I’m shocked awake by a knock on my front door. My bedroom is dark, and I’m disoriented, but there’s light around the edges of the window shade. It’s morning.
The haze burns off quickly as my adrenaline spikes. No one should be here. No one should ever be here.
I fumble for my pants. My heart is pounding, and I’m nauseous.
Another knock.
There’s no reason for anyone to be here. Anyone with a reason would call. Only a few people even know where I live.
I grab a pistol and step softly to the door. I look cautiously through the window. No one.
I open the door and step outside; the interloper must still be nearby.
I scan. Hand steady, index finger aside the trigger guard, ready.
To my right, a small bird flits from the side of the house to the utility pole by the well.
Another knock.
Scuttling around the wooden pole, a ladder-backed woodpecker. More knocking.
I am Wally Walrus.
I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. My heart still thumps as I settle into the chair by the door. A second woodpecker appears. A pair.
The heat is already settling in as I run through the events of the last ten or twelve years. I’ve made enemies. I’ve become accustomed to threats.
The last time someone knocked on my door, it was a deputy serving me papers. Before that, a long string of tweakers and misfits looking for jobs, favors, fights. A cop notifying me that my brother was dead. A delivery driver with no way of knowing I worked nights and needed my sleep.
My last job was driving heavy haul in the Pacific Northwest. With a truck and trailer over 105,000 pounds, if I wasn’t well rested, I wasn’t safe. A knock at the door was never a casual break in my routine. It was a disruption of my sleep that put lives at risk, or the disruption of my life itself.
The jarring intrusiveness of a door knock, of voices outside, of a loud car stereo; the ubiquity of thieves and violent men — these factored heavily into my choice to live well outside of town, far from any public street.
But the past doesn’t stay put. It follows you to new places, into new stages. There is no such thing as a fresh start.
“It is what it is.”
Is it? I’ve always hated that phrase. It’s one of those inane truisms that need not be said at all, the dumbest of ontological assertions. I am what I am. A horse is a horse. It is what it is.
Trite and true as such statements may be, Pavlov would surely disagree. A bell is not merely a bell; a knock is not just a knock.
It isn’t what it is. It is what it was.
So here, half a mile from the highway, behind two locked gates, in a little house few people have ever seen, for a brief moment, a small bird made me think that my life as I knew it, or perhaps my life itself, was about to end.
Feeling foolish, relieved, grateful, I focused on my breathing, lowering my heart rate, settling my stomach. I put my pistol away and decided to drive into town for supplies.
As I stepped around the corner of the house, I flushed a cottontail from the clumps of grass along the skirting. Almost immediately, a Harris’s hawk appeared. Within seconds, she was joined by three others. They were hunting, but they stayed above the power lines; the rabbit was safe for the moment.
I’ve gotten to know this family well; their territory is a little farther up the access road. A pair of great horned owls controls the south end of the property, where my house is; territorial boundaries are somewhat fluid, but the hawks don’t linger around the house.
I got into my car and headed up toward the highway; a roadrunner crossed in front of me and disappeared back into the brush. Doves and cowbirds perched along the power lines, as thrashers and flycatchers darted in and out of the thornscrub.
I stopped at the gate and waited for the dust to drift past before I opened the car door. Several green jays live in the brush near the gate, but I hear them more often than I see them.
Up the highway I passed vultures and caracaras on their search for roadkill; in the springtime, the turkeys would become careless, more concerned with mating than with the passing traffic, and they’d be added to the scavengers’ menu.
Ground doves and bobwhites gathered on the roadway; as I approached, they waited until the last possible moment to scatter.
In town, grackles picked dead bugs from the grilles and bumpers of parked cars, while a Cooper’s hawk perched on the cab of a nearby pickup truck, preparing to strike.
____
When I was a kid, Orange County, California still had orange groves. I spent most of my childhood living in my grandparents’ home in San Juan Capistrano, on a cul-de-sac in a subdivision sandwiched between I-5 and the railroad, on a hill overlooking a few hundred acres of orange trees.
Our backyard feeders attracted an impressive variety of birds, and I enjoyed trying to identify them. There were the usual finches, sparrows, and mourning doves, but the hummingbird feeder was where the real action was. It wasn’t unusual for several Anna’s hummingbirds to compete aggressively for access to the supply of sugar water, but an even greater treat was when an oriole would visit.
