{"id":22662,"date":"2025-08-07T18:26:14","date_gmt":"2025-08-08T00:26:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/?p=22662"},"modified":"2025-08-07T18:26:14","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T00:26:14","slug":"gone-mute","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/2025\/08\/07\/gone-mute\/","title":{"rendered":"Gone Mute"},"content":{"rendered":"

BY HARRY WEEKES<\/em><\/p>\n

You may not believe this, but I actually try not to focus on birds all the time. I do my best to spread my attention around. I like snakes. Butterflies are cool. The ridiculous tree frog that looked like living moss that Hilary found clinging to the side of my in-laws\u2019 house in Connecticut? Well, that was simply otherworldly.
\nBut just like Michael Corleone, \u201cJust when I thought I was out, they keep pulling me back in.\u201d
\nOK, maybe it\u2019s not just like Michael Corleone.
\nThis time, we are standing in my in-laws\u2019 living room, which looks out over Long Island Sound. This is looking out over wonderful pink granite, familiar to us as the stuff of the Sawtooths. The screen doors are pulled wide open, and the atmosphere is one of \u201ccoming storm.\u201d Smooth, sky-blue water reflects clear and sunny skies immediately overhead, but this water gives way to an approaching wind line that is a thousand wrinkles in the surface, whose collective effect is to turn the ocean deep blue.
\nPenelope, the sailor, reads the wind and water in ways that are mysterious to me. As I work to figure out which way the tide is moving, what starts as her question rapidly becomes a statement: \u201cIs that\u2026.A swan.\u201d
\nI look up and experience her same confusion turned into certainty.
\nWhen a swan flies directly at you, and you are not used to seeing them, your neural networks combine a suite of information by stuffing what is happening into what you already do know. In this case, it goes something like this: \u201cA gull is flying toward me.\u201d \u201cThat bird\u2019s wings are enormous.\u201d \u201cThat is a really fat gull.\u201d \u201cWhy is it flapping so weird?\u201d \u201cThat bill is really orange.\u201d \u201cThis could very well be the largest Herring Gull on the planet.\u201d
\nAs I wedged my observations onto a gull template, the bird\u2019s trajectory changed, and the contradiction resolved as I felt my brain go, \u201cUuuuuuuurrrrggggg.\u201d
\nI have never seen a swan in Connecticut. Obviously, they are here. This was a Mute Swan, and it was a doozy. To mix movie analogies, this bird came in like the Imperial Star Cruiser that cast a shadow of Leia\u2019s consular ship at the start of Star Wars. Enormous. Somehow making its surroundings smaller. Almost foreboding, except that it was a Swan.
\nThis bird gave us a majestic fly by that took it from the ocean, through the harbor, and banking to where it disappeared somewhere over the marsh. Against a stormy sky and deep green foliage, in the sunlight rapidly disappearing in the clouds, its great white body, deep orange bill, and tucked up black legs looked pasted on to the sky. There was, appropriately, nothing to say, except the obvious.
\n\u201cThat was a swan?\u201d Said as a question, acknowledging that while this was unmistakable, it was also confirming that this was a first.
\n\u201cThat was definitely a swan.\u201d And then some rapid follow up, \u201cWhere did it go? Where did it come from? That was crazy, right?\u201d These amounted to rhetorical questions.
\nAs is often the case, the members of my family drifted off to other pursuits as I stared into woods where the great bird disappeared. Internally, I whispered a final, \u201cWhat are you up to?\u201d
\nAppropriately, and expectantly, I got no reply.<\/p>\n

Harry Weekes is the founder and head of school at The Sage School in Hailey. This is his 54th year in the Wood River Valley, where he lives with Hilary and their two mini-Dachshunds. The baby members of their flock have now become adults; Georgia and Simon are fledging in North Carolina, and Penelope has recently changed roosting sites to Connecticut.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BY HARRY WEEKES You may not believe this, but I actually try not to focus on birds all the time. I do my best to spread my attention around. I like snakes. Butterflies are cool. The ridiculous tree frog that looked like living moss that Hilary found clinging to the side of my in-laws\u2019 house […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":479,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","_pvb_checkbox_block_on_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,34],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-22662","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-commentary","7":"category-science-place"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/479"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22662"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22662\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22663,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22662\/revisions\/22663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}