About Those Bluebirds

I got back from Boston around 10 pm Monday night. Nine hours had elapsed since I left my sister's home in Harvard MA, until I finally rolled up my driveway in Ohio. And that was taking a commuter train, a subway, and an airplane, then driving two hours from the airport home. My gosh, I could almost have driven it in that time. It was a good exercise, not renting a car; fine if you have the time to blow two or three hours here and there catching trains and tubes to your destination, and you don't mind rolling your suitcase behind you. I just wanted to see if it could be done.

Chet was so happy to have me home again, he got up on a kitchen chair to be near me while I answered some correspondence and wrote a blogpost before sunrise Tuesday morning. His devotion never fails to melt my heart. Little CatDog, sleepin' in the sun, curled up on a chair.

I couldn't wait to grab Chet and trot out to the bluebird boxes to see what had happened with the runt bluebird and its host family. First I checked the host family in the box out by the garden. All four chicks are strapping and growing well after their blowfly purge. Here they are at Day 12. Wing feathers are bursting the sheaths, and feathers cover their upper bodies. They no longer need to be brooded at night, and they're getting so big their mom doesn't want to try. 

 

Peeking again the same afternoon (June 28), when their wing feathers are a bit farther out of the sheath, I find all four to be females! See how gray-brown they are, unrelieved by blue? Now I'm burning to know whether the runt is a girl, too. I've had a feeling it is.

I head out on our road toward the box, a half-mile distant, where Liam and I transplanted the runt from this brood, so it could have a chance of growing up amongst siblings three days younger.

On the way, I'm arrested by the sight of the first blossoms of pink chicory, which sprouts from hardy perennial roots every year along our road.

A mutation of the normal periwinkle blue chicory, it's been growing in this very spot for a very long time. 

July 10, 2007

A very long time indeed.

July 6, 2004

I don't have a little girl to pose with it any more, but I do have a little black dog who enjoys bombing my flower shots, giving me a laugh when he thinks I need one.

If the front view was not so good, this one is spectacular. There. Try that shot. I have the best rumpus.

Enough chicory and dogbutt photography. We have bluebirds to view! 

With growing excitement I pried the hayfield box off its mount. Peeked inside. And yes, I could tell the foster chick from the others right away, but the differences are still pleasingly subtle. 

It's the one on the right top, its bill pointing down. You can see its wing quills, still firmly in their sheaths, and feathers are sprouting along its spine and head. It's 11 days old, and its foster siblings are 8 days old, and things are going perfectly. Yes, it's a wee bit ahead of them, but plenty of food and a comfortable margin, a head start, is exactly what it needed to survive. 

I can't wait to learn its sex, but that will be at least two days from now. 

My beautiful experiment, eet ees workink!!

Phoebe and the Voodoo Lily

My kids trust me as their personal Ranger Rick, their guide to all things natural. I seldom trick them. But sometimes the temptation is too great. 

Phoebe and I rode our bikes over to tend to our neighbors' dog, Max. Max is 14 and he adores Phoebe.

She gives him the love he needs when he's staying home alone.

I used to pet-sit for all kinds of people when I was her age, too. She's good at it. Conscientious. Will set her alarm to feed him on time. Knows he needs to feel someone cares, and isn't just pouring food in a dish and walking away.

While Phoebs bustled around getting Max's food ready, I strolled through Sherm and Beth's garden. Like me, they love weird plants. I spied a voodoo lily in full bloom. Oh oh oh.

This member of the Araceae attracts flies and beetles by emitting a powerful odor of rotting flesh and cat poo. I moved over for a tentative sniff. Didn't smell anything. Took a deep breath and agggghhhh!! Sooo bad. Like sticking your nose in a litterbox. Worse. Flies buzzing all around. Eccchhh.

I swallowed my gorge and called to Phoebe. Hey Phoebs!! Come see this voodoo lily! It smells AMAZING!!

Phoebe hurried over, asked, "Does it smell good?" 

"It smells AMAZING!!" I repeated. I wasn't lying. The stench was awesome. 

