We pull up in Reed Lake car park. On the northern horizon, crops glow gold in the midday sun, and to the west, just tall enough to see, grain elevators, tiny at this distance, the only things to give the landscape any sense of scale. The town of Morse (pop. 216). Between that and us, the hot black ribbon of the Trans-Canada. Turning south, a strip of scrubby vegetation and, beyond, vast muddy flats, and then slashed across the horizon in a single sweep of the artist’s brush, the lake, a heat-shimmered sliver.
As soon as we leave the car we hear, zooming and screeching, with red-stained bellies, barn swallows, or flashing black and white in their twisting and turning, martins, scything through the insect-thick air. Cowbirds cockily sit on signposts, clicking, chattering, like water dripping into a well. But there is no water.
The viewing platform stands tall over the endless flatness. Thirty or forty feet up in the air, you see a little further than from ground level. Over the tops of the nearest grasses, and a little further across the featureless mud.
My eye drifts lazily out, over the chaos of plants, greens, yellows, browns, greys, tall, short, graceful, stubby. Splayed like frozen fireworks, sensitive to any movement of the air. But there is no movement. Do they retreat to leave the mud visible, or does the mud advance to overwhelm them? And beyond, the blinding light.
Through the grass, a gently beaten desire path runs out to the mud, with its grey-brown top cracked and crazed by the relentless sun protecting the dark and glutinous underneath. Two signs demand that dogs be leashed in deference to the ground-nesting birds. The grass is full of long improvisations, obsessively repeated motifs, staccato announcements. Meadowlarks (three or four flute notes and a set of decorations), longspurs (chaotically melodic zizzing), killdeer plaintively squeaking their name.
Does the path continue outward beyond the grass or is it only my imagination, projecting it faintly onto the bare mud? Probably there’s a point where I’d be expected to stop, but it isn’t clear. In any case, why? The water is far away. Far over an expanse of mud that will soon become wet, sticky, smelly, treacherous.
I scan the distant silver with my binoculars. A few silhouetted waders that could be anything. Egg-bodies on long legs with snakey necks. Tiny dots that scurry and stop like snuffling bugs. What I assume are Canada geese. And the only ones identifiable; American avocets, a hint of orange-pink in the heat-shimmer.
I lower the binoculars and twist to stretch my back. Inland, a flitting meadowlark’s flash of lemon yellow puts the plants to shame.
I turn back. Stare. Three blocks of colour. Blue sky; silver streak; grey brown mud. An abstract expressionist canvas.
Heat sits, heavy and insolent, excluding.
Hot air breathed in, unrefreshing.
How long I could bear it?
How are animals adapted to this in ways I am not?
A car pulls up and a man gets out. A dog, unchained, seeing the whole world laid out before it, excitedly lollops towards the vast expanse, careless of whether he’s on and off the path. As suddenly as a speaker cable cut, the songs stop.
I raise my binoculars but the birds are all deep in the undergrowth. The dog’s master, seeing me, sheepishly leashes his charge.
There is nothing more to see and I’m at the extent of my tolerance for the oppressive heat, for unrelievedly breathing in hot salt air. I walk back towards the car, tenderly stepping to reassure the birds that I, at least, am no threat.
Even in those few minutes, the northern sky has darkened with prairie cloud, and in the descending sun the gold burns even brighter. Back in the car park, I turn back for one last look towards the lake. The sky has paled, the hot wet air scattering the sun’s glare. Stretched across it, ragged and broken, diffracted and unfocused by the moisture, a white horizontal dotted line, torn from its graph, tracing thousands of unchanging years.
Swans.
Their usual honking chatter silent, they move even more lazily than usual.
Closer now, and their ungainly beaks become apparent. Not swans, but a squadron of white pelicans. They fly directly overhead and we watch them, their wings rotating in their sockets, pushing through the air like butterflying swimmers. Unskeined, seemingly anarchic, they pass. There is no hurry. They have lived for thousands of years and they will live for thousands of years. They know what they are. Focused only on their place in the pod, on the next few metres of travel, on the next beat of their wings.
They pass and quickly shrink into the distance, their black-trailed wings concealing them against the darking sky. Eventually, over the far gold fields, they pause to regroup, and against the purple northern sky, they wheel. From the west, another squadron joins them. Fifty or sixty now. The two interpenetrate, shuffle and reshuffle, break and rejoin, shatter and mend, force and acquiesce, and form a new, known only to them, hierarchy. Against the dark sky their brilliant white glitters, or they pivot, black feathers edge-on to disappear into the purple. Jockeying for position or giving way, testing leaders, preferring others, changing their minds, finally deciding. Fifty, twenty, none, twelve, random numbers flicker like the tumbling letters of an old-style airport destination board. Purple, white and black. Almost imperceptibly further away now, the white flickers increasingly rare, like the last flares of fireworks, the pauses becoming longer until we realise it’s over.
We climb back into the car.
Love this! As a life-long birdwatcher, I started as a child. Going on walks with my dad in North Dakota (just south of where you were). Loved the Merlin screenshot too… modern birdwatching. 😎I miss the birds of the northern plains, especially the meadowlark.