nature in the neighborhood, winter report
Reasons to be cheerful part 2
The view from my condo:
Like any good condo, mine has sliding glass doors that let out onto my symbolic "yard", an 8' wide deck which runs the length of the rectangular box I call home. The deck itself is unremarkable, but the view beyond it is pretty cool - I look out on Barbara Bennett Park, the Arlington Street Bridge, Wingfield Park and beyond to the river itself, the Sierra Street Bridge and more. In the winter I see all this, but in the summer all I see is a bunch of leaves, which is believe me, a big feature, considering all the retards that populate my park in the summer. But on a cold January night like tonight, it gives me a great feeling of space and connectedness and it's just beautiful. A nice dusting of leftover snow to the right (south, next to the north side of the hill of course), the lights of the Harrah's Tower and the Century 12-plex in the distance, the pristine clarity of the streetlights and the passing cars on Arlington. And of course my beloved blinking christmas lights that I've hung somewhere in my environment for the last, gosh, I guess six winters or so, out on the balcony cheering me up. And conversely when I am out and about I can see my lights from the other side of the river all the way down by the movie theaters 1/4 mile away.
The closness of nature:
There's the hawks nest in the cottonwood tree high above the basketball courts. Red-tails I think, but I really have no idea. I do know that it's a nesting pair, I see them taxiing in for a landing after a day of cruising the river for tasty morsels. I was very happy to see one landing with a good sized branch in its mouth one morning, a little nest maintenance I assume. This another reason that the homies at the basketball court think I'm a little strange (aside from being 30 years older than most of them), I'm always stopping to look up and stare at the nest.
There's the covey of quail that have appeared this winter. I don't know where they nest (in the small amount of underbrush on the hill?), but I've seen them pretty regularly lately, and heard them making their cute little nattering noises. The coolest thing was when they somehow got on the roof of our three story building. From the hill it would be a doable hop up there if you were a quail, I guess. Anyway one afternoon I noticed a pretty large something dropping past my deck outside, then another and another, and it turned out to be the whole quail posse dropping one by one off the roof down to the park.
There's the otter or mink that occasionally appears in the river. I would say otter, but the nature exhibit at Oxbox Park mentions minks and it doesn't mention otters, so I'm gonna go with mink! Gosh it's exciting to see out there, it's head sticking out like a little Loch Ness monster.
There's the river birds. Year-round we have lots of mallards and common mergansers and in winter we have canada geese standing around and crapping all over the park. Ducks in a city pond are pretty f---ing boring, but ducks in a swift-moving river can be very entertaining. They're like little miniature kayakers except better. If they want to go upriver they of course flap their wings and fly. But if they want to be somewhere downriver they tend to save energy and just float on down, shooting the rapids and paddling over to the next little quiet area where they do their mucking around thing.
And that's just the usually boring mallards. The common mergansers are to me, infinitely cooler, certainly far from common! First of all they look cool - they have this mohawk/topnot thing going on their heads, and a more pointed, even hooked beak as befits their niche of being actual fishermen rather than just muckrakers like the mallards. They get out into the middle of the river and really work it! As with the mallards, the boys and the girls look totally different, and they usually hang out in heterosexual pairs. So when I see the striking white body, dark greenhead and bright orange bill of a boy, I love to stop and look around till I find his woman - the female merganser is cooler looking than the male - lovely russet-brown head with a very stylish, swept-back crest on a subtly off-white body.
I find geese pretty useless except when they are flying, then they are magnificent. At the river it's very common to be surprised by a group of 3-10 of them following the river up or down, maybe a foot off the surface of the water, just bookin'. Or high up in the sky in their classic V, heading between the river and Virginia Lake.
My new favorite bird is our one-and-only black-crowned night heron, which I see quite often, coming home from a long night at the bars. I actually saw it first last winter in my first few days of living here and I couldn't quite believe my eyes. Its thing is to find a nice rock or log to perch on, right above the surface of teh water, usually at the foot of a rapids. It just stands there, all hunched over motionless, just staring at the water, waiting presumably for a likely little fish to swim by. It's solitary, only comes out at night, and it is completely still unless you spook it, and is to me both strange and immensley reassuring when I see it at 2 in the morning. I often shout out a greeting/blessing to it and it of course ignores me.
My neighbor's bird feeders attract mostly the usual assortment of starlings (yuk), little brown sparrows and chickadees (very cute) and doves (yuk also, but I've come to respect that they are very acrobatic fliers). But he also puts out those little suet balls (boxes really) and they attract the local flickers and woodpeckers. I do so love woodpeckers, I could watch them all day. My best guess is that we have the red-shafted northern flicker and the downy woodpecker.
Then we have the river itself and its ever-changing moods. As its level recedes to more normal levels, I am ever more impressed with how the flood rearranged things, the new channels and gravel bars. I will be interested to see how the south side of the kayak park will function this summer. It's looking to me like it might be dry - all the water will be shunted to the north side of the island a couple of hundred yards upriver - we shal see...
