The early cormorant gets the branch—four of the 50-plus Double-crested Cormorants who occupy the cottonwoods at the east end of the Montlake Cut.

Christmas is less than three weeks away, and many people took advantage of last weekend’s dry weather to put up their Christmas lights. It’s a fine show at night, when the lights are turned on.

The Fill is also putting on its Christmas show this week. To see it, though, you have to arrive here at dawn, just before the sun tops the Cascades. Walk down to the canoe rental house at the marina, where the Montlake Cut empties into Union Bay. Face south to take in Mt. Rainier on your left and the tall cottonwoods lining the Cut on your right. Then wait. If conditions are right, you will see a scene unlike any other on the planet.

First, the rising sun—still blocked by the mountains—limns the undersides of the dark clouds with glowing magenta. As the sky grows pinker, the lake becomes red, then molten gold, as though the water had become a sea of lava. Just so must the Columbia Plateau have looked eons ago, when lava covered the earth in fiery waves. In the distance, Mt. Rainier takes on the colors of the sky itself, turning rosy with alpenglow. Above the mountain, Venus glitters in the ice-blue sky, its aspect so clear you can see it as a disk: planet, not star.

Then the sun bursts forth, painting the clouds with streaks of aqua and topaz, indigo, tourmaline and amethyst. A movement catches your eye and you turn to the tall cottonwoods. They are covered from top to toe with Double-crested Cormorants, perched precariously on fragile branches like the world’s ugliest Christmas tree ornaments.

A Bald Eagle glides in from the north over the water with frightening speed. The ornaments spring up from their perches and scatter, each one convinced it is the target of the eagle’s attack. But no, the eagle already has a catch clutched in one foot: a small fish. The eagle lands on a log in the marina and proceeds to dine.

The cormorants circle the feeding eagle and slowly return to their trees. The first ones to come back always seem to be the most skilled at landing. They choose a branch, extend their feet, grab on, flap their tail a little for balance, then fold up their wings, necks, and bodies into black blobs.

Late-comers aren’t so efficient. Some grab branches that are too thin, bending them down almost to the breaking point, and then shooting back up again on them like a diver on a springboard. Sometimes the bird goes flying; sometimes it manages to hold on for dear life until the branch stills. Other late-comers try to usurp an already-occupied branch, hovering in midair like oversized hummingbirds until the branch’s owner snaps at them to drive them away. The branchless cormorants circle the bay and try again, sometimes four or five times.

They’re very persistent, even though they must know that water is their true element, not trees. Webbed feet, after all, are best designed for paddling, not perching. But the cormorants are absolutely determined to join their brethren on the branches. Eventually, every ornament is back in place again, and peace settles over the land.

I’m still ho-ho-ho-ing at the memory.

In the wintry months, when the air is still and conditions are right, the night fog rises from the lake and drifts through the moonlight to shroud the land. On those occasions, I like to get myself to the Fill at dawn, just as the sun is topping the foothills of the Cascades. If I’m lucky, the rising sun will warm the air enough to collect the fog into one bank of cloud in perfect alignment with the mountains. It is then that I will see gold.

Quickly I sling my campstool over my shoulder and hurry down the trail. I ignore the flock of American Goldfinches foraging in the alder tops. I can’t stop to look at every one to see if a Pine Siskin or maybe even a redpoll has joined the flock. Nor can I scan the brush to the east of the Lone Pine Tree to locate the Bewick’s Wren who likes to hide there and who starts buzzing as soon as he sees me. I’m convinced the little beggar teases me on purpose. But as my passage swirls the silver mists clinging to the ground, I tell him, “Not today. I have no time for games.”

For I must reach East Point before the sun rises.

The sparrows who have favored the chicory field north of Boy Scout Pond are already awake and active. I can see them rummaging through the grass, pushing the blades aside with both feet at once as they search for seeds. I do not stop, not even when a Lincoln’s Sparrow hops up on a blackberry stem and chips at me, his crest raised in alarm, his black eyes snapping. “You can just put your little crest down,” I pant as I go by. “You know me, and I know you. We see each other every day.”

