Bird Cloud: A Memoir of Place

by Annie Proulx

  By afternoon the wind was up again and at the top of the sky were three eagle-shaped specks, whirling and wheeling. Three eagles playing in the wind. Three? Was one of them a juvenile bald planning to nest here, or was it the big mystery bird? And just how many eagles called this cliff home?

  That night the wind went berserk, terrific shrieking and battering. In the morning it was still intense and I could see the big windows moving slightly in and out. The worst wind yet. I went out into the driveway to see how badly it was drifted. Huge impassable drifts. The wind almost knocked me over. A small bird shot past the kitchen window, but on the far side of the river the two bald eagles sat calmly in the trees near their nest. How could they stand it?

  During the nights of high-velocity wind I lay tense and awake in the dark listening to the bellowing and roar as it tried to blow the house over. In daytime, working and unpacking books, it was easier to ignore it. The television sets would not work because the wind had wrenched the dish out of alignment. After four or five days of relentless howling the wind fell into a temporary coma, turning everything over to a warm, sunny and calm day. Temperatures climbed into the forties. But the weather report warned another storm was approaching. The James Gang smashed a narrow alley through the drifts on the county road and cleared out the driveway. I was no longer snowbound. The power company made it out and realigned the satellite dish.

  The sunlight hours were lengthening by a few minutes each day. While it was calm I walked down to the east end of the property, and glancing up at the cliff I saw not one, but two big dark birds. They were playing in the air, obviously delighted with the calm air, with each other, with life in general. Then they both dove into their bedroom niche in the chimney west of the big empty nest. While they were flying I could not hear their voices because a large flock of ducks, more than a hundred, flew over, twittering and whistling. The big dark birds looked like eagles, they flew like eagles, but they were completely dark. They did not have the golden napes pictured in the bird books. I told myself I had to watch carefully from now on. Goldens soar with a slight dihedral; bald eagles soar with their wings almost flat. But I was now almost sure that a pair of golden eagles owned the big nest and were preparing to use it.

  The next day started out warm, calm and sunny but another three-day storm was on the way and by late morning low, malignant clouds smothered the ranges in all directions. The weather people said it was going to turn very cold. I took advantage of the lull before the storm to get outdoors with the binoculars. A raven was fooling around the cliff face, trying out several niches. Then the big dark birds appeared above the cliff in a tumbling display. The binoculars showed that they did have lighter necks and heads. I had no doubt now. They were a pair of golden eagles and they were courting, planning to fix up the big empty nest and raise a family only half a mile from the bald eagles. I felt fabulously wealthy with a bald eagle nest and a golden eagle nest both visible from my dining room window. I wanted to spend the day watching them, but the storm was due to hit during the night so I headed out to get groceries and supplies while the road was still open.

  January wore on. The bald eagles were up early and used the mornings for fishing, sitting immobile side by side in the dead tree at the river’s edge. It was cold and day after day the snow fell as in Conrad Aiken’s story “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” which I read when I was eight years old, thinking it was a story about a profound snowfall. Later, when I learned it was an oblique study of intensifying juvenile madness I was disappointed. On the frozen river four coyotes nosed around the north shore margins. Upstream the goldeneyes’ strip of water was still open but daily shrinking.

  On a Sunday morning of flat calm it was 21°F below zero. The air was stiff. Freezing river mist had coated every tree and shrub. There were no birds in sight. The sun struggled up and the mist rose in great humps over the remaining ribbons of open water. The tops of the cottonwoods glittered like icy nosegays, stems wrapped in gauze. Spring seemed very far away, but the bald eagle pair sat side by side catching the first rays. They often sat this way, side by side, one great eagle-beast with two heads. Was it for warmth? Was it to renew their bond? Were they like an old married couple who have become companions? Or was it hormonal stirrings? Whatever, it was a fine thing to see. As the sun gained height the eagles fluffed themselves out and began to preen. A lone magpie flew over the mist. In the afternoon I skied down to the east end and into the cottonwood bosque to a corner I once thought would be a good place to put up a tent. There was one golden eagle and four magpies eating the scanty remains of a snowshoe hare. The eagle fled as I came in sight, the magpies went reluctantly, sure I was after their feast. It was easy to see what had happened. The hare’s tracks zigged and zagged through the brush, but twelve inches east of the corpse I saw the snow-angel wing prints of the attacking eagle.

