THERE ARE HOODS IN THE WOODS
Rex Burress
Down by the riverside in December, I saw a pair of Hooded Mergansers swimming near the Feather River Nature Center. I paused to watch the handsome birds diving in the shallows and popping to the surface like corks as they forged for food.
When you look at the beak, you know they aren't going to be dabbling for algae-edibles like the mallards, since the narrow designed bill with a wicked hook on the end suggests otherwise. Small fish is the name of their game, but the real flash of their character is the bright flair of white on the male's head crest. The lady merganser, as in most waterfowl, is less decorated, other than a swept-back brownish hair-do, similar to the more numerous female common mergansers on the river waters.
In city circles, we are more familiar with hoods as in hoodlums that haunt some of our streets. I wear one of those garment hoods when the weather is cold, and had never previously connected it to suspicious people, but, like guns, hooded jackets are useful items when used properly. I would have enjoyed one as a boy in Missouri winters at a time when the norm was a cap with ear flaps.
Other 'hoods' along the river, although they don't have a hood name, are the male migratory bufflehead ducks. The brilliant white splash on the head crest surrounded by dark iridescence equals the show of any other bird, at least to those who take special delight in watching the puffy little “butterballs” display and dive. The neat rounded beak indicates their preference for an omnivorous diet.
Hooded, as in showy crests or crowns, is also applicable to jays, cardinals, oak titmouse, phainopepla, and other bird species. The hooded oriole sometimes can be seen around the river's riparian region, and I've seen one several times in the fig tree opposite the Fish Hatchery. The “hood' is more like a black bib beneath the beak, while the top of the head is bright yellowish-orange.
Some of those New Guinea Birds of Paradise have spectacular crests. There is plenty of diversity in the birds and animals of Earth to promote the wonder of nature throughout legions of wildlife watchers...as long as we provide spaces for them to live.
The hooded-feature of wildlife makes it into the reptile realm, too. There is the spectacular hooded cobras of Asia and Africa. The ability to elevate the head and flatten their neck is for defensive purposes and includes 20 species of the true cobras of the Naja genus, snakes that also belong to the Elapidae family of about 270 species, including mambas and taipans. Only the coral snake of America is of that highly venomous group.
Another snake species able to flatten its head is found in the Midwest--the spreading viper!--alias the non-venomous hog-nosed snake. With the cobra-like stance, they were highly feared in my boyhood home of Missouri.
Another organism that pretends to be a cobra is the Cobra Lily or Darlingtonia Pitcher Plant that can be seen in swamp-like places such as the Butterfly Valley Reserve near Quincy, CA. They rear up snake-like to lure insects into the open-mouth pit-of-death. The deadly Monkshood plant of Europe is another 'hood' with formidable poisonous features.
Of all the Robin Hoods, Little Red Riding Hoods, neighborhoods, probably the most revered 'hood' of all is boyhood or childhood. “Ah, those golden days of boyhood,/When I wandered, free from care,/Down those shady mountain byways,/Building castles in the air.” --Dempsey Welch. Henry David Thoreau said “If you have built castles in the air your work need not be lost. That is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
“Frost is the greatest artist in our clime,/He paints in nature and describes in rime...Lives of great men oft remind us as we o'er their pages turn;/
That we too may leave behind us—Letters that we ought to burn”
--Thomas Hood, 1844 (1799-1845)