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Rebekkah Leigh LaBlue

@rllablue

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poet / avian ecologist
know-nothing birding the gutter

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ebbs the season / subnivium melt in the xylem in the crocus of my learn-some heart

free Palestine free Iran the former a televised pilot subsidized and unobstructed for the latter / but free not in the contortionist United States-ian sense because freedom and empire are antonyms // [excerpts, The Palace, Kaveh Akbar by @rllablue

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6 months ago

51 solo miles in the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness on my first date with Superior—the last of my Greats—& not ashamed to announce that I went all the way: three sleepovers, full dunk hair wet—(and yes ate a bag of pad Thai while half-submerged)—(in for a pennywort, etc.)

—but how construed as solo really when the double-, triple-, quadruple-, &&&-ist of meet-cutes: more-than-witness White-throats, seen-some-shit hemlocks, souvenir stones worth their pack weight, trails divined without concept of the word ‘switchback’ and new meaning granted to cuss-worthy ‘blue blazes,’ Barred Owls, Brown Creepers, old friend thimbleberry, regal spruce, stories siphoned from once-thru-hiking strangers into bottles when my water resupply didn’t pan out where the map marked it should, my leftie big toenail waving her opaque flag of surrender, a want for a bedtime, a Blue-spotted salamander as my unconscious-hours sentinel, the contrarian attitude of peak weather, bryophytes, red squirrels, black flies, the snag’s wind-worn limb that cracked & plummeted & missed me by mere inches—me minding my own selfish business of minding near the falls—the limb landing where I’d sat just a spell prior—me shifting only to deepen my blistered feet in the pool’s relief—the limb still landing close enough to thumb my cheek with terminal shoots so tacitly, […]

—every now & then I’d like to think I transcend the attractiveness of what-I-think-I’m-capable-of as personality & actually prove it to myself. Those total eclipses are gobsmacking. How many do we get, really?

—re-contextualizations: blood in my ears need be no louder than the slow cartwheel of maple from the overstory & onto precisely acidic soil. by @rllablue

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a year ago

31 books in 31 days! such a head-first love affair! (& now on to more—) (but slow-burn this time—)

/ thanks to folks who read along and/or tossed some resources to @thesameerproject (you still have til September 10 to get on the train last-minute) (link still in bio) and to @openpoetrybooks for facilitating a beloved new variation on a beloved old theme: it sounds like tradition. Free Palestine!

//

Day 25: Doomstead Days, Brian Teare
Day 26: Undergloom, Prageeta Sharma
Day 27: Voyager, Srikanth Reddy
Day 28: A History of Half-Birds, Caroline Harper New
Day 29: The Rupture Tense, Jenny Xie
Day 30: The Möbius Strip Club of Grief, Bianca Stone
Day 31: The Century, Éireann Lorsung by @rllablue

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a year ago

live from the a[ch]ery: day 17–24

// moving on to my last set of 8 books for my August! get in on my @openpoetrybooks reading pledge fundraiser for @thesameerproject while you still can! link in bio! :)

//

Day 17: this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all i had so i drew it, Keegan Lester
Day 18: Blackacre, Monica Youn
Day 19: Emporium, Aditi Machado
Day 20: Trophic Cascade, Camille T. Dungy
Day 21: We Contain Landscapes, Patrycja Humienik
Day 22: Her Read, Jennifer Sperry Steinorth
Day 23: [åmot], Craig Santos Perez
Day 24: Gephyromania, TC Tolbert by @rllablue

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a year ago

day 10–16 / summer synecdoche & abundance

// reminder that I’m reading a book of poetry every day in August to help @openpoetrybooks raise funds for @thesameerproject and you can sponsor my lil syntactical sabbatical! link in bio for pledge fundraiser and donation details!
/ double reminder that for a (minimum) $10 flat donation, I’ll curate a personalized list of 10 poets and/or collections I think you should read—dm me proof of donation and we’ll discuss. :)

