The Quiet at Dusk

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It was late spring and I was out, wandering, hoping to see the returning birds of summer on the Oakland hills ridgeline. As I peered through my binoculars to watch a black-headed grosbeak, a couple walking passed and asked if I saw anything interesting. I looked over to see an older retired couple, the husband with a pair of small binoculars hung around his neck. They were birders, clearly, and we got to talking. Eventually the conversation led into talk of birding apps like Merlin. They told me how this app had heard, apparently, a lazuli bunting on the edge of the meadow on the other side of the parking lot around this time, nearing dusk.

“We didn’t see it, but we could clearly hear it,” the husband told me.

As the sun was nearing the horizon, I told them I wanted to check it out, and they kindly encouraged me to do so. As I headed across the parking lot at Skyline Staging Area, I turned on my own Merlin app. Just as I walked onto the fire road, there it was, flashing in the app, the song of the lazuli bunting. Looking across the meadow and back into the woods, I eventually spotted the bird on a long branch of a eucalyptus, in all its brilliant rufous and turquoise, a male lazuli bunting just before sunset. As I peered up at him in the tree, a group of people asked what I was looking at. As I tried to show them, the bunting flew away, slipping through the forest and away to the other side of the ridge, far from view.

Ever since I saw that bunting, I’ve returned to that same spot every other week, more or less, in the hopes of catching another glimpse of the bird. As I learned more about the bunting in the Oakland hills, it turned out that they are known to nest on that very ridge line. And yet, each evening I went up to the hill, I never saw it. Each evening I’d return at the same time, just before sunset in the hopes of spotting it once again. And now, fully in the midst of summer, and it is basically a pipe dream, a comical attempt by this point. But now, I don’t necessarily want to, or feel the need to see the bunting. Instead, I’ve been going on short walks, often without my phone, to see what I can see and hear what I can hear. Often, I don’t see or hear much. And yet I’ve come to enjoy the quiet boredom I find on the trail. It has, more than the bunting, the very thing that has me returning there more and more.

There is something special about that time of day just before the sun goes below the horizon. Winds settle down, if not stop entirely. The birds begin to wail, calling out night for the rest of the ridgeline to hear. Further up the small road, there in the bushes is a quiet stillness, save a mouse, or the shimmying of a spotted towhee. For brief moments between groups of people chatting over their days, week, work, bosses, lovers and the like, there’s breathtaking stillness.

Stopping in the middle of the trail, I’ll stop to take in the quiet. I can hear my soft breathing. Every bit of dirt beneath my feet, small leaf dropping, or the scurrying of fence lizards in this quiet is heard with absolute clarity. This is what I enjoy returning to on the trail.

Quiet isn’t something, I don’t think, we’re supposed to be accustomed to, which makes it all the more intriguing. In a way, absolute silence is something we are made to fear. The lack of birdsong in an area, might mean the birds are not there for a reason. Perhaps silence means the changing of the winds, and perhaps with it a storm. And, more vague than these, in silence, there is more room for your mind to conjure what could be around in the quiet. Quiet is a place of prospect, good, bad, or neutral, but its stillness brings within it the anticipation of its breaking. Not knowing what may break that silence, is perhaps, what intrigues me the most. And there, at dusk on that frequently populated ridgeline, I find it the most beautiful thing.

I still have yet to see the bunting again, and I likely won’t until next spring. But the once heard loud long lilting song of a male has, however briefly, returned to my attention the quiet.

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Also, I’m truly so happy to share this show review I wrote for KQED on a new show at Casemore Gallery, open until the end of August.

***(: READ IT HERE :)***