Coming home after a multi-part all-over-the-map trip can be disorienting. I’ve always been great at taking off, but landing, re-entry, not so much. It took a week for me to feel home after our eclipse adventure, piecing my everyday life back together. What was I doing? Where had I been? Oh yeah, laundry. Who is going to the store? That kind of thing. It was good to sleep in our bed, pet our cat and eat home-cooked food. And yet. There's always a bit of a comedown after a trip.
Fortunately, we returned to the Bay Area at the height of spring and the seasonal bird migration. Everything was either green or in bloom. Throughout the US, millions of birds were coming and going to their breeding grounds if they weren’t already here for it. Imagining all those birds flying through the night to get to where they're going renewed my hope. The Osprey on the marina light post was in Central America a couple of weeks ago. The Western Tanager I saw at a local park last week was in Mexico last month. If a single bird can find its way over half a continent in the dark just think what’s possible for us humans? At the very least I could make order of my home life.
And a bird list or two. The Pt. Reyes Birding & Nature Festival was held the third weekend in April and I’d signed on for a 'Birding to Fault' field trip. Birding to Fault involved two teams, one covering the Pacific Plate side of the San Andreas Fault, the other along the Continental Plate for a morning before meeting up to see who saw the most birds. I met up with the Continental Plate crew in Stinson Beach and we spent the morning running around West Marin trying to bolster our list. It was quieter than expected in some places — the lagoon nearly empty of ducks — and louder than others: a few hundred Elegant Terns had just arrived off of Seadrift Beach and were squawking up a storm. In the end our team’s count was out-paced by the Pacific Plate crew. Nonetheless, it was a fun day, and a great way to get my bearings and my feet back on the ground after so much travel.
A few days later was Hatch Day, the celebration of CalFalcons in conjunction with Berkeley Art Museum and Film Archive. Timed with the actual hatch of the CalFalcon's hatch, the museum feeds the Campanile nest cam to the big screen that takes up their back wall. This year, the web-cam famous Berkeley birds laid four eggs. By Hatch Day, three had hatched and suspense was high about the fourth.
A bunch of CalFalcons representatives, Golden Gate Raptor Volunteers, folks from BAMPFA and Native Birds Connections set up tables to help answer questions, hand out stickers, give people T-shirts and generally hobnob with fellow bird lovers. The museum is at the base of campus and webcam watchers, university students, grade-school science students and passerby came by in a steady stream. In the middle of the day, the female falcon got up and we could all see a crack in the fourth egg. A murmur went up. An hour later, she got up and we could see a new hatched chick next to the three other fluff balls. Everyone cheered!
The experience echoed my eclipse experience. Witnessing a natural wonder is simply life-affirming. I’ll take it.