Enter Flag

I wrote a blogpost with lots of video of a certain tufted titmouse doing all kinds of hopeful things: picking at terrycloth out of boredom, glugging down a big chunk of hard boiled egg yolk all by himself; picking up some special food I made for him out of a dish. And then everything suddenly went south and the next morning his head was upside down, and he was helpless again. Nothing I did made any difference. I kept feeding him and gently manipulating his neck, hoping to ease him out of it, but he faded before my eyes. He had a seizure and died at 8:14 AM on December 3. It was hard. I was very sad. I was mad at myself for telling you all his story before I knew how it would end. I'm not usually that rash. I usually protect my readers from the worst stuff. I wanted to spread some joy, that this little bird was going to have a fighting chance. And in the end, he didn't. That's how it goes in rehab, and especially with head trauma. Recovery is anything but certain. Those birds that hit your window, lie there for awhile, and fly away? There's always more to the story, and sometimes it's a story you don't want to hear.

Early that morning, right at daybreak, I was sitting in my recliner, staring out the window at the slowly lightening meadow. I was putting off checking on the titmouse because he'd been noticeably weaker when I tucked him in the night of December 2. I didn't even want to peek at him, so I sat and wrote in my journal and watched the meadow taking shape in the rising light.

And a doe came walking across the meadow, along the edge where I stop mowing the yard. I grabbed the living room binoculars (there are also bedroom binoculars, kitchen binoculars and studio binoculars--lots of binoculars) and studied her. I recognized her face instantly. My God, it was Flag!

                                                                             29 Oct 2017

Now, it was too dark to get a photo, but my binoculars picked up every detail as I scurried from window to window. I will say I recognized her from the first glance. The first thing I noticed were oversized buff eye-rings. The next thing I noticed were her smallish, rounded ears. I checked her body type: long, with rather short legs. Then I checked her bib--large but indistinct. Oh my God, she had big white flashes between her toes--bigger on the hind feet! It's Flag-it's Flag!! The last thing to check was her tail. When I finally got a good look at it, it was pale red on top, with no black on it--which is unusual. Put those six features together and my often muddled but occasionally marvelous brain spits out one answer: It's Flag!

                                 

                                                                           1 Feb 2017

It was Flag. I had not the slightest doubt. I had not seen her since March 2018! Where had she been?

        

 6 Mar 2018--the last time I saw her.

She'll never tell. Flag is very special to me. She is, as far as I know, Ellen's last surviving offspring. Ellen was the crooked little doe I followed for nine years. Ellen was killed by an arrow right along my driveway early on the morning of November 2, 2016, wasted, left for me and the coyotes to find.

Her twin fawns, Pinky and Flag, were only five or six months old. God bless Buffy for taking them on. Buffy had been Ellen's closest companion; I always suspected she was Ellen's sister. 

Here's Buffy in back, and Flag in front. 

Now, Buffy's in the lead. See how Buffy's legs and pelt are suffused with ochre? She was buffy all over, hence the name. 

                                                                             29 Oct 2017

This is my earliest photo of Flag, 14 Dec. 2016. What jumps out at you? For me, it's the white between her toes. What a gift that little marker is. 

                                         

Her twin brother, Pinky, had white toe flashes too.

          

         12 Jan 2017

By October 18, 2017, Pinky had grown his first spikes. You can see the pink nose for which I named him. 

I lost track of Pinky after that fall, as one loses track of bucks. It's not that I wasn't looking for him...it's that he never turned up again.  But Flag, being a small doe, survived. 

                                                                            17 Oct 2017

                                                                         9 Dec. 2017

                                                                              11 Dec. 2017

Here are those small rounded ears, that unmarked tail showing well. 

                                                                            17 Jan 2017

She reminds me so much of Ellen in these shots. Man, I miss those deer coming around. 

                                                                             4 Nov 2017

To have Flag come walking through the backyard, on the very morning when another soul had to leave, was such a gift. I had bonded pretty fiercely with that titmouse, and I was determined to see him through. I thought what I'd be seeing him through to was release, but it didn't work out that way. So it goes some of the time, too much of the time. Seeing Flag helped so much. She spoke of  persistence against all odds, of hope, just as my own hopes were being dashed. 

17 Oct 2017

Look at what remains, she said. Look at all you still have that brings you joy. My mother and brother and Aunt Buffy are gone, but I'm still here. I have fawns you haven't met. And that might have something to do with the cur-dog you brought here, mightn't it? 

                                                                            30 Jan 2018

Yes, Flag, it might. I am going to keep watching for you, as I have every sunrise since I saw you. Like seeing a ghost, it was. I need a fresh portrait of you, little short-legged Garbo among does, small like your mother and your aunt, and so dear to me. Oh my gosh, I have just noticed the two small white dots atop your shiny black nose. I've looked, and they're in every photo. Attention. Attention. Attention. Nothing is too small to notice. Everything is important, everything is a clue.