At last I arrive at the overlook. Just in time. The fog bank has already risen from the water. It lies between me and the sun, just above the foothills, creating a narrow slit for the sun to shine through. The sky turns pink. The sun’s corona glows. And then the light bursts forth, carving a golden path over the water. The path widens until it becomes a road of molten gold, shimmering, beckoning. Ducks and grebes and geese paddle into the shining corridor to soak up the warmth. I cannot tell their species, for I am dazzled.

Everything in my spirit tells me to join them, to step onto the road of light and follow it. Toward what? And how?  I do not know, but still I yearn. The sun enters the fog, the light dims, the road narrows, the path disappears. It’s gone.

The Great Blue Heron who has been watching from the shore stirs his feathers briefly and goes back to sleep. He sees the sun-path often, and the mist, the moonlight and the dawn. He lives here. But I can only visit.

If you want to be happy in Seattle, you must learn to love the color gray. This is especially true in winter, when it is perfectly possible to lose the sun in November and not get it back again until March. By that time, most Seattleites have forgotten what the sun even looks like. We squint at that strange glowing ball in the sky and then head as fast as we can to the drug store to buy a pair of sunglasses to rid ourselves of the pain of the glare. Ow, we say, grateful that we don’t have to live in L.A., where the sun never seems to take a break.

For us northwesterners, there is great beauty in the gray light of a November morn. Somehow the silvery mists of clouds make every spot of color in the surrounding landscape glow the brighter. Who needs sun when the spirit can be warmed by the reds, oranges, and yellows of a perfect fall day?

This morning was a case in point. A flock of Golden-crowned Kinglets came foraging through the shrubs around the Wedding Rock to brighten the world with their energy and their colorful feathers. Golden-crowned Kinglets are tiny songbirds that forage for insects along the bare branches of bushes and trees. They are graced with black-and-white racing stripes on their heads, topped by a bright crown of golden feathers.

In the flock were two males who apparently had it in for each other. I think they must have been quarreling before they ever got to the Wedding Rock, because they were already all worked up when I first noticed them. Golden-crowned Kinglets don’t have loud voices — they sound like far-away high-tension wires to me — but these two were piping insults at each other as loudly as they could.

Finally, they decided the best way to settle their differences was with a duel. So the first male put his beak down and shined his golden crown at his rival. Without hesitation, the rival took up the gantlet and shined HIS crown right back, upping the ante by spreading out his little golden feathers to reveal a spark of fiery orange in the middle of all that gold. That seemed to deflate the first duelist because he put away his crown, backed up a step, and then flew to the next branch, where he began searching for bugs, leaving the field of battle to the rival.

There is something utterly charming in watching two creatures battle by shining their heads at each other. If only we humans could do the same.

Gulls are among the most under-appreciated birds in all avi-dom. When most people see one, they give it only a passing glance at best. If they remark the bird at all, it’s merely with an offhand, “Oh there goes another seagull.”

But gulls are well worth a second look. Depending on the species, their eyes can be warm chocolate brown or sunshine gold. Their legs and feet are bright pink or lemon yellow. In breeding plumage, their bellies are spanking white, their backs a natty gray, their wingtips gray or black. Many sport ruby-red dots on the undersides of their bills, a target for babies to tap to remind the parents to give them food.

Although we see gulls in the city in winter, they are not urban creatures at heart. Most fly north to breed, where they seek out rocky haystacks far from predators. I have seen them in their northern reaches, standing guard over their precious eggs in the nooks of the sheltering cliffs, or drifting like living snowflakes above the pewter gray ocean as far as the eye can see.

The waters and the land where these birds live are a remnant Eden that invokes in me the very image of creation on the third divine day, when nothing existed but land and sea:

And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of water called He Seas; and God saw that it was good.

Gulls visit this primeval world every year, but we do not see them there, and hence we know nothing of their real lives. And knowing nothing, we disdain them. We disdain them because down here where they dwell amongst us humans, they seem to prefer garbage as their plat du jour. You can see this at the Fill the morning after a football Saturday. When the Winnebagos still have all their blinds pulled against the piercing rays of the rising sun (piercing even when the dawn is cloudy, if the inhabitants of the vans tailgated too exuberantly the night before), the gulls are out there in the parking lot searching every discarded burger bag for a little scrap.

The gulls arrive while the light is too dim to see more than the vaguest shapes of the Golden Arches printed on crumpled wrappers. They have learned they must get to the parking lot early before an army of orange-vested street cleaners and garbage trucks disappears all the football leftovers, edible or otherwise.

