The “Wow-ee!” response of the scientists involved would make for an interesting study, as well as the “maybe it’s the first example of invertebrate tool use but maybe it isn’t” facet of the story.

Everything is smarter than we think and has the prospect of becoming smarter, including us, if we could just get over thinking we’re smarter than we actually are.

Here’s another octopus story.

Took Otto’s wardens long enough to figure out what was going on.

Here’s a story about barn swallows you might have seen.

My experience with octopi is unfortunately limited (thanks to a high school guidance counselor), but I’ve watched swallows for hours—barn, cliff, and violet green.  They exhibit flying skills that shout mental sharpness and high engagement with their surroundings.  Their language, too, is lovely—soaring phrases and jazzy riffs that light up whatever spaces they breeze through.  Beside white-throated swifts (and, of course, park pigeons) swallows are one of the species of birds that show the greatest tolerance for people’s presence.  Many times they’ve let me in among them while they’ve dipped and whirled very close in.  For me, watching them fly is like watching a group of mathematicians scrawl out geometrical problems at high speed on a three-dimensional blueboard.  Very satisfying for this mind to try to follow.

The debate over animal intelligence is progressing very slowly.  The holdup?  Well, that would have to be … us.  We’re hung-up on wanting to be the smartest creatures on the planet, to play the lead roles on this living, growing, prowling, blossoming, metamorphosing stage.

I’ve had enough experience with animals to suspect strongly that the “I’m smarter than other species and even smarter than others of my kind” mindset is not unique to people.  I lived with a Siberian husky that definitely thought herself smarter than other dogs (she was) and smarter than I was (yes, at times), and she absolutely believed herself physically superior, to the point of challenging me to follow her in intimidating feats of derring-do.  I’m uncertain how her rangy, forty-pound body supported such an ego.

And the coyote is not cast in folk stories’ trickster roles by happenstance.

But human beings exert more influence upon the world than dogs or coyotes, from our tool-grasping gift for altering the physical environment to our cosmoplastic abilities—our narrative prowess—and the effects they bring to bear upon all life.  That we struggle with the question of whether or not animals exhibit intelligence might speak more to shortfalls in our awareness than it does to the question of what’s actually happening around us.  That is, our wonderment over animals’ intelligence and feeling might posit some narrative failure on our part, which means it’s a failure of relationship, narrative being one of the primary approaches we take for exploring and developing connexion.

Furthermore, the slowness of our thinking about other species is not something isolated to our relationship with the nonhuman world.  The levels of imperceptiveness and bad behavior people demonstrate toward nature is but an extension of the bad behavior we exhibit toward each other. Thus any progress we make in our behavior toward nature ought to be paralleled in improvements in how we treat each other, and the other way around.

If we can figure out how better to pay attention—if we can tune our minds for deeper engagement—then learning from nature at a higher rate of speed than we do and applying with grace what we learn to humanity’s condition could work out very well for us. For some people, I know it does work that way, as well as the other way around—nature learns from its contact with us. This is not to say that we’re no different from other species; obviously we are. Perhaps we’re the farthermost extension of an entire system’s quest for greater consciousness; perhaps we’re seeking broader dimensions to creativity–maybe even godhood. We have our narratives to explain who we are and what we’re about, but those can and should change. Jesus initiated a powerful narrative shift, new language–and thus a new way–for being in the world and for being-with-others (including animals) when he broke up the unyielding eye-for-an-eye storylines of the Mosaic Law.

Perhaps we think we can get away more cleanly with careless relationships with the natural world, which we appear to believe has no law or awareness, than we can with mankind, which has an extensive and evolving set of laws governing its behavior along with somewhat heightened consciousness where the well-being of our own kind is concerned. But the abuse, exploitation, destruction, apathy, annoyance, clumsiness, insensibility and so on we display towards nature is not behavior we exhibit only toward nature. If we’re doing it “out there,” it’s happening inside governments, businesses, communities, and homes in one form or another. We may not be aware what things that we’re doing to each other are destructive, clumsy, etc. We might say, “This is the only way to handle this. Nobody knows a better way, so there must not be one.” We might say, “This is how it has always been done.”  We have reams and reams of “look no further” language arranged in unmoving narratives.  Meanwhile, Otto is shooting out the irritating lights above his aquarium with a highly accurate water pistol.

Why?

Because they’re there and he’s there, and because his circumstances changed him to the point where he figured how to change his circumstances.

Is this not one chamber of the heart of the creative mind?

One of my hobbies is collecting words carrying the meaning of “understanding” and whose root words are bound up in the metaphorical pairing of perceiving and grasping—of aligning the focus of attention on something and the physical act of laying hold upon or seizing.  The American Heritage Dictionary gives the following definition for “understand”: To perceive or comprehend the nature and significance of; grasp. See synonyms at apprehend.”  There follow three more definitions relying upon the words “comprehend” and “grasp.”  At the heart of both “apprehend” and “comprehend” lies the Latin root prehendere, “to seize.”

Here is a partial list of other words and phrases conveying the concept of understanding that contain root words set in the act of grasping or seizing:

apprehend
comprehend
comprehensive
prehend
apprehensive
grasp
get
prehension
seize
have hold of (an idea)
take hold of (an idea)
get hold of (an idea)
prehensile

The list goes on.  Interesting to know: the root of prehendere, “ghend,” meaning “seize,” “take,” runs deep into words like get, also formed from “ghend.”  The word beget means, at its depths, “acquire.”  Words like forget mean “lose one’s hold.”  The fun word guess means, at its playful roots, “try to get.”

Also related:

apprentice (formed from the past participle of apprehendere, “to seize”)
apprise (also from apprehendere)
comprise (from comprehendere)
reprehend (from prehendere)
prize (as in “something worth gaining,” from prehendere)

And so forth.

The root “ghend” likewise figures into words like predatory and prey.  Well, naturally.

