Chet Baker on Patrol

He's getting a little gray around the eyebrows. Chet's most Frequently Asked Question: "How old is he now?"

I answer, "Seven. Eight in December." And can hardly believe I'm saying the words. How did that happen? How did my 2005 model puppy turn into a silvery gentleman?

I've thought about taking a Sharpie to the gray, sort of a Grecian Formula for dogs, but I know he'd hate the stink of the marker, so I don't. 

It's been hard, not being able to run any more. This dog loves to run. He couldn't love it as much as I love watching his neat little thighs scissoring along in front of me. I've had to find other things to do. It hasn't been hard to find other things to do.

Chet's gone into summer mode, which is when he runs hourly chiptymunk and bunneh patrols around the house. There's always a chance he'll surprise something quick and furry as he burns around the corners on two wheels.

He watches for small disappearing cinnabar tails in the holey back patio stones.

Chet Baker! Are there any snakes?

I will check.

I find snakes by smell.

I have found them in these cracks before.

Chet Baker! Are there any deer out in the meadow?

I will check. I cannot see over the grass now. You should mow it. I have to climb the top deck to see durr anymore. But when I see a durr, I streak out after it, yes I do.

He loved his WVU basketball, even after he popped it (eight minutes) and tore a huge gash in its side.

That was about a dollar a minute.

Worth every penny just to see him race around the yard pushing it with his nose, then gnashing his fangs against it until it finally gave up with a sigh. GNARF GNARF GNARF GNARF ppppfffffffftttttt

This little dog, so dear to me

who lights up my heart with his smile.

There. There's your Chetfix. I needed one, too.

The Mighty Mighty Bluet

There is great power in a tiny flower. The common bluet, Houstonia caerulea, triumphs over drought, frost, neglect and active persecution. It's a member of the Rubiaceae, a very cool family that includes partridgeberry (Mitchella repens), quinine (Cinchona), gardenia (!) and coffee (!!) Oh my!
How all those plants fit in one family beats me--tiny wildflowers and economically important shrubs that dictate land use all over Latin America.

There is a barren hillside on Rte. 821 not far from our house that blooms in early spring with blue. Misty blue, running down like water.

It's barren because the man who lives in the house above it takes a weedwhacker to the wildflowers that try to grow there. He has weedwhacked the Trillium grandiflorum and Solomon's seal into extinction. I see him, balancing on the rocks, whacking away, and I want so badly to stop and talk to him, but I don't. I think it wouldn't go so well.  Besides, I find it interesting that someone would object to bluets. I'd rather watch than intervene, because the bluets are winning.

He prefers daffodils and variegated hostas, his close-mown lawn, to bluets. These rocky steep dry  ledges are no doubt his despair. He can't get the grass to take on them, no matter how he cuts and whacks.

But the bluets don't mind. They don't listen to him and his machines. They go on growing there anyway. 

You see, by eliminating everything else that once grew there, he's creating a monoculture of bluets. And they like that just fine.

And though I mourn the trillium, I like it, too. It's a little victory. He can't kill the bluets. They're too little to bother with. They bend their slender necks and let him have at it. They sing of life and springtime.

Take that! And thank you for your help, Sir!

 Ta-DAAAAA!

What's Become of Sluggo?

Wildlife rehabilitation is often a long road. Especially with box turtles. Sluggo is a longterm client. You may remember that he was hit in the spine by a lawnmower blade last summer. I couldn't do anything for the injury with its jumbled pieces of shell bone, so I gave him shots of Baytril, a strong antibiotic, to prevent infection, then just fed him and supported him in the ensuing year. 

He won't use his back legs. He has feeling in them, and he pulls them strongly into his shell when you try to pull them out, but he doesn't use them to locomote. He drags himself with his strong orange front legs.

Lisa Fosco of Ohio Wildlife Center in Columbus believes that that's because it hurts to use them. Will that get better? We can't say. But like anyone who has a loved one who's suffering, you cling to hope. 

He's a strong, beautiful gentleman with great color and a nice personality.

I took him in for evaluation at OWC. Lisa immediately set to picking and chipping at the dead shell and bone  around Sluggo's injury. 

The black part looks yuckky but it's actually a sign of healing. It's good, it's what you want. 

Lisa cleaned him up really nicely using her fingers and a forceps. I was wincing but Sluggo couldn't feel it as the bone she was removing was long dead. She pointed to a deeper triangular divot at the bottom of the wound and said she thought that was probably what was keeping him from using his hind legs. Sigh. He's not done yet. The hard part is not knowing if he'll ever be releasable.

To be honest, I thought I'd be leaving him in the care of someone who knows more than I do about such injuries, but Lisa wanted me to hang onto him. She made a good point, that he'd do better with individual attention such as I can give him (when I'm around, that is...) than as one of a bunch of patients in a rehab setting. So she sent him back home with me.

I took him out to see how he was doing.

