I drove down from Tucson Arizona and crossed the border at Nogales. I left Tucson at 8:30 am but, as is often the case, was held up at the border.  Despite the assertions by the rental car agency that I would have no trouble getting a permit for the car, in fact, I did have trouble.  Namely because the piece of paper upon which permission was granted me to drive the car into Mexico did not contain anything that directly linked it to the rental car contract, other than my name of course.

the communication…is beyond the language of the living

A solution was found for me, and in all, processing my documents only took about an hour.  Unfortunately, I was behind (in the various lines in which I found myself–first to get the FMM, then to pay for the visa, then to get the visa, then to copy the documents, then to pay for the car permit, then to talk to customs, then to pay for the car permit once customs had ok’d the permit)–a couple from Canada, driving south to Mazatlan in an RV, trailer and two jetskis in tow.  The jetskis were the problem–they did not have a registration that was amenable to the authorities at the border despite the fact they’d apparently made the same trip, in the same manner, last year.  Whatever the issue, it took several hours in various lines, me always waiting behind them, to sort out their issue and send them on their way.

to be modern is to live a life of paradox

The toll roads between Nogales Mexico and Navajoa are recently revamped four lane highways and the drive, in general, was easy.  The one difficult stretch was between Ciudad Obregón and Navajoa, where extensive work is being done on the road.  I was unfortunately driving this road after dark which meant that the sudden revisions where the road curved abruptly and went from four lane divided to two lane no division were announced by a host of flashing lights and arrows.

the fool steps out of his image

I was more nervous about driving the road from Navajoa to Alamos at night, but this was easy and lovely in the dark.  I was also concerned that I would have trouble driving into town as I’d never driven myself in—however, having walked the road many times to the hotel La Casa de Los Tesoros it was surprisingly automatic.

lights a candle in bright sunlight

I arrived late, but a room was waiting in the old colonial Mansión–owned by Suzanne who also owns the Casa de los Tesoros, where I stayed last time.  I am currently in the Tesoros waiting on the owner of a ranch.  I’ll be heading out there to stay for the next few days.

if the fool would persist in his own

folly

Here I will, if I am particularly fortunate, locate the quail and will take observations and possible, if I am even more fortunate, band and measure individuals.  The most fortunate would be to then observe the same individuals again, at least one more time but I suspect that is far far too much to hope for.

he would become wise

It is warm and beautiful here but there are no quail.  On the ranch there are quail, of course, and cattle, but also magpie-jays, crested caracara, coati, mule deer, ocelot, and even jaguar.  On my return to the pueblo in a few days I will tell you what it is I have found.

One of the forms of my dreams was you

This project is about the quail.  They are enmeshed in my words–tangled and  hidden and my constant failure to bring them to you drives this project onward.  As does my constant failure to see the whole picture of their lives–though this is science.  In discovery of something that invalidates a previously held assumption

California quail are  monogamously pairbonded

or, more particularly, complicates it, that assumption fails and the door is opened a crack, letting just a sliver of light shine in.

—

quote is from Dickinson’s Master Letters

This is, incidentally by the son with whom I was pregnant on 9/11. Early pregnant and sick as a dog.  In bed when the first planes hit.

we are both ignorant

And a secret, unrelated to quail and embarrassing because, of course, I am a scientist–

yet love bids me

I asked the fetus: why come into the world now, after all these ashes and falling bodies?  And the fetus told me powerfully that he wanted to live.  He did.  I mean it and I’ve never been one for clinging to life no matter what.  He was born and is and exists and whatever may come he is

the enormous/present folding over the future

We all have our banal little stories about that day, don’t we.  It’s a way of saying, I was there.  For me, it is also a way forgiving myself for bringing beings into the world that will suffer.  Because, of course, we all do, and my children do and will because

Birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, sickness is dukkha, death is dukkha

To choose it is ended, it is actual and more than that it 

This is the last entry of the Redención series.  To be posted near, and read on or near, the big 10th anniversary of 9/11.  What the quail know of this I cannot say.

however ugly the parts appear the whole remains/beautiful

This entry is a wrap of sorts, I suppose.  Oddly enough, I feel like I’ve emerged on the other side of something. Passed through though not

Called Back

These are the waters I neglected while I worked with my birds

Waters now, incidentally, filled with raw sewage.

