-tree or prowling back in the other direction nearer the road where I'd first heard his song in its three parts, emphatic with avian certitude. It struck me what an object of fascination I may have seemed if only because of the whirl of mosquitoes that beset me as I stood below him; I saw him crane his head, grey all the way to chest level which was black-infused, the eye neatly ringed in white, to gather in all possible meaning. Mosquitoes after all make up a big part of his diet.
I learned from my late daddy's old bird book, the Audubon Bird Guide to Eastern Land Birds by Richard H. Pough, published by Doubleday and Company in 1946, that here in the U.S.-Canadian border region and some ways northward the Connecticut warbler favors the black spruce/tamarack bogs for nesting but that further to the northwest where this species is most numerous it gravitates to uplands full of poplar. Though 1946 was a long time ago, I wonder if many of the habitat preferences given in this handbook special to me for its descriptive text don't hold true today. Despite its name, bestowed on one or more specimens identified on migration through the eastern seaboard, the Connecticut is primarily a nesting bird of interior Canada.
Follow-up from finding the lady's slippers led me away toward home, through damp meadows overgrown with alder and willow, back through more of that subarctic type of bog that lies open to sun. Here was a profusion of kalmia polifolia or bog laurel along the edges of overflowing ditches, everywhere in pink blossom. The petals being joined at the base, the corolla or blossom has an especially unified look with scalloped rim and long white stamens and pistil. The budding flowers are nut-shaped and fluted like a trademark hard candy or ornate button.
Another spring arrival nearer the house was our local wild iris versicolor, the blue flag, and subsequently in dryer meadow open to view from a passing car, the orange upthrusts of Indian paintbrush all in a swath over maybe an acre. Because I first saw this uncommon plant, which like the lady's slipper is a parasite on certain neighboring plants dependent on certain soil bacteria, near the Great Divide in Wyoming, I think of it as a westerner in our country and am right away reminded of the local magpies, western relatives of the crow and raven. In our part of Minnesota the magpie claims its easternmost home ground, though we doubtless have a lot fewer of them here than do the mountain states to the west.
From seeing certain wild species, a person's gaze may widen to places way, way beyond, where we felt or expect we would feel freer; we've been and could again go visiting there. The mountain West is that kind of a place to me and doubtless others who aren't from there. My most recent enjoyments have included the short stories of Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain, further popularized in movies. Music, silenced but faintly recalled for its harmonizing of the desolate, the ruined and the sweet, is the undertone of her story 'Them Old Cowboy Songs' whose foreword reads: "There is a belief that pioneers came into the country, homesteaded, lived tough, raised a shoeless brood and founded ranch dynasties. Some did. But many more had short runs and were quickly forgotten."
'Cowboy Songs' is about newlyweds still in their teens, gone alone onto the Wyoming prairies to begin family life in echoing poverty, out of range of their elder relatives' and acquaintances' supercilious and judgmental bearing. Archie is an orphan born in Ireland and adopted out, Rose the daughter of a drunken teamster who carries freight from the railroad docks and a mother who is 'grey with some wasting disease.' Archie learned old lilts and lyrics in his earliest years and carries all of them in memory wherever he goes, given to sharing them whenever the mood is right. Harsh fate separates this couple forever as he devotes himself to faraway paying work, Rose toils alone through her first pregnancy which she's compelled to keep secret, out on the waterless range where she is abandoned, dying of complications as Archie tames horses, then rounds up cattle through a winter's blizzards, mainly trying to make a living for himself and wife back home.
What I make and sell comes to me, absorbed, even mentally overwhelmed amid days spent among these lingering star bursts of evolution, with the knowledge in mind that so many forebears in this country must have been just as bedazzled by creation, depicting as they could the same subjects I find there, or bundling them into song, but I will never know them except in tiny ways by the heritage we draw upon and in various ways sing. Many of these predecessors faded and died in the economic hardships that come with valuing most what we feel could never have a price, in a world and culture that have for a long time imposed their prices. Yet of course all the assorted, clashing types of people who've co-developed the industrialized world are in so many senses one with all the artisans and singers.
A Spruce Grouse Comes Promenading
