Hey tweets, The mud is finally appearing in the main pond at the Fill, after
almost an entire year of high water that encouraged the growth of dense
vegetation right up to the water's edge. With the increase in mud, I am
hoping for a better migration this fall than we had in the spring. So far,
we've seen a fairly good variety of shorebirds reported this fall, including
one LEAST SANDPIPER that I saw hanging out there today, four SPOTTED
SANDPIPERS who appeared last week, and some LONG-BILLED DOWITCHERS. But I
long for the halcyon days before purple loosestrife, when seeing a flock of
20 or more dowitchers was not that uncommon. (Warning to fellow tweets:
delete all that follows if you just want to read about birds.)

Many of you out there in tweetersville will recall the Fill as it was before
loosestrife arrived. In those days, the main pond was shrouded with cattails
so thickly that you could see into the pond only in a few places. Shorebirds
and marsh birds were abundant if frustrating to find. You couldn't possibly
approach without the lookout marsh wrens blaring out your presence to all
and sundry. Red-winged blackbird males swooped out to attack your head,
urged on by a raucous female audience that would join in the flyby if they
thought the males weren't being aggressive enough. Common yellowthroats
would pop up and back down to see what the fuss was about, while I would be
cursing my fate that all the noise would surely scare off the shorebirds.
Any time the blackbird brigade failed in its duty, the killdeers would take
over. They'd scramble into the air with sirens on full-blast. I might as
well have been carrying a bullhorn: Warning! All birds leave the area
immediately. Connie is coming.

"Don't you guys recognize me?" I'd ask in exasperation. "I've been coming
here every single day." Finally one day, I wore a floppy blue hat to keep
the hair out of my eyes. The marsh wrens, blackbirds and killdeers approved..
Maybe they thought I was a big bird with a blue bill. But on that day, they
kept quiet and allowed me to sneak in to watch the shorebirds. As I recall,
there were banks of shorebirds feeding in stripes along the shore: the
leasts highest on land among the grasses, the westerns just dipping their
toes in the water, the dowitchers up to their bellies. It was a primeval
cafeteria with seating by sections. I was enchanted.

I can't tell you when the loosestrife first arrived. I didn't notice for a
long time. Gradually the cattails went away, but the encroaching loosestrife
seemed like a natural succession to me, clueless as I was about invasive
species. Then one day I encountered Scotsman Stuart McKay, who berated me
about allowing loosestrife to take over our pond. "You Americans don't
realize what you have here," I remember him saying. "You take it all for
granted, and you're losing it."

In typical Scots fashion, Stuart showed up the next weekend and began
chopping and pulling out the loosestrife. "Is that allowed?" I wondered to
myself. Then, "I don't care," I answered and joined him to pull.

That summer, we did everything we could to encourage environmentalists to
help us pull out the loosestrife. At one point, we had something like 20
people in the work party, all heaving on loosestrife that had grown to be
more than 6 feet tall, with roots holding onto mudballs so large that I
couldn't lift one by myself. We told everyone we knew to tell everyone they
knew to come and pull. Boy Scouts came to clear out the loosestrife in the
cottonwood pond. A church group came to rid Cinnamon Teal Pond of all the
loosestrife. It took them three or four weekends, but they showed up
religiously. Students who owed community service to their schools got
permission to perform their service at the Fill, pulling out loosestrife. I
remember one boy who was terrified of bees, but he squared his shoulders and
pulled up flowering loosestrife with dozens of bees on each stalk.

By the time the fall migration started, we had cleared out all the
loosestrife around the main pond, Shoveler Pond, the cottonwood pond and
Cinnamon Teal Pond. On one of the last days of our work party, I was at the
south end of the main pond, pulling at a plant that was stubbornly hanging
onto its root ball out in the water when three dowitchers flew in and landed
almost at my feet. As soon as they hit the water, all three heads dived deep
and began sewing for food.

All of us stopped pulling and watched these lovely wild creatures fattening
up for their flight south. We could imagine them coming in from the north,
tired and hungry from a journey that was already arduous, and yet they had
farther to go. We could think back to a time when all of Puget Sound would
have been laid out for dinner for them. But now the Fill was one of the few
places left where these birds could stop, rest and prepare to fly on.
Because of our efforts, the dowitchers had a rich habitat loaded with
life-giving critters for them to eat. Watching them go at it was the best
and only thank-you we needed. Tired, muddy and smelling of the rank mud, we
smiled at each other in perfect happiness.

The next spring, I had high hopes that we would be able to attack the
loosestrife that choked the dime parking lot pond and the ponds along the
road leading to the dime parking lot. Alas, our work party members failed to
show up. The call went out but few answered. Stuart did the work of 20, but
often he and I and my husband were the only ones pulling that year. I can't
explain it. Maybe people felt that they had been there, done that, job over..
Maybe they couldn't face the backbreaking labor and the bees. Maybe their
own lives had consumed their energy, leaving them with nothing to give back
to nature. Maybe they had lost hope.

