Grateful

On the way out from the nature refuge yesterday, I overheard a dad explain to his daughter as they started their hike on the trail, "They set aside all this land and said that you can never build here". I was grateful for the opportunity to overhear this comment, and grateful to the people who decided to preserve this piece of earth.

When, Sonya and I started our walk, we saw a concrete sign on the ground, with an engraving that said, "Welcome to our Home". I liked the tone of the message, which by inverting anthropocentric thinking, made us think that we should not think of ourselves as the people in control, but as visitors. 

On either side of the path, there were signs that looked like vinyl records that commanded us, "LISTEN: To Wildlife Lyrics". It had the name of the bird below, to the right was the logo of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. To the left was a plot depicting the call of the bird, the X-axis denoting time in seconds, and the Y-axis denoting Frequency in kilo-Hertz. It made me wonder why the dry dreary signal processing textbook in my college did not contain such practical examples of situations where a Fourier transform could be used in a real life situation. I wonder if there is an app which does precisely this- identify the bird after processing its call- just like apps like Shazam identify music. Although, it might be better if I installed the app in my brain to memorize the time-domain response of a bird call, and then use it to identify birds. I am able to do that with humming-birds and song-sparrows, but at the refuge, I did not hear the Willow flycatcher or the Yellow warbler.

The refuge I went to did not have a ton of geese or swans or winter ducks. I saw the birds I had seen before- nothing to get the adrenalin coursing through my veins. But, I was grateful. Sometimes one is simply grateful to have had the chance to see nature up close. One goes on a drive to a wildlife refuge and to a waterfall, and the memories of the day are not something extraordinary. If people ask me at work on Monday, I might reply, "Well. Not much just went for a hike, saw some birds and saw a waterfall". Perhaps, our senses have been over-saturated by seeing the continuous streaming of nature videos, so a simple lozenge does not seem worthy after having feasted on a bag of cookies. The overall memory which is lodge in my memory is a sense of calm, peace, and gratefulness that I managed to do this.

I saw a harrier rest in the grass meadow. It took off and glided over the flat wetland, from one to the other, back and forth and across, scanning for edibles. It did this a few times.

I watched a coot, wander up and down the channel, wading towards me and away from me, diving periodically for young shoots below the water surface. It was joined later by its partner, and they both continued this behaviour.

What a contrast between a carnivore and a herbivore. A herbivore has to constantly eat, and spend a lot of time and energy digesting a large biomass. A carnivore, eats periodically, and eats something energy dense, and has a lot of resting time.

Sonya noticed these fresh young leaves growing on a dead thistle pod, a pod with no seeds, seeds which had been consumed by birds, or had buried themselves somewhere in the ground to become the next generation.

I saw a kestrel rest on a stout thistle branch, and bob in the wind through my spotting scope. I alternated between looking at the coot through my binoculars, and the kestrel through the scope. A few minutes later the kestrel was not to be seen. We continued along the path to a strand of trees, where I saw a flock of acorn woodpeckers land. After taking a few pictures of them, we walked on and saw the kestrel hovering in the air like a hummingbird, prepared to dive-bomb on a field mouse.

Later in the day, we went to the Panther Creek Waterfalls- the falls are more majestic in real life than the pictures I had seen on the internet. Any spot on the numerous cascades was a perfect setting to take a stunning landscape photo- a simple exercise of setting the shutter speed on your tripod steadied camera to anywhere between 1/15 of a second to 20 seconds, to get the billowy silky textures of water contrasted with the hard rock, the soft carpet of moss enveloping everything with a shrp straight lines from fallen branches.

The digital age and cheap silicon has made capturing of these images simple, and one can retake images from the instant feedback on the LCD screen- but all these will be gone forever if they are not printed on paper- for paper will last a few hundred years, whereas no computer or electronic device will function after a decade. Such is the paradox of our age, somethings like capture are made easy, while others like storage are made more difficult. Long term storage can only be accomplished by reverting back to an older technology. I am grateful for this knowledge.