Worms in the Head

Slip Point - for how long?

Oh, you gotta hear this - the latest malarkey at least one of the locals is telling herself to excuse the clearcuts:

"And the loggers are cutting due to the alleged tons of chemicals being sprayed, drying and infecting them, and are in a hurry to raze it, but the gov't agencies who would be in charge, are."

A lot of kelp makes gulls happy.

I THINK I know what that sentence structure is, but, it's a TAD confused. The-Guvment-Is-Spraying-Chemicals gang is like the Sasquatch bunch up here - a few flyerovers by test planes from Boeing or some condensation trailes are blown up into Attack like a couple of run-together big dog prints becoming bigfoot proof.

And I finally realized the biggest worm in their heads. I didn't even make the connection until now. Americans who have never been taught any different in the last hundred years are like Scottish Lairds or German Junkers - they want a landscape to look like this: stags, salmon, grouse - and nothing else, not even songbirds, because they might eat something the grouse eat, like ranchers killing prairie dogs, and complaining about pronghorn being brought back. In their minds, the seals are eating "all the salmon," and the seagulls are eating "all the herring."

I had a woman complain about the seagulls when I had just picked up four nice herring flipped onto the beach in heavy surf and took 'em home to Jim cat. A young man, here - whose family is going to survive because he's a Green, not a Greed - told me his dad had said to always kill the mergansers, because "they ate fish." He said he stopped the day he saw the mergansers eating lampreys. 

That's right - these nitwits were killing the very birds that were controlling one of the worst threats to the fish. I swear, the ignorance about wildlife and actual forest and river systems is massive. They might know how to find the fish - and clean them out to the very last one, while blaming the hell out of each other ("It's the Indians! The Sports Fishermen! Bigfoot!" Everybody but ME, in other words) - but they have NO CLUE how an actual river system works in the lives of fish. NONE.

Oh, I'd better say real quick, that the lampreys feed the mergansers and guarantee a future lamprey-cleaning patrol, or these morons will go out and try to kill all the lampreys. I wouldn't put it past them; I thought I knew how stupid humans could be about the environment, but it's a daily moment of my jaw hitting the ground. Jesus, are we REALLY that stupid as a species? The only way we - and I say that as a White Person, because I'm not going to pretend we really didn't get it going - see any way to solve anything is to destroy what's there. We can only work from a desert.

One old guy, snarling about "this guv'ment and this president" said "It used to be better." Well, if he means the time when he remembers the river so full of fish "You could walk on 'em," he and his were working overtime to make that go away - yeah, he's right about that. Although I suspect there's an awful lot of the Pap Finn whine of "Why don't somebody put this white-shirted free nigger on the block?" (Huh. And Obama DOES strip off the jacket and show the white shirt a lot, don't he?)

But because they have no more clue about how a democracy works, especially one this size, than a serf under King Richard, I suspect what the old guy actually means is that the Indians are quietly saying, "Give us back our fish - or we get your town back."

That's right - it's Bartolomé day, isn't it? Named after a Catholic Priest who spent 50 years fighting what was being done by the Spanish to the Natives. It used to be named after a white guy - but he was basically just another 15th century proof that, at one time, Hitler would have been a perfectly normal guy. Adolf the Antique didn't look that way by the 20th century, but those poor Natives who went out to trade and feed and help when those three ships sailed into the beach - yeah, they were basically facing the Nazis; genocide, slavery and all.

So... if it "Used to be better" or different than that time - good. It can just keep getting worse, then, while the people who caused it start facing what they did. And learn to act like grown-ups on this planet, instead of greedy, stupid children.

By the way, Slip Point has eagle nests. Just sayin', in case they try for it. And if that hill, logged, falls onto houses, I get to do juicy news coverage. And say, "I told you so." 

I used to hate having to say "I told you so," but now it's starting to feel good. Why should the environment - and my heart - be the only thing broken? Pride can be broken, too - and usually is. I guess in the case of a slip hill, "cometh before a fall" is horribly literal. 

ALMOST BLACKBERRY TIME

It's almost time to make blackberry wine.... rubbing hands...  they always ripen on my birthday, or did when I was a kid.  Here, it's about a week after.