I wonder what it means that so many of our words for knowing or learning rely so heavily on the physical fact of the structure of the human hand and its ability to close over or upon objects—on the act of manipulating or acquiring.  I’ve wondered how deeply this metaphoric take on knowing has affected the way we understand, form our worldviews, and otherwise approach being-in-the-world. 

What, I’ve mused, is knowing or understanding to creatures who don’t have hands or whose hand-like structures have become adapted for other purposes—you know, like birds’ wings are for flight?  In his book The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild, Craig Childs notes that if you inspect the bones of bird wings, they will “anatomically correspond exactly to each human bone from the arm to the longest finger.  But in birds, the forelimb is compacted and simplified so that the wrist, hand, and fingers are fused into a single elongated bone.”  He concludes, “one of the more structurally advanced animals of the planet is the bird” (p. 101).

What is knowing to birds, whose tipmost wing feathers are able to spread on the moving, changing air like open fingers of an ungrasping hand?  If so many of our words for learning and knowing are based upon our all-important opposing thumbs and the mechanics of grasping, are birds’ conceptions of their being-in-the-world based upon the physical structure of the wing and its ability to gain lift?  Having watched swallows, swifts, and golden eagles as they work with wind flow and gravity, high above any perspective I can gain from my place on the cliff they zip by or wheel past, I’ve begun to think their language and being rides, so to speak, on the wing.

Personally, I think humans missed out when they chose opposing thumbs over wings.  This, though our ability to grasp and hold in part made it possible for us to conceive of and build airplanes.  And, using our hands, some of us can swim, something only a few birds can do.  It might be said we’ve got the best of all possible worlds, but I wonder if, at times, we might rely too heavily upon the this very basic action of grasping in defining ourselves in relation to the world around us.  At times, does knowing as a form of grasping lead us astray and cause us to miss that which cannot be seized upon?

Another thing—why do so many of us limb-grasping, ladder-climbing, hand-over-fist human beings dream of flying after we close our eyes at night?  Is this some yearning or understanding that exceeds our grasp-sense, maybe even carrying us beyond its reach?

When the mind opens to new awareness, is it actually “grasping” a new concept or is it letting go of  a favorite perch?  What is flying to humans, that we should dream of it when we let go of the day?

____________________________________________________________

Childs, Craig.  The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1997. 

Here in SE Utah, Earth Day opened gorgeously.  Warm and blue.  To the south, only a few drawn clouds showing, thin as weeds that snow flattened.  Around the Abajos to the north rise those striking cloud formations that always provoke my wonder.  Can’t remember what they’re called, but I think of them as the “jellyfish formations,” because to my eye they resemble man-of-war jellyfish: small, top-heavy clouds trailing long, wispy tentacles of vapor that appear to dangle into lower reaches of the atmosphere.  As I’ve sought to understand those cloud structures, I’ve read what’s actually happening is that the tentacles are water vapor rising out of unstable air, seeking a more settled region of the atmosphere.  Once the vapor finds that more stable region it forms a cumulus cloud, which may in turn provide the seed of a cumulonimbus cloud, a thunderhead.

 To start my Earth Day in what’s becoming my customary fashion, I’ve gone alone to my favorite high perch in Crossfire’s cliffs to be with the birds.  Coincidently, the first winged visitors to arrive are — heh — turkey vultures, four of them.  I’m looking in the opposite direction from which they approach, so the first clue I have of their presence is the rustling of large wings.

Maybe people aren’t aware of how much noise birds make when they fly.  In the past, I’ve felt clumsy in the desert and as if the noise I made in passing was somehow unnatural and intrusive.  After four years of learning to, first, go more quietly myself, and second, hear the wild mixture of presences, from wings ruffling the air to lizard feet stirring leaves, I realize all of these air-, water-, and earthborne creatures make a terrific din in a place where cars, trains, airplanes, barking dogs, or fighting neighbors don’t devour in great gulps the Earth’s quiet pauses between movements.

Birds are especially noisy, their wingbeats whistling, whumping, whispering, and generally registering audibly with every movement.  Except for the owl, of course, whose wing structure and feathering make it into a silent stealth bomber.  Even when birds like swifts aren’t beating the air with their wings, the way they slice the fabric of the wind frequently makes the same sound as a high velocity projectile zipping past, vrrrrr and vvving. 

So three of the vultures pass by, not flapping now, but drifting so close in I can meet the eye of each that’s my side of the bird’s head.  A trailing fourth bird comes along, and I happen to be looking its way when it rises suddenly from just above the ledge barely thirty feet out and at eye level.  Immediately spotting me, it staggers momentarily in the air, surprised.  It flaps its great wings two or three times to regain control.  Those wingbeats sound exactly like the noise that drew my attention ’round to the previous three birds, so I think one or more of those three, coming upon me suddenly, similarly staggered in startlement.  I’ve witnessed ravens exhibit the same behavior, stumbling mid-air on coming upon me unexpectedly and too close in for their comfort.

But vultures are, at their cores, unflappable.  After that rustle of alarm, they regain composure and return to their drift, not batting a wing and apparently without altering their course by much.  Off they all four go, sailing along the cliff faces, till on some signal they rise into the air and head west.

White-throated swifts zip around, as expected, filling the air with their laughing twitter, though it would of course be wrong to suppose they only sing for the sake of making noise.  The white-throated swift incident I wrote of here suddenly, dramtically, and forever altered my consciousness of what birds are about .  I’ve learned much since then, the chiefest thing being to pay closer attention.  It hardly atones for my ignorance in that haunting incident, but I’m better for it. 

Birds touch each other with song and through song keep in touch.  In the case of swallows and maybe swifts, both of which on the wing are extremely chatty, I suspect some form of echo location at work.  Both species hunt through the air for their food, snatching it on the wing, like bats.  Watching swallows swirl in against a cliff, I noticed that at certain points in their singing they suddenly turn away from the stone, as if echoes of their flight notes bouncing off rock informed them better than their sight when to veer away.

Nothing I think might be is conclusive, of course.  But sometimes, where understanding is to flourish, you must first prepare the gound with an abundance of imaginings.

