The Long Journey

By Rex Burress

The end of October indicates that most of the waterfowl migrants have arrived in California marshes after making the long journey through the airways from the Far North.

A number of species tend to make long treks in quest of food or shelter. Many animals from lemmings to monarch butterflies to wildebeest to salmon make migratory journeys, but birds, especially ducks and geese, are the most obvious. How could you miss a hundred thousand snow geese drifting out of the sky to settle on the sanctuary waters of Gray Lodge or similar refuges in the Sacramento valley? To witness the wonder of flight and the arrival of waterfowl flocks is a sight to behold with amazement.

The annual coming of the migratory waterfowl was a thrilling sight that kept me hanging around a naturalist job at Oakland's Lake Merritt Wildlife Refuge for 32 years. “People are for the birds” applied to me as well as many other dedicated nature interpreters, defenders of wildlife, and outdoor advocates scattered around the country.

Oh glorious day to see feathered friends returning to welcoming waters for the winter, and even to Lake Merritt's refuge, regardless of being right in the middle of a metropolis. Ancestral instincts thousands of years old linger in their brains, and even though a stone city has been built around the lake, still they come, recognizing a refuge home that continues to welcome the arrival of scaup, canvasbacks, goldeneyes, ruddy ducks, coots, all joining the resident Canada geese, mallards, and kin.

At valley refuges, mostly dabbling ducks and snow goose migrants return to occupy the shallow marshes, although with winged birds, you never know what surprise species might appear, to the bird watcher's delight and the hunter's choice. Yes, some are hunted outside the refuges in a managed manner that adheres to “the harvest of the surplus is good conservation” policy.

The birds are free to choose their flyways, an action as mysterious as their navigation in the long journey to a distant destination.

One of my jobs at Lake Merritt was catching and banding ducks retrieved from a wire water trap between two of the refuge islands. The motive was to learn more about waterfowl travel and tendencies by attaching a numbered metal band to the leg, in hopes some finder will report recovery information. Two pintail ducks banded at Lake Merritt in the 1940's turned up in Siberia 20 years later!

I was happy to work at the oldest wildlife refuge in western America, established in 1870, as well as being the first banding station, started in 1926.

For me, the joy was in netting that wild bird that normally stayed at a distance out of gunshot range, and meeting it eye to eye. You could see the colorful, water repellant feathers closeup. You could sense its wild spirit and feel the heartbeats before releasing it to the wind, imaginatively taking part of me with it on long journey's to far away places with strange sounding names. Over perilous wilderness and through wolf and hawk and hunter's predatory recesses, the adventure into the great unknown calls for repetition, like autumn leaves over and over again, always old, always new. God bless the migratory birds!

To a Waterfowl –William Cullen Bryant

“Whither, 'midst falling dew,/While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,/Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue/Thy solitary way?

Vainly the fowler's eye/Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong,/As, darkly painted on the crimson sky,/Thy figure floats along.

All day thy wings have fanned,/At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere,/Yet stoop not weary, to the welcome land,/Though the dark night is near.

Thou'rt gone! The abyss of heaven/Hath swallowed up thy form; yet on my heart/Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given,/And shall not soon depart.”