A CHAIR IN THE MEADOW

A summer is never complete in our family without at least a few days in the Sierra Nevada. The tradition goes back to the early 1900s when my grandparents from Santa Barbara took a train to Raymond in the Sierra foothills where they boarded a horse-drawn stage for the long ride through heat and dust up to Wawona and later down into Yosemite Valley.

My first childhood memory of the mountains was also of Yosemite where we stayed in a rustic cabin at Camp Curry. I remember the Black-headed Grosbeaks and Western Tanagers coming to the deck rail for our offerings.

For the last 50 years, we've spent our family vacations at Angora Lake, the uppermost of three glacial lakes below Echo Peak in the Tahoe Basin. I've visited briefly in June when ice is breaking up on the lake and the natural granite amphitheatre echoes with bird song. Our family week is the end of August when bird activity is waning.

Each year before we leave, the mountain ash and the dwarf willows in the high meadow are turning color. Clark's Nutcrackers begin moving down slope from the higher elevations, where they live among the wind-sculpted white-barked pine. Calling back and forth in the cooling mountain air, their voices have a certain dissident electric quality that for me signals the changing season and the end of summer.

Sibley describes the Clark's Nutcracker as a specialized jay being an intermediate form between jays and crows. Like crows, their flight is direct and leisurely with a dip or two just before landing. Like the Pinyon Jay they harvest and cache seeds. But unlike jays who always hop, they walk about like crows.

Nutcrackers have nothing to fear from the impending winter because during the summer they will have cached up to 30,000 seeds in the ground, often carrying them 90 at a time in a special pocket under their tongue.

A nutritious food supply enables them to spend the winter in the mountains, and to begin nesting before the snow melts.

White-barked pines and Clark's Nutcrackers have a relationship of mutual benefit -- the pines providing most of the Nutcracker's food supply while Nutcracker's forgotten seeds, insure a new generation of trees, often far from the adult tree. In a year when the seed crop is meager, Clark's Nutcrackers will temporarily disperse to the lowlands and even to the coast. One winter, I saw them in a pine grove above Carmel Bay.

This summer with several grandchildren off to college early, we had to forego our August stay at Angora. Instead, I spent a few days earlier in the month at a relative's cabin along the Sonora Pass road on the Stanislaus River near the Dardenelles. In this gentle elevation just below 6,000 feet on the west slope of the Sierra, both vegetation and birds are abundant.

The big presence is the river which tumbles downhill in its canyon absorbing smaller sounds in its roar. The river is the home of the American Dipper - a bird so utterly unique that it is the sole occupant of its family. Imagine, a song bird that walks underwater! Every part of this boisterous river is its domain. Aquatic insects make up its diet. Its mossy nest is most often anchored behind a waterfall. An extra large oil gland waterproofs its feathers and a special skin flab protects its nostrils. Its song is the musical equivalent of the river itself with its joyful trills and endless variations. Even in the winter, wherever a stream or river remains free of ice, the Dipper is there, bobbing up and down on a wet boulder, dashing into the spray, or disappearing altogether to emerge again long enough to celebrate with a song.

John Muir proclaims the bird to be his favorite - the perfect match for his own boundless energy and poetic outpourings. He devotes a complete chapter to the Water-Ouzel in his "Mountains of California." I still persist in calling the Dipper an Ouzel, even though I know this name properly belongs to a European blackbird.

One morning early, I borrowed a folding camp chair, walked over the rise away from the river and crossed the road to a meadow next to a small stream. I set the chair down among the white yarrow and tawny grasses still wet from last night's thunderstorm. With the morning sun warming my shoulders, I settled in, savoring the sweetness of life. The stream gurgled over its pebbles and sandy bed. A thicket of mountain alder, following the stream, made a perfect cover for small birds that I could hear shifting about. A tall stand of mixed conifers - yellow pine, white fir, sugar pine and incense cedar - formed a green wall beyond the meadow. It's at these eco-tones, where one habitat edges on another, that bird life is most plentiful.

Soon the birds considered me nothing more threatening, or interesting, than a tree stump. First to appear were Yellow and MacGillivray's Warblers. Then the more familiar Dark-eyed Junco and the Song Sparrow emerged to feed and preen, looking almost unfamiliar in this mountain setting. From the conifers came the voices of a Western Wood-Pewee, an Olive-sided Flycatcher, Red-breasted Nuthatches, and Mountain Chickadees. Two heavily-barred hawks which sounded like Red-shouldered Hawks cruised over the tree tops, but they disappeared before I could catch them in my binoculars. Making an even briefer appearance, a very pale hawk settled on a high snag but took off again before even closing its wings. I would like to think it was the Northern Goshawk but I couldn't be sure.

Back at the cabin, Stellar's Jays came and went from the feeder, noisy enough to be heard above the river. They scattered enough seed on the ground for an adult junco and its fledgling which still had a streaked breast. A week earlier, around the first of August, a family of Black-headed Grosbeaks were regular visitors to the feeders, but they appear to have left. I briefly saw a female Western Tanager who probably wasn't far behind.

I love this region where pale granites and dark-red volcanic rocks share the slopes and ridges. The volcanic rock, yielding to erosion, often takes on fanciful shapes, suggesting ruined castles.

Going home to the Bay Area, I always feel a certain waning of high spirits as we descend into the lowlands where the sky loses its clarity. The sharp, sweet pine smells are replaced by the odor of hot, dry grass - or no odor at all.

But I'll be back in the mountains again in October in time to see the aspens turning gold and the resident birds and small mammals getting ready for winter in earnest.

-Phila Rogers