Julie Zickefoose on Blogspot

Following Garrett

2012-01-26T04:11:00.000-08:00

Speaking of rarely-noticed things...

I mentioned in an earlier post that both the red-bellied woodpecker and red-headed woodpecker are in the genus Melanerpes. One of the hallmarks of the genus is a propensity to store food (think of the acorn woodpecker, infamous for pocking cabin siding with acorn-stuffed holes).

Here's Garrett's golden midline. This is one of my favorite pictures of him. A bit penguiny, full of character. Many red-headeds show considerably more blush on the belly than Garrett; sometimes it is almost as rich a color as the red-bellied's. The first time I saw it was when examining museum skins. I never knew they had such colorful bellies! but then woodpeckers usually have their bellies up against tree trunks.

Here's the Melanerpes mark on the red-belly.

I'm not the only one playing paparazzo to Garret's movie star. Phoebe caught these wonderful photos of him sipping from a rain puddle on the deck.

and twisting a peanut from our feeder. I feed roasted cocktail peanuts. You used to be able to find them unsalted, but no more. The salt doesn't seem to hurt anyone.

Sometimes the outtakes are more fun than the best photos. Garrett plays peek-a-boo with me.

Who's there?

Give me a hint.

Oh, I get it. It's Garrett!

I knew it was you all along.

And I knew it was you, too. Good morning!

Pensive Garrett, looking his handsomest on a dark day.

While I'm Shooting...

2012-01-24T04:44:00.000-08:00

Garrett the red-headed woodpecker is my muse. He lures me away from the drawing table and encourages me to enter bird time. I have to wait for him to show up at the Zick Dough log. And while I wait, all kinds of other beautiful things happen. This may be my favorite male cardinal shot yet. What if cardinals were as rare as red-headed woodpeckers? I'd be chasing this glorious bird all day. If I'm even tempted to take cardinals for granted, I have only to remember the Welsh birder who stayed a week with us who'd splutter "BRILLIANT! God! Look at THAT!!" every time a cardinal showed up in the yard.

I love this shot, too, of a female cardinal who is giving me the hairy eye for sitting just inside an open patio door. She knows the rules, and I'm breaking them. The door is supposed to be closed at all times.

She's all, "Really, Zick? You're shooting me through the open door? Where I can hear your shutter? And you're thinking that's just gonna be fine with me? Well, it's not. It's not fine. Good thing you make nice food, Missy."

Underlighting is a wonderful thing, especially if you're the color of a ripe bell pepper.

I was stunned to see one of my good old friends, Blondie the leucistic cardinal. She's been in our yard for at least three years, but she's always been on the north side of the house. I'd never seen her in the backyard, and I'd never seen her sample Zick Dough before this beautiful sunny morning. See the white feathers in her crest? It seems she gets a few more every year. What a lovely thing she is. And a good mother. She had a couple of broods last summer. Not a good shot; she was suspicious and I was overexcited to see her, and she vanished when she heard the shutter. But she'll be back. Zick Dough is like that.

I'm abashed and puzzled to say that only one eastern bluebird is eating Zick Dough with us this winter. I don't know why that is. Maybe there will be an influx when the weather really clamps down. (Nope, not even the weekend ice storm smoked more out). Maybe she's a loner. She has a male friend who occasionally comes in, but both of them are terribly shy--the most skittish bluebirds I've ever had. But she is very, very beautiful and graceful. Nothing dumpy about this gal! even though she eats lard and peanut butter all day. I love the harmonious color of the weeping willow in the background. Overcast is ever my favorite for bird portraiture.

She is so tight-feathered and lovely she looks like a Larry Barth carving to me.** Here, she shows the classic "hump back" of the bluebird. Roger Peterson said they look like they have poor posture. I think her posture is perfect.

**If you do not know who Larry Barth is, you owe it to yourself to click that link. If only to see him subdued by a six-year-old Liam in a Superman suit.

Another Melanerpes woodpecker, the red-bellied, M. carolinus. (The red-headed is Melanerpes erythrocephalus). Most people never get close enough to see the ruby-red eye of a mature redbelly. I remember the first time I held one in my hand...all I could look at was its beautiful fiery eye. I love my redbellies, too, and they know it. I still miss Ruby. Maybe there's another Ruby out there. I ask each redbelly who visits if they would like to try to fill her shoes. None yet seem up for the role of Zick Pet. A tame redbelly is a marvelous thing. They are suspicious birds by nature.

For now, I'll appreciate every minute with Garrett, for as long as he chooses to stay. Bill had only a morning with our star bird before he had to leave for Las Vegas. Every time he called home I'd prattle on about Garrett. Garrett does this and Garrett did that and just today he...

Bill stopped me and said, "Do you realize you haven't said the words "red-headed woodpecker" once since I left?"

Hmm. Yeah. That's true. He's not a red-headed woodpecker any more. He's Garrett. Does that make me crazy? (The implication was there, hanging on the line between us).

Well. Bill spent all day today (a Saturday with about 1/2" of ice coating everything) running from window to window trying to get shots of Garrett doing all the cool things a red-headed woodpecker does. And prattling on and on about the cute things Garrett was doing...

and I just smiled. Another one bites the dust.

Garrett Makes a Home

2012-01-22T03:20:00.000-08:00

I can't tell you how fabulous it is to be enjoying our fourth full day (by the time you read this, a full week) of Garrett. All I can do is show you. Every time I see him my heart leaps. It's like new love. There's something about his colors that make all my happy neurons fire at once. It's enough that he's beautiful, but he's so funny and cute, too, so inquisitive...I've been letting myself think that Charlie's come back to keep me company.

It doesn't hurt to think that. I miss Charlie, my sweet little green goofball, every single day. And having a bird around again, even if he's flying free outside, helps fill that hole just a little bit.

Garrett is so bright, so cleanly marked, so outlandishly unexpected among the grays, browns, olives and occasional blues of winter.

I still think someone left a toy on the deck railing when I see him decorating it.

You know, one of those toys that squawks when you squeeze it. The resemblance is rather apt. Garrett's CHUBBEH.

Zick being Zick, I began to worry the second night of Garrett's stay where he would sleep. I would gladly give him Charlie's climate-controlled aviary. I get so attached, I forget that woodpeckers are fully capable of making their own homes.

So Garrett is sitting in the mulberry tree just outside the studio window on a gloomy afternoon and I'm staring at him and he launches off in a fanfare of black, white and red but I can tell by the way he's braking he's not going far. I run to the next window with my camera and get there just in time to see him do this:

He's taken up residence in a broken birch stub just off the back corner of our house! These were the first gray birches we planted on moving here in 1992. Of course, being birches and host to every insect and fungus on the planet, they're dead now. But we did not cut them down. We let them naturally deliquesce. And if you are looking up that word right now, know it is one of my favorites. Ever.

One trunk bit now lies on the back deck railing, serving as Garrett's Zick Dough feeder. And the one still standing is his bedroom. Awwww!

I was not the only person who noticed him going into the cavity for the first time. Three Carolina chickadees began scolding like mad, their dee dee dee’s reaching a crescendo each time Garrett's head popped out of the hole. Perhaps the night roost had changed hands and was now chickadee property. We have a surfeit of chickadees this year, probably thanks to the fact that our backyard pair fledged NINE from a faux birchbark Gilbertson house not 20 feet away. (With a little help from me; I fostered three orphans into an existing brood of six).

Tough tits, chickadees. This is my house now.

Before long his crimson head popped out and then he disappeared again, coming back up with a bill full of punky birch wood!

Garrett was excavating, making himself a home. This cavity, I knew, had been the night roost for a downy woodpecker last fall. Nothing quite like having a downy woodpecker almost pith you when you peek into a mystery cavity right at eye level…you don’t forget that.

Ptoo!! The wind carried his sawdust away.

Up and back he went, bringing the fill out and scattering it with a quick shake of his head.

Ptoo!

I'm standing atop a desk in the studio, shooting through glass, loving every second of The Garrett Show. I spent the entire MLK day Monday, dawn to dark, documenting his every move. One could do worse than be a woodpecker documentarian; one could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Finally, he was done. He squiggled out of the rather tight space.

Enh! Enh! Too much PB and lard...

and perched for a long time, looking fondly at his new house. Red-headed woodpeckers are at once the flashiest and most phlegmatic of woodpeckers, sitting for long periods in one spot. Garrett spends a good portion of his day in just this position, staring into his boudoir.

It is a fine house, and you are a fine bird. I see you feel welcome here. That was our intent.

Stick with people who let dead wood stand in the yard until it falls down by itself, who think it has its own beauty. Who know just what a woodpecker likes.

Hooded Crow Starts a Cat Fight

2012-01-19T15:01:00.000-08:00

I don't often dip into YouTube's waters for material for this blog, but I cannot resist. This post was sparked by something that appeared on NPR's blog: a video of a hooded crow snowboarding down a roof using a jar lid as a vehicle. The headline asked, "Could it Be? A Snowboarding Bird?"

Now, being a bit of a journalist myself, I know that a headline like that is a teaser, designed to incite conversation, and the blog is called "The Two-Way." But come on, people. How can you ask if it's possible that a hooded crow might play? Did we humans invent play? Or is it only for mammals? Any sentient animal can play for no other reason than fun. Birds are no different. Was the young peregrine I saw repeatedly capturing, dropping and recapturing a monarch butterfly planning to eat it? Gee--could it have been playing? A bird??

Speaking of fun, here's a bird who knows how to manipulate the emotions of other animals for his fun.

So here is one very crafty hooded crow and a couple of very dumb cats. Watching it, you can almost hear the crow saying, "Hey! He bit your tail! There! He did it again! I can't believe it! The noive!"

And I can definitely hear the crow laughing. I love love love this video, but then I have a bit of a bird bias. (and I think the cats will be fine, once they work out their differences). My dear Charlie used to strut, wings out, tail spread to its fullest, cackling maniacally, when (s)he was highly amused. Here's a post where she's playing, called Candy Wrapper Games. Watching this crow video is like seeing sweet kooky Charlie again.

For those who wonder, hooded crows are found all across Europe and Russia. And Russian hooded crows may migrate west into Europe in winter.

Don't miss today's first post, Red-headed Woodpecker: The Saga Continues. I know. Two Zick posts in a day?? Never happens. But scroll down to find it. I just had to share this awesome hooded crow.

Red-headed Woodpecker: The Saga Continues

2012-01-19T04:48:00.000-08:00

Garrett enjoys whole corn. I knew he would.

Bill got home late Sunday night and awoke Monday morning to Garrett’s red, white and Superman-hair blue beauty. He and I took photos and reveled in having such a bird—such a BIRD! coming to our very own deck. Phewwwww! He got to see Garrett! And then Bill had to take off again the next day, to meet with optics companies at a hunting trade show in Las Vegas, where they tout the latest weapons and run video loops of “great kills,” which is about as opposite as you can get from staying home in Appalachian Ohio photographing a red-headed woodpecker. What he does to keep a roof over our heads…if you want to kill me, send me to Vegas. The most hostile and forbidding Zick habitat imaginable. As my friend Liz says, "Never been, but I hear there are birds around the edges."

Here's Bill getting himself a dose of serenity before he took off again.

Liam manned his usual station on the living room couch and called us whenever Garrett showed up.

Chet Baker, who needs to be swaddled in Polarfleece all winter, found it a bit off-putting, all the attention this fabulous bird was getting.