In proximity to me waving its wind-stirred, blue-berried limbs stands a  juniper in company with a hearty ephedra (Mormon tea) growing beneath one of its branches and in toward its trunk.  At my left foot, in what must be only a shallow mound of wind-deposited soil that has collected in a stone basin, stands a very small — twenty-to-twenty-four inch tall — pinyon pine.  Growing in tandem with this is a similarly dwarfen cliff rose.  It would seem those two alone would strain the resources of the patch in which they grow, yet a third occupant lives close in to the pine’s roots, a claret cup cactus, forming a single reddish bud off one of its small, star-spined barrels. 

For years, these three plants have grown in companionship together on their little soil island situated on a sea of stone.  What do these three plants know of each other, living with their roots entangled as they must be?

I stand up to stretch my legs and walk to the other side of the cliff in time to witness a finch flutter straight up past the cliff singing a jazzy tune.  It flips over in the air and flutters back down out of sight.  As I return to my perch, I notice a large mammal crossing one of the beaver ponds about a quarter of a mile south of where I stand.  I think it’s a deer but there’s something off about its movements.  Hard to tell from here, but it appears to be limping heavily, and a drag in its walk suggests pain overall.

Budding cottonwood branches hide it for a moment, then it emerges to my sight, walking in that slow, suffering way across the old sandbar that has become a sage flat .  Then it’s gone.

Looking more closely at those cottonwood trees, I notice they’re not budding in concert, or don’t appear to be.  Why are some trees greening up way ahead of their kin?  Next time I’m down there, I’ll pay closer attention.

The swifts have gone now, having moved on to other hunting grounds or responded to a different signal.  I look up in time to witness a great blue heron parachute into the canyon, its huge wings arched to slow its descent.  It glides down a slope of air toward the stream in perfect control then drops below bank level.  Through breaks in the trees and where dips in the bank permit, I see it flapping its wings as it cruises along the stream seeking an advantageous landing spot.

High above, an eagle soars.  I try to follow its flight, hoping it might come close by.  But while I’m watching, it suddenly disappears.  This talent eagles have for disappearing into the light amazes me.  It seems they have nothing to hide them up there but thin air, yet they conjure themselves into it and appear out of it like sorcerers.

Time to go home and plant trees, a project we started last night but failed to complete.  The kids and I worked all evening while the stars appeared, Orion twinkling out of the blue.  We dug in our hard red soil, getting only three and a half of the six planting holes excavated.  Tomorrow I hope we can go hike the Grand Gulch trail, as far as time permits, so we need to try to get the tree-planting task done today, if possible.  Also up this week: starting my summer vegetables from seed: squash, melons, cucumbers, etc.

Later.  The first hummingbird arrived at the feeders today, a male black-chinned.  I was out on the back porch pushing my daughter Teah, whose birthday it also happens to be, in her wheelchair up and down the porch’s length when I heard the bird’s trill.   My other daughter inside the house saw it through the window and came out quickly, eyes aglow.  We both smiled broadly at each other, happy at the bird’s arrival.  “Our hummingbird masters have returned,” I said.  “Go mix up the sugar formula.”  We’ll spend the next four plus months serving these demanding little creatures and reaping the profound rewards of their company.   They start out shy, watching us carefully while they feed at the nectar cups, but eventually they’ll start accosting us whenever conditions don’t satisfy the precision of their natures.  During the summer, we accomodate black-chinned, rufous, and broad-tailed hummingbirds, but the black-chinned birds are the most populous and social.

Soooo … dear reader, what did you do this fine Earth Day?

Today, as I head out for the trail into the canyon that will take me past the dead coyote, I decide to call that trail Coyote Trail, or maybe Coyote Way, to remember that coyote mouldering at the trailhead.  As I pass those remains, I try to satisfy my curiosity about the animal’s gender, but the back legs are frozen together in a rigor of modesty.  A cloud of black flies on and around the carcass goes a-buzz at my intrusion into its community feast and fur-lined creche. 

The day turns out to be warmer than anticipated.  I walk with my fleece jacket tied around my waist, but I’m not long on the trail before realizing that bringing it was an unnecessary precaution.  After weeks of cold wind and an unusually undecided early spring, the weather has at last begun to pool into something fully vernal.  At night, from my back porch, I see Orion set in the west just as Scorpio begins rising over the easternmost, juniper-lined knoll.  It seems as if in the movement between these two the season hangs in some balance.

So I take Coyote Way down into the canyon, becoming over-warm in process.  I’m happy I didn’t leave my canteen behind, as I’ve sometimes done on the cooler, more in-between days.

When I reach the canyon bottom, I walk to one of my favorite sittin’ logs near the creek.  Scanning the canyon’s west rim, I pick out a distant silhouette perched atop a rock near the rim.  It’s too far for me to make out clearly, but its shape suggests strongly that it’s a golden eagle keeping watch.  If it is an eagle and not some eagle-mimicking feature of erosion, it will of course be fully aware of my presence below it.  Not to slight rocks, but what stone knows or does not know lies outside of my ken.

I wore one of my husband’s old henley shirts today, medium brown in color, though that’s much faded.  It’s a long-sleeved, warm thing.  Too warm for conditions.  But wait.  Not fair to blame just the shirt for the discomfort I’m feeling.  As I sit on the log, I peel the shirt off then remove the garment top I wear beneath it.  It’s an extra layer that in this weather, in this place, puts me at a little extra risk.  I stuff the top in my jeans pocket and squirm back into the shirt.

Maybe I’ll have to answer to God for this one day.  Perhaps this is how the conversation will go:

God: Why did you take off your garment top?

Me: Why did you make the sun so hot?

God: To test you!

Me: After all that’s happened between us, why would you feel the  need to do something like that?

