Month: March 2025

Bird Meditation

The mystery in the book I’m currently writing centers around a missing birder and the people who care about him. To enter the experience of my characters, I needed to learn more about birds. Learning facts is useful, but what’s even more meaningful is paying attention. I’m starting to understand why people become birders.

I discovered the small songbirds were quieter in Elephant Butte Lake Park on the trail in the middle of the desert than when I ran on a dirt road behind a nearby residential neighborhood. The further I went, the more songs I heard. Are the trees taller in this neighborhood? Do people feed the birds? Are there more predators in the park than in back yards? The park sounds different, full of Gambel’s quail and their single-note mews or squeaks and occasionally the loud, laughing calls of roadrunners.

On a recent evening the weather was beautiful, the end of a rare spring day without wind. I walked down to the Rio Grande, expecting that all the migratory birds would have left the river by now, but a scattered raft of coots still swam there, clacking and honking and grunting and beeping. A heron soared and circled without flapping its wings for much of its flight, even though, at an earth-level perspective, the air was still. It landed on the other side of the river a few bushes away from where a man was fishing. He acted excited when he caught a fish. The bird held perfectly still and did not catch a fish. Yet.

A coot flipped upside down and disappeared underwater for an incredible length of time. A red-winged black bird in a tree next to the river sang, and one answered from a tree in the wetland on the other side of the parking lot, trilling back and forth to each other. Birds in bushes along the hot ditch, where hot spring water from home tubs and spas empties into the river, were singing a chorus, a symphony. The extraordinary range of sounds silenced my mind. The human world has been a bit stressful lately. As I grew absorbed in the world of birds, everything else fell away, leaving only wings and feathers, swimming and flight, and music.

Bob Stories—Jobs and a Robber

My eighty-nine-year-old friend Bob has often said that he never had trouble getting a job. He described a job interview he had once as a young man. The employer asked him what kind of work he was looking for, and he said, “Anything you tell me to do.”

The employer said, “I like that attitude. But … what if I asked you to kill someone?”

Bob replied, “Well, I know how.”

The man said, “What?” And Bob explained he’d been in the Marines, trained in hand to hand combat. He assured him he really had no intention of taking that sort of job but was otherwise willing to do anything. That was good news for the employer, because what he needed Bob to do was shovel a lot of horse manure.

After Bob had been working for a while, the barn owner asked, “How do you stand the smell?”

Bob told him that his summer job in high school had been on a farm with sixty cows, so he could get used to anything. If you paid him, he’d do the work.

This leads into the next story. In Philadelphia, shortly after getting out of the Marines, Bob was, as he put it, walking on the wrong side of the street. A man came up close and shoved a gun in his ribs, demanding, “Give me your money.”

The way Bob describes it. “For some reason I wasn’t scared. I felt like I was in control. The robber made a mistake, getting the gun too close. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

Bob twisted the gun back at him and asked, “Why do you want to do that?”

“I need the money,” the would-be robber replied.

“Then get a job.”

“I’m desperate. I don’t have time.”

“Yes, you do. Have you got time for the trouble you’ll get into if you keep doing what you’re doing?”

The guy left.

Two years later, Bob ran into him in a bar. “You gonna stick a gun in my ribs?”

“No, actually, I did what you said. I got a job. I was starving for the first week until I got paid, and then I ate like a hog for the first two days that I had money. But now I’m doing fine. Thank you.”

Or that’s the way the story goes.