Your trail starts in a dying long-grass prairie where White-throated Sparrows mix with White-crowned Sparrows, but you don’t stop to look.

The trail goes into woods, and you follow. It runs along a dirty-green river that’s carrying leaves downstream. Trees have fallen, and lay rotting into the ground. It’s colorful in the woods, even on this gray day. No surprise. It’s October.

Being on the trail, looking for birds as they play hard-to-get is fun. Actually, fun’s not the right word. The right word is probably something like: “reassuring.”

It’s reassuring to be in a place that never changes. A place of no time, no surprises. The man-made world is full of change. It makes you want a couple of beers. Or a deep vodka martini.

(Doesn’t matter if a martini’s dry, or shaken or stirred, or any of that James Bond bullshit; it should just be deep. And forget the olives, especially if they have bleu cheese in them. An olive doesn’t taste great to begin with, and stuffing it with rotten milk makes it worse).

Yeah, the forest is reassuring compared to human habitat, which can make you nuts because of its unpredictability. Businesses go belly up. Friends go belly up. You hear about accidents, you see people get sick, you see your parents get old.

There’s commotion in concrete-land. Angry factions, bus fumes, little surprises like parking tickets and computers that freeze. Why dwell on this stuff? Go for a walk in the woods.

They’re always the same.

Wait—you say that the woods change? Right now they’re turning color, losing leaves, seasonally adjusting. Yeah, of course. That’s no surprise. Just the opposite. It’s expected, and like we said, reassuring.

The bird population is seasonally adjusted, too. Orioles are disappearing. A few Eastern Bluebirds hang around—the tough ones—but most are scarce. Juncos with their white-sided tails are showing up. Robins are in flocks. You hear crows and see Blue Jays. It’s easier to see jays when leaves thin out.

If you’re lucky you see a Woodcock, and think, “Could it be a Snipe?” But you’ve never seen a Snipe, and are not sure they really exist.

This wild place is the place to be. Better than booze. Or almost. And that’s your “daily sighting:” the unsurprising woods in October.

As soon as you get off the trail, you’ll go home and raise a drink to the woods. Will it be a beer? A deep martini? Surprise yourself.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 18th, 2010 at 5:34 pm and is filed under "Daily Sightings" A Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.