The view from my condo:
Like any good condo, mine has sliding glass doors that let out onto my symbolic "yard", an 8' wide deck which runs the length of the rectangular box I call home. The deck itself is unremarkable, but the view beyond it is pretty cool - I look out on Barbara Bennett Park, the Arlington Street Bridge, Wingfield Park and beyond to the river itself, the Sierra Street Bridge and more. In the winter I see all this, but in the summer all I see is a bunch of leaves, which is believe me, a big feature, considering all the retards that populate my park in the summer. But on a cold January night like tonight, it gives me a great feeling of space and connectedness and it's just beautiful. A nice dusting of leftover snow to the right (south, next to the north side of the hill of course), the lights of the Harrah's Tower and the Century 12-plex in the distance, the pristine clarity of the streetlights and the passing cars on Arlington. And of course my beloved blinking christmas lights that I've hung somewhere in my environment for the last, gosh, I guess six winters or so, out on the balcony cheering me up. And conversely when I am out and about I can see my lights from the other side of the river all the way down by the movie theaters 1/4 mile away.
The closness of nature:
There's the hawks nest in the cottonwood tree high above the basketball courts. Red-tails I think, but I really have no idea. I do know that it's a nesting pair, I see them taxiing in for a landing after a day of cruising the river for tasty morsels. I was very happy to see one landing with a good sized branch in its mouth one morning, a little nest maintenance I assume. This another reason that the homies at the basketball court think I'm a little strange (aside from being 30 years older than most of them), I'm always stopping to look up and stare at the nest.
There's the covey of quail that have appeared this winter. I don't know where they nest (in the small amount of underbrush on the hill?), but I've seen them pretty regularly lately, and heard them making their cute little nattering noises. The coolest thing was when they somehow got on the roof of our three story building. From the hill it would be a doable hop up there if you were a quail, I guess. Anyway one afternoon I noticed a pretty large something dropping past my deck outside, then another and another, and it turned out to be the whole quail posse dropping one by one off the roof down to the park.
There's the otter or mink that occasionally appears in the river. I would say otter, but the nature exhibit at Oxbox Park mentions minks and it doesn't mention otters, so I'm gonna go with mink! Gosh it's exciting to see out there, it's head sticking out like a little Loch Ness monster.
There's the river birds. Year-round we have lots of mallards and common mergansers and in winter we have canada geese standing around and crapping all over the park. Ducks in a city pond are pretty f---ing boring, but ducks in a swift-moving river can be very entertaining. They're like little miniature kayakers except better. If they want to go upriver they of course flap their wings and fly. But if they want to be somewhere downriver they tend to save energy and just float on down, shooting the rapids and paddling over to the next little quiet area where they do their mucking around thing.
And that's just the usually boring mallards. The common mergansers are to me, infinitely cooler, certainly far from common! First of all they look cool - they have this mohawk/topnot thing going on their heads, and a more pointed, even hooked beak as befits their niche of being actual fishermen rather than just muckrakers like the mallards. They get out into the middle of the river and really work it! As with the mallards, the boys and the girls look totally different, and they usually hang out in heterosexual pairs. So when I see the striking white body, dark greenhead and bright orange bill of a boy, I love to stop and look around till I find his woman - the female merganser is cooler looking than the male - lovely russet-brown head with a very stylish, swept-back crest on a subtly off-white body.
I find geese pretty useless except when they are flying, then they are magnificent. At the river it's very common to be surprised by a group of 3-10 of them following the river up or down, maybe a foot off the surface of the water, just bookin'. Or high up in the sky in their classic V, heading between the river and Virginia Lake.
My new favorite bird is our one-and-only black-crowned night heron, which I see quite often, coming home from a long night at the bars. I actually saw it first last winter in my first few days of living here and I couldn't quite believe my eyes. Its thing is to find a nice rock or log to perch on, right above the surface of teh water, usually at the foot of a rapids. It just stands there, all hunched over motionless, just staring at the water, waiting presumably for a likely little fish to swim by. It's solitary, only comes out at night, and it is completely still unless you spook it, and is to me both strange and immensley reassuring when I see it at 2 in the morning. I often shout out a greeting/blessing to it and it of course ignores me.
My neighbor's bird feeders attract mostly the usual assortment of starlings (yuk), little brown sparrows and chickadees (very cute) and doves (yuk also, but I've come to respect that they are very acrobatic fliers). But he also puts out those little suet balls (boxes really) and they attract the local flickers and woodpeckers. I do so love woodpeckers, I could watch them all day. My best guess is that we have the red-shafted northern flicker and the downy woodpecker.
Then we have the river itself and its ever-changing moods. As its level recedes to more normal levels, I am ever more impressed with how the flood rearranged things, the new channels and gravel bars. I will be interested to see how the south side of the kayak park will function this summer. It's looking to me like it might be dry - all the water will be shunted to the north side of the island a couple of hundred yards upriver - we shal see...