Margotlog: Key West: What to Tell a Housebound Friend
First, it's an island at the end of a chain of islands called the Florida Keys. Key stands for Cay, which I think is Spanish or Meso-American meaning small island.
Second, and here you can imagine me actually speaking to her by phone, though she's not far away, only West St. Paul. I make my voice to be clear and encouraging. She spends her days fighting acute pain. Today, she's "fallen off a cliff," by which she means, a movement has created a surge of agony. She wants my voice to take her out of pain's narrow confines. She wants description.
"I liked one place best," I begin. "The butterfly garden. The warm, enclosed garden is full of plants butterflies love. I recognized mint and milkweed. The paths are full of huge blue Morphos, as wide as my hand, fluttering, iridescent blue. As if some hand had cut sky cloth into scintillating shapes. How long do they live? I asked the butterfly keeper. 'Five days,' he said, 'and they don't eat at all.' That made me sad, but also amazed that there could be such die-off and yet so many here, fluttering against the glass, sipping water, even one briefly resting on my shoulder. But this is the Morpho's time-tested way.
"I don't see many Monarchs, I told the keeper. How come? We both knew almost without speaking how imperiled this once iconic North American and Mexican orange and black butterfly has become. 'We've chosen not to bring them inside, but leave them where we hope they'll flourish.' I understand I tell him. Why less than fifteen years ago when I was driving down Highway 35 from northern Minnesota, such swarms of lazy flying Monarchs crossed in front of me, I had to slow down to keep from hitting them. Now I'm lucky if I see a few up north, and a few here in my St. Paul garden.
"'Do everything you can to help,' he said. 'Here we're working with farmers in Oklahoma and Texas to leave margins around their fields for wild flowers. That's where the Monarchs find the milkweed where they lay their eggs. Oklahoma and Texas are the last stops before Mexico where they can start a new generation.'"
As I talk, I try to recollect the colors and shapes of the garden's other winged beauties--some long and narrow with red in their centers, and black and white on the margins of their wings. Some broad and jagged with yellow and brown zig-zags, and the edges of their wings crisped. Some sedately black and white. Some entirely one color, like a North American bright orange, oblong butterfly, quite pretty against the green. I describe this to my friend, the wounded artist, who is practicing what it looks like in her imagination.
In this plethora of winged creatures, birds have a place too, but the biggest aren't flying. They're three-year-old, hot pink flamingos, "rescued" from a breeder in Ontario, Canada. Not named Rhet and Scarlett, but could be. They're honking from their pool in the midst of all this fluttering and chirping. Scarlett tries to climb out, but slides back off the slippery rocks. I don't want to come face-to-face with her on the path. Yes her beak curves downward in a most peculiar way, but her neck looks strong enough to deliver a blow. Stay put, you two, I telegraph as I pass, going around twice to enjoy the fluttering marvels again.
Several days later, flying home, I study a patchwork of fields, probably in Iowa or southern Minnesota. Trees fur areas around small lakes or along waterways, but all other fields go straight to the margins, none with a border of wild plants. Fifteen years ago when I was on the writers-in-the-schools circuit, I interviewed farmers in southern and northwestern Minnesota farming communities. The towns were experiencing a strange gasping for breath, as if all the red corpuscles were draining away.
Jobs were disappearing. Young people leaving for more populated areas. Smaller farms were being bought up by large operations, not necessarily owned by single or related families. The consolidation, I heard again and again, had everything to do with wanting to plant only one or two crops, soy beans and corn being the favorites. And using big machinery on these fields.
What had been a system of diverse farming--some cows, some pigs, fields of grain and beans, rotated to help enrich the soil--was being replaced by a "corporate" model. Profit ran the business, as much profit as possible. Plant every inch, out to the margins. Plant Genetically Modified seeds, which grow plants that will withstand herbicides and pesticides like "Round-Up" by Monsanto.
I was watching an ethic of responsible farming being replaced by a drive to take everything possible, the devil take the hindmost. Of course there were exceptions to this, but as you'll find by watching the lively documentary "King Corn," the results have been such enormous yields that granaries stuffed to capacity and overflow corn mountains are fueling another problematic practice, the fattening of beef in feed-lots. Not only does this create enormous pools of organic waste, but it puts fat on the beef which, of course, settles around our middles and in our arteries and organs.
Such excess not only kills the Monarchs, one of our summer beauties who in a series of brief generations sends its progeny to overwinter in swarms. But it ultimately damages bees, water, air, and us.
As Rachel Carson wrote in the 1962, a "silent spring" awaits us, though not this time through the action of DDT, but through a more complex combination of excess and poisoning which inexorably will damage our own health and the creatures who share this small planet with us.
Thursday, March 12, 2015
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Margotlog: Luxe, Calme, e Volupte
Margotlog: Luxe, Calme, e Volupte
This line from the French poet Baudelaire (1857) is one of my favorite resorts to describe wafting on warmth and joy. All is ease--luxe, calme. All is indulgence--volupte.
It's rare to feel such untroubled ease in the midst of a Minnesota winter. Yes, the black and white cat caught in a sunbeam expresses sparky charm in her brilliantly lit spray of eyebrow whiskers and the warmth of her sun-drenched fur. But outside though sun reigns, we know from experience, the wind is brutally cold, and the car might not start.
Yesterday there was reprieve, the second of two warmer days. The sun was high in the sky which was blue as forget-me-nots. Bundled up visitors to the Como Conservatory soon shed their wraps. My friend Nordis had come from St. Louis Park to pick me up. More luxe. I hate driving, but especially in winter. Yet our destination was close. We found a parking space outside the wildly eccentric new, glass-roofed wing of the Como Conservatory, and soon were swaddled in rain forest moisture and warmth.
