Marvels

The sailors among you will recognize the name Larry Pardey. He and his wife Lin spent decades sailing all over the world, in wooden sailboats that they built — boats without engines. To fund their cruising, they wrote about every aspect of cruising, and of their lives and the lives of the people they met. Their impact was profound, encouraging thousands of people to follow in their footsteps, to varying degrees. And they entertained and educated thousands more who never left shore, because they spoke so beautifully and honestly of the nature of adventure, of exploration, of play, in ways that everyone can relate to.

Their first, and probably most influential book was Cruising in Seraffyn. Now, over 40 years after it was first published, this marvelous book is being offered in a special Tribute Edition, with all proceeds going to the Larry Pardey Memorial Observatory, on Kawau Island, New Zealand. This is something Larry started, equipping it with 4 telescopes and 15 sets of binoculars, so that schoolchildren could come and get an unimpeded look at the night skies.

Larry’s once-vigorous mind has slipped away, but his legacy is vast. Now you can be a part of it, by helping to fund a place that inspires awe and wonder in the minds of thousands of children. And you get a great read in the bargain. To get your copy, visit Pardey Tribute Edition.

I will continue the Rig Survey series next week.. Meanwhile I urge you to take a break from all things nautical, and join philosopher and gonzo naturalist Jacob Haverfeld, on an adventure in the Southwest.

How I spent my days at the Grand Canyon.  Late March on the south rim is a cold place.  We stopped for provisions in the town of Williams on the drive in, an hour away from the precipice of eroded time. It was a strange scene.  Inside the car was a still-contained Mojave microclimate: zero moisture; dry-warm dusty air; arid and scented with sage.  Upon opening the doors we were greeted to a blast of chilling winter wind, comparatively wet, though perhaps not by Pacific standards.  Still, it was a shock.  Ponderosa pine smell in the crisp air, snow on the ground and a howling, moist wind.  The faces of people hurrying across a Safeway parking lot were wind-burned red, noses and ears bright and inflamed.  Clearly half of everyone in town was suffering from some severe lingering bronchial infection.  Everyone was coughing thickly.  “Plague town” the place immediately became in my mind.  I didn’t feel like lingering, and my mind dropped back in time to days of horse travel, and I pictured our short stay resulting in my companion Cassidy dropping my body into the cold rocky ground and erecting a crude and temporary monument before heading on down the trail.

We went when we did because our friend Emily was finishing up a job there, cooking for the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA).  The scene when we arrived was, I admit, less than I might have imagined.  Perhaps because of having left one season and traveled “back in time” to a colder climate on the rim, there was an exaggerated sense of archaic human history.  Primitive tent, freezing weather, and a strange 1850’s work-camp feel about the place.  We ate with the group in the dark, huddled over our food, shifting on our feet in the cold.  Talk was truncated the first night, partly by darkness and cold, though more by cultural clash than anything else.  The SCA leaders and their flock of youth greatly resembled a kind of religious camp, with self-congratulatory and guilt-ridden environmental themes of salvation and purpose.  Strange songs were sung, and conversation was riddled with a discomforting sense of unhumorous fundamentalism.  Cassidy and I were as strange as two opposable thumbs.  It was a “dry” camp, so we took our bottle of JB to the slightly warmer, tiled floor of the men’s room, and sang songs of the day’s travel.

The wind was altogether more entertaining.  A sally to the rim before supper to catch sunset revealed a blasting updraft ripping through the woods.  A conspiracy of ravens performed fantastic aerial feats together out in the vast empty space of the canyon.  Spiraling downwards, thrown across the sky, traveling hundreds of meters upside-down down and backwards.  One can only say laughing, for there really is no other word for what they were doing.

On a whim, Cassidy threw his hat over the cliff and we watched it sail briefly out over the abyss and then shoot upward, lofted by the updraft over our heads and tossed 80 yards behind us into the woods.  For half an hour we completely forgot our cold in the manner of entertained children ― who can endure any temperature provided they are having a good time ― and threw everything we could find or break off over the cliff.  Enormous pine branches as tall as I were thrown out into space, only to be rejected by the void, and against all comprehension flung upward 50 feet into the air to arc over our heads.  This game was endlessly iterated until darkness.  Naturally my hat ended up high in a tree.  Small rocks thrown down into the canyon rose, miraculously and hilariously, and after stuttering in the wind were fired back at the thrower.

