Between Urban and Wild: Reflections from Colorado

Voyeur

14 It’s early July, a mild evening after a string of hot days. The sun has dropped below the folds of the foothills behind me. I’m sitting outside on the deck, enjoying the cool air, listening with half an ear to the activity that surrounds the house. The day is still bright but has lost its brassy sheen. A car passes on the road now and again, but most of the noise tonight comes from birds. A nighthawk is swooping over the ridge in front of me, calling out a raspy cry as it circles. It dives every so often, bottoming out with a moaning roar, a sound both eerie and comical. Violet-green swallows wheel and plunge, exchanging quick chirps. Other birds, unseen in the pine branches, have been shrilling for some time now, and I’m trying to block out their incessant noise. I’m sitting at the metal outdoor table, the house walls ticking behind me as they release the day’s store of heat. I’m facing east, away from the road and toward the hillside that rises beyond the pickets of the deck railing. The gravely soil of the slope is stippled with bunch grasses and Oregon grape. Ponderosa pines jut from the hillsides around the Voyeur voyeur 15 house, combing the breeze with their long needles. The air smells faintly of warm dust and pine resin. I’m writing a letter to a friend, and in a pause between paragraphs I glance up from my writing. A dark brown bird is perched on the cedar birdhouse nailed to a pine tree a dozen yards from the deck. “Hey!” I yell at the bird, which is poking its head into the entry of the box. It’s obviously trying to get in the birdhouse, and I run down the stairs leading from the deck, with the intention of throwing rocks or pinecones at the interloper. The bird flies away before I can arm myself, and I stomp back up the stairs, muttering. I know that bird doesn’t live in the box because I’m familiar with the ones that do. They’re small birds, dark gray on top and creamy on the bottom, pygmy nuthatches, according to the slightly washed-out photo in my field guide. I’m no birder, but I’ve been neighbors with this pair for some time now. Early in the spring I watched them work at pecking a small round hole into a tall stump on the hillside to the east of our house. Whenever I went outside to get the mail or to water plants, I checked on their progress. At first, I watched the birds as they whittled away at the wood perched on the outside of the stump, but eventually the hole grew deep enough that they were able to work inside, and a light tapping noise was the only outward sign of their project. I would watch and wait for a small gray head to pop out of the neat hole, and if the light was right, I could see the puff of fine wood dust the bird spit out. The head would disappear back inside, and the hollow rapping would resume. This routine transfixed me for weeks, and I often ate my breakfast on the deck, watching and listening to the construction. The muffled taps of the birds’ building went on for so long that Doug and I joked that they had decided to add a spare room. voyeur 16 Later in the spring, I was working at my desk, facing west, when I looked up and saw a bear ambling down the hill. Plenty of our neighbors have bear stories, but this was the first time I’d seen one at our house. The animal was young and, as bears go, small and rangy-looking. I snapped a few pictures through the window, but when it climbed a tree and started clawing the bird feeder suspended from it, I ran out on the deck and, for lack of anything better, clapped and shouted like a farmer’s wife in a 1950s movie: “Shoo! G’wan, you, git!” If I’d been wearing an apron, I no doubt would have flapped it. The bear stared at me and snuffed deeply a few times. It finally winded me, apparently, because it abruptly jumped down off the tree and ran partway up the hill. It stopped, turned to sniff in my direction briefly, and...