by Annie Proulx
A few days later I went for an evening walk on the old property line road, keeping a quarter-mile distance between myself and the goldens. They came out but they did not call, just flew along the cliff, watching me. Near the end of the property another pair of goldens appeared, silent and flying rather low as though also checking me out. Suddenly the nest pair came roaring east along the cliff and drove the strange pair away. I could see them settling in a tree to the east. Perhaps they were nesting there. Six eagles in three pairs in the space of a mile.
The next morning one of the bald eagles and the prairie falcon had a sky-filling quarrel, the falcon darting, the eagle wheeling and swooping. The falcon suddenly disappeared. At noon the wind began to rise and in an hour it was lashing the cottonwoods. One of the bald eagles sat on a branch above the river watching for fish. The branch moved to and fro vigorously. With each lurch the eagle braced its tail against the branch like a woodpecker, and for some reason I found this endearing. Sometimes I thought of these birds as Evan Connell’s Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. The falcon flew around near the goldens’ part of the cliff. The big birds were not in sight. Something about the falcon’s busybody day bothered me. Was it looking for a nest site? In previous years they had nested at the far east end of the cliff near another pair of prairie falcons. Every bird a falcon came near seemed agitated.
Great blue-black clouds rolled in from the west and just at dusk I saw one raven slide into the lower level of the chimney. I was sure it was abandoning the old ledge nest site.
Sunny, warm, a little wind and the smell of spring. One of the balds waded in the river and caught something small. The goldens were on their high promontory. One hopped down eight or ten feet and seemed to be taking a dust bath, then it zoomed to the nest and sat on it for a few minutes. I noticed there were some new sticks protruding. In a few more minutes she (I am guessing) was back on the promontory. As the day ended the swollen buds of the cottonwoods seemed to have been sprayed with bronze. One of the balds drifted near the golden nest and was chased home for its trespass. A pair of Canada geese, the first this year, flew upstream. The sunlight went off the cliff at 5:33 and in its last flash I saw the elk in silhouette at the west end. The huge yellow colossus of crumbling stone held the light as the sky darkened. How many thousands of years had this scene repeated? The goldens made a last flight and the falcon appeared out of nowhere and flew at one threateningly, then slipped out of sight. The goldens headed for their chimney roost. Good night.
Early the next morning, the sun barely up, the bold little falcon was again harassing one of the goldens in the chimney. The golden flew off and came back in a few minutes with its mate. As usual, the falcon was no longer around. All day batches of noisy geese showed up. A few sunny days later one of the goldens fetched twigs to the big nest. Magpies walked along the edges of floating river ice picking up something. I went onto the island to see what they were eating but saw only a hatch of tiny black midges. Could the big, burly magpies be bothered with such minute prey? Why not, if grizzly bears grow fat on August moths? Two chickadees came to the woodpecker picnic that had failed to attract any woodpeckers. Woodpeckers preferred the side of the house or tree trunks. Geese and fast-flying ducks were arriving. It was a good flying day, and two bald eagles, two goldens and three ravens looped around the cliff. The usual crowd of grey-crowned rosy-finches gobbled seed.
Chickadees were rare at Bird Cloud. In Centennial dozens of mountain chickadees came to the feeder on the lee side of the house every day, but I almost never saw them at Bird Cloud. Of course Centennial was close to the forest and Bird Cloud was surrounded by open grazing land. The prevailing weather at Bird Cloud had, as its basic ingredient, a “whistling mane” of wind from the northwest. It built concrete snowdrifts in winter, in summer desiccated plants, hurled sand and gravel and dried clothes in ten minutes. The eagles, falcons and pelicans loved windy days and threw themselves into the sky, catching updrafts that took them to dizzying heights.
