There is a kind of owl whisperer at Lake Claremont. I see her fairly often, and we have become kind of colleagues. She has rescued barn owls from the water, and from the attack of crows. She has no qualms about picking them up, or throwing something over them if only it will help. She’s been scratched and harassed in the process—by crows, magpies and owls. She looks for them, and finds them, amongst the trees beyond the edges of the lake; she tells me where, and sometimes I can see them too—like the tawny frogmouths to the east, or the barn owls to the north west in recent years. She tells me about other ones today. I look and look and cannot find them; not like she finds them, and they find her. And yes, she does (with no negative judgment intended) slightly resemble one.
Category Archives: Nature Poetry
Rivers Becoming
I take a walk today out where one river becomes another, both ways. I start at the Derbarl Yerrigan Swan River side and walk upstream, levels still pretty low somewhere near mid-winter flow. I follow it up the bank, northern side, hopping a granite rock or two; 10-o’clock flowers coming out, moorhens, galahs, shelducks, black ducks, egrets, herons, fantails, balgaz, tuarts, melaleucas, zamias, casuarinas; kangaroos at Walyunga—where it turns into the Guggleyar Avon—water bubbling, guggle-yarrin. Then I turn back around, following the water as it flows.
Noticing also, on the valley walls—especially south side—the many dead trees. It looks like the red and orange of northern hemisphere fall…though without a springtime coming.
Back to the Lake
Back to the lake today after five weeks of being away: USA away. And the thing I especially note are the bardoongooba—the Australian shovelers—tipping themselves 90 degrees to reach what they need to reach down there—most likely grasses—orange legs kicking in the air; the lake at 1.2 metres.
Elk
In a half-asleep, half-awake daze of driving away from the Salmon River, Idaho, after five days, we come up over a rise and see a whole country spread out before us, early evening. And then, off by the edge of the road on the other side, a mother elk and young, which is one thing, but how my cousin reacted was what I noticed most. He hunts them at another time of year, shoots them with bow and arrow. Something about the way he saw them that struck me. Some other kind of connection.
Lower Salmon, Nimíipuu Country
We have just rafted the Salmon and Snake Rivers, Idaho, Nimíipuu Country. There may be too much to say: Bald eagles, big-horn sheep, hawks, osprey, a salmon, mother bear and cub bathing in the river, waterfalls flowing in, quick rapids, longer slower stretches, turkeys, pidgeon-like chukkers, rocky-grassy steep hills all around, scrubby bushes and ponderosa, sun and rain, killdeer (plovers), something like an avocet, starlings, robins, night hawks, bats, rising fish, alto and cumulus and cirrus, blackberries, magma rock columns vertical and horizontal, later sandstone, white sandy beaches each night we camp on, poison ivy and scraggly bushes. Five days. All pulled by on the arms of my cousin and his wife…and those of the river.
Arches
We drive the drives and walk some of the trails of Arches National Monument, Utah; the red-rock forms looking all watery—sculpted by water and wind—resembling the wet-sand castles you might make at a beach; many arch-like forms, the spaces beneath worn away. Close up, the sand is a fine, dusty red. In one spot—a kind of mini canoyn—we take our shoes off and feel it warm and soft between our toes, so dry. Later, we are staying in a hotel-motel in nearby Moab, the Colorado River flowing close by—a kind of marshy floodplain wetland to the west. And as soon as that sun sets, whole clouds of mosquitos come flooding in, ravenous—beings of too much life, too much wet…with the dry, side-by-side.
Pagosa Hot Springs
By the side of the San Juan River flowing cold and spring-summer-melt fast in Pagosa Springs, we walk past the nearby sulphurous foul-egg-smelling scents of the hot springs by the road and river’s edge. The hot, steaming water runs from out the side of the bank above the river, flowing from one shallow, hard-rock pool to another. There are about five pools, seemingly man-made or assisted, in which we sit with grey sediment and test the temperatures—the top one’s very hot, the next one not so bad, and then eventually a spot opens up in the ones right by the river’s edge where we can lean against the flat rocks and find a spot that feels just right, goldilocks-like, between the heat of the slowly-flowing spring, tricking in, and the cold, once-mountainous water of the river’s edge, with only a semi-porous wall of rocks between.
To Santa Fe
Drive Taos to Santa Fe New Mexico. After the sharp peaks of Colorado, and the tall sharp Ponderosa pines, here we find the slightly rounder peaks of high desert, and the more rounded Juniper pines; everything dryer, more worn down; softer rocks? We find a cold spring by the Rio Grande while looking for a hot one. And as usual the clouds build up more cumulus in the afternoon.
St Louis Valley
Driving down through Gunnison, Colorado, then through a small valley with creek and red rock walls, over Buffalo Pass and eventually into the wide St Louis Valley—a rift valley, like the ones we have flown over recently in Africa. We stop at a roadside hot springs and sit in the almost boiling water, and look out at the desert with mountains behind. We pass through towns like Moffat and Crestone; drive by some piles of clear white sand at the foothills to the mountains. And all the while I can feel the opening-up-ness of the valley, the water, its springs. Amidst the industrial junk and flatness, there is a life—a watery life—ripped open and springing up still. We pass on to the Rio Grade Gorge, with its bridge, beyond the Taos Earthships. Down down into the valley we look, and see that water—more water—flowing out, and down, and on. Mexico on.
Crested Butte Circlings
Summertime Crested Butte, Colorado, some 22 years since I was last here working on a winter ski lift. And I have never seen it like this: snow only on the upper peaks, while down here near the base, and on the way to the old T-bar lift, all that lay beneath wintertime snow (and even springmelt) is now revealed, bright and shining green: long, tall grasses; aspens white truncked with round flickering and flitting green-to-gray leaves; dandelions large stemmed and leaved, rising to a big yellow flower or cosmic cluster of seed; yarrow stretching off along the ground in an infinite number of indentations like a rivery floodplain or liver system; small blue birds sitting on ropes courses; new trenches where they’re improving things along the line of lift. And then from slightly down the mountain I spy somethign dark against the pale blue of Sunday morning sky, gliding, rising, slowly circling, wider and wider, higher and higher—some kind of raptor—hawk maybe, brown mostly, circling up from out of the aspens, until here’s directly overhead, and the red of his tail is obvious. He circles around us standing on this one piece of open ground above the old T-bar and the nearby lift; round and round above us he circles, not flapping, merely gliding, not rising, just circling in the morning light; sun above, slightly to the north and east, rising ever higher over us, over the circling red tail, over that butted peak of the rocky mountain looking down. And we stand there in that circling moment, together, until we begin to move, or he does—circling off towards the west, and is gone.
John Stubley 