We spent two days down inside the canyon, where temperatures were much more pleasant and warm.  We walked down trails that when seen from below defied reason. The making of them is very much in question as a logical undertaking.  Flowers blooming, small silvery-green lizards skittering.  The alien formations of yucca stalks.  Exploration of old mines, we were informed by a small sign, was forbidden due to buildup of radon, a colorless, odorless gas – a natural but radioactive gas formed by the decay of radium.  The ground was littered with strange green and blue and red rocks.  Naturally bats lived there. A song about the restorative properties of Radium Springs was carried down the trail a ways.

Inside the chasm:  Spotted Towhee; flock of bushtits; turkey vultures (wobble hawks); canyon wrens; rock wrens; Say’s Phoebes; black-throated sparrows; white-throated swifts; peregrine falcon.

On the rim:  Western Bluebirds; white-breasted nuthatches foraging like small upside down ninjas; pygmy nuthatches; juniper titmice; gray-backed juncos;  mountain chickadees; cayotes; ravens.

We camped on a high plateau about halfway down.  Somewhere far above us the origins of mammals, somewhere in the most recent few layers of time high above.  Roughly 2 billion years down to the bottom, down past the great unconformity, down past countless layers of silted deposits of ancient oceans and ancient life forms embedded in the rock.

We spent the day together and alone, wandering the rim, forming theories and conclusions, attempting to comprehend, and failing pleasantly each time, staring blankly or sleeping on warm rocks before rising to attempt comprehension again.  At perhaps eleven at night, long after a very shadowed moon melded with the rim above us, after glassing the sky’s vastness with binoculars for a few hours and watching satellites traverse the cold sky, I wandered alone to the edge of the rim, and standing in the warm wind thought to call Piper.  My cell phone sparked to life.  The time was wrong: it read 12:00 a.m. which was unlikely. My eyes glanced over to the date and I was surprised to see that it read Jan. 6, which of course it was not, this being March.  But as my eyes slid across the line of text I was still more shocked to encounter a complete reading of Jan 6, 1980 12:00 am. This was, I will say, briefly and staggeringly weird.  On a sunny afternoon, perhaps standing on a sidewalk, surrounded by people and buildings, if a man looks down at his watch and it reads an incorrect time he is not much more than annoyed, and certainly is not thrown into a temporary dislocation of time and space whereby everything he knows suddenly falls away as if the appropriate time were the gravity holding everything together.

However, standing on stone deposited before the birth of mammals is another matter. Suspended, as it were almost floating in darkness, on a precipice of time, surrounded by lethal vertical vastness and stars, my tender human mind experienced an inexplicable plummet into space. I fell into the stars. For in that moment it was evident first that the person I hoped to call on my phone, by the phone’s telling of time, was not even born yet.  And I was not even an idea in the minds of parents whose youth and location in the world I could not ascertain; they certainly wouldn’t know me yet.  In fact, practically everyone I knew didn’t exist.  “Cassidy,” I said, “can I show you something?”

I can tell you that the experience of time-travel is not at all like in the movies. Your first thought is not that you will accrue enormous wealth by betting on all the baseball games which haven’t been won yet, or the stocks which haven’t yet skyrocketed in value. In fact, money is pretty well a meaningless concept to someone who has just lost all reference points. Perhaps you would become a mystic, or more likely end up institutionalized. Traveling backwards in time to a place before your own birth is probably the closest thing I can think of to experiencing true impermanence and living to tell about it. You are cosmically alone.  Free and unformed. A dim cloud of stars on a drifting trajectory, a bubble of spacious laughter and dust, all your friends and loved ones smiling conspiracies of stars themselves, timeless, without trouble. There is nothing to be saved, sadness a misperception of time and space itself.

