I went out this morning with my splendid Swarovski binoculars and my much less splendid Canon camera, in the hopes of getting a picture of either the wood duck I saw yesterday at dusk, or the snowy white albino squirrel of Friday.
Nature was playing her favorite game of all time with me - closing her right hand and putting it behind her back, bringing her left from behind her back and opening it. Neither the squirrel nor the wood duck were where they had been, or at any of the spots they might have been expected. But I walked into a mad party of singing, feeding, darting birds in bright sunlight at the end of one of the ponds.
The star of the lot was a brown creeper - an incredibly inconspicuous bird I have been lucky enough to see only three times before in my life. They walk up tree trunks, their intricately patterned backs camouflaging them perfectly from a distance but their bellies shining white if you can see the bird from the side. They are so skittish, they are seldom on a single tree for more than a few seconds. I have still never seen one for longer than the instant it takes to identify it, then it flees because it thinks identification is tantamount to capture. Today I was so lucky as to be able to see the creeper once in the morning and once about an hour later, on another trunk part way around the pond. This painting suggests some of the pattern on the back, but nothing of the dazzling white of the underside in bright light.
The creeper must have appeared because it felt invisible in the crowd. There were goldfinches, the brilliant yellow of summer turned a subtle living buff, slate-colored juncos just showing up in bands for the cooler weather carrying on with high-pitched sputtering, an infinitesimal but perfectly shaped golden-crowned kinglet, a downy woodpecker, a mockingbird, restless mobs of robins roaming around looking for easy plunder, blue jays, white-throated sparrows with their sweetly resonant single warning note, a song sparrow that was too busy feeding to sing, chickadees pecking at the open hollow ends of broken weed stems, a warmly red-brown Carolina wren around a fallen log, titmice with big black eyes and tiny bills.
Something about the carpet in the air all these little birds were weaving with their constrasting songs and their darting flights, made me think of the Sufi poets.
There was a moment of hyperreality as I stood perfectly still among these excited specks of life, surrounded by a storm whipped up by not by wind but by crystal morning sun falling silently out of a still vast blue autumn sky.
