The Best American Travel Writing 2011 Read online

  Every day Bird Cloud showed remarkable changes. The dull mud was inescapable. A few pale green rushes sprouted at the end of the island. The river grew larger and faster. One of the elk reappeared after a two-week absence. It, or they, may have been feeding on the back slope, which could not be seen from the house. In mid-month a little burst of warm days cleared most of the ice out of the river. Falcons, ducks, geese, hawks, and eagles sped in all directions, coming and going. I counted twenty mountain bluebirds and knew there was a housing shortage. But the ravens, harassed mercilessly by the prairie falcons, abandoned their old nest site. I was left with only the memory of the previous year when four young ravens teetered, flapped, and finally pushed off from the home nest late one afternoon to try their wings. It had been Memorial Day weekend and one of the season's first thunderstorms was moving in. The young ravens fluttered and hopped, clung and dropped, flew short distances, always close to the cliff face with its thousand crannies. We watched them with pleasure, but their hopping and unpracticed flying also attracted the attention of every other bird in the vicinity. The bald eagles, red-tailed hawks, and falcons circled or chose high perches suitable for diving attacks. The great horned owls hooted from the island. The storm arrived, dropping first a few splattering drops, then sheets of cold rain that drowned our campfire. I was sure the young ravens were done for. They could not seem to get back to the nest ledge and huddled on narrow shelves or exposed knobs of rock. With sadness we went inside, dreading what the morning would bring. Would any of them survive the waiting predators? Would the storm batter them?

  The dawn showed off one of those fragrant, polished days so rare in Wyoming, windless and fresh-washed. We all rushed to the cliff with binoculars wondering whether any of the young birds had survived. "I see one!" someone called and then another came into the sunlight from its hiding hole, rather damp and bedraggled. The last two joined them from some cranny, and there they all were, preening in the sun, smart and sassy and very much alive. They spent the day practicing evasive flying and I didn't worry about them any longer.

  An early-morning walk on the island brought me face to face with a great horned owl in a willow thicket. So strange. The left eye was brilliant yellow, the right one a rusty brown, very likely from an injury. It fled into a cottonwood and stayed there all day. Now migrating birds flew over constantly, following the river. One afternoon there were six golden eagles on their way somewhere else but unable to resist playing in the air currents above the cliff. Mallards, mergansers, and dippers arrived, then black scoters, a pair of northern flickers, a northern harrier, and a single western meadowlark. The river, fed by rapid snowmelt, continued to rise, and on March 19 it was high enough to lift the bridge and swing it onto the island shore, cutting it off from the mainland. The warm days continued, worrisome because everything was drought dry. A forecast for rain brought nothing. When it finally did fall it made the roads into an icy, slippery mush.

  One of the Canada geese, no doubt thinking itself clever, built a nest high up on the east end of the cliff, not far from a peregrine falcon nest. I wondered if this was the same foolish goose that had built a nest the year before in the top of a tall tree and open to the sky between the golden eagle nest and the prairie falcons. She and her mate lost all their chicks to predators and had to try again, this time with a nest on the ground beneath the tree and the male standing guard.

  In late March a winter storm moved in for a day and a night. Despite the snow and wind a flock of horned larks gleaned seed among the sage and rabbit brush. The prairie falcon roared down out of nowhere and the larks exploded into fleeing rockets. Other carnivorous birds, especially the bluebirds, sat dejectedly on the fences waiting for spring. When the storm sailed away it left a foot of fresh snow. At the cold sunrise there was a heavy fog over the river that expanded and blotted out the sun. Beneath the snow the ground was wet, half-frozen mud. Just to have somewhere to walk I drove the truck back and forth in the driveway, flattening the snow. The snow turned the black metal ravens on the gateposts into magpies.

  April came in windy and warm. On a walk to the east end I found a dead osprey on the ground, its gray feet curled in an empty grasp. There was no way to tell what had brought it to its death. There were so many jealous and territorial birds around that any one of them might have seen the osprey as an interloper—within half a mile two pairs of goldens, red-tailed hawks, and a pair of peregrine falcons, and a little farther west the raven family and the prairie falcons. Spring is the time for death. A calf carcass washed up on the island to the delight of the magpies and perhaps the eagles.