I came in from a long morning of sawing sumac and hauling honeysuckle around 11 AM and was out on the deck tracking  Curtis when a big chocolate-colored buck emerged from the newly cleared area. Nice to have a way through the honeysuckle, innit? I had neither binoculars nor camera, and I raced through the living room, cursing, to get the closest pair of bins. The living room binoculars had migrated to the foyer. One can't have too many strewn around the house... I knocked over a hand-made end table in my rush, atop which, as it happened, was a box with an antique porcelain elephant inside.  (I had to stop to laugh for a minute while writing this; it's sooo Zick.) The table and box went flying. All this I noted as I streaked past, but Job One was to get the binoculars. Nothing else mattered. Happily, neither the table nor the bubble-wrapped elephant in its box were hurt in the least, while I have another spectacular bruise forming on my thigh, to join the bruises already there, from the butt ends of branches and cruel rose canes that I fight every morning in my "daily practice" of mano a mano combat with invasive plants. By the time I raced back, jumping over the fallen table, binocs in hand, the buck had leapt across the meadow and was but a dark tail disappearing into the pines. See, that's what deer do to me.  They make a blur of me. I want so badly to know them better, to trace their arcs, as I traced Ellen's and Buffy's. I will knock myself silly in pursuit of knowledge like that. And the only way to get it:  Be. There.

As I sit here writing, I'm thinking of a bit of Robert Frost's poem, "Birches:" 

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

And so I dream of going back to be.

It’s when I’m weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

From a twig’s having lashed across it open.

I'd like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

One of my eyes is indeed weeping from a twig's having lashed across it open. (God, the beauty and precision of Frost's wording).  It hurts, but I expect it'll be all right. The other eye isn't weeping; it's watching five brand new blue jays who have come to the yard at long, long last. They've finally arrived, weeks later than usual, and it's time to pile up the cinder blocks and build a new Cyanocity jay feeder for them. Hope I don't drop a cinder block on my foot, but I hold the possibility open. 

Right off the bat, I don't recognize any of them, but I'm peering, Popeye-like,  at the camera playback and sorting through each tiny feature, because this is how we learn.

                   

  For those who wonder, yes, Flag is named for the fawn in The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. A formative book among many formative books. I might have identified with Jody, who raised Flag, just a little bit.

Meet Me in the Meadow

From her brief encounter with TinyTine, Flag made her way out to the meadow, an almost visible trail of pheromones floating behind her.  Me, running from the studio to the living room, and easing open the deck sliding door to shoot the action.

 Buffy, her constant companion, at far left, then the spike buck I call Lil' Pisser, and TinyTine the ten-point at far right on the border.

Buffy picked up her head to watch, because clearly something was going to go down, with her girlfriend Flag stinkin' up the place. 

 

first, Lil' Pisser had the bad judgement to walk up and challenge TinyTine. Really? You're a YEARLING. But there's no mistaking his laid-back ears. He looks ugly.

 

 

One light shove and Lil' Pisser knew he was outmatched. L.P. never hesitates to throw it down. He loses every time, but he's gonna be a badass when he grows up, that's clear! Ain't skeert.

 

  

Be off with you now, L.P.

 

 Meanwhile, up walked the beautiful young 8-point I call Ringo, for the wide white ring around his muzzle.  You see how his antlers are high and big, but don't spread beyond his eartips. Less than 4 1/2 years old. 

 

 

 Ringo was trying to get a location on Flag, picking up her chemical beeps. It was Flehmen Friday again!

  

He doubtless knew that TinyTine was right behind him.

 

TinyTine walked up behind Ringo, who ignored him as long as he could. Look at the set of TinyTine's ears. Ut-oh.

 

Ringo turned to answer the challenge. A buck won't just let somebody walk up behind him without turning to face the music, points forward.

 

Ringo walked right up to TinyTine, who had stopped to be considered.

And they...kissed?

 This was getting interesting, but it would get a lot more interesting before the session was through.

Stinkin' Up the Place

Who goes there? 

 My friend Geoff Heeter introduced me to the concept of spread in antlers. A buck has to be 31/2 or 4 1/2 years old before the antlers spread beyond the span of the ears. I think I have that right. You can see that, while this one has a high crown and long tines, the antlers still spread no further than the ears do. This is not something I've picked up on before. I mean, I knew a wide spread meant an older buck, but I didn't know the numbers. Thank you, Heets.

I didn't know at first what brought them, these bucks, walking proudly through the meadow of another gray morning. All I knew was to praise them and start shooting, or rather, clicking, gathering my trophies, my snippets, my memories.

First was a proud, high-crowned eight-point. Not particularly massive or aged, like the brace of beauties in my last post, but so beautiful nonetheless. Any buck is a great treat for me.

He seemed to be looking for someone.

By and by he slipped into the honeysuckle and sumac tangle, taking a well-worn deer road down into the woods.

Following a hunch, I hugged my big lens and skittered through the house to the studio. There, I found my little friend Flag, Ellen's daughter peeking out from behind the birch trunks. Flag was born in the spring of 2016, with a twin brother named Pinky, so she's 2 1/2 years old now. 

 And it became apparent that Flag was, in hunter's parlance, "stinkin' up the place." It appeared she was still in estrous, on December 9. She must be really fast to have escaped getting knocked up in the first rut.

