The APL Iolite, unloading at Port of Seattle © John Sidles

John and I went to the Port of Seattle early yesterday morning to wave hello to my new book. For the past few days, we’ve been tracking the progress of “our” ship, the APL Iolite, as she made her way from our Hong Kong printer across the Pacific. It turns out there are several websites that track ships in real time. When John discovered this, it stimulated all his nerd molecules. So he spent a morning trying to estimate exactly when the Iolite would steam past Golden Gardens Park. We thought it would be fun to stand on the cliffs there and wave as our books went by.

On Monday morning, the ship was anchored in Elliott Bay, waiting to chug into dock and begin unloading. We sprang into the car and headed over the West Seattle Bridge to Alki, where we could get a good view. Unfortunately, the ship moved to dock as we were stuck in rush-hour traffic, so we just missed seeing her arrive. We did get there in time to wave at the crane operators as they unloaded one container after another, moving one every two minutes on average. We also waved at the truckers as they drove the containers to US Customs. They probably thought we were nuts, but we were having a blast.

The book, Second Nature: Tales from the Montlake Fill, is the culmination of all my best craftsmanship in writing and color printing both. It has 32 essays about the intersection of human nature and wild nature at the Montlake Fill, my favorite place on Earth; and it has nearly 90 photographs from some of the best bird photographers in the region. The photos are simply stunning, and I can only hope my readers will think the essays are worthy.

Books should be released by US Customs later this week. If you want one, you can order it directly from me ($23.95, plus tax and s/h), or you can buy a copy soon at Seattle Audubon’s Nature Shop, Flora & Fauna Bookstore, or University Bookstore.

I’ll be giving a series of book readings in December if you’d like to come hear me read and have me sign your book: Grays Harbor Audubon on Dec. 4; Kitsap Audubon on Dec. 8; Friends of Yesler Swamp at UW’s Center for Urban Horticulture on Dec. 11 (co-sponsored by UW Botanic Gardens); and Seattle Audubon at CUH (co-sponsored by UW Botanic Gardens) on Dec. 15.

Here is a sample of some of the spectacular photography:

Clark Kent came to the Fill yesterday. Or at least the avian version did. Kent, you’ll recall was the shy reporter whose alter ego was the awe-inspiring, colorfully clad Superman. On regular work days, Clark wore a plain gray suit, glasses, and a fedora. But when crisis called, he would step into a phone booth, tear off his glasses, rip open his shirt, and reveal a garish get-up of red, blue, and yellow, ready for action.

Our own (avian) version of mild-mannered Clark Kent was a winter-plumaged Eared Grebe, a duck-sized puffball of a waterbird garbed in gray flannel above and dress white below.

Eared Grebe in winter plumage

So nondescript is this bird in winter that I didn’t think I would ever be able to identify one at the Fill. Few people have. In the past 30 years, only four Eared Grebes have been reported here.

In the summer, though, there is no mistaking this bird. Like Superman, Eared Grebes dress so flamboyantly even Edna Mode (superhero design queen) would be impressed. Streaks of gold shoot out in rays from behind the grebe’s lava-red eyes, creating a solar flare against the night-dark black of the bird’s head and neck. Rich chestnut glows along the bird’s flanks, a banked fire serving as a base for the flaming gold and red above.

Our grebey Clark Kent never morphs into Superman at the Fill though, and not because we lack a phone booth for the guy to change in. Eared Grebes change only when it’s time to breed, and they don’t breed here. Instead, they form dense colonies in the pothole ponds of eastern Washington. It is there they put on their superpowered displays. All we see here is the ashy aftermath in smudges of black, gray, and white.

This particular Eared Grebe was diving for fish just beyond the edge of the lily pads that float near the shore where the Loop Trail parallels the lake. I wouldn’t have picked him out from the other more common grebes if fellow birder Evan Houston hadn’t come by with his scope and zeroed in on him. Together, we watched the grebe dive over and over, staying atop the waves only briefly before submerging again. A bird on a mission. A big thrill for us.

Adult Northern Shrike. Photo © Lyn Topinka, courtesy Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge.

Ansel Adams would have loved the Fill today. The soft sun of an October morning shed its light on the groves of trees surrounding the ponds, creating deep shadows contrasted by the bright leaves just beginning to turn to gold.