  I was not sure of the timing of the bald eagles' family life. They had started fixing up their huge nest in December, a task that can go on for several months. It looked to be more than six feet across. But I suspected there were young in the nest the first week in April, mostly because I saw one of the bald eagles determinedly chasing a red-tailed hawk near the nest. The hawk had been patrolling the western section of the cliff for several days. That would put the eagles' egg-laying in the last week of February or the first week of March. The female lays two or three eggs over a period of about a week. Both eagles take turns brooding the eggs. Though the females do more of this duty than the males, both have a brood patch on their bellies: bare, hot skin that rests directly on the eggs. Whoever is not on the eggs rustles food. On a warm, sunny day both parents can have a little break. Incubation takes thirty-five days, more or less. Once the eaglets have hatched, exhausting work begins. If the weather is still cold one of the parents stays with the babies and keeps them warm. When the spring sun beats down hot and fierce the parent eagles transform themselves into wide-wing umbrella shades. In the early days the male was kept busy finding and bringing food to the nest, four to eight times a day. After the first few weeks the female hunted as well, and in the late stages of rearing a nestling the mother did most of the hunting.

  By the third week in April the American pelicans had arrived, big knobs on their beaks showing it was breeding time in their world. The pelicans were fabulous fliers and on windy days put on astonishing exhibitions of soaring and diving. Fishermen in Wyoming shoot pelicans because they believe the birds eat all the fish, leaving nothing for them. That first spring at Bird Cloud I was appalled by all the big, fluffy white carcasses that floated down the river.

  In May the weeds came and I spent hours pulling evil hoary cress and trying to claw out the prolific white roots. The air was stitched with hundreds and hundreds of swallows. Several persistent rough-winged swallows tried to build nests in the house eaves. To reduce the number of possible spots for porcupine dens I started piling up dead wood and fallen branches on the island, planning to have a bonfire on a rainy day. There was plenty of undisturbed room for them on the other side of the river. A tiny, dark house wren had found the wren-sized birdhouse on the island and was moving in, carrying wisps of dead grass and minuscule twigs not much larger than toothpicks.

  It was a big thrill when I saw a white-faced ibis near the front gate where there was irrigation overflow. The ibis stayed around for weeks. A few days after this sighting I was sitting near the river and saw two herons fly to the bald eagles' fishing tree. They were too small to be great blue herons and did not really look like little blues. A few minutes with the heron book cleared up the mystery; they were tricolor herons, the first I had ever seen. By the end of the month American canaries were shooting around like tossed gold pieces despite another cold spell.

  Suddenly it was mid-June and noxious weeds grew everywhere—leafy spurge, cheatgrass, Canada thistle, and more hoary cress. Nests were full of young birds, and the predator birds, who had hatched their young earlier, had rich pickings. Even a raiding great blue heron flew over pursued by smaller birds. I hadn't dared go near the fence across from the big nest for fear of forcing the goldens to abandon, but I could see now that they had two big chicks in the nest. And June marked the appearance of an insect I had never seen before— Eremobates pallipes, a.k.a
. wind scorpion, a resident of deserts and the Great Basin. It is straw-colored, about three quarters of an inch long, and very much resembles a scorpion although it is not poisonous. It will bite if disturbed. It feeds on smaller insects, so I caught it and put it outside, hoping it could catch mosquitoes. More likely it made a snack for the myriad hungry birds rushing around outside.

  On a hot, dusty Fourth of July, I walked down the road to the east end, pleased not to be cursed by the parent goldens. One of their chicks had found a narrow shelf with an overhanging ceiling not far from the nest, and there it sat, harassed by—who else?—the prairie falcon. But even young goldens are tough, and the falcon departed. When I got back from my walk I found some bird had dropped the corpse of a large nestling on the deck, white downy feathers, wings not fully fledged, the head gone. I thought it might have been the chick of a great blue heron or sandhill crane. The drought was bad, very hot and dry day after day and no rain for a long time. The grass cracked and broke when stepped on and it was too hot to sleep at night. Wind scorpion weather.