//

Day 10: Full-Metal Indigiqueer, Joshua Whitehead
Day 11: Science and Other Poems, Allison Hawthorne Deming
Day 12: resuscitation party, Rob MacDonald
Day 13: medi(t)ations, Emma Bolden
Day 14: Death of a Naturalist, Seamus Heaney
Day 15: The Choreic Period, Latif Askia Ba
Day 16: Ceremonial, Carly Joy Miller by @rllablue

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a year ago

still so much backwards ordination worth sharing if I can outwit my snare of time and place but for now August is prairie lightheadedness it’s conference season it’s a certain kind of once-abhorrent ecological conceit that I think maybe I was wrong about—

it’s a Sealey Challenge! doing my best to read a collection of poetry every day this month: a too-long back-burnered restorative necessity for this statistically embroiled brain (o grad school!) and with an urgent phototrophic lean to spare. @openpoetrybooks is sponsoring a Sealey Challenge Poetry Pledge Fundraiser to raise money for Palestinians in the diaspora via @thesameerproject , whose work is grassroots, donation-based, life-saving for those who’ve been, who are, who will be under Israel’s genocidal siege of starvation and systematic erasure.

if you’ve been looking for a place or push to share some resources, here’s my silly little inciting incident. already 9 days in, I’m committing to donate $2 per collection I read in August; if you want to hop on the bandwagon, you can find the link to the pledge form in my bio (pledge a flat donation or monies per read!).

P.S. for a (minimum) $10 flat donation, I’ll curate a personalized list of 10 poets and/or collections I think you should read—dm me proof of donation and we’ll discuss. :)

free Palestine in the deep time kinda way!

//

Day 1: 24 Pages and Other Poems, Lisa Fishman
Day 2: Judas Goat, Gabrielle Bates
Day 3: The Wild Iris, Louise Glück
Day 4: This Nest, Swift Passerine, Dan Beachy-Quick
Day 5: […], Fady Joudah (فادي خودة)
Day 6: Raptus, Joanna Klink
Day 7: Mural, Mahmoud Darwish (محمود درويش)
Day 8: Bluff, Danez Smith
Day 9: Vexations, Annelyse Gelman by @rllablue

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a year ago

un-uniquely, the paperweight of my life of late contends with a particularly heavy stack: / 1) the whole You Have a New Life / Languages Away from What You Knew thing; / also, 2) All Your Ghosts Are People in Other Places; not to mention, 3) You’re a [Queer] [and Yes, Privileged] Ecologist / in [Her] Barrel Tending Already Over the Waterfall of Collapse.

// The only solace right now is poems: the one tractable star of my life that isn’t inherently parameterized / by hierarchies of oppression—[probably not what my Masters’ advisor wants to hear]—and which I’ve neglected—sufficiently / but intentionally—during my time embodied / among mountains and arroyos and mistakable call notes the last 5 years.

// I’m a just-barely-lucky one who gets to hide out in Academia for a spell—my federal funds for-now-, secured—my whiteness forgoing questions of my “”competence””—watching for days and weeks and—what will be felt in Deep Time—eons of my friends and colleagues and mentors and aspirationals losing everything they’ve spent a life working [at times, Literally] pennies for. Not one of them ever even cared about the pennies, not really.
The work of caretaking for our landscapes looks glamorous and it is glamorous because of its impossibility: the tender, rebellious working-still of it, despite.

// Lately is: my dead dad’s ties, exhumed / 4/5 Great Lakes / getting pissed at my keyboard suggestions for not being algorithmized to know what I mean / noodles devoured in public with an animalistic, agitated abandon / Friday morning’s ritual submersion in the half-frozen Yahara / estimating beta 1, 2, and 3 / pomegranate molasses / fresh bread / egg yolks baked in their own cloud-whipped whites / 2 a.m. embarrassment in new arms outside the bar / new wok / new skates [reclaiming my waltzes] / public transit / (tldr ur house-bound ladybugs are thirsty) / the opossum chewing up the basement / the negative degrees and knelt before the Snowy Owl, gawking / no field work to speak of / no elevation to speak of / wondering what the fuck it’s all for, now, hating that it’s for simply the same as it was—

/ That my respective stars still witness me. by @rllablue

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2 years ago

Today I am 28. This week I left Montana for Wisconsin: my new home for some time, considering, in relation to, despite.
In the last 5 years, I’ve lived in 9 states—8 of those in the last 3; I’ve moved every 2-5 months, with a modest standard deviation. Montana was an outlier: 8 consecutive months, my longest stint anywhere since leaving North Carolina.

