Low-Riding Moon

Moon events tend to be low-key and inconsequential. Blue moons—a second full moon in a single month— aren’t astronomical events at all, but merely the result of our current calendar conventions. And “super” moons are hardly more exciting. Sometimes the moon looks big, sometimes it doesn’t.

But lunar event that’s fast approaching takes place only once every 18 years, as the moon arrives at the low point of its almost two-decade swing up and down the horizon.  

This event has no practical significance, either, and it’s not impressive to witness. But I find it fascinating to consider that a thousand years ago residents of the area we now call the American Southwest were aware of it, and found it so intriguing that they built an observatory to pinpoint and perhaps even celebrate the occasion.

I’m referring to Chimney Rock, located amid the austere and haunting landscapes of southern Colorado. Hilary and I visited the stark contours of the ruins years ago. It rises above the pines, both strange and awesome, like a towering knobby ridge. 

Archeologists had long been puzzled by the presence of sophisticated core-and-veneer masonry at the top of it, typical of the Ancestral Puebloan culture centered in the high desert a hundred miles to the southwest. The mystery was compounded when scientists who surveyed the site in 1988 discovered that the buildings rested on solid bedrock. This meant that not only the stone and timbers, but also the soil and water for making bricks, had been laboriously carried by hand up the 1,200-foot escarpment from the river valley below. Why? The slightly longer growing season on the ridge could hardly justify such an enormous expenditure of labor. There had to be another explanation.

Before long someone noticed that if you stand in the courtyard of the loftiest and most elaborate pueblo you could watch the moon rise directly between the two “chimneys” further east along the ridge. Could Chimney Rock have been a lunar observatory?

Perhaps. But there was a hitch. The moon rises at a slightly different point on the horizon every month. Its position also changes from year to year, moving from north to south and back again following an 18.6-year cycle. At each end of its path, it pauses for two years before beginning its slow journey in the opposite direction. Astronomers, rather unimaginatively, call this pause the Major Lunar Standstill.

The archeologists studying the site in 1988 happened to witness the moonrise during just such a “standstill.” This meant that the moon would soon begin to rise further south along the horizon, and it would then be sixteen years before the quasi-dramatic sighting became possible again.

Clearly, the infrequency of the event was a mark against the theory that Chimney Rock had been used by the locals as a lunar observatory. But an archeologist from the University of Colorado determined, by analyzing the tree rings of the beams used to construct the buildings, that the site had been in use first in 1076, and then again in 1093, after a sixteen-year hiatus. Could it be merely a coincidence that the northerly lunar standstills of the late eleventh century began in 1075 and 1094?

Although the correlation in dates doesn’t prove that Chimney Rock was used to observe the moon, the evidence is intriguing; and the fact that sophisticated devices for tracking the moon’s rhythms have also been unearthed at Chaco Canyon, the capital of that now-lost Ancestral Puebloan world, lends further credence to the idea. It wouldn’t have been necessary for the Chacoans to calculate anything—they might simply have put sticks in the ground to chart the moon’s shambling peregrinations.

  

 It remains to be explained why anyone would care to track the moon so precisely in the first place. Well, modern observances of Easter, Passover, and Ramadan are all dictated by lunar cycles, and many pre-literate societies have developed even more elaborate correspondences between events in the night sky, seasonal farming and hunting activities, time-honored myths, and ceremonial observances. Even today the Pueblo tribes of the Rio Grande and Black Mesa have a particularly rich set of such associations.

We’ll never know for sure what part the moon played in the lives of the Chacoan people—they lacked a written language—but the efforts they took to establish an observatory, and presumably a ceremonial center, at the top of a towering ridge of inhospitable rock, many miles from the bustle of life at Pueblo Bonito, testifies to their keen interest in the moon’s movements. Considered in that light, it becomes easy, when visiting Chimney Rock today, to envision the purpose of at least a few of the ninety-one structures that have been exposed by the excavations on the ridge.

Chimney Rock is now a national monument. If you’re interested, you can sign up to participate in programs there anytime, though it seems they’re hosting a special festival to celebrate the Major Lunar Standstill on September 23. The event may not carry the significance for us that it did for the Ancestral Pueblans, but what it lacks in spiritual overtones is compensated for by its historical resonance.

