Category Archives: Poodle

Duck, Duck, Eagle

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Eagles are flying over our heads, forced off the wetlands by an incoming tide. I ask Aki, “Little dog, where are the ducks? The poodle-mix looks at me like a person might look at someone searching for the nearest ice cream store in a burning city. Maybe she wonders why I care about dull ducks when the tidal meadow is magenta with shooting stars. She knows that they are my favorite flower, something I inherited from my dad.  

            My interest in waterfowl is more intellectual than esthetic. All winter the Fish Creek delta was infested with mallards. American widgeons and teals joined them in the spring. Fish ducks like golden eyes, buffleheads, and harlequins paddled offshore. Today it’s all gulls, eagles, and crows. 

            Our first eagle of the day was an immature bird that roosted near the opening of Fish Creek Pond until forced off by one if its elders. We see the young eagle a half and hour later being driven off an ocean side roost by an adult bird. The three other adult birds in the neighborhood scream what sounds like curses as the immature eagle flies off across Fritz Cove. 

            All the eagle action pushed duck thoughts out of my mind. So did our sighting of a red-breasted sapsucker that we inadvertently flushed from the path as we rounded the pond.  But soon I thinking about ducks.

There is a place on the trail back to the car where a guy can sneak through a screen of spruce and spy on a little pond. A few weeks ago the pond was lousy with ducks. Today I found two mallards when I eased out of the trees—a hen and drake. They stood as close as lovers on a mound of bare dirt, a nesting pair. Mystery solved. 

Above the Fog

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Fog wraps around Chicken Ridge when the little dog and I climb into the car. It thickens as we drop down to the channel. If the fog could burn off in a half and hour this would be a great morning for a tidewater walk. Rather than rely on the gloom doing a quick disappearance act, I steer the car across the Douglas Bridge and drive into the mountains. 

            I just make out the tops of the Douglas Island ridge as the car climbs up Fish Creek Road. Aki starts squeaking when we crest a small hill and near the parking lot for a trail that crosses three meadows. But the meadows’ stunted pines are as vague as ghosts in a grey cloud. Letting Aki know that we will stop soon, I push on to the road’s end where the fog is melting away like ferry vapor. 

            We climb the service road to a mountain shoulder. Below us fog still obscures the three meadows trail. By the time we reach the shoulder, the grey is gone. If I could have seen the future, I would have taken the meadows trail. But then, I wouldn’t have smelled or seen or heard the high country coming to life. 

            Melting snow has charged the mountain streams until they overflow their banks. Nesting robins twill loudly, as if to be overheard about the shushing streams. The shrill piping of a mountain marmot startles the little dog and me. I look for the large guinea pig that gave the alarm but it has already dived in a hidey-hole. The air fills with the smell of sweet resin each time we pass near a pine tree. 

            Somewhere on the mountain bears are breakfasting on roots but we see none. Peak views and the tall, yellow blossoms of skunk cabbage provide all the visual drama until we stumble on our first true wildflower of the year: a mountain marigold. All of its white petals lay flat except one. It uncurls as we watch. The sun will soon make short work of the dewdrops clinging to its petals. For the marigold’s sake, I pray that true summer has arrived. There is no turning back for the flower now.  

Secret Spots

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Aki trots down the narrow boardwalk, passing blueberry bushes in full bloom. For the first time in weeks, the sun muscles its way through the cloud cover. It enriches the pinks of the berry blossoms and warms the little dog’s tight, grey curls. A pair of red-breasted robins hop between bushes. Above them, a  chestnut-backed chickadee, its clever toes clinging to a thin alder branch, leans back as if to be better enjoy the sun. 

Bird song fills the air and I wonder why this place is so rich. It’s just a swampy yard with soil too poor to support spruce or hemlocks.  The stubby Douglas pines are the only evergreen trees that can survive. 

A flash of blue startles me out a sun-induced reverie—a sparrow-like bird with bright-yellow patches on its wings and back. It has vertical white and gray stripes on its chest and back that make it look like it is wearing a thrift store vest.  I won’t be able to find a picture of it in any of my bird books. The handsome stranger, like the other songbirds along this trail are not shy. They flit and fly often but always seem to land in a spot where I can see them. 

Crossing a slow creek lined with blooming skunk cabbage we make our way to the beach. Just before reaching it we pass beneath an eagle’s nest built high in a spruce. Only the white head of an adult eagle shows above the lip of the nest but we can hear the mewing of a chick. 

