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Suddenly in June the baby hooded mergansers appear, seven of them paddling serenely on the stream. I haven’t seen their parents in weeks. I try to sneak up—Baila the dog’s way ahead of me investigating the streamside entrance of what seems to be an extensive woodchuck network, but the fuzzy birds notice me and, one after the next, orderly, quickly, they dive near the bank and disappear. I mean, literally disappear. The current’s fairly high, but the water’s very clear, and poof, they are gone, no doubt into the abandoned muskrat den that’s been their nest. I’ll have to look for the entrance once the water level’s well down. No doubt one or both of the parents are up ahead leading Baila on, the old broken wing maneuver, pitiful squeaks. Dog falls for it every time, and a good thing: The merganserlings are safe.
Just above their muddy bank is an eastern kingbirds’ nest I’ve been watching for years, and already this season for weeks. The original was on a silver maple stub, what was left of a big old tree that leaned flood by flood till its leaves were in the water, then its branches. Subsequent years of ice and flood removed all the branches and bark, and one spring a pair of kingbirds found a bit of a crotch attractive for a nest, just a cupped pile of twigs open to the sky on that bald log, lined nicely with popple fluff and dried grasses. Each spring the leaning bole was closer to the water, till finally ice-out in spring carried it away among huge floes and other logs. That same season (and happily for the kingbirds or their returning progeny), a black cherry leaned in, got stripped, and offered its trunk.
This day one of the adults is high above, harsh warning calls. I don’t have to get very close, take a quick look at the nest through my binoculars. I love to watch the mother hunkered down in the deep bowl of it, just the white tip of her tail visible at the upstream end, the black cap on her head downstream, maybe sometimes the glinting black bead of her eye: she’s incubating eggs.
She’s not gonna budge.
Last week she was there in the pouring, splashing, pelting rain, day after day, and must have sat through the two hail storms. I was out there for one downpour and watched in admiration, tough little bird getting sopped, not so much as a leaf above her head to break the force of the heavy raindrops, no raincoat hood like mine to hold in a little warmth. The rain brought the stream up into flood stage for a few days, nothing serious as floods go, but cresting just a kingbird wingspan below that nest, a roiling muddy crashing torrent, the log rising and falling rhythmically, momma holding on.
I follow Baila along the bank through new Joe Pye weed and new false hellebore and new cow parsnip, every summer flower, all this stuff barely up to my knees, soon to be head high. The dog’s upstream, still baffled by the disappearance of a wounded duck she’d thought a sure retrieval, sniffing all around.
Posted on Tuesday, July 15, 2008 in Permalink
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Reader Comments:
Essays (or blogs as you call them) by Bill Roorbach as as welcome as the "flowers in May!" Always makes my day a little brighter, I would love to meet him one day.