As we watch the golden orb appear between the twin peaks of Chimney Rock, we’re being moved by the same event that touched the local residents a thousand years ago.  

 

A Sweetness in the Air

Stepping out into the early morning sunlight, I was assaulted by the freshness in the air. The sky was blue, unlike the curtain of orange we’ve been living in the past few days due to the fires in Manitoba. There was dew on the grass, and I could see a few blades of fescue emerging from the ground out near the curb. How much of it will grow to adulthood I have no idea, but in the heavenly atmosphere of the morning I found it easy to enjoy.

The entire scene reminded me of a trip Hilary and I took to Burgundy in May of 1998. We brought our camping gear along in a suitcase, picked up a rental car in Brussels, and headed south. We were usually the only people camping in the village campgrounds, which were often located alongside a bend in a small but robust stream just outside of town. I was amazed, day after day, at how quickly someone showed up to collect the camping fee.

We toured archeological ruins from the era when Julius Caesar and his troops were locked in mortal combat with Vercingetorix and the native Celts—later immortalized in the Asterix comic books—and we also visited a few wine caves and museums in Dijon, Beaune, and thereabouts. We spent a few nights in small hotels, and one beautiful morning before we’d gotten out of bed two barn swallows flew into our room through the open window and twittered around briefly before departing. Was that a dream?

I’ll never forget the remarkable museum of pre-Roman artifacts housed in the local museum of Vix, which we happened upon purely by chance. The dazzling ornaments, weapons, and household items on display would give those from Sutton Hoo a run for their money. If I remember correctly, the main burial site contained a woman, her chariot, and all sorts of military and domestic finery, plus a bronze urn about six feet high that has been fashioned in Greece.

One day we parked the car strategically and took a hike through the woods past a dilapidated fish farm to the peaceful and almost-too-pristine Cistercian abbey of Fontenay. The monks used water power to perform a variety of mundane tasks, and a plaque on the wall proclaimed proudly that the abbey was the birthplace of the industrial revolution.

Every morning we’d drive into town to have a breakfast of café au lait and croissants in the dining rooms of one-star hotels where the old-fashioned wallpaper sometimes gave me the impression I’d stepped into a novel by Balzac.   

Near the end of the trip we drove up into the Alps past Lac D’Annecy toward Chamonix. We secured a spot in a huge but deserted campsite only because a maintenance man was there mowing the grass and he’d left the gate open. We chose a site from which we could see Mont Blanc out the door of our little Timberline tent.

But it seems I’ve gotten off the subject: the sweetness in the air. Great-crested flycatchers shrieking right and left. We take our daily stroll around the block. We wave at a neighbor heading to work and say hi a block away to a woman we’ve never seen before who’s out in her front yard with a dog. The dog barks at us. She's embarrassed. "Oh, he's just saying hi."

The air is not only fresh, but cool. And what about those negative ions? I’ve been told—well, yes, I read it online—that they “enhance mood, improve cognitive function, protect against airborne irritants, reduce stress, and boost immune function.” That's all well and good,  though it sounds sort of technical.

The question is, what do you do with all this fortuitous glee?

Hilary's off playing tennis with a friend. Her brother, Paul, will be stopping by soon to help me replace a few rotten boards in the deck. Or rather, I will help him replace a few boards. Or rather, I will make some ice tea while he replaces some boards. Then we'll relax and drink the tea. 

Seduced By the Merlin App

If you happen to enter into conversation with a beginning birder, it’s rare that more than thirty seconds elapses before they mention the Merlin app, with a special glee. Learning the songs and calls of, say, two hundred birds, can take years, and perhaps decades. But all you need to do is hold up your phone with the Merlin app open and within seconds it will identify every bird that’s singing in the vicinity and provide a photo and a link to further information about that species.

For years I poo-pooed such an approach to birding. I neither needed nor desired an electronic device to mediate between me and the great outdoors. Such an arrangement undermined close communion with the landscape. And besides, I didn’t even own a cell phone until 2024.

I’d learned many bird songs over the years, one after the other, by seeing the bird sing it and somehow remembering the sounds and the patterns. The descriptions in the bird book were occasionally helpful, for example the “teacher, Teacher, TEACHER” of the ovenbird, the “witchity-witchity-witch” of the common yellowthroat, or the “drink your tea” of the Eastern Towhee. But I found that such verbal approximations only seemed to work in retrospect, helping to retain and internalize a pattern of sounds once you’d already heard the real thing and matched it to the bird that delivered it.