There is little wind to riffle Stephen’s Passage when we reach the beach. I plop down onto a patch of dry gravel and let the little dog explore. A northern harrier flies off the water towards us a few feet off the ground. The nested eagle screams and the harrier swings away and moves south towards Outer Point. 

Back to the Troll Woods

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Aki and I are back in the Troll Woods after a long absence. It’s good to be in the peaceful place. This time of year the little dog doesn’t have to worry about eagles. We might run into a wandering black bear but that doesn’t trouble a dog with a heart way too big for her 10-pound body. 

Thick, yellow-green moss covers the forest floor and the trunks and branches of the trees, turning them into sculptures that could have been designed by Gaudi. It would be silent if not for the nesting songs of invisible birds and the muffled roar of Nugget Falls. 

There is beaver sign everywhere: cottonwood limbs stripped of their bark, trails formed by the beavers skidding wood into their ponds, small dams slowing the flow of every watercourse. We run into a member of the beaver patrol. Late every afternoon she caps a pipe that runs underneath the beaver’s main dam. Otherwise the sound of moving water would energize the beavers into building a bigger dam behind the one pierced by the pipe. Every morning she uncaps the pipe, allowing the pond’s water level to drop. Otherwise the trail we use to access to the woods would be flooded. 

Small Thing

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It’s as hard to ignore the screaming yellow skunk cabbage blossoms as it is to look away from the mountains that surround Gastineau Meadows. I am making a conscious attempt to find beauty on a much smaller scale. This, as any delay in our walk usually does, seems to perturb Aki. She refuses to join me in my search of the wet meadow. 

As the little dog keeps her paws dry, I pry back dead blades of grass and find tight buds of cranberry leaves and swelling pollen pods at the tip of Labrador Tea stalks. A scattering of last summer’s cranberries dot mossy patches. In those places reduced to mud by dogs and hikers, the insect eating sundew plants spread their tentacles like tiny sea anemones.

The poodle-mix and I are startled by the sudden appearance of three songbirds. Two of them drive a third one to the ground where it rolls onto its back. All I can make out of their tussle is a confusion of brown and white feathers and a blade of grass clamped in the beak of the downed bird. Before I can raise my camera they are airborne.  From the branch of a dead pine tree one of the birds, with the dark head of a junco, gives the little dog and I a nasty stare and is gone. 


Pilgrim at Fish Creek

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The little dog and I rush out the door again, again wanting to see the Fish Creek delta while the morning light is still good. Okay, that was a human-centric statement. While I wanted to see the delta washed by the kind of light captured by Flemish painters, Aki would have preferred a sleep in. She’s joined up to make sure I don’t get into trouble. It’s still cold enough on the delta for me to need gloves. (Another human-centric statement). The grass not yet touched by the morning sun is covered with a fine frost. Crow caws and eagle screams let everything within a mile that Aki is back in town. 

            As I watch a solitary swallow thin out the mosquito population, I think about Annie Dillard and her book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She dived deep in what her creek had to offer on each of her many visits. If she lived in our rain forest, what would she make of seeing only one swallow instead of the expected cloud of its kind diving and gliding after flying bugs. The scene might inspire her to get out her copy of Silent Sprintand return each morning in hope of seeing more swallows hunting over the meadow. 

            Trying on Ms. Dillard’s skin for size, I lead Aki along the creek, watching mallards in twos and threes fly over our heads and those of roosting eagles to the same meadow where I watched to swallow. Would she guess that the flooding tide forced the ducks into the air? 

            Crows seem to be every where, wading in shallow ponds, bathing in the fast moving creek, pecking their way through meadow grass. So are eagles. A brace of mature eagles keeps watch on each end of the causeway that links the mainland with a small, spruce-covered island. The island seems infested with noisy crows. We inadvertently flush an immature eagle from the edge of the island by walking under its roosting tree. It circles over our head and lands in a different roosting tree. Ms. Dillard might ask what is keeping all these eagles on the parameter of a crow-infested island. 

Aki gives me her worried look, something she conveys by flexing her eyebrows.  She doesn’t care about natural philosophy or biology or Annie Dillard. She was touched by the shadow of a predator. “Time,” the ten-pound-poodle-mix seems to say, “to go.” 