Suddenly I’m overcome by the exquisite quality of life, despite all the odd challenges that have caught me by my tail.   I’m overwhelmed by how it feels to be-in-this-world and by a wonder that seems to grow in my organs and warm in my marrow.  I’m grateful for my life, that it somehow managed to form forth and survive this long to see yet another spring, which anymore opens like a random gift given for no special occasion, a gift that unfolds clarity and mystery together.  I have not lost one grain of the attraction I’ve always felt between myself and this  world.  It’s hard to express, because I am, of course, not something apart from this world, like the pole of one magnet touching the opposite pole of another, but part of it.  And how is it that one feels attraction for what one is a part of?

I don’t know what I’m trying to say.  Perhaps I can’t say it, not in a brief flight of words like this, but maybe in a lifetime of saying it will come out well said.

I start walking again, knowing my path will take me a hundred yards nearer the eagle-figure-on-the-rock.  I expect that if it is eagle, it will take flight if I cross whatever boundary it has set between us.  As I loop around and reach what I suppose to be the nearest point to the eagle form, I look up at it.  At the touch of my eyes, which any eagle can feel more keenly than I can, the silhouette sprouts wings, takes to the air, and the matter is settled.

I hear swifts calling as they prowl the vining tangle of canyon breezes, and maybe I hear swallows.  Anyway, today the canyon is a different world from the one it was two mornings ago, when the wind pinned me against stones and few birds came by.  Today the air, still a complex of breezes and gusts, is much moved upon by turkey vultures, eagles, swifts, and yes, finally, the cliff swallows. 

The eagle flies cross-canyon to the west rim, and together we make our ways northward, me covering ground along the canyon bottom and the eagle looping against the cliffs.  Mourning doves’ calls pipe and echo, sounding like stray notes a some rustic flute.

As I begin climbing out of the canyon, I hear the heavy vrrrrr of big wings diving past.  I look around, accidently into the sun, then can barely make out in time an eagle, wings flexed and rounded, split the air as it passes making the sound of a high velocity projectile.  Looking back at the ground, I find myself momentarily blinded.

I stop at one of my lower perches — not the best seat in the house from which to watch the bird flight extravaganza, but it’s comfortable and bejeweled with flowering rock echeveria and some frilly yellow flower lifting its impressive bloom from a tall — well, not very tall, but straight plant bearing long, narrow leaves.  This plant’s blossoms are shaped something like heralds’ trumpets with frilly bells.  

Beside the flowers, I have a friend here, a lizard.  I remember this animal from last year.  It lives in the rocks that form my perch and we’ve become somewhat accustomed to each other.  It will bask nearby, on the top of a rock where it can watch me without too much concern.  I enjoy this creature’s quiet presence and hope that always, when I stop here, it will come like this, up onto a nearby rock, where we might share this space and look at one another from time to time.  It’s only half-grown, so if, like me, it manages to survive being-in-this-world for a few more years, we may become better acquainted.

A large black fly keeps landing on the page of my hiking journal, following the pen’s tip as it moves across the paper, tracking the wet ink with quick, jerky fly-steps.  ???

With the swallows’ return, one more stone of loneliness rolls off my heart. 

Now I can bless even the turkey buzzards.

April 22, 2008

At the cliff this morning, I find a colony of white-throated swifts fully active, hunting the wild blue, tangling into the wind gusts that stream through the canyon’s channel and splash against its rocks.

A vulture passes by, very low, slightly out from the ledge where I sit. 

A swift just cut in quite close, the vrrrrr of its wings as they sliced air sounding like a miniature jet.  A pair of hawks circle high overhead.

Will eagles come?  I barely finish writing the question when I look up to see a golden eagle, juvenile or maybe second year, brown feathers flecked with white.  As I gaze up at the eagle, a black-chinned hummingbird rises like a helicopter into my line of sight, directly between the eagle and me, probably examining the burgundy tones in my shirt, faded overall but most vivid in the cuffs.

Or … what?

The hummer sheers off.  The young eagle flies about seventy-five feet out at maybe a fifty-foot elevation above my position.  After having a close look at me, it dives steeply into the canyon as though swinging on a swimmin’ hole rope then glides up smoothly to the opposite canyon rim.  This behavior is more in keeping with what I’ve observed out here when I’m alone.  The pattern has been that they fly below me if it’s just me, showing me their broad, gold-mantled backs.  Perhaps they’ve become accustomed to the figure on the cliff.

The swifts sparkle today, glancing off breezes or knifing through in moments of calm air, playing gravity’s game.

A canyon wren chimes.  A pair of cliff swallows bombs past at rimrock level. 

I stand to put my back to the sun so as to see the swifts better.  A flock of about ten to twelve whirl high overhead in a tornado of communal flight.  Some pair off, backmost pursuing the foremost, and I wonder if I’ll witness a mating flight.  Swifts mate on the wing, couples tumbling through the air in a pinwheel of motion.  I saw this once before in this canyon.

But something behind me snags my attention and I turn in time to see an eagle at the opposite canyon rim perform a “stone dive,” folding its wings in, and, rounding its shoulders to throw its weight into the top half of its body, dropping over headfirst then downward fifteen-to-twenty feet, where it opens its wings to level off, then folds them in and drops again.  It does this two times more then flies off along the opposite rim, heading south.

The sun is punishing today but I can’t see details of movement in the eagles’ flights against the cliffs if I wear my sunglasses.  Besides, eagles seem to dislike the glasses.  Hats, too. 

Oh well, eyes need some relief.  (Puts on glasses and hat).

A lizard crosses the stone near where I’m sitting, head bobbing whenever it stops.  It skitters over and pokes around my canteen then skims behind me and without breaking pace runs over the edge of the rock head down.  In acts like these I can see the connection between lizards and birds in their relationships with gravity.  Not hard to imagine some lizard, already prone to acting in defiance of that tension, letting go and bending the business more toward flight. 

Swift shoots by again, very close.  How confident they are in their long, angled wings, especially for how little these birds weigh!  Less than two ounces — I know, I’ve held one in my hand. 

