Marshlands in Winter

Darkness in the southeast corner of Oklahoma. Drizzle. Fog. 4:30 A.M. No coffee. Sounds like the beginning of some bird counting. Curvy two-laned roads. What the hell ore these people doing up at 4:30 on a Monday? They may be asking the same of me.

Back to Red Slough for the first time in years to help David Arbour with his count. He seems to be down some counters, but it turns out he is not. His plea has worked. I find the main north/south road with the help of a sign and some guesswork. Make my way past the small gravel parking areas to the one I think is northern most. I passed a group of duckhunters unloading gear along the way. It seems an exceptional amount of gear in my quick passage. But it is that time of year. And probably one of the big reasons the marshland project exists at all. It is definitely not for the lovely Sedge Wren or the King Rail.

I find one other truck is parked at this small lot which I do recognize from years ago, even in the dark. It is empty otherwise. And I stand in some poorly defined drizzled darkness wondering if ‘owling’ is ever a good idea without coffee before another pick-up appears and pulls in.

“Herschel?”

“David?”

He has come to rescue me. I am one lot shy of the northernmost. I follow him to the real starting point and recognize this patch as well. Maybe. Here several vehicles and people are awake and dressed for the day. Less camouflaged than duckhunters, but still. Introductions around. All new to me except Leif who pulls in after a bit. He has driven 200 miles from another count yesterday in south Arkansas. Leif does have a count addiction problem. But I cannot always say it is a bad one. Another, clearly smarter group, will be here at 7 after the owling hours to disperse out into the dawn.

By flashlight and maps people are directed to owlish places. David is having some clogged-up ear problems and I go with him as a better pair of ears. Ears that note some personal hearing retreat in the past years but still I can hear the Blackburnian Warbler, the Blackpoll. These are true testers. Owls, well, owls are easy. David has an owl call collection on a battery powered device and some rail notes. He seems to have everything on this little black box. And he says the rails answer in darkness as well. And this place is the most railish place I know. All of the King Rails of my life except one have been seen here. Sometimes staggeringly close and even in family groups. They are the kind of bird to make you a birder. Or at least more astounded at nature than you were a few minutes before you saw them. David has a few that stay all winter among the myriad Virginia Rails. In this vast swampy place.

First to the owls though. And one must stagger the calls. Big owls eat smaller owls and small owls fear the calls of the larger night killers. So, we start with a Screech who are really just a double handful of talon and ear tuft. David sends the sound out. And his device is impressively louder than a phone. I have to stand away from the thing. Quickly, when this dissertation of Screechy speech concludes, two Screechies in the east and west directions talk back.

“Can you hear those David?”

“Nope.”

David is younger than me by ten years or more. I feel for him. You do have to slide into your hearing loss. Or it is a shock. For him, this is temporary. On to the Barred Owl. And he proceeds to send out a series of Barred calls which includes the monkey cackle and some hisses and screes that I don’t even know.

“Jesus, David.” I don’t think he hears me.

It is quiet. The swampy woods just stare. David’s spotlight makes weird shadows. Creatures splash in the woods: raccoons and deer, most likely. Mother-of-God, they think, we are about to be owled to death. David says he knows the birds are in these woods. We wait. And then he says, let’s try the Great Horned. Though we both know this sometimes silences the Barred. And if the woodland creatures were frightened by a Barred, we are about to boost the nightmare a level or two. David fumbles with some buttons and proceeds to attack the night silences with a symphony of Horned owl sounds that make me, a large human, want to hide in the truck. Even worse hisses and screes that I don’t want to hear.

And it is quiet again for a bit. And then a Barred Owl calls so close I think he must be assessing my hat for attack.

“Wow, that one does not give a shit,” I say.

And he goes on. Triggering another Barred. Then he sails out over us while David tracks him with the spotlight. He calls again out in a small tree in the marsh and then comes back. After this, three or four more Barreds answer back and come in close. They make the wild call. The hooting hacking laugh of feathered night creatures, the brotherhood of darkwings. It is a sound to convert everyone to wild places. Several distant Great Horned’s also talk. I shake my head. The count is begun.

Down the levee further David has a spot for Virginia Rails. His device speaks fluent rallidae into the night. He says they sometimes wait up to two minutes to respond. I had no idea. I have certainly never spoken to rails. But, true to form, a full minute in darkness after the call recording a Virginia makes the sneezy cackle off to the left. We find three more further on and also try some Kings without success. Several Great Horned Owls just decide to talk to the low sky and the darkness around us. David can’t hear any of them. But he loves the chase.

