Celery Bog

It is still dark when Sugata, MB, and I step out the front door for our walk, but the trees around us are alive with the songs of birds. MB pulls me forward, occasionally lunging to the side to take in new scents as we navigate the neighborhood.  We cross the street and walk past part of a golf course, sprinklers spewing water on one section of the course, groomers mowing another section. The cold morning wind surprises me; last I was in Lafayette we were daily plagued by stifling heat. Soon we are crossing Tippecanoe Co. Bridge #1103 toward the Celery Bog.  From the bridge we have a great view down onto the marsh. Red-wing Blackbirds fly past us and perch on cattails along the bank; their red stripes puff out like shoulder-pads  as they land. Killdeer strut along the shore, almost invisible against the mud. Some skim over the bridge, piercing the air with their plaintive cries. 

While I’m caught up in looking at a female mallard with her brood dabble in the thick marsh, I notice that I’m surrounded by quiet music. The intervals are the same as a horn playing Reveille but the music is much softer, much more subtle and the notes are in random order. It takes me a moment to figure out the source of the music. The tines of the bridge are catching the wind and singing; the harder the wind blows, the higher the pitch. 

We cross the bridge and descend to the path along the edge of the marsh. Birds of all kinds teem around the water's edge: Tree Swallows, Goldfinches, Cardinals, Canada Geese. We spot a cormorant and an eagle, but most fascinating are the Great Blue Herons who float so gracefully above the water, long legs tucked behind.

This will not be our last trip to Celery Bog. It has enchanted us; going there will become a daily morning ritual.

In the evening while talking with Y, she mentions how Wal-Mart is starting to become the new word for store, “Just like tissue turned into Kleenex,” she says. Then she mentions the Wal-Mart at Celery Bog. “Wal-Mart? At this Celery Bog, down here?” I ask. It’s a stupid question. What other Celery Bog would there be? I’d seen a building on the other side of the marsh, but hadn’t known it was part of the evil empire.  

It figures; Wal-Mart tends to moves into large swathes of “unsettled land” and “develops” them. In the late 1990s Wal-Mart bought a piece of land right next to the Celery Bog which had just been purchased by the city and opened as a nature area 1995. Wal-Mart’s move was controversial as many opposed the intrusion of a big corporation right next to the city-owned nature preserve. Wal-Mart built a small store originally. They lay low for a few years garnering business as usual with lower than low prices until 2001 when they announced plans to expand into a Superstore, an undertaking they claimed required filling in an acre and a half of wetland. They went to the Army Corps of Engineers to convince them this was the only feasible solution. The Corps gave permission, with the caveat that Wal-Mart build four and a half new acres of wetland.  

Indeed there have been a number of controversial projects surrounding the bog. In addition to the supersizing of Wal-Mart, there have been serious issues with the road going through the wetlands. I question why the road was built there in the first place. Portions of the road kept sinking into the marsh, leaving bone-jarring washboard, and eventually rendering it entirely impassable. Y mentioned the road has been closed at least thrice for extended periods.(Incidentally, the road problems shut down the traffic that went near Smitty’s, one of the only purely “local” grocery stores, which not long thereafter went out of business).The latest attempt to remedy the road/marsh problem is the bridge, (yes, the singing bridge). We have yet to see how this newest solution stands up to the test. 

Then there is the adjacent golf course that decided to remove dead trees bordering the golf course and the bog to beautify the course (for some ceremony I've been told) and in so doing, removed the nesting sites of many birds and upset the water table. Everyone’s basements in Y’s neighborhood flooded soon after.  

And this is still not the beginning of humans interfering with the habitat. According to one interpretive sign we read along the path: “The soil and topography where prairie potholes are found is ideal for agriculture. As a result, most pothole wetlands in north-central Indiana have been drained and filled. Efforts to restore this critical habitat are in progress at Celery Bog, the Kankakee Marsh, and other locations.” Celery Bog has been a wetland since the last ice age, but it was once drained in the late 1800s by enterprising farmers who figured the rich peat would make excellent farmland. Many crops indeed grew well there, among them celery. In the 1960s the water levels rose and the farmers were unable to maintain the land for farming; it returned to marsh.

And the herons came.

I watch spellbound as a Great Blue Heron floats over the shallow water for landing. He lets his long legs dangle; his feet skim the surface before he pulls them forward to step from sky to water. 

All pictures taken by Sugata and Sonya near Celery Bog.