Next time you see me ask to hear the sounds my phone plays when turned on or off; it will seal the story nicely for you (it hums a phosphorescent series of utterly alien alternating harmonic pitch changes and whispers “time, time, time” in a faint breathy female ethereal voice – I shit you not).

The above was part of a letter written by my dear friend Jacob Haverfield. You can see more of that letter in a previous post, .Difficult Feats, Pointless Tasks. Worth a look.

Also maybe worth a look: the last many month’s worth of essays and puzzles here on my Blog. I am so happy that our site stats indicate that we get a lot of binge readers.

The current rigging puzzle is called “Weird Wire,” and you can find it http://briontoss.com/index.php/2018/07/18/breaking-strength-2-weird-wire/.

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Fair leads,

Brion Toss

There was a preacher from Missouri, or someplace like that, who got some supporters to outfit a missionary project, and he built a big pirate-ship-looking thing to sail down the Mississippi to the Caribbean to save the heathens down there.  He had already made it down the Mississippi and east as far as he could go and still stay out of the open ocean.  You know, just that he had come all the way says something for the man and his ship.  Errol Flynn would have been right at home on that thing. It looked like the boat was almost fifty feet long, but it was hard to tell where the actual boat stopped and the decorative part started.  It had all sorts of filigree and dolphin strikers and chicken beaks and stuff up by the head and some sort of balcony and extra transom and windows back by the stern enclosing the enormous head of what would normally have been an outboard rudder.  The kitchen was way up in the forecastle …. on deck with full standing room and a regular-size cast iron, combination L.P. and wood-burning range.  The living quarters were in the poop and had the rudderhead protruding up through the roof with a twenty-some-odd-foot tiller way up there seven or eight feet off the deck.  It was worked by hauling tackles to a homemade spoked wheel, at least seven feet tall, mounted on a preaching pulpit in front of the forward bay windows of the living quarters.  The well-lit cabin must have been a delightful place with all those windows and all those Bibles and hymnals and prayer books in shelves lining the wall, their spines gleaming with gold.  There were two huge masts that looked just like pressure-treated utility poles with varnish on them.  I noticed an ingenious use of semi-truck mudflaps as chafing gear for the gigantic yards lashed to the masts and secured at the ends by braces and the sheets that would normally be made up to the clew corners of the sails.  The preacher was even kind enough to take me below to show me the stores and the engine room.  I noticed hundreds of canned hams stored under a grating in the dry and spotless bilge, and boxes of spaghetti in racks along the sides of the hull.  Big agricultural liquid tanks gleamed palely up in the bow.  There were cardboard boxes of even more Bibles, hymnals, and prayer books secured with big rope netting.  The immaculate engine room had a little Perkins diesel engine…heat exchanger cooled, three-to-one “Velvet Drive” gear, 1 3/8-inch stainless shaft, patent, “never-drip” hard-seal well-pump-style stuffing box.  There were at least two fuel filters and a sediment bowl.  A big old polished bronze and glass raw water strainer glistened like jewelry in the fluorescent lights.  I was able to catch a glimpse of the dull but expensive gleam of no-telling-how-many genuine Rolls batteries under the stainless steel expanded metal of the engine room deck.  There was a paper  towel holder handy to the dipstick.  Bounty paper towels — there was nothing second rate down there.  Errol might have fit in pretty good on deck, but you could tell, that preacher wouldn’t have let him penetrate ever so slightly into that engine room with his slap-dash self.  I even felt a little out of place, but I was glad to get a chance to marvel at it.

I liked his engine room and agreed with him about his mission.  Somebody needed to do something about all those heathens down in the Caribbean islands.  I told that preacher that I thought the way to do it would be to clench a Bible, hymnal, or prayer book in his teeth and swing over onto the heathen yacht on a halyard with a canned ham under his arm.  I hope I don’t give the impression that I am making fun of the man.  His boat might have been something of a show, but I guess that is what he thought it would take to accomplish his mission.  It was obvious that he knew exactly what he was doing, so far, and I’m sure he knew exactly how to deal with heathens without me.  Unfortunately, I had to come back to our shop in Georgia to try to build a boat for a man and was unable to supervise the crossing of the open water of the Northeastern Gulf of Mexico…too bad.

