Читать книгу Wild Rides and Wildflowers - Scott Abbott - Страница 15
Оглавление11 May, Teasdale, Wayne County, Utah
Last night was cold and cloudy. Nanc and I wake to a dusting of snow across the sage and piñon landscape. On Thousand Lake Mountain to the north and the Boulder to the south, lava flows are accented by the new snow, and the reds and yellows of the Mesozoic rocks have been delicately frosted. As we stretch awake in the thin and melancholy blue and orange light, fourteen deer cross a hundred yards in front of us after a night of good food in the alfalfa fields east of Teasdale.
There are robins here, several sparrows, an American kestrel, a few mountain bluebirds, a red-winged blackbird, two starlings, and several common ravens. I don’t agree there is much common about the raven. These birds (Corvus corax) are very smart—some say as smart as a good dog. They apply logic to problem solving and seem to be constantly running a con or just playing for the hell of it. A couple of years ago I stood at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon at sunset and watched a raven rise a thousand feet above the rim, fold its wings, fall like a bullet below the rim, catch itself, and start over again.
14 May, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
The day began with neon and ended with iridescence.
My eighth-grade son, Ben, appeared this morning wearing a neon-green shirt and bright purple pants and left home fifteen minutes before the bus was due. “My friend and I have to coordinate outfits,” he explained.
Late this afternoon I took my first bike ride in a week—alone, because Sam and Nancy are spending the week in Teasdale. After days of alternating rain and sun, the hills are furry with fresh grasses. New scrub oak leaves give whole hillsides an orange-brown hue. The first flax of the year, Linum lewisii, blue as a robin’s egg. Riding toward the canyon’s mouth, I wondered when the lazuli buntings would appear from their winter range in the mountains of Mexico. My notes from last year show our first sighting on May 17th. On cue, just before breaking out of the canyon, I heard a familiar call. Putting down my bike, I walked back toward the quick, high-pitched song repeated every fifteen seconds or so. An iridescent blue head shimmered at the top of a still leafless scrub oak. A male lazuli bunting, Passerina amoena. The familiar bright cinnamon breast above a white belly. Two white slashes across the dark wings. The bird sang again and again, and from the hill above, another voice answered with its own version of the song. I stood between the communicating birds, silent, thinking about my own pending migration.
Later I stopped at the ditch above the disappearing orchard (ten rows of trees now gone) and bent to look at the emerging dusky-purple clustered flowers and slender curved lingual leaves of the year’s first hound’s tongue, Cynoglossum officinale. Another European introduction. I straightened up to see a flash of yellow, then a second one. Two male western tanagers (Piranga ludoviciana) chasing a single female. The bright yellow breasts of the males contrast with their black wings and backs and are accented by their brilliant red heads. They, too, have returned from wintering in Mexico, albeit somewhat farther south than the buntings.
So much color! And to think that the evolutionary forces that developed the colorful buntings and tanagers are also at work in Ben’s choice of his own eye-dazzling plumage, meant to impress the girls and boys of the eighth grade.
15 May, Wayne County
On the road near Grover today, we are stopped by a herd of maybe 150 cows taking their time up the middle of Highway 12 on their way to Miner’s Mountain. I step out of the car. Two cowboys, one old, one young, ride at the back of the herd. The young cowboy sits a big buckskin. “Good-looking horse,” I tell him. “Thanks,” he nods and rides on. The other cowboy, who won’t see seventy again, rides over and smiles. “Beauty is as beauty c’n do,” he says. “I got horses back in my barn prettyr’n that horse and they don’t look half as good.” This while a cow pisses next to me, a great yellow gusher that splashes me up both legs.
Makes an old green activist wonder about the future of the cowboy, about the interactions between the old west and the new. Makes me wonder how we can learn to talk together long enough to solve our differences.
21 May, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
An early morning canyon wind. This routine draining of cold air to our lower valley creates a small delta of unusually clean air at the canyon mouth where Sam and I both live. It’s a steady wind this morning, a constant presence that flavors every aspect of our ride. Standing, for instance, just above the quartzite that has knocked us off our bikes again this morning, we watch eight gulls (Larus californicus) fly up canyon. Headway is possible for them only in furious spurts, followed, always, by a sudden veering away, a sliding downstream.
The wind is at our backs as we swoop up the knife-edged ridge. We talk about the return of the buntings from Mexico, look across the canyon at the greening scrub oak, feel the systematic breathing of the canyon. Above us, a dark-feathered hawk toils against the wind, lumbering upcanyon. It draws our attention into the sun hanging just above the canyon’s highest eastern notch. The hawk disappears into the sun and Sam marvels at the sundogs crouching to either side. We remember the winter morning when we stood on our skis high in Hobble Creek Canyon and looked into the sun to the south to witness two full rings, the larger of which shimmered colorfully down into the gully at our feet. Sam swore it was a visitation of the Virgin Mary.
22 May, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
From time to time, for the past several years, a bird has puzzled us here. It’s a bit smaller than a robin, but with that same sort of substantial presence. We’ve never seen it close enough to identify it. Today, one perches in a trailside tree. “Turn around, you sonofabitch,” Scott says. “Show off your plumage! Don’t you know we’re trying to commune with nature here?” It’s in no hurry, but finally complies. It has a velvety black head, short conical beak, dark wings with white dashes, orange sides, a white breast, and a sharp reddish eye. A rufous-sided or spotted towhee (Pipilo maculatus). Chirpchirpchirp—trilllllllllll!
24 May
New flowers everywhere: purple Wasatch penstemon (Penstemon cyananthus), yellow Dalmatian toadflax (Linaria dalmatica), delicate white woodland star (Lithophragma parviflora), spiky yellow goatsbeard (Tragopogon dubius), mellow orange globemallow (Sphaeralcea coccinea), and purple northern sweetvetch (Hedysarum boreale).
Enough said.