Blackberries... which we can't use gloves with because we can't nibble off a handful before working arm back out of the Iron Maiden of vines. 

Oh, who else (female) here ever went berry picking without a bra and leaned stupidly into a bank of Himalayas?

Our neighbor had a bunch of the little wild berries come up next to her porch, and has already picked more than her husband found in the woods in four trips.  

Speaking of berries, the Thimbleberries on the side of our road are popping out now.  My favorite berry; they taste like a cross between raspberries and roses.  Some people think they're insipid, and it takes a lot to make jam, and then they lose that special flavor.  So I just stand and snarf them like a happy monkey in the long meadow.  This is how we're supposed to eat, anyway.  I can't reach into the back bushes -- or I don't feel like it -- so I'm not eating anybody else's share; there are so many berries up here now, every bird and mammal and insect has more than they want.  It's why we're putting off cleaning the outside of the house for the year, until the birds stop bombing the very pale lavender paint.

The signs of spring and summer.  Salmon-berry bird begins to sing when the salmon-berries ripen, and goes silent as the thimbleberries cap red and juicy.  And the house gets decorated with purplish splotches.

WHERE ONLY MAN IS VILE

Ah, the joy of living in rural areas.  The latest human nastiness is a woman who, in spelling her name for a newspaper cut line, told me, "It's German.  I have to tell people that, because they want to spell it like some Hispanic crap."

BUT -- on the other hand, nature is lovely.  After a hard week, we grabbed the first lovely day to take a long walk on the beach and see where the river mouth had opened up a new island, and almost closed the old river, so we could get to the island.

We followed a gray whale down the beach as it fed among the buffelheads, in the deep water off the steep beach, only about 20 feet from us.  We listened to a blue heron cuss us out, and viewed harlequin ducks and loons.

The humans can't last forever; most diseases don't.

POKE THE BIRD

Here there's a big rock around that headland that BELONGS to a ruby-crowned kinglet.  There's a tree near the river that belongs to another one.  You take your life in your hands (laughing yourself to death) if you get near either.

Of course, touching the rock and leering, "Oh, is this YOUR rock?  And here?  And HERE?" can't help.  I thought the furious little bead of feathers was going to explode from pure indignation.

Teasing wildlife.  We're going to hell.

Watch Your Kids

Some idiot, while fishing in Clallam Bay, shot a pigeon guillemot; you should be able to see the bullet hole.

If they're flipping bullets around for non-sports birds, they're flipping bullets around with depraved indifference.

There's a term we used to use for kids when I ran a blockwatch in Bremerton:  bullet magnet.  They just attract 'em.  

So if your kid catches a slug fishing on Clallam Bay this weekend, you know where to look.  Let me know: I get paid for all the articles and photos I can collect.

Too Close and Not Close Enough

Out in the garden, bent over plucking some greens, I heard a winnowing sound that I'd barely identified as wings  -- in that split second wondering if it were angry bees and then a crow -- before I had to duck out from under two hurtling bald eagles. They zipped over the fence and flew off along Bear Kill Ridge on a courtship flight.

(Nobody knows who was killed -- the bear or whoever was hunting it)

About six eagles are hanging out in the area; three adults, three immatures (nothing yet from this year).  We call one of the youngsters "Bird-Killer" because she zeroes in on and takes ducks out of the water.  We think it's a female; she's big. A month ago she rose from the reef and flew toward where we stood on the beach, rising over sea-ducks feeding near the shore. 

She hovered, then suddenly dropped and powered along the waves, targeting a buffel-head drake.  The drake took off and flew for his life, Bird-Killer like a big dark jet behind him, her great wings scything through the air, closing the gap by the moment. There was a sudden explosion of spray as the drake dived underwater in full flight.  Bird-Killer overshot, then swung around.  She wafted up, watching for where he would resurface.  He came up, but no sooner than she'd dropped through the air, he dropped back under the surface. of the water.

You could almost see her shrug, before she headed off down toward the mouth of the Clallam Bay River.  She's evidently learned what she can take or not, and doesn't waste action. She's going to be a serious competitor once she gets her white head feathers.