Robins in February

We're drowning in Ohio. The Ohio River is predicted to crest at 38.3' (down from 39.5' (ohhhh noooo) on Sunday afternoon. Watching the predictions, which mean the world to those affected, has been nervewracking. They keep revising them upward, and the latest jump (9 pm Saturday) was a durn foot!! Up here on the ridgetop, it's a minor inconvenience not to be able to get into town by our usual routes, but in Marietta, it's disastrous. Days of deluge have turned my yard into a pond and flooded our route into Marietta. I tried to talk Liam through a route to town on Friday so he could help evacuate the boathouse where he rows crew.  I sent him down some iffy muddy roads and inadvertently got him hemmed in by quickly rising water on either side of him, albeit a couple of miles apart. Couldn't go forward, couldn't go back. He, with one bar of 4G on which to communicate. Me, in intermittent text contact with him, back home, frrrreeeeakkking out.  Bill had to jump in his car in town and find a route so he could come down by a back road over a ridge and lead Liam out. That was my quick, lovely nooner panic attack--thinking of my kid surrounded by milk-chocolate creek water with nowhere to go. On the phone afterward, Bill said, "When things like this happen, you can't panic."

Oh. Except that I did, and I do. I guess I have to stop doing that when my kid when last heard from was in his car with floodwater on either side of him and 40 minutes have gone by in total silence. Anyway, rescue effected; Find my Friends on my iPhone pinpointed his location; cellphones and mama and daddy love saved the day. It's probably good for a kid to get in a sticky wicket now and then. It's just not much fun when it's your kid.

Poor Marietta is caught once again with its pants down by the rains and the swollen Ohio and the fast-running Muskingum, by Duck Creek dumping all that runoff into both of them. The last flood, just a month ago, carried off $30,000 worth of docks from the boathouse where Liam rows. So, big fundraisers to replace those, on top of all the fundraisers it takes just to keep these kids in rowing shells. Thank goodness the replacement docks have yet to be built, because those would be gone, gone, gone now. The boathouse itself is about 1/3 underwater; the rowers got all the shells out and carried them to safety, but oh, what a terrible mess. Front Street in Marietta is under, which means bad, bad things for the wonderful businesses there. It's a resilient town, but spring flooding gets old, and it results in empty storefronts in a town that struggles to remain as vibrant as it is.

 If only we could funnel this rain to places out West that need it so badly. This climate change, and the odd jet stream that has formed since the ocean water is so warm, is tough, bringing Arctic cold way farther south and east than usual, while it visits arid drought on the West. And it's not fake, and it's nobody's imagination. Nobody makes up a flood like this. It's here, the unfriendly neighbor, creeping up the front steps.

If I'm only going to see the sun first thing in the morning, by gum I'm going to get out and greet it.

 

And the unexpected gift this day: a peach glow to the northeast

 

and a big flock of American robins, bringing indescribable beauty and peace in their songs and their brick-red breasts. Robins, studding the haymeadow like cloves in a pale ham.

 

I watch them leaning over to pluck Smilax fruits and remember that I've left a mystery unresolved. 

 

I posted this photo of an epic pileated woodpecker poop on Facebook, saying that it was full of carpenter ants and sumac seeds, and a knowledgeable friend, the kind that's good to have, asked if that wasn't a Smilax seed instead. So I'd made a mental note to go flesh a Smilax fruit and determine if he was right.

I knew it was pileated woodpecker poop because there was this kind of working all around where I'd found it.

 

Also because I am in the habit of looking for, and finding, pileated woodpecker poop. You should try it. You can often find awesome turds where they've been working for awhile, close to the ground.  An undisturbed pileated woodpecker has tremendous sticktoitiveness. (I use that word in irony, as it's one of my least favorite words in the universe). I mean, that bird will work for hours on a stump or fallen log. So of course it's going to have to go, and if it's on or very near the ground, the poop is deposited gently. That way it doesn't disintegrate when it hits the ground, and you get these fabulous J-shaped cylinders. 

So when the robins were done eating and had flown, I got a Smilax fruit and chewed the flesh off it, finding it pleasingly sweet but very stainy, like hackberry fruit. And sure enough, there was the big round puffy warm-brown seed that my friend James Ferrari had spotted. Smilax. Perfectly good diet item for a winter pileated woodpecker. Sumac, too. Poison ivy, though that's all gone by now. They take a lot of fruit.

 

Right near the Smilax patch is a woods road that's had a lot of erosion of its bank. I am always finding little bulbs exposed here. I used to think they were spring beauties but now I'm not so sure. Perhaps they're snowdrops or crocuses, escaped from an old homestead. A bulb is an incredible thing. It may persist for many decades, and it should be buried pretty deeply. 

 

This little bulb was exposed through the terrible cold, the single digits that we had for weeks after Christmas. And it is sending out shoots. What kind of antifreeze does it keep in its cells?? I cannot imagine. The least I could do is replant it. After:

 

And its suffering companions, too.  Before:

 

and after.  

 

Another little Science Chimp errand--keep checking to see what these shoots become. Hoping for flowers.

I try to leave the world a better place, even if it's only in small ways, whenever I go anywhere. It won't be long before I can go check on the ones I saved and maybe see this.

April 3, 2017--not far from where I replanted the bulbs.

Small good deeds...

Even as replanting bulbs gives me a warm glow, picking up trash on my road invariably sends me into the foulest of moods. There's something about dumping out tobakky chaws and getting brown spitgoo on my hands that sends my mood corkscrewing into the ground. I had my arms absolutely loaded with trash after only about 200 feet, and I came upon this. Awww!!