On another hunch, I peeked out the west window of the studio and whoa! There was a buck I call TinyTine, lurking around the fallen pine in the backyard.  TinyTine is a ten point, but just barely. See that tiny tine on the beam of the near antler? That's his claim to 10 point fame. I've been following him for several months. I see him regularly at a corn feeder about a mile to the east of my house. And now here he was right in my backyard! His other nickname is CornHog.

Flag knew when to get gone. She moved down toward the meadow, peeing as she went.

 

TinyTine, you'd best get going.

 TinyTine followed, checked that stuff out.

Mmm. I love the smell of estrous in the morning. See his partly opened mouth? He's doing flehmen, passing the scent through his vomeronasal, or Jacobson's organ, assaying it for hormones. This area is a patch of chemoreceptive cells in the nasal cavity, just above the hard palate. TinyTine is huffing Flag's urine, passing it through his Jacobson's organ, testing it.

Flag must've passed his test. After all, it's #flehmenfriday. The chase was on.

This will be a several-part post about one magical December morning. I'll post as I can, when I can find a couple hours to rub together. It's a challenge to even get the photos sorted and edited, much less write them up; it's taken days. But I don't want to lose this morning. I want to remember it.

Plucky's Gift

What ever happened to that half-winged mourning dove?

You know I wouldn't leave you hanging if I could help it.

I had this whole post written on a plane. And the Internet swallowed it. The photos stayed but the text disappeared. Never had that happen before. Now I'll probably say something completely different than I did while hurtling over Kansas at sunset. One of the things I like about blogging is that I have no idea what's going to come out when I sit down. I started this one, and what came out was "One Day in Light" (the last post). When I'm blogging, I enter into a conversation with you, and it can go anywhere.

I saw the ghost of Ellen on March 11. I'm at the point where I can recognize certain deer naked eye at rather long distances. I raised the blind in the bedroom and saw Ellen against the west border of the meadow. The camera revealed that it was actually Flag, her daughter. All the little Elleny things in her gestalt at several hundred yards, that added up to Ellen for me, made me smile so big. It was like a visitation from her mama.

 

Nobody would give a passing glance to a small plain doe like Flag, unless they had known her mama, and come to love her so. I grow fonder of Flag every day.

 

I almost never see Flag without Buffy. Doughty little Buffy. I'll always wonder if she was related to Ellen, because they were always together, too, though they didn't get along very well. 

 

I have watched Flag take corn right from under Buffy's nose, and have never seen one iota of aggression between them. That's saying something, because I've seen Buffy fight.

Here's Buffy kissing Flag back in January 2017. Flag was still a little fawn. She'd just lost her mother in November.

Buffy, left, Flag right, today. See how much warmer-toned Buffy's hair is?
Buffy's also got tear tracks from her weepy left eye.

Buffy gave me a good laugh on March 8 when she stamped me. Deer stamp when they see something they don't like. Which would be me, through the window, at my drawing table.

 She stamped me with both front feet!

 

 Come on, Buffy. You know me. Stop punching more holes in my poor mushy lawn.

I do notice a difference in these two (the only ones who come in to clean up the jays' corn) and the other deer at Indigo Hill. Buffy and Flag are much more approachable in the field, more likely to watch me pass at a safe distance than the others, who all bound off. They know the Corn Lady, know my schedule, know my voice. It feels good to be recognized, even if I can't throw my arms around their necks.

Speaking of recognizing...A small gray female mourning dove, the avian equivalent of Flag, came walking in from the direction of the trumpetvine tangle on March 1. 

  

 Nothing to distinguish her on the left side, unless you were to notice the fresh white edging on her secondary wing feathers.

 

But on the right side...oh yes. Hello, Plucky! Look at that regrowth! There's still a lone black primary exposed, one of the two that remained after the hawk attack. But here come the primaries!

Luckily, she gave me a closeup.  It took only two weeks for all those feathers to regenerate. That, to me, is amazing.

In a few more days, she'd be virtually indistinguishable from the other doves.That won't stop me, and hasn't. I'm still looking for a small, grayish dove--probably less than a year old-- with a pale cheek and fresh wing feathers. So far, I haven't seen her again. But I take that to mean that she no longer needs to hide in the vines and gobble down grain at my feeder simply to survive.

 

As is so often the case,  I find myself scrutinizing groups, looking for one special creature. It may seem silly to some, but for me it's time well spent. Looking for Plucky taught me that each mourning dove has a unique spot pattern on its wings. Like this one--likely an immature, who is sprinkled with small dots.

 

And this mature male, with his iridescent neck and large oval spots on his coverts and tertials.

 

 I'd never realized that about mourning doves before Plucky came into my life. And I will recognize her should she appear again, as her wings are very lightly spotted.  And that's something to be able to say, that you could pick one special mourning dove out of a flock. That's the gift of close observation.

When Plucky finally took flight March 1, she corkscrewed as she went, but not nearly as badly as she had before. No longer would she have to walk from the tangle to the feeders and back.

Plucky had gotten her second chance.