As I’ve grown up, the formal human holidays became less and less important every year. There’s so many things about Christmas we can’t control: prices, family politics, the weather. Instead, I look forward to those spontaneously perfect days when nature’s stars align — the winter’s most beautiful snowstorm, the day I saw a bobcat carry a limp, spotted ground squirrel past me in its mouth; and the month I’ll forever remember as “coyote summer” — the wild holidays come without warning, and leave a larger mark.
Perhaps this preference has something to do with my dad’s magpie-like habit of serenely ignoring most arbitrary human holidays, and just bringing presents home whenever he found some item he thought was nice.
No offense to the astronomers who selected New Year’s day as the point when earth circles back toward spring, but most other holidays seem arbitrary. I was born in September, but does anything in me or nature shift on that specific day? No. September is often a boring time — a long, slow shift from green to brown. It’s real holiday is the arrival of sandpipers, who nested in the far north, to Big River beaches like Riverfront Park and Hood River Spit.
Natural holidays may be random, but they’re never meaningless. I think a good way to get to know them is to just walk somewhere every day. Visit the same place over and over, and you’ll get a sense of its turning points: My spring begins when Straggly Gooseberry leaves fan out just enough to collect quarter-inch dewdrops. Winter crests when Varied Thrushes appear in a huge, but almost invisible, orange wave alongside the big snow.
But once, several years back, my favorite holiday actually came on Christmas.
A friend and I were draped over a small concrete bridge, peering into a clear stream we visited almost every day, when a flock of Pine Siskins arrived in the White Alders. Siskins are small, delicate birds, brown from a distance and elegantly streaked with chocolate and tan up close. A strange color of chartreuse, a pale greenish yellow, adorns their wingbars. They’re unpredictable; some winters, few appear — other winters, when seed crops and weather coincide just right, dozens or hundreds flock into the alders. That day, we must’ve watched more than 100 decorate the bare trees, neatly pick their lunch from the tiny alder cones, and drop a rain of delicate seed fragments onto us. A small, swooping Sharp-shinned Hawk eventually ended the party with its failed attempt at lunch.
Then I looked down, and saw something I’d never expected to see in my measly foot-deep minnow-scale stream: A fish’s tail bigger than my hand, vanishing. Several red, green and silver steelhead were thrashing their way upstream through the unusually clear, low winter flood.
I didn’t remember until some hours later, when our noses were very cold, that it was Christmas.
No such thing happened this year, but I don’t care. A birdwatcher’s holidays never really end. Have fun in the woods, everyone!
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