I think they must like this part of their lives. They certainly seem to relish their garbagial finds. But they are not what they eat. Or at least not completely. They are also the pearl and pewter flyers of the Far North, whose eerie cries fill the dawn like the Creator Himself calling on the waters to separate them-selves from the land.

Last week I was somnambulating at a meeting of the Friends of Yesler Swamp. Not that the meeting or the speakers were boring, mind you. On the contrary, the speakers were substantial people who knew what they were talking about, and they were talking about an issue I am very interested in: the future of Yesler Swamp, the easternmost part of the Fill.

But the afternoon was warm and sunny — one of the last remnants of the summer we should have had back in June or July but never did. The windows of the conference room were open, the air was balmy, and the voices started to fall into a rhythm akin to white noise. My eyes glassed over, and I found my mind drifting into a dream state, a kind of waking sleep similar to what fish, who have no eyelids and thus must always look glassy-eyed, experience. The last time I can remember falling into this state was in high school calculus class, a class I had to drop eventually due to complete lack of mathematical brain cells. My last thought, as I drifted off, was, “I hope no one calls on me.”

Suddenly, a cobalt blue shape streaked by the window, calling its creaky gate-hinge call. “That’s a scrub-jay,” I yelled, levitating out of my seat and waving my arms like a semaphore.

Western Scrub-Jays are a kind of blue jay originally from California. Ever since the 1970s, they have been expanding their range northward. I saw my first Western Scrub-Jay at the Fill two years ago, a bird that showed up in the company of our resident Steller’s Jays, hung around for a couple of days, and then disappeared. The bird I saw at my meeting was only the second one I’ve ever seen here. I tell you this so you will see I was justifiably thrilled when another one flew across the CUH yard like a glorious blue comet. Thrilled, not nuts.

Everyone else began to look wildly around for the source of my excitement. One woman, as I recall, even looked under the chairs at the floor — I guess all she heard me say clearly was the word “scrub.” Of course, the bird itself had long disappeared.

“IT’S ALL RIGHT,” trumpeted a professor on the committee. “It’s all right,” he repeated more calmly. “She’s a birder.”

Everyone, including me, sat down again. The meeting resumed. I tried to look normal. A few minutes later, when a Northern Flicker flew by and attached itself to a wooden beam only a few feet away from the window, I didn’t say a word. I had had enough attention for one day.

On these early fall mornings, when the fog grips the tops of the cottonwood trees and last night’s dew beads every blade of grass like liquid diamonds, I go to the Fill with a sense of great anticipation. Migration is in full swing now, and I never know what I will find around the next bend in the path.

Two days ago, I heard a burbling, gurgling kind of song near Main Pond. I scanned through the willows, trying to find the singer, but it was hopeless. A breeze had blown up from the lake, jangling all the leaves and making it impossible to see any birdly movement.

In earlier years, I would have ground my teeth, knowing I was missing a new bird, possibly a great bird, thanks to the ding-dang, bleeping wind that never blows when you want it to, or where you want it to, or how you want it to. Capricious, the poets used to call such a breeze, and they were right.

Nowadays, though, I am more mellow — almost zen-like, you might say, in my acceptance of whatever it is nature chooses to send me. If nature sends a great bird, I accept it with peacefulness in my soul. If nature sends obscurity, I smile my Buddha-like smile and pass on with serenity, at one with the universe and…

That hee-haw noise you’re undoubtedly hearing now is my husband’s horse-laugh at the notion that I serenely accept missing any bird, great or otherwise.

Fortunately for my amour propre, the burble bird eventually came winging its way out of the willows to perch on top of a small fruit tree in Hunn Meadow West just as the sun broke through the fog. A Western Meadowlark.

Western Meadowlark

For a brief moment—the mere length of one bird’s song—I lived on a planet graced by a binary star: the sun on high, and the meadowlark gleaming as brightly down below. Then the bird loosened up its vocal chords and serenaded the world. Its liquid notes trilled through the motes puffed here and there by the wind, joining together the tangible and the invisible into one glorious whole that enwrapped every living thing. Including me.

Nirvana.

The autumn winds tore through the Fill yesterday, sending all sensible creatures into cover. Birds, like other pilots, are reluctant to fly in strong wind because they know how dangerous a sudden gust or shear can be.