There was a bench just inside the entrance to Tropical Encounters. A pleasant-faced woman sat at one end, scanning the high trees and apparently listening. Bird song surrounded us. I sat down. Nordis sat down. Soon the three of us spied a plump yellow finch, so identified by the most charming young docent, with wide blue eyes and cascades of rich brown hair. "Oh, I saw something blue." She identified a blue tananger. Soon she handed us a thick-paged flip chart of rainforest birds brought to spend time in this crystal palace..
I had been so sick. Off and on since mid-December, with sinus infection, heavy cough, stomach flu. Trying to revive roller skating at a grandson's roller rink birghday part, I was blindsided by a faltering kid. Splat. On the right hip injured years ago when Fran and I spent 12 hours scarping paint off stucco to ready my little house for sale, I had traipsed around for five days, from class to class of a writing residency, training the cord for a heating pad. Now, I lay in the warmth of electric blanket. After a two weeks, each step on the hurt hip still led to a wince.
Oh, the joy of forgetfulness, immersion in beauty, green and warmth. We sat and sat, talking about rain forest adventures, theirs, not mine. Spying more birds in the many storied glass palace. Warm, at ease, voluptuous.
The first year I moved to Minnesota, my then husband and I went to see the sled-dog races on lake Como. The right thing to do, we thought--try and fit in with the natives. I wore my New York wool coat and silk-lined, knee-high boots. Yes, there were socks, probably two layers of socks. And heavy mittens. No doubt I wore jeans and a sweater under the coat--good for New York winters.
Within twenty minutes, the cold wracked my fingers and toes with such pain we had to leave. Frostbite, which would recur for years until I learned to layer, to buy heavy, rubber-soled waffle-stompers, a down coat well below my knees, two hats, three sweathers, three socks, several long scarves up to my eyes, and a wool hat under a down hood.
I could walk from the car to Como Conservatory in minus-20 windchill and survive without excruciating ache in fingers and toes. But that first year, I also discovered the surcease from pain available with deep draughts of moist green air. The antidote is still the next best thing to waking up to breakfast on a lanai in Kauai.
This line from the French poet Baudelaire (1857) is one of my favorite resorts to describe wafting on warmth and joy. All is ease--luxe, calme. All is indulgence--volupte.
It's rare to feel such untroubled ease in the midst of a Minnesota winter. Yes, the black and white cat caught in a sunbeam expresses sparky charm in her brilliantly lit spray of eyebrow whiskers and the warmth of her sun-drenched fur. But outside though sun reigns, we know from experience, the wind is brutally cold, and the car might not start.
Yesterday there was reprieve, the second of two warmer days. The sun was high in the sky which was blue as forget-me-nots. Bundled up visitors to the Como Conservatory soon shed their wraps. My friend Nordis had come from St. Louis Park to pick me up. More luxe. I hate driving, but especially in winter. Yet our destination was close. We found a parking space outside the wildly eccentric new, glass-roofed wing of the Como Conservatory, and soon were swaddled in rain forest moisture and warmth.
There was a bench just inside the entrance to Tropical Encounters. A pleasant-faced woman sat at one end, scanning the high trees and apparently listening. Bird song surrounded us. I sat down. Nordis sat down. Soon the three of us spied a plump yellow finch, so identified by the most charming young docent, with wide blue eyes and cascades of rich brown hair. "Oh, I saw something blue." She identified a blue tananger. Soon she handed us a thick-paged flip chart of rainforest birds brought to spend time in this crystal palace..
I had been so sick. Off and on since mid-December, with sinus infection, heavy cough, stomach flu. Trying to revive roller skating at a grandson's roller rink birghday part, I was blindsided by a faltering kid. Splat. On the right hip injured years ago when Fran and I spent 12 hours scarping paint off stucco to ready my little house for sale, I had traipsed around for five days, from class to class of a writing residency, training the cord for a heating pad. Now, I lay in the warmth of electric blanket. After a two weeks, each step on the hurt hip still led to a wince.
Oh, the joy of forgetfulness, immersion in beauty, green and warmth. We sat and sat, talking about rain forest adventures, theirs, not mine. Spying more birds in the many storied glass palace. Warm, at ease, voluptuous.
The first year I moved to Minnesota, my then husband and I went to see the sled-dog races on lake Como. The right thing to do, we thought--try and fit in with the natives. I wore my New York wool coat and silk-lined, knee-high boots. Yes, there were socks, probably two layers of socks. And heavy mittens. No doubt I wore jeans and a sweater under the coat--good for New York winters.
Within twenty minutes, the cold wracked my fingers and toes with such pain we had to leave. Frostbite, which would recur for years until I learned to layer, to buy heavy, rubber-soled waffle-stompers, a down coat well below my knees, two hats, three sweathers, three socks, several long scarves up to my eyes, and a wool hat under a down hood.
I could walk from the car to Como Conservatory in minus-20 windchill and survive without excruciating ache in fingers and toes. But that first year, I also discovered the surcease from pain available with deep draughts of moist green air. The antidote is still the next best thing to waking up to breakfast on a lanai in Kauai.
Thursday, February 12, 2015
Margotlog: Sudden Tears
Margotlog: Sudden Tears
The Russians are particularly good at this--an upwelling of tears at the turn of a head or sliding into a car. Today's snow and high clouds make me think of a Chekhov troika pausing in a stand of thin trees which whisper above their blanket of snow.
Maybe the illness of last evening and this morning has roused them. Last evening, Fran lay white-faced and sweating under heavy winter wraps as we watched another episode of Jeeves and Bertie. I kept saying in a quiet way, "Maybe you shouldn't go to Phoenix." Before going up to my own bed, I left an empty plastic waste basket beside his lounger/sleeper. He vomited twice during the night. Mid-morning, the trip canceled, he came upstairs to sleep under the electric blanket. Now, hours later, he still sleeps.