At risk of missing something — the bird zone is so active here today! — I decide to lay back on the stone and soak in heat and light from that fireball burning above.  To mute the intensity of the sunlight, I tip my hat forward over my eyes.  Like rain, the light falls quickly along the length of my body and soaks in. The sensation is deeply, thoroughly satisfying.  Bird shadows make it through the hat’s fabric to glance across my closed eyes.  I hear a hawk fussing, probably at me, and lift my hat and see it dive away, emitting its sharp, single-note cry.  I sit up for a better look.  Sounds like that Swainson’s hawk that used to chide me for hanging ‘round its nest, but I’m not very familiar with hawks.  I lay back down, drawing the blanket of warmth back over my body’s length.

I hear a hummingbird draw close in, a black-chinned from the tenor of trill.  Following with my hearing the thin bell-like sound it makes I can tell when it moves in tight to hover at my left ear.  Could it be that it’s examining the bit of my *PWS showing from beneath the hat, examining my cheek for petals and nectar?  Wondering this causes an old memory to flash up. 

After I graduated from high school, I worked nights and graveyard as a roll bagger at local Italian bakery.  A man, considered a derelict, whom my co-workers — a bedraggled lot themselves — called “Hillbilly Dilly” used to come into the bakery (itself somewhat derelict) from time to time.  My co-workers said he talked in rhyme, and indeed, the man did at times speak in natural phrases of poetry.  Legend was that he had a genius for music and played a lively piano at a local bar until either a woman, drink, or both ruined him.  He fascinated me.

One night Hillbilly Dilly opened the bakery’s big double doors and wobbled in.  That night, I was working near the front, and he approached.  He wanted to buy a loaf of bread.  I took this to be a good thing and fetched a fresh loaf for him.  Looking at me deeply with his rheumy eyes, he dropped a few coins in my hand — nowhere near enough to cover the loaf’s cost — and said, in an uneven, raspy voice, “I don’t have enough to pay you all tonight, but I’ll pay you the rest tomorrow.  I promise.”   “Okay,” I said.  ”I promise,” he repeated.  “I’ll be back.”  “I believe you,” I said.  I handed him the loaf and he left.

As soon as Hillbilly Dilly was out the door, my supervisor dove on me.  “What did you do that for?” he barked.  “He’s not even going to remember coming in here.”

I said, “If he doesn’t, I’ll pay for the loaf myself.”  It was easy to take what for me amounted to a small risk.   But who knew what it was for Hillbilly Dilly?

I don’t recall if he came in the next night, or even the one after that.  Sometime that week I was working the ovens at the very back of the bakery when another worker called to me over the screech of the oven’s rotating shelves.  He had a wry but urgent glint in his eyes.   “Hillbilly Dilly’s here,” he said. “He’s asking for ‘the girl with the rose on her face.’”

A bolt of wonder struck me.  The girl with the rose on her face.  That would be me, and me only.  I’d never heard anyone speak of my coloration that way.  And yet, it was a good name.  This man, in the tatters of his musical nature, could say something about me others couldn’t, that even I hadn’t thought to say.  Feeling summoned more directly than if a fiery holy creature had called me forth, I dropped what I was doing and walked quickly to the front of the bakery.  There stood Hillbilly Dilly, his face not showing much but his hazy blue eyes turned on me directly, his gaze, open.  He picked up my hand and pressed a few more coins into it, gave it a squeeze.  I thanked him, he thanked me, then he turned and marched, in his weaving way, out the door. 

I didn’t have to count the coins to know they still didn’t amount to enough to pay for the bread.  I fetched my wallet and took out more than enough money to make up the difference and dropped the coins into the can we kept above the benching area for spontaneous purchases of this sort.  It was the least I could do, in light of the gracious and somehow insightful metaphor he’d given me in exchange.  I threw my supervisor, who had watched the scene unfold, a smile.  He said nothing more about the business.      

I move not a muscle while the hummingbird satisfies whatever wonder it has about me.  It’s so close, I wish not to frighten it, causing it to spend energy unnecessarily.

When the hummingbird leaves, I notice that I feel my pulse in the tip of my nose where my hat rests against it.  It is beautifully, peacefully slow and steady.

Swifts make an interesting buzzing call.

When I sit up to write, big, winged shadows slide over the rock where I’m sitting.  I look up to see three vultures, heads bald like monks who have dropped their hoods.  They sail by in procession without batting a wing.  They spend little flight in extra movement, no “stone dives” from them. 

Cliff swallows dart past, flying something like bats in a fluttering tumble.  They’re classified as songbirds, and they belt out short phrases of a song I think belongs to a particular portion of their aria of flight.  Good notes to end my visit on.

No, wait — a pair of swifts cuts past. 

This is one of those days when my time here, full of excellence and brilliant with life, is going to follow me home in streaming ribbons.

A beautiful cloudless Earth Day on the cliff.

*PWS: port-wine stain, a birthmark on a person’s skin ranging red to purplish in color,  in my case, spread like jam across the left side of my face.

Why do I still do this?  Why, at my age, do I follow as if I were nine years old unmarked, unpaved trails away from what I know into the wilds of what I don’t know?   That’s how this striving creation—part light, part water, part air, part earth, and all aspiring flesh—shows itself to me, in the mutual bodying forth between us. It seems an involvement composed of equal slices revelation and formation, since in discovery, everything changes, the New erupts into being, not just in me, the older wide-eyed child, but in this juvenile Creation.

Today, I begin at the Crossfire Canyon’s cliffs, taking inventory of the birds.  A few days earlier I saw cliff swallows flash between the rims, returning or passing through.  Had they stayed or gone?  To find out, I take to the air myself, or at least to the boundary between earth and air, the rimrocks.  

No swallows present themselves, nor white-throated swifts, whom are said to arrive in May but actually begin slicing the wind in Crossfire in April.  Down in the canyon, the southwestern version of the spotted towhee calls.  Chee-chee-chee-vrrrrrrrr, chee-chee.  In the Sibley Guide to Birds, Sibley remarks that geographic differences in plumage and voice among the towhees are “poorly understood.”

I chuckle.  What understanding doesn’t feel poorly? 

Up-canyon, a raven croaks. 

