Wild About Utah

It was early afternoon in mid-July 2019 and my first time setting foot on Antelope Island. As a newcomer to Utah, I was itching to explore the local sights and had come to learn about the impressive annual shorebird migration from my friend, a bird enthusiast and fellow graduate student.

I can never tell if the anachronism of daylight savings is ironic. Maybe that’s due to my newly syncopated circadian rhythm. Or maybe it’s all a dream. Or perhaps, it’s somewhere in between.

Of all the lovely wildflowers to enjoy in Utah, Indian paintbrush has to top my list. The nickname “prairie fire” is an accurate one, highlighting the variety of colors we find: reds, oranges, yellows, pinks, purples and sometimes a mixture of two.

As I watch waves of migrant birds move through our valley, beginning in mid-July with rufous hummingbirds and a few early shorebirds, followed by raptors pouring over the Wellsvilles mountains in mid-August, then September when many of our songbirds head for the tropics, and lastly in November come the waterfowl- ducks, geese, and swans stream through by the thousands, I am thunderstruck. The remarkable physiology that allows our avifauna to find their way through storm and unimaginable

This summer, while running on the river trail, I saw an otter. A real life river otter. It leapt out of the water and darted into a pocket between rocks on the bank, with a trout in its mouth! It was one of those moments where I was confronted with something that was, in my mind, so wildly outside the realm of possibility that it took me a minute to figure out what the blurred brown weasel-shaped thing even was.

There is a story I like of an old Zen master who one day was asked to speak wisdom to his acolytes as they were sitting outside. He obliged. He rose and walked to the front of the students. He waited a moment to think carefully about his words, opened his mouth, and then just as he was about to speak, a bird in a nearby tree sang its beautiful warbling song. The master did not interrupt but instead simply listened and waited until the song finished, and the bird had flown away. When it had, he

The following is an unedited transcript. At 11:00 last Friday, I was standing alone outside a 120 ft pigeon loft in Fielding, Utah, scanning the sky for incoming birds. A few minutes later, the loft owner, Derek Alder, pulled into the driveway. "I passed them in Malad," he said, hopping out of his truck. “They should be here in about 10 minutes." Earlier that morning, Derek had driven 250 pigeons to Spencer, Idaho, 180 miles away. He had released them at 8 a.m. and had barely beaten them home.

I first met the Great Salt Lake in 1964 with two CMU college buddies on our way to Los Angeles. We heard you could float in its magical waters. Sure enough it worked and we bobbed in its gentle waves, oblivious to the many other virtues of this extraordinary water body.

Doubt is a tricky thing. It’s neither good nor bad, it is simply the axis upon which the scales of hope and fear balance. It is the prerequisite of faith, belief, disbelief, and nihilism, all equal paths of equal circumstance. It is the fork in the road which Berra told us to take all the same.

The following is an un-edited transcipt. Children’s author George Selden described the impact of a cricket’s chirping in the bustle of a subway station in his book “The Cricket in Times Square” like this: “Like ripples around a stone dropped into still water, the circles of silence spread out. …Eyes that looked worried grew soft and peaceful; tongues left off chattering; and ears full of the city’s rustling were rested by the cricket’s melody.” Combine this musical talent with Jiminy Cricket’s