  On the summer day the James Gang and I found the chert vein in the west end of the cliff we came upon a curious puzzle. On one ledge with a sheltering overhang there were hundreds of dry sticks scattered around, and more in an intertwined tangle that seemed to be the base of a gigantic nest. We decided it was an old eagle nest that something had destroyed. Looking around we spotted a ten-foot length of rusted heavy wire, one end wrapped securely around a twenty-pound rock. We couldn’t get past the idea that the free end of the wire had once been attached to some kind of trap, that someone had wanted a live eagle. It was not hard to imagine the eagle ripping its own nest apart in a savage effort to get free. There is not a way to know what happened.

  Wyoming was once a haven for eagle killers. In the bad old days in this valley in the 1960s and ’70s many men who are now cattlemen raised sheep and firmly believed that bald and golden eagles carried off young lambs. If you raised sheep you killed eagles—bald or golden, but especially golden eagles, though both birds were protected by law. Poison (thallium sulfate was a favorite), or shotgun from rented helicopters and small planes, or sharpshooters from open pickup windows were the preferred modi operandi. Eagle populations declined. Gerald remembers one eagle killer near Saratoga who came around to brag about his kills. Eagles were killed in other states, especially in the west, but Wyoming became notorious to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Audubon Society, and to newspaper readers across the country as the home ground of the most ignorant, blatant and vicious eagle-killing ranchers. Chief among them was the wealthy and powerful sheep rancher, Herman Werner, ex-president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, one of “The Wyoming Helicopter Monsters,” as Michael Frome, the distinguished environmental journalist, labeled them, from the Casper and Buffalo area, using a hired helicopter based in Buffalo to “sluice” eagles.3 Werner had ranches near Casper and Saratoga. Nathaniel Reed, the assistant secretary of the interior under Richard Nixon, made stopping the killings a primary goal.

  In 1971 the FBI set up an eagle sting. An agent who was raised in the west posed as a ranchhand and got a job on Werner’s spread where, in the bunkhouse, he heard about dozens of dead eagles. Because this was hearsay, a federal judge would not issue a search warrant. But Bart Rea, an Audubon member who had been monitoring the eagle killings, and his friend, another Audubon member, were out at the airfield one day and both men happened to notice someone working on a nearby helicopter. They could see a shotgun and empty shells in the craft. The friend had his camera with him and used it. The man working on the helicopter realized he had been photographed. Weeks later the anxiety-ridden helicopter pilot showed up at the Department of the Interior in Washington. He said that if he were granted immunity he’d tell about the eagle killings, and so he did, testifying to a Senate subcommittee that he had carried eagle-hunting shooters into the Wyoming skies, that Werner was one of the air service’s best customers, and that the gunners had shot more than five hundred bald and golden eagles. Time magazine reported the Wyoming dead eagle count was 770.4 Despite “national outrage” the department was still not able to get a search warrant for Werner’s land. But the U.S. Air Force,
testing new surveillance planes, flew over the ranch and an infrared camera lit up a pile of decomposing flesh. That finally got the search warrant and the discovery of eagle carcasses in number.

  There was still a hitch. The U.S. attorney for Wyoming balked at bringing a case against the rancher because he was sure that Herman Werner would never be convicted by a Wyoming jury. Werner . . . made a surprise visit to [Nathaniel] Reed’s office. “He simply bolted in,” Reed remembers, “a wiry man wearing a Stetson hat. He said he was going to get me. I said quietly, ‘Before you get me, please tell me who you are.’ He said ‘I am Herman Werner, the man who protects his sheep by killing eagles. And you don’t know anything about eagles.’”5

  The tough alternative newspaper, High Country News, took up the cause and Wyoming public opinion began to quiver and shift. The U.S. attorney general pressed for prosecution. But Werner never came to trial. A few months before the trial was to begin he was killed in a car wreck. In Wyoming, as the wool market declined and sheepmen turned to cattle, as the fine for killing eagles greatly increased, as ranchers began to learn that the Department of the Interior had sharp teeth and that bald eagles were interested in carrion and fish, not lambs, the killings virtually stopped.

