My husband and I have volunteered at a raptor rehabilitation center for years, and when we decided to adopt a toddler, the center’s staff threw us a baby shower on the lawn outside the kestrel’s cage. They presented our new daughter, Maia, with bird-embossed T-shirts and a stuffed toy turkey vulture. We ourselves received a […]
Melissa Hart
Posted inMarch 2, 2009: How low will it go?
Of flotsam and jetsam
As poetry students at a California university, my friend Merie and I walked to class along the beach. We often paused to examine dead seagulls, whose glazed eyes and tar-matted feathers we described in our would-be avant-garde verse. Somehow we never questioned where the birds came from or even why they were dead. Twenty years […]
Posted inDecember 22, 2008: What a mess
John Daniel: A good animal, too
Ourselves When the throaty calls of sandhill cranesecho across the valley, when the rimrock flaresincandescent red, and the junipersare flames of green on the shortgrass hills, in that moment of last clear lightwhen the world seems ready to speak its name,meet me in the field alongside the pond.Without careers for once, without things to do, […]
Posted inNovember 10, 2008: Still Howling Wolf
Let it mellow
One does not expect to learn about conservation via the sight of one’s 85-year- old great-grandmother hunkered down bare-bottomed under the rosebushes, but there it is. In my formative years, “Grandmary” taught me to reduce, reuse and recycle everything from bacon grease to urine. “Pee makes the roses bloom bigger,” she told me when I […]
Posted inAugust 6, 2007: Guns R Us
The owl and I
“I rejoice that there are owls,” Henry David Thoreau once wrote. For 30 years, I had no idea what he meant. I grew up in Los Angeles, and if owls soared the smoggy skies, I never saw them. Only after moving to Oregon did I learn the word “raptor.” Intrigued by these magnificent, carnivorous birds, […]