March 4: Manatees

Today we went on a manatee tour out of Port of the Islands, just south of Naples. I've always wanted to see one of these endangered sea cows, and we were not disappointed. We saw at least a dozen of these half-ton mammals moving through the shallow water of the canal, looking just like--as our guide put it--giant potatoes. Several came right up to the boat, close enough that we could see barnacles and algae growing on their bodies, as well as (sadly) propellor scars on their tails. Social creatures, they hang out in small herds. Our guide Rick told us there are about 5,000 manatees left, and that the unseasonable cold has killed several hundred this winter. What I found fascinating is that these gentle herbivores each have to eat about 100 pounds of sea grass a day. At high tide they will also apparently forage on low-hanging red mangrove leaves, pulling them down with their fins. We saw one mother with a calf--they come up to breath in unison. She will care for and nurse the calf for what must be two very long years.

Manatee coming up for air

Slow-moving giants,
herds foraging for sea grass--
cows of the warm sea.

March 3: Painted Bunting

The male painted bunting is one of the gaudier little birds in North America, and for many years it was a species I only dreamed of seeing. I would look at its picture while thumbing through bird guides and think to myself, Someday I would love to see that.

Photo by Doug Jansen via Wikipedia Commons

This photo doesn't do the live bird justice. Blue head, red body, yellow-green back--it's like a bird from a kid's coloring book, an unreal combination of colors.

On my last trip to Florida, about four years ago, we went to Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in an attempt to finally see this amazing bird. (We had made a previous attempt a few years before in Evergalds National Park.) Corkscrew is a noted place to see them, and because they put up feeders to attract the buntings, the key is to stake out a feeder and wait. So we got there when the gates opened, headed out the boardwalk straight to the feeder where they'd last been seen, and waited. And waited. And waited. After about an hour, a female painted bunting showed up. She's a very pretty lime green, distinctive in her own right. We were about to give up and just be satisfied with her. But finally the male arrived, and he was worth the wait. It just doesn't seem possible that such a bird is a natural creation. We felt we had been rewarded at last by the bird gods, who--believe me--are very fickle. (We also saw a bobcat while we were waiting, but that's another story.)

Today we arrived at Corkscrew a couple of hours after the gate opened. After we paid and were getting ready to head out onto the boardwalk, a docent told us that five painted buntings had just been seen on the feeder right outside the visitor center door. Five! I would have been happy with just seeing one more. We rushed out, and there they were. It seemed like buntings were everywhere--on the feeders, in the bushes, flitting about the underbrush. A cardinal and a red-bellied woodpecker got in on the feeder action. I counted four male painted buntings at one time. It was almost sensory overload--an embarrassment of avian riches. About five hours later, when we had walked the whole boardwalk loop, we decided to check one last time. This time, two males and a female were on the feeder. On top of just having seen several big waves of warblers, three swallow-tailed kites soaring in a blue sky, a red-shouldered hawk on a nest, and singing white-eyed vireos, I felt replete with birds. It was a satisfying day in the swamp.

Gaudy little bird,
just a handful of color--
thank you for being.

Lame photo taken with my pocket camera this morning. But just look at that color!

March 2: Herons

Watching herons stalk their prey is a lesson in patience. Oblivious of onlookers, the heron ever... so... slowly... moves each foot forward, its gaze fixed on something in the water or grass. If the bird is in deeper water, it may simply stand there staring down into the murky depths. It's like watching someone meditate, so intently is the bird focused, so completely in the present moment. For the birder, it's a meditation on a meditation. The bird stalks so carefully, for long, drawn-out minutes. Then, just as you're about to lose interest and look away, bang! The bird strikes. For a brief moment, a bug or little fish squiggles in the bird's bill. You see the bird swallow and it continues on to seek out its next target. With that care and attention, I'm sure the bird doesn't miss often.

On Sanibel Island over the past three days we saw the following species of heron or egret: great blue heron, little blue heron, tricolored heron, snowy egret, cattle egret, great egret, green heron, reddish egret, and yellow-crowned night heron. This time of year, the main activities of these birds--other than croaking at each other--seems to be this interminable quest for food. Depending on the species, we saw them wading in the salt estuaries, picking among the mangroves, or patrolling the roadsides.

