The Plebe Spews

if the previous night was a splendorific stroll down memory (billy) lane, then last nights' was a balls-out jaunt to the isle of perspiration.

snowshoeing in late march...especially when temperatures stay above freezing...is a chore. one is always kicking ones' tips free of snow, one is always picking ones' ass up off the ground, one is always questioning ones' journey.

the true advantage of traveling solo is that no one can laugh at any of my splayed plights.

on thursday night, i moved like an aging fullback (albeit with 36" snowshoes strapped to his feet) 1.5 miles along an old road where, last year, i had lag-bolted 5 nest boxes onto the boles of unsuspecting trees.

to refresh the unrefreshed...most of the 96 boxes i hung last year were hung after the owl breeding bacchanalia of "ought-five" had subsided, but before black flies and mosquitos and blue man group ruled the earth. in the tizzy of all those boxes, i was able to document the sound knee cartilage makes when it surrenders in its battle against a fat and inflexible man and later, recorded the precise moment when i realized hanging all those boxes might be a large waste of personal time.

oh, and i found a moose antler.

the decision to place five boxes along the abandoned road was borne of whimsy, not biology. i had never heard a boreal there before but had always liked the look of the place: diverse forests butting up against the bee-dub wilderness. no, wait a minute...make that: diverse but young forests...the whole area had been ahhh...what's the silvicultural word for deforestation???...oh i know...purified...over the last 30 years.

yeah...purified.

i arrived at the most distant box at sunset, dripping wet after the trek through 2 feet of corn snow. at first, i couldn't get my gps unit turned on so the location of any box, let alone all five, was locked within the electronics of my "navigational unit" (i like the sound of that). when it finally whirred to life (i.e. my navigational unit), i found all five boxes.

as fate and this narrative would have it...all five boxes were empty.

my navigational unit works fine. thank-you.

but you know what? all is okay because it's still early in the season and as i type, the saw-whets are moving through the north woods like nocturnal starlings, my first round of surveys is over, i am...at least for today...no longer sleep-deprived, it's time to start thinking about my garden, another summer with nikky is drawing near, and my attitude is good.

come to think of it...i didn't need that cartilage anyways.

what i did need though, was the boreal owl to sing for me at the end of the stream and the alder and the black spruce two nights ago.

an owl song changes everything for an owler.

the male boreal sings quietly, but without urgency. his song is uncluttered and pure, soothing all the things that have made me an owler. i listen between bouts for a response from a female but hear nothing.

on the land below this knob of bedrock, a saw-whet sings.

the boreal moves overhead again and for several minutes bounces between jack pine and white pine. my head moves as though watching a tennis match.

i cannot imagine the boreal being alone. his forest is untouched and unadalterated. when he sings, his song carries for miles. surely somewhere, a female hears his nocturnal voice. if she is near though, she is reclusive and reluctant.

deep within my parka, immobility begins to take its toll. my toes move reflexively to offset the wet and now, the cold of the organic stream. after an hour and a half, i refasten my snowshoes and follow the tracks that have just led me to the springtimes and nights of my past.

caught on the cusp of twilight and darkness, i experience owler anxiety. across a small draw, another protected stand of aspen is visible. the internal debate is short but heated.

"that stand looks better."
"no it doesn't."
"yes it does."
"no it doesn't."

experience tells me that either stand could have harbored the owl a decade ago, but things have changed.

i cannot move to what i cannot hear.

and so, i pull my down parka out of its cocoon and wait.

the approach of night during the moonless nights of march means immersion in metamorphosis. nature is coming alive.

you see it. you smell it. you hear it.

the boreal sings from the spruce on the journey to his cavity tree. he flies directly overhead to a large white pine and his courtship song begins.

i do not have to move.

in this stand, in this patch of the boreal forest, everything, for one evening is as it always has been.

from the road the channel is well defined, cutting through the sedges and rushes on its slow meander to the north. its banks rise above the ice and snow, exposing rich, black organic earth where the sun has loosened winter's grip.

it is still an hour before darkness, but moving along the stream during daylight means only one half of my journey will be made with the tunnel vision of a headlamp.

i move easily until the alders choke the stream. the ground is free of vegetation in the black spruce, but moving there means the expansiveness, the exhileration of the fading day will be lost and subsequent movements would occur in a world of claustrophobic green. the decision to continue fighting the alder is easy.

the temperature is cold enough and the snow compact enough that my snowshoes stay atop the earth. when my foot breaks through the ice though, i pause, wondering if it is in water. when i feel the cold moving down my boot liner, my hesitation, my pondering, suddenly seem foolish.

