Brush adventures

Hear that voice? Sure, maybe you can’t hear it, but I can. I hear all sorts of voices (as if you didn’t know that already) but the voice I’ve been listening to lately, the one that I’m really tuning in, is a mix of Liv Tyler and Ozzy Osbourne.

That’s right, a little sexy lilt mixed with Crazy Train.

It’s the brush queen, calling. That’s right, the brush queen. You know brush. That high, muggy, prickly, sweaty, mosquito-infested blight that most people avoid like the plague.

I’m loving brush lately. Enjooooying it immensely.

See, there’s cool things in brush.

The cool things I found this week were a cedar waxwing nest, a mink, several different species of bright and colorful birds to be named later (which is a lame way of saying I have some idea what they are but I’m not quite sure what they are) several different species of dragonfly and I saw a cool looking fly that had orangish wings.

(I know what you’re thinking, now the idiot is paying attention to flies. Doesn’t he know flies bring on pestulence, disease, the end of the world?)

The brush I’ve been hanging out in is beaver induced, which is to say, the beavers moved in, cut down a bunch of trees, which spurred the growth of a lot of brush. Then the water went down, the beavers moved out and birds moved in.

Did you know (and I bet you didn’t) that beavers are the one mammal (aside from humans) that have the most direct impact on the environment they live in? Think about it. They build a dam. They cut down the trees. They turn creeks into swamps — pretty much overnight.

But all this busy-beaverness is not bad, of course. Beaver colonies and the brush they leave behind is a cornucopia of bird and mammal habitat, from the ornery grizzly bear and moose to the American red start and the yellow-rumped warbler.

(And yes, calling your wife a yellow-rumped warbler is perfectly acceptable, trust me, I do it all the time. OK, I don’t, but try it and write me. I’d love to hear your story.)

So at any rate, Boy Wonder and I were tromping around in the beaver brush not too far from the road last week and we found some pretty cool stuff, like the above-mentioned cedar waxwing nest and then I went back all by myself because the kid, as you might guess, isn’t a huge fan of brush that’s way, way over his head and I was watching this nice little rivulet of a stream and I thought to myself, self, that looks like a place a mink ought to be, and sure enough out pops a mink (and I am not making this up).

So sometimes it’s good to listen to the brush queen.

Good things happen in brush.

But I must go now. My yellow-rumped warbler is home…

How sweet life is.

Chris Peterson is a photographer/reporter for the Hungry Horse News.