Once I was all ocean–

Before there was any water there were

(we were all ocean once and fire)

tides of fire

The point is, I chose the birds.   In choosing the birds, however, I also choose frustration and a sense that I was attempting something impossible.

Space in which I stand on a plain Alone

Though, of course, not impossible as in something heroic or impressive

Dreams in which the body is hollow

My impossibility is that sort of small wish–perhaps banal–to know more about the birds.  That’s it.

the skull blooms

What has happened in the month since I’ve been home is that I’ve pushed through the possible and impossible (at least right now)–swinging from a temptation to give up the research entirely….

and, remember it is not a job in so much that a job = payment for services rendered; though, in work and frustration I would argue that it is a job.

…to attempting to bury myself in it somehow.  To other thoughts outside the realm of this blog or even

I have wanted to efface myself

Anyway.  Upon the suggestion of my collaborator (Dr. Gee), I’ve returned to reading the Naturalist books–A.S. Leopold, by Paul A. Johnsgard

In North America the term ‘quail’ has unfortunately been applied to virtually all of the smaller native odontophorine species, although in both size and relative tail length they might better be called partridges

…’colins’…derived from ‘zolin’, the Aztecan-language (Nahuatl) name for these birds

Johnsgard’s discussion of biogeography has me thinking–about movement over evolutionary time, about selection and drift.  About time and about the overall patterns of these birds in their plumage, in their behavior, in them.

Whom fliest thou?

Here, at least/We shall be free

Questions about why these patterns of dichromatism in the Callipepla group–three with males and females of different colors (California, Gambel’s, elegant:  C. californica, C. gambelii, C. douglassii) and one with colors the same between the sexes (scaled:  C. squamata). Questions about the duetting of wood, tree and singing quails (Odontophorus, Dactylortyx, and Dactylortyx) and antiphonal calls of California and Gambel’s quail, for example.  These sorts of things.

It is scribbled along the body/Impossible to even say around

So, in sum.  My interests–NEW WORLD QUAIL

1) The evolution of the behavior of California quail at an individual level–how evolution has shaped their decisions and how their decisions and their evolved social glue affects their fitness (a proxy for the impact of an individual’s behavior on the evolution of traits).

chance is the only thing that really expresses/the longing for paradise

The evolution of New World quail–of the entire family Odontophoridae–forces driving diversification and geographical distribution.

some ash, enough energy held

These questions are mirrors and oddly enough

I/embrace as new/are in/fact old

attacking aspects of the bigger questions (in time, in number of species) seem more tenable to me right now than the smaller questions (individual, species, behavior) which require the observation of many individual quail, individual by individual over time.  These bigger questions are more tenable because I can attack them in the lab using genomic approaches, in the field, in short spurts.  The big questions are incredibly interesting to me though, and forever I suspect, my love will be watching a bird I watched the day before and the day before that–a bird I know from previous encounters, doing something, anything–living.  It might be vocalizing or copulating; it might be as simple as appearing in the same place she has appeared every day, at the same time.

the map of my person

I will do this–there will be a time in my life to encounter those individuals. They may not wish me to attend to their lives but I’m determined to–

succor me/ and pray for my comfort.

Is the girl you used to have in prison yet?

A penultimate entry in this series.

a subject for the Hospital–she looked like a maniac when I saw her

I feel a bit as though I am redeemed.   Maybe it’s just the day.  But little bits are turning around inside and I see tiny lighted pathways sometimes.  It is suitable that I’d notice this for #13–

patients were often strapped to chairs in semi darkness

Is my redemption undermined by whatever or where ever you are or aren’t?  Does what you are doing, dear reader, matter to this perilous structure I’ve constructed?

we have no right to reject any whatever the conditions might be

From the 1870s to the 1920s, years spanning the settlement of the state by folks from both sides of my family, California had a higher rate of commitment for insanity than any other state in the nation.  