Back at the lot, it is hard to tell dawn is anywhere near. The low sky rumples. Distant mallards and Gadwall make their respective chatter out on the dark water. I meet my partner for the day, Brent, from Minnesota. He is staying locally with his brother. He has a bigger truck than mine. We are given a map and some highlights. And off we go.

Our map is smeared with red marker because of the drizzle and humidity and David’s excited explanatory fingers. The sky is down and hazy, blending into ground fog. Enough to dampen one’s mood if one were not just out for the whole day chasing birds in some new landscape. That kind of day may be bulletproof short of lightning and tornadic winds.

Fog stands across Ward Lake. We lean on some fence tops and scan the water. I see the shadowy form of two Bald Eagles in a far hardwood. The white heads make them look decapitated. Coots scoot in and out of view. Mallards gabble and laugh. For a duck, this may be the perfect weather. To each his own. We pull into a driveway entry after an upward flash of birds there. “Birds,” being the word for stop. More fencing and curious cows. A bluebird perches next to a sun-whitened bovine skull hanging on the fencepost and Brent tries for this photo. A red pickup sits in the tall grass beyond. Pine Warblers scrabble in the leaves, like they do in winter. Our hardy winter warbler, I know not what tempts them in the litter. Brent shouts and points at a hawk coming from the east out of the haze. It comes and comes while we try to define its hawkish lineage before it curves suddenly and shows a long sickle beak: an immature White Ibis. Brown on the back and neck, not a bird I have ever seen on a Christmas count. It was not on our headlist of large flapping birds in December. We laughed. And then walked down to search the field it appeared to have evacuated. Grassy and wet, a pond with Gadwall nervously pacing. No other Ibis walked the field. A loner.

Brent went back for the truck and a single sparrow popped up and perched on the rail fence near me. The Gadwall made their alien sounds to the south. The sparrow made my sparrowsense wheel and turn. It had its back to me and gazed at me over its shoulder calmly like a vireo. Savannah Sparrows did not travel alone and they were nervous birds, always shifting and calling, turning their breasts to me. This one did not. And when he finally flipped and stared it was a Vesper. I only see one or two a year. Brent came over to admire it. And we flushed some Snipe into the air after declaring the field to look very snipish.

We find a road to a cemetery. And Brent informs me that as a younger man, he had found on his journeys across country with a tent, that cemeteries were one of the safest places to camp and sleep. No one bothered you there. If you could get over the initial creepiness, he said, it was fine. It was also often a fine place for birds. We pass through pine landscapes and stop for a tree full of carrion birds. Amazingly most of them are Black Vultures. I comment to Brent that this is certainly the quintessential cemetery bird if there is one. He laughs.

At the open grassiness with headstones, we hear Mockingbirds. What cemetery does not have Mockingbirds? Passing crows. And then a sharp-edged bird going east to west, a Merlin that we watch until it is out of sight. The falcon I always need and only rarely find. Compact and fast, I have still never seen one make a kill. Perched and gazing back at me through a scope, yes. Fully aware of me, yes. “You will not do,” in the falcon eyeshine. Goldfinches flare. I look down at the headstone of a girl who died at the age of seventeen.

A Sedge Wren in a ditch, up and glowing with those creams and faint reddishnesses. Agitated: defined. Towhees and Thrashers making their sad and whistled notes here and there. On we go. The map was poor. And we found a road running northward that appeared to have no relationship to the map. That is always the road we want, I think. Brent nods. And we narrowly take it onward through mudholes and overlying trees until it breaks out into the sun and we find a six-wire barbed fence that looks created by OCD fencers of unknown provenance. Robotic almost in its lines and spacings. Off to the east is a vast field, grown with wild things: grasses and sedges and juncus and goldenrod leaning with the slight breeze. Who fences off a vast wild field? No cattle. No machinery in sight. The boundaries clearly are pine plantations: west, south, east. We keep on until we find some posts which look like they will make a gateway but the gate is unfinished. No Stay Out signs. No Private Property signs. No purple blazes. We turn east into the vastness.

