Daydreaming

Daydreaming about a place, a long way from here. The concept of existence is an interesting one to me, and I think about it often. Though I sit roughly 6,000 miles from this landscape filled with guanaco, someone else sits in it. I think it takes traveling far from home to realize that the maps we look at throughout our lives hold physical places, people, and animals, and unless we go there, we’re missing out on a whole lot.

Austral

The more you traverse around the Earth and its ecosystems, the more similarities you find. While those striking yellow eyes may have been new to my list of life species, they were so familiar to the relative in the north I know quite well. This particular morning was one I think about often - I can still feel that spiky vegetation poking straight through my pant legs as I followed these little owls around, while the cool morning breeze let us know the day had begun. I owe a lot to this place, for not only the memories it’ll provide for the rest of my life, but for the new perspectives I have of the world. I never realized how truly valuable those would be. Travel is good for the soul.

Austral pygmy-owl, southern Patagonia.

La Fragua

Only a landscape as vast and perceptible as those found throughout Patagonia could make the largest flying bird on Earth appear small. Nestled into a well-used communal roost site, a common behavior for this species, thirteen Andean condors sit out of the wind and prepare for a night’s rest. At daybreak, they will leave collectively to begin the search for food. 

My wonder and curiosity for Patagonia is profound, and my mind has not stopped running around it since setting foot there a little over six weeks ago. It’s hard to imagine how similar an ecosystem over 6,000 miles away can be to your home. I guess it all comes back to the basic lessons that science teaches us - lessons about mountains and rain, forests and desert. 

I’ve walked in many places throughout my life, places as grand as the Greater Yellowstone and pure as the Desert Southwest, but no place at all rivals the steppe of the Andes. It’s as if the world is 100 years younger there, and the people have managed to stop time. May it never tick on… 

Floating

Sometimes, as it turns out, the stars do align. An owl hunting the fine line between light and dark, myself standing not too far from him, creates an image and pulls together an idea that I’ve had for a long time. This is one of those moments where I feel rewarded for caring about the wellbeing of something.

Floating.

Summer’s Surprises

After nearly five years of living in Montana, it’s all beginning to feel familiar. I take this as a positive, for I’m finally settled into the place that I once decided to call home on a whim without any friends, a place to live or a job to keep me here. Of course, those vacancies eventually filled themselves but not without some questioning from myself mainly, the person who decided that this was the best course of action. All of this to say, I still find moments here and there that make Montana feel new again - which now sounds ridiculous to say as I write this from a closed room in the fourth largest state in the nation, most of which I’ve yet to even glimpse.

Last night, following a hint from a good friend that she had seen an owl, I had myself one of those moments, for I had located a family group of great grays that I hadn’t met before. The rush was much like the first time I ever laid eyes on one of these large birds, in a different mountain range on the other side of valley. It was a good reminder of who this place really belongs to, as I had familiarized myself with those trees once or twice before. As it turns out, the trees don’t belong to us, the humanoids as I like to say, seeking shelter when it rains and heat when winter sets in. The trees belong to the wild ones - the owls own this place.