It is, perhaps, clear by now, this entry is not going to be about the birds–per se–though it is in the Diaries because it is connected to my trip and my trip, of course, was about the birds.

59% were committed not because they were violent, not because they presented a threat to others or themselves, but simply because they had been reported…to exhibit “odd or peculiar behavior”

This information about incarceration in mental institutions I first encountered in Joan Didion’s Where I was From. They refer to statistics gathered in Richard W. Fox’s So Far Disordered in Mind.  In Stockton, CA, where my great and great great grandparents lived at the time, there was the Stockton State Asylum, one of three asylums built in California following the Gold Rush to take in the folks driven mad by the hunt for gold and silver, the difficulties of farming, those sorts of things.  But really, of course, commitment laws being what they were, evidence of odd behavior was grounds for incarceration.

The great plain around Stockton is some forty or fifty miles wide from east to west, and to both the north and south stretches to the horizon, literally as level as the sea and seemingly as boundless.

The city is along the I-5 corridor, South of Sacramento, West of San Francisco.  The dog and I passed it going to San Diego and passed it again returning to Seattle.

I have rejected my connection to the Central Valley though we (as in my family generations ago) farmed that land in some ways or others for years.  We farmed and we also died there.

the great central valley of California, as level as the sea, stretches to the horizon both on the north and to the southeast…But there is nothing cheering in it–

Sometimes we try to cut things loose but then we go back and they make some sort of strange sense–the quail and the shotguns, the flat land and her flooding.

There was nothing in my academic studies that predetermined my study of quail–perhaps my feet were taking some old route, though.

all things seem blended soon in the great, vast expanse.  

My relatives were there in the San Joaquin Valley from the 1890s or so onward and through the Great Depression some more successful some less so–and I keep being drawn back to dig around in the dirt and to look at the stones. You never know where there’ll be silver or even gold.

Multitudes of streams and bayous wind and ramify through the hundresds of square miles–yes, I should say ‘thousands’ of square miles–about the mouths of the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers, and then away up both of these rivers in opposite directions, until nothing can be seen but the straight line on the horizon

Sometimes they lost hold on things but no one to my knowledge spent time in the asylum–though the building itself might have been just down the street.  Of course, who would mention such a thing?

to the bone, to the colorless white bone,/the excellence

We all have inside ourselves a bit of craziness.

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair

And if we walked a certain way, we’ll be incarcerated for the rest of our lives.

Thy wring earth right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me?

[I think that is the reason the cliché of the lunatic asylum so attracts--some of us feel confident to incarcerate the rest of us and quite possibly would, given half a chance]

you are on the side of humanity, aren’t you?

I’m ending this soon.  Then I’ll go quiet for a bit and you can rest.

The rain was a godsend to the farmers.  The soil had begun to bake and crack so thatht the growing gain could not get on farther

One more last call and we’ll see

The trees of the mind are black.  The light is blue.

Perhaps I’ll still be redeemed

I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

perhaps not

darksome devouring eyes my bruised bones…and fan

suddenly a vacancy, a silence

x

——

quotes are by Lavinia Norcross, William H. Brewer, Joan Didion, Anne Carson, Sylvia Plath, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Josiah Royce, Robinson Jeffers

not honey, not the south

Though outside, right now, is one of the few sunny days we’ve had this year in Seattle.  So it is a weather event, though not an unseasonable one.

not the plunder of the bee/from meadow or sand-flower/or mountain bush

The beauty of this place is undeniable like today when Mount Rainier in her volcanic sleep stands like a mirage far south but not so far and we might as well lie down because the beauty is killing us.

but this is not mine, if I were clay, my clay would not be from the earth here.

not so –/though rapture blind and hunger crisp/dark and inert my mouth

old desire–old passion/old forgetfulness–old pain–

The green and mountains the waterways (but not my sea)–one can stand on a hill, even in this city, and it embraces you in green and power.  But, though I can touch this, something inside is held back.

heat, more passionate/of bone and the white shell

Because it is the landscape in the south, in California, that sea, and the shrubby chaparral and maritime scrub and desert, and live oak woodland whose clay I’ve stolen into myself for this entirety of my life.  I can live anywhere else but I’m not sure I’ll ever shake what that landscape is to me.

