Habia Una Vez…

Habia una vez el bosque encantado… In Spanish, once upon a time, there was an enchanted forest.

I learned today why people sometimes disappear in enchanted forests. They don’t want to leave. Why would anyone want to leave a place where dozens of bright yellow goldfinches cling to even brighter buttery sunflowers, performing upside down acrobatics to capture tasty morsels? Why not stay forever in a land where fuzzy bumblebees grumpily bump into each other, loudly buzzing and crowding around for ever more nectar? Or where drunken orange butterflies flutter by?

In this enchanted forest, a gray squirrel barks at the greedy goldfinches, reminding them that other creatures like sunflower seeds, too. A chubby porcupine, stuffed from the grubs and snails and other goodies of summer, waddles through a clearing. A plump frog protests against intruders and plops into a recently formed mud puddle. A cicada, not yet ready for the ear-splitting nightly chorus, clings to the underside of a leaf, hoping to stay out of sight of the hungry birds.

Those hungry birds are everywhere if you take the time to look. Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers, cleverly blending their black and white feathers into the black and white shadows of the cottonwood trees, peck into the soft bark, searching for crunchy insects. Their bright red topknots and hammering beaks belie their desire to stay hidden from the fierce Cooper’s Hawk preening on a nearby roost.

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Cliff Swallows, who spent the summer nesting under the bridge of a busy street, now wage mighty battles overhead with dragonflies. The swallows almost always win.

While the dazzling red Summer Tanagers and glittering Blue Grosbeaks, have left the forest, heading toward warmer climes for now, a bright-eyed White-Breasted Nuthatch clings to the tree bark, spiraling up and then back down in search of scrumptious snacks.

Always pointing south as they hop from one safe place to the next, Wilson’s Warblers flash their bright yellow eyebrows in the dapples of the underbrush, their black caps blending into the shadows. A brave Dusky Flycatcher, so tiny and so drab as to hardly be noticed, lands on a bare branch and gives a sly wink.

Smells of wet earth and moldering leaves and green wood waft through the breeze. A blue-tailed skink rustles in the brown leaves of seasons past, bringing a reminder that the overhead clouds of green foliage, soon to be gold, will fall, too.

Mighty trees felled by a mightier wind litter the forest floor with debris—branches, leaves, snapped trunks that leave blond scars against the sky. The sky, on this particular afternoon, is not the usual azure, but a steel gray, with a watery sun fighting to warm the earth—moistened by the recent storm—for a few more weeks.

The autumn mudflats of the once rushing Rio reveal the prints of the water birds—the egrets, the ducks and geese, the herons and sandpipers. Suddenly the raspy screech of a pair of Sandhill Cranes breaks over the green and golden-tinged treetops, true early birds to this stretch of the river, as they head to the winter feeding grounds at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge (https://www.fws.gov/refuge/bosque_del_apache/).

The river, a muddy “string of pearls” connected by rivulets of flowing water, still provides enough sustenance to see the birds on their way south, the mammals to their winter dens, the people to their season next to the fireplace. Although it has shrunk from meters wide in the spring to now merely centimeters wide in some places, the river’s life-giving liquid is the glue that holds together the entire world in this otherwise vast desert landscape.

If a visitor leaves an enchanted forest, they must leave a piece of themselves there, too. The forest demands it. Usually, it is a little piece of the heart. Yet, in return, the forest gives the visitor even more to take with them, golden memories and golden dreams. Habia una vez el bosque encantado…

Author’s Note: Acclaimed naturalist author Gene Porter-Stratton inspired this piece.