this stream through the wetland and the alder has been traveled often this winter. moose, fox, and marten tracks tell the story of winter's pursuits and escapes and of both purposeful and aimless journeys.

i have waited 2 years for a night such as this.

as i rise out of the spruce, jack pine and white pine stand tall, guarding the weaklings of the forest, the aspen. this clone has been protected well and i know that my 3/4 mile journey has placed me where i need to be.

this, afterall, is where the boreal owl will sing.

the boreal owl i heard before surveys was at it again last night. a singing fool doing its thing for a listening fool. it has been nearly two weeks since i last heard him and i was beginning to wonder if he was still around.

ohhh...he's around.

it turns out he was not conveniently located near a nest box, as i had whimsically hoped for, but instead is inland, protected by acres of windfall and hazel. i'll visit him soon, because that is what i do, but i need to finish up the first round of surveys before the calendar turns to april.

it was a specatular evening. no clouds, calm intermixed with some gusts, and cold. it was a bit more owly than the night before, but nothing that would leave me in open-mouthed amazement. a boreal, a great gray, saw-whets up the wazoo, all bookended by silence.

blast from the past.....

when: 26 march 1989
where: gunflint route
what: 45.5 miles surveyed
owls heard: 9 boreals, 3 barreds, 1 saw-whet, 1 great-horned

the owls pulled a bait and switch on the owlman. they got me all excited about the developing spring, then sent me up the arrowhead trail for 5 hours of dead silence.

they are probably gular fluttering just thinking about it.

if thursday meant 5 boreal forest owl species, friday meant none. feast and famine. ebb and flow. yin and yang.

owling.

of course, the weather was less than cooperative but conditions were within my long-ago established "requirements", so to not survey would have meant a night of healthy food and deep sleep, albeit a night spent in my garbage home (my computer monitor is around here _somewhere_!!!!).

i have loathed surveys along the arrowhead trail for about a decade now. in fact, in 1992, i avoided them completely; so sure was i that owls had been removed from the landscape by a combination of feller buncher, toxic herbicide applications (thank _you_ dnr), and owler exhaustion. then, a few years ago, the land barons opened up their zoning pamphlets and found they could make lots of ka-ching through subdivisions and things like dog kennels and abandoned recreational vehicles started popping up crocuses.

next thing you know, cops will be filmed as it happens from hovland...

but, i need to do it and so last night i again made the trip from hovland to mcfarland lake, then over to the asphalted security of the gunflint trail.

it was another "get drunk and go fast night" on the snowmobile trails, but other than that, i spent most of my time soaking up the silence. well silence and all those fricking dogs. does anyone like the sound of barking dogs? no wait a minute...make that the sound of 30 barking and howling dogs, compounded by the canine domino effect that when one kennel starts up, every kennel within ear-shot starts up.

one other question: what do they do with all that dog shit?

no saw-whets. lotsa mutts.

okay, so i'm tired and i'm not sure but i have probably already broached this subject in previous episodes. but i'm tired and i'm not sure but.......dang.

so no owls last night. that's okay though, because my first round of surveys are nearly complete and i have already experienced most of the representative acoustics of the nocturnal, avian predator community one would expect to find in minnesota's boreal forest.

and...i'm done with the arrowhead for a few nights.

whew!!!!

the last time i heard a boreal owl during surveys was the middle of march,
2004. that was about 650 miles...1300 stops...or...to put it in an owl
context...around 730 saw-whets ago.

...yadda yadda yadda...

the boreal then was an owl soon to be emotionally abused by a group of
overzealous birders who placed their needs above the needs of a male owl who
truly, just wanted to breed. those events dramatically changed my approach
to what i do...and when it comes to owls...who i do it with.

let me put it this way: it only took one drunken snowmobiler to create an
indelible stereotype for me about all the rest of the drunken snowmobilers.

even back in "ought-four", i had no idea that i was about to enter a spring-and-a-half of boreal owl-less nights. ohhhh, i had pronounced hunches it would occur, but even after it happened i remained in a state of disbelief.

last night, a stones' throw from the canadian border, i stopped my vehicle
and listened to the song of a boreal owl. it was welcome. it was unexpected.

his song carried over the song of a saw-whet and moved atop the frozen
surface of a lake, and flowed like plasma in my veins.

he was either a 1/2 mile from me, or 3 miles. i couldn't tell and i guess it really didn't matter.

an owl song after so much silence.

owl and owler...

there's a scene in dumb and dumber, where lloyd and harry wake up in the flatlands of nebraska, thinking they're in colorado. lloyd looks around and in a state of disbelief says "john denver's full of shit, man."

that's kind of my approach to weather forecasts. a dart at a dart board. best guess wins. not even close.