All of a sudden, with groceries in the trunk of the car, I am weeping for Eleanor, as if she had just spoken my name and risen from the lunch table to take me upstairs. Outside it would be a chilly November day, and later I would drive a rental car from the assisted living apartment where she lived, across dormant fields lightly touched with snow. When I turned left toward Bombay Hook, a flock of snow geese would rise white-winged into the air.
But I am stopped at a corner beside Feist Veterinary, proceeding toward the two stop lights on the route home. My cheeks are wet with tears. Can this be her birthday, Feb 12? She would be 98. A woman who laughed and filled a life with good work and friendships. She was helped by a companionable younger sister, and their adorable mother.Yet her husband was killed when his troop ship was torpedoed in the Pacific, and their son, born a few days after I was, did not live more than a week.
After both my parents died, I took to visiting her more often in the Delaware assisted living. I sat opposite her curly white head, bright blue eyes and freckled skin, so unlike the smooth olive of our Italian relatives. Behind her chair, hung a Gauguin print--surely his Pacific Island paradise, yet not with a shore and curving palms, and a woman with languorous hair. This was full of odd shapes in oranges and gray blue, citron and purple--a intensity over something I could not quite make out. It might have been the shape of her life.
And now I weep for her intense love and humor, her wails of frustration and flash of rage. For her armature was fully charged, unlike my mother's which wounded suddenly, which pretended calm. So much to love when it is fully expressed, when there is warmth to the touch, when the heart is open.
The Russians are particularly good at this--an upwelling of tears at the turn of a head or sliding into a car. Today's snow and high clouds make me think of a Chekhov troika pausing in a stand of thin trees which whisper above their blanket of snow.
Maybe the illness of last evening and this morning has roused them. Last evening, Fran lay white-faced and sweating under heavy winter wraps as we watched another episode of Jeeves and Bertie. I kept saying in a quiet way, "Maybe you shouldn't go to Phoenix." Before going up to my own bed, I left an empty plastic waste basket beside his lounger/sleeper. He vomited twice during the night. Mid-morning, the trip canceled, he came upstairs to sleep under the electric blanket. Now, hours later, he still sleeps.
All of a sudden, with groceries in the trunk of the car, I am weeping for Eleanor, as if she had just spoken my name and risen from the lunch table to take me upstairs. Outside it would be a chilly November day, and later I would drive a rental car from the assisted living apartment where she lived, across dormant fields lightly touched with snow. When I turned left toward Bombay Hook, a flock of snow geese would rise white-winged into the air.
But I am stopped at a corner beside Feist Veterinary, proceeding toward the two stop lights on the route home. My cheeks are wet with tears. Can this be her birthday, Feb 12? She would be 98. A woman who laughed and filled a life with good work and friendships. She was helped by a companionable younger sister, and their adorable mother.Yet her husband was killed when his troop ship was torpedoed in the Pacific, and their son, born a few days after I was, did not live more than a week.
After both my parents died, I took to visiting her more often in the Delaware assisted living. I sat opposite her curly white head, bright blue eyes and freckled skin, so unlike the smooth olive of our Italian relatives. Behind her chair, hung a Gauguin print--surely his Pacific Island paradise, yet not with a shore and curving palms, and a woman with languorous hair. This was full of odd shapes in oranges and gray blue, citron and purple--a intensity over something I could not quite make out. It might have been the shape of her life.
And now I weep for her intense love and humor, her wails of frustration and flash of rage. For her armature was fully charged, unlike my mother's which wounded suddenly, which pretended calm. So much to love when it is fully expressed, when there is warmth to the touch, when the heart is open.
Thursday, February 5, 2015
Margotlog: Emily's Angleworm
Margotlog: Emily's Angleworm
Though I supposed myself a serious graduate student, studying 19th-Century American Literature at Columbia, it now comes clear that I took away only one snippet from what that century had to offer--Emily Dickinson brief remark:
A little bird walked down the path
it did not know I saw
It bit an angleworm in half
and ate the fellow raw.
Yesterday I wrote this on the back of an envelope, just to make sure it didn't slither off into oblivion. The occasion was not pure whimsy, but a glimpse out the back window at a shape looming in the bare elm. Hawk!
The huge bird swiveled its head, somewhat disdainful as wind tufted its feathers. On the ground, under the wide branches of the white pine, gray squirrels kept eating seeds. Not a sparrow or chickadee in sight.
I consulted the Sibley Guide to Birds. Hawk, yes. But precisely what kind I couldn't tell. Dark back, long tail, paler front. Could have been any number of juveniles or females. I didn't think it was an immature bald eagle, though it seemed huge against the gray sky..
The next time I looked, a squirrel had inserted itself onto the other end of the branch and was advancing toward the tall, still bird. Stupid squirrel. Frisking, frolicking. Courting danger, I thought. Squirrel ran right toward the towering bird who looked down its nose at the annoyance. What the devil? I thought. Doesn't it know any better? Squirrel advanced, bird hopped an inch away. Squirrel skittered. Paused. Advanced.
Lifting its regal shoulders in an almost audible "Well!" the hawk spread wide dark wings, soared low into the yard, inserted itself between the houses, and was gone, leaving behind the chance to eat any darn thing raw.
This morning the wind blew bitter. I left for an appointment and returned. Squirrels eating, Birds invisible.
Too cold, I thought and hurried inside. At the window maybe twenty minutes later, expecting to see nothing, I found a regal, orange-chested Cooper's Hawk (unmistakable) holding to the ground a splay-winged pigeon. "Come quick," I called into the house. We both saw it. I put my nose in the book. Fran said, "It's squirming. Must be still alive." I looked up. Raw prey and predator were gone.
The back-yard dusted itself off. An hour later, it was full of birds, as many as could stand the fierce wind before rushing for shelter in the spruce. It didn't matter what we saw. So there, Emily, with your flouncy fella raw.
