A perfect late-fall day in New Mexico–sun, blue sky, snow on Mount Baldy. A crow was preening on top of this road sign when we turned north on NM 76 to travel the last few miles to Chimayó.
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Once seated in one of the many dining rooms of the adobe hacienda, we had to decide: turkey and dressing with cranberry sauce, or tacos and enchiladas with red chile.
After pumpkin pie and sopapillas we stopped in the courtyard to take photos of each other and to pay our respects to St. Francis.
On Wednesday afternoon I drove in rain from Santa Fe to Albuquerque to attend a public hearing about wolves. Overnight the sunny, dry weather had changed to overcast and wet. Rain was still falling several hours later as dusk settled over downtown Albuquerque and I wondered if it was an omen, but of what, I couldn’t say.
I found one of the last open slots on the periphery of the Embassy Suites parking lot and debated a moment before I decided to carry my leopard print umbrella, not knowing if its pointed tip might be perceived as a weapon and confiscated. On my way in to the hotel, I noticed a few cars from Colorado and California scattered among the New Mexico license plates.
Inside, the doors to the ballroom had opened and people were filling out forms requesting the opportunity to speak. I didn’t sign up. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), who was conducting the hearing, stressed that written comments would bear equal weight to spoken and I had submitted my letter a few weeks earlier. I came armed with my recorder and a notebook so I could focus on listening and observing.
Two Views
With a few minutes until the hearing was to start I stopped by the conference rooms where the meetings and rallies representing those for and against wolves had recently concluded. Out in the hallway both groups had exhibits: a life-sized photo of four children in a wolf shelter or “kid cage”, constructed of plywood and wire, designed to provide a safe haven for rural children waiting for the school bus sat just a few feet away from a small nylon camping tent with snapshots of wolves mounted above it.
Back in the ballroom the seats were filling up. Security consisted of an armed guard and a yellow sign stating that weapons, food, and drinks were not allowed inside. A woman wearing a Wolves Are Essential sign was turned away, but I got in with my umbrella.
I took a seat midway back in the room. In the row in front of me sat a family, the two parents with their son and daughter, both grade-school-age. The boy and his dad held their cowboy hats in their laps. Milling about in the aisle were wolf supporters wearing Let the Lobo Live and National Rally to Protect America’s Wolves.
At six o’clock the meeting was called to order and three FWS employees presented and explained their proposed rule changes.
The first proposal is to de-list the gray wolf, meaning that it would be removed from the threatened and endangered species list and would no longer receive federal protection. It would include all wolves in the lower forty-eight states except the Mexican gray wolf, a subspecies.
The other proposals involve the complex management of the Mexican wolf recovery program and would allow the direct release of wolves throughout the recovery area, limit the wolves’ movement to the recovery area, and re-designate the existing wild population as experimental, non-essential. This complicated set of changes would be the focus of most of the evening’s testimony.
Each speaker was limited to two minutes. I sat with pen poised above my notebook as each one stood at the microphone. Were they for or against the wolf? Sometimes it was hard to tell. The proposed rule changes were generally not favored by either side. What soon became evident was the huge chasm between those who want all wolves de-listed (including the Mexican wolf) and those who think all wolves (including the gray wolf) should continue to be protected.
One speaker stood out for me: Colin Henderson, a rancher in favor of expanding the Mexican wolf’s range. He raises Navajo churro sheep just north of the New Mexico border in Colorado. After relating that he had two ewes injured and one sheep killed the prior week, either by coyotes or dogs, he said that he felt that the expansion was necessary to create a healthy, genetically sound wolf population. If the wolves were allowed to roam without intervention, his sheep could be at risk.
By the time the hearing concluded three hours after it began, my unofficial tally showed that seventy-two had testified with forty-nine speaking in favor of the wolves and twenty-three against, which agreed with the Albuquerque Journal’s “two to one in favor of expansion of the wolf recovery program.”
I walked outside after the hearing surprised to find that the rain had stopped.
Note: With one more public hearing in Arizona and the comment period extended until December 17th, it will be several weeks before the FWS issues their final decision.
I wish more of my camera trap shots were like this one of the black bear that passed through my yard several times during the summer and early fall, but, alas, they are rare.
Every Sunday I bring the camera in from the back fence to see who walked by during the week. Lately, there hasn’t been anything to get excited about, but as I studied my recent photos I did notice a couple of things.
At first this seemed to be a mundane picture of a deer’s butt, until it occurred to me that it could help answer a question about the deer that frequently saunter through our backyard: are they mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) or white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virgineanus)?
Maybe it should have been obvious from this picture I took through the screen door this summer–those are some awfully large ears–but I wasn’t certain.
The best way to tell the difference is from the back. White-tailed deer have white tails and mule deer have white tails with a black tip. Now I know.