Slow, stalking heron
inching through the mangrove roots:
patience rewarded.

Little blue heron

Yellow-crowned night-heron

March 1: Captivated on Captiva

This afternoon Paul wanted to do some fishing, and a local fly-fishing guide recommended the beach on the Sanibel side of the bridge to Captiva. So while he froze his feet in the surf and caught nothing, I beachcombed on one of Florida's best shell beaches, then literally sat in the warm sand just a few yards away from resting groups of terns, gulls, and shorebirds. I couldn't stop snapping photos. The water was a brilliant turquoise, my feet were bare for the first time since last summer, and I got some great practice at identifying shorebirds as mixed flocks of willets, dunlins, knots, sanderlings, and Western sandpipers surrounded me. A Western sandpiper decided to curl up right next to me for a while, and later, while sorting through heaps of shells, turnstones practically walked over my hands while they too picked over the shells to find tiny crustaceans hiding underneath. Just before we left, a dolphin swam parallel to the beach, right past a guy on a boogie board. I think these few hours on the palm-lined beach were the most relaxed and happy I've been in months.

Here with sand, birds, shells,
roaring surf, passing dolphin,
I find perfect calm.

February 28: Florid Birds

There's nothing like some tropical color to lift the spirits. We spent most of today soaking up sun and local color at "Ding" Darling National Wildlife Refuge here on Sanibel Island: herons of all shapes and sizes, white ibises, wood storks, brown and white pelicans, roseate spoonbills, ospreys, shorebirds, ducks, gulls... We took it all in--ibis's scarlet bill, yellow-crowned night-heron's golden eye, snowy egret's "golden slippers," spoonbill's unreal pink--and then capped off our day with an incredible sunset over a sandy beach on the Gulf. One of those days that's difficult to put into words, so I'll throw in a few photos after my haiku:

Don't hide those hot pinks
amid twisted mangrove roots--
bring us rose glasses.

White Ibis

Snowy Egret

Roseate Spoonbills

February 27: Arrival in Florida

We are currently enjoying evening one of our week on the southwest Gulf Coast of Florida. Since we arrived in the dark, our only clues that we're not in Maine anymore, Toto, were the roadside palm trees and the flat landscape. Clear night skies, too--Mars straight overhead and a bright waxing moon. It's unseasonably cool--mid-60s now--but compared to the Northeast, we aren't complaining.

We'll spend our first three nights on Sanibel Island, a place we've enjoyed in the past very much despite the touristy build-up over the years. You reach the island via a modern toll bridge, but a friend has told us of the good old days when you had to take a ferry to get here. The lighthouse blinked to the south as we crossed the bridge in the dark, and then we turned onto the main drag to get to our little motel, a typical beachy place with a giant bed and a tiny bathroom, within striking range of a restaurant where Paul has indulged in the past in the all-you-can-eat shrimp special. True to form, he consumed three rounds tonight and we both left happy.

The seas, as best as we could tell, looked calm here--it's so strange to think of the tsunamis hitting Chile, Mexico, Hawaii. How blessed we are to be here with few worries, blithely planning a day of birding, beach, and maybe some fishing for Paul tomorrow.

Wake to snow in Maine.
By miracles of travel,
palm trees in the dark.

February 26: Aftermath

Two of my co-workers driving in this morning on Route 105 had to pass under a fallen tree that was only held up by power lines. One of them didn't have power when he left home. Many homes in Camden also don't have power, and Internet service is down at the office, my house, and according to Time Warner, "all across Maine and New Hampshire." Roofs blew off buildings in Rockland. Tree limbs of all sizes lie scattered across the landscape, wreckage everywhere. My neighbors lawn once again hosts an intermittent branch of the river. The deluge of rain washed away almost all the remaining snow, leaving behind muddy lawns full of sodden leaves, road gravel, and wind-blown bits of trash. It's not a pretty sight.

But as I drove to the library (for an Internet connection), a big patch of placid blue sky peeked out from behind the clouds. The harbor, too, seems to be at rest now. A hint of calm after the chaos.