We did our best that year, but we managed to keep only the main pond and
Shoveler Pond clear. After that, every year was a harder struggle. Stuart
bought a gas-powered weed whacker and tried to keep the flowers from making
more seeds, but the loosestrife was clearly winning. Then one day I saw a
large loosestrife plant growing out in the cattails on Union Bay. I knew
then that our fight was nearing its end. There was no way we could pull out
a 50-pound ball of mud growing in water too deep to wade in. I told Stuart
the news. He just looked at me and then went back to pulling. I did the
same, but my heart wasn't in it.

I confess that there were days when the thought of going to the Fill was
painful. I felt guilty that somehow I had failed. I believed that there must
exist a key somewhere that would unlock people's hearts and get them to come
in vast numbers to pull out every last one of those vile plants that were
killing my beloved Fill. But I couldn't find the key. I didn't have the
words, and I call myself a writer.

At my lowest point and dreading another fruitless year of pulling, I paid a
visit one spring to meet my nemesis and find out what kind of a battle it
was going to be. Instead of vigorous young plants, I found withered stalks
covered with brown leaves. The leaves had holes in them. As I walked among
the dying plants, I looked down and saw dozens of bugs on my pants. Of
course, my initial reaction was to let out a high-pitched ewww and start
dancing around shaking my pants legs like I had just become the favorite
entry to win the St. Vitus Day Dance-a-thon.

I found out later that the insects were weevils and beetles from Europe.
They were here to war with the wicked. After much study the CUH had decided
the best way to fight loosestrife was with biological controls.

The bugs did a real number on the loosestrife, attacking both the roots and
the leaves. In the second year, after successfully overwintering in the
field, the bugs did even better. I think that year, not a single loosestrife
plant around the main pond flowered.

It's been many years now since Stuart or I or my husband have had to pull
loosestrife, although the plants do seem to be making a bit of a comeback
this year. The birds have not rebounded as we had thought they would, and
the cattails have not come back. But the mud is there, waiting, and I am
confident that any shorebird who decides to stop off for a while will find
rich pickings, enough to refuel for the migration flight ahead.

I talked to a CUH employee shortly after the bugs had proven their worth. I
told him that I was a member of the loosestrife-pulling crew that had
struggled for so many years to clear the ponds. "Well, you see your efforts
were useless," he said. "While you were doing that, we were studying the
safety of releasing insects from Europe. We wanted to make sure that we
weren't going to be introducing a bigger problem if we released them here.
When we were certain that the insects were safe, we released them and now
look at the results. If you had just waited, those results would have been
the same."

After that employee spoke to me, I went home and re-read my favorite play,
"Cyrano de Bergerac." In the last scene, when Cyrano has been felled by a
log of wood and realizes that he will not die gloriously as he had lived, he
struggles to his feet and says:

Let the old fellow come now! He shall find me on my feet, sword in hand. I
can see him there. He grins. He is looking at my nose, that skeleton. What's
that you say? Hopeless? Why, very well. But a man does not fight merely to
win.... You there, who are you? A hundred against one. I know them now, my
ancient enemies - falsehood! There, there. Prejudice, compromise, cowardice..
What's that? Surrender? No! Never, never. I fight on. I fight on. I fight
on.

There are round circles that dot the page where Cyrano says his last speech..
They are my tearstains. I cry not from despair but from the sheer emotional
bond I share with all of humanity when we choose hope in the face of defeat..

What the CUH employee told me that was a brutal truth, but was it the only
truth?

I say there was a deeper truth in what we did. I say that we kept alive the
Fill for shorebirds until a more permanent solution was found, and I say
that we did so by our own efforts. I say that we built a community, however
imperfect, who worked together to save something well worth saving. I say
that people who love the environment should take heart and never give up.
You can never be defeated if you keep getting up.

As Dr. Jerome Groopman said on NPR, "Many of us confuse hope with optimism,
a prevailing attitude that 'things turn out for the best.' But hope differs
from optimism. Hope does not arise from being told to 'think positively,' or
from hearing an overly rosy forecast. Hope, unlike optimism, is rooted in
unalloyed reality. ... Hope is the elevating feeling we experience when we
see - in the mind?s eye - a path to a better future. Hope acknowledges the
significant obstacles and deep pitfalls along that path. True hope has no
room for delusion."

In other words, hope is not a feeling of optimism; it is a way of life.

That is the lesson that the Fill has taught me.

Here's everything I sat at the Fill today:

pied-billed grebe
great blue heron
green heron
Canada goose
mallard
gadwall
northern shoveler
green-winged teal
wood duck
glaucous-winged gull
ring-billed gull
least sandpiper
rufous hummingbird
barn swallow
black-capped chickadee
American crow
American robin
cedar waxwing
common yellowthroat
American goldfinch
house finch - Connie, Seattle

csidles at isomedia.com