Subject To the Natural Forces

The theme of this spring, at least for me, is: 

There are powers much larger than yours. Don't think you have control here.

For someone who has great reverence for the many forces of nature, looks to nature for comfort and succor; for everything, really, it's kind of exciting to see her exert her vast power. 

To see spring coming on after a winter that started late and ended hard, to see the trees reddening and blossoming against the greening hills. To know they won't and can't be stopped.

To see storms raking across the land, to be sent to the basement by sirens and a suddenly blatting cellphone. And to realize, as we scurry downstairs, that these are but the pitiful efforts of a colony of ants to tell one another that something evil this way comes.

Flooding has put us on the back roads, taken time out of busy days. Like it or not, we are forced to circumvent swollen creeks and road collapses. You can rail against it or decide it's a gift in disguise. For me, being forced down unknown back roads is nothing but an adventure. I sit forward, hands tight on the wheel, waiting for the next amazement, storing away the route for future use.

 Look at the light, look at the land, live in this hour. You'll be busy 'til you die.

The beauty of a red roof before a curtain of rain, glowing like a ruby dropped in the grass. This, on a back road I would never have taken if the rest weren't flooded.

Looking for the gift in everything: that's the trick to feeling happy and satisfied with your lot, whatever it may be.

I wouldn't have had a visit with this beloved old dame unless my regular route were flooded.

With her windows out
This one won't stand much longer
I treasure her now
knowing that one day
Without fanfare, she'll be gone
and all her trees too

Forces, powers greater than mine are everywhere. The only thing I can count on now is change. And change can be a cleansing, a sweeping away of everything that holds you in place. A flood. 

Off we go now.

And the skies clear and everything is different.

I'm astonished to find myself jumping out of my car and making the exact same image, two days later. The eye and brain, working together, are wonderful things. Light changes everything, doesn't it? But the essential mystery remains.

Someday I hope to work up the courage to peek inside, walk her aching floors, see who is living there now. I'll have to deduce that by their droppings, but I'm good at that. Something in her fortress of evergreens stops me. The cavegirl in me is afraid to be caught in there, behind dark walls.

It's the world's largest bird house now.

I think I love it so because it reminds me of a house on the prairie, with its shelterbelt of great white pines and the open sky all around. One pine took a terrible beating in the last snowstorm. Pines break, that's what they do. Soft wood in hard times.

On this blindingly sunny day, the flood is exciting. I wonder with a kind of electric charge in my brain, a frisson of danger, just how high it will go.

Yes. I can still make it to town across the last bridge that remains to me. Will I make it back home?

Close to the road. Please, no closer. But I can only ask politely. 

The creek isn't listening.

The river wouldn't crest for another four days. Under glorious skies, it crept up and up, even after the creeks had gone down. Here, it's swallowing the levee.

And the tiny ants paint numbers on our bridge abutments, to tell each other what's bad, and then what could be so much worse. It's been here, and don't forget it.

If you're reading this, you're underwater now.

The message to me? Be thankful for what you have. Stop and appreciate at all you've been given. Breathe spring's sweet air and look for her messengers. They're all around you, flying in by night and blossoming by day, singing the song that can't be stopped.

Listen to it!

And The Three Graces dance, each in her own way.

Red maple, sugar maple, black tupelo, boogeyin' down.

Copperhead Catchin'--Who You Gonna Call?

We're having some crazy spring weather here. The night of April 9, there was a tornado warning, from a wall cloud with rotation spotted about 20 miles southwest of here. It passed without harm, but it sure got the sireens going, people headed to the bathrooms and basement. I actually bundled all my baby bird paintings for the new book down to a secure closet in the basement. That's 13 years of work that, on the brink of publishing it, I'm not anxious to reprise, and couldn't if I wanted to.

It rains and rains and rains, making us wish for a transcontinental water pipeline, so we could send some to our drought-stricken friends out West. Just not fair. 

 Bill and I were up for a couple of hours the night of the 8th, me sopping and wringing towels into a lobster pot as water poured in over the basement door stoop; he outside drowning, digging an emergency trench across the lawn to shunt water away from the door. It worked! It won't be much fun to mow over, but our music equipment and my paintings are safe and dry. I loved that little bit of ingenuity that actually worked, and saved the day. The whole basement would have flooded without that little trench.

Wish I could say the same about the foyer, where a badly-hung gutter is feeding water back into the sofit. Drip, drip, drip into a spaghetti pot. Gutter guy who hung it wrong is totally hiding from us. Grrr.

Everyone's affected by the deluge. Even the snakes. My artist neighbor Beth Nash called about an hour ago. 

