Conversations with Birds by Priyanka Kumar

Author:Priyanka Kumar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions

AT 7:15 P.M. we are at the refuge headquarters, just in time to hear Debbie Pike’s talk on the crepuscular birds we will look for: the Western screech-owl, Megascops kennicottii, who nests in ponderosa pine cavities, and the great horned owl, along with the master of camouflage, the common poor-will, Phalaenoptilus nuttallii, whose onomatopoeic name is a nod to its song (poor-willip, poor-willip), and the fast-diving common nighthawk, Chordeiles minor. After the talk, we spray on the citronella-based mosquito repellent that Debbie has provided. In an olive-gray ranger uniform, she is middle-aged, smooth-skinned, and cheerful. We all drive in a caravan toward the Gallinas Nature Trail. To access the trailhead, our party of some two dozen people walks through a cattle gate, next to which a red-lettered sign warns: Caution: Hazardous Wildlife Out and About. Michael wonders if hazardous wildlife is code for rattlesnakes but Debbie is already some distance ahead, leading the hike.

The mile-long trail begins with an open short-grass prairie: a narrow dirt path is flanked by native grasses such as blue grama and buffalo grass, and spiked with buttery-and-claret upright prairie coneflowers, floppy mullein leaves, and sparkling-white morning glory. Along the horizon squat olive-green mesas, layered against the Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) Mountains, with Mora Rock to the far right. It is dreamlike to walk in the chartreuse prairie in the twilight and going by the children’s springy steps, they find it agreeable to be between earth and sky at a time when they’re normally indoors and brushing their teeth. Our lives today shrink away from crepuscular activities but twilight is a fecund, in-between time that can yield reflections or ancestral stories on a rooftop charpoy in India or around a roaring Pueblo campfire. The prairie is greenly expansive; the light is tinged with honey gold and the sky striated with colors from blush pink to dove gray. The scene makes me wonder: Why have we spent so many luminous dusks inside? How could I bear to be shut away while all this was unfolding outside?

A superstructure of rocks—salmon pink, ocher, and terra-cotta—devours the trail and we toggle over smooth and broken stones, ruins from settler homes, which our four-year-old calls “a bumpy path!” We hike up to Box Canyon’s sheer walls of stone and some of the hikers brazenly perch on the precipitous edge of the steel-gray canyon. We settle a few feet back on a rock formation, where mosquitoes at once descend upon us.

Debbie fiddles with her iPhone to play the Western screech-owl’s bouncing-ball call. She warns us not to try this at home and to leave this method of owling to the rangers, so as to not unduly stress the birds. I nod, agreeing. The recording she plays is a string of accelerating notes. We wait for the squat, pale-gray owl to respond. All at once, a pair of slate-gray nighthawks flies over the canyon rim and, before we can blink, the birds, with the speed and suddenness of bomber planes, dive directly over our heads, eliciting gasps from the children.

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