The way I heard it from my islander buddy, the preacher listened to the droning, on and on, of the National Weather Service, and looked at the weather fax until it looked like it would be good for a while and then motored out the pass between St. George and Dog islands into the open Gulf, heading for where the Intracoastal Waterway resumed at Anclote Key about a hundred miles away.  He was planning to motor the whole way like he had been doing so far and save his sails for “the trades”  He listened to the radio too long, though, and missed the tide in the pass, and by the time that little 4-108 had pushed that behemoth out past all that water coming in, it was getting late.  Later he told my buddy, one of Dog Island’s hard-bitten permanent residents, that he was counting on the land breeze to give him a nice lee of the island and the shoals east of there to make it an easy cruise.  It probably would have been a nice trip in a more predictable season of the year.  After the preacher got outside the pass in the nice easy swells of the big water, he activated the autopilot and went into his house and got a chair and his bedroom slippers and sat there watching his great big wheel turning ever so slightly in tune to the flux gate and watched the Floridians turn on all those electric lights that they use to demonstrate their dominion over nature.  I guess he was thinking about opening up one of them canned hams when the wind started breezing up from the south a little like it does around here when a cold front whips a little farther down than expected and begins to draw the weather in from the Gulf.  By the time he got the chair and the bedroom slippers secured, it was blowing pretty good.  Too bad it wasn’t the expected land-breeze and there wasn’t any lee.  The preacher said that it was blowing about fifty with fifteen- to twenty-foot swells.  The data buoy anchored eighty miles out in the Gulf said eighteen with gusts to twenty-two and four- to six-foot waves, but you know, things are real variable in the Gulf of Mexico.

About midnight or so, my buddy, the permanent resident of the island, was coming home across the bay.  I guess I better explain that situation.  This island where I live most of the time has no bridge or public transportation to it.  Because of that and certain other characteristics (like intermittent electricity), there are only a few people who live here all the time.  Most of the folks over here just come on weekends when the weather is good and the FSU “Noles” ain’t playing.  It takes a special person to be able to handle this place.  So, this friend of mine was coming back to the island in his motor whaleboat from checking in at the Tiki Bar (a little bar right on the river with roaches in the palm-thatched cabanas – to enhance the ambiance) on the mainland, which he sometimes visited for a little while, when he noticed eleven very bright flares from somewhere around the shoals east of the island.  He knew that a vessel was in distress — big-time, from the quantity and quality of those flares — so he headed to the rescue and found the preacher and his boat washed up sideways on the sandbar (called “Dog Island Reef” on the charts).  Turned out that, while he was skirting the windward side of the shoals watching his GPS and Loran and radar wondering when the land breeze would start up, the beam sea began rolling those telephone poles around in the holes until they wallowed the wedges out and then they really went to flopping.  Before long, the yards had snatched enough slack in the lines securing them so that they were trying to sweep all that tophamper off the deck.  There was nothing the preacher could do but hold on to the wheel and try to give the autopilot and that little Perkins all the help he could while he dodged those spars.  He would have probably managed to slide by the shoals if one of the canned hams hadn’t hopped over and popped the nipple off the “state-of-the-art” plastic (I ain’t gonna mention no names but I am a bronze-age man myself) raw water intake through-hull fitting to the engine.  After that, it didn’t take long to boil all the coolant out of the heat exchanger.  The preacher was too busy to notice until the engine ran hot and seized and the whole mess washed sideways up on the bar.  The preacher dove for his emergency cabinet and all those (not out-of-date) SOLAS-approved flares.  Would have shot an even dozen but he dropped one while he was side-skipping the sweep of the main yard.  My buddy says he was amazed at the spectacle of just eleven of those things.  Said, “You know them little shotgun-shell flares like go in the plastic pistol, just ain’t in it with the real thing.”

