~By Vicky~
For fifteen years I have never been able to appreciate the perpetually monotonous grey days of a rainy Oregon winter. Moving to Portland in my 20's had gotten me to appreciate microbrew beers, bikes, and bars as a staple way of maintaining status quo sanity. I used to zip around on my single speed bike in a downpour to get to some damn great neighborhood bars. Then, somewhere along the way I got older, moved for work to the less bike-friendly city of Salem, Oregon, and found myself unable to find a decent bar to weather the winters. Admittedly, even if there were one or two good bars in this city, I think the twenty and thirty-something joy of obliviating oneself to one's meteorological reality sounds a bit worn. Weathering winter in my late thirties almost to be forty in a hip bar with a beer belly and vitamin D deficiency sounds downright depressing.
Salem's not the worst city and I shouldn't give it such a bad rap. My wife and I were able to afford a house with a large yard for Juniper, our husky-mix, and ol' three-legged Laila to run around in. When we want to hike, there's next to nil traffic getting to some good nearby trails. The bleak Oregon weather just felt extra compounded here in this rather bleak city of Salem. We held out hope for those occasional dry and sunny days when we can go out into the woods. But I just got too restless for that waiting.
Winter of 2018 found me pretty restless and wanting to do more with photography. The occasional nice day was spent hiking, but on hikes I didn't feel I had the time to focus on photography skills. I would take a few minutes on one or two photos but felt bad for keeping S. waiting around while I did what must look to others to be the most repetitive, OCD manipulations with my camera. So in reality, I probably didn't spend enough time as I would have otherwise, and I would hurry through crafting compositions. S. assures me that she was never bothered waiting for me, but I hardly want to try anyone's patience on a 5+ mile hike with constant stops and starts. Thus, one day I jumped onto Google Maps terrain view and scrolled around the vicinity of Salem looking for some point of interest. Somewhere nearby I could drive to, set up my camera and tool around.
This is how I happened upon Baskett Slough National Wildlife Refuge just west of Salem. I didn't know what the National Wildlife Refuges were about. All I knew was that Baskett Slough was a promising nature place close by where I could spend an easy couple of hours practicing landscape photography. I'm an avid hiker and have gone to some spectacular places, so I wasn't expecting a place with some tree covered hills, ponds, and hay fields to be anything to write home about. But here I am writing about it. I fell in love with the place.
Describing Baskett how I did with its hills, ponds, and hay fields sounds pretty basic. But in person the place is much more than that. It is serene with an understated earthy palette of golds, greens, yellows, browns, and oranges in shades that are soft to the eyes and blend harmoniously rather than contrast with one another. Seasonal changes and the sowing and growing of the grasses revealed a texturally dynamic landscape from vibrant and lush to muted and moody. This versatility of atmosphere allowed me to take photographs in Baskett on sunny and cloudy winter days.
S. fell in love with the place too and it became our beloved Baskett Slough. Slough - we debated on how it was pronounced. Slouwe, sloff, slew, slaw? We wondered what was a slough? According to the good ol' Oxford English Dictionary (OED) the word "slough" dates back to the 900's. North Americans might say "slew" and use it to mean "a side channel of a river, or a natural channel that is only sporadically filled with water." The English would have it rhyme with "bough" and think of it as "a piece of soft, miry, or muddy ground; esp. a place or a hole in a road or way filled with wet mud or mire and impassable by heavy vehicles, horses, etc." With its ambiguous spelling I'm sure it's been pronounced a myriad of ways. S. and I like the British pronunciation, though we slip into other pronunciations because, as mires and marshes are visually dynamic landscapes, "slough" is an aurally changeable word.
S. was originally the one of us to have the amateur's appreciation for birds. On hikes she would listen for their sounds and got excited at a fleeting spotting of a bird. The small perching birds, the passerines as we came to learn they were called, I was indifferent to. They were cute, they flitted, they chitted. S. on the other hand, cooed at the sight of them. "Oh, look at that bird!"So, knowing S's love of little flighty creatures, I brought her out to Baskett to show her this great find. Since it was winter, there a were a lot of ducks and geese at the refuge. At the time for us, ducks were ducks and geese were geese. We made no distinction. They swam, they made honking sounds, and they were numerous. Peripherally we noted that some of the ducks looked much different from each other, but still we categorized them all up as alike. (This, of course would change, but that's a story for another time).
We went to the gravel road that bisects Taverna's Marsh from Cackler Marsh. Autumn and winter rains had filled both marsh ponds, and their mired waters etched the narrow road. I would say that this restless winter of 2018 was to be the molting into our birding lives, because a certain bird piqued both our curiosities. This species flocked and flew amongst the tall marsh reeds and perched at the tops taking stock of the landscape. We were immeasurably charmed by their red epaulets blazing off black bodies; little generals that boldly perched and noisily declared their territories. The air was filled with their sharp metallic cries that came out of sharp pointy black beaks. Now, S. and I are not birders who can bird by ear. It is a skill we have slowly acquired but only through intense repetition of hearing, and it does not come easy to us. We can probably count on one hand the birds that we can identify by sound. With a musical cry that rang bright, this bird became one of the few that we can always identify by sound alone.
Enamored, piqued, intrigued, charmed, challenged and mystified. These are emotions that a little bird brought to us. Not new emotions, but concentrated in a fleeting moment and on a fleeting thing. We have always appreciated our surroundings, but this little bird made us more aware of the smaller details. We began to see birds everywhere. And now we wanted to know, we absolutely hungered to know what birds we were seeing! For the scholar and dreamer pair that we are, our brains and hearts sprung to flight at the venture of building our avian assemblage.
Birding is much like solving a puzzle; you take little pieces of observations and try to fit them together to identify your bird. If a piece doesn't fit than you have to find other pieces that fit better and maybe you'll have your bird. Or maybe you still don't have enough pieces of data and you do more research to find more pieces. You use your birding guidebooks (because at this stage you have more than one guide: one with illustrations, one with photographs, and one just because it was put out by The National Geographic Society in hardcover), you use your electronic guides - a birding app or two, an ornithology website. Then you try to smash a piece in to make it fit, but that never works - it just isn't that bird. But, perhaps, it's this bird? Yes! This is the bird we saw! A new bird identified! And you crack open a microbrew IPA and toast to the new bird on your Life-List!
So, what was the first bird that got us into this crazy birding life?
Comentários