San Juan Capistrano is famous for its cliff swallows, so much so that they were a topic of a popular song recorded by The Ink Spots in 1940, and later covered by the likes of Pat Boone and many others.
When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano isn’t really about swallows; they’re a device to mark the passage of time. But I still enjoyed hearing Bugs Bunny sing about my home town in a couple episodes of Merrie Melodies.
Saint Joseph’s Day, March 19, is known locally as Swallows Day. The local legend, and a frequent subject of Warmer Brothers cartoons, was that the swallows returned each year from South America on that exact date, to a Franciscan mission founded in San Juan Capistrano in 1776.
The birds are central to San Juan’s identity, appearing on municipal signs, church bulletins, even lending their name to a notorious local bar. The name of my favorite taqueria, Las Golondrinas, is Spanish for The Swallows.
Every year I attended the Swallows Day parade, which featured marching bands, equestrian groups, and an impossibly large and often clumsy majorette team called the Silver Streaks. But my favorite part of the parade was the cowboy gunfights — costumed men firing off blanks and pretending to murder each other in the street, to the delight of thousands of onlookers.
Of course, the swallows legend is mostly nonsense. The birds do return every year, but not on the same day, not all at once, and not only to the mission. There is nothing especially unique about their migration — hundreds of bird species migrate between the tropics and temperate North America every year.
As a kid I was led to believe that swallows were strictly a San Juan thing; on summer road trips I was surprised to see huge nesting colonies under bridges and overpasses all over the western United States. It turns out you can see cliff swallows in nearly every part of North America. They even show up in Hawaii from time to time.
Amusingly, nearly every depiction of a swallow in San Juan Capistrano shows a bird with the deeply-forked tail of a barn swallow; while there are barn swallows in San Juan, the cliff swallows that made the city famous have square tails.
I was always more interested in the birds than I was in local folklore and small town identity.
Down the hill from our house, there was a large, vacant field. Most mornings, on the way to school, my mom and I would see a great blue heron standing in the grass. We’d always thought of herons as wading birds, and wondered why this one was spending so much time away from the water, until the morning we saw it eating a gopher.
At the end of our cut-de-sac, a small stand of eucalyptus trees was the communal roost for over a hundred turkey vultures. When I was given a telescope for Christmas one year, I only used it once to look at the stars before aiming it lower, to watch the vultures as they came in to land. I was fascinated by the way they made their way to their respective perches; their flight patterns seemed coordinated, almost like a busy airport.
Over time, we noticed a change in the birds at our backyard feeders — just as many birds, but less diversity, though a few new species began to make frequent appearances. Scrub jays were a welcome addition; less so the growing number of European starlings.
When I return to San Juan today, I barely recognize it. I have a hard time finding my way around a town I used to wander freely, through parks and alleyways, exploring creek beds and steep hillsides. I skateboarded through neighborhoods, and rode my bike to Doheny. It’s where I learned to drive. And to fight. I never knew its street names, only its landmarks.
It’s where I learned to see.
The vacant field, which used to host rodeos and carnivals when it wasn’t hosting a great blue heron, is now a private high school, named for one of the founders of the local mission. The citrus groves have all been replaced by medical offices. And as the last of the orange trees disappeared from the valley, so did the orioles from our backyard hummingbird feeder.
____
I had a busy summer at the equipment auctions, but hadn’t expected to win a 73,000-pound excavator. I’d been throwing in last-minute, lowball bids on all the machines that didn’t have major mechanical problems, and watching them sell for double, triple, even ten times my maximum bid. So I was surprised when I won the Komatsu for around $12,000.
I thought it was a fairly small machine, not a mini, but not gigantic either. Then I looked up the specs. Oops.
Once I got it to the ranch, it turned out to be a very capable machine. I had a few repairs done, but didn’t spend much, and ended up with something that could easily dig through the heaviest caliche — the layer of limestone cement that sits under most, if not all, of my property.
About a hundred yards from my house there was an old stock tank — a round basin surrounded by a berm — that probably once held water, but had become overgrown with mesquite and lotebush. I decided to use the excavator to clean out the basin, enlarge it a little, and turn it back into a pond for my ducks and geese.
The noise from my work attracted a Swainson’s hawk, hoping I would uncover a rodent den or a rabbit’s nest. She perched on the berm, mere feet away from the machine, not seeming to recognize that there was a human sitting inside it.
Once I’d dug out a fair amount of soil, I smoothed out the basin, using the excavator’s tracks to pack down the clay.