take last night, for instance. winds were forecast to decrease to a tolerable (i.e., survey-able) level after sunset and so i went through my fleece ritual, then my headlamp ritual, then my empty calorie ritual. by the time i was inland though, it was obvious i was wasting my time. the treetops were bent to the ground and topsoil from saskatchewan was stinging my eyes.

i waited a while, ate a few more donuts, another bag of pork rinds, had a charleston chew for dessert, then headed back to the shore.

for the most up-to-date weather info, i used to listen to the noaa radio site, but once they started broadcasting their forecasts with computer voices i had to stop. the female robot voice was far too sexy for an owler, alone in the woods, at night.

i wanted her then. i want her still.

anyways. tonight is another wash-out, but things are looking better for the next couple of nights.

as long as i don't wake up in nebraska.

last night, surveys were the furthest thing from my mind. instead, i wanted
sleep. long, luxurious, undisturbed and complete sleep. but then, just when
i was comfortable with my justification to stay home (winds were ...insert
hyperbole between quotation marks..."daunting"...good one billy...) i got to thinking...what if i miss something?

if an owl sings in the forest and no one is there, does it make a sound?

sometimes owling is not about what you need to do, it's about what you have to do. needing and having are two very different things.

i need to know why boreals have vanished. i have to know why.

different things, huh?

every night i am out, i am in biological contemplation. i ask the most obvious question: "what's different now from when i started in 1987?"
easy response: no owls. but when i really get down to it, when my viscera tell me i am on the right track, it all comes down to a changing forest. the kandscape is more fragmented, its stands more open, two things that spell doom for an interior forest species.

the loss of interior forest, especially in northern minnesota where the
boreal forest comes to a grinding halt means the boreal owl will soon be an anachronism.

8888

so, i heard an owl a week ago and that is where i went last night. i dragged my sorry behind inland and sat and waited and heard nothing. sometimes the wind, but nothing more than that.

at least i was in the woods hear the sound an owl makes when it doesn't sing.

sandwiched between a windy start and a windy finish to last night's surveys was mid-march, nocturnal perfection. three hours of auroras and constellations and pondering and problem solving and four different kinds of owls and updated canidae scent kiosks and organic wafts of reawakening water and the sound of ice contracting in the cold and then dead, complete, penetrating calm.

when the calm occurred i was in its crosshairs, trying to sort out wind-whipped harmonics from the rest of the night. i cannot adequately describe the change from noise to nothing (as opposed to describing the change from nothing to noise), but it is incredible. it is one of the rare chances to experience just how critical the sense of hearing is for an owler and then, how critical acoustics and acoustical communication are for the owls.

by the time 0200 rolled along and the winds again made my presence inconsequential, i was lucky enough to experience a booming great gray, a solicitous great-horned female, several cantankerous barreds, and of course, the increasingly present northern saw-whet. if a boreal had sung, it would have been a perfect evening. then again, knowing what i know about boreals, i think last night was as close to perfection as i am likely to experience for a while.

******** a blast from the past:

date: 19 march 1998

route surveyed: crooked lake
km surveyed: 60
number of 3 min stops: 78
owls heard: 2 barred, 2 boreals

after the excitement of the first few survey nights erodes, and more and more stops are bathed in silence, reality sets in. i begin to disconnect from endearing owl nostalgia and the anecdotal proof that "i have been here before", and painfully... move to the present, 3 survey minutes at a time. ohhh, i still ponder. but then, each pondering moment comes to an end and it doesn't take long to realize that silence has again become my owl guide.

being manic defines my owling. for 7 weeks each spring, my highs are higher and my lows are lower. i sleep less and when i do, it is brief and interrupted by dreams of talking owls and of strangers wondering why i am dreaming of them and of ice-fishing with bjork.

for the first 18 years, one could say i was a full time owler. i left jobs, i refused work. i drove thousands of miles from remote corners of the earth to be here when the owls sang. i slept during the day and ventured north when darkness approached. then last year, i realized that continuing owling was akin to an intoxicated drive on the road to financial ruin. so, i took work. daytime work. dreary, numbing, cat-napping, daytime work.

with new daytime tasks, i had a decision to make: give up owling, or do so in moderation. giving up owling, of course, is not likely to occur in my immediate, physically-abled future. i am in the middle of long-term data collection and as a biologist who has managed to retain the ideals of being a biologist, nothing speaks louder than prolonged effort. if one is a biologist, then one should be about biology.

owling in moderation, is what works best now. i don't survey all night long (week-ends are another story) and if i get 5 hours of sleep a night during the week...well...my workmates will just have to accept that is me at my morning best...my disheviled, grumpy, caffeine-sucking, hat-haired, morning best.