He was tired of being in a cardboard box, that's for sure. I set him on the concrete and he peed in excitement. And then one hind leg came out.

He was making for the spiderwort tangle, and he really, really wanted to get there. And the other hind leg came out, the one I never get to see.

Truly, he more just dragged them than anything, but they were out and moving, and that's a huge start.

I thought that going forward I should try to get him to walk on concrete, because the second he got into the soft mulch he tucked them back in and dragged himself with his front legs.

Lisa showed me how to massage his legs, how to stroke his feet "so he knows he still has feet, knows that they're still there." 

I hope he comes to trust me enough to let me massage him every day. Right now he remembers getting injections there and he pulls his legs in when I go to touch them. 

I never visit the Ohio Wildlife Center without marveling at the job these good people face. Over 4,000 animals are admitted every year, the vast majority coming in right now through July. Rehabbers call it baby season. There were bunnies everywhere, little blind ones and ones that were big enough to nibble on dandelion greens and clean their faces with quick paws.

And there were baby ducks, standing in their food, dreaming of their mamas.

If you've any extra resources, please think of OWC. The people I saw hurrying around the clinic were so tired they were reeling and punchy, warmly accepting box after box of rabbits and thanking the kind folks who had brought them in. I left, resolved to keep working with my one little case, and in awe of the volunteer network the Ohio Wildlife Center maintains. And wishing I had a few lotto millions to shunt their way.

Victorian Village Guest House

File under: Percs of the job. It's not all leading birding field trips in a frog-drowning downpour; it's not all lugging several hundred pounds of music equipment up stairs and down halls. Sometimes you get a treat. And the trick is to let those treats carry you through the next slog or meltdown.

I'm writing from the Victorian Village Guest House on Neil Avenue in Columbus, Ohio. This is my second stay here, and I'm delighted to say Bill is with me and also enjoying its considerable amenities.

I took the first series of photos in December, when I came here to speak to the Columbus Natural History Society.

I scurried around to photographically document its untrammeled glory before I turned it into a Zick den with my exploding luggage.

I love the bathroom. And the soap is French-milled lemon verbena and it is heavenly. The soap always speaks of the quality of an establishment. I left my Dr. Bonner's Peppermint bar in the dop kit. 

Just made tea and toasted orange-cranberry bread in this lovely kitchen. It's so wonderful to stay somewhere new, clean and uncluttered, as opposed to old, ehhh and cluttered. There's even a teeny dishwasher!

It's quiet and peaceful, being set well off the busy streets. 

The December vista. It's hard to believe you're in downtown Columbus! Doesn't it look like it's out in the country somewhere? The guest house was built on the footprint of a carriage house that was standard issue for these gracious manses in Victorian times.

  From the excellent website:  A step above a bed and breakfast, Victorian Village Guest House offers a 950 square foot luxury suite tastefully appointed with antiques and modern amenities. The suite includes a full kitchen, private bath, bedroom with queen-sized bed and great room with soaring 17 foot ceilings. Situated in the rear lawn of the Morton’s renovated 1895 Queen Anne style home, the guest house provides privacy & delightful 2nd story views of the lawn, patios & perennial gardens. A peaceful retreat in an urban setting, the guest house is truly the best of both worlds! 


I would add that it's handy to Columbus' delectable Short North, where restaurants, bistros, antique and curio shops, and a fabulous dog accessory store await. If you want to buy costumes for your Boston terrier, Pampered Pooch is where you'd head.

All of that is true, true, true. And it comes with the neighbor's buttermilk tabby.

 At this link, you can take a virtual tour of the place. Such fun! except that it makes me seasick because I'm such a dolt with the mouse. Blarrrgghh. Slow down, Zick.

I love computers. Except when they make me seasick.

The Greek yogurt, fresh berries, orange blossom honey and organic maple brown sugar granola makes it all better. 

Yesterday afternoon as Bill and I were heading out to our smashing "Wine and Warblers" event at Columbus Audubon's Grange Center, I spied a feather on the sidewalk in front of our guest house. It could have come from no other bird than a black-billed cuckoo. It was very dirty and tattered, but when I washed it up, there was the small grayish-white tip, the tapered but not pointed shape, and the olive-brown shade that yelled black-billed cuckoo to me. As you can see, it's as long as a pen--about 5". I was amazed. Right in downtown Columbus!

But as I shot the gardens this morning, the songs of migrant Tennessee warbler, northern parula and even the dull wit! of a least flycatcher rang around me, and I knew it was possible that a black-billed cuckoo had molted a feather here, as well. 

I molted a little when I stayed here, too. Allium and columbine:

The peonies weren't even awake when I made these photos.

Hey! wake up! I wanna see your yellow stamens.

At least the foxgloves were up and bugling.

A view back to the Morton's home. Ahhh.

I'm afraid the Victorian Village Guest House has spoiled us for future visits to Columbus. Or anywhere.

Oh dear. The bar is awfully high.