Though I supposed myself a serious graduate student, studying 19th-Century American Literature at Columbia, it now comes clear that I took away only one snippet from what that century had to offer--Emily Dickinson brief remark:
A little bird walked down the path
it did not know I saw
It bit an angleworm in half
and ate the fellow raw.
Yesterday I wrote this on the back of an envelope, just to make sure it didn't slither off into oblivion. The occasion was not pure whimsy, but a glimpse out the back window at a shape looming in the bare elm. Hawk!
The huge bird swiveled its head, somewhat disdainful as wind tufted its feathers. On the ground, under the wide branches of the white pine, gray squirrels kept eating seeds. Not a sparrow or chickadee in sight.
I consulted the Sibley Guide to Birds. Hawk, yes. But precisely what kind I couldn't tell. Dark back, long tail, paler front. Could have been any number of juveniles or females. I didn't think it was an immature bald eagle, though it seemed huge against the gray sky..
The next time I looked, a squirrel had inserted itself onto the other end of the branch and was advancing toward the tall, still bird. Stupid squirrel. Frisking, frolicking. Courting danger, I thought. Squirrel ran right toward the towering bird who looked down its nose at the annoyance. What the devil? I thought. Doesn't it know any better? Squirrel advanced, bird hopped an inch away. Squirrel skittered. Paused. Advanced.
Lifting its regal shoulders in an almost audible "Well!" the hawk spread wide dark wings, soared low into the yard, inserted itself between the houses, and was gone, leaving behind the chance to eat any darn thing raw.
This morning the wind blew bitter. I left for an appointment and returned. Squirrels eating, Birds invisible.
Too cold, I thought and hurried inside. At the window maybe twenty minutes later, expecting to see nothing, I found a regal, orange-chested Cooper's Hawk (unmistakable) holding to the ground a splay-winged pigeon. "Come quick," I called into the house. We both saw it. I put my nose in the book. Fran said, "It's squirming. Must be still alive." I looked up. Raw prey and predator were gone.
The back-yard dusted itself off. An hour later, it was full of birds, as many as could stand the fierce wind before rushing for shelter in the spruce. It didn't matter what we saw. So there, Emily, with your flouncy fella raw.
Saturday, January 17, 2015
Margotlog: Minnesota's Trumpeter Swans
Margotlog: Minnesota's Trumpeter Swans
In that dreamy mode when the mind brings up images as if from the deep, I imagine the swan as a ballerina, arching her beautiful long neck as she takes flight on her toes, her arms like slender graceful wings. Beside her, riding the air, two huge white birds, their white necks and black beaks outstretched, skim the water, put down black webbed feet, and fold their white wings--tents of clouds, gliding to a stop.
In the ballet Swan Lake, the swan dies, leaving her human lover aching with grief. In a daily cacophany of birdland on the winter Mississippi River near Monticello, Minnesota, our own ballerinas of the air hold up their regal heads, paddle upside down searching for food, mix with almost grown, gray cygnets, and receive the applause of an astonishing amount of corn.
Every day throughout the winter, in this theater of the swan, a generous couple, aided by swan lovers from miles around, feed around 500 swans, mallard ducks, and Canada geese. The menu is around 1500 pounds of corn a day. It is an astonishing sight, especially since the trumpeter's come-back has been conducted largely by the same species who almost eradicated the bird in the first place.
In 1989, when Minnesota's "bring back the trumpeter" effort first took flight, I wrote a long article for Minnesota Monthly (March 1989)--"Bringing Back the Swain." There had been two decades of work to protect and help repopulate a small number of swans in Hennepin County, Big Rat Lake, Carlos Avery Wildlife Area, as well as several lakes in Becker County, near the western edge of the state. Trumpeters used to be plentiful throughout much of the continental United States but they were an easy target for hunters--their heavy body (up to 35 lbs) and slow take-off and landing with their nine-foot wingspans--"like a 747," early wildlife workers like to say--had left their numbers so small in the continental US as to predict extinction.
Then in the 1980s, thousands of trumpeters were discovered in Alaska. In an amazing effort, funded in part by "the chickadee check-off" on state income tax forms, Minnesota's Department of Natural Resources and Hennepin County Parks--aided by "citizens for swans" in the Trumpeter Swan Society--worked to repopulate Minnesota with its glorious native swan. DNR's Carrol Henderson flew to Alaska to collect (sparingly) the trumpeter eggs--the size of nerf footballs. Steve Kittlesen tended incubators, turning the eggs as a parent swan would, and hastening the hatched cygnets into swimming pools. He quipped it was a darn good think he didn't have to teach them to eat.
There were some sad set-backs--a mink got into a brooder building and killed all 31 newly hatched cygnets. Replacements of this expensive stock came from the Minnesota Zoo, private growers, a research station in Manitoba, and Hennepin parks. "The better way...would have been not to let the [trumpeter] disappear in the first place," Kittleson said. But the habitat and the financial support and the eggs were available. Fully grown trumpeters were flown to small puddle lakes near Fargo-Moorhead, to try raising families. Goofy things happened: one bird couldn't be herded to water for 90 minutes. One kept heading to the road to watch the cars.
The following summer, 15 free-flying pairs returned to Detroit Lakes, joining 42 newly released birds. Over the winter, some birds discovered open water on the Mississippi near the nuclear power plant at Monticello. Others spent the winter south in Iowa and Missouri.
One of the best reclamation efforts was reviving Swan Lake near St. Peter, bringing back its original grassy, reedy form. A huge lake with many small bays, Swan Lake used to be home to many trumpeters long before Westerners arrived. "Named Manka tanka ota menda, or Lake of the Large Birds by the Dakota, the lake was a summer hunting ground for Chief Sleepy Eye" (Galt, 1989). When I wrote the 1989 account of these efforts, there were predictions that someday 150 birds might live on Swan Lake. The DNR hoped to establish a free-flying flock of 30 breeding pairs, and 300 birds to add to the Hennepin Parks flock of 100.
