Hey tweets, I think I'm going to have to start taking my goose-whapper stick
to the Fill regularly from now on - the Canada geese have paired up and are
beginning to think about hissing and biting. You can just see the wheels
turning in their heads: Should I? Can I? Will I? Yeah, that might be fun.

Not that I ever actually whap a goose. I just wave my walking stick in front
of me as I go. Like Crocodile Dundee and his aboriginal hypnotizing skills,
my stick-waving seems to mesmerize the geese so they leave me alone. This
technique even worked against the really big, pugnacious male who had set up
housekeeping down at the point a couple of years ago. He was sneaky and
would wait until unsuspecting pedestrians had walked past him, then he would
fly full tilt at their backs and try to bite their heads off. He nearly got
my husband one time.

Anyway, as I was walking and waving my way through the Fill yesterday, I
came upon a mother wheeling her toddler along the path in a stroller. The
little girl was delighted by the geese and wanted to get closer, so the
mother obligingly shoved the stroller right up to a male who was probably
three times the size of her daughter. Luckily the male was too flummoxed to
know what to do. The mom was about to push closer so her daughter could do
what? touch the goose? point better? get bitten? I rushed over to explain
that the geese are becoming very aggressive now that breeding hormones have
begun coursing through their veins, and the mom should be really careful
around them.

Hillary Clinton says that it takes a whole village to raise a child, but I
think this mom would have preferred more privacy. She was not exactly
overjoyed to hear my remarks, and she let me know that I should butt out. I
guess she figured I was depriving her and her daughter of a nice experience
in nature.

Maybe people are watching too many nature shows nowadays and are not getting
out into nature itself. Nature is many things: ravishingly beautiful,
unflinchingly truthful, deeply mysterious. But nature is not by nature nice.
For nice, you have to go to Disneyland.

As we humans take over more of nature, we become more the caretaker and less
the participant. It's not that we are divorced from nature - after all, who
is going to step up and control global warming, and yet global warming will
affect all of us more profoundly than we can guess. So we don't exactly
control nature. Yet we are shaping a world in which the wild is not really
going to exist as wholly wild. We'll be taming it down quite a bit, platting
nature into discrete parks, some big, others small.

This raises the question of how much wild we will put up with, especially
when our own comfort or desire is curtailed. In Adventureland, Disney's
hippo pops up to give us a kind of canned scare, but she's really just funny
when she twirls her ears. We can easily imagine her in a tutu. I have the
feeling that the mom I met yesterday and her kid would have been just as
happy if the Canada geese had been wearing figurative tutus. The mom was
uncomfortable thinking otherwise.

But that mother could just as easily have experienced her goose encounter as
a wonderful opportunity to see a natural creature living an amazing life.
What a miracle those Canada geese are. Each one of their feathers is the
result of millions of years of evolution. Each feather serves a precise
function; all are perfectly attuned to help the owner swim, fly, stay warm,
get cool, be scary, attract mates. We need Calvin Klein to do as much.
Canada geese mate for life; how envious of their morals George Bush must be.
The geese that have paired up already are the nonmigrants who have become
such a pest; but nearby was a flock of cackling Canadas fueling up for their
long flight to Alaska. What mystery drives them north and gives them both
the urge and the knowledge to go to the right place? The cacklers are tiny,
scarcely bigger than mallards. Maybe when we see them we are looking at a
snapshot in time, a vision of a new species in the making. None of the
cacklers have paired off in the flock yet. Maybe they're still too focused
on their long journey and are putting off sex until they reach their goal.
So much to think about, wonder about, learn from. Why is anybody sitting in
front of their TV?

In fact, now that I think of it, I am probably being most unfair and even
unkind to that mom. She probably was trying to let her little girl
experience the wonders of nature. She just didn't understand that danger is
present in nature fully as much as is wonder. It's hard to appreciate
danger, especially when it flies at you and gives you a big bite. But if we
require that nature be safe for us, then we might as well pave it over and
make it all into a mechanized theme park.

The Fill gave me something else to think about yesterday as well. At the
Fill, the gardeners are hard at work again. This time, they are planting a
quick-growing little woods of chokecherry and deciduous saplings to shade
out the blackberries on the slope of a small hill about halfway down
Wahkiakum Lane. They have already planted a forest of little plants, each
protected by a stick and a blue wrapper. Their work reminds me that the Fill
is not a nature reserve. It is a garden. People cultivate it for our own
purposes. At the moment, the purpose is to maximize mixed use. One of the
mixed uses is to encourage wildlife to use the Fill. Let us hope that that
will always be our purpose, no matter how much pressure we get to Disneytize
everything.

FYI, here are all the species I saw yesterday:

pied-billed grebe
double-crested cormorant
Canada geese (including more than 20 cacklers)
mallard
gadwall
green-winged teal
American wigeon
northern shoveler
ruddy duck
ring-necked duck
greater scaup
bufflehead
hooded merganser (5 males in breeding plumage, 3 females ignoring them)
common merganser
American coot
glaucous-winged gull
bald eagle (same pair as before, I think)
ring-necked pheasant (stupidly ensconced in the willow clump on the south
end of the main pond - where's he going to go if someone, i.e., me, spots
him?)
Anna's hummingbird
downy woodpecker (beautiful male in newly minted-looking plumage)
northern flicker
Steller's jay (heard, not seen)
American crow
black-capped chickadee
bushtit
Bewick's wren
marsh wren (heard, not seen)
American robin
European starling
yellow-rumped warbler (coming into breeding plumage now)
song sparrow
golden-crowned sparrow
red-winged blackbird
house finch - Connie, Seattle

csidles at isomedia.com