Snow Goose

As I approached the South Tivoli Bay, I heard a dramatic squawk. Two enormous birds looped and circled around each other. It took a moment for me to realize what I was looking at: an Immature Bald Eagle chasing a Great Blue Heron. It seemed like a case of teenaged miscalculation. The Heron dropped into the reeds and vanished. The eagle flew off.

Thrilled by the show, I continued snowshoeing south, following the path that meanders near the edge of the South Tivoli Bay. The Bay is wide and shallow, often freezing up before the rest of the river. Snow covered the ground and the temperatures hovered near freezing. I could see that the Bay had a thin coat of ice, gleaming in the high noon sun. There are three underpasses that lead to the Hudson River and near those underpasses stood open water. There had to be ducks nearby.

Goose bedraggled; photo by Bard student Christina BaalI arrived at a jut of land affectionately referred to as Buttocks Island. I walked out through the crevice of the island and peered south. A flock of Ring-Billed Gulls stood on the thin sheet of ice. Soon, the heron joined them, standing tall next to its shorter compatriots. I spotted the eagle in a far tree on the end of Cruger Island, perched near a mature eagle, it’s white head visible without my binoculars. The immature eagle flew over, swooping low over the gulls. They all took to the air, while the heron stood, refusing to engage in another chase.

I loitered for a while, scoping the Common Mergansers floating in the open water near the underpass. Beyond the underpass I could see the far shore of the river, the hamlet of Glasco and the Catskills, lumpy blue, in the background. It was a perfect blue-sky day, the sort of day that demands time outside.

I poked around the south side of Buttock’s Island, hoping without much hope, to see a Snow Goose there. Just after Hurricane Sandy swept through, the Goose arrived. It looked pretty bedraggled, white feathers all askew. When thousands of Snow Geese migrated through the valley this fall it did not pick up and join its cousins. I assumed it was too injured to fly. Despite this, the bird had made it through December, with frequent visits from Bard College students, eager to see a special bird. Through the fall I had grown fond of the bird, thought of it as my goose, and had resisted an urge to feed it.

The bird wasn’t there, of course. I refused to get sentimental. This was just nature taking her course. A fox or a coyote could have made it a good meal.

I continued on my way, taking the narrow path that rolls over hillocks and hugs the South Tivoli Bay. The views through the trees were long, out to patches of open water where Black Ducks floated. As I approached the mouth of the Sawkill, I heard the cackle of the Kingfisher that had been there all summer and fall. And then, to my amazement, there was my goose, idling in the open water! It shoved further out as I approached, full of admiration for its will to live.

 

Love at First Snap

After the first day of my nature writing class at Bard College, a student came up to me and said, “I have twenty baby snapping turtles at home.”

My heart leapt. There is nothing cuter than a baby snapping turtle, not even a kitten. They look like miniature dragons with oversized heads, fragile little shells and spunk. They are all purpose and who doesn’t love a creature that is fully itself, confident in its turtleness. A baby turtle is not yet the belligerent, large snapping adult they will become—when I love them even more.

My student’s lively story unfolded. A friend was building a house in Rhode Island and dug up a snapper nest. He gave her the eggs, which she proceeded to keep in a box of soil in a warm room all summer long. Her mother-in-law arrived from time to time to tell her to just throw out the eggs. But she held on, and finally last week little limbs started to emerge from the ping-pong sized eggs. It took several days for the babies to emerge; every single egg hatched. The turtles had been in the world for three days, living off of their yolk sacks. They now needed to be released.

last of the yolk sackOf course, these turtles should have been taken back to Rhode Island, to keep them near their home. The movement of turtles is mysterious, but what I am sure of is they do not travel from Rhode Island to New York.  Releasing these baby turtles in such foreign a place as one of our bays might disrupt their elaborate life cycle.

In May, snapping turtles travel from the water to that just-right spot to lay their eggs. It is in May that we find snappers crossing the roads, or, sadly, crushed as they try and do so. I’ve come across snappers scooting into the soil, digging in deeper with hind legs in order to lay a clutch. And, I’ve found the eggs, like torn white leather, littering a hillside after a raccoon has had a good egg snack.  And, I’d seen baby turtles marching toward their future, as uncertain as it is. But an entire clutch of baby turtles—I had never seen this before. Ignoring the legal aspect of this (in New York State, you are not allowed to take or transport reptiles), I told her (after consulting with a local ecologist) to bring the babies to the South Tivoli Bay for release.

At five thirty on a Thursday afternoon my student and her husband (who leads eco tours in Peru) arrived in a Prius down the steep rocky road to the Bard Field Station. She held a green plastic dish that contained the dark, eager little turtles. They had long pointed tails, and spiny backs. They clambered on top of each other, stretching their oversized heads toward the sky, trying to escape their plastic prison. On the route to this release, my student had found yet another baby snapping turtle on the road. She held this grey-looking turtle in one hand. We now had an excess of turtles to love.

the more quiet local turtleThe local turtle, huddled in its little shell was a contrast to the home-raised turtles, black and all flailing limbs. They had tiny beaks, which they had used to work their way out of their shells, and some still had a yolk sack on their stomachs. We admired their energy for a while, then went in search of a perfect release spot in the Saw Kill, which drops into the South Tivoli Bay. This Bay, wide and open, is somewhat sealed off from the larger Hudson River by the railroad tracks. It’s a perfect environment in which a turtle can grow.

