Creek Running North

Well, one animal is likely to enjoy the new road: we came upon a perfectly content western fence lizard there this evening, catching the last few bits of illumination before the sun dropped down behind the Sonoma hills.

The bay was high and — for this placid body of water — relatively choppy, with treacherous four-inch swells. We came around the sewage treatment plant and were enveloped in a joyous crowd of barn swallows.

There’s a movie that comes to mind whenever I see these birds. In Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation, Hobbs (Jimmy Stewart) plays an infinitely patient father forced to go “bird spotting” with his son-in-law’s prospective boss, Mr. Turner, played by John McGiver. Each time the inexpert Hobbs spots a new bird and asks for an ID, Turner gives him a weary, patrician sneer and says, dismissively, “barn swallow.”

Barn swallows are anything but pedestrian. They dart and swoop with stunning accuracy, thick clouds of them taking seemingly random paths through the air without collisions. Their colors shift from steely blue to rust, but in some light — such as that from a setting sun tonight — they can look almost golden. Their forked tails make them look especially jaunty, like a stealth bomber or a Corvair.

I spent one evening six or eight years ago ankle-deep in the Belle Fourche, watching barn swallows career beneath the Devil’s Tower, landing every so often among their cousins, the cliff swallows, who build improbable mud nests on the crumbling red cliffs. “I have never seen birds fly in mixed flocks,” declaimed an aging birder in one obviously relevant Hitchcock film set in Bodega Bay. Never trust birders in movies, at least not movies from 1962-63. Barn swallows fly with cliff swallows at the mouth of Pinole Creek as well, but the cliffies are somewhere else tonight.