Why was it so windy at Bird Cloud? Elevation is a potent factor, so with the top of the cliff checking in at a little more than seven thousand feet above sea level the wind was almost never flat calm, and often like a collapsing mountain of air. We felt the Coriolis effect of the earth’s turning. The cliff itself directed the wind along its stony plane face as boaters coming down the river knew only too well. I wondered if this was Bernoulli’s principle, an increase in wind speed as the air is squeezed between the cliff and the tropopause, the atmospheric boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere five to ten miles overhead. The nearby mountain ranges of the Sierra Madre and Medicine Bow produce large amplitude gravity waves, wind shear and turbulence. And because vast tracts of land to the west were heavily grazed cow pastures unbroken by trees or shrubs, the wind could rush east unimpeded. And this, I found, rereading Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, was deadly for chickadees. “I know several wind-swept woodlots that are chickless all winter, but are freely used at all other seasons. They are wind-swept because cows have browsed out the undergrowth. To the steam-heated banker who mortgages the farmer who needs more cows who need more pasture, wind is a minor nuisance. . . . To the chickadee, winter wind is the boundary of the habitable world.” He adds the true note that “books on nature seldom mention wind; they are written behind stoves.”8
It was wind-produced snowdrifts on the county road that prevented me from living at Bird Cloud in winter. Yet I could appreciate the raptors’ elation when they rose to mad, tilting heights. And the wind is a giver of health and life, cleansing fetid pollution from the atmosphere and transporting countless seeds to new locations. Two billion years in the past blue-green algae and bacteria had pumped enough oxygen into the atmosphere to make the early ozone layer and shield life-forms from the savage ultraviolet sunlight. The ancient Ordovician wind carried the first land plant spores to barren and empty places, starting the fantastic unfolding of diversity in plant forms, leading to the first flowering plants roughly 140 million years ago and so on to more than 400,000 species today.
Fresh snow fell overnight and the rosy-finches had learned something from the chickadees. Now they were all fighting over the woodpecker picnic mix as rich suet held the seeds together. I wondered if something was dead at the west end top of the cliff. The goldens were up there, rising and falling, and the balds were there as well. I remembered several years earlier in Centennial when a deer got into our small herb garden, panicked by something, tried to squeeze through a six-inch space between fence slats and its broad chest got wedged in, the animal unable to escape. Whatever had frightened it tore out its heart, leaving the body still jammed in the fence. We dragged the carcass down into the willows. A pair of goldens found it within hours and in three days had eaten the entire deer. Now I hoped that whatever attracted the eagles was not one of the elk. I had not seen either for about a week. A little later one of the balds was back in its fishing tree and half a dozen whistler ducks flew over the house with one of the goldens right above them, maybe trying for a feathered jackpot.
As March came in the river deepened and widened. I could just hear the gurgling water from the house. A hawk that fit the description of a juvenile light-morph broad-winged hawk sat for an hour on the most northeasterly branch of the most easterly tree on the island. The head and bib were a dark, rufous brown, the underside pale. Chickadees, grey-crowned rosy-finches, ravens, bald eagles, goldeneyes and a few red-winged blackbirds, a pair of blue-winged teal and a solitary rough-legged hawk were livening up the wind. A few days later ducks and geese were everywhere. And, as I knew they would, the red-winged blackbirds took over the bird feeder. Their main meeting place was the willow thicket on the west end of the island, where hundreds jammed into the same clump, sang and sang and flashed their epaulets, then all flew away only to return and sing and flash again. The prairie falcon cruised back and forth in front of the cliff, its color so like that of the pale rock it was virtually invisible. A marmot showed up from somewhere—the remain
ing pile of lumber—and took up a station beneath the bird feeder, happy with the spilled seed that the red-wings dropped. Walking down at the east end of the property in a light rain I saw an unusually large marmot on the top of the cliff, peering down. A few hundred yards east I caught a glimpse of a burly coyote as it ducked out of sight. Both were oversize. With hindsight I thought the “marmot” really had been a mountain lion cub and the large “coyote” probably its mother, as I saw both cats at close range later in the spring.
One lovely warm afternoon the goldens were sunning themselves on the cliff top above their nest site. They flew outward, wheeled and returned to a projecting rock they favored. When they flew their shadows also flew along the cliff and it was not easy to sort out the birds from their shadows. The larger golden sat on the rock while the smaller, darker eagle did some fancy wing work, then glided down to its lover, presented it with something small, then mounted her. I had never seen a pair of eagles mate before.