A great, informative article about the history of Celery Bog:

http://www.jconline.com/article/20111030/NEWS/110300333/Celery-Bog-natural-treasure

History of Farming at Celery Bog:

http://www.indianaaudubon.org/Birds/BirdingSites/CeleryBog/tabid/175/Default.aspx

Removal of trees from golf course:

http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wbaa/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=1278605

Development of Celery Bog:

http://www.eas.purdue.edu/geomorph/celerybog/development.html

Dog Days of Summer and Random Beauty

I'm thinking about  all the years of my childhood and realizing that no friend or family ever pointed out an interesting bird in the wild. I have seen a few exotic things at zoos, but do not ever recall walking from my house and being face-to-face with an exotic bird. There used to be paddy fields next to our high-rise building in Hyderabad and there were two or three trees that had interesting nest by weaver-birds, and I still remember seeing one deep blue Kingfisher in grade four while riding my school bus. I guess in the places I grew up in India, urban Hyderabad and semi-urban Ranchi, "development" and the concomitant construction of houses ensured the birds were pushed out of the concrete jungle and out of my world.

Even here in West Lafayette, Indiana, more and more of the land is being consumed. Just today I heard on the news about some million-dollar property in the city limits being sold by the city to a robotics company for a dollar to set up a factory.

Sonya and I have been taking in the sun early in the morning each day, leashed to our four-legged squirrel-hunting leader, MB. Each day so far has been peppered with magical visits from exotic birds. While in Tennessee, I had been told by R that the bluebirds she had seen had blue feathers on the top and an orange and white belly. We saw one today in the most unlikely of places. On our usual walk, after crossing the Lindburgh Bridge spanning the Celery Bog wetland, we take a right and walk through the trails along the west shore of the wetland. Today we decided to head left along the bike path towards campus. The path initially separates the Purdue golf course to the left and suburban houses to the right. Half a mile later, the houses and lawns are replaced by a huge field which is mono-cropped with uniformly machine-planted grids of corn. On the left we still had the golf course which was being mowed at multiple places by noisy, strange human-topped machines and quieter Canada Geese flocks. A far cry from the wetland bordered by a wood if we had mad a right turn.

I went down on my knees to take a photograph of a dwarfed and diseased corn baby, which was being roasted by the bright golden sun surrounded by an army of brawny foot-and-a-half long corn soldiers. Sonya and MB walked on. When I stood up, there were a pair of bluebirds on the little tree that somebody had planted to supplement the grass on the golf course and the green corn. The bluebirds were not the slender bluebirds with longer beaks we had seen in Glenwood Springs, CO or the bluebird with the homologous shape in the Wapanocca Reserve in Arkansas. These were indigo blue on top contrasted with the light blue sky, and orange and white below. These were the bluebirds R had seen in Tennessee. These little sparrow-sized bluebirds examined me with their sclera-free black eyes.  I took their pictures from less than six feet away. I heard a bird cry to my left and tilted my head in that direction. A Red-Wing Blackbird was chasing a Starling and the pair were headed towards us. The two bluebirds dove into the army of green and the moment of magic was over.

Bird by Bird

Sugata’s 400 mm telephoto lens, bought in January, almost haphazardly on Craigslist started our journey into bird-watching. The lens brought us closer to the crows, sparrows, robins, and gulls of our Portland neighborhood. We spent a weekend watching raptors and water birds at Sauvie Island with friends and the Audubon society, then went back the next day for quieter bird watching. Clouds of Snow geese settled on the ponds; flocks of Sandhill Cranes gargled gently above us. Kestrels, Redtail Hawks, Bald Eagles we saw. We went to the waterfront for Cormorants and Canada Geese, found Red-wing Blackbirds around Oaks Bottom Pond.  The names of birds seemed to magically appear in my brain. I’d hear a trilling bird on a hike in the Columbia Gorge, see a flash of yellow, and the word “Meadowlark” would pop into my head. When I observed a gray bird with long tail feathers in Memphis making all kinds of calls, “Mockingbird” seemed right. I’ve had many satisfying moments confirming these epiphanies by checking online.  As Sugata and I have continued travelling, we’ve run into previously unknown birds: the Summer Tanager, the American Goldfinch, the Indigo Bunting.  I’ve been leafing through our copy of The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America to match birds with pictures. Our most exotic bird to date is a Yellow-crowned Night Heron we found in the Wapanocca National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas.

