May 2025
By Liz Melville Photos by Alan McCoy
This week I am focusing on seeing the wonder that is all around me, and I will take walks with the sole purpose of paying attention and seeing and hearing what is right in front of me.
Opportunistic Birding
The “KILLdeer, KILLdeer, KILLdeer” calls from a flock of Killdeer flying low over my head brought my attention away from the chaos around me to the birds dipping through the sky.
I was at Mt. Spokane High School, an Eastern Washington public school that sits high on the Peone Prairie surrounded by the Selkirk Mountains to the North and East. It was a lovely area to look for wildlife and do a little birding.
However, I wasn’t there to watch the birds; I was there to watch a tennis match. I am a newly hired tennis coach for one of Spokane’s many high schools, and I had spent the morning chauffeuring players to different schools around the city. Our players and most all of the high school players in Spokane were participating in the Inland Empire Tennis Tournament, a Spokane tradition that started 78 years ago. This locally famous tournament has twelve events across eleven locations scattered from Mount Spokane and Mead in the North, to Ridgeline and Central Valley in the East. And while the tournament is a tradition that high school tennis players look forward to, it is also a logistical nightmare for coaches, who must arrange to get all of their players to each of the site locations by 8:30 AM.
The Killdeer cries from overhead were a welcome distraction from my hectic morning, and I was intrigued to watch them fly. In the past, I had only seen them on the ground, hobbling away from me with their fake injuries. I didn’t know their wings are the shape of boomerangs; I didn’t know their flight pattern is a bit erratic; I didn’t know they would fly as a flock, filling the sky with their calls.
As my player and I were watching the Killdeer overhead, the tournament director announced the start of her match and directed the girls to the back corner court that was furthest from the school and road.
“This is great,” I thought to myself. “I can watch tennis and do some birding.”
I looked around for the best place to sit and noticed a group of ground squirrels popping up and down from their holes underneath a tall fir tree. I decided this would be an interesting place to sit; I was not disappointed.
As I sat in solitude and watched the tennis, I was also able to listen and watch the birds as they flew in and out of the tree behind me. Unlike the ground squirrels, who had disappeared into their holes, the birds decided I was harmless and went about their business. I heard the “Ca-KA-ca, Ca-KA-ca,” from a small flock of California Quail as they half flew, half ran out of my tree to another fir tree close by. I saw a Robin flying into the tree with a mouthful of twigs in her beak, and I saw and heard blackbirds as they sat on the tall fence of the baseball field that lay behind the courts.
After the match, as I was telling my player, who is also a bird lover, about all the other activities that were happening while she was playing tennis, the tournament director announced that everyone needed to shelter in place because a mountain lion had been sighted nearby.
Another Day where Nature Provides Relief
I was having a chaotic, anxiety-filled week. I needed an escape. I called my friend Stuart, whose place is a bird haven, and I told her that I needed some friend and bird therapy. On the day of my visit, we made some coffee and chose a place to watch a pair of Phoebes fly to and from their nest, which sat high on a crossbeam on one of her sheds. These medium sized flycatchers were mostly silent as they watched us watching them until we got too close to their nest, at which point they began calling “PHEEbee, PHEEbee, PHEEbee,” which I interpreted to mean, “Please leave, Please leave, Please leave.”
Listening to their request, we took our coffee and sat by a bird bath in another part of Stuart’s yard. Here, we saw Red Crossbills swooping in for long drinks of water. I was excited because I had previously only been able to hear their calls from high in the trees.
Stuart then told me that she thought they felt safe at her place because of an interaction she had had with them during the June heat-dome of 2021. One day during this crazy hot spell, Stuart went out to water some of her plants and noticed Red Crossbills sitting listlessly on the empty birdbath as if too weak to move. Worried, Stuart created a high mist above them, and after a few minutes, they ‘woke up’ and started looking around. Since this interaction with them, Stuart told me the Red Crossbills have been frequent visitors to her yard and no longer seem frightened of her.
Before leaving, we sat in another corner of her yard, where we watched the brilliant yellow American Goldfinches and House Finches fly to and from a feeder. These were birds I had only heard near my city property. I was happy to connect the birds to their voices.
In addition to the birds I saw during my reprieve at Stuart’s, there were also many birds that I only heard. They included: Pygmy Nuthatches, Red-breasted Nuthatches, Mountain Chickadees, Western Meadowlarks and a Northern Flicker.
A Wonder Walk from Long Ago:
One of the traditions I created with my children when they were young was to have a weekly "Special Time" with each of them. The tradition would mean that Oliver, Lynn, or Penny would choose something that they wanted to do alone with me, and I would then make time to do this activity with them.
Typical Special Time activities included: going on a bike ride, reading a book that only the two of us shared, or driving the eight miles to town to get an ice cream cone. But our lives were busy, and it was sometimes challenging to carve out time for each of them each week. On one such busy week, I had already spent time alone with Oliver and Lynn, but Penny was still waiting for her turn, and at four years old she didn’t want to wait. So I suggested:
"Let’s go have an adventure outside. Let’s see what we can find.”
I was not confident that our adventure would meet “Special Time” criteria, but it was the best I could do.
Much to our delight, right away, in one of our house’s front windowsills, we found a little green frog. We looked at it, Penny held it for a bit, and called for her siblings to come take a look at it. Our trip was already a success because frogs were not common where we lived.
We continued to walk around the yard, noticing the flowers and blooming plants and finding some beetles and other bugs, when I had the inspiration to look under the doghouse. This plastic igloo structure was never used by our dogs. They preferred hiding under a bush or laying right up against the house when the weather was bad; they never accepted our purchase as a worthy gift. Instead, this doghouse sat inside of our chicken enclosure and acted as a makeshift shelter for our birds during a rainy or blazing hot day.
When I flipped over the doghouse, it was as if I had opened a treasure box. There were long, fat earthworms, Roly-polly bugs and beetles, and to our utter surprise, a salamander. This exotic creature was perhaps six inches long including its tail and had yellow and black stripes down its sides. I could not imagine where it came from and why it was living under the doghouse.
The details of what happened next are blurry to me, but I believe this discovery was so extraordinary that Penny ran inside to tell her siblings to come and look at what we had found. After a long look at the salamander, we returned it to its home under the doghouse.
The exploration, which started off as an apology adventure, turned out to be the best Special Time ever, and one which, much to Penny’s delight, Oliver and Lynn were jealous about.
Later that summer, we found a group of these creatures in a mound of dirt in our yard. This time we had done enough research to know we were looking at Western Skinks. It appeared that this bunch had dug a cavern in our yard and had a home under the grass in our yard.
Recently, I read more about these creatures on field guide.mt.gov where I learned that it is common for the Western Skink to live on the grasslands of Eastern Washington.
I thought of this story, as I am fighting the weighted blanket of the news, and it reminds me that I must look for wonder everyday, everywhere; it is often right in front of me.