Sorry, Chet, but you're going to have to get used to seeing Mether and Daddeh all preoccupied.

photo by Phoebe Linnea Thompson

I use our old Scotch rocker, which came over from Scotland with a our late aunt's grandmother and is one of the oldest things in our house, as a sort of blind and monopod, resting my elbows on its back while I hand-hold my camera. Bill gets better shots because he uses a tripod and a better lens. I tell him my shots are good enough for a blog.

Garrett is no shrinking violet. Red-headed woodpeckers are hard-wired to be aggressive. If you think about their plumage, the bird is one big HELLO HERE I AM! His black and white wings flash in flight; his all-red head is the avian equivalent of warpaint. Plains Indians used the heads of red-headed woodpeckers as battle ornament; it was the Cherokee's talisman of war as well. He’s like Texas toilet paper; he don’t take sh-t off nobody. One study of aggressive interactions between red-headed woodpeckers and starlings showed that the woodpeckers initiated 51 of 62 interactions. They are able to successfully defend their nest cavities from takeover by starlings. According to the Birds of North America species account, even pileated woodpeckers will defer to red-headed woodpeckers in an argument over a nesting cavity. Those poor sweet retiring vanishing flickers should take a page from the red-headed’s book.

This old photo of Buck the Bull shows the habitat a couple of miles from our home where red-headed woodpeckers used to breed. Habitat like that--with big mature oaks over grass--is hard to find. The habitat is still there, but the birds are inexplicably gone.

So why have red-headed woodpeckers become so terribly rare? Well, they need mature oaks and hickories to produce the nut crops they need to survive the winter. And they need those huge trees to be widely spaced with a grassy savanna beneath. Where do you find habitat like that? Around here, hardwood trees like oaks and hickories are never allowed to get huge any more. They’re cut for timber when they’re still teenagers. And what comes in after the big trees are cut is thick young second growth, a habitat the birds can’t use. Red-headed woodpeckers need an open understory because they are primarily insectivores. They catch much of their food on the wing, and they still-hunt like bluebirds do, plunging down into the grass to capture grasshoppers and caterpillars. They’re the most heavily insectivorous of all North American woodpeckers, in fact, which is why they’re also the most strongly migratory—most of them clear out as soon as the insects die back with frost.

So habitat loss is one huge factor, and pesticides are another. You can’t go spraying forests for gypsy moths and expect to still see red-headed woodpeckers. Agricultural chemicals are death to them, too. Many birds get hit on the roads taking grasshoppers off the pavement. They fly low and slow and forage on the ground. My father noticed in his lifetime that they’d vanished from many parts of Iowa where they had once thrived, and he theorized that roadkills played a part. I suspect that chemicals worked a much deadlier magic on their population, but Dad and I never agreed on DDT, Dieldrin, Chlordane…

The Birds of North America species account authors (Kimberly G. Smith et. al.) speculatively link the RHWO's demise to the disappearance and possible extinction of a grasshopper that was formerly abundant in the Midwest. Think about that, and then wonder if man had anything to do with that. I don't tend to wonder long when you're talking about agricultural pesticides and insect abundance.

I don’t know where this little fellow (or gal; red-headed woodpeckers are sexually monomorphic) came from, but he dropped out of the sky like a freshly-wrapped present. The weather turned cold right before he appeared, going from the 50’s to daytime highs in the 20’s, and I’m guessing that smoked him out and sent him looking for supplemental food. We were charmed at how readily he inspected our feeders and sampled our offerings. And I was flattered that he likes my cooking best of all.

I was so excited all the day he arrived that I was good for nothing but running from window to window shooting photos. When I finally figured out he meant to stay awhile, I worked off my nervous energy making Zick Dough. Eight batches of Zick Dough, eight large peanut jars full. It’ll go fast in this weather. I so want him to stay. Eight batches worth, I want him to stay.

The next morning he came in around 8:30. I hollered to Bill; he got a bunch of nice photos; we marveled and for the rest of the day I looked out the windows about twice a minute. Got some nice photos, too, especially when it warmed up a bit and I could throw open the glass sliders and shoot through clear morning air instead of double-pane glass.

Phoebe and Liam and I went on our run and she pointed out a diving pileated, and that made it a six-woodpecker day for me: red-headed, yellow-shafted flicker, hairy, downy and redbellied being the other five. I’d like to buy a sapsucker, Pat.

We robbed the neighbor’s deer feeder of some of its whole corn, and I brought a pocketful home. Not five minutes passed before Garrett had found it and was stuffing corn into the rotty bits of our young sycamore that lost its top in a windstorm fall before last.

He looks like he means to stay, and that makes us very, very happy.

Adding sunflower hearts, that makes five things Garrett has accepted at our feeding stations: whole corn, Zick dough, cocktail peanuts, suet, and sunflower hearts. Going to buy a bunch of grapes next time I go to the store. Pears weren't such a hit. Not that I'm putting out food specially for him, understand....

Red-headed Woodpecker. At Our Feeder. No, Really!

2012-01-17T04:39:00.000-08:00

I went running Sunday morning, even though the road was snow-covered and what wasn’t snow was ice. Thanks to ice and circumstance, I’d taken an unprecedented three days off in the last week, and I needed to get out. The sun was brilliant and right in my eyes; it was 22 degrees and as long as I kept moving I was fine. Chet and I lingered in the cemetery, he sitting on my lap as I sat on a headstone. We warm up his paws that way. I wrap my arms around him and rest my cheek on his back and we just sit. I sometimes think that if we were lost in the woods we would sit that way until we figured out what to do.

As I came up our driveway headed home I saw fresh bootprints in the snow and the words BIG NEWS drawn in a drift. I quickened my pace. Came up the sidewalk to find Phoebe still in PJ’s, clutching my camera with 300 mm. telephoto lens, frantically waving me inside. “There’s a red-headed woodpecker at the feeder RIGHT NOW! Get in here!”

She was the one who had run out to look for me; she the one who'd scratched M. HURRY HOME and BIG NEWS in the snow on the driveway. And now she was following this vagrant bird from window to window, frantically keeping tabs on him, willing me to get home before he flew away forever. She shoved the camera in my hands and pulled me to the kitchen window.

You can't buy a 15-year-old girl like that. You have to make them, with a healthy assist from Luck and Fate. This is Phoebe, having just found a short-eared owl's roosting nook (yes, they roost on the ground), and the fresh warm poop left by the flushed bird.

She knows how to make her mama's heart sing. And the best part is it thrills her just as much. More on that later.

There he was! just off the kitchen window in all his natty glory, pecking away at the peanut feeder. It was a little like seeing a unicorn in the garden. Phoebs had taken a bunch of documentary shots already. I flipped all the way out, then started shooting. Red-headed woodpeckers are vanishingly rare in Ohio now. A couple of pairs used to breed in a stand of giant oaks over a cow pasture about two miles from our home, but have since deserted that place. We’ve had flyovers every year in September, October and May, most of them spotted from our tower (red-headeds fly slowly and very high, so they can watch for hawks) but only one other red-headed woodpecker has landed in our yard in 20 years. That one ate corn for a morning and was gone before Bill got home from work. I've never forgotten that bird, that lost chance to share its miraculous beauty.

Of course, Bill was away at an Ohio Ornithological Society board meeting. Irony of ironies. He was missing his absolute # 1 favorite bird while figuring out how to make Ohio birding better for everyone else. It about killed us to know that.

Over the next seven hours, that woodpecker tried everything we had. He contemplated suet; he tried black oil sunflower (but seemed not to know how to open the seeds). He ate peanuts from our peanut feeder, and cached several in the bark of a dead tree just inside the woods. While he sat in our sycamore, I moved quietly out and replenished the Zick Dough in our birch log feeder, leaving conspicuous piles on the deck railing, too. He watched me. And not five minutes later he was tasting what I’m sure was his first beakful of homemade manna. From then on, he bopped between roasted cocktail peanuts and Zick Dough, storing quantities of both in the dead tree’s bark.

He was ugly to all the other birds, something I found oddly endearing. This newcomer, this rara avis, acting as if he owned the place. I was ready to sign the title over. The kids were enthralled, running from window to window to watch him. I was beside myself. How could this happen again, with Bill away?

I opened the deck sliders and sat quietly in a rocking chair and clicked away at him as he fed only 12’ away. He wasn’t bothered by the sound of the shutter. What a guy.

Lazily scratching his face on one of our feeder perches. Tip from my slim archive of bird photography pointers: Put the food in holes in a rotty log (birch is my favorite!), then prop some groovy looking dead branches all around your feeders, so you can get natural looking photos. You can only go so far with a photo of a bird on a feeder. Because ultimately, all feeders are pretty ugly compared to a weathered branch or a rotting birch log. If you plant birches in your yard, you'll always have rotty logs to play with.

Because birches love to grow, but they love to die even more.

Needless to say, we fell completely in love with Garrett, as Phoebe named him, and the feeling seemed mutual. He watched to see what I'd put out for him next, and sampled it as soon as I was inside. He's bombproof, ignoring the slap of our shutters as we aim our lenses at him from inside the darkened living room only ten feet away. But would he hang around for us?

And because I know you'll ask, here's the recipe for Improved Zick Dough.

With the whole story about why it needed to be improved. More Garrett in my next post.

The Bluebird Effect Arrives!!!

2012-01-13T12:37:00.000-08:00

Friday, January 13 was a LUCKY DAY for us at Indigo Hill. A very special box arrived via a hollow-eyed UPS deliveryman who had fought his way over the newly poured skating rink that is our road and driveway. (He left two other boxes with us, meant for neighbors further down our road, not wanting to push his luck).

Chet Baker was immediately intrigued and offered, in his own helpful and forthright way, to open the box for me. It was a continuation of Christmas as far as Chet was concerned. He got very good at chewing open boxes at Christmastime.

You do not need an X-acto knife, Mether. I have my teefs.

When his teeth failed to cut the tape, he began a rapid digging motion that sooner or later would have hit pay dirt.

Luckily Bill of the Birds had my camera set to video. Chet's attention is a bit divided between the mystery box and a stack of strawberry pancakes on the kitchen table. It was a snow day and the kids were enjoying their second round. Cute doggeh vid alert! Oh noes!

Inside the box were the first two copies of my new book,

The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds with Common Birds.

Yep, that says "Foreword by Scott Weidensaul." Squeeee! Scott has a brand new book , The First Frontier, coming out from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (yaaaay!) at the same time!

My editor, Lisa White, explained that while these two copies of The Bluebird Effect were sent by air from the overseas printer, the rest are probably on a container ship (imagine!) making a slow crossing of the Pacific Ocean, and from landfall on the West Coast being borne by truck to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's warehouses. Release date (shipment from the warehouse) is February 20, which will translate into early March availability and shipment from my studio. So close! the time will fly. I've been busy taking pre-orders and I expect that to only pick up as the time gets nearer. I gotta say, the cash flow is much needed and welcome. Thank you!

I absolutely couldn't believe I was holding it in my hands. But the weight of it is very real--just an ounce short of TWO AND A HALF POUNDS of brand new book. And an inch thick, which doesn't sound all that thick, but it is a brick in the hands.

You most def would want to avoid dropping it on your foot. That would hurt, and perhaps bust something.

It has the most delicious sweet-corn yellow pebbly cloth-covered boards, spring green endpapers, a strong tight cloth binding, and an engraved spine. It has a dust cover that feels like textured watercolor paper. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt pulled out every last stop to make this book exceed even my extravagant vision for it. And I am deeply grateful for that. Amazed and grateful, and awestruck. Thank you Lisa White, thank you designer Melissa Lotfy, and thank you Martha Kennedy, cover designer extraordinaire. Against their better judgement, they let me get up to my elbows and scrubble around in the design pot and for that, too, I am very grateful.