Such is life on the technician circuit: / not just a hoard of boxes, packing newsprint—some of the same stories and obituaries following me around / for years now, cushioning a few cherished mugs, dried flowers, river stones, and tchotchkes across state lines— / but every few months, restarting: new landscapes, birds, traffic patterns, gun cultures, wildflowers, friends, / new difficulties holding onto whatever was before. As a tech, / there’s no such thing as “settled”: the months it takes to adjust spent with one foot drawing circles in the leaf litter, the other already out the door in some other latitude / eyes mending, un-mending the horizon. // You get very good at hellos; you get even better at goodbyes.
To claim anywhere for a foreseeable future, now? Terrifying. After moving around for so long, it’s hard to swat away the brain-fly that equates sessile with stuck. I know, in truth, that my fear is in for something special.

This morning I walked three blocks to my local coffee shop, down a city street too big to now be mine and yet, past the community garden soundtracked by cardinals—a chime long-lost to my intermountain-west-entrained ears—dressed like a self I haven’t communed with in some time (Golden-striped button down under a cream long sleeve with sparrows. My father’s green parka. My mother’s tiger-striped, brown scarf. Mauve beanie. Tall, heeled, olive boots.). / Dinner with my mother, stuffy and hoarse, in my earbuds: Thai food, a Manhattan, a pot of jasmine tea. My father’s ashes on their way to live with me for the first time. My love in central Texas sanding down banding pliers. Me not knowing the next time I’ll touch such tools. “It’s just like the part in the movie / where the mirror starts moving without me.” My whole concept of joy in transition. Shaped by lakes, lakes, lakes. by @rllablue

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2 years ago

little blackfoot / bbys first cutthroat by @rllablue

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2 years ago

another bright, bright spot from the summer backlog / early July visiting a collaborator deep in the Bitterroot Valley / boreal birds, like this Canada Jay [Perisoreus canadensis, CAJA]—(forever Gray Jay in my heart)—are among my most beloved fascinators.

although captured during the breeding season, much about this bird is still relevant to the way we’re currently assessing birds on migration. how does the old adage go—to micro-age or not to micro-age?
thrilling to be able to discern a bird’s precise age through the first few years of its life: the process we call “micro-ageing.” having such a small heartbeat thrum against the center of my unworthy palm for the first time and being able to say, this bird is in their second year of life (older, maybe, if you’re a woodpecker or a raptor).

certain conditions, however, can prevent us from being any more specific than “adult”—this CAJA is a prime example.
once an individual is roughly half-way through a molt, many of the previous generation’s feathers we’d need to assess for molt limits have already been replaced—in CAJA, these are the lesser and median coverts (l.covs, m.covs)(3).
after a N. American songbird’s second annual pre-basic (fall) molt, it looks identical to all adults also in minimally their second fall of life (regardless of their actual calendar age). flight feathers are not molted in a CAJA’s first fall, but all falls afterward; the most precisely we could age this bird, on this day, therefore, is after-hatching-year (AHY).
while fall was still a ways away for this CAJA back in July, the pre-basic molt often initiates earlier in resident species that started breeding before their migratory counterparts. we sexed this bird as a female, based on the presence of a waning brood patch.

as far as WRP goes, we coded this bird M-SPB (minimum second pre-basic), which highlights the presence of active molt but leaves room for ambiguity with a qualifying code (“minimum”)—are those outgoing feathers juvie or an older basic? sometimes the most accurate answer is Who’s to Say!

[All banding is conducted under a federally authorized permit issued by the USGS Bird Banding Lab.]