I, of course, was out here anyway. We Sidleses are not overly gifted with sense. Rather, we are free-range chickens, and my range is the Fill. I come here in all weathers, and I love the wind. It reminds me I am free, even though I have deadlines to meet, chores to do, and taxes to pay (now that the end-of-the-line, no-more-excuses, the government-has-run-out-of-patience tax deferral time is approaching). Sigh, oh gusty sigh.

The juvenile Cooper’s Hawks were out, too. Unlike me, they’re not chickens of any sort, but neither are they sensible. In fact, they are downright goofy, which is probably why I feel I have so much in common with them. Earlier in the year, their parents dumped them off at the Fill to fend for themselves, and they’ve been learning how to hunt ever since.

The other birds don’t seem to take them very seriously. The American Goldfinch flock that has been feeding on chicory for the past several weeks perches in the same trees as the hawks do, and they chirp at their predators. Prey are not supposed to chirp. They are supposed to flee before the fierce attack of the mighty raptors, but the goldfinches just sit there. I guess Cooper’s Hawks aren’t born with fierceness; they have to build it, one small emoticon at a time.

All three juveniles were trying to catch food for the day, but since nobody else was out and about, they weren’t having much luck. They did drive away a Greater Yellowlegs, who had hunkered down on Main Pond to forage in the mud while the storm raged above.  The shorebird didn’t want to leave its dinner table, but the hawks were just a little too present. So it finally jumped into the sky and laboriously flapped its way south, leaving the hungry hawks empty-clawed.

I was glad the yellowlegs got away this time, but I realize that the hawks have to eat, too. As a squall of rain blew in, I turned up my collar and headed for the car. I can go home to a pizza in the oven, but the birds must catch their own prey. I wished them well.

On Sundays, when UW parking is free, I always drive over to Conibear Mitigation and park in the lot next to the shellhouse. I walk out on the deck where the fake, snarling coyotes twist in the wind, scaring off the Canada Geese and my husband, who thought they were real and rabid. Here, I set up my camp stool and look for bitterns and herons among the cattails of the mud islands that spatter the area.

If no waders appear, I turn my steps to the mitigation trail leading north. This is a good place to look for rails, waterfowl, and warblers. In the fall, it’s also a good place to scan for migrating shorebirds, who like to tread the lily pads as they hunt for insects. Few people come here in the early mornings, aside from an occasional jogger, so I can lose myself in nature and pretend that I am migrating, too.

In the aftermath of Husky home football games, though, this area is about as unnatural as you can get. Crows and gulls by the thousands crowd the sky, squabbling over the detritus left behind by fans. The birds arrive early, ahead of an army of garbage trucks hired to clean up the area. The humans and birds race each other to see who can get to the garbage first.

Human behavior has got to be fairly inexplicable to birds, but this particular behavior is probably the most baffling, at least to crows and gulls. Why on earth would you scrape up perfectly edible garbage and bury it in trucks to haul it away? Inquiring minds want to know, but on this day, they got no answers. The garbage workers were oblivious to the birds’ cries.

After losing the Battle of the Bilge, the disappointed scavengers perched on the grandstand seats of the baseball diamond and in the snags that rim the Lagoon. They were joined by a lone Pectoral Sandpiper, a great bird for the Fill. Pectoral Sandpipers are mid-sized shorebirds who breed in the tundra and winter in South America. They migrate through the Fill in spring and fall, but in very small numbers and by no means every year. I like them because they remind me of ancient Egyptian pharaohs. Like the kings of yore dressed in their jeweled gorgets, these sandpipers wear a pectoral of brightly patterned feathers around their necks.

This particular sandpiper was foraging on a tiny spit of mud in the middle of the Lagoon. The spit was smaller than my ironing board, yet the sandpiper was finding plenty to eat there. As it hunted and pecked for food, minding its own business, a crow took umbrage and peeled off to attack.  Calling in alarm, the sandpiper leaped into the air and flew around the Lagoon, chased by the crow.  Eventually, the sandpiper disappeared going east, but about fifteen minutes later it reappeared on the same tiny spit. Another crow attacked, and off went the sandpiper, only to return a while later. The crustaceans on the spit must have been exceptionally tasty.