Melissa Lotfy's design is fun-loving and lavish, giving the hundreds of bits of artwork lots of space and room to breathe.

In creating the illustrations, I wrote my notes by hand, but nice and big so they could be read. (I've heard from people who had to take a magnifying glass to Letters from Eden to read my notes. Sorry about that...I hadn't known they would go into a book when I made them).

Lookit that osprey diving through the text! Sploosh!! This is a full-sheet watercolor painting, 30" high and it reduced down to a crystalline-perfect image. I page through the book with my mouth hanging open each time.

Piping plovers skitter over the sand, running from a wave. Honestly, the watercolors look like they were painted right on the pages. The paper is beee-yoo-ti-ful, too.

I think my favorite paintings are the ones with active brush strokes and feathered washes. I knew those would probably work best for the book, so I laid on those watercolory effects. And work they do, giving the illustrations a life of their own. Some of the birds look like they're flying right off the page, they're so crisp and clean.

Somehow, Houghton handled my pencil drawings so as to capture every stray line and nuance. Gorgeous. It's a picture book; it's an art book, 310 illustrations with 80,000 words of explanation. It's a memoir about my life with birds, injured, orphaned, endangered, or otherwise in my care.

Most of the sketches were done directly from living birds, so there's springy life, an uncomplicated essence and motion, in the drawings that studio drawings lack.

There are some little departures, like this story of an injured white-throated sparrow that turned into a kind of prose poem.

And some treasured mementos, like this hurried memory painting of a leucistic turkey vulture that flew right over our house--and that I saw again near Woodsfield, Ohio, a year later. There is a great deal of magic in turkey vultures. I explain in this chapter how the turkey vulture came to be my totem bird. So it's not all Science Chimp stuff--there's plenty of romance, too.

Bill and I oohed and ahhed and reveled. Bill said, "I've never seen a better printing job on any book." Coming from an editor and author of dozens of books, that's high praise. I concur. And I'm picky to a fault. Just ask Lisa, Martha and Melissa!

Our kitchen, stopped in mid-griddle on a snowy, strawberry-pancake, no school, very lucky Friday the 13th. Daughter Phoebe Linnea taking these photos of us. Thanks, Phoebs.

Yes, it's finally here. And it is more substantial, and jaw-droppingly lavish than I ever dreamt. It's going to make the most beautiful gift book!

Well, two copies are here. The rest, dodging winter seaspray somewhere on the Pacific, rocking along on a slow boat from China. But they'll be at the warehouse before you know it! And I'll order a whole mess of them to inscribe to the recipient and send out from my little studio. I've converted sweet Charlie's aviary into a framing station/shipping depot. I can feel her loving, lonely spirit every time I walk into that room.

You can click HERE to pre-order The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds with Common Birds. And if you wish to add Letters from Eden: A Year at Home, In the Woods or Backyard Birding: Using Natural Gardening to Attract Birds, the same link works, too. There are clickable banner ads in the right sidebar of this blog, too.

I've got boxes that will hold one, two or all three. And if you want more, I can do that, too. Ima be a busy squirtle come March! Be sure to tell me to whom you'd like them inscribed.

Can I get a Wooo--Hoooo?!!

Plop!

2012-01-12T03:32:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the brief hiatus. I've been painting and when I'm painting (pictures, not walls) I can't be bothered to do anything else. This includes wiping counters, scrubbing toilets, burning trash or washing clothes. Or storing blogposts. So I'm out. Striving to get another bunch canned, but I'd rather paint. It's just more fun.

The other day I was reading a newspaper rundown of the stated positions of Republican candidates on all manner of things: same-sex marriage, abortion, global warming, foreign policy, health care and the like. I grabbed a highlighter and circled all the things that froze me in my mental tracks. I hadn't known, for instance, that all the evidence for global warming was simply "junk science." Apparently, if you're a Republican presidential candidate, the polar ice caps won't melt in front of you, glaciers won't vanish and the sea level won't rise. Which must be cool, like having a Cloak of Invisibility.

The more I read, the more convinced I became that we have a new set of superheroes before us, with unique superpowers. Who needs the Fantastic Four? These guys get to say who reproduces and when, and who gets to get married and where. They can debunk entire bodies of science with a single "Poo-poo!" And I thought it would be cool just to be able to fly, or pick up a car.

Before long I had circled pretty much everything on the page.

Then last evening I was listening to NPR and anchor Audie Cornish said this:

"Fresh from New Hampshire, one by one, Republican presidential candidates landed in South Carolina today."

And by virtue of this rather sly wording, I got a sudden mental image of some snow goose photos I took in New Mexico in 2007.

Wings in perfect synchrony. Aww, what's that?

Memo to South Carolinians: Whatever you do, don't look up and keep your hats on, at least until they're gone.

Pitcher Plants and Peacock Feathers

2012-01-08T04:34:00.000-08:00

I have this pitcher plant chock-full of insects; I had to share. So I took them to Science Club, which Mrs. Hendrix and I teach on Wednesday afternoons.

The kids were all over it. After a brief lesson on carnivory in plants (imagine!) I gave them some tweezers and encouraged them to find out what kinds of insects the plant had been trapping and digesting.

It wasn't long before we had a good pile o' bugs.

There were a lot of houseflies, some bumblebees; wasps and hapless moths, but the bulk of the catch was hoverflies of the family Syrphidae. I felt kind of bad about that because I really enjoy syrphid flies, especially the big ones that look like yellowjackets, the way they hover, humming loudly, right in front of your face, as if to say BOOGA BOOGA. When I get one in the house in the summer I always try to catch it because they seem to die very quickly in the confines of a house. Sweet bugs. I love their little downcurved abdomens, twitching as if to sting, which of course they can't.

We found an Asian multicolored ladybird beetle chewing her way out of the pitcher! Not stupid. She fell in, took a look at the carnage beneath her feet, and found her way back out. I guess you have to be resourceful to take America by storm. (AMLBB's are a huge pest; once introduced for alfalfa aphid control, they're now wintering by the bazillion in homes all over the East and Midwest).

Once we had identified all the insects we could using the Kaufman Field Guide to Insects of North America, I asked the kids to stuff the dead insects back in the pitchers. It was awesome.

This was a very special Science Club. I had also brought a huge sheaf of peacock tail feathers that a friend had given us. See, you can balance a peacock feather on your hand or nose or cheek or what have you, and it will stand up elegantly. You only have to move back under it when it finally starts to topple.

T. was extremely good at it. He passed 800 seconds and at that point nobody really cared to count any more. Chet Baker in the background, checking the premises as usual. The Bacon loved this meeting, and only tried to grab a few feathers off hands and noses.

Phoebe comes to Science Club when she can. I have to say she looked kind of grown up around the 4th, 5th and 6th graders. Sigh. I've tried tying her up, putting a cinder block on her head, but she's 5'9" and still going. It's not easy to have a supermodel in the house. Makes me feel kinda sawed-off and lumpy.

That durn blonde boy is shooting up, too. He loves running around with a peacock feather on his nose.

Gross, Liam. Do you really want to put a tailfeather on your tongue? Don't you know where that feather's been? Bleh.

M. put it on his cheek. My favorite photo from the melee. M. loves birds, especially nighthawks. We showed him his first in September (a huge flock was migrating right over the school grounds) and he about self-combusted with excitement. I smile just thinking about that moment.

And a melee it was. Kids running and laughing everywhere, their faces alight with the wonder of air resistance and gravity, crispy dead hoverflies and plants that eat meat.

Science Club. It's whatever we want it to be.

Hog Island Hard Sell

2012-01-05T04:39:00.000-08:00

nice shot, Zick! If a monkey taps on the shutter button long enough...

All right. Enough of the soft sell. Ima beat you over the head with some alcids, make you want to sign up for Hog Island Audubon Camp's "Joy of Birding" session taking place June 24-29, 2012. Bill and I are teaching there, so come see us! We saw these incredible sights aboard The Puffin, on our field trip to Eastern Egg Rock to see my LIFE ATLANTIC PUFFINS.

I know. A reasonably well-traveled birder oughta have seen a puffin by the time she hits the mid-century mark. I'd tried twice, in Newfoundland, but fog socked us in both times. This was a mighty, mighty fine way to see one's life puffin--right alongside husband and kids and a bunch of like-minded souls on a nice little boat on the calm seas around Eastern Egg Rock off the Maine Coast.

Here is a black guillemot chasing an Atlantic puffin. I don't know what the issue was, but they gave quite a show, looping and dodging all around our boat, thrilling birders to the core. It was incredible to see alcids, usually just specks in a freezing cold winter spotting scope, up close and doing outrageous birdy things.

We dosed our little Shoomie up with Benadryl, and he had to be awakened to see his life Atlantic puffin. We wouldn't have needed the Benadryl; the seas were fine. Next time, Bonine. It's a nicer, fuzzier pill.

I sure love this photo, though. Sleepy lil' Liam.

Black guillemots are splendid little birds, with their brilliant orange-red gapes and feet and that lovely oval patch of shining white on the wing. Like puffins, they nest on rocky islets on the Maine coast.

and must patter over the water to gain the air.

There wouldn't be puffins nesting on rocky Maine islets but for Project Puffin, spearheaded by Steve Kress. He comes to our session and tells the astounding story of transplanting puffins from Newfoundland to Maine, putting them in artificial burrows, drawing companions in with recordings and decoys...it's incredible. And thanks to this Herculean effort, we can putter around Eastern Egg Rock and witness a thriving breeding colony of Atlantic Puffins in the Lower 48. It is a beautiful thing.

I squealed like a pig when I saw my first puffin. So much cuter and rounder and more droll even than imagined. But you can't see them just anywhere. You really need to be on a boat, to circle their nesting islands. One good reason to sign up for Joy of Birding!

Atlantis fritillary on tasselflower, right outside the Hog Island dining hall. Lifer butterfly for me!

And a lovely little Long Dash (skipper) on white clover. Ditto on location.

The field trips are delicious. This is Harbor Island, with one picture-postcard view after another, happy birders trekking around botanizing and butterflying to their hearts' content.

There are dreaming rocks on Harbor Island.

Gazing rocks, too.

And fields of Rosa rugosa, a rugged import from Asia that I nevertheless love dearly for its attar-of-rose scent and splash of color in seaside landscapes.

Curious myrtle warblers trill on every side.

and the stunning little northern parula zips away in the treetops.

I don't know about you, but just the sun and those clear blue northern skies are bewitching me, locked under thick gray flannel in January in Ohio, watching the juncos that may breed there sort around in the new snow...

Signing up by Jan. 15 gets you an early bird discount of $25 off! Reason to smile!

When I think of Hog Island, I think of how relaxing it is--even when I'm "teaching." I can't help but teach, wherever I go. Nothing different there. Same with Bill.

Seals, both harbor and the big gray or "horsehead," haul out on the seaweed-covered rocks.

Taking their lead, Bill found time to kick back, but Liam kept peeking to make sure his Hotdog Brother was really asleep and not just faking it. I loved finding this photo in my archives. Not much has changed except Liam's height and weight...he's still keeping close tabs on Daddy.

The sun and sea worked its magic on other class participants, as well. This is known as the Lizard Effect.

It could just as well be called the Hog Island Effect.

Brother and sister explore the mysteries and abundant life of the tide pools

and talk about this and that as they gaze into gently waving kelp.