*******

17 march, survey tidbits...

cold. damn it was cold. then the winds picked up and by midnight, i had lost the urge. a swet and barred within the first 10 stops, then nothing thereafter.

i went through one of my old boreal owl haunts but could only imagine the owls' song.

nostalgia is my middle name.

every time the moon rises, i loathe its cheap light. i'll take the light of a billion stars over moonlight any time.

11 years ago tonight, i moved across the north woods landscape like a nocturnal
gypsy. i drove then stopped, listened, then drove again, and kept doing so until
my strigidaen synapses were overloaded.

on that night, i was perched at the apex of owl discovery. the woods were alive with owl songs and calls and after 8 hours, i had tallied 18 boreal owls.

sadly, i heard more owls that insular night than i have heard in the last 4 survey years.

no wonder i have become nostalgic for the nights of old.
*******

16 march 2006

another calm night, another quiet night. my surveys started with an owl and ended with an owl. everything in-between, though, was reduced to a wintertime whisper. three saw-whets total, no mammals, no cars, no snowmobiles, no motherships, just three saw-whets.

i seem to recall (see: nostalgia, above) that during my early years, boreals always were the first to sing. now, the saw-whets start early and don't stop. sometimes, they never stop.

i seem to recall that boreals used to be a part of my life every spring and knowing that they may be no longer, i am like a lost boy.

tonight though, is another night.

i am sitting in my truck at the end of a gravel road, waiting for darkness. the air is calm and crisp, and the only imperfection to the mid-march sunset is a thin film of clouds that moves from the south like a celestial ripple. this is a scene i have rehearsed over 19 previous springs; a scene which now needs no further rehearsal.

i was excited during the afternoon. perhaps it was because i have already heard a boreal and know i have already equaled last year's total, or perhaps it is because surveys are how i feed the compulsive need i have to be attached to the night.

one stop down, 1,300 to go.

when i finally leave the vehicle, my senses are ready. i pause, exhale, and am coddled by winter. the truck pings against the cold, my heartbeat slows, my ears listen for a pin drop in the muffled landscape. there is no sound, there is nothing.

an hour later, overlooking the cascade river, i stand in the middle of the road for another 3 minutes of immobility. the river is locked beneath snow and ice, yet the tension between winter and spring rise from the river and the groans of a rejuvenating earth move along the watershed like roiling thunder.

a saw-whet sings and for the 20th year in a row, i am there when he does.

hearing is everything; being there no longer a choice.

in a way, i sometimes fear the pulse can ruin the heartbeat...

at sunset last night, i moved atop softened roads towards my 20th owl spring. i did so without fanfare; without the helpless apprehension of my first owl spring. i went knowing that discoveries made now, will not be discoveries when made later. but, i can't sit when a calm, clear march night knocks on my door.

i guess some things will never change.

tucked into the recesses of boreal forest, near a tiny clearing, i cloaked myself in fleece and sat. within minutes, i watched as a saw-whet flew in, then listened as it let go of 4 call notes. then, in the distance, i heard the song that humbles me.

in the spring of 2005, i spent around 250 hours of my life along the now familiar roads that truly, lead to nowhere. of those 250 hours, only 20 seconds were spent with boreal owl song. in retrospect, the investment was much greater than the return, but i heard the song when i most desperately needed to hear it...when my springtime nights were losing meaning.

when the owl sang last night, i was overwhelmed, turned emotional by harmonic perfection. he sang only two bouts, but did so with clarity and purpose. and, he did so in an area that is now rife with nest boxes.

i can only hope.

back to 1986...

in that summer, high above the azure blue waters of lake superior, the young falcons were rolling out of the hack box like cars off an assembly line. our tasks were simple: feed them, watch over them, report on them. so many birds, so much confusion and so...we named them. we named them for girth (air angus) and disposition (brat), and we named them to lance the monotony of a 10 hour shift in an observation blind. but some of the birds we named for our heroes.

i got to name the first male out of the box that wet summer in tofte. i called him puckett. he was called that not because of any avian peculiarities, but because of an avian observer peculiarity: i loved the twins, then i hated them, then along came kirby puckett.

kirby puckett removed the minnesota stigma of four super bowl losses and a stanley cup that never was. he did so because he knew how lucky he was to be playing a game and he played it as though each was his last.

by the end of august in 1986, all the birds had moved on to reproduction or mortality. i never saw puckett again; never heard where he went or how he got there. instead, i watched another puckett. a puckett who made it okay to have a hero again and to think that sports wasn't only about losses, it was about having fun. winning didn't hurt either.

rest in peace kirby.