I had to take a second or third look before I noticed the bobbed tail in the lower left-hand corner of this photo. It brought back memories of the only bobcat I have ever seen outside of the zoo. It was a warm mid-September Saturday in 2010.
My cousins, Tristan and Sean, were visiting and their five kids were having a great time exploring our wooded yard. The adults were inside drinking coffee and planning the day’s activities, when the quiet of the morning was shattered by a scream.
We all ran outside and discovered that Drew, the youngest, had tried to leap over a prickly pear cactus, but misjudging the distance had landed in the middle of it. His family gathered around to comfort and help, but the misery of the cure was worse than the fall.
After the barbed spines had been removed and the tears dried, Tristan and her daughter, Grace, sat on the porch swing while I stood talking to them. When Grace pointed, we fell silent. A bobcat walked, discreetly and deliberately, along the fence line, just passing through, paying no attention to us.
Better than any picture that I have ever taken is the memory of that tawny, spotted cat with tufted ears and bobbed tail, padding through the yard.
Note: My final post about visiting NYC, slightly out of order.
High heels, even sensible ones, are not the shoes to wear on the High Line. Late on Friday afternoon, our first day in New York City, Dave and I took the subway up Seventh Avenue to a stop a few blocks east of the elevated park that runs along Tenth Avenue. The heels might have been fine if we hadn’t gotten turned around in Greenwich Village where the north/south grid suddenly angles and not all of the streets have number names.
Eventually we found Gansevoort Street and the stairway going up to the High Line at its southernmost point. The park is a recent addition, opening in phases, the first in 2009, the second in 2011, and the third under construction. It sits on top of a rail line built in the 1930s to haul freight along Manhattan’s west side.
Photo Credit: D. Betzler
In 1999 the long-abandoned railway, slowly being reclaimed by nature, was slated for demolition when Joshua David and Robert Hammond met at a community meeting. Two average citizens who wanted to save the structure, each one promised to help if the other would spearhead the effort. Within months of that meeting they co-founded The Friends of the High Line and spent the next ten years, first, saving the rail line from destruction and, then, coordinating the creation of the park. I read their inspiring book, High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky, during my trip to the city.
Photo credit: P. Nixon
On the warm October day of our visit lots of people were enjoying the park, strolling the narrow path, admiring the view of the Empire State Building, and taking photos of a few lingering blossoms. My pinched toes forced me to abandon the walk at 23rd Street.
We returned on Sunday after our trip to New Jersey and walked the park from the north end to the south—in sneakers.
Photo Credit: Josiah Lau Photography via Compfight cc
If I lived in New York City, the High Line would be my park. I imagine early morning walks in the spring savoring each new bloom, lazy summer afternoons lounging on a bench watching the world go by, and snowy winter evenings strolling the quiet path, pausing to watch the city lights blink on.
Last week I rode one of the classic streetcars down Market Street and around the Embarcadero to Fisherman’s Wharf. It was a festive trip, as it usually is. Visitors were holding on to the leather straps studying the Muni transfers given to them by the driver in exchange for two dollars; looking up, occasionally, to take in the sights as we rolled down the street; and consulting with their travel mates as to the best place to disembark.
San Francisco’s waterfront offers endless possibilities: shopping for picnic supplies at the Ferry Building, taking photos of the resident sea lions at Pier 39, or savoring a crab cocktail at the wharf.
Dungeness crabs at Fisherman’s Wharf
What the visitors probably don’t realize, just as I didn’t for a long time, is that the crabs on display today are not local crabs. A vendor confirmed, when I asked at one of the many seafood stands lined up along the wharf, that commercial Dungeness crab season will open on November 15th. It runs through June, although most of the crabs (only males over 5 3/4″) are caught by the end of December. Crab season along the Pacific Coast from central California up to Alaska is staggered throughout the year so there never seems to be a shortage of crab cocktail at the wharf.
If you order a one of the little cardboard containers filled with the sweet seafood doused in cocktail sauce to eat while you enjoy a walk along the piers, be on the lookout for these bad boys.
Seagull
If one of them snatches your lunch out of your hand, you won’t get a refund or any sympathy.
Warning
I needed to see the feet–yellow or black? The roosting birds were not showing even a toe when Dave spotted them out the train window shortly after we pulled away from the station at the Newark Liberty International Airport. It was dusk and the white birds appeared to have settled in the trees next to the marshy wetland for the night, legs and beaks snugly tucked into their feathers.
At home I have bird identification guides stashed for easy reference: National Geographic next to the breakfast table, Sibley at my desk, and Peterson in the car. However, I didn’t have any of them with me on the train. Luckily, as with most things in modern life, there’s a smart phone application (app) for that.
