Blog post 5 -- Season Cycle

When I set out for the pond this week, I passed a stream of people on the sidewalk with dark black crosses on their foreheads, reminding me that it was Ash Wednesday. I don’t have a relationship with the church on my block, outside of complaining every few months about the parents who idle their giant SUVs for 30 minutes every day when they pick up their children from school. Sometimes I feel guilty for not instilling the Catholic traditions I grew up with in my children. But we talk a lot about generosity, forgiveness and acceptance. And, inevitably, we question whether or not this church encourages its parishioners to be stewards for the earth.

The warm weather, bright sunshine and ash crosses made me think about rebirth. We’re moving out of winter. Bits of green are shooting up from the sleeping earth. Because it was such a nice day, there were more people at the pond than I’d seen before. Several were there alone, sitting on benches, watching and listening. In Gretel Eherlich’s “The Solitude of Open Spaces,” she writes about the healing property of space, that it “has a spiritual equivalent and can heal what is divided and burdensome in us.” Here in the city, we see fewer open spaces, but we see variety. Most of us can find a niche, or as a friend once said of city life: everyone can find his or her stream. It’s comforting to see these two forms of spirituality on the same day, in the same neighborhood: the Christians celebrating the start of a season and the pond visitors, finding solace in the quiet and the open space.

Leaf mosaic in the ice

At the eastern end of the pond several people gathered, pointing and looking through camera lenses at the tree on the island. I slowly made my way over, studying the tall grass for movement. Still nothing. By the time I reached the bird watchers, only two remained. I could see many more birds in the tree. Like the ones I saw last week, their feathers blended into the varying shades of brown in the tree. I could tell they were large, even though they were folded into balls. There were at least six. One of the birds stood watch as the others slept. It was black and gray and white. A women with a camera said it as a black-crowned night heron, and she speculated the others were young night herons.

How many birds are the trees?

I went home and consulted Google, which turned up a news segment from last summer about black-crowned night herons setting up a rookery south of the pond. The babies were brown with the same wing pattern as the ones I saw last week. From two men identified as “avid bird watcher” by the network news, I learned the herons lived in a marsh on the city’s South Side, but white egrets and blue marsh herons, bigger birds dubbed “bullies” by the anchor, moved into their space. So the herons relocated, “pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps to the high-rent district,” said the anchor. Avid bird watcher agreed: “Even Donald Trump couldn’t afford a down payment on this strip of real estate.” (This I doubt.) I also learned from the bird watchers that the night herons have a 44-inch wingspan and stand 25 inches tall. I love that there are people in the city who devote their time to identifying birds and know which are local and which are visitors. A city might not offer a lot of open space, but it can accommodate many different people.

News video about the herons

Blog Post 4 -- Bird Stealing Bread

I’ve always noticed how many more people come out when the weather warms up. Today I noticed the birds. In addition to the crows who hang out at the South Pond every day, there were smaller birds with higher chirps joining in the call-and-response. They were hard to spot. Several sat at the top of a tall tree where the crows normally hang out. And another group, with a different chirp, sang from a patch of thick, bare trees inside the zoo. The warmth is relative, of course. Today, the temperature crawled above 25 and the sun came out. It felt like spring after weeks of frigid temperatures in the teens and lower. After a few visits to the pond where nothing seemed to move, today the squirrels dug in the snow and dirt while the birds filled one another in on the latest news.

The surface of the pond was still frozen and covered with a couple inches of snow. I wandered around a little, looking at the prints running back and forth across the ice, hoping to see signs of the coyote. The prints were all rabbit. In the middle of the south end of the pond there’s an island, home to small animals who might be vulnerable to predators on the ground, or so the signs say. With solid ice between the island and the land, that’s not the case in the winter—or this winter. Last year they would have been fine. I wonder what kinds of animals or birds live on the island. The rabbits have been moving back and forth, but they’re not predators. Do they attract predators who might see the prints? I also wonder if there are hundreds of rabbits, or a couple dozen who are very busy.