Adams’s great artistry as a photographer was his ability to capture these contrasts of light and shadow. But although he loved all the colors of nature, Adams preferred to express himself in black-and-white.

It wasn’t just that the color photography of his day was too primitive to represent nature accurately. For Adams, black-and-white exposed the inner meaning of nature’s beauty, allowing viewers to understand nature more deeply.

“Our lives,” he said, “at times seem a study in contrast: love and hate, birth and death, right and wrong…everything seen in absolutes of black and white. Too often we are not aware that it is the shades of gray that add depth and meaning to the starkness of those extremes.”

The stark beauty of black-and-white was on full display here today, embodied by one small bird who flew across the yellow-brown fields of Hunn Meadow to perch in the Triple Tree near Main Pond. A Northern Shrike has brought its beauty from the Far North to grace the Fill for a time, a living monochrome framed by a backdrop of autumn gold.

My favorite Western Grebe motored over to the Montlake Fill this week to fish in the Lagoon (the westernmost water body on the site). I was very glad to see him again. I think he’ll probably stick around here for the winter.

I first saw this fellow three years ago as he was paddling westward beside the floating bridge. Western Grebes are not very common at the Fill, although a wintering flock has gathered for years at the north end of the lake a few miles away. I keep my eyes open for one because I like to keep records of bird species at the Fill. This site has been birded since 1895, and I am one in a long line of records keepers.

Anyway, three years ago, the Western Grebe I spotted was behaving in a most unbirdly fashion. It was making a beeline westward, clearly paddling with some purpose in mind. The purpose turned out to be fishing in the Lagoon at the Fill, almost a mile away.

The thing that struck me about this was how long the grebe kept its destination in mind. It took about 20 minutes for the bird to swim from the bridge to the Lagoon. In all that time, it never wavered from its purpose.

I’m not sure, at my age, that I could keep one thing like that in mind for as long! As I get older, I find myself more easily distracted from whatever it is I am doing, and then when my mind drifts back to its original thought, I can’t remember what it was I wanted to do. “Why did I come into this room?” I often ask  myself.

Unlike the grebe, who obviously had decided that it was going to the Fill to find fish, when I forage at the supermarket, I frequently forget what I went there to forage for. So I buy bags of groceries, return home, and attempt to answer my husband when he asks, “Where’s the milk?”

Maybe, instead of being so proud of how smart we are as a species, we should all wish for bird brains.

If I had to guess the political persuasion of Wilson’s Snipes, I would say most of them are probably Reaganites. While I generally dislike painting an entire species with such a broad brush, it’s obvious that Wilson’s Snipes are great believers in one of President Reagan’s favorite maxims: Trust, but verify. Snipes clearly trust that the Fill is a safe place to hang out during the fall, winter, and spring, but they constantly verify that no predators are about to pounce on them. They look up into the sky for enemies almost as much as they look down at the ground for food.

Wilson’s Snipes are freshwater shorebirds with short legs and Jimmy Durante beaks. They are arriving at the Fill now in numbers. Yesterday I found four in Hoyt’s Meadow. If you’re lucky, you may come upon one foraging on the mudbanks of the Lagoon, ponds, and Waterlily Cove of the Fill. Their favorite food is worms, crustaceans, and insects that burrow into mud. Snipes hunt by probing the soft mud with their long bills, which are loaded with sensitive nerves at the tips so they can feel out a likely morsel. Occasionally, snipes fly over to the prairies to pick at food or seeds they find on the ground.

Wilson’s Snipes are plump, tasty menu entrees for a variety of raptors that regularly come to the Fill, including Peregrine Falcons, Merlins, Cooper’s Hawks, and Sharp-shinned Hawks. I’m sure the local Red-tailed Hawks who usually prey on rats wouldn’t say no to a snipe if one were offered, either.

With that many fearsome predators seeking your demise, it’s no wonder Wilson’s Snipes are conservative in their habits. Without sharp bills or long talons, snipes’ only defense against attack is to be wary and to hide. That’s why they have eyes set almost on top of their heads (so it’s easy to scan the sky), and cryptically colored feathers (so they can blend in with their surroundings). Their beige, brown, white, and black feathers camouflage them so completely that we birders usually see them only when the birds flush from hiding and fly away. Most of us are more familiar with the back ends of Wilson’s Snipes than with the whole bird. Makes it hard to verify they’re here, but I trust that if I am patient and persistent, I will find them.