Within moments I had Audubon available at my fingertips, not only photos and range maps, but also recordings of bird calls with a warning not to play them in the field (confusing not only to other birdwatchers, but also to the birds). Once I had the app it didn’t take me long to decide that what I had seen were egrets, but were they snowy egrets or great egrets? Based on their size, which I misjudged, I thought they were snowy egrets (Egretta thula).
Photo Credit: Drew and Didi via Compfight cc
Wanting to be more certain I sent an email to Marie Winn who wrote Redtails in Love and has a blog about birding in Central Park. She was kind enough to immediately reply to my question. She, too, had seen these birds on train trips in the area and thought they were probably great egrets (Ardea alba). But she said it’s hard to know for sure without getting a look at their feet (snowy feet are yellow and greats are black) or beaks (snowy bills are mostly black and greats are yellow). I trust that Marie’s guess is better than mine.
The rest of my trip was a bust as far as birdwatching: two robins on a lawn in New Jersey, a few sparrows flitting around on the High Line, and a row of pigeons on the arm of a light post next to Central Park, which made me certain that Pale Male was not in the vicinity.
The line to buy train tickets at Penn Station was unexpectedly long for a Sunday morning–red shirts behind us, green in front. We were all headed for New Jersey. The hubbub subsided when we reached the tracks and conductors directed the Patriots’ and Jets’ fans to a separate train.
Ours was a short, quiet ride to Cranford, the town where Dave grew up. We walked the mile and a half from the station to the neighborhood of two-story, one garage houses, scuffing our feet through piles of oak and maple leaves. To Dave’s surprise Maryland Street still dead-ends at the edge of the woods, a few doors down from his former house. He played in the woods as a kid, riding his English racer on the trail in the summer and sledding with his brothers, one piled on top of the other on their Airline Racer, on snowy winter days.
On our way back downtown we paused to jump on the hopscotch grid at the Walnut Avenue School and picked up a few red and yellow leaves–mementos of our trip to New Jersey.
I didn’t set out to write about visiting the 911 Memorial at the World Trade Center (WTC) site. My feet were sore and my camera battery was dead by the time I finally cleared security. Peering over the edge of the reflecting pools, I contemplated a single white rose placed on one of the engraved names and remembered the horror of that day.
After leaving the memorial I kept thinking about the tree, one of the last things I noticed. The elaborate web of guide wires trussing it up and holding it in place was what caught my eye. It wasn’t until later that I learned the tree’s story, a lone pear tree in a grove of swamp white oaks.
The Survivor Tree, as it came to be known, was rescued from the WTC site a month after the 2001 attacks, a charred eight-foot stump with one living branch. It was taken to the Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx where park staff nursed it back to health, not knowing at first if it could be saved.
The tree, a Callery pear (Pyrux calleryana), is a common one and was planted at the WTC in the 1970s. Originally imported from Asia in the 1800s, the trees are now found throughout most of the United States. We had a similar tree in our backyard when I was growing up in western Kansas. It was was the most exotic tree in our yard, especially beautiful in the spring when it was transformed into a cloud of white blossoms.
The Survivor Tree was moved back to the 911 Memorial site in December 2010. It still bears scars and always will, but has grown tall and strong, a resilient survivor. Its legacy will continue to grow through the Survivor Tree Seedling Program. During its rehabilitation tree experts propagated several hundred seedlings and over time they will be shared with other communities that have suffered tragedy and loss.
Walking around the city yesterday, I saw lingering signs of summer on the High Line,
but today in Battery Park City it was looking more like fall.
So far, no Pale Male sightings.
Photo Credit: Shawn Hoke via Compfight cc
Later this week I will be leaving New Mexico to spend a few days in Manhattan, one of my favorite places to take a break. It’s not just Broadway shows and Murray’s bagels that I enjoy, but also watching a baby giraffe at the Bronx Zoo or lazing away a Sunday afternoon on a bench under the trees in Central Park.
In preparation for my trip I reread Marie Winn’s book Red-Tails in Love, the story of a hawk (called Pale Male) that showed up in the city in 1991 and proceeded to find a mate and raise chicks on a Fifth Avenue building. Hawk watchers with binoculars and scopes kept tabs on the family from a bench in Central Park. According to a recent post on Winn’s blog, Pale Male still soars over the treetops in Central Park, hunts pigeons, and perches on the balconies of fancy apartment houses to eat his prey.
Winn recounts another story in her book about discovering, with her fellow birdwatchers, a rare owl during the annual Christmas bird count. When a family from Kentucky in town to enjoy the holiday sights happened by, the group offered them the binoculars to get a look. Seeing the long-eared owl roosting in a white pine, one of them exclaimed, “A wild creature right in the heart of New York City! Isn’t that remarkable!”
I’ll be on the lookout, posting any signs of nature that I see.