She stuck her nose right down by the spathe and took a deep draught. Trusts her mama. And gave a strangled cry as she recoiled, covering her face with her hands.

She twirled away for a few yards, yelled, "I HATE YOU!!" and stood there shaking her poor little head. "It's stuck in my throat! It's burned into my nose! I hate you!!"

Ah ha ha ha ha. Little Science Chimp prank for ya there, girlie. Pay it forward.

I led her to these iris, which smelt of grape bubblegum. Almost all better.

She turns 18 tomorrow, this Child of Light. And she's gotten her biggest birthday wish, and he's been staying with us for a week.

Perhaps Phoebe's favorite skyline...PNC Park, home of the Pirates.

We kicked his visit off with a Pirates' game, against the AZ Diamondbacks. Here, they're walking across the bridge to the stadium. Liam is always included. I love that about these kids.

The game didn't go so well in the end, but we had fun.

The baseball park is a scene my family loves, but it's truly all too much for me. The organ music, the roaring crowd, the announcements, the flashing tickertape, the clapping and stomping. I get antsy and have to get out of there. I guess it's because my soundtrack of choice is crickets and birds, and my ears and senses are set to sort through all the natural music, identifying each singer. So when I get a wash of loud, random noise, I go on Tilt, like an old shaky hunting dog might.

I did enjoy watching the clouds sail like great clipper ships across that beautiful city skyline. Rough-winged swallows dipped and swooped on the infield.

We had a quintessential Pittsburgh moment--the pierogies, racing past the iconic Heinz ketchup bottle.

It's true--the moments I treasure most are when the kids and I are out in nature together. We've been doing some biking this summer, a bit of cross-training with all the running. It's astounding how many miles you can cover in a short time with a bicycle. I feel like a caveman, discovering The Wheel. Ten miles feels like nothing.

Whenever there's a hill, the kids get there first. I have to stop and take cow photos, anyway. 

We've befriended all the dogs on our routes. 

We look for pink chicory. I make them sit down with it, because I'm remembering a moment...

And I'm blasted back in time to the first pink chicory we found, and the ten-year-old who posed for me. It was in the same spot. The plants are still there.  But everything else has changed a little since July 10, 2007. What a difference seven years makes.

She's growing up now, and she's going to go soon, and we're going to have to make sure Liam's OK with that, that he gets enough love without his big sister handy by. 

I watch her starting her real life, and part of me wants to go along. A lot of me does.

 Happy birthday, beautiful bird. These hills will be waiting for you when you come home.

Success is Relative

The mower laid this plant down in June but somehow didn't cut it off. It's blooming while lying on its side. I know how it feels. My arthritic toe's been acting up lately. Cortisone shot I got in March has worn off. I still run, but I'm grateful nobody's around to see how. Not much looking forward to another shot, but I see one on my horizon. Kind of like hoping a ten-foot long wasp will fly down and sting you in the big toe.

You will recall that I have been trying to "grow" rose gentian, Sabatia angularis, from seed. For two years I've been trying.

Nature is forever trying to explain to me what is possible and what isn't. I just won't listen. See toe, above.

For two summers and one winter I have nurtured teeny tiny seedlings of this plant, grown from seed gathered in November of 2010. I started with over 120 seedlings. That got narrowed down, and narrowed down a few more times. The marvel is that any lived.

So this spring I planted them out, all nine or so that made it for two years. They were so pitiful, so tiny. Nothing like the robust two-year-old plant shown above that's currently blooming its head off, untended, unwatered--nay! practically mowed to pieces on a dry bank along my running route. 

At the same time, I planted out another hundred or so rose gentian seedlings started in April of this year that were so tiny I had to take off my glasses to see them. I lugged water out to them in 5-gallon jugs, in the garden cart.  Big Toe didn't like that much.  I tried to keep them alive. But when we had to go to Maine, the temperatures soared and they went unwatered for over a week. And they all simply disappeared. Withered away. And so did the nine two-year old plants I'd worked so hard to bring along. 

A lot of other stuff happened here at the farm in that week. It wasn't one of my favorites. 

