March 2010 Archives

A little bit of time east of it, too, actually, but for a week, Dad, Ian and I spent most of our time in the territory once controlled by Judge Roy Bean.  On March 13th, the three of us flew to Houston, met at the airport, and took a flight to Midland, TX, which sits in the Permian Basin.  The Basin is east of the Pecos, close to the southeast corner of New Mexico, and it contains... well, if you consider the underground area, it contains oil. Lots of it. This is good, certainly if you happen to own the land above it, because other than oil, there's just not much else around:

It took me only a few bewildered moments of driving around to realize that aboveground, the towns of Midland and Odessa, which have a human population of 200,000 people, have essentially nothing that wasn't either built or planted by a human being. This is the view out the back of our hotel:

You got your sagebrush, and you got your prickly pear, and you got your occasional scrubby plant (a cane cholla or a mesquite bush, maybe), but otherwise, you're talking several hundred square miles of nuthin'. Since humanity arrived to suck the oil out of the basin, the scenery has altered a bit, so that now you got your sagebrush, your prickly pear, your occasional scrubby plant, and lots and lots and lots of oil pumps, power lines, and windmills:

Luckily, we weren't there for the Permian Basin scenery, but for its convenient location: close enough to New Mexico for me to pop in and log a life bird there, a goal I'd failed to reach on my last trip to the state in 2008, but also (relatively) close to our main goal for the trip, Big Bend National Park.

Our first stop after crossing the Pecos was Roswell, legendary in cryptoscientific literature for the events of 1947, when reports of a flying saucer crash were issued from the nearby Air Force base. The reports were quickly altered into reports of a downed weather balloon, but the area has never been able to shake off the ensuing rumors about coverups, conspiracies, alien wreckage, and even extraterrestrial corpses. The town of Roswell, recognizing that there's not much else to draw tourists to southeast New Mexico, especially now that the base has closed, eventually come to celebrate its peculiar notoriety, sometimes in subtle ways (such as in the name of one strip mall: The Landings at Roswell) and sometimes in more blatant ways:

While I was in town, I snagged Kelly a UFO-bedecked t-shirt with "BELIEVE" printed on it in a not-quite-similar-enough-to-Fox-Mulder's-poster-to-get-sued way, but the main draw of the area for me was the presence of Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge just outside of town. Located in the Pecos Valley (on the western side, if you're wondering), the refuge attracts birds of all sorts, including waterfowl galore, hawks, blackbirds, and even Sandhill Cranes. Sadly, we were there just a few days too late for the hordes of cranes and Snow Geese that had wintered there, and though Dad and I had made a cursory scan of the lakes just before sunset the night before, we'd seen only a handful of cranes, a huge mob of blackbirds being harassed by a pair of Marsh Hawks, and a lot of pleasantly damp scenery--no life birds for me.

We returned the next morning, when the weather was cold, rainy, windy, and generally uninviting, and the volunteers in the visitors center were not optimistic about birding for the day. I did, however, spot a couple of odd-looking sparrows under the seed feeder outside the center, one of which had a freakish brick-red undercarriage--its undertail coverts looked like they'd been dragged through the red clay of North Carolina. I couldn't find any such sparrow in my National Geographic or Peterson field guides, and I cursed myself for not picking up a Sibley guide to western birds before the trip. (I own only the eastern Sibley, and I have gradually found myself relying on it as my primary field guide.)

I tugged myself away from the feeder (which was easy to do thanks to the 40-degree temperature and howling wind) and jumped back in our rented Buick Enclave for a slow traverse around the lakes. We saw plenty of ducks, blackbirds, and harriers, as well as a trio of Red-shafted Flickers, but nothing new to me. I was getting pretty frustrated after an hour or so, and after a particularly chilly stop at a "blind" that offered us neither protection from the elements nor invisibility to the ducks, I was ready to call it quits: if Dad and Ian wouldn't mind stopping at the center's feeder one more time so I could try to nail down that weird sparrow, I'd be ready to call off the birding for the day.

We rumbled back to the center and I jumped back into the breeze, while Dad and Ian hunkered down in the car. My binoculars revealed the feeder's most common seed-eater (and the Southwest's, as best I could tell), the White-crowned Sparrow, but nothing odd. I sighed, resigned to having been defeated by New Mexico yet again.