No one could have imagined that today, in 2015, an estimated 2500 trumpeter swans live in Minnesota. They mate for life and raise their fluffy gray cygnets in small prairie pot-holes. Some surely try out spots in Canada, and Montana. Each year a number of trumpeters and other water fowl sicken from ingesting lead from hunter's bullets and fishing sinkers. The lucky ones are treated at such places as the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in Saint Paul.
But overall, the present numbers and health of the world's largest and, for me, most beautiful water bird is nothing short of miraculous. A few days ago as we stood in a chill wind watching the "man who feeds the swans" spread splash after splash of corn among the noisy, stately, pushing, eddying throng, I thought how wonderful when humans take to their hearts another form of life, and protect and nourish it. Young and old, hale and feeble, came to watch the swans enjoy their food. And not only that to appreciate the on-going effort, the care and desire to continue feeding and helping the trumpeter through the winter.
Of course only a fifth, at the most, of the summer trumpeters hang out in the warmed water below the Monticelli power plant. But at this moment, I can't imagine asking for more. This ballet of the air and water, of human and big white bird is a continuing love story.
---
To enjoy watching trumpeters in the winter Mississippi, here are directions from the Twin Cities - take 94 west and exit at the first Monticello exit. Up up the ramp at the stoplight, turn right. You will be on Hgwy 39. Go 1/4 mile and turn left onto Mississippi Drive. The park is about 500 yards, and is clearly marked with parking for handicapped and others. There's a path down to the river. Each day's "feeding" is at 10:30 a.m. Make a donation if at all possible.
In that dreamy mode when the mind brings up images as if from the deep, I imagine the swan as a ballerina, arching her beautiful long neck as she takes flight on her toes, her arms like slender graceful wings. Beside her, riding the air, two huge white birds, their white necks and black beaks outstretched, skim the water, put down black webbed feet, and fold their white wings--tents of clouds, gliding to a stop.
In the ballet Swan Lake, the swan dies, leaving her human lover aching with grief. In a daily cacophany of birdland on the winter Mississippi River near Monticello, Minnesota, our own ballerinas of the air hold up their regal heads, paddle upside down searching for food, mix with almost grown, gray cygnets, and receive the applause of an astonishing amount of corn.
Every day throughout the winter, in this theater of the swan, a generous couple, aided by swan lovers from miles around, feed around 500 swans, mallard ducks, and Canada geese. The menu is around 1500 pounds of corn a day. It is an astonishing sight, especially since the trumpeter's come-back has been conducted largely by the same species who almost eradicated the bird in the first place.
In 1989, when Minnesota's "bring back the trumpeter" effort first took flight, I wrote a long article for Minnesota Monthly (March 1989)--"Bringing Back the Swain." There had been two decades of work to protect and help repopulate a small number of swans in Hennepin County, Big Rat Lake, Carlos Avery Wildlife Area, as well as several lakes in Becker County, near the western edge of the state. Trumpeters used to be plentiful throughout much of the continental United States but they were an easy target for hunters--their heavy body (up to 35 lbs) and slow take-off and landing with their nine-foot wingspans--"like a 747," early wildlife workers like to say--had left their numbers so small in the continental US as to predict extinction.
Then in the 1980s, thousands of trumpeters were discovered in Alaska. In an amazing effort, funded in part by "the chickadee check-off" on state income tax forms, Minnesota's Department of Natural Resources and Hennepin County Parks--aided by "citizens for swans" in the Trumpeter Swan Society--worked to repopulate Minnesota with its glorious native swan. DNR's Carrol Henderson flew to Alaska to collect (sparingly) the trumpeter eggs--the size of nerf footballs. Steve Kittlesen tended incubators, turning the eggs as a parent swan would, and hastening the hatched cygnets into swimming pools. He quipped it was a darn good think he didn't have to teach them to eat.
There were some sad set-backs--a mink got into a brooder building and killed all 31 newly hatched cygnets. Replacements of this expensive stock came from the Minnesota Zoo, private growers, a research station in Manitoba, and Hennepin parks. "The better way...would have been not to let the [trumpeter] disappear in the first place," Kittleson said. But the habitat and the financial support and the eggs were available. Fully grown trumpeters were flown to small puddle lakes near Fargo-Moorhead, to try raising families. Goofy things happened: one bird couldn't be herded to water for 90 minutes. One kept heading to the road to watch the cars.
The following summer, 15 free-flying pairs returned to Detroit Lakes, joining 42 newly released birds. Over the winter, some birds discovered open water on the Mississippi near the nuclear power plant at Monticello. Others spent the winter south in Iowa and Missouri.
One of the best reclamation efforts was reviving Swan Lake near St. Peter, bringing back its original grassy, reedy form. A huge lake with many small bays, Swan Lake used to be home to many trumpeters long before Westerners arrived. "Named Manka tanka ota menda, or Lake of the Large Birds by the Dakota, the lake was a summer hunting ground for Chief Sleepy Eye" (Galt, 1989). When I wrote the 1989 account of these efforts, there were predictions that someday 150 birds might live on Swan Lake. The DNR hoped to establish a free-flying flock of 30 breeding pairs, and 300 birds to add to the Hennepin Parks flock of 100.
No one could have imagined that today, in 2015, an estimated 2500 trumpeter swans live in Minnesota. They mate for life and raise their fluffy gray cygnets in small prairie pot-holes. Some surely try out spots in Canada, and Montana. Each year a number of trumpeters and other water fowl sicken from ingesting lead from hunter's bullets and fishing sinkers. The lucky ones are treated at such places as the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in Saint Paul.
