Marking Time
by Dave McBee
Crows patrol the lake, crisscrossing slowly and thoroughly, feathering, focusing straight down to spot the tiny, silvery sticklebacks that spawn, die, and float to the surface every year at this time. Spotting one, a crow stalls out, drops almost to the surface to snatch up two inches of silver with outstretched claws, and then beats wings frantically toward the trees clutching its prize. Crow babies must be fed. Now.
A pied-billed grebe marks time as water lily stems corkscrew to the water's surface. Today, five thousand stems in this quiet corner of Seattle's Portage Bay have, in unison, broken the surface by about a half inch, looking like five thousand lime-green hair implants. The grebe, at the proper time, will build a floating nest, tethered to a patch of lily pads. Today, it (the sexes look alike, and both will care equally for their young) patrols within six feet of the spot where a nest has been built for each of the past four summers, at least. The next day, the grebe floats at the very spot, at one end of a particular oblong, amoeboid raft of lilies that is just beginning to reassume its familiar shape, as if reorienting itself to the site. The grebe waits, marking time, for now.
A mile east (as some fly) another grebe sits atop its already-completed nest, at least, until some inquisitive fool splashes up in a boat. Then it pulls a few shreds of the rotting vegetation that make up the nest over its eggs (to hide them, and keep them warm) and dives, reappearing a dozen feet or so away, where it waits until the intruder leaves, his curiosity satisfied. This particular nest is tethered to a patch of native pond lilies; the ones mentioned earlier were the eastern water lily, an introduced (and dominant) species. The native pond lily breaks the surface earlier in the spring than the eastern lily, providing an earlier nesting site. The leaves of the native lily stretch a foot or more above the water's surface, providing much better cover for both nest and young birds. By now, the nest is completely concealed from passers-by. There has been a nest in this exact spot for each of the past three summers, at least.
Nearby, a red-winged blackbird's nest sits empty, abandoned. Two weeks ago it was full of babies that were, as I peered in, trying to pretend they weren't there. Did a heron snatch them up, their presence betrayed by my poking about, or did they simply fledge and get gone?
Ten minutes later, a great blue heron passes overhead, grasping a long forked branch in its beak. Each fork is about two feet long; the ends dangle like great pencil-thin moustaches below the bird's head. The nearest heron rookery is at Shilshole, four miles in the exact direction the bird is flying. The probable source of the branch is another mile behind the bird, in the marshes of the University of Washington Arboretum. Five miles carrying a single piece of wood.
An editor will tell me this needs an ending, but it has none. And no beginning.
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