October 18, 2018
(from the nature blog Eyes on the Wild of one of our docents and board member, Moira Yip)
[Winter is on its way: I woke this morning to a dusting of snow. So I will migrate back to the UK this weekend, and this is my last post from Maine for the season.]
After failing to find the sandhill cranes, Antigone canadensis, on foot, generous friends took me out on the water for another try.
The cranes fly across every evening to their preferred nighttime roosts, and on schedule they appeared. The light was fading, and they are skittish so we couldn’t get too close, so all these photos will give you is an impression of their magic:
Across the treetops:
To land in a reedy meadow, from where they alternately fed and watched us warily.
They have only been breeding here for a few years, so they are still a novelty. At four feet tall they are stately birds who mainly breed further north in Canada, so we are lucky to have them. They will soon migrate south for the winter.
En route, we watched these yellow-rumped warblers walking on the lilypads catching tiny insects of some kind:
And then the setting sun and the fall leaves turned the water into molten copper.
* My title is from a poem by the Chinese Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi, 白居易, AD 830, translated by Arthur Waley.
The western wind has blown but a few days;
Yet the first leaf already flies from the bough.
On the drying paths I walk in my thin shoes;
In the first cold I have donned my quilted coat.
Through shallow ditches the floods are clearing away;
Through sparse bamboos trickles a slanting light.
In the early dusk, down an alley of green moss,
The garden-boy is leading the cranes home.
And a portrait of the poet:
