Subject: Fill February
Date: Feb 15 14:44:10 2004
From: Connie Sidles - csidles at isomedia.com


Hey tweets, Yesterday at the Fill, I got an inkling of what ancient peoples
might have felt when the winter came and days got shorter and shorter. Who
could really be sure that the sun would return? Better do something: make a
sacrifice, paint oneself blue, light a bonfire, beseech the gods. If we do
it right, then the sun will return; conversely, if we don't do it right,
then the sun might never return.

Yesterday, we must all have done something right because the swallows
returned, just as they have been doing for thousands of years. Yes, there
were two barn swallows at the Fill yesterday, soaring exuberantly over the
prairie and catching the recently hatched bugs that filled the air.

I realized, as I watched those two swallows, how happy they made me. My
heart was lifted up by the fact that once again, the swallows had come back
to brighten all our days of spring and summer. What would the Fill be like
without them? Surely a tamer, plainer place, drab and sterile. Without the
swallows, wrens, vireos, shorebirds and all the dozens of other birds who
come through on migration or stop awhile in the summer or winter, the Fill
would be what it once was: a dump.

But it is not. Because of the hard work of its caretakers and its loyal
fans, and because we as a society have chosen to pay the price to keep it
open and healthy, the Fill is a nature reserve.

Many of us modern, scientific, secular types chuckle indulgently when we
read about those poor, ignorant primitives of long ago who thought that they
could influence nature's turning of the seasons. But ancient peoples' desire
for life and happiness were perhaps not so different from ours. Certainly
they wanted to exert some control over their fate. If they thought that
dancing and bonfires controlled the sun, well, we can say that their science
was poor but their need was the same as we feel today. We too wish to
control our lives and nature. Unlike our ancestors, however, we have been
given the knowledge and the power to truly affect our environment in ways
that we ourselves can choose.

For me, the deepest lesson of the Fill is that, while humans can mess up the
planet, humans can also clean up the mess and make the earth beautiful
again. So beautiful that the living grace notes that are swallows will come
back each year and call it home.

Here's everything I saw at the Fill yesterday:

pied-billed grebe
double-crested cormorant
great blue heron
Canada goose (including several flocks of 15+ cacklers)
mallard
gadwall
green-winged teal
American wigeon
northern shoveler
ruddy duck
wood duck (male in breeding plumage in slough north of new wooden bridge)
canvasback
ring-necked duck
greater scaup
lesser scaup
bufflehead
common merganser
hooded merganser (including several males in breeding plumage)
American coot
ring-billed gull
glaucous-winged gull
sharp-shinned hawk
rock pigeon
Anna's hummingbird
northern flicker (yellow-shafted, hanging out near golf driving range)
barn swallow
Steller's jay
American crow
black-capped chickadee
Bewick's wren
marsh wren (several males singing all over the Fill in the cattails)
ruby-crowned kinglet
American robin
European starling
yellow-rumped warbler
song sparrow (where are all the other sparrows?)
red-winged blackbird
spotted towhee
American goldfinch
house finch