  Two very Wyoming touches to the whole affair are the commemorative Herman Werner Reservoir Number 1 in Converse County, and the Werner Wildlife Museum at Casper College. The museum includes “an extensive bird collection.” Wyoming irony.

  The helicopter shootings got national coverage, but eagle electrocution stories stay in the ecological and wildlife magazines. In 2009 PacifiCorp, a monster electric utility spread over the west, was fined $10.5 million for killing eagles and other birds in Wyoming by electrocution. Between January 2007 and July 2009, PacifiCorp fried 232 Wyoming eagles with its old transmission equipment. It is on probation and has been ordered to retrofit the equipment. It can’t happen quickly enough.

  Every morning in January 2007 there were a dozen jackrabbits and cottontails around the house, digging through the snow for frozen grass. When we drove down the entrance road there were always two or three dodging and leaping in front of the truck. Finally, after weeks of swinging in the wind, the bird feeder attracted a clientele—around fifty grey-crowned rosy-finches. A magpie in a tree on the island wondered what the fuss was all about. For rosy-finches the flock is everything. It is a unit with many small parts held together by some kind of group consciousness in flight and feeding. In a flock there is less exposure to predators—the “selfish herd” effect? Stokes said that birds tend to bunch together in fall and winter and that there is a hierarchy within the flock. So far any hierarchy eluded me.

  Colorado was hit with its fifth big snowstorm in five weeks. At Bird Cloud snow and cold alternated, and there was a very heavy rime frost on the willows and trees along the river. The finch flock grew ever larger with rosies apparently coming in from everywhere. Chris Fisher in Birds of the Rocky Mountains put it well: “During the winter, Gray-crowned Rosy Finches spill out of the attics of the Rockies to flock together at lower elevations.”6 So they were likely coming into this valley from both the Sierra Madre and the Medicine Bow. At and around the feeder there were eighty to ninety finches. They rose into the sky for no reason I could ascertain, wheeled about and returned to the feeder. There were no birds of prey in sight, no humans, no dogs or cows or snares, the wind was calm and the day sunny. Did they all fly up to gain elevation and spy out the land for distant threats? Or to reassert the (to me, invisible) hierarchy? Sometimes they flew to the trees near the river for a few minutes, then back to the feeder. I had to refill the thing several times a day.

  Days later the magpie that had watched the mob of finches for a week, now ventured to approach the cafeteria and found a few seeds on the ground. How long, I wondered, before he or she brought in friends and relatives? The magpie concentrated on the big rock beneath the feeder which likely had tasty seeds lodged in its crevices as I often hurled handfuls of seeds over a wide area. The finches continued to help themselves at the feeder. The magpie eyed them. The magpie hopped to the top of the wire fence around the feeder tree and gazed at the feeder. All the finches flew up suddenly and the magpie leapt into space. The finches circled back sans magpie. It was time to make another trip to the feed store for more seed.

  The beautiful days had grown longer. In the morning I watched one of the bald eagles dive toward an open stretch of water off the island and I ran madly upstairs with the binoculars just in time to see it heave a fish onto the ice. It ate part of the fish then flew to the nest. At ten minutes past five the sun still gilded the top fifty feet of the cliff. One bald eagle was in the nest tree, the other flying downriver. The cliff turned the color of a russet apple and I enjoyed the rare deep orange sunset smoldering under the edge of a dark dirty-sock cloud.

