~ by Sumalee ~
About a year ago, V. and I were strolling the many straight lanes, once paved gravel roads, of a bygone U.S. Army training camp, precipitously built after Pearl Harbor to eventually house some 40,000 personnel, turned into a wildlife area-slash-hunting ground that is popular with birders and gunners alike. It was then that we surprised our very first wrentits. Wrentits are shy, secretive songbirds who are primarily heard rather than seen, their characteristic "bouncing ball" chant often the sole indication of their presence.
Many birds, especially waxwings, find this area appealing because of the plethora of ancient
fruit trees, mostly apple, yielding hard, scrappy fruit that repulse human tongues but which many songbirds apparently regard as manna. We enjoy the E.E. Wilson area because of the many tracts of old, sheltered fields, copses, and overgrown berry thickets and brush that we can ramble about in and keep company with the many species of little birds flitting amongst berry bushes and gnarled fruit tree branches. Coming around a bend one morning, we surprised a wrentit who flittered rapidly from branch to branch of a berry bush. His signature arpeggio rang in the air to identify him once he had retreated to back brush, but we had heard and had luckily seen his buffy breast, the color of darkened cantaloupe, with circumspect streaks and a long tail. We listened to him and his companion for quite some time before moving on.
I wonder why we're so often surprised to find that wildlife, truly wild, will sometimes stay in the same spot from year to year. Perhaps that seems too domestic to us, but certain species do, and apparently the wrentit numbers among them. So last week, when we adventured to E.E. Wilson for the first time in several months and turned the exact same corner, we were astonished to again surprise a wrentit and hear his teasing chant in the very same berry bush. Again, he was too quick and frenetic for V. to get a good shot of him but he called to a companion across the road (in another déja vu moment) and gave us enough cause to return another occasion for a deliberate early morning stakeout, called wrentit wake-out.
The morning of wrentit wake-out was cold for this time of year in the Willamette Valley. We'd had little rain but a slough of sunshiny days that meant drought. Our usual marsh birding grounds were composed of brittle stubble or meager puddles, "scrims of water" as V. puts it. We placed our hopes on a wrentit sighting to lift our spirits from the dismal prospect of the marshes, whose palettes and composition have desiccated before our eyes in short time since we became serious birders. We came laden with enough cold-weather gear to fortify a small army because hiking in the high 20s is one matter, sitting still for two hours in those same temperatures is another. Good coffee, a simple but hearty breakfast, and keen hopes warmed us as we sat, waited, and listened. V. positioned her camera on tripod pointed toward the berry bush at an angle intended to capture the early morning "blue hour" lighting. Two wrentits revealed themselves by their chipping within an hour, but they were behind us in dense blackberry bushes. We hoped that our old friend would emerge from the red berry bush, but he patently declined. After two hours of creeping freeze and no exposé, we decided to move on.
Along one of the many crumbling asphalt roads, V. spotted an ingress into the dense brush. A quiet footpath led us forward to a clearing surrounded by trees. Several little birds darted among the trees so we stopped to spot and count. Black-capped chickadees, bushtits, Bewick's wrens, a Hermit's thrush, and starlings dashed about or watched us from above. One
of the joys of birding is that another person will see, process, and then recognize a dash of color in the foliage at about the same time you reach the same realization. V. spotted a flash of grey low in the crackling brown leaves and alerted me about a half-second before I realized I was looking at a bird and it was the same bird. It flickered from branch to branch in short hops on the same tree before then darting into a tree immediately proximate. Another one emerged. We saw the long tails, the buffy-cantaloupe breasts and streaks, and the bold yellow eye. V. got her shots, and then some: although this location was not our original wrentit wake-out, whether by luck or destiny, the morning light adorned the face of one of the wrentits which openly peered at us before disappearing. In atypical fashion, the wrentits revealed themselves by sight before sound. Our morning adventure had taken a fruitful detour.
After this triumph, V. and I decided to follow the path further on to what we hoped was still a pond (if we were to believe GPS), the drought notwithstanding. Happily, we came along the shore of a substantial pond and after only a couple of minutes, began to see some veritable migratory waterfowl--a couple of bufflehead, some pied-bill grebes, and one American coot. Always curious about what's just around the corner, V. led us alongside the edge to the head of the pond. Sad evidence of gunners' activity, dozens and dozens of shotgun shells, littered the ground, evidence of lives blasted into fragments. In a comical moment, when we realize our own naïveté, V. discerned that one large heap of brush that we were standing alongside was actually a well-camouflaged duckblind.
We've often daydreamed about building a blind of our own whenever we make good on our marsh dreams, and we entered the blind to check out its structure and composition. From the standpoint of its purposed construction, it represented killing through disguise and concealment. To us, it would represent a cozy shelter to watch birds without disturbing them, to enjoy their dabbling and diving without intruding on their innocent lives. We determined to reappropriate the blind to these ends. We returned on a mission three days later to do exactly this, but gunners already occupied the bind and another set of gunners the opposite end of the pond. We saw a flock of six or seven waterfowl overhead start to descend and our hearts were gripped with anxiety but thankfully, this blessed flock reversed course and flew past the pond instead of landing. Shots rang out all morning while we retreated. Reappropriating the blind would have to wait for another occasion, but we maintained heart. After all, our wrentit adventure had turned into two adventures of beautiful birding.