When my buddy got there, the big boat was lying over on its side with its bottom to the breakers in about four or five feet of water.  My buddy eased the whaleboat around to the lee side and tried to hold a conversation with the preacher about what he wanted to do.  Turned out that he should have just told him to hop on board if he wanted to go back to Carrabelle because the man refused to abandon all those Bibles.  While they were trying to shift the good books from one boat to the other in the surf, that one-inch fitting in the bottom of the big boat was equalizing the inside water level with the outside water level (both well above the batteries), which killed all three radios (single-sideband, VHF and CB) and left only the meaningless drone of the dry-cell-powered weather radio.  The wind shift from the cold front came, the tide turned and took the wreck off the reef, where it sank down to where the spars and part of the preacher were all that were sticking out.

It took a while for the preacher to convince himself that it was all right now to give up the good fight and get out of that cold water.  Unbeknownst to both of them, during the decision-making process, the whaleboat was winding up six hundred feet of half-inch nylon line with it propeller.  My buddy finally figured it out when a big inflatable boat appeared, coming rapidly up from astern.  The cold, the Tiki Bar, and the frustration of trying to be subtle with this preacher had dimmed his wits, and at first he thought this thing was just coming to see how things were going when, in fact, it wanted to dive under the stern of the whaleboat, explode, and wrap all up in the wheel in a knot as hard as a truck tire.  He and the preacher spent a long time trying to cut the damn thing loose, but they were frustrated by the coldness of the water, the roughness of the fabric of the top-notch dinghy, and by a five horse British Seagull outboard motor that was also wrapped around the wheel and shaft of the whaleboat.  By the time they gave up on trying to clear the propeller, the Seagull was all they could get loose.  Too bad the “stopped lark’s head” the preacher had tied around the mast of the ship to make up the whaleboat didn’t hold like that knot around the propeller, and they had been drifting rapidly toward the Florida Middle Ground all this time.  They tried the old trusty 12H Danforth which had held the whaleboat so faithfully for so many years in the rough anchorage at Dog Island, but it wouldn’t find the bottom with the line that they had close to hand.  Of course, they had the six-hundred-foot dinghy painter spooled up between the wheel and the strut, but that was unavailable.  My buddy estimated that they would end up somewhere down around Ft. Myers if they were really lucky.  If they were just sort of lucky and the wind came on around more east like it usually did, it would the Keys or Cuba.  If they weren’t lucky, they might get to work with the heathens after all.  Hard to predict on the first day of a four- or five-day Norther.

This is the first of two parts. You can find the full story, and many others, in “Flotsam and Jetsam,” a book by the late, great Robb White. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Thanks to the good people at Breakaway Books for letting me post this here. You can find the book through your local bookstore (recommended), and of course through Amazon.

Next week: The thrilling conclusion, in which grit, maritime MacGyverism, and a bit of luck save the day.

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Fair leads,

Brion Toss

Heinrich had no sense of humor. I mean literally, he was missing any trace of a sense of humor. He was a solid, reliable deckhand, and not unintelligent, but in our boisterous, fun-loving crew he stood out like a Baptist in a dance hall.

When he talked he sounded just like Henry Kissinger, only without the lilt and vitality. He was the living, breathing, stereotypical manifestation of a staid, rigid, earnest German man.

This was something of an embarrassment to the other Germans in the crew, and they worked assiduously to kindle a spark of joviality in Heinrich’s phlegmatic soul. Seeing this, the American and British deckhands joined in; the whole crew embarked on the task to Wake Heinrich Up. We arranged pranks, like imitating him, in his presence. All of us. All day. The hope was that he would see how dreary he looked and sounded, but he didn’t seem to notice, and we got exhausted trying to behave like him.

We made sure he was present on movie nights, and obtained the most raucous, slapstick titles available. He was bored by everything but the credits.

We played tricks on him, wrote skits, sang silly songs. Nothing.

Eventually we thought, wait, we are making this too complicated. Let’s start with basics. Let’s just try telling him some jokes, the simpler the better. The Germans tried first, and some of their attempts were Zen-hilarious. I remember one in particular:

A skeleton walks into a bar. The bartender says, “What’ll you have?”