  A hard, hot wind blew incessantly, drying out the lettuces in the garden, tearing petals off any flowers not made of steel. But the young eagles, both bald and golden, loved this hot wind. They and their parents were all soaring and zooming, trick flying, mounting high and then rolling down the air currents. At one point I could see seven eagles flying above the cliff at various altitudes, some so high they resembled broken paperclips.

  A few mornings later a bird with an ineffably beautiful song woke me. I had no idea what it was and it was not visible from the high bedroom windows. I tried to identify it from birdsong CDs without success. It was the harbinger of a nasty little frost, a complete surprise that killed the tops of my tomato plants and beans, scorched the zucchini and cucumbers. I didn't realize it but the surprise mid-August frost would be an annual event at Bird Cloud, striking just when the garden was approaching high ripeness.

  On the first of September, making coffee in the kitchen, I glanced up at the cliff and saw the big tawny-red mountain lion walking along the top. It descended to an area of outcrop above and to the right of two huge square stones balanced almost on the edge. Three weeks later, just before dark, I glassed the cliff and the colluvia below and noticed a large round rock on the debris pile that I couldn't remember having seen before. The telescope revealed it as a dead deer that had apparently fallen from the top of the cliff. Falling off a cliff was not something even the most addlepated deer would do. I surmised the lion had chased the panicked deer over the edge, and until dark I kept peering through the telescope, looking for the lion come to claim its kill. But the lion did not come. The next morning two ravens were on the carcass. As I made coffee I noticed that the ravens were gone, replaced by thirty magpies and two coyotes. It took the coyotes half an hour to break through the hide. The bald eagles perched nearby, waiting for their chance, and several ravens also waited. One of the coyotes departed. There was no sign of the lion. By mid-morning the remaining coyote, bloody-muzzled and gorged, waddled away. The magpies moved in. The most cautious diners were the eagles and ravens, who waited until after eleven for a turn at the deer. The first coyote returned with two friends and all three began to tug the carcass toward the edge of the colluvium, a drop-off of about ten feet. By afternoon the carcass was no longer in sight, now fallen into the brush below where perhaps the lion would claim it. The renegade thought occurred to me that perhaps the neighbor's cow that had fallen off the cliff the year before had been chased to its death by the lion.

  The prairie falcons left, and the next week the ravens were back. A lesser goldfinch flew into a window. I left it on the deck and in the morning it was gone—I hope because it revived. Many birds knock themselves out and then come back from apparent death rather groggy and confused, but alive. The big, handsome northern flicker is an aggressive bird that often hurls itself at its reflection, falls like a stone, lies on its back with its feet curled up for a while, opens one eye, gets shakily up, and staggers through the air to a nearby branch, where it spends an hour or two thinking black thoughts—and then flies into the window again.

  By the end of the month most of the migratory birds were gone. I remembered an earlier September when some friends and I had camped at the top of Green Mountain where we could look down at the Red Desert and make out the old stagecoach road and a few bunches of wild horses. We hiked around, noticed quite a few hawks, and by mid-morning realized that the hawk migration was in full spate. Hundreds of hawks flew over us that day, swiftly, seriously intent on getting away. Also intent, not on getting away but on filling up great pantries with pine seeds, were gray jays. They would cram seed after seed into their pouches and then take them to their secret caches. One smart gray jay, trying to pack in more than his crop could hold, hopped (heavily) to a little pool of water in the top of a boulder, took a few sips to wet down the seeds, and resumed gathering.