The Puffin comes in to pick us up from our noontime sojurn on Harbor Island. When we get back, dinner will be waiting. Just having someone cook for us for five days....I can't tell you how nice that is. And it's especially nice when it's Yanni.

So please consider doing yourself a big favor and joining the little flock at The Joy of Birding. We'll keep the light on for you.

Hog Island Audubon Camp. This June. Be There. We Will!

2012-01-02T04:40:00.000-08:00

It's been awhile since we took the kids to Maine. We've all gotten new glasses and several dozen haircuts since. I can't believe what adorable little grubs the kids are in this 2007 photo. I believe we were on Hog Island, Maine, in 2007 and 2008. Just a weeklong stay, but Phoebe and Liam speak of that time with rapturous sighs, and I am feeling a bit nostalgic myself.

But nostalgia is a useless emotion. Because we are coming back with our nearly all growed up kids to Hog Island Audubon Camp June 24-29, 2012! Bill and I will be leading "The Joy of Birding," a "class" with "high educational value." Mostly we will be putzing around looking for fabulous boreal birds with a bunch of other people who also enjoy putzing around looking for fabulous boreal birds. Talkin' birds and bird behavior and marine biology and turning over rocks and looking at bones and doing all the things we do when we're out in nature. Mostly looking at birds.

Like this black-throated green warbler taking a bath at the little pool by the dining hall, in between feeding his babies.

Or this hen common eider, spooked from her nest on a shrubby islet.

Here's a northern gannet, resting somewhat incongruously on Hog Island's rocky shoulder.

If you listen in the night, you'll hear the spine-chilling tremolo call of the common loons loafing all around Hog Island's waters. Bonus: they're in spangled velvet breeding finery, and good voice.

But it isn't all birds, all the time. There are so many beautiful sights on the Maine coast.

Wreck of the Cassie, just off Hog Island.

One of the dozens of lobster boats that start their unmuffled engines at around 3:30 AM just offshore. Needless to say, bedtime gets earlier by the second night. Still, the blub-blub-blub of lobster boats in the dark is a very cool sound, especially when overlain with loon calls. It says MAINE COAST in no uncertain terms.

The Fish House, where Bill and I will give talks in the afternoons and evenings, joined by Sara Morris, Steve Kress, Scott Weidensaul, "Seabird Sue" Schubel, Peter Vickery, Rick Salmansohn, and Tom Johnson. For a complete rundown on instructors, see their profiles here.

There's something about hearing the sweet quavering whistle of a white-throated sparrow in summer that completely sends me. It takes me back to Newfoundland, I guess. That's a magic song anytime and anywhere but oh! with the sun beating down on the Usnea...it's divine.

Next post: More restful imagery, more arm-twisting to get you to come join the Zick/Thompsons on Hog Island at the end of June.

It's a mighty restful and restorative place. Even if you're working.

Pitcher Plant Hell

2011-12-31T04:39:00.000-08:00

I looked at my fine plant with new eyes. Not only was it beautiful, it was deadly!

As you might imagine, I had a problem leaving live moths in the pitchers, scrabbling helplessly against the leaf's slickly haired sides.

Judging that the plants had more than enough to eat, I saved them.

oh thank you giant primate

One I freed was a lovely Virginia Ctenucha, one of the wasp-mimic moths.

Just couldn't let it sink down into the goo.

Also had two gorgeous Ailanthus Webworm moths, Atteva punctella, one of the larger microlepidopterans, with a beautiful veined orange-and-white rolled wing. They flew away the second they were out in the air. Couldn't get a photo.

Earwigs, wasps, bees, flies, honeybees, syrphid flies, hoverflies--anything that comes to flowers will come to a pitcher plant, apparently, only it's the Hotel California for pollinators.

Even paper wasps are not immune to its sweet, honey-scented charms. It has a competitive advantage in that it's quite hardy and in full, sweet-scented bloom when practically everything else has croaked from the first frosts.

Stick to flowers, guys. These plants are bad news.

Pollinators swarm my Suffolk Pink chrysanthemum just a few feet away. It's the hardiest and latest-blooming of all. It doesn't even get going until Halloween in southern Ohio, and it's a blessing blooming that late. (It's done now; these photos have aged a bit since I took them.)

"Suffolk," in a few different colors, was probably the first mum ever brought to the New World. The foundation stock for my plants (yes, it spreads modestly and delightfully) came from peerless pastel painter and partner in peripatetic hilarity Cindy House, from her Vermont/New Hampshire gardens. (You may remember her spotting the "body bags" outside a Massachusetts restaurant).

A nice, super hardy, willing plant. Not like those nasty carnivorous ones.

I have the pitcher plants in the greenhouse, on the cold floor next to an outside vent, for the winter. Hoping I'm doing right by them. They're just too precious to me now to let them freeze into the pond ice again. Thanks again, Cheryl! All it took was five years and some sphagnum...

Pitcher Plant Magic

2011-12-29T04:27:00.000-08:00

Don't do it, little flowerfly!

(probably Syrphus ribesii)

It is humbling to have, growing vigorously in my backyard pond (and now on the floor of my greenhouse), a plant that is so terribly rare in the wild, so over-exploited and endangered, that its very existence in the wild is in question. Native to low-nutrient longleaf pine savannas along the Gulf Coast (generally along the Florida panhandle), Sarracenia alba is one of the showiest and most beautiful of the pitcher plants.

S. alba, being so showy, is vulnerable to collection and the despicable exploitation by florists, whereby flowercutters will denude entire stands of all their pitchers to get the long-lasting specialized leaves for arrangements. Inexcusable. Never buy an arrangement with pitchers in it. Worse yet is habitat loss from wetland draining and development. Fire suppression also knocks back populations when they get shaded out by overgrowth. Yes, the white pitcher plant is getting it from all sides in the wild, even though it's easy to propagate in captivity.

I came by this plant from fellow blogger and plant maven Cheryl Harner, author of the wonderful Weedpicker's Journal, who gave it and a red variant to me years ago. She told me it's best grown in distilled water, and warned that my fishpond would probably have too many nutrients for this entirely carnivorous plant. The way it works is that the plant takes all its nutrients from the bodies of insects it traps and digests, and it can't take nutrition through its roots. The pitchers are lined with slick, stiff, downward pointing hairs, and any insect that topples into the specialized leaf is not getting back out. Period. It falls in with the others being rapidly digested by the sweet-smelling fluids at the bottom of the pitcher. Eeek!

I looked at the plants a little dubiously. With all I have to care for here, did I really want plants I'd have to coddle along in containers of distilled water? And while I thought about how to best provide for it, into the fishpond it went. And in the fishpond it stayed, through summer and winter, and it didn't do a whole lot, put up some little bitty pitchers here and there, and a bunch of long narrow leaves that never became pitchers. It was a little disappointing, but I only had myself to blame. Still wasn't really into the distilled water thing.

This spring, while cleaning the pond, I looked at that nice little plant and thought, "You've lived through all these winters, the snow and ice, and you've always come back, but you could be so much more." So I took the plant out of its pot and swaddled its paltry roots tightly in dried sphagnum moss because I thought it would like the acidity. I put it in a bigger clay pot and sank it in the pond.

And it did this:

Said thank you thank you thank you, it did, with a flush of the finest two-foot-tall fall pitchers I'd ever seen!

So I'm photographing it on a fine late October afternoon and I happen to lift a lid to see what's going on in there and YIKES the entire flute is stuffed with hapless insects!

Quickly I lifted the other lids and yep, they were full, too, absolutely crammed with dozens of insects.

Maybe hundreds. Here's a side view. Something has bitten into the flute and you can see black. That's the bodies of insects. They go all the way up to where the red and white markings start on each flute.

In my next post, I do a typically Zicklike thing about it all.

Good Cows, Good Dog

2011-12-27T04:28:00.000-08:00

To our boundless joy, a local farmer has decided to take the hayfield near our mailbox down using the myriad teeth of ten Angus/Hereford cross cattle. I have betrayed my affection for cattle in several places on this blog. Briefly put, I fall in love with each and every one that I get to know. I am ignoring here the fact that I consumed about $30 worth of filet mignon at Christmas dinner, and am subject to almost uncontrollable steak and burger cravings, especially when consorting with vegetarians.

Humans are rife with contrasts. And, as I prove three times weekly,

you don't have to be perfect to write a blog. I'm OK with loving cows and loving to eat them too. To be blunt about it, that's what Angus/Hereford crosses are for. Knowing that doesn't keep me from bawling like a baby when my favorites are loaded on the clattery trailer, bound to who knows where. I have a whole photo essay about that, but I haven't had time or the heart to write it up. It is a mistake to fall in love with beef cattle, to name them, to touch their wet pebbled noses and feed them apples. A mistake I gladly make over and over.

When they first arrived, this set of ten cows was skittish and curious at the same time. Our appearance at the bus stop caused a slow stampede as they came to see who was about.

For a couple of giddy and delirious mornings, the cattle ran alongside us as we jogged the road. It was so exciting, being part of a stampede. But soon enough we became old hat and now if they are lying down they won't even get up off their briskets when we walk right up to them. Which, in itself, is nice, because they have become comfortable with this talkative woman and her little white-faced sidekick.

I don't think it's an accident that they tend to be clustered along the fenceline each morning when I run. Cows are subtle like that.

Just turned seven on December 12, Chet Baker is quite a different animal than he was at two. He can be contained, for the most part, not with leash and collar but with quiet words. I will confess that the first time he spotted these cattle in the field he lit out after them, bounding and barking. He thought when he first saw them in the distance that they were deer, and deer need to be escorted to the woods edge with a great show of bravado.

We hollered and shouted quite angrily, but the bit was in his teeth. Luckily, at that moment he stepped in a hole, flipped head over heels and landed with a flump, tail tucked and ears down, headed straight back to us. I am pretty sure he thinks I shot a sticky web from the heel of my hand and threw him, because he was most apologetic when he returned.

Now, a month later, he loves to look at the cattle, but wouldn't dream of messing with them. He stands quietly while I talk to them and call them by the ridiculous names we've given them.

This is Phantom (right), named for her half-mask. She has the coolest white around her eye; she looks like a mime cow.

Spotify is a bold and curious lady. She tempts The Bacon to cross the fine electric line that keeps her clan of ten from fraternizing with their tiny lookalike.

Good cows, good dog, animals in harmony.

The red one is Stephanie. She's my favorite. We communicate with brainwaves.

Keepers of the Giants

2011-12-22T04:30:00.000-08:00

Now that it's thoroughly, awfully, evenly gray here in Ohio, I need to go back to a golden fall day in Cambridge, and some photos I squirreled away for just such a weepy day.

In a place that's been settled for as long as Cambridge has (try 1631) there are some pretty darned impressive trees. Trees that have been there much longer than the houses have, and the houses have been there a long time. Here's a glorious American elm, still hanging on to vibrant life. Right next door to the beech I'm about to feature, in fact.

Hodge thinks there should be some kind of historic treasure designation for many of Cambridge's arboreal giants. I agree. She took me to the spot on Brattle Street where a homeowner had cut down the perfectly healthy twin of a massive beech still standing in the yard. I couldn't comprehend what would move someone to do that to such a gigantic tree. But then again I am not living under such a gigantic tree. Lack of sunlight in summer? Branches crashing onto the roof? I suppose there was a reason, but I couldn't bring myself to photograph the enormous disc of healthy white wood, flush to the ground, which is all that remains of what was once a glorious beech.

As medicine, we visited a beech that is appreciated, that comes as part and parcel with the house and is equal stature.