But overall, the present numbers and health of the world's largest and, for me, most beautiful water bird is nothing short of miraculous. A few days ago as we stood in a chill wind watching the "man who feeds the swans" spread splash after splash of corn among the noisy, stately, pushing, eddying throng, I thought how wonderful when humans take to their hearts another form of life, and protect and nourish it. Young and old, hale and feeble, came to watch the swans enjoy their food. And not only that to appreciate the on-going effort, the care and desire to continue feeding and helping the trumpeter through the winter.
Of course only a fifth, at the most, of the summer trumpeters hang out in the warmed water below the Monticelli power plant. But at this moment, I can't imagine asking for more. This ballet of the air and water, of human and big white bird is a continuing love story.
---
To enjoy watching trumpeters in the winter Mississippi, here are directions from the Twin Cities - take 94 west and exit at the first Monticello exit. Up up the ramp at the stoplight, turn right. You will be on Hgwy 39. Go 1/4 mile and turn left onto Mississippi Drive. The park is about 500 yards, and is clearly marked with parking for handicapped and others. There's a path down to the river. Each day's "feeding" is at 10:30 a.m. Make a donation if at all possible.
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Margotlog: May All Your Christmases Be White?
Margotlog: May All Your Christmases Be White?
Even as I write this, I sense the double meaning--white as in snow-covered, aka, Minnesota Northland Christmases, but also "white" as in belonging to those with white skin. When I was growing up in Charleston, South Carolina, we "whities" were surrounded by people with brown skin, who celebrated Christmas much as I thought we did. They shopped with us at the dime stores, though not yet sitting at lunch counters. When I occasionally passed their homes, especially those on the barrier islands south of Charleston, the decorations shouted "Christmas"--strings of red bells, twinkling colored lights, maybe even a Rudolph and a sleigh cavorting across a roof top. Christmases were not white at all--but often brilliantly blue and green, with palm fronds clacking, and street-corner Santas looking hot in their red flannel as they rang their bells.
We kids in the Old Citadel decorated our family trees with homemade ornaments cut from colored paper. My parents hung glass dew-drops and balls up high. Lower we placed funny pipe cleaner guys in striped trousers and black vests along with our homemade angels, purple and pink. Who knew where those funny guys in striped pants had come from. Maybe from our parents' Christmases before my sister and I were born. They lived in Pittsburgh for a decade through the Depression and parts of World War II before having children. Sometimes my mother talked nostalgically about big iced cakes from "Swan's" which she picked up after work for Christmas eve. (I have no idea if that was really the name of the store, though something like it rings a bell.)
I have lived in Minnesota longer than anywhere else and Christmases are often white, white and cold. If we're lucky, a brilliant blue sky compensates for unbearable windchill. Again I muse about the line "May all your Christmases be white," and remember that the day before Christmas this year, my husband and I drove west from our Saint Paul neighborhood, across the still unfrozen Mississippi. Another old song popped into mind: "Over the river and through the woods/ To Grandfather's house we go." We certainly wouldn't have wanted to try driving a sleigh over the river this Christmas eve. Not until a few days later did snow and piercing cold arrive. Even now, I bet the Mississippi is not frozen solid.
Still there are these expectations. As Fran and I commented, driving through a still brown urban landscape to Minneapolis and the first of our family Christmas celebrations, so many Christmas songs assume the land will be covered with snow--"that stings the toes and bites the nose as over the ground we go." This is a Nordic assumption, probably from Germany and Britain, I think. "Good king Wenceslas looked out, on the feast of Stephen, When the snow lay round about,/ deep and crisp and even." Suddenly, my mind springs back to an encounter I had with my daughter years ago in the huge Munich museum called the Alta Pinakothek.
We were standing before a painting by Albrecht Durer, the great early Renaissance German painter. We're looking at the subject of the painting, a firm-cheeked handsome man named Oswald Krel (1499). He looks thoroughly Renaissance, meaning clear-eyed, in command of his existence, and wearing a fur-trimmed collar. Yet in panels beside him, hairy men brandish clubs and firebrands, attacking travelers on snowy forest roads. "How creepy," I say to her. And she, with her superior knowledge of German language and culture, labels them "Krampus, Austrian ghost walkers who around St. Nicholas eve, Dec 6th, attack villagers in the fields."
As I will write in the book I'm finally finishing called "The Shared Leg or Falling for Botticelli," these ghost walkers and their cruel, unprovoked attacks reminded me of something I hadn't thought of for a very long time. My mother, who grew up in eastern North Dakota, with a German father and Swedish mother, used to tell us that she and her brother and sisters almost always received a piece of coal in their Christmas stockings. When I thought of those killjoy Krampus, I thought of the coal in her stocking. What was it supposed to mean?
A reminder of their inherently "fallen-from-grace" devilishness? Or that "Papa" was always on the lookout for wrong-doers? Or that all of us need the guidance of a loving saint across the winter wastes at Christmas time? The carol about Good King Wencaslas tells us exactly that. Like the King's page, we need to step behind someone who has "dinted" the snow, and when we encounter a poor man, we need to call out "Bring me flesh and bring me wine, bring me pine logs hither." Because in the bitterest weather of the year, the message of Christmas is...
Therefore, Christian men, be sure, wealth or rank possessing,
Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing.
That still leaves the uncertain meaning of coal in one's stocking, and attacks by Krampus in snowy fields. Deep in the Nordic psyche, I think, lies a delight in shocking expectations, in shocking the innocent on a forest path. Like a snowstorm that roars in out of the west, making it impossible to push open the front door for days. I'm not wishing such a development on any of us. I'm just remembering...
May all your Christmases be white!