And then I turned on the water. Initially it didn’t hold much, but it improved over time. I bought a timer to help me ration water and keep me from draining my well, and then I set it incorrectly and drained the well anyway. Fortunately the pump wasn’t damaged and the well recharged.
I was more conservative with my water use after that. Fifteen minutes at the top of every hour was enough to keep the lowest part of the basin consistently filled, with about a foot of water at its deepest point.
I did not expect what happened next. Several species of diving beetles and other aquatic insects arrived almost immediately. As I monitored the water depth, birds came to drink and bathe in the new pool. Dragonflies of every color buzzed along the surface, dipping in to drink or deposit their eggs. Bees and butterfles pulled moisture and minerals from the mud.
I added a brush pile on one bank, which attracted more birds. I’d been keeping a list, but with water in the pond, I was adding new species every day. Painted buntings, blue grosbeaks, a black-billed cuckoo. I’d made several birding trips to the lower Rio Grande Valley, but I was seeing more species around my own pond.
The insect activity bordered on oppressive, but that brought several species of flycatchers.
I found animal tracks in the mud: deer, raccoons, and turkeys were all visiting the site.
Back at the house, the action was likewise intensifying. I’d recently hired some contractors to remove an old barn and replace it with a more modern poultry house. North of the barn site I had broken up some of the caliche to allow the trees and shrubs to root more deeply, and I’d seeded the area heavily with browntop millet, cowpeas, and native grasses. I rolled out and spread a couple round bales of mixed grass hay to give the seed a little shade and improve moisture retention.
Pyrrhuloxias, which look like the northern cardinal’s heavy metal cousins, raided my millet planting, joined by three kinds of doves and various finches and sparrows.
Three oriole species began making regular appearances around the house. One of my resident great-horned owls emerged one evening, only to be attacked by an oriole and driven back to the treeline.
The owls were among the first birds I saw when I moved in, stumbling across a nest site in my old barn. The nest wasn’t successful and the eggs were eventually eaten by raccoons, but the following year I was able to verify that they’d raised at least one baby at some other nest site.
One of the adult birds killed a rabbit just below my bedroom window. For a moment there was chaos — wings beating loudly against the wall, the rabbit squealing, the young owl begging to be fed, while the parents hooted to each other enthusiastically.
When I went out to investigate, a deer was snorting and stamping somewhere in the nearby darkness, and a flock of turkeys called from the brush.
I hadn’t seen the owls much since the demolition and construction started, so I was relieved when one of them appeared, though I always wonder how much of a threat they’ll soon pose to my chickens and other poultry.
On my porch there was a roll of welded wire fencing, stood up on end; the inside of the roll became the nest site for a pair of mockingbirds. I moved the roll slightly and strapped it to a post so it wouldn’t get knocked over. The birds didn’t seem to mind and the female continued to lay her eggs.
As the pond deepened and grew more biologically active, I added a few mosquitofish and fathead minnows, ahead of what I’d hoped would be a significant rain event.
The storm came early, without warning, and dumped over two inches of rain in an hour. When it had passed and it was safe to be outside, I went out to get a charger cord from my car, and then I heard what I can only describe as the mooing of a herd of alien cattle.
The sound was coming mainly from the pond, so I walked down to investigate. The water level had risen perhaps two feet, and it was full of spadefoot toads, which live most of their lives underground, dormant, until they’re awakened by thunder and heavy rains.
Their eggs hatched within a day, and the tadpoles grew quickly, from little black dots to an inch long in their first week. I never saw the toadlets leave the pond; one day, they were simply gone.
More storms came, and the pond filled a bit higher with each major downpour, and drained a bit slower. A second toad species, the Texas toad, also bred in the pond. I was never able to find them in the shallows, but identified them by their calls, which sounded almost electronic, so loud I thought they might damage my hearing.
I continued to monitor the nest on the porch; there were briefly four eggs, but one disappeared. Around the time I thought the eggs had been abandoned, I checked the nest and found a tiny chick, still wet from hatching. The other two hatched the next morning.
I took the excavator to a different part of the property to dig caliche for the roads. A white-tailed hawk appeared nearby, watching. A tropical raptor in the northern part of its range, and a larger bird than the Swainson’s hawk, I saw her often in the days that followed, sometimes at the caliche pit, sometimes near the house. I feared she might displace the pack of Harris’s hawks, until I saw them perched on consecutive utility poles along the access road, apparently unperturbed by each other’s presence.
