Tags
birding and writing, Cornell Ornithology Lab, creativity, eagle's cry, verisimilitude for writers, writing
Last week, a Townsend’s warbler showed up at our backyard bird feeder. The picture of this little guy comes from the All About Bird’s website, Cornell University’s ornithology lab, which is an excellent site for birding info.
The Townsend’s warbler is a West Coast species, a bird about the size of a chickadee, and it only partakes of our feeder in late winter/early spring. This bird prefers the high canopy of fir forests, and drops down to city yards when the forest pickings are slim, or it’s migrating from warmer southern forests. I think we get them because we live in a neighborhood of mature evergreens, including cedars and firs and even a couple of towering sequoias.
I’m more dilettante than devoted birder, but I know this little guy because its distinctive yellow is so much brighter than that of goldfinches, the other yellow birds common at our feeder.
Any activity that requires close observation (Is that a varied thrush or a robin, a rough-legged hawk or an osprey?) benefits writers. Verisimilitude often lives in the small details. My hand-embroidery practice also enhances observation skills. Replicating the colors of nature with thread requires me to spend a lot of time on the tiniest details.
Observation isn’t limited to the visual channel. Last week Craig and I spent several days in Astoria. At an overlook above the mouth of the mighty Columbia River, on a rain-smeared afternoon, we sat gawking at the gray churning water and the distant forested slopes on the Washington side of the river. Then I heard the unmistakable sound of eagles. American movie makers don’t really like the chittering high-pitched call of actual eagles, so they often substitute the cry of some other hawks, the red-tailed hawk, for example, but I’ve learned to tell the difference.
I didn’t know we’d see eagles this particular day, but I’d brought my spotting scope and two of the three eagles circling and calling settled at the top of a Douglas fir tree for more than an hour. We got a good long look at them. What surprised me was how long the two eagles spent facing each other, just inches apart, without really moving. I wondered if we were seeing mating behavior.