Its branches gracefully arch over the lawn, sensibly covered with broad-leaved groundcover since grasses don't much like growing under beeches. In some places the branches scrape the ground and rise up again.

Hodge would be the best Keeper of the Trees I can imagine. I think Cambridge should create an office for her. She could go around designating the Ones Who Must Not Be Cut.

the same mighty monarch, at a distance.

I don't think I was imagining the faces in its nearly pristine bark. A bit scary, upon closer inspection. We found only one small set of initials carved into it--something worth remarking upon in an urban area, where beeches are virtually all horribly scarred by those seeking a piece of posterity in this act of vandalism.

Whaddya think you're doin' with those apples?

At this, Hodge and I launched into the scene from The Wizard of Oz where Ray Bolger says, "Come on, Dorothy. We wouldn't want to eat THOSE apples anyway. They're full of little green WORMS"

and the apple trees start winding up, lifting kneelike roots and throwing apples at Ray and Judy as they run down the Yellow Brick Road.

Speaking of Oz, the home that accompanies this magnificent tree fits it perfectly.

Thank you to the homeowners who maintain these islands of beauty and serenity, these sanctuaries for giant trees. You are the Keepers of the Giants.

Jumpin' Bristletails! Slitherin' Stimulopalpus!

2011-12-20T04:32:00.000-08:00

Every now and then, I have fresh cause to celebrate the Kaufman Field Guide to Insects of North America, surely one of the most dog-eared of a collection of dog-eared field guides.

Moving the garden cart in the garage, I noticed something scurrying, which reminded me of a silverfish, but wasn't quite right. It was a Jumping Bristletail, which has been moved from the silverfish (order Thysanura) to the order Microcoryphia. They're forest-floor denizens, and they have a beautiful coppery sheen and three cool-looking tails. To me, they look like something that might have crawled the Permian sea floor. In fact, they appeared in the Devonian period along with the arachnids, and are among the least-changed of all insects. With simple chewing mouthparts, they feed on algae, mosses and lichens.

I particularly like this passage from Wikipedia:

During courtship, the males spin a thread from their abdomen, attach one end to the substrate, and string packages of sperm (spermatophores) along it. After a series of courtship dances, the female picks up the spermatophores and places them on her ovipositor. The female then lays a batch of around 30 eggs in a suitable crevice. The young resemble the adults, and take up to two years to reach sexual maturity. Unlike most insects, the adults continue to moult after reaching adulthood, and typically mate once at each instar. Archaeognaths may have a total lifespan of up to four years, longer than many larger insects.^[2]

What is it about me and odd, long-lived insects? I'm attracted to the primitive, the odd, the venerable. I like knowing that this tiny creature can live up to four years, while much larger and more spectacular insects like the luna moth may croak a week after metamorphosis. (Ah, but the Science Chimp urges that we remember that the luna has had a nice long summer of caterpillar and a winter of pupa under its belt before it takes wing to mate and die).

And now the Science Chimp is warmed up and rubbing her hairy hands in glee. Because late this summer, she finally solved a mystery which has been buggin' her for years.

See, there are these tiny, tiny insects that flow in packs over the sandstone walls around our patio, over the paving blocks that form our raised garden beds; even over the cemetery headstones at my favorite churchyard.

And nobody I asked knew what they were.

There were difficulties. For one thing, they're very quick, and very difficult to photograph as they race over the stone. Yes, this is a lousy photo, but it's better than the previous 50.

I kept at it, though, and finally got a couple of decent shots of live rockrunners, as I named them (needing to name them something!)
I was elated to discover thin threadlike antennae in this photo, which might help in tracking down an identity. To judge how very tiny this thing is, those are sand grains in the sandstone...

I tried to catch some, hoping to put them in the fridge for awhile and cool them down enough to get some good macro shots. Well, I accidentally killed one in gently clapping my hand over it.

Tiny. Why do I care? Because I have to know what it is, and I don't mind waiting years to find out.

At last, I could see something of its structure.

And though I'd never seen one fly, it had wings! Nice big wings!

I thumbed through my insect guide. The closest I could get was Springtails, order Collembola. But this thing seemed more insect-like than a springtail. So I hit bugguide.net. I can't remember the series of things I typed into the search box before arriving at Stimulopalpus japonicus. But whoop, there it was.

It's in the Order Psocodea (Barklice, Booklice and Parasitic Lice). It's in the suborder Troctomorpha, and the family Amphientomidae (Tropical Barklice.) And get this: It was accidentally introduced to the Washington, D.C. area from Japan in the late 1950's and has spread as far west as southern IL to northern AL.

"The introduced population is apparently all-female."

Which means that they're all clones, reproducing through parthenogenesis.

What they're doing in those massive packs, so many that they flow like water over the rock; how they've managed to flourish to such an extent that they're now found on rocks in the middle of tumbling streams and gravestones and my garden walls in Ohio, must remain a mystery.

At least they have a name for me now. Not that they know or care, these parthenogenic female packs of rockrunners.

Bugs. I can only wonder, and wonder some more, the permanent question mark hovering over my head.

Things That Make Me Laugh

2011-12-18T04:25:00.000-08:00

My hometown newspaper, which makes me laugh for all the wrong reasons. I have a file three inches thick of stuff like this.

iPads have spell check, right? Can they do anything about stupid?

An accidental protuberance. I got one of these on my wedding day, but it was on my chin.

A pepper given to me by my friends Zane and Margaret, via my neighbor Beth.

It's not a big pepper.

but it is an impudent one.

Lest you think that this is an unusual specimen, think again. They're all like this.

They were brought to Zane, an ophthalmologist, by one of his elderly patients.

Clearly an heirloom variety of the highest order. Saving the seeds. Definitely growing this one next year.

Tadpole Postscript

2011-12-15T03:54:00.000-08:00

On October 7, 2011, as I was pruning my huge gardenia tree with the braided trunk for its annual trip inside, something jumped, and it wasn't a tree cricket. It was one of my tadpoles, all growed up.

Well, sort of. She was still minuscule. But man, she looked like a tree frog now. (basing this guess on the fact that females have pale throats while male throats tend to be darker). Hello, sweetheart!

Charmed beyond all measure to see a successful frog fledgling, I set about making portraits.

She climbed with that special reptilian flow that tree frogs are so good at.

I think this is my favorite shot, those long fingers, that wise face...

I reflected on how a pailful of tadpoles had enriched our lives all summer long, what a miracle, what a gift they'd been.

From watching them hatch to seeing them learn to recognize me and anticipate feeding time, watching them grow limbs and leave their watery world for the air and leaves and sun, they'd opened up a new world to us.

But as things go when one messes with nature, not everything went so swimmingly. For the only frogs that actually metamorphosed were the older tadpoles we'd saved from the driveway. The eggs I'd scooped out of the fishpond had hatched, eaten, swum, grown, and then simply stopped growing. By late November, they still hadn't metamorphosed into frogs. Why? What could be going on?

Perhaps a clue can be found in the fact that about 20 of the older tadpoles also failed to metamorphose. They didn't even sprout legs. None of the group raised from eggs sprouted legs at all. Oh, they'd had time--the eggs were laid July 10, and gray tree frogs take about two months to mature.

Delving into the literature, I found that several things can retard development in tadpoles. Removing the thyroid keeps them from becoming frogs. Well, that wasn't it. I hadn't touched their thyroids. Starvation can cause retardation. With my fish food supplements, that was unlikely to be the problem. Crowding can also cause retarded growth. Hmm. These tadpoles, it seemed to me, had ample elbow room and a greater water volume than in most of our roadside puddles. But they never grew elbows.

Thinking about it (and I did, for weeks!) I concluded that perhaps the answer to the riddle could be revealed by turning it upside down. What speeds development in tadpoles? Shallow water and higher temperatures, that's what. When a tadpole in a natural pool feels the water heating up because the pool is drying, that can cause accelerated development, a race to metamorphose and be able to gulp oxygen before the watery habitat is no more.

Perhaps my tadpoles never felt that pressure, never felt the need to metamorphose. As the summer wore on and turned to fall, the sun stopped striking their pools; on the north side, they were now in the shadow of the house. The water, which had been very warm in July and August, stayed deep, and more importantly, it cooled. And the tadpoles simply stopped growing.

I wondered what had happened in the pond to the eggs I'd left (I'd taken half and left half to hatch there). I suspected that they'd become fish food as soon as they hatched, being tiny and wormlike. I never saw a tadpole there.

And now, what to do with the remaining tads? We'd already had a couple of hard freezes, and their pools had become covered with ice. Amazingly, they were still alive under there, still moving feebly. When the weather warmed back up they were their lively selves again. I decided to put them in the pond where they'd started out in the first place, to see if perhaps they could survive the winter in a dormant state and take up the business of metamorphosis next spring. It was an imperfect solution, but I didn't see any other alternatives. I couldn't throw them in the Amazon tank indoors, because there were all kinds of nasty things in those pools that would probably kill my home-bred tetras.

Neither could I simply tip the tadpools into the pond. Over the course of the summer, tiny snails had proliferated, and there were doubtless flukes and leeches, too--all of which can mess up fish. No, I'd have to dip-net the tads into clean water and then transfer them with a net. Which I did, on November 20.

When I emptied the large tadpole pool, the bottom was covered in leeches! Yicccch!

Yep, that's a leech on my thumb, its tiny head searching for a victim. I was very glad I'd followed my instincts not to tip the water into the pond.

For all I know, that's full of leeches, too...just about bound to be. But I didn't want to introduce anything new.

I netted all the taddies and put them through a couple of rainwater rinses. There were about 50 remaining, about 20 of those older and larger, from the driveway batch, and the rest from the July egg mass in the fish pond.

I poured the water through the net, which is the only way to catch tadpoles. Much less stressful for them than chasing them around.

Wriggling life, about to be given their second snowball's chance. I hope it works. It probably won't, but...

Into the pond they went, swimming tentatively out into the vast spaces. I felt OK about putting them in with the fish now that they were bigger--American toad tadpoles seem to do fine once they reach this size; the fish no longer seem to regard them as prey.

Maybe we'll see you next spring. Hope so.

More lessons learned, more curiosity fueled. You can think you're doing wild things a favor by helping them out, but as often as not you're just messing them up. It seems to me, mulling this over, that tadpoles were meant to grow up in shallow, hot, barren-looking mud puddles, not the Club Med for Frogs I'd so lovingly and lavishly created. They're meant to grow up without fish to prey on them, and that dictates a most ephemeral watery habitat--a puddle. Perhaps I'd doomed them by giving them everything I thought they could need. Maybe something in the food I gave them retarded their growth--I don't know...but I fed the older tadpoles, too, and most of them made it to frogdom.

I was humbled by some photos I found online of gray tree frog eggs hatching and maturing in a large plastic plant pot saucer full of rainwater. The frog had laid its eggs there and in that almost impossibly sterile environment they'd grown and thrived. Go figure.

There's so much more that I don't know than I know.

That's what keeps me going.

They're Gray Tree Frogs!

2011-12-13T03:52:00.000-08:00

When a tadpole is hovering somewhere in the limboland between larva and froglet, it can be hard to tell just what it is. They're pretty nonspecific in color and markings, a little goopy in form. In this photo you can see the protofrog's jaw, this tiny lower mandible where once there was a sucker. He's coming along. He's still highly aquatic, and will drop back down into the water at the slightest inclination, but he's on his way.

At this point I still wasn't sure what I had. It would take some time before the froglets looked anything like adults.

What will you become, little blob?