Even as I write this, I sense the double meaning--white as in snow-covered, aka, Minnesota Northland Christmases, but also "white" as in belonging to those with white skin. When I was growing up in Charleston, South Carolina, we "whities" were surrounded by people with brown skin, who celebrated Christmas much as I thought we did. They shopped with us at the dime stores, though not yet sitting at lunch counters. When I occasionally passed their homes, especially those on the barrier islands south of Charleston, the decorations shouted "Christmas"--strings of red bells, twinkling colored lights, maybe even a Rudolph and a sleigh cavorting across a roof top. Christmases were not white at all--but often brilliantly blue and green, with palm fronds clacking, and street-corner Santas looking hot in their red flannel as they rang their bells.
We kids in the Old Citadel decorated our family trees with homemade ornaments cut from colored paper. My parents hung glass dew-drops and balls up high. Lower we placed funny pipe cleaner guys in striped trousers and black vests along with our homemade angels, purple and pink. Who knew where those funny guys in striped pants had come from. Maybe from our parents' Christmases before my sister and I were born. They lived in Pittsburgh for a decade through the Depression and parts of World War II before having children. Sometimes my mother talked nostalgically about big iced cakes from "Swan's" which she picked up after work for Christmas eve. (I have no idea if that was really the name of the store, though something like it rings a bell.)
I have lived in Minnesota longer than anywhere else and Christmases are often white, white and cold. If we're lucky, a brilliant blue sky compensates for unbearable windchill. Again I muse about the line "May all your Christmases be white," and remember that the day before Christmas this year, my husband and I drove west from our Saint Paul neighborhood, across the still unfrozen Mississippi. Another old song popped into mind: "Over the river and through the woods/ To Grandfather's house we go." We certainly wouldn't have wanted to try driving a sleigh over the river this Christmas eve. Not until a few days later did snow and piercing cold arrive. Even now, I bet the Mississippi is not frozen solid.
Still there are these expectations. As Fran and I commented, driving through a still brown urban landscape to Minneapolis and the first of our family Christmas celebrations, so many Christmas songs assume the land will be covered with snow--"that stings the toes and bites the nose as over the ground we go." This is a Nordic assumption, probably from Germany and Britain, I think. "Good king Wenceslas looked out, on the feast of Stephen, When the snow lay round about,/ deep and crisp and even." Suddenly, my mind springs back to an encounter I had with my daughter years ago in the huge Munich museum called the Alta Pinakothek.
We were standing before a painting by Albrecht Durer, the great early Renaissance German painter. We're looking at the subject of the painting, a firm-cheeked handsome man named Oswald Krel (1499). He looks thoroughly Renaissance, meaning clear-eyed, in command of his existence, and wearing a fur-trimmed collar. Yet in panels beside him, hairy men brandish clubs and firebrands, attacking travelers on snowy forest roads. "How creepy," I say to her. And she, with her superior knowledge of German language and culture, labels them "Krampus, Austrian ghost walkers who around St. Nicholas eve, Dec 6th, attack villagers in the fields."
As I will write in the book I'm finally finishing called "The Shared Leg or Falling for Botticelli," these ghost walkers and their cruel, unprovoked attacks reminded me of something I hadn't thought of for a very long time. My mother, who grew up in eastern North Dakota, with a German father and Swedish mother, used to tell us that she and her brother and sisters almost always received a piece of coal in their Christmas stockings. When I thought of those killjoy Krampus, I thought of the coal in her stocking. What was it supposed to mean?
A reminder of their inherently "fallen-from-grace" devilishness? Or that "Papa" was always on the lookout for wrong-doers? Or that all of us need the guidance of a loving saint across the winter wastes at Christmas time? The carol about Good King Wencaslas tells us exactly that. Like the King's page, we need to step behind someone who has "dinted" the snow, and when we encounter a poor man, we need to call out "Bring me flesh and bring me wine, bring me pine logs hither." Because in the bitterest weather of the year, the message of Christmas is...
Therefore, Christian men, be sure, wealth or rank possessing,
Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing.
That still leaves the uncertain meaning of coal in one's stocking, and attacks by Krampus in snowy fields. Deep in the Nordic psyche, I think, lies a delight in shocking expectations, in shocking the innocent on a forest path. Like a snowstorm that roars in out of the west, making it impossible to push open the front door for days. I'm not wishing such a development on any of us. I'm just remembering...
May all your Christmases be white!
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Margotlog: Tucson: Desert Birds
Margotlog: Tucson: Desert Birds
We found a comfy hideaway on the eastern side of Tucson, renting the next to smallest of six casitas (Spanish for little houses), called "Rain Dancer." Second morning as I read to Fran from a new story-in-progress, the ceiling started to drip on his side of the bed--Rain Dancer, living up to its name, but it was a danse macabre in my story. My character, a young woman who was scheduled to waitress at a restaurant in the World Trade Center, had called in sick. The 9/11 attacks occurred. Now she was tormented with guilt at the death of her stand-in. Drip, drip, drip went the gentle rain on my husband's side of the bed.
"This is the greenest desert in the world," a ranger told us. Huge saguaro cacti poked up throughout an uneven terrain of barrel cactus, organ pipe cactus, prickly pear cactus, mesquite trees--some gnarled like ancient bodies gripped by pain. Mesquite protects the small saguaro from heat and predators until they can rise into 200-year grandeur. I was awed. A twelve or twenty-foot saguaro has roots extending the same number of feet in all directions. Even below ground they dominate this desert.
Eventually we had to move out of Rain Center to the larger casita next door. It was decorated with deep indigo-blue tiles around a rounded Mexican fireplace. Deep blue indigo suggests water in the tan and gray-green of the desert, water so rich as to be jeweled, humming with shadowy eminence. In my story set on the North Shore of Lake Superior, water plays a savage role. An ore boat cracks apart in mammoth waves and wind. A sailor from Uzbekistan is rescued and brought into the life of the guilt-ridden young woman.