In the crease below, Crossfire Creek (not its real name) steps down-canyon in a series of beaver dams, built over the last three years.  Evidence of prior beaver occupation exists around the creek—a few weathered tree spikes where beavers harvested the tree’s woody height, trunk damage more fortunate trees recovered from, forming scabs of new wood and bark on their wounds.  I’ve heard rumor that a former neighbor trapped out that previous beaver population. 

When I first moved to this area four summers ago, arriving just before the new wave of beavers, the creek was a wiry marathon runner making a tense dash of snow melt from the Abajo Mountains before summer played it out.  By July, its flow foreshortened to spring-fed stretches and pools formed around the roots of gigantic boulders that had sheared from cliffs and tumbled to the canyon’s lowest points.  When I first arrived here, the creek stopped flowing within view of where I now sit.  Or it pumped flash floods down to the river running twenty-plus miles from here. Under the beaver’s lavish attention, ephemeral Crossfire Creek has grown more stable and Rubenesque.  Now, instead of tenuous and occasional depths, sinuous silver riffles, tight channels and leaf-littered shallows, deepening green pools plump between a growing number of beaver dam belts. Many of these ponds outlast the summer, a little water made much of.

Approximately two miles upstream from here stands one of the county’s twenty-eight human-built dams, 265-acre Crossfire Reservoir, completed in 1984.  At spillway crest, it stores 9,319 acre-feet of water and 16,000 acre-feet at dam crest.  In the summer of 1983, I remember riding with BYU archaeology field school students on the old highway that dipped down into Crossfire’s then narrow canyon and rose again before falling once more through the pine and juniper forest to the cleared outskirts of the town were I now live.  Some of the archaeologists I worked with the summers of ’83-‘86 conducted the archaeological assessment of Crossfire’s banks in preparation for the dam’s construction.    

The old highway now serves as access to the north and south shores of the lake, its crossing lying below water with a mean depth of 35.2 feet.  A fine new highway of safer design runs over the reservoir’s south-westernmost end, across the dam.

I have upon occasion used the beaver dams below to cross the creek. 

No swallow, no swifts.  The ones I saw earlier in the month must have been migrating through.  Except for butterflies flowing down from the mesa behind me, launching themselves over the cliffs and diving for landforms below, and other winged insects recently hatched, the air is unoccupied.

The desert has begun dabbing on perfumes.  In the wind, a dry, clean, sweet odor, light on turpenes from the sun-warmed pinion pines and sage, and maybe something that rises from the dust of ages when spring temperatures loosen the soil.  General notes of reviving vegetation in the fragrance.  The ephedra stands robust, erect bristles losing their wintertime palor, flushing pine green.  Prickly pear cactuses, whose paddles flush purple during winter dormancy, likewise greening up.  Cliffroses fill out their stalks, erupting miniatures of the leaves that will cover their black twigs and brances.  Soon intoxicating incense will drop from clouds of pale yellow flowers, forming pools around each plant that will flow out in redolent call to local pollinating insects.  The princess plumes are awakening, green blades rising along tall stems toward the flowerhead, a large, ornate structure of yellow-blond bloom. 

Flicker.
Scrub jay.
Canyon wren: tew-tew-tew-tew-tew-tew-tew, in falling scale.

Raven: Aw-aw-aw-aw.

Today, the canyon is a music box of birdsong.

Lacking swallow- and swift-flight to wonder at, I feel the itch to move.  I pick up book, pen, canteen, and walk south, following the cliffs.  There’s something about keeping to the cliffs, treading the edge of my physical possibilities.  The perspective, for one thing—as close to a bird’s eye view as I get.  But by this deer trail and that flow of gravity, I find myself fifty feet below the canyon rim, then one hundred.  I realize I want to go down into the canyon and begin looking for a way compatible with the truth of my flightless condition.

Threading my way along slopes whose soils hang loose from weeks of freeze-thaw, dancing gingerly across fields of clattering, shifting rocks flowing in stone creeks however slowly toward the canyon floor, I slip, slide, and stumble my way down.  Indian paintbrush flashes up in scarlet flames from inside other plants, including a pigmy sage with tiny leaves and delicate stems.  Don’t know its real name.  I pick a couple leaves and breathe in their scent, sweeter and lighter than the much larger sage species growing along leveler ground.  It’s a rock creature, this little sage, up here on the canyon’s steep slopes with other species able to flourish the uneven terrain.  The paintbrushes foretell the arrival of hummingbirds, who follow red flower flames back and forth across hemispheres.

My knee, injured over a year ago, isn’t happy at all with how I’ve gone about this day, so I try to make short work of the descent without doing myself further harm.  I’m now about a hundred feet above the canyon bottom, in a bench zone where another spring flows toward the creek.  I have unanswered questions about this area but have already pushed past my time limit and have a couple miles to cross to get from home. 

After resting, I continue flowing down to the streambed and strike a cattle trail, a promising one.  Animals, like deer but especially cattle, prefer following paths of least resistance, so I can depend on the navigability of this trail.  I backtrack it, following the up-going hoof prints down, till I hear—then see—the creek.  As I pause to consider options for passage down the steeply eroded bank, I spot a well-used cattle trail running off in an intriguing direction.  Not the way home, but what’s around that bend?

Standing in quiet consideration, I become conscious of a thick humming noise.  The sound pulls me around abruptly and I look for the source.  Below I see a tree—no, a small thicket of trees—covered in a yellow haze of tiny blossoms.  Hundreds, maybe a thousand or more honeybees and smaller bees and flies work the split buds.  The honeybees’ thighs are bulging with yellow pollen.  Ants carrying objects flow out from the foot of this thicket, whose highest branches reach maybe twenty feet into the air.  Haven’t seen anything like this anywhere else in the canyon.  The trees—whatever they are—might be producing blossoms, but the whole thicket appears to be spreading from subsurface roots.

Worth seeing, this Thicket of Life.

Whatever is going on here, for the local bees this tree grouping is among spring’s earliest and most abundant providers.