But one morning I walked out and there was this little fella perched on the rim of his habitat, looking out into the big garden full of insects that he would soon inhabit. And even though he still had a bud of a tail something about the way his fingers wrapped around the rim of the pool said tree frog to me. Gray tree frog. Whoopee!

The round sticky pads on his toes clinched it for me.

As the froglets got older they colored up a bit, too, some turning green. As I understand it gray tree frogs can change color the way anoles and chameleons can, from green to gray to almost black. Some sources have green being only a juvenile color, with adults ranging from nearly white to nearly black, but I've seen one full-grown individual that was lichen-green.

They have a distinctive slow walk when undisturbed, sort of oozing over the leaves.

Naturally, I became enamored of them.

Wouldn't you?

Once their tails were absorbed, they were ready to go. They dispersed into my nearby flower garden, a mighty jungle for a frog the size of your fingernail. I assumed they'd travel overland in rainy weather to reach larger trees, or perhaps dig in for the fall right in the flowerbed.

Whatever happened to them, they had survived because we'd bothered to save them, and that made us feel good. To think that they'd have dried up to sad black slime in the driveway, when they gave us so much happiness metamorphosing on our doorstep...I don't think I'll ever be able to walk by a drying tadpool again.

To tell you the truth, I've never been able to do that. But usually I drop them into a larger pool somewhere. This is the first time I've gone so far as to make habitats for them. It was well worth the trouble, heavy coon grates, water changes and all.

I recommend getting involved with tadpoles. With caveats, as usual, which I will explain in the next post.

Chet Baker: Now We Are Seven!

2011-12-12T05:31:00.000-08:00

Chet Baker turns seven today. I can think of no better birthday present for his fans than this video of him in action.

I am the person whose right big toe appears in the lower left frame. Who is trying to laugh, snort and wheeze quietly behind the camera, and mostly failing. Phoebe is the fluffer, providing His Chetness with just enough help to keep him hoping he will get a bikkit in the end. I've probably watched this video a dozen times (it has 16 views on YouTube so far!) but I still laugh until I cry. Biased? Sure. But he's a funny dog.

This is the distilled essence of The Bacon: knowing, ornery, vocal, and supremely expressive. Frustrated with his lack of opposable thumbs, but fully capable, with those amazing eyes and that rough voice, of enlisting the help he needs to get what he wants. Watch it to the end. The Bacon gets his bikkit, and then some.

Happy birthday, Chet Baker. You are the sunshine of our lives, court jester and kiss dispenser supreme. I promise we will have your birfday party just as soon as I get back from Columbus.

If you're into radio and live video streaming, I'll appear on WOSU's All Sides with Ann Fisher (squee!) at 11 AM today, Monday, December 12. Listen here. I know. What am I doing taking a gig on Chet Baker's birthday? It oughta be a national holiday. And tonight at 7:30, I'll speak to the Columbus Natural History Society. You can find out more here.

Party when I get home, Bacon. I promise. You can open the package from the Virginia Chapter of the Chet Baker Fan Club. And I got you more bikkits. (Trader Joe's Sweet Potato and Turkeh).

From Tadpole to Frog

2011-12-11T04:01:00.000-08:00

There is a certain satisfaction in setting up a little ecosystem and seeing to it that it runs right. It's the allure of aquariums and terrariums, the challenge they present to us to create an environment that has everything our chosen denizens need.

Science Chimps have lots of aquariums and terrariums around all the time.

It took awhile to get the pondlets in balance. Thanks to all the nutrients in the silt (and probably in the goldfish pellets), I had a few weeks of severe algal blooms which I addressed with siphoning and water changes. Because I didn't want to suck up any taddies with the silt, I retrofitted my siphon with an onion bag, doubled over four times and secured with a rubber band. Worked pretty well.

The point being to see the tadpoles growing and changing, or what's the point? Finally, the algal blooms settled down, the water cleared, and we got to enjoy them again. FYI I used only rainwater in the tadpools, just as I do in my Amazon tank. Tap water around here is pretty nasty for delicate aquatic organisms. About the only thing that does well in it is cichlids, which are adapted to its high pH.

As July wore into August, several froglets emerged each day. Such a magic moment, when this creature of water becomes a creature of air; when it switches from swimming with lashing tail to kicking with its brand new hinders. When it crawls out and does its first pushup with brand new arms, looks around and
suddenly lunges forward to nab a gnat.

I saw that, once. Where once there had been a sucker now there was a little frog mouth and it snapped open and the gnat was gone.

Cradled in the water hyacinth, a new frog wonders.

He'll go back to the water when danger threatens. And each day his tail will shrink until all of it has gone to his growing bones and body.

I noticed that the new frogs looked smaller than the tadpoles. They lost their big poochy guts and got waists. Which makes sense, since they're moving from herbivore to carnivore, too, and perhaps need a shorter intestine as an insectivore than they did as an algavore.

Some of them look downright skinny when they first climb out. There have to be some growing pains involved in switching mouths from little sucker to boca grande.

This perfect miracle played out each day for us to watch. The kids called the four-legged tadpoles "armies" and kept an eye on them, because they knew once the tads had grown arms that they'd be frogs soon.

Ah, the joy of maintaining a microcosm.

The Tadpole Project: Followup

2011-12-08T03:58:00.000-08:00

When last we left The Tadpole Project, it was July 10, and the eggs I'd taken from the backyard water garden had just hatched in a superdeluxe fish-free mini water garden I'd set up near the front door. Go here if you'd like to re-read that post.

Not only did we have a mini garden with just-hatched eggs, but the kids and I had gotten down on hands and knees and rescued every last taddie from the rapidly drying driveway puddles. We put those in a separate artificial pool, because they were just getting their hinders and we wanted to track their development separately. There were hundreds and hundreds of these older tadpoles and we just couldn't leave them wriggling under the hot sun.

It's such a wonderful feeling to take a handful of about-to-perish tadpoles and release them into a cool bucket of water. They lift off from the silt that was about to be their grave and flutter through the water, doubtless saying WHEEWW!! or AHHHH! or HALLELUJAH!! or BRRR! or CHICKAWOW WOW!! or whatever a rescued tadpole says.

The older tads are in the left garden, and the younger ones (from the eggs from our pond) are in the right one.

A !@#@#$# raccoon soon saw to the overpopulation in the little gray pool. In one hellish night, it reduced the tadpoles by about 3/4. After that, I put a heavy grate over each pool every night. Having to do that every evening wasn't much fun, but I couldn't let that happen again. Durn coons. Just little bears, is all they are.

The tadpoles that remained seemed traumatized, and were extremely skittish and shy for more than a week. I could tell they'd learned from that awful night that dark looming creatures above them mean death. I felt bad for them and set about winning their trust.

Goldfish pellets were just the thing.

I've always wondered what the heck tadpoles are eating in the barren little mud puddles where they grow up. Microorganisms? Algae nobody can see? They grow and mature like magic even in vegetation-free puddles. It's one of life's great mysteries.

I was worried that there wouldn't be anything to eat in the rainwater I put in the artificial pools, so in addition to some algae-coated plants from the pond and a few lettuce leaves I decided to toss in some goldfish food sticks. These were enthusiastically received.

Tadpoles are pretty subtle little beings, but note the eye roll on the left-hand tad. Pretty cute, if you know what to look for. Like he's saying, "Hey, Legs, pretty good stuff, huh? Beats the algae Mom left for us."

One extremely charming thing that happened in the bowl of young tadpoles (the ones hatched from eggs) is that they learned to anticipate feeding time. When they saw me come up to the water garden, they would begin swimming energetically along the edge of the pool, all in the same direction, apparently anticipating the moment when I'd drop a few goldfish pellets in and they could eat.

I thought it was pretty keen that they keyed into the routine and seemed happy to see me, coming up to the surface the way fish will. Tadpoles seem so larval, so squishy, so anything but sentient. It was nice to have evidence that they had learned this routine, and knew something, anything at all.

We as a species are always underestimating our fellow creatures. Even those of us who bend over backwards to look for signs of intelligence. I still underestimate them.

The tadpoles grew and thrived. I wasn't sure of their species, since there are several candidates. The two most likely were mountain chorus frog (a local specialty with a raspy, comb-tooth call) and gray tree frog. Given that these eggs were laid late in the season (late June) I was leaning toward gray tree frog.

All would become clear when they finally metamorphosed. I love this shot for showing the dear little sucker mouth this legged tadpole is extending. He's not gotten his arm buds as yet.

As the tadpoles mature and sprout arms, they absorb their tail. There are so many things about frog metamorphosis that blow my mind, and just one of those things is the ability to absorb an appendage. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could do that? For instance, let's say I'd like to morph into a fashion model. If I had tadpole superpowers, I could just absorb most of my upper thighs and belly flab and head on down to the Ford Agency. I could be one of those beautiful middle-aged ladies in the Viagra ads, the ones that are always strolling around on beaches with their sleeves and pantlegs rolled up, looking satisfied.

Instead I am sitting here wishing I could have some ice cream. But I can't, and won't.

Yes. Tadpoles. We were talking about tadpoles.

Another mind-blower. These guys go from having a fishlike sucker mouth with a sort of radula (spiny tonguelike scraper) to having a regular frog mouth that opens and closes like yours and mine. So besides the obvious metamorphosis from fishiform to frogiform, the mouth is undergoing profound changes as well.

And naturally, that dictates a diet change. Once they're out of the water, they're no longer scraping surfaces for food; they're catching live prey.

Could they be tree frogs? They were so tiny...

They were beginning to emerge, breaking the barrier between water and air. Time would tell.

Family Fun

2011-12-06T04:00:00.000-08:00

My sister Barbara. I was devastated when she left for college when I was six. We have since reconciled.

Now, she is once again my envy because she has fabulous grown children who have produced some miraculous beings for Barbara to play with.

Clara, most winsome of girllets, quiet as a dove and twice as sweet. Yet to get that first haircut...

Will, quick, brilliant and sweet as pumpkin pie.

Max, who has our Dad's big ol' mouth, pinstriped overalls and tendency to pull things apart and put them back together again, then tell you all about it. He and his brother Will are train guys. I like train guys, and have some experience with them.

Barb mounted an impromptu family reunion at her house, completely surprising me with a huge dose of baby magic, which I sorely needed.

Nothing like a freshly-scrubbed toddler to set your world right.

We had Adoration of the Babies, which is pretty much how my family spends its time together--watching little kids do their thing.

My nephew Eric and his wife Tera are trying to sell their house while occupying a new one. There's this issue with the buyer of their prior house, who wants a tree on the neighbor's lot cut down before she'll close the deal. It is a story bordering on absurd, but typical of this buyer's home market. Eric and Tera were given a cake to welcome them to their new neighborhood, and brought it along. Barb, Karen and I customized it for them

to gales of laughter.

In Connecticut, I visited my mom, who was very surprised and happy to see me, and landed on sister Micky and her family. We went out running and I kept up, which is saying a whole lot if you know long, lean Micky. We spent Nigel Tufnel Day together, and at precisely 11:11 on 11/11/11, we put Micky's LP of Smell the Glove on the turntable and blasted "Big Bottom." That was good. I was struck by the fact that they have a working turntable; that record sides are amazingly short in this world of continuous music; that I was very thankful to be right there at that moment.

We spent part of a morning doing some handsaw surgery on a big lilac, which I'm sure will rebound well. I can safely say that my sister and her family have the biggest brushpile in Avon, legacy of the Halloween monster snowstorm and the nearly 9 days of power outage that followed. That's a big brushpile. A foot of wet snow on still-green leaves: not good. They survived it in true pioneer style, living by the fireplace, burning wood they'd cut for the winter. I was really proud of them.