#moltmonday b/c i remembered! by @rllablue

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2 years ago

25 miles in the Glacier NP backcountry to welcome August / my first miles in the park, however, actually weeks ago already: a bookend to my year within a year / that completed a suspicious symmetry, snow to back-then’s sand, a brutal south to my new latitude: a year that started in Big Bend NP, similarly signaless, sigiless— / when my father died but I didn’t know it yet.
// I passed the anniversary quietly, still not knowing how to grieve what I’d already pre-grieved on a gut feeling for the better part of my life.

/ not until this most recent trip did I break open in any traditional sense: beneath a blind of morning light stuck askew on the peaks sheltering Ellen Wilson, / the lake a lock to the calling loon’s key / the false hellebore in full bloom and the fireweed nearby, lecturing color theory / just as loud as the waterfall’s summer distrust of stagnancy / a Wilson’s Warbler among the lowest limbs of fruiting mountain-ash, the 14-point Mulie blinking back spruce / like a daytime moon / the paintbrush and beardtongue, spirea and aster and buckwheat, the Black Swifts likewise shivering / off alpine chill in their moss hideaways / the glacier on high overseeing all of it:

/ a “traditional” sense being— tears? leaning against someone dear? anything but throwing my hands up? a year later and still—
(the ghost taste of calcification in a dark roast like his ancient Mr. Coffee used to imbue)

“I dreamt you fed me
Omakase Berries
I dreamt we were coyotes
Licking the seeds off our teeth
And I woke up
In the heat of Phoenix
Wish you could’ve seen it”

oh, Cassandra. you wrote it and I lived it that morning / bleary-eyed on a sub-alpine lakefront / the weight of what much-needed joy my dad has already missed—let alone a future tense—crystallizing / the realization of just how many of his dreams became my own—independently?—on accident—despite everything?

“Sweet as honeysuckle
When you want a pocketknife”

oh, Katie. that one, too.

so much everything.

// the backcountry doing what it does best. by @rllablue

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2 years ago

eight of nine weeks down this season and I’ve yet to share a single bird—proof of the near-vacuum that is & has been & will be Montana summer.

Lazuli Buntings (Passerina amoena, LAZB) are a staple at two of our banding sites / imbuing smoked-out skies with buzzy, loping songs that drone into late midday hours like cicadas.

compared here are the wings of a second-year (SY) & after-second-year (ASY) LAZB [2]. in the SY bird, all secondary coverts (l.covs, m.covs, g.covs combined) have been replaced in the pre-formative (PF) molt [3], with the new-to-me exception (!!) of the thumb-sized patch just above the bird’s shoulders [5]. the loose, brown p.covs are also retained juvenile: feathers this bird has worn since nest-bound last summer. within the primaries, we see an eccentric limit [4]: the darker, blue-tinted pp4-9 contrasting the brown, juvenile pp1-3. finally, all three tertials (ss7-9) & s6 have been replaced in the PF.

generous with their gem-tones & apparent molt limits, LAZB are straightforward to age—yet their patterns of replacement are actually a skosh complicated amongst North American songbirds.
hatching-year (HY) LAZB undergo not only an incomplete, eccentric formative molt in their first fall, but also—in some individuals—an inserted, limited body molt on the summer grounds before the typical formative molt (PF) even begins, called a pre-auxillary molt (PFa). the scattered body feathers replaced by HY LAZB in the PFa will be replaced a second time, sometimes just weeks later, during the true PF… so, individuals can wear up to 3 plumages in just their first few months of life!
a classic “molt migrant,” a LAZB’s PF replacement begins on the journey to & once arriving on molting specific stopover sites in the monsoon region of the N. American southwest.

// everywhere I’ve banded, I’ve had a bunting / to narrate my breath & sweat & riotous cheer / to capture my naïve heart with their color-block extremism. / it’s not our first meeting but this time they sound out belonging.

[All banding is conducted under a federally authorized permit issued by the USGS Bird Banding Lab.]

#bb_global by @rllablue

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2 years ago