Every day the place showed remarkable changes. The dull mud was inescapable. A few pale green rushes sprouted at the end of the island. The river grew larger and faster. One of the elk reappeared after a two-week absence. It, or they, may have been feeding on the back slope which could not be seen from the house. In midmonth a little burst of warm days cleared most of the ice out of the river. Falcons, ducks, geese, hawks and eagles sped in all directions, coming and going. I counted twenty mountain bluebirds and knew there was a housing shortage. But the ravens, harassed mercilessly by the prairie falcons, abandoned their old nest site. I was left with only the memory of the previous year when four young ravens teetered, flapped, and finally pushed off from the home nest late one afternoon to try their wings.
It had been Memorial Day weekend with friends and relatives and one of the season’s first thunderstorms was moving in. The young ravens fluttered and hopped, clung and dropped, flew short distances, always close to the cliff face with its thousand crannies. We watched them with pleasure, but their hopping and unpracticed flying also attracted the attention of every other bird in the vicinity. The bald eagles, red-tailed hawks, the falcon circled or chose high perches suitable for diving attacks. The great horned owls hooted from the island. The storm came on inexorably, dropping first a few splattering drops, then sheets of cold rain that drowned our campfire. I was sure the young ravens were done for. They could not seem to get back to the nest ledge and huddled on narrow shelves or exposed knobs of rock. With sadness we went inside, dreading what the morning would bring. Would any of them survive the waiting predators? Would the storm batter them?
The dawn showed off one of those fragrant, polished days so rare in Wyoming, windless and fresh-washed. We all rushed to the cliff with binoculars wondering if any of the young birds had survived. “I see one!” someone called and then another came into the sunlight from its hiding hole, rather damp and bedraggled. The last two joined them from some cranny and there they all were, preening in the sun, smart and sassy and very much alive. They spent the day practicing evasive flying and I didn’t worry about them any longer. But now that was only a memory. In 2007, thanks to the prairie falcons, there would be no young ravens.
An early morning walk on the island brought me face-to-face with a great horned owl two feet away in a willow thicket. So strange. The left eye was brilliant yellow, the right one a rusty brown, very likely from an injury. It fled into a cottonwood and stayed there all day. Now migrating birds flew over constantly, following the river. One afternoon there were six golden eagles on their way to somewhere else but unable to resist playing in the air currents above the cliff. Mallards, mergansers and dippers arrived, then black scoters, a pair of northern flickers, a northern harrier and a single western meadowlark. I found identifying ducks rather difficult because of their various color stages and fast movements. They are also very skittish and high-flying. The river, fed by rapid snowmelt, continued to rise and on the nineteenth of March it was high enough to swing Uphill Bob’s bridge onto the island shore, cutting it off from the mainland. The warm days continued, worrisome because everything was drought dry. A forecast for rain brought nothing. When it finally did fall it made the roads into an icy, slippery mush.
One of the Canada geese, no doubt thinking itself clever, built a nest high up on the east end of the cliff, not far from the peregrine falcon nest. I wondered if this was the same foolish goose that had built a nest in the top of a tall tree and open to the sky the year before between the golden eagle nest and the prairie falcons. She and her mate lost all their chicks to predators and had to try again, this time with a nest on the ground beneath the tree and the male standing guard.
In late March a winter storm moved in for a day and a night. Despite the snow and wind a flock of horned larks gleaned seed among the sage and rabbitbrush. The prairie falcon roared down out of nowhere and the larks exploded into fleeing rockets. Other carnivorous birds, especially the bluebirds, sat dejectedly on the fences waiting for spring. When the storm sailed away it left a foot of fresh snow. At the cold sunrise there was a heavy fog over the river which expanded and blotted out the sun. Beneath the snow the ground was wet, half-frozen mud. Just to have someplace to walk I drove the truck back and forth in the driveway, flattening the snow. It seemed to me that the house site was a combination gravel pit, mud slide, snow bowl and wind tunnel.