It was at that moment when something caught wind of me--or perhaps sight of me--and panicked. I saw rapid motion, not through my binoculars, but in my peripheral vision, and whipped my head right in time to see four birds rushing across the ground at a frantic pace, their chickenish, head-bobbing motion helping to defeat their ultimate purpose of seeking cover in the brush. They split quickly into two pairs for ease of concealment, but by now I could see their crests, cottony white and wagging in the breeze, as well as their blue-grey plumage. These were life birds: my first Scaled Quails.

Amused and not a little relieved, I returned to the car, plunked myself down, and announced that Goal One had been met: I had my New Mexico lifer. In fact, I had two: as Dad drove back to town, I flipped through my Peterson and realized that the strangely colored "sparrow" under the feeder had actually been a Canyon Towhee; its rusty undertail coverts are not mentioned in its entry, but they are mentioned in the one about the formerly conspecific California Towhee. Basking in the warmth of the Enclave and the glow of accomplishment, I found the damp scenery amusing and interesting, and as we reached downtown Roswell and the grassy lawns of the New Mexico Military Institute, I was perfectly happy watching the various birds of the region's built-up areas: White-winged Doves, Great-tailed Grackles, and the ubiquitous Rock Pigeons. In fact, there was a largish white one on the grass of the football field beside the car, crouching protectively over its prey.

Prey?

The white plumage was accompanied by two rusty thighs, and the dead animal held in its talons gave me the final clue I needed to recognize the bird as a Ferruginous Hawk--lifer number three for the morning.

As best I can tell, then, New Mexico may play hard to get, but once she succumbs to your blandishments, she is the most generous of lovers.

TO BE CONTINUED




9:22 AM

I'm back from a week West of the Pecos, traveling through southeast New Mexico and the Big Bend territory of Texas.

And I'm here to tell you, folks, I have never been more appreciative of the plant life in my home region.

More later, but here's a quick pic of where I've been:


Talk to you soon. I'm going to go enjoy the chlorophyll.


8:34 AM

Sunday's trip in and around Blackwater NWR on Maryland's Eastern Shore was a good one, not just because of my first Long-tailed Duck, but because of a wide variety of other cool birds, good company, and quality steamed shrimp from the Portside restaurant in Cambridge.

My friends Nick and Ginger joined me on this excursion after our original trip was snowed out at the end of January; alas, that meant that we missed the hordes of Snow Geese that winter at Blackwater, but we did see plenty of other stuff:


Our lodgings for Saturday night. I have my doubts about that sign, since I'm assuming that a nuclear explosion would probably reduce the amount of concern felt by the Days Inn staff about my wake-up call.

Below is the scene that confronted us just about everywhere in the area: skillions of Canada Geese:


The refuge claims to host 500 Tundra Swans during the winter. I believe we saw each of them individually:


A pair of Great Blue Herons getting an early start on nesting season:


Well, okay, we got ONE Snow Goose. He had a broken left wing and was hanging out with the Canadas near the refuge HQ while awaiting the wildlife rescue & rehab people:



Our biggest surprise was the out-of-his-range White Pelican sitting out in the middle of one impoundment. I'd seen them in Florida and Iowa, but never anywhere close to the Chesapeake. Here you'll see him with an immature Bald Eagle:

 
Here they are after Young Mr. Eagle has taken wing and flown a little too close for Mr. Pelican's liking:


And last but not least, this handsome devil:



3:33 PM

Sorry I don't have time for a longer post just this minute--too much to grade, too much driving to do--but I thought y'all might at least enjoy the crappy picture below of my latest life bird: the Long-tailed Duck (nee Oldsquaw), photographed just off the bridge to Hooper's Island on Maryland's Eastern Shore on 3/7/10 following a highly enjoyable morning of teeming swans, incontinent eagles, injured geese, displaced pelicans, and many, many hours in the car.



Back soon!