The skeleton replies, “ A beer, and a mop and bucket.” This joke was funny even when I heard it in German, and I don’t speak German. But Heinrich just thought it was a sensible thing for the skeleton to do.

We tried telling jokes in English, starting with why the chicken crossed the road, and realized before we had even finished the setup that the answer was going to be far too meta for Heinrich. Which it was.

We tried sex jokes, cowboy jokes, lawyer jokes. We told of how numerous priests, rabbi’s and preachers walked into assorted bars, all for nothing, because humor is about things that begin by seeming one way, and unexpectedly turn out to be another, and Heinrich could never catch the shift. Life, to him, was a matter of putting one foot predictably in front of the other.

We had just about given up on him, when one day one of the Brits asked him, “Hey Heinrich, how do you circumcise a whale?” A group of us were gathered on the focs’le head deck, on a sunny, lazy morning. We all groaned, partly because this is an ancient and groanworthy joke, and partly because we knew that Heinrich was going to respond, “Why would I want to circumcise a whale?” Which he did. But then someone else said, a little exasperated, “No, see, this is how this kind of joke works. It starts with a silly question. That’s the setup. Then you, Heinrich, say “I don’t know,” and repeat the question, and then you get the punch line, and it’s funny.”

“Okay,” said Heinrich, “That sounds, uh, reasonable. Go ahead.”

So with no real hope, the Brit repeated, “Heinrich, how do you circumcise a whale?”

And Heinrich replied, “I do not know. How do you circumcise a whale?”

And the Brit said, “Four skin divers.”

There was a long moment of silence. Nobody moved. Then we heard a sound like a nail being pulled slowly out of wood. It repeated, and we realized Heinrich was laughing, maybe for the first time in his life, and we started laughing too, with tears of joy and relief and gladness for our fellow. After a while he jumped up and said, “I must go and tell someone this joke They will laugh.” So he ran down to the foredeck, and down the scuttle to the crew’s mess, with us in hot pursuit. He slid in next to a crewmember who was eating breakfast and said, “How do you circumcise a whale?”

She paused with her spoon halfway to her mouth, put the spoon down, looked at him, and said, “I don’t know, Heinrich, how do you circumcise a whale?”

He hesitated a moment, then replied, “Three frogmen.”

The events described above took place in 1985 or so. Since that time I have occasionally heard someone tell the primary joke about foreskin four skin divers – not surprising, as it is an old standby – but I have also heard of other  people making similar mistakes in the retelling. It’s the only joke I can think of that is even better when you get it wrong.

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Fair leads,

Brion Toss

My friend Jacob Haverfield is a naturalist, among other things. What follows are a couple of excerpts from a letter he once sent me, about adventures out in various fields. I will try to avoid building things up too much, but will say that this is stuff to savor.

The first section is about his time documenting an invasive plant species in the desert. The second is about birding. Enjoy.

1. Climbing Through Thorns

I have yet to develop or discover a vocabulary which accurately describes much if anything at all about trying to move through an environment populated, or rather dominated, by “Salt-cedar.” Salt-cedar ingeniously pushes out all other forms of under-story or competing natives by copiously shedding its salt- laden leaves into a thick litter on the ground, stifling all other seedlings in a kind of toxic blanket. It can grow unspeakably large – as tall and broad as a 30-foot cottonwood – but seems more commonly to top out at about 9 –12 feet.  It is unspeakably difficult to move through. Only Himalayan blackberry would be more horrific. If a fire were to break out while you were in the center of even a smallish stand of Salt-cedar, your odds of escaping would not be good; not only is the ground a tinderbox of leaf-litter, and the “forest” thick with dead shoots, but the bare fact is that you cannot move beyond a predictably,  unbelievably slow speed. You are impeded. You either cannot stand up because it is so thick, and therefore must crawl, or you cannot move forward because it is so thick. It is common to spend an hour and a half traversing 800 linear feet of flat ground. We often emerge looking as though we had encountered a mountain lion somewhere in the middle. We are filthy, covered in black Tamarisk dust: a glassy, charcoal-like substance that when you are thrashing through the thickets fills the air much like a cloud of burning pencil graphite.