This is, of course, despite the fact that, quite possibly to be Californian, especially to be of the stock that came out in the proverbial covered wagon, means to be willing to never dwell on what got left behind; never look back at all.

But the Quail

But of course

There are Callipepla up here in Seattle and the surrounds:  remember the male I saw on the top of a hill cow calling several days in a row–moving up the hill then away–and then there no longer?  They are in the parks, though in such sparse number their populations feel like remnants.  They are on the islands–Whidbey, Bainbridge and San Juan.  They are up on Vancouver Island.  These populations were introduced though in southern Washington they might be native–certainly Oregon bears some native populations.

the past could be jettisoned

About those introductions, by the way,

restocked or introduced because of use as game species.  Restocked in California in response to dwindling populations.  First capture and release in California in 1908 when 1,500 California Quail from Baja California were liberated in Los Angeles

but seeds were carried

California quail have been introduced all over the world and their populations have taken, meaning they are established and existing in places like Vancouver Island but also the big island of Hawaii, in Corsica and Chile. The thrive in New Zealand, where there is concern that they are outcompeting local species of quail.  To some extent, there seems to be a Mormon trail of California quail where the introductions of the birds and the movements of Mormons coincided for awhile.  One of those strange coincidences that, were I to try hard enough, I could make into a story that might give the sort of meaning to life that can be comforting when the stars are just a bit too ice cold bright.

we were glad to get a trunk to bury him in.

I’m going to at least get a sense of these populations of quail up here in the Pacific Northwest–perhaps there is a local pocket big enough that I can get some data.  If nothing else, I’m interested in subspecific variation and getting basic data on the birds here, right now, and what sorts of habitats they are exploiting could be interesting, perhaps.

What I tell myself right now, what I’m creating as a “research program,” are the pieces I can do–the natural history of the elegant quail, the phylogenetic relationship of much of the new world quail especially the Callipepla, aspects of the biogeography of California quail and perhaps little extra bits about behavior, like variation in social and mating behavior and more detailed accounts of the vocalizations.

If your life bewilders you 

Like, for example, the antiphonal call–or jamming–male and female calls interacting and intersecting and changing the meaning in away that only two can change it.

If the rain lashes your face like manes of all the horses of this century

What is the overarching question, you ask?

If you cannot remember what word you wrote

I can give you an answer, and perhaps you will like it–something about is there selection for tactical behavioral flexibility in response to environmental and social factors in New World quail (Odontophoridae) and how is this selection constrained (e.g. genetically, socially through bonds…etc)?

If there are no faces, if faces are not what you interrogate

Or something like that.

If…and ‘where is a place I can write this’

—-

quotes are from Anne Carson, Joan Didion, BNA species account for California Quail, HD

What does this mean?

Becoming “awake” involves seeing our confusion more clearly.

I think that is what I am trying to do–awaken.

A specter is haunting

1.

In the wind of I-5 through the Central Valley  the wing of a dead bird, species unknown, flapped into the wind and a white tailed kite Elanus leucurus struck something in the dry grass.  I passed a sign for Quail Lake–a place I have the sneaking suspicion within which no quail actually reside.  In my notes I have written crow…? and fabric caught on barbed wire and Western grebe, black necked stilt, green heron, belted kingfisher, Western kingbird feeding fledglings.

Aechmophorus occidentalis, Himantopus mexicanus, Butorides virescens, Megaceryle alcyon, Tyrannus verticalus

At a rest stop, near Williams (formerly Central), north of Sacramento, the dog and I saw four people heading to a white van.  Three of the people were shackled together–two men in orange jumpsuits and a woman in street clothes. Their hands and feet were chained and they shuffled.  The fourth person was an extradition officer (I know this because my little dog…but also it was written on his shirt).

is there always/something wrong/something between two

They didn’t look up and their hair was greasy–a girl with short dark hair, a boy with longer light brown hair.  He was smaller and thin.  She was wearing jeans.  The other boy…I’m not sure…I don’t remember.  I say they are boys and girl because they were so young.

tomorrow when I wake if I wake

Though that idea of young may be me thinking of myself and of them.   Sometimes things happen and then you are old inside in some ways and everyone around seems so much younger.

and the dream

and wherever they might be now.  And whatever takes us to where we are going.

comes singing toward me 

I realized today that the boy with long hair, the man, young man, accused felon? convict? fugative? reminded me a tiny bit of Kurt Cobain and yes I was a fan of Nirvana once though I remember seeing them in concert a few months before he shot himself and he had nothing in it anymore.  It was almost 20 years ago and maybe that is why I felt so old.