Hummocks of grassiness with pools of water interspersed. Several sparrows tink and shift. We bail out into the rumpled prairie. A Harrier lifts and returns to tilting, flaring, hunting in the wind. We wander out and flush Savannah Sparrows and Swamp Sparrows and Song Sparrows. The truck in the distance as a silvered toy, some real rain batters across and away like a message tapping on my hat brim. After I comment on the purity of the Panic grass densities, we flush Le Conte’s Sparrows. One perches up and I shout and point Brent toward it. “Wow,” he says. The commonest response to this bird, I am guessing. Even in the diffused and overcast light this small bird will make you wonder about people who don’t like sparrows. We shake our heads and flush four or five more. It is a bird so secretive and mousy in the grass that it was one hundred years before anyone ever saw a nest after the bird was defined. In winter, my state of Arkansas is the center of a circle where you may see them if you are patient and find the beautiful grassiness just like what we were standing inside. LeConte, the man, was an Entomologist who named over 5000 beetles. He discovered a few birds while chasing his insects. I will never be as great as a man who has a thrasher and a sparrow named for him.

Northward, beyond the fenced area we gaze over an even larger burned field now regrown with broomsedge and saplings. It would be easy to wander out and get lost there. I step over stumps. I find so many deer prints in the mud, I look up and think I will surely see some curious Cervine herd staring back. We cannot do this field justice. We need a tent and several days. We go back down our narrow road to search for the north entrance to the lake that we could not find earlier.

A walk into the deep woods on a half-assed road. It is what we should aspire to on most days. Phones are dysfunctional here, so we have some directional guesswork and the Arbour map which is not detailed in its scrubby back pathways. Everything looked right, felt right. The path we chose zagged and meandered and teased through slim creekways and mudholes. Wood Duck here and there wingwhirred and screed up, through and away. All the woodpeckers spoke in this hardwood world: Flicker, Pileated, Sapsucker. We guided towards somewhere water by the distant Mallard conversations. Here and there Rusty Blackbirds popped up and tail wagged in their iridescent finery. Blackbirds after my own heart, who seem to mostly shun the social murmurations of the farm and field and prefer the quiet of leafy walkways in the woods.

Eventually we see a levee of a sort, taller than we are, the highest point, no doubt, for miles. And it both lifts and rescues us from the pools and enlarging water bodies funneling us toward the lakelands themselves. The big open water is all to the south of us and that is private land. This area we walk is owned by the Forest Service. Someone has tried to keep a narrow path open on the levee. Perhaps just some industrious deer. Coots batter up and pitter-patter into what seems their perfectly assigned escape routes off into the flooded brush. We cross several Beaver paths that come up and over the levee with water down sharply on both sides. These are slick and muddy and well-traveled. It looks like otter and coot and bobcat and deer and coyote and poachers and aliens and everything else tracks up and over the beaver levee-lift. Beaver, I think, should charge a toll. This birder must place a boot dead center on these keeled crossings or he will have a slick fast screaming ride east or west down into the juncus and buttonbush. I can picture Brent staring down at the bubbles of my aftermath. “He died doing what he loved.”

The view from the levee widens out the further we proceed. The marshlands opening up in a spread under the silvered sky to the southeast. The duck flocks are wary. The grebes and coots bunch up and drift behind plant clumps while peering cautiously toward these rare invaders. It is a place one wants to kayak out into on a spring morning. Though getting even a small boat here would be quite the task. We stay low and quiet but, in the end, we flush the great mass of ducks off the water in sudden mass eruption, picking out the Pintail and Shoveler in the Mallard formations.

We are wanted back at the Slough parking lot at 1 p.m. for a lunch break and, of course, we are late after our extended levee hike. The caravan is heading off as we arrive, and David runs back to ask if we want to go with them for the Rail drag. We do indeed and, thus, we fall in line. There are a few birds possibly Red Slough has better helped to understand in our world landscape. The Yellow Rail is one of them. ‘Secretive,’ is the word always applied in texts concerning them. ‘Elusive,’ is the other word. And it was 18 years ago now that David was mowing a grassy field in October in the Slough and flushed Yellow Rails with the mower. The maps then all showed winter range blue only along the coast. And seeing this bird in migration is rarer by far than a lightning strike. Yet they move in winter from the Canadian plains to the Gulf Coast. It is hard to believe they don’t just walk all the way when you see them fly. Ranges on the quickly updated internet maps of Cornell or Wikipedia now show this blue winter dot over SE Oklahoma and SW Arkansas. The last Sibley guide still did not show this.

