When everything is terrible, it’s time to seek out the imagery of hope.
And everything is terrible this Monday: multiple new fire starts around the state over the weekend, firefighters losing ground on containment of fast-spreading area conflagrations, winds early and high today — so much so that aerial support has reportedly turned back to base, unable to fly in such conditions, and leaving those on the ground as the only means of trying to halt the spread.
We had a few lovely clouds at dawn, the kind that make you believe, in defiance of all forecasting, that rain might still be possible . . . but of course, as predicted, it all came to nothing. We are fortunate here that a shift in the winds has blown the smoke and smog of the weekend entirely out of the valley, but the air seems almost too bright — brittle, sharp-edged, as though one good blast of these trickster winds will shatter it all into dust.
And it probably will.
In some ways more troubling, because they are harbingers of long-term upheaval, are the changes we are already seeing in our migratory visitors for the year. Some arrived early, some late, some not at all; some have already raised the first broods while the weather held more of winter than spring, while still others are only just now beginning the process of nesting, far later than normal.
So we look for hope where we can find it, a small ray of light amid the fear and the smoke. It’s not much, granted, but it’s something, and the subject of this week’s photo meditation reminds me of both the how and the why.
Wings shot this image, if memory serves, in the early summer (probably technically late spring, but certainly hot enough for qualify as summer by any standard) of either 2013 or 2014: May or June, probably of the latter year. Back then, we still got migratory Bullock’s orioles in those weeks when earth and air really begin to warm for the first time, and in that year, a pair of them built a nest up high in the aspens, almost directly above where we had placed the picnic table. While the air was still chilly, we were able to watch them return repeatedly with strands of horsehair and twigs and bits of damp earth to create a perfect ball of a nest. And we waited.
At one point, we came outdoors to find a baby, bony and featherless, with eyes still shut, dead on the ground below. It appear to have been pulled from the egg and dropped, probably by a larger bird scared off too late by angry parents. We buried it at the base of the tree. And we waited.
Not many mornings later, we heard tiny voices emanating from within the giant gray ball of horsehair and twigs, and we knew then that at least some had survived. Some days thereafter, Wings captured this image — from a safe distance beneath, using the zoom function on his digital camera. It was that one perfect shot that you have only a second to catch, and he succeeded.
Neither of us had ever seen a live baby oriole before, its beak disproportionately outsized compared to head and body, yet still utterly recognizeable as one of its kind. And that year, we were privileged to watch their parents raise them. They spent part of the summer with us before moving on along their migratory path.
The next year, the parents returned; they went straight to their old nest and checked it out thoroughly before abandoning the idea of re-use and building a new one instead. The new one, though, was not nearly as long-lived; subsequent winter storms shredded it thoroughly.
But still, the original held. That first winter, and for two or three thereafter, it attracted frost and snow like a magnet; in the winter sunlight, it shimmered like a giant Christmas ornament, as though it were wrought of frosted glass instead of horsehair and mud.
The ornament is gone now, of course. So is any nest. High winds and heavy storms eventually took care of that. But to have something last so long, even without further use . . . it reminds me that Earth and her children know what they need, know how to build and how to sustain, know how to produce beauty and timelessness in the basics of survival.
We have no orioles this year, not yet, anyway. If they come at all, I suspect it will be toward the latter half of the month, when — if — the winds have died down, and the fires with them. But we do have other small spirits of the air: tiny finches and siskins, hummingbirds, even a few butterflies now.
The flames ride the winds of death, but these tiny beings know better: They ride the winds of survival.
Theirs are the winds of hope.
~ Aji
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