Under California’s “Uniform Criminal Extradition Act” and California Penal Code Section 50.34, in both of these cases, the authorities may issue a warrant for extradition (known as a Governor’s Warrant), and the fugitive can be arrested. An arrested individual is then required to return to the wanting state to face criminal charges.

Extradition typically involves felonies serious enough to warrant the effort and cost of tracking down and moving fugitives.  When we see this sort of thing we feel a rift–or I do.  What I thought was normalcy of free movement, of certain ideas of how we live our lives within the confines of society is broken.  I think that makes me naive, perhaps.  I’ve been in other places though, where things are broken and I was, in some ways part of those broken people.  Where we can look at what is normal life and it seems like we are peering through a dirty glass.

I know why you will not give it to me./You are terrified.

Sometimes I think I am very old and also very young and never quite the age I am supposed to be.

Load up on guns, bring your friends

The trees of the mind are black

The confusions here have not been mine alone.

The light is blue

2.

Later, I will return to the Central Valley because it is central.

a hologram that dematerializes as I drove through it

But now I’m thinking of a point of interest I’ve mentioned before.  One that is more connected to the birds and this is, after all, the diaries with quail as the pivot point and, though they are part of the central valley, their populations were being decimated in that region about the same time my family was farming there.

Many men must fail, times must be hard, state finances disordered

On the site in San Diego, there used to be farms surrounding the contiguous patch of soft and hard chaparral.   These were what became financially unsustainable in the 1990′s and were therefore developed.

You were meant, if you were a Californian, to know how to lash together a corral with bark…you were meant to show spirit…keep moving.

The farms were maintained by the men from the large camp of undocumented workers that lived in this contiguous patch of chaparral.  In these hills were brothels and restaurants.  In the fallow field to the east, where Target now lives, there was an annual rodeo.  The water tower had installed nearby a shower that the workers used to wash themselves.

The work, you know, comes upon you 

for what exactly, and at what cost, had one been redeemed?

Despite the suggestion by some folks working with me that I carry a gun “just in case” the only problem I ever had was someone cutting the ropes tied to the poles that I would leave out for my mist nets.  Not the nets, just the poles and ropes and stakes so that I could come out alone and stand the poles up and attach the nets and try to net quail without assistance.

you will answer our taut hearts

Not that mistnetting quail is particularly effective though I did catch one bird by his toe.  Another bird was killed when, right after she hit the net, a red-tailed hawk came screaming in and knocked the entire thing down, breaking her neck.

my heart I miss her so

you own the stars you own the thunder but you have to shut it off

The undocumented workers that walked through the hills and showered up by the water tower and worked the fields are gone–I knew many of them and I do not know where they are now.  The shower is no longer available and anyway, there are only two small farms left–hectares and hectares are gone to houses, the golf course and the shopping centers.

We make homes where ever we find them. That is why the hills are still filled with cans and old pots, and with ghosts.

Though from whence comes my nostalgia I cannot say.  Farming is not always a kind master to either the workers or to the land.

I have had enough

there is no scent of resin/in this place

Remember the notebook? Left in the brush–only to be revealed by the escape route cut by the firefighters. Remember Littleton and the dead baby?  And the fact that once I was contacted by someone who recognized the names but never contacted me again.

We live these lives and then we disappear

The notebook was an oddity– unlike the scraps of clothing and old shoes that are all over the brush–indeed are all over the lands near the border. North of Nogales near abandoned water bottles and elsewhere.

