September
I was planning on spending a quiet day at home, curled up on the couch drinking coffee and watching mountain bike racing. Then I heard that a Blue Rock-Thrush was spotted at Broughton Beach. These are Eurasian birds so this guy was a long way from home. It's so uncommon in the US it made the news so you may have even heard about this rare visitor.
Broughton Beach is a quick bike ride from my house so I loaded up my binoculars, scope and camera and pedaled over there. There was already a decent crowd. In the few years I've been birding, it's been fun to go to these big deal kind of sightings because it's guaranteed you'll run into people you know and meet some new people. It's a weird little party. The thrush was super cooperative, spending time high up on some concrete structures in the water and down on the beach foraging for food.
No one will know exactly how he got here but there's been quite a bit of speculation that he was on a ship. People brought at up that he must be lonely, being the here in a foreign place with no other Blue Rock-Thrushes around. That led to a really great discussion about the human experiences we often project onto animals. And there are two sides to that - projecting those feelings and emotions on to animals might mean we can relate to and care about them more. At the same time, it can cause people to do things that aren't in the best interests of animals. All creatures, organisms etc experience life in wildly different ways, most of which we can't even comprehend! Their survival is also so different than ours, birds experience a high rate of predation so making it to adulthood is really a miracle and that a bird could survive a long off-course flight or a boat ride foraging for bugs and spiders is pretty amazing. Do birds experience loneliness? I don't know that we'll ever find that out.
Not long after that discussion, a book I placed on hold came up at the library and it felt like perfect timing - An Immense World by Ed Yong He talks to all sorts of people who study animal behaviors and senses to give us an idea of what it's like to experience the world with senses that are tuned differently than ours. I highly recommend it. Not long after that was available another hold popped up(why do all the library holds always become available at the same time??) - Togetherness by Rowan Hooper how symbiosis plays a part in so much of the existence on this planet which we humans have really thrown out of balance.
It's been a big year for some birds around here and there seems to be a big influx of Clark's Nutcrackers. They can be an interruptive species when they spread out looking for cone crops. I first experienced these birds last summer in the Wallowas where there are tons of them. When in groups they are incredibly loud and also very cute. They remind me of this interconnectedness in that they are incredible foresters. They hide tens of thousands of pine nuts a year -50-80,000 across wide teritories. They have great spatial memories meaning they will remember where the majority of their food is cached. The ones they don't remember will often sprout up as trees. We're over here trying to remember where our keys are and these jays are just flying miles to go grab some snacks they stored for later.
Other than thinking about birds and nature, it's been a bit quieter month. I was going to do one last big backpacking trip of the year but a huge rain and windstorm was forecast for about 24 hours of it and it just seemed like a bad idea. I was disappointed because I had prepped all my food and packed and just had to bail at the last minute. I did do an overnight up on Mt Hood and got to enjoy the fall colors, hiking out as the sun set and the moon rose over the mountain.
I haven't felt motivated to make art much and had started this painting and didn't like how the water looked so I just kinda gave up on it. I finally finished it today and actually like it. I have to remind myself of a few things with paintings - it's all just practice so it's worth finishing regardless but also some paintings really don't come together until you've added in more details. This one looked so much better once I painted in the sea stacks and the rocks in the water. I'm hoping to do a few more paintings in October too.