  The highways were miraculously clear and dry in early February 2007 and I went to Santa Fe for a week to let the James Gang finish up some work in the house. Global warming got to Bird Cloud before I came back and for the first time in months the ground was visible. The road in and our lane were quagmires of heavy mud. The county actually ran a snowplow up to our gate for the first and last time. The cliff was still sunlit at 5:30 and the two elk were still hanging around the cliff. The rosy-finches smothered the feeder as soon as I refilled it with fresh groceries. Several magpies watched from the island. On my first morning back only one eagle sat in the fishing tree. The other was on the nest and I supposed he/she was sitting on eggs. A real sign of spring. I stayed far away from the goldens’ nest as they were skittish and shy and I did not want them to abandon it. I thought bald eagles must lay and hatch their eggs earlier than the goldens. I knew I should look this up, but did not.

  In order not to disturb the goldens I gave up skiing to the east end of the property and went instead to the Sierra Madre trails. I stopped for gas at the Encampment Trading Post one morning and a Forest Service truck pulled up for some of the same. The driver said he had just finished grooming the ski trails (something that almost never happened on the east slope when I lived in Centennial). The trails were beautiful and the skiing perfect despite heavy snow showers which I like. On the way home I saw a golden eagle dining on a roadside deer carcass. Was it one of the Bird Cloud goldens?

  On my way back from Santa Fe I had bought a telescope and set it up in my bedroom which has a grand view of the river and the cliff. The eagles weren’t in sight but one of the elk was. Oddly, it seemed to be wearing a canvas jacket, different and lighter in color than the neck and haunches. Was it a trick of the light? It looked like a boulder in the middle. After an hour the elk stood up and disclosed the second elk lying close behind it. With the telescope details leapt into prominence. The first elk pulled some tufts of hair from its back, then nibbled on sage or rabbitbrush. The second elk became invisible again. There looked to be well over a hundred rosy-finches at the feeder. But where were the fine ravens who raised a crowd every year on a high ledge of the cliff directly across the river?

  Ten days into February 2007 came one of those anomaly days, warm and cloudy. I woke to the spatter of rain. The forecast said it would turn to snow by afternoon. I wondered about the ravens. Shouldn’t they at least be bringing twigs to the nest ledge? Ehrlich, Dobkin and Wheye said that the male, with some help from the female, builds the nest; that she lays four to six eggs; that they both sit on the eggs; that incubation is eighteen to twenty-one days and that the young fly after thirty-eight to forty-four days.7 So, if they fly, as they have the past two years, around Memorial Day, then they must hatch around April 20–25, and the eggs must be laid the first week in April. They are monogamous birds. Late in the afternoon, as if it had read my thoughts, one raven appeared, sailing around the cliff, legs hanging down as though prepared to land. It flew into the deep chimney to the west of the old nest site several times. That would be a better place to nest if the ravens wanted more privacy and shelter from the southwest winds, but for me the view would not be good.
The elk were still around.

  Ehrlich et al. also wrote that rosy-finches build nests in cliffs and crevices in alpine tundra and maritime islands. They too are monogamous. The finches at the feeder were just winter visitors, not residents, but they could be breeding in the Medicine Bow or Sierra Madre. The two goldens sailed around their big nest all afternoon. One perched on the projecting rock at the top of the cliff. With the telescope I could see the golden hood rather well. In the vicinity of the raven nest a prairie falcon flashed into sight. I remembered seeing one in that area last summer. I had no idea what trouble that bird would cause the local residents. The bald eagle pair came flying down the river on their way home. The goldens seemed to chase them for a few hundred yards and then turned back to the big nest area and one flew back up to the projecting rock. When they came in for landings their wings looked very broad and bent into huge hoops. The balds were soaring high, maybe looking for food. What a show, and all from my dining room window.

  Bird life was picking up as beetles and worms began to stir in the earth. Early the next morning a northern harrier sat on an electric pole but fortunately did not make the killing contact. I spent the day shelving more books and writing and at sunset, without thinking, I tried to walk along the river but the goldens became so agitated that I turned back. One golden angrily escorted me all the way to the house. I had once thought of inviting bird-watchers onto the property but I knew then that was impossible. The goldens had to have privacy.