After the rabbit rush hour

Still the activity level was more subdued than at the pond to the north. Each week I become more curious about the differences between the two ponds. North Pond is noisy with geese and ducks, but I know this is partly because people feed the birds, despite signs all over the place explaining that bread isn’t good for the geese. A few years ago and I saw a man sitting on a bench tossing Flaming Hot Cheetos to the pigeons and geese. How can someone possibly think that’s a good idea?

As I wondered about the redesign of the pond and which animals stayed, which ones left, I noticed a mass in one of the bare trees on the island. It was far enough away that I couldn’t tell if it was a nest or a large bird. I have to confess part of me wanted to pick up something heavy and toss it to see if whatever it was would fly away. But I know that’s just a few steps short of tossing chemically coated snack food to geese. So I used my camera to try to get a closer look. It was a sleeping bird, folded up in a ball. Only after I got home and zoomed in my already zoomed-in image did I notice there’s another. The zoo’s blog recently featured a Cooper’s hawk who visits the pond, with a few photos of the hawk eating a pigeon. I can’t see a tail, so wonder if it’s an owl. Either way, it looks like the man-made wilderness appeals these two, who don’t care about humans and their junk food.

Who's sleeping in the tree?

Bird Stealing Bread, by Iron and Wine

Blog post 3 -- The Ice Is Getting Thinner

Once again, things were very quiet at the South Pond. I left Mucho at home this time, to see if there might be more signs of life without the sight or smell of my big, hairy beast. When I first arrived, there were a few crows around, as there were last week. One was pecking at something on the ground. After it (is there a way to identify sex?) flew away, I went to see what the bird was trying to eat. It was a shred of food wrapper. Crows must be like the starlings Lisa Knopp writes about in her Lexicon from The Nature of Home. She says starlings will nest anywhere, eat anything. This must be true of crows. They seem hardy and clever, able to adapt. In fact, a quick Google search on crows turns up an article from Cracked.com, a favored information source for America’s youth (at least the youth I live with), about the ways crows are smarter than we think. Their No. 1 strength: adaptability. They study human behavior; they memorize the garbage pick-up schedule. Knopp says starlings will inherit the earth. I think the crows might.

Last week the ice was still and silent. This week, because we had two days of warm weather, the ice was thinner with little round holes of open water, as if bubbles had popped through the ice. Because of the openings, I could hear the water move below the ice. Donuts of air formed under the holes, then disappeared. Watching the slow, shifting movement was like watching a lava lamp, kind of mesmerizing.

Holes in the ice

I’ve started to think a lot about the difference between the South and North Ponds. Over the weekend, I walked with Henry to the North Pond. It was busy with activity, maybe because it was slightly warmer. We could see animal tracks across the snowy surface of the pond—rabbit tracks, and what we suspect were coyote tracks. Two groups (gaggles?) of geese gathered in the open water over the aerators, generating lots of noise as they swam and fed. We met a bird watcher, who pointed out several small birds in the trees around the pond. He said in order to see birds, you should stare at one point and look for movement in your peripheral vision. He showed us the bird feeders at the Nature Museum (at the south end of the pond), and named several species of birds that feed there. I recognized a woodpecker, only because of the pecking. He also pointed out two European geese who live with the Canada geese. They have orange beaks and lighter coloring. Plus, some mallards and ducks milled about. Mallards, he said, will mate with anything. What at first looked like a homogenous group was actually pretty mixed. And, apparently, a little promiscuous. As we left, I noticed some of the geese biting ice at the edge of the open water. Were they eating it? Trying to make the opening larger?

Geese and ducks at North Pond

 Saturday at the North Pond was very different from Thursday at the South Pond. It makes me wonder if it’s the weather--or if by dredging the water, restocking the fish, and replanting the shore, the architects and zoo staff made it difficult for the city creatures who called the pond home. Fewer people at the South Pond mean less human food. There are no trash cans. The deeper water must mean more hibernating opportunity for the fish and insects, so fewer feeding opportunities for the birds. If the animals and birds had come to rely on human presence, the bird feeder and garbage bins at the North Pond must make for a nicer habitat. This doesn’t mean there isn’t animal life at South Pond. There are rabbit tracks here as well. It means I’m very curious to see how much activity returns as the weather gets warmer.