Other fun things: Staying overnight at the Visual Art Center's huge Victorian house with Cindy House. We were not spooked by the clanking radiator pipes, no not one bit. The next morning we went out searching for breakfast and saw this in the doorway of a restaurant:

We noted the presence of a funeral parlor directly adjacent to the restaurant. We looked at each other and Cindy commented, "Wrong door!"

We were awful.

But the breakfast we found at Canton, Mass's Amber Road Cafe was not awful. It was spectacular.

Cindy opted for French toast smothered in fruit; I went for corned beef hash with garlic-rosemary toast. Mmmmmmm.

The whole trip was like that meal: colorful, fun, rich, delicious, satisfying, put together with love. I'm feeling very blessed to have my wonderful friends and family, and to know my new friends at the Visual Arts Center. Thanks to everyone for lighting up my life. Like The Terminator, I Will Be Baaack.

Mass Audubon's Visual Arts Center

2011-12-04T04:05:00.000-08:00

Believe it or don't, I was in Massachusetts to do other things than photograph gravestones and owls and twigs. I'd been invited by the Mass Audubon Visual Arts Center in Canton to come give a talk in honor of their retrospective of Robert Verity Clem's stunning art, now on display. Bob was a mentor to me; he steered me toward working from living birds (and those freshly dead, too). He showed me how the feathers lay and stack on their wings and taught me how to get it right. He even sent me a stack of watercolor paper when he found me working on junk.

So I spoke of that, and of what happened after that, of a life led among birds, taking care of them and helping them when I can.

And a whole bunch of my friends showed up.

from left, back, VAC Curator Gigi Hopkins; field sketch artist and author Clare Walker Leslie; painter and museum exhibit creator Sean Murtha; hopeful collegian and linguist Emily Barth; former Mass Audubon Director of Natural History Services Jim Baird; artist, carver and writer Rob Braunfield.
Front row, from left: Sculptor, carver, and painter Larry Barth; painter and field sketcher Barry Van Dusen; painter and newly minted Master Wildlife Artist Jim Coe; pastel painter Cindy House; painter and explorer Lucia de Leiris; and a very wide-angled and agog JZ. Darn it, VAC Director Amy Montague shoulda been in this picture but she was taking it!

You would not want to drop a bomb on this room. The world of birds in art would never be the same.

I'm still amazed at the gathering that took place, and deeply grateful to Amy Montague and Cindy House for corralling a flighty aviary of artists into one place for such a joyful reunion. Most brought things to show and tell. It's so inspiring to see the beautiful work my friends are doing, and to be able to talk with them about it. These people are going out and painting in oils and watercolors and pastels en plein air; they're sketching birds and animals from life; they're living proof of the legacy Bob Clem left.

Amy took us downstairs to poke through some early work by Bob Clem. What a treat that was, to view his working drawings and early paintings close up!

A moody northern shrike watercolor.

As we gasped and exclaimed, we joked about which piece we'd like to slip under our jackets and walk home with...this page of falcon drawings was at the top of my heap.

The immediate recognition I felt upon viewing this fine, fine sharpshin was akin to looking out the window and seeing one fetched up in the birch, watching the feeders. Bob's work is so true to the bird that not for a second do you have to wonder if it's a sharpie or a Cooper's. Every stroke of the brush says sharpie. He knew his birds so very, very well. If you go see the show, don't miss the life studies of a perched Cooper's hawk in the stairwell. Another slip-under-the-jacket painting for me.

The VAC show is awesome, and well worth a trip down to see this master artist's rarely-reproduced work firsthand. I'm a watercolorist and despite heavy-duty staring there were passages in his paintings I couldn't figure out; sunlight hitting off algae mats and that kind of thing. He had a patience and an ability to plan his paintings that I lack. Most of all, they're true, to light, to landscape, to bird, and I'm deeply grateful to Bob for imparting that all-important search for truth to me when I was a baby bird painter.

Read Connecticut painter Sean Murtha's blogpost about Bob Clem, and how he felt seeing this show, here.

I gave a talk at 2 on Saturday November 12, and another at 11 on Sunday the 13th. We had great attendance for both. There were so many people I knew in the room on Saturday that it truly felt like an episode of "This is Your Life." The combined expertise in art and ornithology in that room was so thick you could cut it with a knife. I was nervous as a kingfisher right up until I grabbed the podium and launched, and then it went just fine.

It sure helped to have family there.

And the dearest of friends. This is Rob Braunfield, who taught me everything about bluebirds and the art of seeing, too.

Columbus Area Zick Alert!

2011-12-02T10:53:00.000-08:00

I'm very excited to present a brand new talk, "Rooted in Appalachia," for the Columbus (Ohio) Natural History Society at 7:30 pm on December 12, 2011. This is their special annual holiday meeting, and I understand there will be holiday desserts. Oh dear. It will be held on the West Campus of The Ohio State University at the Museum of Biological Diversity, 1315 Kinnear Road, Columbus OH 43212. You can get a map and directions here.

I've finally put together a general natural history talk specifically so I can roll around in all the things I love about Appalachian Ohio. But it's also about making your own fun. For instance: If you love a rare wildflower like rose gentian

why not rope off where it grows so it doesn't get mowed,

gather some of its dust-fine seeds

and grow a hundred of your own?

Gray tree frogs, same deal.

You like 'em? Get you some seeds.

Grow your own.

It's always worth the trouble to raise something up.

Monarchs, same deal.

"Rooted in Appalachia" is about making your own fun. Free fun.

It's about getting what your spirit needs out of the land.

Hope to see you there! Be sure to blurt "BLOG" if you found me here. And slap my hand if you catch me reaching for Christmas cookies.

I'll be speaking with my beloved Ann Fisher of WOSU's All Sides LIVE in the studio from 11-12 that morning, December 12. I wind up talking and usually laughing with Ann about once a month for an hour or so, and I can't wait to meet her!

Back to Cambridge

2011-12-01T04:06:00.000-08:00

Harvard's Memorial Hall, whose recently reconstructed hat perfectly matches the one taken down by a fire in 1956. It didn't have a hat when I went there for the Freshman Mixer and final exams. At the time of its construction (1874), Mem Hall was the largest meeting room in America, a Hodgefact which amazes me. It's a ridiculously cool and imposing building, and it makes my heart sing that the University managed to rebuild its imposing chapeau.

One of the pleasures of returning to Cambridge is wandering through Harvard yard, mulling on all the things I first experienced there as a freshman. Alas, it was closed to me and anyone without an active Harvard ID for the duration of my visit and who knows how long? The Yard was being Occupied, and Harvard police understandably wanted the occupiers limited to Harvard students/faculty/staff. So the students had a bunch of tents they'd gotten from the Harvard Outing Club and they were all tented up in there in the mild fall weather and nobody among the general rabble could go in or out. Caterers arrived regularly to feed them. Food looked great. I was hungry. As Hodge's Harvard freshman son dryly observed, "It's not much of a stretch to occupy a gated community." Occupiers would have it otherwise, as this PostHarvard article observes. Still, how can the University allow everyone access to the Yard when students are sleeping in tents out in the open? Much as I didn't like walking around the Yard, I got it. And wondered what impending winter weather would do to the protestor's resolve.

I was sad to be locked out. I wanted to linger under the elms and think. I wanted to peer into my single in Weld Hall, the one right by the back door which was fab except that I woke up every time somebody came in at 2 AM. I wanted to walk by John Harvard's statue and remember standing there and watching when the Yard's resident barred owl (ca. 1976) flew down and snatched a grey wool hat off a very surprised bicycling student. I saw that. It was excellent. She almost fell over but regained her composure and looked up as only a student whose hat has been snatched by an owl can look up. I am sure the owl thought a squirrel was hitching a ride on her head. I am sure he was disappointed to bear it back to his elm, tear into it and find not warm meat but only more fuzz.

Even then I was noticing what there was to notice in nature, in the heart of a bustling city. Sometimes I wonder how I made it through. I was meant to live in the woods. I knew that, even then.

Memorial Chapel looked mighty spooky with the full moon rising.

Outside, the streets were bustly with people. Maybe it was because nobody could cut through the Yard, but I don't remember Cambridge being quite so congested. Eep. Lines and packs everywhere. I've lost many of my adaptations to the crowded life. A bicyclist was coming at me on the sidewalk in the dark. Dazzled by his light, I moved to my right and he moved to his left and he cursed me for getting in his way and making him almost topple over. Well, I'm sorry. Where I come from people don't ride right at you on bikes with blinding lights on the sidewalk. I knew then just how a deer feels when a car comes at it on a road at 3 AM.

Where I come from it is hard to find a nice crabcake, too. So Hodge took me to Henrietta's Kitchen where an affable barkeep served us crabcakes.

This is Hodge, trying to biggen hers. It works on the iPad...

We laughed. We had fruity drinks. We yakked. I miss her. But I'll be coming back to Massachusetts in the spring, when the winter is past, the flowers appear on the earth, and the time of the singing birds is come.

I'll have a new book to talk about! (see banner ad at right).

By then, I hope Harvard Yard's iron gates will be open again. They'd better be.

Ouroboros!

2011-11-29T03:53:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I mentioned that standing at ornithologist William Brewster's grave was a full-circle moment.

But that's Mt. Auburn Cemetery--full of such full circles. Like this one. How odd. A snake, eating its own tail.

And look! another one. What the heck? Back to the bricks to find out.

It's an ancient Greek symbol called an Ouroboros (from oura meaning "tail" and boros meaning "eating", thus "he who eats the tail". I was pleased that just looking at it and guessing, Hodge and I figured out what it must mean--that death is not an end but a renewal, a rebirth. Cyclicality, rebirth, re-invention. There are, of course, much more convoluted, Jungian meanings to the symbol, but we'll just leave it at that.

A nice emblem for a mausoleum or headstone. And another thing to look for as we walk Halcyon Way.

A feeble attempt to find out something about Lars Peter Larsen came to naught. Heck of a piece of rose quartz, though. It felt cool and soapy, utterly delightful that they left it in its uncut form, just this giant jewel dropped out of the sky with a plaque bolted to it.

And here is Charles Sumner, for whom Boston's Sumner Tunnel is named. Hodge says that

she learned from reading David McCullough's Americans In Paris that while studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, Sumner worked right alongside students from Africa, and had a gigantic epiphany that there could be no denying the intellectual equality of Africans, so cruelly enslaved and oppressed in his own country. He became an abolitionist and when he died, both whites and African Americans lined Boston's streets five deep to view his funeral cortege.

Hodge further advises that a congressman from South Carolina clocked Charles Sumner in the Senate chambers with a cane in 1856, a blow from which he never fully recovered. Here's to mouthy abolitionists.

So many good, good people. So humbling, to stand above them.

All that, and Japanese Stewartia, too. Glorious bark, at its best in winter.

This one, planted in 1939 (!) to honor Ann Silverman Sheingold, Wife-Mother-Mentor-Friend. We'll leave it at that. Oh, all right. She was a therapist and clinical social worker, born in 1930, who passed away in 1995. Teacher and lecturer, too. A lovely tree in her memory. Stewartia pseudocamellia.

I'm just trying to figure out how the tree could have gotten planted to honor her when she was nine. Maybe you can buy the right to put a plaque on an especially awesome tree that happens to be growing at Mt. Auburn, to honor a loved one after the fact. I'd pick a bendy old Japanese maple, that's what I'd pick. Put me under one o' them.

