[*See the short film about and pre-order my new book: TOO HIGH TO FAIL*]
It was so quiet on my canyon run this morning that the wing thrusts of the resident courting ravens’ wings actually echoed as they dove. I heard each one distinctly twice. Always a good sign when it comes to emotional health — theirs and mine.
Watching the ravens and listening now to the also-echoing, also-passionately-in-love doves, I scanned the horizon, and indeed surveying all that I’ll vainly call “mine” from atop the impressive, hundreds-of-miles-across vista provided by the uppermost plateau the Funky Butte Ranch’s black diamond driveway (this is where the chairlift should let off), it was easy to choose, mindset-wise “Another post-Anasazi neo-Rugged Individualist in sync with the Cosmos” over, say, “So much neighbor feud evidence.” Both focal choices were options in every direction.
It helps what Bertie Wooster would call The Overall Outlook that this is still, though only just, the time of year in the high Land of Enchantment desert when I’m glad to see the sun is already up. There are still a couple of hours before non-optional siesta. Jogging back down to the morning goat-milking, the first light over the butte didn’t so much end nighttime as reveal land that operates (as every New Mexican knows) according to its own physics.
The conclusion I draw after a similar lesson pretty much every day for a thousand days in a row (sublesson: for the nineteenth Millennium in a row, nature once again provides a human the ultimate light show — today’s episode is spring light filtered trough new walnut and peach tree foliage) is that I prefer life not with no one whispering in my ear, just with hummingbirds and child song rather than, say, car alarms and ambulances doing the notifying. Or late night reality reruns.
Speaking of late night, the last sound I heard under strong evidence of intergalactic intelligence (lotta stars visible, is what I’m saying) yesterday was the Funky Butte Ranch great horned owls. They were likely nesting here above this ranch before people were. Or at least since the Anasazi honed the chert and obsidian tools whose flakes I’m always finding everywhere. My computer told me that successive generations of the long-lived species will occupy the same nest. This year’s chicks (there are two) are the great-great-great grandchildren of the batch from my first carnage-filled year. In fact, owl nest-clearing is quite the annual rite: I’ve seen terrified-then-soaring fledgling flying lessons every spring since I’ve lived on the Funky Butte Ranch.
I love being the interspecies newcomer. You can see the lifestyle sigh in the studiously scanning Strigidae eyes as I and my toddlers march loudly down to milk the goats every morning. In their day there was no singing. Just swooping. ‘Least the two-leggeds draw the squirrels to the front doorstep.
“Thank you for keeping the (garden-eating) ground squirrels in check,” we tell them whenever we think of it. Their Funky Butte cliff nest arches over the garden and orchard like the upper deck pub at a modern sports arena. Their hoots echo even on high wind days. It’s a major component in the rhythm section of the spring Funky Butte soundtrack.
Other than choosing to fence the obvious garden spot seven years ago (and thus turning sand to worm-crawling dank soil via goat poop), I don’t feed ‘em. The owls. They could live anywhere. But on my annual climb to their nest with my kids to say hi to this year’s family while, for homeschool biology class, collecting squirrel-bone-filled pellets (my oldest carried a magnifying glass), I was palpably appreciating a new facet of the blessing of this other family in what you might call our ground/air duplex. It was a reason beyond even their free, fairly comprehensive anti-rodent patrol (my neighbors have stuffed replicas perched on their garden gates, this being the desert version of the scarecrow). It was the fact that we have without fail got along since the moment of our arrival, when I had one and they six fewer rings on the generational family tree. These birds show that I can actually consistently coexist peacefully and even affectionately with any neighbors at all.
It’s thus all the more of a compliment that their home is so physically close to mine because with their vision and hearing (again, thanks Internet) we’re not just sharing a duplex. We’re sharing one with thin walls. I can see them from the porch, from the goat milkstand, from the second floor of my kids’ playhouse. They no doubt know my entire schedule. Even my outdoor clothes chest and bathing habits. Continue Reading »