This week I experienced a Ponce de Leon moment at the Fill. Ponce de Leon, you may recall, was the Spanish conquistador who, legend has it, went looking for the Fountain of Youth and found Florida instead. Not being satisfied with having discovered a new continent, Ponce de Leon searched all up and down both coasts of Florida for the Fountain of Youth, enduring heat, humidity, the flies, and mosquitoes. I can easily imagine him marching along in his metal helmet and breastplate, wishing someone would invent air conditioning.

However, much as I respect the conquistador’s trials, really his quest was nothing compared to mine at the Fill. He searched Florida for only eight months. I have been searching for something even more elusive than a mythical fountain for 25 years: the Hutton’s Vireo. Hutton’s Vireos are small, nondescript birds of olive and gray with few distinguishing field marks and almost no singing ability. (Their “song” is really more of a two-note set of calls repeated monotonously in the spring, a repertoire as drab as their outward appearance.)

It is, perhaps, this bird’s very plainness that has attracted me. Hutton’s Vireos are creatures as full of life as the gaudiest bird on the planet, yet they have some of the dowdiest plumage. I like the contrast. Unfortunately, Hutton’s Vireos do not belong at the Fill. “The habitat is just not right,” one expert told me, “so searching for them here is pointless.” It’s all too true. Hutton’s Vireos are fairly common in western Washington, but they prefer forests. There is no forest habitat at the Fill — just marsh, prairie, ponds, swamp, and gardens. Hutton’s don’t travel around much, either. They are year-round residents who tend to stay put once they establish a territory. However, some do spread to non-breeding areas in the fall, and why not to the Fill? I have long wished to see one here. This past Tuesday, I got my wish.

I was sitting on my camp stool in front of a small grove of alders and cottonwoods, watching a gigantic flock of Bushtits forage from bush to branch to grass stem. Among them were Black-throated Gray Warblers, Wilson’s Warblers, Western Tanagers, and other migrating songbirds. I was trying to put my binoculars onto every twitching leaf before “warbler neck” set in and incapacitated me, when behind one leaf halfway up an alder emerged the vireo. I stopped breathing as this little guy slowly worked its way along a branch, captured a bug, ate it, then wiped its bill clean on the branch. It was in plain view for perhaps three seconds.

Twenty-five years of searching, and here was my reward at last. Three seconds became an eternity as I watched. Rare magic. Who needs that silly Fountain of Youth when you can find a treasure like a Hutton’s Vireo? Best of all, my treasure was real.

They leave quietly in the night, the birds who came here last spring to breed, and the young they raised. Without fanfare they steal away – the Tree Swallows who cared for three chicks in the narrow snag at Southwest Pond; the four Cinnamon Teals who hatched on Main Pond and took their first flight together all the way over to the lake, a distance of 20 meters; the Savannah Sparrows who kept the prairie grasses abuzz with their chatter; the Common Yellowthroat babies whose dads were so busy fetching bugs the poor guys barely had time to sing their boundary songs. All gone away.

I wanted to say goodbye, to wish them well on their long journey south. But birds are not about saying goodbye. Sentiment is simply not in them. Neither nostalgia nor regret can hold them here. When they leap into the sky and join the vast stream of other birds fleeing our shortening days and colder nights, they do not look back. Their eyes look only ahead. They feel the call of the south, and they are free.

Fall is a time of leaving. The last warmth of summer drifts away as languidly as the cottonwood leaves that break from their branches with a little crack and float down.

But fall is not just the season of endings. It is also the time of arriving. Yesterday, a foursome of American Wigeons flew in from the north. They will spend the winter here. It is their home. So too for the flock of Ring-necked Ducks that winged their way back and forth across the lake, looking for just the right place to set down. Foster Island looked good at first, but in the end they settled on Waterlily Cove. A good place for fish. A good place for life.

Late August through mid-September is the time when most of our wood-warbler species migrate through the Fill. Wood-warblers are a family unique to our hemisphere. They are small songbirds (4-7 inches long) that eat mostly insects. North America hosts almost 50 different species each summer. The males of most species molt into bright colors in breeding season so they can attract the drabber females.

