Due to a variety of circumstances passing understanding, I recently found myself from one end of NJ to the other in one day. Granted, New Jersey is kind of teeny compared to say, Montana, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, so it's not really such a feat, but the difference between the Appalachian north, and the carolinian coastal plain of the south are far greater than a scant 140 miles or so would indicate from a glance at a map.
A turn around the mountains (well, hills, really compared to what get called mountains in the Tyrol, or the Cordillera Real, or the high Sierras, but they are what passes for mountains in New Jersey, and might as well be the Himalaya to a Kansan) in my home town was downright rejuvenating for one who had just driven the length of the flatter than flat Delmarva Peninsula and the merely flat coastal plain of NJ.
Misty and grey on International Worker's Day, the hills of home did not disappoint. The oaks were golden and buzzy with the songs of Black-throated Green Warblers, the forest floor covered with the single, vertical oval leaves of Canada Mayflower and the odd Hepatica, my first Red Eft of 2012 crawled across a carpet of mosses and needed its rough little orange back stroked with the back of a finger. Rose-breasted Grosbeaks chinked and sang their rich loud warble, as Chestnut-sided Warblers proclaimed how pleased pleased pleased tomeetchYA they were (Though I'm sure we met last fall. Perhaps their memories are as mercurial as their plumage?). The smell of Hemlocks and birch and maple loam pervaded all.
A bit incongruously, a pair of Black Vultures kettled up out of the glen. Long ago, in Reagan's second term, I found the first pair of Black Vultures in the county at a friend's pig farm. They were a true rarity then, and today rather collided with the highlight of the day, a true highland and boreal speciality, the Common Raven, which in 1980 something would've been far more absurd in May than the rarity which were Black Vultures.
I had just come from a mountain-top cemetery where a few years ago I had found a pair of Ravens with a recently fledged, still pale-eyed youngster. I stepped out of the car, and while thrilled to have a Pileated Woodpecker flyover, was disappointed by a pair of crows, and no Ravens. I walked around the graves, and back into the woods, to the tune of Ovenbirds and Blue-headed Vireos. Still no Ravens. So I tried imitating a Raven, knowing that each second I was not hearing the far-carrying, echoing off the ridge-sides, deep moans and rolling R'ed croaks of Ravens they were that much more assuredly not to be found where I was.
After a while, having errands to run, I gave up. No Ravens for me, not this time. Not here.
Just as I got to my car, I looked up, for no real reason, and there, not fifty feet from the side fo the road, and easily seen if I had looked the right way from the driver's side window when I had parked, in the shade of a dense stand of Red Pines, was a 3 foot deep, and about as wide bundle of sticks. Standing stock still, and vertical next to it on the spoke of a pine limb was the attenuated, long-tailed bulk of a Raven, silently staring at me. I had been watched the entire time.
I involuntarily smiled and slipped into the car. There is no doubt why Raven was Prometheus or Mercury or Loki of so many native American cultures. The largest perching bird had made a fool of me for sure.
Now we fast forward, via that mundane miracle of a modern time-machine, the Toyota, and a few hours later, I found myself at sunset on a broad Atlantic saltmarsh. Having left the Boreal, now the Surreal decided to have some fun with an already mind-bent little ornithologist.
The wheeling flocks of Shorebirds were amazing, but expected. The Terns balling up as a Peregrine tried to single one out (The old and the sick thing may well be true of four-footed predators, but Charadriformes and Peregrines? No, not so much. The healthiest Forster's Tern or Black-bellied Plover can zig when it should've zagged in front of scimitar-winged death in a power stoop. It is always the strongest swimmers who drown.) The scores of long-legged waders, the Bald Eagles, the Skimmers, the Clapper Rails, the wheezing chorus of Seaside Sparrows in the Spartina all, again amazing, and sights and sounds for winter-weary eyes and ears but not above the realm of the understood, all within the parameters of normal-however remarkable and wonderful.
Then the butterflies sank in. I was aware that they were everywhere, and that there were a lot of them. There were not just a lot, though, but more than that. Far more. More than what was reasonable, more than what was fathomable. More even than what was enumerable, at least by human eyes and hands, and then add dash of a lot more than that for good measure, too.
There were thousands upon thousands of butterflies flying landward off the marsh and from the ocean beyond. Most were Red Admirals, but there were fair numbers of Anglewings and Ladies, and the odd Monarch or ten.
Were they locusts, it would've been a plague. But they were butterflies, and it was sunset.
And it was wonderful.
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