"Do you still have your snake hook?" she asked, her voice quite a bit higher pitched than usual. I didn't even ask why. I knew.

"Yep. I'll be right over."

I grabbed the tongs and an empty garbage can with a clamp-down lid, jumped in the car and was over there in less than four minutes. With one stop to dump out the dead mouse in the can, pee-yeeww!

 I knew what it would be, but I never dreamt where it would be. 

This is right where you do NOT want a venomous snake. Over your head.

Yep. Beth was trying to close the door that leads from her studio to her greenhouse, and something was catching in it. Oh. OH! She said the head was hanging down right over her head!

Now Beth is no wussy. She's not afraid of copperheads. She just doesn't want them right in her studio. A little quirk of hers, I guess. Her studio's in the basement of their barn, and the copperheads just love the rather pourous stone foundation and the fact that it's heated. She's got some serious copperhead stories.

Like me, Beth respects all animal life, and she values the copperheads for the mouse control they offer. Just wishes they weren't venomous, and that they'd stay out of her work and living spaces. Hey, me, too.

It was no trick at all to gently work the tongs in that loop of snake sticking out and ease her down into the can. She was still a bit sluggish from the winter. An April copperhead is an early one, but it's Beth's second of the season. We usually don't see them until July at our house.

Probably a female, getting on to 3' long. The thing to do here was to relocate her. Since I was all suited up with my muckboots on and had her contained, I offered to find a spot for her. I kinda know the spots around here. I thought as I drove, and made up my mind. I turned down a very steep dirt road toward an abandoned house I thought might offer dry harbor for a frightened copperhead. 

Where nobody would go. 

At least nobody would go without expecting to see a copperhead there.

Cricks are up a bit, I noticed. 

Road was getting washed out in a hurry. By now it was pouring, another frog-drowner in full swing.

The display of ancient daffodils by the house I chose. I call this one Raggedy Ann, a shaggy double variety, but the ones at this homestead are a neat variant with sharp-pointed, longer leaves and a distinctly star-shaped flower. Raggedy Ann is the oldest daffodil around, the most likely to be found in really old abandoned farmsteads around here. I'm told she's the first daffodil the colonists brought from England.

I dumped the can out and was very glad I was wearing my high muck boots, because Mrs. Snake wasn't so thrilled at being dumped. She took a bead on me and struck.

Don't worry. I was holding the can lid in front of me because I figured she might strike. Inside of her mouth was white, almost like a cottonmouth. Science Chimp, always taking notes. She got gone in a hurry.  

I was very pleased that it was so dry under the old flooring. On my way down here, I had looked at and rejected a number of natural rock ledges for possible release because they were too wet. If she'd wanted to be wet, she wouldn't have climbed up above Beth's door.  Note the skull to the right.

Housecat, along with a bunch of its scattered, chewed up bones. Keep 'em inside, folks. Coy-wolves love 'em.

Copperhead Castle, from inside. It's a fixer-upper, but it's got charm. And hey! it's got copperheads and cat skulls.

I will confess to totally loving getting that call, relocating a nice snake to a reasonably suitable place, and helping out a wonderful neighbor who's helped us out a bunch. I made Beth pose for a commemorative shot. Country girls, doin' it for theyselfs.

I know who she reminds me of in this photo. My hero of heroes.

The shots in this post are not up to my usual standards, but you try photographing a copperhead over your head when you have enough adrenaline running through your veins to kill a cow. OK, now wrassle it gently down without hurting it.

Now go see Beth's incredible art. I own several of her recent paintings. You should too!

This one hangs on my bedroom wall. It spoke to me. I can't imagine why.

 bethnash.com

Red Alert for Hummingbirds

Don't buy this. Don't pay $6.49 for something that you could make much better yourself for about a dime. This is not hummingbird food. It's sugar water, tarted up to look pretty with Red Dye #40. And it's really, really bad for hummingbirds. Read on.

She came to me as they all do, over the phone, with a worried, uncertain voice describing her predicament. She’d blundered into a chemical plant and was found, disabled, around 11 at night. Who knows how long she’d been there, circling the ceiling, bumping her tiny head until she fell senseless at someone’s feet? Repeated efforts to get her to drink nectar had failed, and she was fading fast. I met the caller in town, he on his lunch break, and he opened a makeshift containment system that consisted of two Chinet bowls, lined with tissues and taped together. She was lying on her side, curled in a C, as I would be were I a hummingbird who had been without food for 18 hours. I took the syringe of bright red nectar and inserted her bill into it, as he had repeatedly tried. I held her until she began to struggle, and in struggling her bill opened slightly. Some nectar flowed in and her tongue at last began to flicker, then lash, and red nectar poured out of the corners of her mouth as she took sustenance for the first time. Poor little thing. I smiled at the man. “The key is to piss them off enough so they cuss at you, and their bill opens, and then they get what you’re trying to do.”