I could stay here for a long time, considering this thicket, but I’m out of time. As I walk along the creek here looking once more like that thin marathon runner trying to beat time, thin skin rippling over sand and pebbles, I think, “The beavers have not come this far down the creek.”  Moments later, I discover the most remarkable beaver dam I’ve ever seen, the archetypal beaver dam, the Platonic Ideal. 

Its curved berm, a good fifty feet long, has been stacked up three-to-four feet above the streambed.  Layer upon layer of rough but efficient latticing, woven of cottonwood and willow branches and bits from other trees, maintain its staying power.  Along the dam’s outer edge lie dozens of gnawed-off tree trunks and branches, ranging from three to almost five feet in length and up to fourteen inches in diameter.  None of the upstream dams have this feature and at first I think this jumble of wood sloppy work or unfinished business.  But then I see that the ends of these branches and logs have been planted in the stream bed and bank at various bracing angles against the dam’s convex surface or laid such that an end presses down on the dam’s crest, clearly a deliberate engineering choice, though I’ve never seen this kind of fortified damwork. 

A smooth pond of deep, green water—deep for desert—backs up behind the reservoir and curves out of sight, I’m guessing about two hundred feet.  Wow.  Wow.  None of the upstream beaver dams amount to anything like this, having between them walls modest by comparison, no more than twenty feet wide, woven from reeds and much smaller tree parts.  Such water impoundments pale next to the one stretching back from this structure.  Water runs over this dam’s spillway at what I imagine is the stream’s normal flow rate. From the dam the creek slithers south-southeast, running once more flat against its bed.

Talk about intelligent design.  I am in awe of how much beavers can do with so little water, of how much change they have brought to the canyon in the three years they’ve been here.  Depending on what happens during the summer months, I expect to see dry-boned, wry little Crossfire Creek become something of an Eden for the local tight-lipped flora and fauna. 

I follow the trail running along the western edge of the pond to discover I’m wrong about the length of the pool.  The backup runs at least two hundred feet beyond what I guessed, submerging what used to be the trail’s stream crossing beneath water approximately two feet deep for a twenty-foot stretch. 

As I stop to consider my options, I hear a hawk’s scree. 

A mourning dove’s coo-ah, hoo, hoo. 

Can’t cross without getting powerful wet, and I don’t want to get that wet this far from home.  Have to find another way.

Towhee.

Raven.

Dove.

Woodpecker’s duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh as it drums.

Taking de tour, I come across a wood rat’s nest (?), a mound of twisted sagebrush parts standing about eighteen inches high.  Also the odor of cat urine, bobcat probably, though puma is not out of the question.

I follow a cattle trail on an up-and-down byway till I meet up again with the main trail, stitched here with turkey tracks.  Now I’m tired and running out of water.  The rest of the path is familiar, but the next point where it crosses the stream contains the seed of another dam.  Soon this crossing, too, will lie underwater.

Worn out and sore-kneed, the water in my canteen reduced to a rattling slosh, I work my way home.  As I pass the smaller upstream beaver dams, I think how fortunate I am to have moved to this canyon before the beavers arrived so that I could witness what unfolds from their prowess in hydraulic engineering.  A multiplying of fishes and plants, an arousal of uncanny green.  A reduction of walkable ground.  The ATV trail, which remains outlawed, submerged and rendered impassable.  Shifts in animal populations as new creatures utilize the abundance of water and old residents undergo population surges.  Almost certainly, a lot more biting gnats and mosquitoes.

Yep, look at me here, in the right place at the right time.   I’m one lucky 53-year-old kid.

An abridged version of “Bird in the Hand” was published in 2007 in Glyphs III, a regional anthology containing writings by local writers and visitors to southeastern Utah’s redrock country that Moab Poets and Writers publishes every two years.  I’ve written more about MP&W here.  

In July 2005 my brother Jim and I threw camping gear into his new Toyota 4Runner and headed for a canyon in the San Rafael Swell. The object of our trip: try out the 4Runner on real four-wheel-drive roads and see petroglylphs at the canyon’s mouth. We arrived at the canyon at dusk and as evening fell helped each other wrestle up tents in a whipping canyon wind.

After admiring the rock art the next morning we decided to explore the canyon and looked for possible routes in. To our left lay a boulder field littered with obstacles too imposing for my taste. “We’re not going that way,” I said, but as I turned away, my eye caught rapid movement just at the edge of my field of vision. “What’s that?”

Jim didn’t answer, just looked. Focusing, I made out long black wings beating at the canyon’s wall, and flashes of white. Some black and white bird fluttered near the ground. With the exception of magpies, black and white is an unusual color scheme for birds living in remote sandstone deserts.  But the Swell is not magpie country—too few trees.  And what was the bird doing? Curiosity drew me toward it. It appeared to be trying to scrabble up the canyon wall, but its feet clutched ineffectively at the dirt and rock. It beat its wings furiously trying to help itself up.

Absorbed in its mysterious task the bird seemed not to notice my approach. It appeared swallow-like in body, with long, sharp, angled wings of the sort that slice air. But drawing closer, I saw those wings had a fourteen- to sixteen-inch-wingspan—too broad for any swallows I knew of. “This must be some member of the swift family,” I mused. The bird continued fluttering against the wall, prompting me to wonder if it was sick or injured or maybe old. Sometimes it slipped down the cliff face and pushed itself back up on its “elbows,” crawling in the way I’ve seen grounded bats crawl.

Wonder built in my brain, welling up, until in an irrepressible act I asked, “What are you doing?”

I didn’t expect a reply, but many humans aren’t conscious of the compelling effects of spoken-aloud questions, either upon each other or upon animals. Marketers know something about it. They use questions as hooks: “How are you folks this evening?”  “Mind if I ask you a question?” “What cell phone service do you use?” Before people can stop themselves they answer, opening the door to the sales pitch.