The clothes and foot prints, and abandoned shoes and the water bottles and casette tapes and old records and knives and tents and spam cans and butane cans and old lighters, these are what the border brings, these and the fences and the minutemen with their sad pathetic weapons, and the corpses in the desert.

____
Quotes are by Inger Christensen, Karl Marx, Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Los Angeles Criminal Attorney Website, Edward Dickinson, William H. Brewer, HD, Nirvana, The Bowerbirds, Chögyam Trungpa

There are people in the park next door to my house. They’ve been there every night for the last several nights. The moon really is full tonight. I found the tarp they’d strung up between some trees so they could crouch there and do, what?

It is easy to blame the dark

Speak loudly I suppose.  I’m tempted to turn the hose on them to see what would happen, or perhaps let the dog loose.  She wouldn’t do anything except lick them.

I’m tempted to do something but I don’t want you to know

I have a violence in me that is hot as death-blood

I don’t know why they piss me off.

you do not necessarily feel [compassion].  You are it.  

I drove back from the field–three days the dog and I on the road.  I couldn’t help it–every space we passed, every patch of land with brush and trees, even into the central valley–even where I know they don’t live anymore–I asked whether they might be there.  I wanted to stop at each place and hike and look for tracks, listen for calls–flush them.

how…how…show me the way

That’s just the way it is.  I can’t help myself.  How did I gain this obsession.  How do I loose it?   Should I?  Or should I continue to follow it and allow it to define me?  What other way is there worth being in the world?

to shake a memory

As I suggested in the last post, I wasn’t altogether successful in achieving my goals on this trip.

Failed…says the little gnome in my head  

I am afraid that you are now going to abandon me–that you won’t trust me anymore.   But you know, the point of the trip was to find out whether it was worth pursuing my  big overarching research program with California quail on the population in San Diego.  I wanted to ask whether traveling 3 or so times a year for a several weeks would allow me to collect sufficient data to say something about their social system.  The answer is no.

Leap says the world and I fly

Just because I didn’t achieve all my goals doesn’t mean I accomplished nothing.  Do I sound defensive?  I do not want to.  I want to be as hard on myself as I need to be.  I want you to know though that when I worked on the quail for my Ph. D. project I was in the field year round–almost every day.  I have data for Thanksgiving and Christmas, my birthdays.  This was doable because I lived down there.  It was also necessary to get a handle on the population.  So I knew this was a crap shoot.

I am an object

And, anyway, the field season did result in samples and measurements.  There are places for these and for smaller questions with the California quail.  I also have the  concern that my once robust group is shrinking.  And if I can keep track of them periodically, I’ll be able to roughly track population size over time.  If they are decreasing in number on that particular location of that particular site, I’ll be able to detect it.

within it I’m completely restless

So you know, part of the convincing is to you but part if it is the sense that the quail I’ve trapped and banded deserve their trauma (trapping is trauma–they are afraid–though perhaps small trauma because they come back.  Or am I just soothing my own aching conscience?) to be for a reason.  Each bird is an individual being in this world not a puzzle piece.  (or we all are puzzle pieces…perhaps)

within it I’m completely immeasurably mute

If I am not doing something real and valuable (and I’m not going to fiddle with the question of what value is in this post…) with what I get from trapping them then I do not deserve the privilege of causing them discomfort and fear.  (would but that there was a way for it not to be about this–but then part of it is that they are so very far from me, that sort of abyss that Derrida mentions.  This abyss means fear and discomfort–)

I am lost,/behold what star is near

I also feel as though I owe the production of something valuable to my kids because, to do this field work, I was away for nearly a month.

To ache is human

While  the children joined me for a week–helping me band and observe the quail–I was not parenting them for much of the time.   When they were not there  I missed them desperately;  it’s just the way it goes, and I felt guilty. The field work felt like indulgence despite the fact that it was not relaxing.  What sort of person desires to be with quail and do that work?  What person  desires to be with ones’ children but isn’t?  What it feels like is failure.

Why do these words mean that there is 

It’s a ripping in two, in three–don’t let anyone tell you differently.  The feeling comes from inside and tears.

something wrong

I’m sorry.