9:24 AM

I've been a feminist since the days when I wasn't even functionally male. Sure, I grew up in a household where Dad was the major breadwinner and Mom the main homemaker, but there was never any suggestion that this was an arrangement handed down from On High. If anything, it was a simple recognition that their respective skill sets gave the family more financial security and much better meals than the reverse would have done. (Dad's pretty good at breakfast, but Mom's roast beef hash and "greaseless" pork chops gave her the edge there.) Moreover, Mom was a charter subscriber to Ms. Magazine, which I often flipped through, usually ignoring the big stories about workplace harassment and abortion rights and dialing in on cartoons and the "Stories for Free Children" section. I spent a lot of time listening to Marlo Thomas's Free to Be... You and Me album, especially the sketch where Marlo and Mel Brooks played newborn babies attempting to figure out their sexes ("Tomorrow morning, the one that needs a shave, he's a boy.") When I started reading Doonesbury, I immediately considered Joanie Caucus a completely sympathetic character, and her attempts to find meaning in her life outside the proscribed role of homemaker made perfect sense to me.

Obviously, having a mother who was fiercely intelligent and thoughtful about her role in the wider world made an impression on me, but I should also note that I never... never... heard my father generalizing about women. There were never any locker-room comments about how girls were or ought to be. I was supposed to treat them courteously, that was for sure, and Dad did set me up with a remarkably cute blind date once, but that was done because she was the daughter of a visiting friend, not just as an attempt to hook me up with The Hotness or something. As far as my folks were concerned, women were people and that was that.

When I eventually found the woman for me, then, it's not surprising that she considered herself a person and that was that. She went by Ms., was pursuing her college degree, and told me about her own mother's complex role in her life. (Ruth was a traditional homemaker for over twenty years, but when Kelly's dad had a debilitating heart attack, she decided it was time to go back to school and get her pharmacy degree; she was actually in school at UNC at the same time as Kelly for a while.) I found myself surprised and delighted and occasionally bewildered by some of the gender differences that I was now confronting in a direct and daily fashion, but most of them made perfect sense. Of course when we married, Kelly would keep her own name. Naturally she'd work outside the home. We were partners, working together, equal in all things.

I mention all this to be clear: when it comes to gender issues, I am enlightened nearly to the point of incandescence. I was a Sensitive New Age Guy before there was a New Age, and even with 15 years' experience at an all-boys school, I remain as appreciative of and sympathetic toward the female experience as any straight male I know.

But there is one item in the male/female dynamic that remains, to me, utterly baffling. It's become a cliche, too, and that makes it an even more difficult area to discuss rationally.

I speak of the toilet seat.

The stereotype is that we men come barging in like neanderthals and callously, inconsiderately leave the seat up so that our women will then risk falling to their dooms in the abyss. Our failure to put the seat down is read by some women as an act of support for the Patriarchy. Meanwhile, some on the male side of the divide (including Dodge Motors' advertising agency) see the act of putting the seat down as some form of emasculation, one so horrific that the only possible compensation for it is spending thousands of dollars on a big metal prosthetic penis.

This is just stupid, folks.

I believe that I have a responsibility to my wife (and anyone else who may use our bathroom): Not to Pee on the Seat. That is the reason why the seat can be raised, after all. If not, it would be permanently fixed to the top of the bowl. I consider the expectation that I Not Pee on the Seat an eminently reasonable one, and I am therefore extremely scrupulous about raising the seat before I unleash Number One all over the place. I feel it's the least I can do.

But I see absolutely no reason why I should also be expected to LOWER the seat again.

Look, when it comes to elimination, women are not stupid. (Okay, there are a few exceptions. But generally they don't get to come to my house.) They know when they approach a toilet whether the seat is up or not; they do not back into the bathroom from the doorway. The supposed danger of falling in is non-existent.

The toilet seat is not a device that women operate less effectively than men; women are perfectly adept with tools ranging from hammers to whisks to laser pointers to scalpels, just as men are. The toilet seat is not a device intended exclusively for males; it appears in both men's and women's rooms, as well as unisex bathrooms, indicating that it is intended for use by both sexes. And the toilet seat is not unsanitary, at least not in any meaningful way; why should you fear putting your hands on something that you're about to rub with your naked butt?

In short, I expect any woman to be able to handle the responsibility of lowering the seat just as I handle the responsibility of raising it. For me to do otherwise would be to adopt a patronizing position that I feel cannot be supported by logic, courtesy, or the demands of equality, and I simply will not do that to half the population of Planet Earth. I consider the necessity of lowering a raised seat or raising a lowered one a small price to pay for a greater understanding between men and women and a fuller appreciation of our shared humanity. We shouldn't let underperforming automakers use it as a wedge to drive us apart.

Right, honey?

Honey? I love you.

And the seat IS dry.


10:40 AM