 

Thoughtful of them to bag up their car trash for pickup. Beats having to pick up each item individually. Thanks so much!  I've learned that trying to carry everything I've found only makes me crankier, so when my arms are full I make trash stations along the road, then come back to get it all in my car. The sole plus of picking up my neighbors' trash is not having to look at it any more. Well, I have to admit there's also the anthropologist's thrill of discovering what constitutes "food" for litterbugs. Mountain Dew, Busch Lite, Little Debbie, McDonald's, RedMan. None of those things are getting in my cakehole, ever.

Back to more wholesome things...I have a constant aesthetic tug-o-war with the dratted plastic-wrapped haybales. While I like the way they catch skylight and define the landscape, I loathe the wrapping. I can't walk by without wondering where all that miles of plastic goes when they're unwrapped for cattle to feast on. As a photographer, I ask myself:  Do I frame them out of each shot, or shrug and include them? They lend a surreal, giant blancmange air to this shot. I saw a titmouse drop down and disappear entirely into the rotted top of a fencepost. When it emerged, it had a nut in its bill. Perhaps it or another bird had cached it earlier. Off it flew with its prize. I love seeing what birds eat when they aren't cadging peanuts and sunflower seeds.

 More robins on Smilax. You might call it greenbriar, or catbriar.

 Robins, with the dratted haybales again.

I jockey around, and finally decide that placing the robins above the distant bales works best.

 

 If I stand in just the right spot, I can see the porch light from the farmhouse through a barn window. It's a Stonehenge moment, but you'll have to click on the photo to see it.

 I'm not done walking. I need more miles. So I head on out our road and walk the perimeter of a large hayfield that narrowly escaped becoming a drill pad for an oil well. Had that happened, I probably would have had to leave my home. There's a vulnerability to living atop the Marcellus Shale. You're at your neighbors' utter mercy, if they have any. And living at their mercy is a far bigger deal than having to pick up their litter.

 

I love how the road looks, like a smooth gray bushmaster, snaking off through the hills.  I never tire of this vista. That's a heavy sky, after a faintly promising sunrise. There will be more rain today.  I walk the edges of the hayfield, and find all that's left of a small deer I saw poached and lying in the field a couple weeks ago. No vultures in yet to clean it up, but the coy-wolves took care of it.

Everywhere are the reminders that this beauty I imbibe so deeply is fragile. That none of it can be counted on to always be here. These giant firs were planted many years ago as a windbreak for a classic Ohio farmhouse that I loved. It's been long since razed and burned. A bunch of jonquils and a few naked ladies (pink amaryllis) still come up in the field where the house once stood. I may be one of only two people on our road now who even remembers that house, or the man who once lived in it.

 

People and buildings die; landscapes change.  Logging lays bare a view I'd never seen before. We are always chewing up the land here. Nothing stays the same.

 

I listen to the robin's song

Saying not to worry

           

My, How They've Grown

Spring is flirting with us. Almost freezing, then sunny and cold, then warmish, then almost freezing. The forsythia endeavors to persevere.

It makes us feel good just to look at it, a treasure chest opened and bursting with radiant gold.


Here, we have had chipping sparrows, cardinals, and even a brown thrasher build their nests, and all have succeeded. It's a good plant, all the better when let go a little wild.

In the woods, the spring beauties (Claytonia virginiana) are blooming. Each pair of leaves leads to a nutritious tuber that bears like to eat. I wonder if skunks do, too, and imagine so.
Liam, Phoebe and I go out to check the frogpools along our oil well access road. They're just puddles, but they're home to spring peepers, mountain chorus frogs, gray tree frogs, American toads and sometimes wood frogs and green frogs. All laid eggs there last year, when early summer rains kept the pools full into July. The rains I'd hoped for finally materialized in the last week of March, and the mountain chorus frogs and American toads are singing full bore. Peepers are AWOL as yet. I can't remember a spring without peepers.

Walking back from the pools (we saw ripples but no eggs as yet), I notice that my boy Liam is getting very big indeed. Well, he's nine; he's not a little boy any more. How can that be?


Phoebe, at twelve, is properly suspicious of my camera. She keeps me at a distance. I usually use a telephoto on her, the way I would photograph a deer.


Farther up the path, as the evening falls, she finds something in the grass that needs to be identified. Paging Science Chimp. I knuckle on over. Policy: If my kids want to show me something in nature, I am there as fast as I can get there. If they ask to go to the newt pond, we go to the newt pond. Showing an interest in nature gets immediate reward.


She is 5'4", only an inch from catching me. She will surely zoom right past and look down on me by Christmas. And yet she can fold up those giraffelike legs and be five again.

Phoebe's find turns out to be a lone grape hyacinth, and we discuss whether it was named because its tiny round bell-shaped flowers look like a cluster of grapes (likely) or because they smell like grape bubble gum (less likely). At any rate, it's a long way from its compatriots that still come up in a mysterious fairy ring behind the old house foundation on the hill.

Liam flakes out, watching the clouds go over.


A bud bursts its binding. This might be a buckeye, or it might not. There's something sorta hickorylike about it.
He gets up, turns around, and I see his father in his face. I wonder if Bill ever sees me there.


Outwardly, I may have given him little more than his coloring and a pouty lower lip, but there is plenty of me inside that soul. Neither of us has much use for team sports. We'd rather watch clouds or draw.

It's time to let spring warm our faces and bring joy back to our hearts. Here's a photo I love from last week.


Chet Baker tells Nina that someone loves her. That's what spring, and Chet Baker, are for.