Today marks the beginning of a new cycle for our Monday photography feature here at The NDN Silver Blog. It marks the beginning of a new cycle in other contexts, too.
The seasons are changing — rapidly, now. Fall has been here, unofficially, for a month already, but now the signs are growing ever more visible: a few of the aspen leaves are just beginning to turn at the edges, some of them fluttering to earth in a silvery cascade in the afternoon winds; the lush green vines on the fence panels are now suddenly tipped with crimson; when the Indian Summer sun hides behind a cloud, the temperature drops enough to require sleeves.
The weather is changing for the short term, too. Our chance of rain for this evening has risen from zero to thirty percent over the course of the day. Much more is slated for the days to come, as Hurricane Odile spins inland and moves north and east and merges with the current late-season monsoonal weather pattern. Flash flood advisories are already being issued for some areas for the rest of the week.
There are changes yet closer, too.
And then, of course, there is last week’s Audubon report, a grim forecast for the wingéd ones who both Wings and I count as our relatives, our teachers, our guides.
Audubon’s Birds and Climate Change Report: 314 Species on the Brink. That’s the title. What’s inside is frightening. Here in New Mexico alone, some fifty bird species are now at greatly-heightened risk, their habitats threatened in a significant way by climate change alone. Extractive industries and their toxic effects, along with consumptive ways of modern life, and the pollution, contamination, encroachment, and habitat destruction that accompanies all of them will only make those projections worse than they already are. But here . . . here, right in this very place where we live, many will be lost to us before the end of our lifetimes.
The eagles, both bald and golden, both so important to our peoples. The hawks that are also culturally and spiritually significant — specifically, the ferruginous and the Northern harrier. Two days ago, I went outside and saw one of the latter, a male, circling overhead in ever-widening hoops, playing on the air currents, apparently hoping to be seen before he moved northward. From my own lands, the common loon and the sandhill cranes, the latter of particular significance to me, and on whose migratory path we sit. In the waters of the nearby Rio Grande, the mallard and the common goldeneye.
Here, among those who call our land home, who eat at our feeder and share their space with us, a variety of finches and sparrows, bluebirds and jays, woodpeckers and chickadees, the Bullock’s orioles who returned to us this year and made their nest in a tree directly over the picnic table where we eat breakfast every morning. The common raven. Even the seemingly ubiquitous black-billed magpies, who are as integral an element of the local landscape as you are likely to find, strutting and chattering and laughing and begging shamelessly for food.
And it’s not only the birds. There are dragonfly and damselfly species now at risk. The greatly-threatened status of the bees and butterflies has been widely known for a few years now. We’ve been fortunate: the last few years, the honeybees and bumblebees, the butterflies and hummingbirds and their namesake moth counterparts, all have returned to us, in this spot. Like the Bullock’s orioles, they arrived this year and settled in for the season. And once in a great while, they allow Wings to capture their presence in a more permanent image.
Wings has decided that it’s time to use his camera to record their existence. They come and go as they please, of course. Whether he records their images at any given time depends on their own moods as much as anything. And so new images, new records of our wingéd and feathered clansmen will be intermittent and seemingly arbitrary. He has a head start on a solid historical record for the birds, and I’ll be posting some of those images here in the weeks to come.
But for today, it seemed as good a time as any to lead with the particular photo shown above. It’s from August 25th, some three weeks ago. We’ve had our usual collection of small butterflies and moths this year, plus a mourning cloak or two, a swallowtail or two, and at least three of the endangered monarchs. I first noticed their return two years ago, making this the third summer in a row that they’ve established a regular presence. This year we have one adult male and female and that have mated, plus a third whose gender is unknown. It was present in the aspen at the same time as the two shown above, on a different branch. These two flew jointly over our heads, spiraling around and around each other in a mating dance as they covered yards in a second’s time, finally alighting on the branch of the aspen you see above. Wings was able to get several outstanding photos, from the start of the mating process to the end . . . and was fortunate enough to capture this one perfectly-symmertical image of the two joined together as one uniquely three-dimensional butterfly, looking for all the world as though it were one being with wings spread to the Four Directions.
From its description in the new Wingéd Ones series in our Photography Gallery:
HOPE
In the face of climate change and seasons’ change, of looming winter snows, still it burns like the fiery color of the monarch’s wings.
The urge to live, to pass on one’s spirit, to the future generations comes as naturally as flight to creatures delicate, endangered, and so wholly alive.
Soon there will be birth and rebirth, genesis and regenesis, creation and transformation.
And so, we are given the gift of one final possibility before the snows descend, bright orange wings against a turquoise sky: spiraling, beating, merging, melding into one, and stopping to rest just for one moment before carrying on with life in a cycle of endless possibility . . . of hope.
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In a time of great uncertainty both globally, on the great existential issues, and locally, amidst the more quotidian seasonal changes, it’s a reminder that life is a cycle, a complex and multilayered one, and that it begins anew constantly, irrespective of our own personal frailties and seeming finalities. Two beings that began their lives in one form, only to undergo the most perfect metamorphosis and transform into something else entirely, still find a way to come together to create new life that will walk (crawl, fly) that same transformative path.
It’s an image to nurture, both in real terms, by providing such beings a safe haven, and in spiritual terms, in the hope that we keep alive in our hearts.
It’s an image I need today.
~ Aji
