According to the weather experts in the press, central New Jersey recently endured a significant meteorological event. Apparently the very low temperatures we experienced—two or three nights when the mercury got only to a few degrees Fahrenheit above zero—were the coldest in recorded history. And recorded history is now more than a century. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of that, but it got as cold as I can remember during the sixty years we have lived here. The chill was very brief, however, and was swiftly followed by what seemed like premonitions of spring.
Monday morning was indeed nearly spring-like. I got up feeling quite perky, and while still at the breakfast table I resolved that I would do something passing for an adventure to celebrate—take a walk down to the lake along the pleached paths in the backwoods rather than what in the cold has become my humdrum normal route, mostly on macadam and concrete sidewalks of the side of our house facing civilization. What Joan had been reading aloud over the cream of wheat was a charming op-ed essay by the Nashville columnist Margaret Renkl, wearing her naturalist rather than her political hat, about her visit to an Alabama nature reserve where large flocks of Sandhill cranes were beginning to break up and start North. This brought to my mind our own local avian celebrities, a mated pair of bald eagles, although I knew that actually searching for them was a fool’s errand. They are still in the general area, but they moved on from our lakeside tree about two years ago. I know that I am deceiving myself when I pretend that I might be seeing them in very distant circling turkey vultures; but so much of the best in life rests on self-deception. So I walked down to the lake, and a fair way along the riparian path, full of manufactured expectation. It was sunny, and in the occasional open patch where protracted sunlight could do its work,even warm. There were very few birds of even the commonest species in sight, though a fair amount of (to me) unidentifiable song came to my ears from the distant bare trees beyond my sight-line. What I discovered , rather to my alarm, was that masses of daffodils, many of them the offspring of my own lakeside plantings, were trying to show, and some crocuses were already out. It is too early for this by the old norms. Late February will almost certainly feature more deep chill. I doubt that daffodils will be killed, but their eventual appearance could be weakened.
I have a particular yen for “our eagle”, who for all I know is by now OurEagle 2.0. or higher. Many years ago this eagle used to make occasional visits to a dying tree at the extreme bottom of our own back yard. On occasion we would see him perched there near its top , but he was frequently first drawn to our attention by audio-visuals of a thrilling kind. Sitting in our glass-walled sitting room we would sometimes hear the distinctive whoosing of his huge wings circling the house. On sunny days the huge shadow of those same wings would flash like an intermittent visual Morse code across the lawn and even the living room walls. He seemed to check us out before every visit. One morning when I went into the yard early I was astonished to see, about ten yards into the lawn, a very large and heavy fish. Here was piscatorial mystery. The fish had been decapitated neatly by some sharp blade held by a human hand, but it had not been gutted. It had to have been the prize catch of some fisherman at the lake docks or canal lock, and snatched from an unattended hamper and transported here by the eagle. Why the eagle had to drop it is guess work. As I say, the fish was quite heavy, but these birds are powerful. I want think it had been intentionally dropped by eagle, a fisherman’s house gift for an old friend. Lox! Imagine that, a Jewish eagle. For a mad moment I considered making it my breakfast, but unfortunately the fish looked almost as old as the friend. In one of the passages I remember most vividly from Audubon, he describes his patient but productive espionage session in the clefts of the rock walls encasing the Ohio River trying to spy out a nesting pair of eagles. Patience paid off. After a long wait, he spotted a magnificent parent bird, obviously headed for a nest with young out of his peeping sight. There was a large, whole fish impaled in its talons.
Yet not seeing much bird life, and certainly no eagles, indirectly expanded my knowledge of the species of the Sandhill crane. Ms. Renkl’s essay was strong on lyrical interpretation. She is a fine writer. But we got a lot more ornithological substance in a phone conversation with our son Richard. Rich is an amazing bird guy—I mean, seriously. According to some actual official record kept by some actual recognized official, Rich is the Number Two birder in Brooklyn. This achievement is quite impressive to his parents. Yes, I know that the “Second Prize in a Beauty Contest” is an embarrassment in Monopoly, and its ten bucks an insult. And yes, I know, Julius Caesar said that he would rather be the Number One guy in Aups than the Number Two guy in Rome. (Aups is an obscure village in Aquitania—today roughly the south of France, and one of the tres partes into which Caesar famously declared that Omnia Gallia divisa est.) Aups was even more obscure two thousand years ago, when Julius passed through. But I’m not talking about little places like Aups or ancient Rome. I am talking about Brooklyn, population two-and-half million!
Richard told us that the persistent changes in our weather patterns are already beginning to be reflected in our fauna no less than in our flora. Among the species which are pushing eastward and northward are the Sandhills. Their natural habitat is the freshwater marsh, and their greatest parade grounds are still on the Platte River in Nebraska, where their great show—around half a million of them—is usually in March. But Rich tells us that there are now many reports of Sandhill colonies in the mid-Atlantic states, including New Jersey. We still have quite a bit of wetland that hasn’t been blacktopped, though it’s going fast. So it is conceivable that Ms. Renkl may someday have to start traveling north rather than south to find the huge flocks. Who knows? Now if we could only come up with even one mating pair of Passenger Pigeons…
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