It was a lesson in paucity and plenty. The crow and gull populations of the Fill have exploded, due to the fact that they find human activity helpful. We generate a lot of garbage, which crows and gulls eat. The Pectoral Sandpiper population, on the other hand, has plummeted, due to the fact that they find human activity harmful. We generate a lot of garbage, and in the process destroy a lot of mudflats and short prairie, which the birds need.

As our population continues to grow, we change more of the environment to suit us. I hope we will find it suits us very well to preserve habitat not just for avian garbage collectors, but also for this most marvelous member of the shorebird family, the Pectoral Sandpiper.

Barn Swallow at Main Pond.

Sometimes I think my real life is lived here, at the Fill. This is where I experience my greatest peace of mind, my true connection to the natural world. It is here I feel joy, even exaltation, at the sight of a swallow spreading its angel wings over the pond, swifts shooting like fireworks over the tops of the alders, goldfinches in their hundreds taking in the rich bounty of nature and giving back to me that richness as I watch them.

I have been absent from paradise for the past five days. My son and his partner came for the 23rd Annual Block Party we host every year. When they drove up in their little car, I rushed out of the house to give them both a hug. I have not seen them for months. They and my other kids and my husband are my real life, you see, for they are the ones who bring me joy, even exaltation, because of the love I hold in my heart for them.

I housed the kids in the basement, which is also my office, and I lent my computer to my son so he could play his games, check his email, and network on his social pages. I could not write a word while they were visiting, and now I can again. Writing is my real life, you see. It brings me joy, even exaltation, to paint a picture with words, after struggling to find just the right word to paint with from the the rich palette offered by the English language.

I must have other real lives too, scattered through the corners of my time and place like the giant dust bunnies that occupy most of the corners of my house (cleaning is definitely not my real life). We all do. Perhaps one hallmark of modern urban life is this fact, that we lead many different lives, each one important but usually separate.

Birds in nature do not have this. Oh, they have many phases of life. They hatch, fledge, fatten up, migrate, and breed, and each of these phases is different. But not separate. Nature is integrated. That is why when we can connect with nature, we recapture the sense of oneness we once had but have now lost, a oneness we yearn for without knowing what or why.

Here, at the Fill, where life and death are apparent and very real, we are whole again.

The enormous American Goldfinch flock that has assembled recently to feast on the abundant seeds in Hunn Meadow East was teasing the two juvenile Cooper’s Hawks again yesterday. The hawks are teaching themselves how to hunt effectively for their favorite prey: any bird they can catch. The trouble is, they simply cannot catch the faster, more maneuverable goldfinches.

The finches know this, and so they cheerfully gather in the little hawthorn tree whenever one of the hawks perches there. The poor hawk twists its head this way and that, trying to grab one—like a kid grabbing at popcorn—but this never works. Sometimes, the hawk tries so hard I think it’s going to twist its head right off its neck, like a piece of wire you wiggle until metal fatigue splits it in two. All to no avail.

Eventually, the hawk gives up and—head still firmly attached to body, luckily—flies to the Triple Tree, a set of three tall cottonwoods growing in the middle of the field. Invariably, the would-be prey fly off in a finch-cloud in all directions, chattering a warning to any other likely prey. “The hawk is coming! The hawk is coming!” after which all birds simply disappear.

It’s an example of how a flock works for the good of all. Many species of birds begin to flock together at this time of year for reasons of safety. The more eyes, the better, they seem to believe. The more voices, the louder the warning. The more wings flapping, the greater the confusion.

Within a goldfinch flock, though, you can also see that each bird is an individual. For one thing, they all seem to be molting out of their bright gold feathers at their own pace. Some birds are already completely dull, ready for winter. Others have barely begun. I often wonder if these procrastinators procrastinate the same way every year, habitually late to turn in their homework, as it were. Or maybe an individual makes the molting deadline most seasons, but this fall got a little behind, for whatever reason.

I’ve counted more than 500 American Goldfinches in the flock, each one an individual, yet each also contributing to the safety of the whole. I like to watch them as they go about their birdly business because it reminds me of the push-pull we humans also experience as we try to strike a balance between individual versus community. Like the goldfinches, we too are individuals, but we are also social creatures.

The first few years of the 21st century have demonstrated that we live in a time when individuality amongst our own species is at an all-time high. So I feel grateful to the goldfinches for reminding me that me too is also we too, and self should never become selfish.