Three different walking stints today: downtown in the morning to the doctor, downtown to the Library and to Arts Center East gallery (for the “Innate Heroine” all-woman show) in the afternoon, and the inevitable dusk-time Charlie-dog ramble.
I’ve already told some of you about this, but now we spread the word. Don’t miss the Nova special, Great Human Odyssey, a two-hour PBS program that ran on October 5, I think (we caught it last night online). One of its segments that particularly fascinated me was the story of early, thousands-of-years-ago Polynesian navigation and how recreations of the same watercraft using ancient navigation skills — no charts, no GPS, no instruments, just reading the stars and flows of ocean currents — is being employed to circumnavigate the world in a three-year voyage, currently underway. Read more about the voyage here.
Remember our Cougar post earlier this month? Here’s a report this week from the local newspaper. (click on underlined text to see details)
A few more, in my preferred mode of interpretation, presentation, expression …
Some signs of autumn this morning. No snakes to report this time.
This morning as we walked through the dense brush on the bank between the Rinehart Canyon cliffs and the Grande Ronde River, I heard a yelp up ahead, not sure whether it came from Kim or Charlie, who were perhaps 30 yards in front of me, invisible. I could only see a few feet ahead as the foliage was about head-high and the path was tightening, so I saw nothing out of the ordinary. But in a couple of seconds my phone rang and Kim was reporting that Charlie, walking ahead of her, stepped right over what she presumed to be a dead rattlesnake, but as she got near, it suddenly coiled and emitted an audible warning. She said that she dove through the brush at the side of the path to get past, and advised me to do the same. Some visuals:
More photo doc from Rinehart Canyon to follow.
Tried again tonight, joining about half a dozen other diehard watchers. In the space of just under an hour, we saw two swifts darting about and circling. One finally appeared to dive into the chimney. The other was not seen again. We went home. Will mark our calendars to revisit the scene in September 2017.
P.S. This is an example of what was supposed to happen, what we were trying to see (this from September 2013 in Portland):
This afternoon I slipped down to Max Square as rumor had it that hordes of migrating swifts would be plunging into a local chimney on the five-floor Foley Building downtown. At 4pm, I saw about fifty birds circling the rooftops for a few seconds, then they disappeared. Charlie and Kim joined me an hour or so later, and by that time, a fairly large crowd was assembling. Matt Cooper (classical and jazz pianist extraordinaire), in a show of versatility and sensitivity to local tastes, provided entertainment with the help of his bluegrass band. Food vendors were on hand. And lots of people with dogs.
Earlier I had chatted with a gentleman who pointed out the chimney to watch (he turned out to be mistaken, and I missed much of the main event) and tried to make me believe that between 10,000 and 40,000 swyfts were expected. I ended up seeing no more than 40 – 50 at a time, and except for the early sighting, those didn’t appear until about 7pm, some two hours after the predicted and advertised time. Nevertheless, we did a good deal of people and dog watching, took in the sunset and were able to connect with Nik for a few minutes around 7:30pm after he came off his work shift. We intend to try again tomorrow night, but with proper placement at a vantage point that will allow for a more generous viewing than tonight’s.
You may contest this statement, but several photos below, particularly of the chimney views, do include up to 20 or 30 birds each in the distance. You may have some difficulty picking them out — what we have here is a Failure to Photograph. But there is tomorrow night …
Kim directs our attention to this security cam photo, from one of her Facebook friends, taken near the top of 12th Street (yes, where Kim hits the trailhead for her at-least-weekly-and-maybe-every-other-day two or three or four mile hike up to Bushnell Trail with The Charlie-Dog). Here we see a cougar in the wee hours of the morning a few days ago, eating from a dog’s feeding bowl.