Reassessing boundaries is a part of everyday life at Camp Indralaya, and the garden is not an enclave of exception.

Set at the heart of the human zone, the garden performs as a small, dynamic, fenced-off domain of interwoven diversity whose relations extend well beyond its own borders. When combined with enveloping woodland and seashore, it is part of a wildlife corridor that can impact the best of human intentions while raising pertinent questions.

Accordingly, it is safe to say that there is always something new to learn about sharing any small parcel of land with so many fellow inhabitants.

Of particular interest and fascination are the many birds who come and go for various reasons of purposeful duration, warm-blooded creatures who navigate freely so many human designs and constructs.

Empowered by this gift of flight, birds also seem keen to accommodate being close to familiar persons and routines. This enhances the chance to observe their behavior, delight in their companionship, or capture a short-range portrait with a modest point-and-shoot camera.

As I amend the soil or turn the compost, I enjoy their many chirps and trills, impressed by how they can sometimes sustain what seems to be inexhaustible singing.

Inadvertently, I start taking mental notes; I reference a journal of sights and sounds gathered across the days and years.

The arrival of milder spring weather typically prompts the return of the tree swallows who waste no time reclaiming a bird house that sits atop a timber post in a plot of climbing and rambling roses.

Soon to follow are the violet-green swallows, who quickly engage their lookalike cousins in an air show of swooping turf negotiations, one which ends with the late-comers leaving to locate some alternative nesting site.

As for the tiny house wrens, keeping track of their actual numbers can become a head-twisting task.

A feisty male might commandeer two or three of our simple, fence-top bird houses, then diligently ply them with a wide assortment of nesting fibers. But in spite of such efforts, one obvious female typically opts for a handyman-crafted, gothic-arched residence that is nailed to the shake-sided wall of the tool shed.

Beyond, in the sprawling orchard meadow, robins, juncos, and flickers, along with stopover western tanagers, can be seen combing the grass for insects or darting from tree to tree.

But who is that bobbing across the meadow with a chicken-like gait?

Turns out to be the rare northern bobwhite, the only indigenous quail of the eastern – yes, eastern - United States, now living in small numbers on the San Juan Islands. A remnant perhaps of some foregone plan to stock the region with game fowl or cultivate quail eggs for consumption.

( Sadly, only days after the aforementioned sighting at Indralaya, while walking to town along Orcas Road, I came across a northern bobwhite lying in the roadside grass, dead, without any visible signs of predator or scavenger ).

Meanwhile, back at the bird house that is home to the ever active tree swallows: large, white feathers seem to be the bedding material of choice. Taken from another bird's nest? Gathered from the seashore? Very curious.

If the vole population is lower this year than last, the reason could be a stoic barred owl – not a feather out of place - who visits the garden at daybreak and dusk to undertake the hunt.

Perched high atop a rose bower upright, it scans the garden as silently and efficiently as its species can glide through the air. On one occasion, as I went about my garden chores some thirty yards away, it stooped upon a sighting of prey, but for all I could tell, it came up empty.

Accordingly, there is no lack of drama, mystery, and controversy in the daily lives of our avian neighbors. A summer ago, while pruning canes and building a trellis in an overgrown rose bed, my colleagues happened upon a nest containing four white-crowned sparrow eggs. We did all we could not to disturb them, and sure enough, a week or so later, tiny heads and beaks were peaking above the wall of woven twigs and fine grasses. The parents were always perched close-by, trading songs, and attending to the newborns.

Then little by little the nest began to become dislodged, until suddenly, one morning, all the chicks were gone without a trace. Did a mink climb into the garden and snatch them away? The parents continued to trade their songs, but the meaning of their message could not be deciphered.

So it is that over the course of a life, the presence of birds, like that of all the natural world, provides us with ever evolving maps of time and place, of experience and small revelations, that conflate and reshape memory in the way of revisited stories which amend and alter sheer perceptions of utility and uniformity.

With that in mind, I cherish a return of the pine grosbeaks who sometimes indulge in the garden birdbath; the red-breasted sapsucker pecking away at the bark of the walnut tree; or the distinctive, reassuring call of the olive-sided flycatcher - “three beers here”, if you insist - whistling down from high in the conifers.

As the salmonberries ripen at the garden perimeter, the beep-beep yelp of the spotted towhee may no longer come from the meadow edges but instead from the hedges close to good-pickings; as so the robins will reconvene in ever greater numbers there, penetrating the prickly thicket not seldom with fury and great agitation as they battle for the biggest, the sweetest, amid such abundance.

“Why do these birds behave the way they do?,” a novice once asked the Zen Master. “They do it for you,” replied the Master.

Lloyd Vivola

Chief Gardener

May 29, 2018

In Cascadia