Rail dragging involves pulling a rope with interspaced, dangling plastic jugs partially filled with stones by hand or by slow moving ATV. Across fields that look like many of the winter fields everyone has been in before. If you are flushing Le Conte’s Sparrows and Sedge Wrens, you are likely in the right place. The problem is that one or two people walking in the grasses is enough to stir up a wren but not enough to get the mouse-like rails to fly. They are runners. So, with our 12 people and two ATVs and a thirty-foot rope, we took on this field of about 15 or 20 acres. Sedge Wrens start popping immediately and Song Sparrows and here and there a Le Conte’s Sparrow. The ATV guys work the field like a vacuum down one edge and up the next adjacent strip. People follow along or stand on the levee. I finally make my way to the levee as the riders take the last stripe of grass in front of us and up pops the white-winged, barely-can-fly, quail-flapping bird that is a Yellow Rail. It passes right in front of me and I see details of beak and breast and striped back as it lands again off to the right. It is quickly surrounded. The birds try and leak out of any holes you leave in your human chain. We press in and a young teenage girl who must be some birder’s daughter sees it moving. Unmasked, it runs again and flies and is once again surrounded. At the edge of the grass cover it surrenders and runs one more time, straight into my gloves. I hand it directly to the Ornithologist.

Chris Butler from Oklahoma has banded over 100 Yellow Rails. And apparently only about 400 have ever been banded anywhere. He handles this one like a man that has certainly held rails before. Creams, yellows, whites, reds: in hand, they are a fancy sparrow crossed with a small quail with a dainty Rallidae beak. He says the recaptures for him and others are remarkably rare. And says that either the birds don’t live long or there are a hell of a lot more of them than we think there are. It is a glass half empty or half full type question. Chris also did some mystical isotope analysis of feathers and determined these Red Slough rails were born in the western part of their Canadian breeding range mostly. Ones they caught in Texas were mostly from Minnesota. As I said, mystical. The small and amazing bird squirms and looks like it wants to go back to Canada right at this moment. After photos it does get to return, at least, to this grassy world nearby. 

On the road again, Brent and I head north and then east through pine plantations and open fields with cattle. Vultures soar with no cemeteries in sight. Hawks glide from perch to perch. And we make it back to our discovered field for the dusking down of the world. David said he had never seen this vast field. And it was not in Red Slough itself, just in the extended circular map of a Christmas count boundary. David spent most of his time year round inside the true boundaries of the marshlands. We had come back to watch for Short-eared Owls. We pulled into the road and turned around to park pointed toward the west inside the tall grasses. A female Kestrel rode the wind like it was the lever she was needing, the lift she understood. The north wind having built around all of us towards the approaching dusk. Up and stalled she paused, perfectly still, making the shadow that often forebodes the death of a fieldmouse. She perched on a knoll and picked at something.

“Kestrel and Wood Duck,” Brent says, “these are my two are-you-real birds.”

I nod like this fact is understood by everyone. We watch the She-kestrel work upwind lifting and holding, stalling and falling. She carries off something that is tailed and heavy, a mousebrain sparking out: falcon fuel. The male appears soon after, also hunting before the dusk. Perhaps they are unrelated: just two Kestrels in a mousy mousy world. I know not the nuptial permanences of the Kestrel. “I will swear no forevers to any bird.”

The sky is still hurried and low, the wind pushing its underbelly off somewhere south. The sun never broke all day. Temperature now in the 30’s, the wind cuts through my gloves. The ones that held a rail earlier. I examine them closely for downy fluff, for happenstance pinfeathers, standing against the south side of the truck which is now a wind shelter. Another Harrier lifts out in the fields, getting Brent excited for a moment. “Here we go,” he says. More crows pass aslant against the cold air. Crows have things to do, things to discuss as always, out there somewhere, even this late in the day. As I watch the late afternoon candle gutter out with the low clouds. Horizon gone. No hope for a moon. No hope for any stars. We never see an owl rise up. But we have closed the day in, at least, some kind of hopefulness. We stood among Kestrels working around us like we didn’t exist. The last dark bird of any kind has flacked off to the west. We look at each other in some sort of agreement. We nod. Brent and I both with miles to go towards anything like a bed or a beer.

And we did have a long and shadowed day of it. Drizzled and silhouetted, we etched out another one in a better place than usual. And this seems to be the right answer to the question I have already forgotten. The one I asked in the darkness earlier this morning. When I had not had coffee.

I may not have said it out loud. But now I am sure I will think of it on the way home.

        HR

Thanks to David and Brent.  

Note that the photos were taken the following morning at Red Slough when there was some actual sun. Except David's fine Rail in hand shot. Credit to both David and the USDA Forest Service for use of this photo.

Further links to articles about the Rails and other Red Slough activities here.