But some good things happened, too. When we came home, the royal catchfly I'd been growing for a couple of years was finally in full bloom. All its leaves have since turned yellow. I guess it doesn't like 103 degree blazing sun so much. Tough summer. BUT it is setting seed, and for that I am grateful. This plant may not survive, but I'm going to take its seed and start over this fall. This plant, I think, I have a hope of growing. After all, one of my two plants lived long enough to bloom. For me, that's a pretty good batting average.

Here is the bank where the rose gentian grows without anybody caring for it but me. And all I do is mark it off so the guy won't mow it AGAIN. Phoebe is coming back down from smelling the fabulous cluster shown in the first photo.

Phoebs has always loved flowers, like I do. We've been admiring the chicory. Chicory is one huge reason to get up early in the summer, because it's done by noon.

 This chicory has been cruelly mowed once this summer. It sulks for a couple of weeks and then sends up a zillion bushy stalks and blooms more beautifully than ever. Wow, what a show. I don't give a fig that it's Eurasian. You could never call it invasive because it grows where nothing else will--in the compacted, bone-dry gravelly soil of roadsides and waste places. Chicory is my second favorite wildflower, right behind rose gentian. There is no blue like chicory blue.

 Our chicory comes in pink, too. I photographed a little girl by a pink chicory plant a bunch of years back. Now she's driving her brother to Open Track and the pool. And I am beginning to believe that they will come home again each time I watch them roll down the driveway, talking and laughing and listening to the songs they like on the radio. I watch my whole world drive away, and I force myself to have the faith that it will roll back home again.

She's a good driver. 

If I look hard, I can usually find a purple intergrade between the pale pink and the true blue chicory. Bewitching.

They go so well with goldfinches.

I'd make a lousy plant breeder because I don't appreciate things just because they're different or rare. I don't find the pink an improvement on the blue. It's kind of wimpy. But I love to spot the pink plants in our population.

Anyway. Back to the rose gentian. When we left our heroine she had squandered approximately two hundred rose gentian seedlings by transplanting them out on Bill's dad's grave. None, apparently, had made it. At all. 

And then on the evening of July 15, 2012, she walked out to check once more. To see if the catchfly was setting seed. To see if she could find any trace of the gentian seedlings. 

And there was one. She laughed aloud to see it there.  One rose gentian plant that had made it through the storm and the drought and the neglect and the general ineptitude of this wishful wildflower horticulturist. 

It is three inches tall, but it is going to bloom.

 Success is relative. 

Welcome to My World

Every time I go out running, and that is every morning

I wish I could bring you along. But you are usually sleeping, or at least not in the mood to stretch yourself out and then get very sweaty. 

You would think I'd tire of this road, running it every day, but the fact is that watching it change its clothes and its soundtrack each day fascinates me endlessly.

There are always surprises. Sometimes it's the deep violet blue of the morning's first chicory.

 

Sometimes it's pink chicory. I know of five plants on this curve that are pink. I don't know how common that is, but it feels singular to me.

 

There's one intergrade that is a bewitching periwinkle bluepink.

Sometimes it's an eastern tailed blue mimicking a flying bit of chicory. I love ETBL's. They are a most friendly and confiding butterbug. You can see the tail on his left hind wing.

Sometimes it's a hayfield, suddenly cut, with meadowlarks circling overhead not knowing what in the world they should do. (They wound up leaving the next day, but that's OK, because I had seen their babies fledge weeks earlier). If there's one thing meadowlarks know about, it's haying.

 Sometimes it's an unexpected curve in a treeline that reminds me of England.

 Or black-eyed Susans against a misty tree scrim.

And always at my side Chet Baker, sweet companion of the morning and my life. In him I have a dogmometer. I can tell how hot it is by whether he's in front of me, beside me or yards behind. Over about 82 degrees and I'm liable to have to wait for the boy. Under 80 and he waits for me.

 We always stop and think at the cemetery. We breathe and sweat and are glad to be alive and not having a red cedar and pizen ivy growing up through our rib cages.