Does no interstice exist 

I’m sorry  I’m not holding up my end of the bargain here

that’s not an empty zone

The voices still come from the park.  They are still there.

And there are still poison oak lesions on my back.

Itching.

and not a battle zone

Forgive me.

##############

quotes are from Sylvia Plath, Bill Callahan, Inger Christensen, Chögyam Trungpa, HD, Emily Dickinson

O forgive me, forget! Look, as the clouds up there

veil with black the slow moon,

Often, moonlight seems to clarify what the sun has rendered far too bright.

I drive away

Seems to–I’m skirting the issue here, I’m sure you can tell.

stay and shine in your beauty

That is because I am afraid to really get to the heart

the beauty of the decoy

so to speak

the beauty of the bird

of the thing.

And, as you can tell, I can effectively draw things out though, indeed, at some point my audience will recede and then it will be me and the moon, until she, too, dives over the horizon.

You’re so much alone in this lovely world,

and then just me.  Whatever that means

You always claim, my darling, but as for that,

just me and every other living thing within my vicinity and within me as well.

You cannot know…

As I was trapping at Poison Oak Gulch–I’d set the traps and then found a place on a little hill to sit and try to get some sort of observations while I waited–I lay down for a bit to rest.  I hate to admit this, it feels like a slacking sort of thing but I was very tired and it was just a moment that I let my eyes close and then when I opened them I saw the clouds, the sun himself and the blue sky.

He touched me

I heard quail as well and sat up as their calls crossed back and forth from the north and south sides of the open field,  between poison oak bush Toxicodendron diversilobum and laurel sumac, lentisco, Malosma laurina.  

so I live to know

I waited as they called but no one ventured from the southern corner into the path.  I could have seen them had they chosen to take this route, but they didn’t.

The northern group called on the other side of the tall grass and could have happily been tramping through the dried vegetation with me incapable of actually ever seeing them.  Indeed, at least on bird did–she was the one I captured in a trap nestled in this grass.  In one of the four traps, I should add.  Four traps, one quail.  This was the bird trapped in two places, on two days, at the same time in the morning.

do not let the dove harm us here

This capture of her felt like a nice little data point.  But it also felt

let it fly forth, flying its best

like I’d only gotten a tiny taste, after two weeks of trapping and taking observations ten or so hours every day, of what the small group I was trying to follow was doing.

Sisyphus sings:

A stone flies up over the mountains

I’d like to sing, but that isn’t the point here.

If I say it to you now will everything change?  Shh, don’t tell me.

Nobody but me/Walks the waist-high wet

Nobody but me knows that place and those birds like I do and I barely know them at all.  I am letting go of my big ideas for this population, my drive to answer the question of how flexible is their social behavior, how driven by environment and how maintained by social cohesion. Questions like:  is social behavior in California quail under selection so that each individual always selects a tactic to maximize her/his fitness or is there some point where social interrelationships results in selection of tactics that are possibly less fit than other options? require that I know how individuals make their choices, what are their options, what are their webs of relationships.  And, of course, these questions also require that I have a much stronger sense of how the environment impacts these choices.

The irreplaceable 

I’m letting go of these ideas and I’m letting go of the fantasy of being inside these birds–this group, MY birds.  What I’m keeping is the faint connection of continuing to band; continuing to take observations.  Keeping in touch with them.

Golds bleed and deepen

But here’s a little bit more–this is the wing of a bird–I’m checking the moult of the primaries and secondaries–the longest feathers of the wings.  In juveniles, the moult corresponds roughly to age.  For adults, patterning on the secondaries pre-moult can tell one whether this is their first year or if they are more than 1 year old.

That is a beautiful bird.  That bird is out there tonight, more than 1000 miles away, roosting in the night.  He must be–I will him still alive and I will him there, roosting  It is one thing I can do from here that doesn’t hurt.

It doesn’t, does it?

I waited a long time- Master-
but I can want more-

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 

Quotes are from

Susan Tichy, The Rg Veda, Robinson Jeffers, Friedrich Hölderin, Emily Dickinson, Inger Christensen, Sylvia Plath