On second thought, after a bit of shuffling around, I found this photo taken near Asheville NC of Phoebe with a Stewartia in full bloom. Good Grief!! I didn't even know what I was shooting at the time. Thought it was a real camellia. Nope. Stewartia. By gum. What a tree. Now I know what I want for my birthday...

Hmm. Still...maybe I'll have someone plant out one of my old bonsais in the orchard when I shoot through. I've been tending them for 30 years...just put them to bed for the winter...what tree could be nearer to my heart?

I know just the guy to do it. He should be digging a little better by then.

Life--when well-lived, it's full of ouroboros. Your challenge: Use my new favorite word in a sentence today.

Stumbling on Brewster

2011-11-27T03:58:00.000-08:00

It is impossible for an observant person, a curious person, to move quickly through Mt. Auburn Cemetery. Each visit is a new exploration, often dooming me to hours of shuffling through Web pages looking up this or that, my wondering spawned by stumbling on yet another intriguing headstone. A few of them are self-evident. I don't need to look this fellow up. I feel him in my bones with every skywash I do, feel that quivering hopefulness that I won't mess this one up as the paint runs over the paper. I was amazed to find his stone so very modest, just a ground-flush block in with the rest of his family.

But then, families being families, maybe having a watercolorist in the bunch wasn't that big a deal to them.

Hodge brought Homer the mussel shells from Maine after her last trip. Someone else put the periwinkle and the fir cone there. She says the mower blows such offerings away but they always reappear. And I'm seeing his Prouts Neck surf exploding in my mind's eye, and knowing he likes those shells and the people who bring them.

So Hodge and I are walking along and she veers over to show me a favorite verse from the Song of Solomon on a large boulder and I gasp and realize that we're looking at the grave of a very well-known American ornithologist, William Brewster.

For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come (Song of Solomon 2:11, Holy Bible).

And this is why Hodge and I are such a good pair. We may light up at different significances, but we each light up in our own way, and when we're together those diverse noticings smoosh together and make Reese's peanut butter cups.

I didn't have to dig far to find Allen Emmett's brief but excellent profile in the N/D 2007 Harvard Magazine. I'm borrowing heavily from it here, thank you Mr. Emmett!! There, I learned that Brewster's parents deemed him too frail and his eyesight too poor for him to attend Harvard (clearly, standards have changed!) He was an avid birdwatcher and record-keeper at age 10, collecting specimens with a shotgun, which was the only way one studied birds then, binoculars not having come into use. He used his excellent hearing to identify birds without having to see or shoot them, and Emmett quotes him describing the night sky "alive with birds...as may be learned by anyone having keen hearing who will take the trouble to stand for a few hours on some elevated spot and listen intently.”

Brewster birded Cambridge intently, doubtless ranging over the very spot where he'd one day be buried. His family lived on Brattle Street in Cambridge. From 1885 until his death in 1915, he was Curator of Birds at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, an honorary master's degree under his belt. Ha. So there. He was first President of the brand new Massachusetts Audubon Society, the very organization which had brought me to this fine state to give my talks. He founded the still-thriving Nuttall Ornithological Club at age 22 and in 1883 co-founded the American Ornithologists' Union. I've done a mighty lot of drawings and paintings for them.

Here's a detail of my newest painting, a male Brewster's warbler (hybrid between a blue-winged and a golden-winged warbler).

It was a full-circle moment, standing agog before that stone over Mr. Brewster.

Thanks again, Hodge. Hand me a Reese's willya?

Great Horned Owls of Mt. Auburn

2011-11-24T04:48:00.000-08:00

New York has its famous red-tailed hawks Pale Male and, until recently, Lola.

Cambridge, Mass has a celebrity raptor pair, too. Last winter, a pair of great horned owls took up residence in a spiny locust (?) tree near The Dell in Mt. Auburn Cemetery.

The nest was so tiny, flimsy and low to the ground that anyone walking by could clearly see the two owlets trying to grow up there.

Photographers would stand directly beneath the nest, causing the owls a bit of anxiety. Finally, cemetery management put yellow crime scene tape up around the nest tree, something they'd been reluctant to do for fear of alerting even more people to the owls' presence.

A cellphone photo of a post-breeding bird by Kris H. Macomber, who was not one of the personal territory violators. This owl just happened to be sitting very low and very close last week.

Here is the nest tree; the nest is a small aggregation of sticks on the first horizontal limb to the right. For an owl, that's a very low nest.

To make a long story short, despite having to learn to perch at a tender age thanks to their lousy little nest, both owlets fledged successfully and have delighted scores of visitors, including me.

On our first mid-November visit, one was sitting, somewhat obscured, near the Dell.

On our second visit, Kris' eagle eye spotted one on the far side of the Dell. It's the upright blip on the lowest branch on the right side of the bare oak, right above the notch at 12:00 in the golden weeping beech tree.

Pretty cool, huh?

Another view, and this time you can see the owl right above the notch in the dark green yews. That's a big bird, to be visible at that distance.

Of course, we walked closer, and found him looking stoic.

He needed to be a cool customer, because a young Cooper's hawk had discovered him and decided to spend his morning pinwheeling around and cakking at the poor owl.

The Dell. Of all the spots in Mt. Auburn, The Dell is probably most representative of how the forest must have looked before it all went to ornamental rhododendrons and viburnums and Chinese tallow trees and Japanese maples. Little wonder the owls chose it.

Not far from the Dell, a faithful dog sleeps, hoping to meet his person in Heaven. Yes, I stroked his cold head.

And Oliver Wendell Holmes (the poet and father of the super-famous judge) rests with his wife.

And beneath the owls' favorite tree, a watercolorist rests. Hodge brought him mussels from the Maine coast. She's thoughtful that way. Somebody else brought the periwinkle and the fir cone. It's a thing, like the roses on Poe's grave.

I knelt and soaked it all in, hoping some painterly genius might osmose through my palms.

Today, I am thankful for Mt. Auburn Cemetery, for giant trees and beautiful gravestones in the leaf-lit dells, for willing owls, dear friends and for my wonderful family. Peace to you on Thanksgiving.

Fresh Pond in the Sun

2011-11-22T04:16:00.000-08:00

Fresh Pond had been so good to us on Thursday, Hodge and I decided to go again on Monday. It was a rip-roaringly beautiful day for November 14. We saw a very late red-eyed vireo spooking about in the shrubs. I don't think I've ever seen a vireo in November before. He didn't get the hint in the Halloween snowstorm, we gathered.

The vines and shrubs were full of food for birds. Look at this bittersweet banquet draped all along a fallen tree.

A closer look:

and through the magic of digital cropping, a closer look yet, confirming my original suspicion that this plant was altogether too vigorous and fruit-laden to be our native American bittersweet, Celastrus scandens.

American bittersweet bears fruit capsules that are orange over red fruits. And it bears fruit only at the ends of its twigs.

Oriental bittersweet (C. orbiculatus) has yellow fruit capsules over red fruits, and it bears fruit in the leaf axils, all along the long stems. Bah. But still excellent bird food, as the giggling robins, warbling song sparrows and wheezing waxwings attested.

Because we were sort of power-walking, I did not bring my telephoto lens. I had only my point-and-shoot Canon G-11 with me. And I turned the air blue trying to photograph some resting canvasbacks that had blown in overnight to join the ruddy ducks, American coots and ring-necked ducks already ensconced at Fresh Pond.

This (an avian subject behind a screen of twigs) is where manual focus override is such a blessing. And lacking it is a bird photographer's curse. Here is my beautiful study of winter twigs with blurry hen canvasbacks behind. The G-ll was convinced I was doing an arty shot of the near twigs and absolutely refused to refocus on the ducks. !@$#$@#$%$#%!!!

This is as close as I could get to an in-focus canvasback photo, even though they were close enough to hit with an acorn. !#@$#%$#%#!!

You'll just have to imagine the drakes' ruby eyes, winking open and closed as they drowsily listened to my profane lullaby. I know, it's not worth getting that mad. But I do anyway. I am used to cameras that do my bidding, not defy me with their own little autofocus ideas.

I had far better luck with one of the resident Fresh Pond redtails who was obligingly perched in the open, in full sun. Ahhhh.

Hodge said that she sees redtails pretty much every day in every possible setting in Cambridge (something that certainly was not the case when we were both there in the 70's and 80's). And she says she is always thankful to see them, and always stops to admire them, and never stops loving them. And I watch her doing just that. I feel the same way about redtails. Always worth a third glance and a crane of the neck and a happy sigh, this big beefy beautiful buteo, just waiting for rats and rabbits.

Hello darling! and thank you for being here, for just being you.

Juliet Kepes, Artist

2011-11-20T04:30:00.000-08:00

"Juliet's Shadow Caged" by Gyorgy Kepes (1939)

Next to Spectacle Pond at Mt. Auburn Cemetery, there is a pair of modern headstones that I have come to love.

They're separate but equal, Kris likes to say. Together, but distinct. So lovely.

One is stone and one is cedar. Stone is Juliet, cedar is Gyorgy.

Beneath that modest wood post lies what's left of Hungarian born Gyorgy Kepes (1906-2001) founder of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. A prime mover in the Bauhaus movement in Germany, photographer, artist, designer and writer Gyorgy went on to teach visual design at MIT starting in 1946. He's credited with "erasing the lines between fine art and science."

A coucal, perhaps, etched on Juliet's stone.

Being a bird artist, I was instantly intrigued by Juliet's stone, and set about finding out more about her. British-born Juliet Appleby (1919-1999) met Gyorgy in London when she was 17 and already working as an artist and illustrator. Gyorgy spotted her on the street, told her he had decided he was going to marry her and asked her out. By the next year, she had joined him in Chicago, where Gyorgy followed his colleague Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to head a curriculum in Light and Color at Moholy's "New Bauhaus" art school in Chicago. Juliet went on to study there while Gyorgy taught. From there, they moved to Cambridge.

Juliet began writing and illustrating children's books, starting with Five Little Monkeys in 1952. Her gorgeous work is reminiscent of Eric Carle's (The Very Hungry Caterpillar). Her subject matter was mostly natural history, and she drew a heck of a nice stylized bird. I first noticed the resemblance of her work to Leonard Baskin's. She received a citation from the Society of Illustrators for Frogs Merry in 1961, and three of her other works, including Beasts from a Brush (1955) were nominated for The New York Times' Ten Best Children's Books of the Year.

But enough of my yakkin'. I can only assume that the birds gracing Juliet's beautiful headstone were among her favorite drawings.

To me, they have the quality of cave drawings--utterly simple but knowing and nonetheless full of information and movement.

An especially sweet reductionist ring-necked pheasant heads up her stone.

I'm moved by beautiful things, by thoughtful monuments, and delving into the lives of one couple interred here at Mt. Auburn helps me realize that this is a vast city of singular people; that beneath every stone is a person and a story, likely to be a gripping one.

My father-in-law's grave in our orchard as yet has nothing on it but young, deer-bitten coneflowers, and a lovely iron bench for sitting and reflecting. Maybe that's enough, right there. And maybe it isn't. If I could put anything there I'd put a stone piano, because jazz was his voice. We'll see. I think about it a lot, especially when I walk Mt. Auburn's citadel of the beloved and well- remembered.

Weeping angel.

Callas, and a forever arrangement of stone, complete with basket (whaa?) What a weird thing to have to sculpt. It's like finding a bouquet of carnations from Oopsa Daisy in your perennial garden.

Another of Hodge's finds: Cymbal maker Puzant Zildjian! Wow!

And another Armenian, this one with a decidedly bizarre monument. I hear Hodge singing "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands."