The Meadowlark Came Back

I think it was last August when I wrote about it, that dearth of songbirds that had come to my world. In particular, I mentioned that I had noticed how the Western meadowlark was absent, and how lonely the sagebrush grasslands seemed without his song. My best friend, Stephanie, recalled the Western meadowlark from her childhood in Cody, Wyoming. Now, of course, Stephanie is in an urban area in Utah and wouldn't have noticed the absence of meadowlarks so much. But to hear that they weren't even here, in the heart of the sagebrush-covered West, disturbed her as it did me.

This year a hint of spring came early. Way back in March we had warm weather--above average, they said. But that was only a teaser, for little did we know what was coming. Between a cold, wet April and the coldest recorded May on record for Pocatello, this has been a remarkable spring, remarkable for its dreariness. But out of it all a Phoenix arose, so to speak. Out of the figurative ashes of the cold and the wetness of our Idaho spring, came all kinds of songbirds I hadn't seen on my property before: goldfinches, western tanagers, evening grosbeaks. In fact, two grosbeaks greeted my wife one morning about thirty seconds before I pulled into the driveway when they ran headfirst into my new picture window. I went to pick up the male and found the female sitting there beside him, stunned. Being the bird lover I am, I put the female in the pocket of my coat with only her head protruding and held the male in my hand as I called my mom to tell her about this remarkable experience, most importantly, the appearance of the long-absent grosbeaks. Well, as you might guess, the male got his strength back and flew out of my hand, and the female took strength from her mate's revival and took wing out of my pocket. So I no longer had "two birds in the hand," but unfortunately two birds in the house! After both birds managed to once again knock themselves senseless from INSIDE the house, I had the foresight this time to take them both outside, where in short order they revived and flew away.

But back to the songbirds. For some reason they are back. I never dreamed I would see the incredible black, red and yellow plumage of the beautiful western tanager in my yard, but there they were. And the goldfinches--both birds whose absence I had mourned. Yet above all, there in the sagebrush meadow behind my house, piped the song of the meadowlark. Filling out their bright yellow chests, with the black chevron pinned so boldly across it, they let their melodies fill the air. They are back, and I am soaking in the beauty of their song. I guess it is last year's absence that makes this year's music sound so sweet, and I suppose that's how life always is. You have to have the sadness to know the joy.

All I care about when I walk into my forest is this knowledge: The meadowlark has returned.

Reptiles with feelings?

It was one of those incredible moments when you would give almost anything to have a camera, particularly a video camera, with you, but you don't. My family and I were traveling to a friend's house to take down some juniper trees when something in the road caught my eye. I'm one of those inexplainable oddities who actually tries to NOT run over a snake when I see it in the road, and when I realized I was looking at one I swerved to the left. I missed the snake, but looking in my rearview mirror I could see that this one wasn't crawling out of the way. So I backed up in order to chase it off the road before a less hospitable motorist could drive by.

What I found when I reached the place where the snake had been was nothing short of shocking. First off, the snake that had made me stop was already off the road by then. But there on the shoulder where it had crossed were two more of them, intertwined. The larger of the two was on its back, and the other one, perhaps two inches shorter than the four feet of the first one, had the entire length of its body snug up against the other's. My first reaction, as I'm sure would have been the reaction of most people, was to believe they were mating. But a closer look proved this to not be true. First, their "parts" weren't connected, and secondly, the larger snake was dead! It's head had been run over by a previous car.

So here were these two snakes, a dead one, on its back, and a live, slightly smaller one, that had completely "embraced" the first one and was writing and back and forth like crazy. Now, I'm no herpitologist (snake scientist), but as I watched this live snake's activity a number of things came to me. It appeared that he/she, the live snake, was by virtue of lying on and around the dead snake and writhing madly back and forth, trying to bring life back into it, or to coax it to move. Another possibility was that it was actually trying to move it farther out of the roadway, out of danger's path. Either way, the live snake was so engrossed in whatever it was doing that I was able to pet its body, and it gave no sign that it even noticed. It didn't hiss, didn't try to get away, just continued this bizarre "dance of death" that it was occupied in when we arrived.

We ended up staying there watching it for fifteen or twenty minutes, and all the while the snake tried to move its buddy, its mate, its brother/sister--whatever the connection was--off the road, or to bring it back to life by moving with it, perhaps sort of a reptilian artificial rescuscitation. Finally, I picked up the dead snake and moved it to a safer place several feet off the road. I have known too many people who might have seen it on the road edge and gone out of their way to run it over, killing the other one in the process. This brought about the first change in the live snake's activity. Once we put the live one down in the grass as well, it darted away from the dead snake, and I thought it was going to make its escape. However, I picked it back up by the tail and held its head near the dead snake for a couple of seconds. At that point, the snake seemed to recognize its comrade once more, and once more it entwined itself with the body of the dead one and began trying to move it. Now, of course, the snakes were nowhere near the road, and it seemed the obvious conclusion was not that the live snake was trying to move the other one off the road but truly was acting as a rescuscitator.

We left and chopped junipers for over an hour, and when we returned we were shocked to find that the snake was still there, performing his rescuscitative efforts. This time we rushed home with our load of wood and grabbed the camera. However, when we made it back half an hour later things had changed. The live snake was still there, but now he was still. The sun had moved, causing a nearby juniper to throw shade over the snakes and chilling them. Either that fact or perhaps sheer exhaustion had caused the snake to stop trying to "save" his friend. I tried moving them both out into the sunshine again, but it was as if the cold shadows had broken the spell, broken his obsession, so to speak. The live snake slithered away into the low branches of the junipers, and we let him go.

But that snake has left me pondering: What do we as humans really, truly know about the feelings, the "emotions" of the animal world. Many people like to believe that we are the only beings who can think or feel, who do more than just react to circumstances. Perhaps in the case of this snake that is true. Or perhaps there is something more, something deeper, that no mere human being can understand. I don't know. I can't pretend to. All I do know is that on that warm spring day I was witness to something I have never seen in 44 years of life, 44 years as an amateur snake "expert," something I will probably never see again. I will always wonder what the connection between those snakes truly was, and I will always wonder what purpose the living snake had in mind. I guess it's just another mystery for the ages.