The sky's calm blue eye
looks down on this mess below,
unblinking, removed.

February 25: Waterfall

When I was a kid, I loved to be allowed to stay up late and watch "Fantasy Island." I loved the combination of drama and magic, knowing each couple would leave the island with everything all worked out thanks to the mysterious powers of the dashing, exotic Ricardo Montalban.

Driving below the western slope of Mount Battie this afternoon in the (still) pouring rain, I noticed a torrent of water streaming down the steep rocky slope to fall on the talus below. I was immediately brought back to the opening credits of "Fantasy Island"--the aerial view of the island that featured a breathtakingly long waterfall cascading through the lush green tropical forest. The bare, cold rock face of Mount Battie is hardly equivalent to that snapshot of Hawaii I used to savor every Thursday night. But for just a moment, Mount Battie offered up an epic bit of landscape.

Rock-skin shedding rain,
day's dramas washing away--
mountain waterfall.

February 24: Snowdrops

Photo by David Paloch via Wikipedia Commons.

I didn't see the flowers myself, but a woman I was visiting today said that snowdrops were already blooming in the shelter of her house. She also said that she'd discovered little Johnny-jump-ups still blooming under a thin crust of snow. Outside her window, a continuous stream of chickadees buzzed her bird feeder and cracked open seeds in the shelter of a rain-darkened apple tree. Rain washed the windows. The chill drear of the weather made the rocking chair set by her old cast-iron cookstove feel like the most perfect place in the world to be at that moment.

Her son had been out on the lake on his four-wheeler earlier that day, and she'd been very anxious for him--our recent warm, wet weather has made the ice rotten and unpredictable in spots. But now he was back on land, safe for the day. I noticed some ice fishermen standing out on the ice in the pouring rain, waiting for their flags to pop up. Not quite sure what the fun is in that. Maybe it was made exciting by the tinge of danger offered by the wide strip of water that had opened up along the shore's edge.

One of my neighbors around the corner tells me that she too has snowdrops blooming near her mailbox, and that come spring she'll divide some to share with me so that next spring I too can enjoy the wonder of flowers blooming while there's still snow on the ground.

Snowdrops in the mud.
Last fishermen on the lake
brave the rotten ice.

February 23: Red Birds

A twelve-hour workday doesn't leave a lot of creative brain energy left. I just got home, and all I want to do is go straight to bed. But first, this haiku...

The highlights of my day: a cardinal wolf-whistling from the bushes when I got out my car at the office this morning, and a rosy-breasted robin cluck-cluck-clucking away from the top of a tree when I left the office for a series of meetings late this afternoon. My daylight hours were bracketed by these red birds, and despite random flurries of snow throughout the day, I couldn't help but think of the birds as signs of spring.

Chortling robin,
lusty, lipstick red cardinal,
unfazed by snow squalls.

February 22: Gray

Color of the sky: soft billows of cloud starting to darken with rain. And the river, rushing onward in the flat gunmetal light of the afternoon. And my cashmere sweater, donned today to soothe my spirit after I woke up feeling tired, cranky, and achey but not quite sick. Gray has always been my favorite color to wear when I need a lift, my comfort clothing. To accompany comfort food, which tonight will be macaroni and cheese with lobster bits mixed in. 

In this mood on this kind of day, I think of the James Taylor song "Another Grey Morning" from his album "JT," the first record I ever bought. A portion of the lyrics, which capture a gray mood so poignantly: 

She hears the baby crying downstairs

She hears the foghorn calling out across the sound

Repetition in the morning air

Is just too much to bear

And no one seems to care

If another day goes creeping by

Empty and ashamed

Like an old unwanted memory

That no one will claim

The clouds with their heads on the ground

She's gonna have to come down

The woman in that song is clearly depressed, and I most definitely am not, but I'm tired enough that I can sort of relate. I left work a couple of hours early today to take a nap and recharge a little, to make it through the rest of my work week--because it's not good when you're exhausted and it's only Monday. So now I'm going to curl up in my sleeping bag with my snoring old cat and let my thoughts drift away with the day's last gray light. The clouds look like they would make good pillows.

Not winter, not spring,

not sunny but not raining--

year's gray area.