Check it out, check in. You will never want to leave. We sure don't. We're settin' here tapping away on our respective Silver Surfers with the fasty fast wireless Net. Please accept our heartfelt Thank You, Lisa and Jeff Morton, for giving us a taste of the truly wonderful in Columbus.

Contact them here.

Spring, All at Once

 Desmia funeralis, Grape Leaffolder.

Mmm, what a natty jet airplane of a moth! Perched on Nancy Love's gravestone at my little Methodist cemetery. I could not have told you what it was without David Beadle and Seabrooke Leckie's new moth guide, which makes me whoop with joy. What a book!! I'm getting it signed at the New River Birding and Nature Festival, where Seabrooke will be speaking and showing us all the fabulous moths. Giving them names, for once. O joy! I get to meet her and get my book signed! See, writers get just as geeked out as everybody else. (Postscript: She was Wonderful. Marvelous. Self-effacing but quietly confident, brave and magical, too).

Scattered, scattered, I am. On her way to the New River festival, Murr Brewster came over for a day and a half and a lovely night too and we emptied my greenhouse. Two women could not have had more fun, than messing about with pots and soil and deciding which geranium looked nice with which nemesia. I love that woman!! We decided she really just needs to live here. Think how much we'd get done. Or not. Yakkity yak yak yak.

 The second we put them out, the "Graffiti Red" stellar geraniums were visited by swallowtails and this lovely male hummingbird, who had been flying into the greenhouse every day to say hello to the flowers. It made me smile as wide as Montana to be in the Garden Pod when he flew in, because he sounded like a gargantuan wasp from a Japanese horror movie in there.

Birds are flooding in. Oh my gosh. How can I do everything I have to do to get ready for the festival?? To keep my precious plants and bulbs from dying while I'm away this spring? There's an indigo bunting in the orchard, and they're flying over in twos and threes, zapping...

And there are sweet kids to be fed and run to the waiting bus...not for much longer! They get out May 23!!

but there's a faded scarlet tanager rasping away in the orchard, too...

 and the woods is full of wood thrushes, and how can you do everything that needs to be done when you are melting away?

Twee-o. Tweedleay. bup bup bup twardle tee? Twowdly-oh Tee? Twee-o.

And the leaves drip and the song twines around my heart and squeezes it up into my throat.

Yellow-breasted Chats are Back!

 Mayday! Mayday! The birds are all here and I'm overwhelmed. Why can't they spread it out a bit? Today, we welcomed indigo buntings, magnolia, Tennessee, chestnut-sided, blue-winged and Nashville warblers; black-billed cuckoos, rose-breasted grosbeaks and scarlet tanagers; a pair of belted kingfishers, wood thrushes and red-eyed and yellow-throated and white-eyed vireos, to name just some. Ones in boldface arrived today.

Oh, and yellow-breasted chats. See, just one of those would have been plenty. 

But too much of everything is just enough. I need a miracle, every day.

The yellow-breasted chats woke me up on May 1 as it got light, arguing and yelling from the tangle to the east and the tangle to the west. the former owner of our house was from the north of England. "Those are the rudest birds!" he said. "They fly over making the most awful noises!" Yes, indeed.

Chats have bred in our yard all but one of the 21 years we've lived here. For reasons unknown they deserted us in 2010, to come back in 2011. Now I hold my figurative breath until I know they're staying.

I look at our yard and overgrown orchard and know the changes are happening, that they're more chickadee habitat than bluebird habitat now, more redstart than prairie warbler habitat. Some birds go, and others replace them, and I guess I have to be OK with that, but please, please, chats! Don't leave us.

When chats sing they shoot their necks out and that glorious sunflower-yellow throat pulses and belches with a shot of stunning color.

Klook. Shep shep shep shep. Whoit? Geh geh geh geh geh. TSH TSH TSH TSH TSH TSH TSH TSH!

Yeh yeh yeh yeh yeh! Klook. Whoit? 

And so it goes.

And it's even better by moonlight, because when they sing at night you know they're sleeping here too.

There are ten million things I should be doing right now. Packing for the New River Birding and Nature Festival this week, where I'll be speaking and singing with The Rain Crows and leading field trips starting Friday May 5.  (thank you Kathy in Delray!!) Oops! That's tomorrow! I'm packing hundreds of pounds of books on the back of my carrier on my tiny Subaru. Sometimes I miss the Exploder.

Scrambling up more books to sell.

Planting the gladiolas and tuberoses which are sitting in muck buckets in the garden.

Potting the overgrown and sad bonsais who are languishing in their winter pit, 20 days late.

Running to town to do ten errands in two hours.

But I can't ignore the chats. They demand my attention and they get my unbridled adoration.

Well, almost all of it. Mether, are you coming? You have been with that birdie for a long time. And you and I are both soaked. You have a lot of things to do.

I know, Chet Baker. I'm coming. But there's this wood thrush singing...