Maybe I’ll see an owl tonight when I walk the dog. Probably not. I’ve seen them silhouetted against the sky in bare trees, but not often. My chances are pretty slim, even though the moon’s full and throws a lot of light. Meanwhile, there’s a Clark’s Nutcracker right in front of me.
It’s on my wall. I remember taking that shot with a long lens. The bird fills the frame, with evergreen branches blurred behind it. Long black bill. Gray and black plumage. In my book, a pretty rare bird. And I found him in a place that’s rare, too, at least for me: The high, snowy Rockies in Colorado. We were on a back trail, seeing Mountain Bluebirds, Steller’s Jays, Gray Jays, Ravens, Magpies; the birding was good. Then, right above me, this Clark’s Nutcracker. Snap. I made an 8×10 and framed it.
On this cold, birdless day in the Chicago suburbs I saw it on my wall for the first time in….I don’t know, years. Funny, it’s right there every day but has become part of the invisible background of life. I don’t see wallpaper, either. Today, the nutcracker jumped off the wall at me. I remembered that day in the Rockies when I took the photo. I’d been hoping to see a mountain lion there. I’d heard they were all over the place. I had seen bighorn sheep, full-curl rams, close up. So I figured almost anything was possible.
I went into a store on the mountain top where tourists buy postcards. I asked the guy behind the counter if there were lions around and he walked me to the back door, opened it and pointed to a rock twenty or thirty yards away. He said, damn, it’s gone. Then he went on to describe how a big mountain lion had been sunning himself there, just that morning. I figured, what a put-on. I laughed at how much of a rube I’d probably seemed to this local tough guy and how obviously he was playing with me. Yeah, yeah, I said.
Still, I walked back to the rock, and in the snow around it there were prints, big lion-size ones with their distinctive pug marks. Maybe the guy had been telling the truth. When I see my photo of the Clark’s Nutcracker I think about almost seeing a mountain lion. This happens every time. Too bad I almost never notice the photo. Except today, when it was my daily sighting.