What sometimes troubles me is hearing gorgeous bird calls and not knowing how to match the song to the kind of bird.  While I can look up “yellow bird” on google and find an image that leads me to the name, current technology does not allow me to match a bird-song to a bird. It strikes me how visually centered we are. How the words we use for visual description are far more numerous than our words for aural description. I’m sure that somewhere, there exists a bird-watcher app on some fancy-dancy phone for matching song to bird. I don’t really need one.  I see how dependent people are becoming on those little hand-held devices for EVERYTHING already. Also I wonder about so much knowledge being so easily accessed and how that relates to my brain development or rather the lack of it. With so much information, so easily available at hand, there is little reason to remember anything.  I also wonder about how such convenience will affect the amount of effort I am willing to put into learning. It may be slightly harder to research all of the birds in the area and to learn their songs. But the resistance and the effort, may work toward motivating me to retain what I learn. Maybe it is time for me to move beyond my limited knowledge of bird call pronunciations (a chicken says “cluck, cluck,” and a rooster says “cock-a-doodle-doo.”) According to Sibley, the American Goldfinch says: “toWEE  toWEE toWEEto tweer tweer tweer ti ti ti ti.”

I’ll sign off now. Pictures to follow. 

Kon-ka-reeeee!

Female Summer Tanager, Collegedale, TN, May 08, 2012

Indigo Bunting, Wapanocca Wildlife Refuge, Arkansas, May 06, 2012

Yellow Crowned Night Heron,Wapanocca National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas, May 06, 2012

Juvenile Bald Eagle in flight on Sauvie Island, Multnomah County, OR Feb 04, 2012

Robin seen at 19th and NE Davis, Portland, OR, on Feb 04, 2012 

Sonya

Movement

Journeys often begin with excitement, exhaustion, and a little sadness.  Ours did anyway. A few friends came to see us off,*some* of whom graciously videoed our struggle to lighten our overweight suitcases three minutes before departure. We staggered aboard with two backpacks each, as well as armfuls of miscellaneous objects, either cast out from their original packaging, or never having found a secure spot. Once we had tamed our luggage we sat and let our sweat dry, then teetered to the back of the train to watch Portland disappear. Bye bye, Portland. You’ve been good to us.

It takes time to iron out the mix of feelings upon departure. The exhaustion tends to increase temporarily as spending a night in coach is not conducive to rest. The other emotions dissipate over time as your senses become absorbed in the new stimuli: the stunning scenery from the observation car, the curious conversations of other passengers, the hook of a good book. Gradually a new feeling begins to emerge: restlessness. Despite attempts at aerobic exercise during the longer stops, it’s never quite enough to satisfy. Exercise for the sake of exercise after isn’t so much fun—especially on strip of gray concrete. (I still say that if I ever work on a train, I’ll divide passengers up. Smokers to the east, nonsmokers to the west—and over in the nonsmoking section I’d get out my boom box, turn the volume up and lead everyone in an energetic  5-minute dance.)

We arrived in Glenwood Springs April 30, and found ourselves (after nourishment) exuberant to be moving our bodies. We’ve walked the town, swam in the hot springs pool (two blocks long!), biked the Rio Grande trail to Carbondale and back. Today, after organizing our stuff we may squeeze in another hike. Our last greedy bit of movement before that luxury is taken away.

Sonya

Thoughts on Labour, Gender and Class

Yesterday, I went to the Amtrak station at Glenwood Springs, CO to change my train tickets. I was surprised to note that the woman working at the counter was the same person who had unloaded my suitcase from the train the day before. For someone from India, this was a culture-shock. It is inconceivable that someone in India who has a desk-job - say a ticketing agent; would also load and unload suitcases on the platform. There are other issues at play too.

In India, I am guessing that even at the smallest station, there would be many jobs: a station-master, a ticketing person, few people working as physical labourers to load and unload goods and mail, signal-people on either end of the station, and people to clean the station, in addition to a host of other unofficial people who depend on the train-station for their livelihood: food-vendors,newspaper and magazine sellers, coolies, boot-polish kids, beggars, auto-rickshaw drivers- and most of these would be men.

The station in India would also have hand-painted signs- so a local would get hired for the job, instead of a standard sized sign made in a factory somewhere like in all Amtrak stations.

It was charming to see a small black-board, where the same person mentioned above, would write the time of the expected arrival of trains. There are only passenger trains- eastbound and westbound; the eastbound train had departed on time at 12:10 pm, while the westbound train was running late by 3-4 hours. Having left Chicago a day ago, it was scheduled to arrive at 4:53pm.