  By mid-October most of the birds had gone south. The meadowlarks were the last to leave. The golden eagles were somewhere else, though probably in the area. The bald eagles were involved in a major undertaking—the building of a new nest in a cottonwood closer to the river and closer to our house. One eagle flew in with a double-talon bunch of cut hay, likely swiped from a cattle ranch's bales. This new nest, unlike the old one, was highly visible. I worried about people who floated the river in summer. Of course, this eagle pair had shown that they were more interested in river traffic and what we are doing around the house than in privacy and isolation. As with humans, in the bird world it takes all kinds. For weeks they hauled materials in, mostly sticks and a dangerous length of orange binder twine that could tangle young birds tramping around in the nest. They took breaks from the construction and went fishing at the east end of the cliff, something they would not do when the goldens were in residence. But were the goldens really gone? There were a few days of rain and wet snow that made the county road a slithery mass of greasy mud.

  On the first of November I walked along the river fence line in the evening, and as I came abreast of the big nest, the scolding "GET AWAY, FOOL!" call came from the cliff. The goldens were in their bedroom niche.

  Colder and colder the days, clear and windless, the kind of days I have loved since my New Engiand childhood. A rough-legged hawk, a stranger in these parts, came hunting over the fields. The bald eagles did something unusual—they chased it furiously, asserting their territorial rights. The hawk fled. The new nest looked large and commodious. The day after Thanksgiving a Clark's nutcracker appeared briefly. It looked a little like a gray jay but had dark markings on its face like a small black mask, and the body and wings were utterly Clark's. I saw it for only a few seconds before it sprang away, but it seemed that very often I saw birds that were subtly at variance with Sibley's illustrations.

  Near the end of the month a little warm wind pushed in a bank of cloud. A northern harrier coursed over the bull pasture, just barely skimming the grass, floating on and on in lowest gear, then landing in the distance, hidden from me. It rose again, higher, using the wind. One morning one of the bald eagles brought a hefty stick to the new nest. It was long and awkward, and to get it in place the bird had to circle behind the nest and trample it in from the back with the help of its mate. It was a really big nest. A few hours later a bold raven came and sat on the west branch of the bald eagle's fishing tree, about twenty feet away from the male eagle. They both seemed uneasy. The raven pretended unconcern and stretched his wings. The eagle shifted from one foot to another as if muttering, "What is this clown doing in my tree?" The big female eagle came in for a landing and sat beside her mate, and as she put down her landing gear the raven took off.

  In the afternoon the wind strengthened after four days of calm and the goldens enjoyed it, rising into the empyrean until they seemed to dissolve in blue. It was like one of the Arabian Nights tales in reverse, the tale in which someone fleeing looked back and saw something the size of a grain of sand pursuing, and a little later loo
ked again and saw something the size of a lentil. Later still the pursuer resembled a beetle, then a rabbit, and finally a slavering, demonic form on a maddened camel. But to my eyes the goldens shrank first to robins, then to wrens, then hummingbirds, and finally gnats or motes of dust high in the tremulous ether. Just before gray twilight the northern harrier returned but strayed into enemy airspace above the cliff, and suddenly there were four ravens chasing and nipping. The extra pair of ravens came from nowhere, like black origami conjured from expert fingers. As darkness swelled up from the east a full moon rose and illuminated great sheets of thin cloud like wadded fabric drawn across its pockmarked white face.

  November fell through the floor and December began with the tingling, fresh scent of snow. Seven or eight inches fell. I had hoped this month would be snow-free, but that hope was dashed. Getting the mail or supplies was chancy. Usually I could put the old Land Cruiser in low and smash through the snow, but in places the wind had packed the snow into unsmashable drifts and I got well and truly stuck on the county road. I tried to barrel through a five-foot drift that looked fluffy, small in comparison with the big piles that would come later in the winter, and ended up high-centered on a solid pedestal of snow, all four wheels off the ground. It snowed again just before Christmas, deep and beautiful snow that lay quiet in a rare calm. The hero sun came out for a quarter hour, then fell as though wounded. Eagles and goldeneyes were the only birds around. At dusk I skied down to the Jack Creek bridge. Mist rose from the river and the cliff seemed to be melting, the top floating on quivering froth.