Much as I love the Fill, this is not the best place to find warblers. At most, we get only 13 species, and some of these are quite rare. So it is always with great delight that I greet the warblers who do come here.

One of my favorites, and one of the most colorful of all the species, is the Yellow Warbler, a bird so yellow it resembles a small sun rocketing through galaxies of green leaves as it hunts for food. Two Yellow Warblers were migrating through here yesterday. They both showed up to forage in the bushes lining Main Pond, the biggest pond at the Fill. This pond has many bushes, and each bush has innumerable insects, so there was plenty of food to go around. Evidently, though, this was not the case in the minds of the two warblers, who spent more time chasing each other than they did finding their own bugs to eat. They acted like they had to defend each little branch of each bush from the depredations of their rival. Around and around they would fly, never allowing each other a moment to perch or, God forbid, eat anything.

Watching them reminded me of the times I would drive my two kids around in our van. There was space in the back for six kids, but my two always clashed over who got to sit where. Our trips were filled with cries of “Mom, make him stop.”

I wonder if those Yellow Warblers will chase each other in continuous spirals all the way down to South America.

The “teenage” Pied-billed Grebe who hatched out on Main Pond here at Montlake Fill was busy catching fish again today. His parents left him on his own at least three weeks ago, a very tender age to be all alone in the world. You might say they threw him in the deep end of the pond, except this pond is nowhere very deep. That’s a good thing because the only fish that thrive here are tiny minnows, just the right size for a small grebe to eat. The pond sustains this little guy bountifully, so perhaps it is no accident his parents chose it for their nest back in April. They must have known their baby would be confined here a long time, unable to leave until he grows his flight feathers. Pied-billed grebes cannot walk – their legs and feet are set too far back on their bodies, so at best they can flop forward a few inches at a time, hunching with their toes and “ankles.” Grebes do much better underwater, where they can rotate their feet 90 degrees, turning them into effective paddles. On still days like today, I can follow the youngster’s progress underwater because of the air bubbles he releases periodically. The grebe’s bubble-path reminds me of the ring of bright water that Gavin Maxwell’s otter Mij made as he dove for food. A large ring ripples out from the grebe’s dive site, spreading leisurely in even-spaced circles across the mirror surface of the pond. A few feet further on, a smaller ring appears, marking the grebe’s progress. I watch for the next sign, a ring still smaller. Then the grebe himself breaks the surface of the water, shaking his head and sprinkling droplets all around, like diamonds strewn on satin. Perfection.

Adult Least Sandpiper on Main Pond, fall migration

A jogger friend of mine ran into me the other day on the Loop Trail. Well, not literally. She stopped to shoot the breeze. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” she commented. “I think summer is finally here.”

“Every day is beautiful at the Fill,” I replied. “But summer is over. Fall migration is in full swing, you know.”

My friend was taken aback. “Why do you say that?” she demanded. “I haven’t even broken out my bathing suit yet.”

I explained that shorebirds were coming back from the Far North, heading toward their winter homes in Central and South America. Since early July, we’ve seen numerous Least Sandpipers, a few Western Sandpipers, and good numbers of Long-billed Dowitchers. All over North America, a vast river of fall migrants is flowing through the sky every night.

“It’s only the adults so far,” I said, explaining that shorebird babies are precocial. That means they are born almost instantly ready to take care of themselves. The parents don’t have to feed them or even guard them. So a few days after the eggs hatch, the parents migrate south, leaving the babies behind to grow up on their own. When the babies are strong enough to fly, they start their own migration, usually in late August and September.

I stopped talking because my friend looked like she was sucking on a pickle. I realized she was not ready to say goodbye to summer. “Birds all follow their own schedules,” I hastened to add. “For a lot of birds, it’s still summer. Gadwall babies just hatched on Main Pond.” Frowny face.

“I saw two Tree Swallow parents feeding their young in the tree snag on Southwest Pond,” I offered. No dice.

“The temperature is supposed to hit 80 today,” I said feebly. She harrumphed and left me.

As far as we humans are concerned, summer began on June 21 this year and will end on September 23. That is what our calendar dictates. But every now and then, nature reminds us that we don’t make the rules. Nature does.