In our week in the desert, half the days were overcast, but rain fell heavily only once, scaring us out of the Rain Dancer casita. Days later, down a slow incline we reached a "wash." Parts were still wet. A starry plant close to the ground sparkled with drops of dew or left-over rain. Under the dry surface, the sandy soil was still wet. Cottonwoods bent down to get their arms in the dirt. Tall western ash trees turned golden and did not bend at all. It was quiet except for the birds.
Was it the spiny resistance of the vegetation, making one feel alien, that fixed my eyes on the sky? There on wires in the back yard sang a burbling, warbling, scolding, twittering big gray bird with a curved-downward beak. It sounded like a mocking bird. Suddenly I was home in the lush green of a South Carolina Christmas. My father would soon get out his violin and we'd play duets, he counting Italian solfeggio to keep me in tow. The curved-bill thrasher would keep us company.
Walking one evening up the road, I spied a brilliant red bird high in a mesquite bush. Suddenly it swooped into the air, displaying black wings, and returned to its perch. A Vermillion flycatcher. I was mesmerized. It kept spiraling away and returning against the slowly receding light.
From morning to noon, hummers chased each other away from the feeder near the covered patio. One hummer took its time. It was bright green with a touch of black on its cheek. Its beak would tilt down to suck, lift out while the bird looked around before tilting down again into the tiny hole of sugar water. Calm, almost nonchalant before another whose black head ruffled open into brilliant red, chased it away with a huge buzz. It was a bit like slapstick, except to the humming birds, territory was everything.
There were no flocks of birds, but four Harris hawks--huge brown-black birds with white across their tails--flew through the brush, posting themselves on electric poles or atop the low trees. Almost too big for the diminutive scale of the desert, these hawks, we learned, work as a family team, scouting and harrying their prey. Our arrival sent them packing to quieter territory and leaving the sky to us and the jewels and capers of the desert.
Maybe the one who made me laugh the most was the rather ungainly Gila woodpecker, with its black and white striped coat and tail. This bird would crouch on the tiny hummer feeder, almost embracing it, as it awkwardly tried to fit its thick beak into the sipping holes. We laughed and felt rather ungainly ourselves in the spare, muted quiet of the almost-winter desert.
We found a comfy hideaway on the eastern side of Tucson, renting the next to smallest of six casitas (Spanish for little houses), called "Rain Dancer." Second morning as I read to Fran from a new story-in-progress, the ceiling started to drip on his side of the bed--Rain Dancer, living up to its name, but it was a danse macabre in my story. My character, a young woman who was scheduled to waitress at a restaurant in the World Trade Center, had called in sick. The 9/11 attacks occurred. Now she was tormented with guilt at the death of her stand-in. Drip, drip, drip went the gentle rain on my husband's side of the bed.
"This is the greenest desert in the world," a ranger told us. Huge saguaro cacti poked up throughout an uneven terrain of barrel cactus, organ pipe cactus, prickly pear cactus, mesquite trees--some gnarled like ancient bodies gripped by pain. Mesquite protects the small saguaro from heat and predators until they can rise into 200-year grandeur. I was awed. A twelve or twenty-foot saguaro has roots extending the same number of feet in all directions. Even below ground they dominate this desert.
Eventually we had to move out of Rain Center to the larger casita next door. It was decorated with deep indigo-blue tiles around a rounded Mexican fireplace. Deep blue indigo suggests water in the tan and gray-green of the desert, water so rich as to be jeweled, humming with shadowy eminence. In my story set on the North Shore of Lake Superior, water plays a savage role. An ore boat cracks apart in mammoth waves and wind. A sailor from Uzbekistan is rescued and brought into the life of the guilt-ridden young woman.
In our week in the desert, half the days were overcast, but rain fell heavily only once, scaring us out of the Rain Dancer casita. Days later, down a slow incline we reached a "wash." Parts were still wet. A starry plant close to the ground sparkled with drops of dew or left-over rain. Under the dry surface, the sandy soil was still wet. Cottonwoods bent down to get their arms in the dirt. Tall western ash trees turned golden and did not bend at all. It was quiet except for the birds.
Was it the spiny resistance of the vegetation, making one feel alien, that fixed my eyes on the sky? There on wires in the back yard sang a burbling, warbling, scolding, twittering big gray bird with a curved-downward beak. It sounded like a mocking bird. Suddenly I was home in the lush green of a South Carolina Christmas. My father would soon get out his violin and we'd play duets, he counting Italian solfeggio to keep me in tow. The curved-bill thrasher would keep us company.
Walking one evening up the road, I spied a brilliant red bird high in a mesquite bush. Suddenly it swooped into the air, displaying black wings, and returned to its perch. A Vermillion flycatcher. I was mesmerized. It kept spiraling away and returning against the slowly receding light.
From morning to noon, hummers chased each other away from the feeder near the covered patio. One hummer took its time. It was bright green with a touch of black on its cheek. Its beak would tilt down to suck, lift out while the bird looked around before tilting down again into the tiny hole of sugar water. Calm, almost nonchalant before another whose black head ruffled open into brilliant red, chased it away with a huge buzz. It was a bit like slapstick, except to the humming birds, territory was everything.
There were no flocks of birds, but four Harris hawks--huge brown-black birds with white across their tails--flew through the brush, posting themselves on electric poles or atop the low trees. Almost too big for the diminutive scale of the desert, these hawks, we learned, work as a family team, scouting and harrying their prey. Our arrival sent them packing to quieter territory and leaving the sky to us and the jewels and capers of the desert.
Maybe the one who made me laugh the most was the rather ungainly Gila woodpecker, with its black and white striped coat and tail. This bird would crouch on the tiny hummer feeder, almost embracing it, as it awkwardly tried to fit its thick beak into the sipping holes. We laughed and felt rather ungainly ourselves in the spare, muted quiet of the almost-winter desert.
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