The snow turned the black metal ravens on the gateposts into magpies. About fifty horned larks were huddled in the sparse shelter of sagebrush plants and crouched in clusters in the driveway. Horned larks, wrote Charles H. Trost in Sibley’s Behavior, need open ground. They like overgrazed pasture which no doubt makes Wyoming attractive to them.9 Their hind claws are very long. And like other larks they give fine aerial displays as both sexual attractants and territorial claims. But there were no aerial displays after the storm. A few red-backed dark-eyed juncos showed up, their feathers extravagantly fluffed out against the cold. A few purple finches and mountain chickadees joined them. The red-winged blackbirds divided up, the males at the feeders eating seeds, the females at the woodpecker picnic getting the suet as well as the seeds—building up strength for egg laying? I could not tell if the golden eagle was on its nest. The rim of the nest was white with snow.
April came in windy and warm. On a walk to the east end I found a dead osprey on the ground, its grey feet curled in an empty grasp. There was no way to tell what had brought it to its death. There were so many jealous and territorial birds around—within half a mile two pairs of goldens, red-tailed hawks, one pair of peregrine falcons, and a little farther west the raven family and the fierce prairie falcons—that any one of them might have seen the osprey as an interloper. Spring is the time for death. A calf carcass washed up on the island to the delight of the magpies and perhaps the eagles.
I was not sure of the timing of the bald eagles’ family life. They had started fixing up their huge nest, a task that can go on for several months, in December. It looked to be more than six feet across. But I suspected there were young in the nest the first week in April, mostly because I saw one of the bald eagles vigorously chasing a red-tailed hawk nearby. The hawk had been patrolling the western section of cliff for several days past. That would put the eagles’ egg laying in the last week of February or the first week of March. The female lays two or three eggs over a period of about a week. Both eagles take turns brooding the eggs though the females do more of this duty than the males, both have brood patches on their bellies, bare, hot skin that rests directly on the eggs. On a warm, sunny day both parents can take a little break. Whoever is not on the eggs rustles food. Incubation takes thirty-five days, more or less. Once the young eagles have hatched, exhausting work begins. If the weather is still cold one of the parents stays with the babies and keeps them warm. When the spring sun beats down hot and fierce the parent eagles transform themselves into wide-wing umbrella shades. In the early days the male was kept busy finding and bringing food to the nest, four to eight times a day. After the first few weeks t
he female hunted as well, and in the late stages of nestling rearing the mother did most of the hunting. (I assumed the larger bird was the female, according to the ornithological books.)
The eagles fought and chased red-tailed hawks away from the nest day after day. I was sure there were fledglings in the nest. But I was gone for two weeks and missed all the action. When I got back the third week in April the American white pelicans had arrived, big knobs on their beaks showing it was breeding time in their world. The pelicans were fabulous fliers and on windy days put on astonishing exhibitions of soaring and diving. One of the sad things about Wyoming was the ignorant fishermen who shot pelicans because they believed the birds would eat all the fish, leaving nothing for them. That first spring at Bird Cloud I was appalled by all the big, fluffy white carcasses that floated down the river. Fortunately there were none in subsequent years.
When I returned from a trip to Ireland in the middle of May, the air was stitched with hundreds and hundreds of swallows. Several persistent rough-winged swallows, remembering the kindness of the James Gang the summer before, tried to build nests in the house eaves. I found a dead pelican at the end of the island, the head completely gone, no other sign of injury. Gerald remarked that it was the habit of cats to eat the head first. I did not think the mountain lion would bother with a pelican or, if it did, restrict its dinner to the head. But a well-placed shot with a large-caliber rifle, or a shotgun could have blown the head off. To reduce the number of porcupine dens I started piling up dead wood and fallen branches on the island, planning to have a bonfire on a rainy day. There was plenty of undisturbed room for them on the other side of the river. A tiny, dark house wren had found the wren-size birdhouse on the island and was moving in, carrying twigs not much larger than toothpicks and wisps of dead grass.