I devised unique descriptions for many of the songs I learned. For example, the spirited song of the ruby-crowned kinglet sounds to me like the creaky workings of an old hand pump, only three octaves higher. And the high-pitched song of the eastern wood peewee sounds to me like the lament of a jilted lover: first a plaintive three-note call, “Are you there?” followed by a long pause, then a dejected, off-key, two-note descent. Uhhh-uh.

I don’t know, but I wonder whether bird enthusiasts who merely hold their phones to the sky again and again actually absorb and retain the patterns they hear and succeed in associating them with the proper species.

But in recent times I’ve gained some insight into the usefulness and also the visceral appeal of the app. The first breakthrough came when I was hired to lead a small group of birders on a hike. I’d never met them before. They were beginners, full of enthusiasm. Two of them had the Merlin app.

We were walking through the woods out in Oakdale. It was a rainy morning, the leaves had filled out, and we weren’t having much luck. I heard a warbling vireo in a cottonwood tree fifty yards down the path. The song is common but difficult to describe—a rapid but wandering successions of fuzzy notes unlike that of any other bird. It seemed unlikely that we’d see it, but I drew everyone’s attention to the song, then asked one of birders to look it up on her app. She played the song, then showed the photo to everyone.

That was great. We never saw the bird itself, and if we had, it would likely have been a small white pellet the size of a cannellini bean scuttering through the upper story of the trees. But everyone had seen and appreciated its subtle beauty, and we knew it was up there somewhere.

A few weeks later, Hilary and I were in Old Frontenac, hiking the trail out to Sand Point, when we heard one of the strangest songs I’ve ever heard. One expert describes it as “a vigorous, wide-aware, intentional medley of odd noises that may continue for long periods of time…the alarm call of a wren; a series of nasal quacks; a wolf whistle; a foghorn; and a chuckling, high-pitched laugh.” He also mentions whistles, chortles, cat-calls, gurgles, and grunts. 

The song was loud; the bird was very close. We looked around for at least twenty minutes but saw nothing. No movement, no fleeting avian form. As we left, I said, “It’s probably some weird creature like a yellow-breasted chat.” I’d never seen one, or heard one. A shot in the dark.

A few hours later we were in Lanesboro, settling into a cozy upstairs room at the Cottage House Inn, when I suddenly heard it again! Impossible. “That’s it!” I all but shouted. “That’s what we heard!” Hilary had looked up the chat on her Merlin app and was playing the song.

When we got home a few days later, I submitted the "sighting" of the chat to eBird along with the narrative of how we'd figured it out, and they accepted the event as legitimate, based on our description of the song, though the bird is considered a rarity in these parts. 

This spring the app has become a useful tool for confirming a song we’re unsure about, and for identifying a song we’ve never heard before or don’t recognize. Just this morning we were up at Sherburne NWR walking a path through the tall grass when I heard a faint but piercing “chip.”

“I wonder if that was a Henslow’s sparrow?” I said. Wrong. Hilary pulled out her phone and turned on the app. Grasshopper sparrow! We heard the “chip” a few more times, then the bird burst out of the grasses and perched on the stalk of a leafless sapling twenty feet ahead of us, where we could see his characteristically flattened head.

Twenty minutes later we were chatting with another birder at the bend in the gravel road where we sometimes see an orchard oriole. He was just then looking at an orchard oriole, as chance would have it, and he showed us where it was. I told him we’d come upon a grasshopper sparrow, and he said, “Yeah, I got a good picture of him. He was sitting in plain sight on a leafless shrub."   

But it’s important to recognize that the Merlin app is sometimes wrong. This morning at Sherburne it mistook a catbird for a brown thrasher. And at the crack of dawn, as I stepped out onto the deck to rehang the hummingbird feeder (which we bring in every night because of the raccoons) the app informed me that a mockingbird was singing somewhere in the vicinity.

I don’t think so.

It occurred to me just now that all three of these birds are mimic thrushes, whose songs are full of complex, harsh, and seemingly random noises. Maybe someone at the Cornell Ornithological Lab is working on that glitch right now.