Claustrophobia is a common sensation. If you have crawled your way into this shit, there are no shortcuts for getting back out. The branches are strong enough that you build upper-body strength pushing against their springy masses, but not so strong as to let you climb very high. Sometimes you can walk suspended above the ground by as much as six feet, but not on what you would think of as limbs, more a chaotic basket of many branches whose overlapping points miraculously, though precariously, suspend you for a time on a springy thicket which inevitably collapses, leaving you entangled like a Christmas tree ornament.  Protective glasses are essential, as your face is gouged at from every sudden and surprising angle at regular intervals of say three stabs to the face per foot of progress. It is rather like having a tree grab you by the face as you pass through. If you find yourself in a “clearing” within this horrifying jungle, wherein you have a few inches between your face and some pointy-ended branch, you stand (if you can) and survey the strange freedom of your limbs’ extension as if this might be a master bedroom, or a spacious campsite.

It could be worse, and it often is. But there is something about enduring these degrading afternoons which sharpens the sense of humor. Performing difficult feats to accomplish pointless tasks seems to be good for humans, for some reason.

2. Birding Is Your Ideas About Birds

The people I am working with are generally of a wonderful sort.  Birding is an imaginative exercise as much as a taxonomic one. The interpretation of birdsong requires imagination in order to distinguish one call from another, a feat which is absolutely essential to identification, both to distinguish visually similar members of different species, and because birds are so often heard and not seen.  Associations and descriptive analogy are commonplace – as with the unforgettable “quick, three beers” which describes the Olive-sided Flycatcher’s song so well, and establishes it firmly in your mind. Working with nerdy musicians means I am privy to a lot of apt musical descriptions and comical associations.   Bird songs are described as “the broken robot”, or “the ghost call”, or “the digital trill”, the typewriter “chak, chak chak” call note of Bewick’s Wren. It is absolutely essential to find some way for your mind to play this trick, to sort through a cacophony of blended species noise, and separate the strands by identifiable monikers. Needless to say many, many, birds sound grossly alike, and only some part of their song stands alone or is unique. The more you listen, the more they sound different, and the more startlingly the diversity reveals itself. As soon as you have one bird placed in your mind, identifiable by song, then room is made to hear the next baffling call. It is rather like hearing one long garbled call, and then focusing the light, and seeing that in fact fifteen separate species are singing.

Identifying a bird requires a lot of detective work, running a storm of vague signals through the kludge of your mind and trying to come to some conclusion.  We listen to a lot of recordings to drill, but local dialect can be surprising.  Sonograms are interesting to give you a sense of the rhythm or spacing of notes.  Obviously there are the guide books; each has its strengths and weaknesses. In an unexpected way guidebooks can be misleading by being too “perfect.” A book filled with coffee-table-worthy photographs of good focus, close-up detail, and perfect lighting and contrast may seem like a good choice for getting a sense of what a bird looks like, but I’m starting to suspect that a better ― that is more realistic ― field-readying type would contain only distant images, high-contrast (either too bright or too dark), half-hidden or blurred by movement; that is to say a nebulous cloud of vague clues. A puzzle, requiring imagination.

You gather as many clues as you can, none of which exclusively identifies the bird, and attempt to triangulate certainty, a linked series which together forms an image.  In a very weird way birding is about your ideas about birds. Flight pattern (flutter, swoop, wobble, dart), location (high, low, mid), prominence or hiddenness, environment. A bird’s age or molting stage dramatically affects its appearance, and posture can make a bird look remarkably different (if it’s hunched or elongated). The good birders look at a swarm of hundreds of ducks of several types, all on a pond together, and swiftly somehow find the few, rare species.

If you are new to this blog, you might like to click Here to seek out other articles. If enough of you enjoyed this piece, and if you let me know, I will put up some more of Jacob’s work. I hope this happens — he has a great bit about the Grand Canyon.

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Fair leads,

Brion