But well-asked questions have music to them, a directness of intent marked by tone and tilts in the voice throughout and then again at the end. The words WHAT are you DO-ing have rhythm. Many animals know rhythm. It’s in their feet and wings—it plays in their heartbeats. Their own languages depend upon rhythms and variations in rhythms. Some studies assert that rhythm, phrasal repetitions, even rhyme act as mnemonic devices for species that employ them in their songs. Why might that be? Because at the very least, rhythm rises from the depths of the creature, from its organs and other very basic structures of the body. In all singing species, the singer is the song.

At the noise of my question, the bird stopped scrabbling. Looking over its shoulder it identified me as the source of the sounds it had just heard and turned to face me. With a drunken walk it hobbled over till it stood between my feet.

What is this?  Is it thinking of attacking?

I repressed an impulse to step back.  Reflecting on that moment, I believe now that a rapid exchange of information occurred in those few seconds as the bird and I considered each other.   I read the bird’s behavior for expressions of intent; it read mine for the same, and perhaps for something more. 

Looking down at the bird, whose head tilted up looking, I supposed, at my face, I asked, “What do you want?” The bird started scrabbling at the leg of my jeans in the same way it had the rock wall.

Years of experience with small things tugging at my pant leg or trying to climb up my body prompted me to lean over and put my hand in front of it. I bumped my finger against its underside the way I’ve seen cockatiel owners encourage their birds to step onto their fingers. Still, I felt wonder and astonishment when the bird stepped into my hand, folded up its long, black wings and settled against my open palm.

A bird in the hand weighs nothing. If I had closed my eyes I might have doubted that the very slight weight I felt against the skin of my palm was anything at all—flight itself, perhaps, come to rest for a moment, dimpling the skin of my open hand. What is the worth of such weightlessness? For birds born to navigate upper regions of the breathable air for extended periods of flight, as I found out later this one was, such insubstantiality translates into boundless wealth.

Overcome with wonder and the intoxication of physical contact with a willing wild bird, I could barely focus on its face. But something seemed wrong with its eyes, or maybe the bird, exhausted from its struggle with the cliff, had merely closed its eyes as it rested in my hand. I couldn’t tell for certain what I saw in that black head with mere glints for eyes. Carrying the bird back to the rock face, I lifted it higher up on the wall where it had seemed to be trying to go. It stepped onto the ground there, turned, spread its wings, and sailed unsteadily back to the canyon floor.

It returned to me. Again I lifted it to the rock shelf; again it turned and sailed down. It didn’t want to get up on the shelf—at least, that didn’t appear to be quite what it wanted. I had a powerful desire to help this animal that seemed to be asking something of me, but because I didn’t understand the bird’s nature or condition I couldn’t think what to do.

One obvious idea was that through accident, illness, or old age, the bird had come to the farthest reaches of its life,  lost its powers of flight, and ought to be “put out of its misery.” But because I didn’t know what I was looking at I didn’t feel it appropriate to dispense “mercy” as per that old and merciless cliché. Perhaps the bird had merely suffered some injury it could heal from in time.

The bird didn’t ask a third time. It fluttered away from me, its long, fine wings extended, touching elbows to the ground for stability.

Jim had stood several yards off observing but saying nothing. “I don’t know what we can do for it,” I admitted as we watched it wobble away. We continued our hike up the canyon.

But the incident had thrown me into confusion. My usual appetite for outdoor adventure had gone and I could no longer focus on what we were doing. Questions banged in my head, all of them echoes of the big question: What had just happened?

Once at home, I looked for answers. Bird-watching friends helped me identify the bird as a white-throated swift, Aeronautes saxatalis, a bird I’d never heard of. But identifying the bird only raised more questions. My friends recommended I talk with Merrill Webb, a birding enthusiast and biology teacher at the Utah County Academy of Sciences, a charter school on the Utah Valley University campus.

From Merrill I learned more about the swift’s remarkable qualities. A migratory species, white-throated swifts arrive in Utah during May from points south, including Mexico and Central America. An almost exclusively aerial species, they forage on flying insects and spend most of their lives in high-speed, agile flight. In Utah (and perhaps all of North America) only the peregrine falcon is known to be faster. One white-throated swift is reputed to hold the world record for sustained flight—three years without landing.

White-throated swifts don’t even land to mate. Merrill said that one of the most breathtaking scenes a birder can witness is the mating flight of these swifts as they come sweeping along the face of a cliff or through a canyon at breakneck speeds, copulating pairs tumbling through the air.

With a wingspan of up to sixteen inches, it’s remarkable that such a vigorous flyer weighs in at 1 ¼ ounce or less. Truly, I had held in my hand a creature of stunning qualities.

Now I knew something about the bird, but nothing I heard or read explained my experience. That the white-throated swift belongs to the order Apodiformes, subfamily Apodinae, which means “without feet,” might have been my first clue. Merrill Webb had mentioned that white-throated swifts have tiny, nearly useless feet. They can cling to cliff faces with them but climbing cliffs or walking for any distance they cannot do.

Internet searches provided a possible key to the mystery. Birding articles from the U.K. and Europe said that if a swift becomes grounded for any reason—for instance, harsh winds—its physiological combination of long wings and feet unserviceable on terra firma render it incapable of regaining flight.

The articles told how some who had found grounded swifts took them to the highest point they could find in the surrounding landscape and threw the birds off into open air, returning them to their lives. None of the articles I read told of swifts approaching the people who found them. But I wonder if such birds as inhabit otherwise uninhabitable spaces, especially in remote locations as they do in Utah, with few if any predators able to threaten them, might live in rare confidence like the birds and reptiles of the Galapagos Islands.

Of course the bird might have been addled by illness or injury. But I think now that the rough wind my brother and I had struggled with the night before had knocked the swift down, maybe by dislodging it from its evening roost or nest on a nearby cliff. Whatever its circumstances, I understood at last that what I ought to have done to give the swift its best chance was to take it to the highest rock outcrop I could climb and throw the bird off, something that if were done to me would insure my death. And perhaps that partially explains my failure in the encounter. Thinking within the boundaries of my ignorance of this species and my own physical realities, the bird’s exigencies proved beyond me, though perhaps the bird itself had hoped for something better to happen between us.