My caliche pit filled with water, then drained, leaving behind a layer of clay on its walls. Perhaps this site would work for a larger pond. As with the first pond site, insects arrived quickly, and lizards and toads followed. I found myself seemingly in a race against the local ecology to develop the site before it could be colonized.
____
The millet is about two feet tall and the cowpeas are still growing well; various grasses and forbs have emerged from the clumps of hay I spread on the ground several weeks ago. There are patches of bare ground in need of more seed; I could leave them alone and let them fill in on their own, but a little more millet will jumpstart the process.
On the porch, the mockingbird chicks grew rapidly; in the first few days I rarely saw their parents, but they were clearly being fed. I took a photo of the nest once a day, to document their progress.
On day six their first pin feathers were coming in, and the adult birds paid more attention to my brief presence around the nest, though they remained remarkably tolerant.
By day thirteen, conditions had become so cramped that the nestlings were sitting on top of each other, and shortly after I took my daily photo, the first of them left the nest. The other two left a few hours apart on the following day, disappearing somewhere in the tall grass, in the brush, or amid my skid steer attachments. I watch the adult birds to see if they’ll reveal their children’s locations as they continue to feed and protect them away from the nest, but they aren’t giving up any secrets.
A pair of barn swallows that built their mud nest on the porch last summer have returned. Last year they raised one brood successfully, but their second one was killed by fire ants. The drought knocked down the fire ant population this year; they’ll recover, but with any luck my orange oil treatments will keep their numbers down, allowing native ants to recover and nestlings to remain unharmed.
I usually walk down to the pond twice a day. I check the water level, look for tadpoles and aquatic insects. I scan for animal tracks in the mud, and monitor the plants growing around the berm. I take a pair of cheap binoculars, and if the mosquitos aren’t too bad, I stay awhile to see what birds come to visit.
I’d like to build a blind here, but it’s not my highest priority. I have other projects I need to finish first. The utility company wants to clear the brush along their right-of-way, so I’m installing a new gate to give them easier access to their lines.
I’m clearing paths of my own for new fences. I’ll bring my sheep and their guardian dogs soon, but I need tight fences to keep the dogs from roaming.
I’m conducting a survey of trees and shrubs on the property. Huisache, honey mesquite, wild lime, persimmon, lotebush, palo blanco, anacua, granjeno, guajillo.
Live oaks, pecans, cedar elms, and cypress are in the property’s future, but today I’m growing Texas sabal palms, Texas ebony, and anacahuita from seeds I’ve collected locally and in the Valley. I like to imagine what they’ll be ten, twenty, fifty years from now, long after I’ve been buried here myself, or in some other patch of living soil I’ve come to love as much as this one.
It’s hot today, but I’m wearing a thin, knit cap. I recently shaved my head and I don’t want my scalp to sunburn. I should just get a cowboy hat, but I can’t bring myself to do it. My style, or lack thereof, hasn’t changed in decades; identity is winning over utility. I’m still walking around the ranch in flip flops, pulling huisache thorns from the soles and flicking sand burs from in between my toes.
I look stupid when I’m bald, but it’s easier to shave my head a few times a year than to deal with barbers, and I like the way the hair feels when it first grows back — like velvet. So I wipe the sweat from my forehead and hope the insect repellant stays on the back of my neck, and I sit on the berm overlooking my pond, and I watch, and listen.
I learned to recognize the long, rattling croak of the lesser nighthawk before I ever saw one in the air, but after a heavy rain they’ll start feeding earlier in the afternoon, and they’ll still be active well into the morning. The larger, common nighthawk flies higher, and keeps more of a routine; I often see the same one heading north around dusk.
A utility pole just south of the pond is a popular perch for birds of prey, until they’re chased away by mockingbirds. Another species of woodpecker, the golden-fronted, has a nest inside the pole. They’re noisier and more visible than the ladder-backed woodpeckers.
Crickets and katydids in the brush begin to replace the chorus of daytime birds, and a few bats arrive to take flying insects from the air. The short, whirring calls of the pauraques begin.
I’ve seen the owls less frequently in recent weeks, but they’re certainly nearby. It can be hard to pick out their calls when there are so many doves around. I scan the top of the brush, hoping for a glimpse, as the woodpeckers chatter and continue their endless excavations.
A knock.
Peace.