When I kayak in the North and South Tivoli Bays I almost always see a V in the water. If it is a deep V I think Muskrat or Beaver. If it is a shallow V I think snapper, and look for their triangular-shaped heads moving through the water. I sometimes catch up to a turtle and watch the large, almost flat shells sink into the murk. I have often wanted to hop out of my boat and pursue the turtles as I’ve heard that snappers don’t snap in water. But I’ve seen them snap on land and the speed and strength of that keeps me snug in my boat.

We walked upstream, and as we approached the rush of water, the local turtle, which I held in one hand, came alive. It pushed against the palm of my hand with its sturdy legs, wanting to enter the water. I cupped it gently, then stooped to set it free on a flat rock near the moving water. It scrambled with no fear toward the edge of the rock and plunged into the water. I watched it pedal its legs in the clear stream as it was carried off in the current.

“Maybe we should release the other turtles in quieter waters,” I said. I worried that this turtle would be swept over a small falls, would be tossed about. Of course my worries were tame ones—this turtle had a lot more to worry about than a small falls, which it could surely navigate.

We scooped up the little turtles and plunked them into the stiller waters of a cove. They swam free, and then some returned to shore, clambered out on rocks, as if to say a final goodbye. They looked alert, ready for their new lives. But we, of course, we not ready to say goodbye, especially my student who had tended to them all summer long. We lingered, watching and laughing as they clambered about in their new home. And then we knew we had to leave. As we walked off I thought how wonderful it would be to know what happened to one of these small lives. And I thought how wonderful it was that I would never know.

Perfect Fall Days

Perfect fall days are a particular torture.

            Perfect: Blue sky, cool, sun, a crisp snap to the air. Apple days. Cliched days.

            Torture: You know they won’t last. There’s nothing you can do to properly celebrate them, short of being outside all day. And even then a sense of desperation tugs at my skin.

When I was younger the only way to do justice to these days was to rock climb. Sitting on a ledge, looking down into a valley of yellow, orange and red tinged trees, while the turkey vultures soared below me was heaven. The pull and tug of climbing, the sore fingertips, the dusty smell of chalk on my hands all aligned with the wrestle with the day, which was the wrestle of my soul. The way I knew I had taken all the day had to offer was walking out at dusk or in the dark, the clank of climbing gear a sort of music. My climbing partner and I were always hungry and tired and satisfied.

Now, since I climb little, I am learning new ways to swallow these days. On Saturday Peter and I started our bird search, which was really a sparrow search, at Southlands, a large horse farm south of Rhinebeck, New York. There are fields of uncut grasses, and in them sparrows sprung up, allowing us a peak: Savannah, White-throated, Field, Song, Chipping, and one special Lincoln’s. A kestrel—my favorite little falcon—soared from one end of a wide field to the other. We heard pileated, red-bellied, downy and hairy woodpeckers in the woods. It was beautiful. And after three hours of walk, it wasn’t enough.

So we drove north to Rockefeller Lane. This road runs beside Greig Farm, which in this season is putting up beautiful lettuce, celery and not much else. Some of the fields are left fallow. From all of the rain earlier in the fall, puddles remain. Just as we were following a few pipet-looking birds, a flock of five shorebirds circled in front of us. “Those are good birds,” Peter said as we followed them with our bins. “Keep an eye on them.” They circled and circled. “Land,” Peter whispered, willing them to ground. And sure enough, they landed in a large puddle about 150 feet in front of us. I stayed put with the scope, while Peter inched forward with his camera. I saw two pectoral sandpipers and a least sandpiper (that shorebird workshop paid off!). And then there was something else amidst these birds. It had blue grey wings, a white belly, a dark stout bill. A phalarope. But what sort. Phalaropes do not frequent this part of the state, so it’s not a species Peter knew well. Peter’s first guess was a Red, and countless emails and analyzing his photos later he decides the first instinct was correct. 

A red phalarope is an uncommon bird anywhere, and in this area, downright rare. Seeing the phalarope added to the exhilaration of the day: there were treasures out there to be seen! So after a short break we had to be out once again. We drove to the road to Cruger Island. The passageway there was thick with mud. We walked out with a duck hunter wearing camouflaged waders; duck season has begun. Out by the island a tin boat lurked with four hunters waiting near their decoys. In the distance the shot of a gun. This wasn’t how I intended our day to end, with the birds I had sought all day being shot from the sky.

We walked the train tracks, skirting the South Tivoli Bay. Mute swans graced the far shore, mallards hid, a few blue herons stood stock still in the shallow water. Five coots, unusual at this time of the year, bobbed together, their white bills evident from a distance.

The sun headed west. We headed home. A fat moon rose. A perfect day had ended as it should: walking out in the dark. There was no clank of gear or smell of chalked hands, but rather the squish of our rubber boots in the mud, and the silence as we listened for owls.