Grump

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Aki’s heading up Mount Roberts. So are three of her humans. It seems like every family in Juneau is climbing the mountain too. There are even a few tourists off the first cruise ship of year using the trail.  Aki is in doggie heaven because many of the humans have brought their pups. 

            I should be happy to share the mountain with so many people. But I’ve become addicted to solitude and I am not getting it today. It’s too bad I’m preoccupied and grumpy. Otherwise I could fully appreciate the sunlight dappling the forest floor, shinning spotlights on emerging ferns. I’d probably get a kick out of the ravens flying low over our heads as they imitate the beep beep sound of an unlocking Subaru hatchback. 

Addition

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I left the house this morning without brushing my teeth. Aki looked puzzled but still joined me in the car. Most days at this hour she’d still be curled up and asleep. A feeling, not a phone call or Facebook tip drew me out the door. I just knew that something magical was happening where the woods of northern Douglas Island touched the sea.

            We looked without success for whale spouts in Fritz Cove on the drive to the north end of Douglas Island. No orca dorsal fins broke the surface of Lynn Canal when we passed False Outer Point. If we were to find anything special it had to be hiding in the woods. 

            At this hour I was not surprised to find an empty parking lot at the Outer Point trailhead.  Bird song, punctuated by raven squawks and the hammering of red-breasted sapsuckers provided the soundtrack for our walk.  The beaver pond was gray with patches of sky blue as the rising sun weakened the persistent cloud cover. 

            When Aki followed me onto the beach, we spotted a greater yellowlegs sandpiper in the shallows. An adult bald eagle seemed to be contemplating life from its perch on an offshore rock.  On other rocks harlequin ducks slept or stretched. 

The mountains bordering Lynn Canal, beautified by late winter snow, emerged from cloud cover. All the things we experienced—the nesting bird songs, woodpecker tapping, the sandpiper (first of the year for me), the contemplative eagle, and whitened mountains—were enough to draw us from our beds. But the magic of the moment was provided by early morning solitude, unshattered by the works or words of man. 

Crazy Weather

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I’m leaning against a young tree, using its trunk to steady my camera. The tree is part of a spruce hedge that should prevent a nearby great blue heron from seeing me. Through a narrow opening in the hedge I watch the heron wade across a narrow stream.  It moves with such stiff grace that my eye can’t catch actual movement. 

            Aki doesn’t whine or give any other clue of our presence. It won’t be her fault of the heron spots us. In my makeshift blind, I wait for the big bird to stab down into the water after a sand lance. Instead it slowly turns its head until it is looking directly at me. Busted.             

            After extracting myself from the hedge, I give the little poodle-mix a reassuring pet and lead us further out into the Fish Creek Delta. We cross an open spit from which we have a 360-degree view of the area. In the center of this natural compass a cold wind slams snow and rain at us. To the west, the sun is throwing cloud shadows on the green slopes of Admiralty Island. A wall of clouds obscures the glacier to the north and the Douglas Island ridge to the south. For a moment another cloud curtain raises to reveal Sheep Mountain in the East and then drops. 

Family Ties

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Two eagles, both hunched against a cold wind, cling to the roof of an old mine ventilation tower. The tower rises out of a beach of mine tailings that were crushed to sand over a hundred years ago. Rusting relics of the time when this was a mining town emerge from the sandy tailings, exposed by the ebb tide. 

            The eagles on the tower have the white head and tail feathers of mature birds. Fifty meters away, an eagle with the mottled brown and whites of an immature predator roosts far back in a tangle of alder branches. It watches one of the mature eagles, maybe a parent, fly out and over Gastineau Channel, circle and then dive toward the water. When the hunter returns with empty talons, its mate gives it a scolding that can be heard all the way from Downtown Juneau to the cabins at Lucky Me. I turn to see what effect the scolding has had on the immature bird and find that it has flown away. 

            The adult eagles settle into silence sulks allowing me to concentrate on the sound of Aki’s paws pounding on the sand and the songs of nesting birds. In spite of the lingering stretch of cold weather, the inhabitants of the Treadwell woods have committed to spring.

Pollen pods of alders lay empty on the forest floor.  Sharp-edged leaves emerge from the dead-looking branches of cow parsnips.  Drops of last night’s rain cling to the butter-yellow skunk cabbage flowers. Elderberry leaves slowly relax their grip on their clusters of incipient flowers.