Hey tweets, I took a bad attitude with me to the Fill yesterday. I am so so
so tired of this pestilentially endless summer. When will I hear the rain
pattering on my roof again, or watch the little rivlets wash down my window,
creating millions of mazes that are here and then gone? When will the fall
really come, with its crisp mornings and its promise of vagrants around the
bend? Shoveler Pond looks like an African waterhole at the tail end of the
dry season, the time of year when forelorn waterbuffalo paw listlessly at
the dry earth, trying in vain to dig up something to drink. That was me
yesterday afternoon, scuffing along the dry bed and flopping down on my camp
stool by the main pond.

I had no real excuse for my mood. In fact, I told myself that I have a
happier, easier life than nine-tenths of the other people on the planet, so
what right do I have to kvetch? Nonetheless the spirit of kvetch had filled
my soul. Then I heard a liquid trill that, had it been visible, would have
been an icicle hanging from the eaves, refracting the round and sparkling
world of winter. "That's certainly not anything from *these* parts," I said,
looking around for the source. There, not three feet away, were two juvenile
long-billed dowitchers, very gray in color with plain tertials. They were
aware of me but didn't know what to make of it, so they kept feeding until
they got tired. Then they put their bills in their backs and went to sleep.
Not even a merlin passing directly overhead, nor later a sharp-shinned hawk
settling into the willow tree, could rouse them. Maybe they knew something
about those raptors that I didn't, such as, they weren't hungry or hunting.
Or maybe the young dowitchers were too clueless to be alert. Or perhaps they
felt the raptors wouldn't attack when such a large "duck" as I was nearby.
In any case, the pond stayed quiet when the raptors showed up; none of that
electric energy that so often fills the atmosphere at such times.

I relaxed too, and slowly my bad mood dissolved into the murky water at my
feet. I remembered a poem I had heard on NPR a few hours before. Some poet
was reading a poem he had written in which he asked "the river" what then he
could give to it. I hate this kind of drivel; it always sounds so pouffily
pretentious to me. The poet told the river he was going to give it his
anger, and then he was going to give it his fear too. As if, were the river
really an entity to whom one could give gifts, it would want gifts like
that. Good lord. Could I possibly have absorbed these stanzas, and was I now
thinking I had given my bad mood to the main pond? I couldn't be harboring
*poetry* in my soul, could I? I thought about a PG Wodehouse story in which
a soupily sappy romance writer died and left her cottage to her
mystery-writer nephew. The nephew moved in and began to write a faceless
fiend type of story for his editor but found that references to fairy
sprites and daisy chains kept creeping in and taking over his prose. The
story is enough to raise the hair on any self-respecting writer's neck.

Be that as it may, I had to admit that my bad mood had fled. So I got up and
walked around my favorite place on earth to see what there was to see. I can
report that the ducks are coming back in force now. Huge rafts of coots and
ducks are floating in Union Bay and all along the lake. The sparrows are
also coming in now, even golden-crowned sparrows, which seem a bit early to
me. The gulls are returning, too, and the cormorants. The last of the
passerines are heading south: no more swallows or swifts present, and just a
few warblers left. The mallards are taking on breeding plumage, as are the
green-winged teals. And the flickers are going at it, too. I saw a pure
yellow-shafted male making a play for a hard-to-get red-shafted female. They
were easy to see, perched as they were on top of one of the lamp posts south
of CUH building. I watched them making faces and babbling at each other,
beak to beak, for nearly half an hour. How can you keep the cares of the day
bundled up in your heart when you have something so funny to watch? The Fill
always delivers.

Here's everything I found:

pied-billed grebe
double-crested cormorant
great blue heron
green heron
Canada goose
mallard
gadwall
green-winged teal
American wigeon
northern shoveler
ruddy duck
wood duck (males in full breeding plumage)
ring-necked duck
American coot
long-billed dowitcher
ring-billed gull
glaucous-winged gull
sharp-shinned hawk
merlin
rock dove
belted kingfisher
northern flicker (red-shafted and yellow-shafted)
Steller's jay
American crow
black-capped chickadee
Bewick's wren
American robin
European starling
yellow-rumped warbler
common yellowthroat
savannah sparrow
white-crowned sparrow
golden-crowned sparrow
song sparrow
red-winged blackbird
house finch - Connie, Seattle

csidles at isomedia.com