He told me that she’d been able to fly when they first found her, as high as 12 feet in the air, but only in a tight spiral. That’s OK, as long as she can fly and get altitude, I thought. As long as her wings work, she has a chance at being a hummingbird again, instead of a sad little scrap of feathers like she is now.

I took her home and made a place for her in a ten-gallon tank, lined with paper towels and fitted with low perches and a feeder.


I filled it with Nektar-Plus, a hummingbird maintenance diet that includes proteins and vital nutrients—a far cry from the dyed commercial “hummingbird food” she’d been offered. I don’t fault people for buying it; the labeling makes it seem so much better than simple table sugar and water, but it’s not. It’s horrid. If you didn’t have doubts about feeding commercial preparations, check this out. She’d last had commercial nectar around 2 pm on Tuesday. At 2 pm on Wednesday, her droppings still were dyed vivid red.

Red dye that is used to color commercial “hummingbird food” (generally Red Dye #40) is derived from coal tar or petrochemicals. It has proven carcinogenic and mutagenic (meaning that it induces tumors) in rats and mice. Further, it decreases reproduction rates and increases the incidence of both internal and skin tumors in these animals. It is banned in Denmark, Belgium, France, Germany, Austria, Sweden, and Norway, but is still in use in the U.S.

Because it has not been directly tested on hummingbirds, manufacturers of artificial nectars containing red dye are on solid ground when they claim that no proof exists that it is harmful to hummingbirds. That’s true. But neither is there any research that indicates that red dye is not harmful to hummingbirds. They also state that the dyes used are FDA approved for human consumption. That’s true, but the FDA has also set limits for consumption, and recommends that people not ingest large quantities of a single dye product. However, when we set up a hummingbird feeder with dyed nectar, this is just what we’re encouraging hummingbirds to do. And that’s the core of the problem.

How much red dye does a hummingbird consume when it visits a feeder containing artificially colored nectar?  A banded and color-marked rufous hummingbird observed by hummingbird researcher David Patton took an average of 10 grams of nectar from the same feeder each day. A popular dry nectar mix contains .21 mg. of dye per gram of dry mix. Combined with water as directed, a gram of the solution contains .04 mg of Red #40. A hummingbird taking 10 grams of the mix ingests about .42 mg. of red dye per day. This works out to .12 mg/g of body weight. It doesn’t sound like much, until you note that the World Health Organization recommends a daily limit of only .007 mg/g of body weight in humans. And DNA damage in mice showed up at concentrations as low as .01 mg/g of body weight.

**Thanks to Stacy Jon Peterson, author of the original piece from which these calculations come. And to Sheri Williamson, for alerting me. If you'd like to learn more, go here.

The stunning truth is that a hummingbird taking artificially dyed nectar may be ingesting the dye in concentrations that are 17 times the accepted daily intake recommended for humans, and 12 times higher than the concentration found to induce DNA damage in mice. And they may be ingesting it every single day, all summer long. Yikes.  Suddenly, the anecdotal reports from hummingbird rehabilitators of bill and liver tumors in hummingbirds known to feed on dyed nectar are cast into an alarming light. It’s true that no solid research yet exists to prove that red dye is harmful to hummingbirds. Hummingbirds are not humans; are not mice. But all hummingbird feeders have red parts that serve to attract the birds, and artificial nectars have little if any added nutritional value over sugar water. We’re only pleasing ourselves with the dyed nectar. After all I’d read, I wondered why anyone who loves hummingbirds would feed them something that might be harmful to them, in concentrations that are 17 times what’s thought to be safe for humans.

If you'd like to know what happened to this little hummingbird, just hit Hummingbird Hospital Part II. And from there, you can hit Newer Post and get the rest of the story. We all love the rest of the story.

Thanks for letting me bend your ear about this. Now, on the tiny chance you've gone out and bought that ruby-red stuff, go dump it down the sink and mix up one part table sugar to four parts water. Boil it, let it cool, fill your feeders with something about 1/10 the cost that won't harm these precious little mites.

This post has gone through the roof, with almost 20,000 unique views since I posted it! I've been asked how to clean hummingbird feeders.  I'll write the answer here for your convenience. 
 I can tell you what I do. First, I avoid any feeder that can't be completely disassembled for washing. Second, I take the entire feeder apart and wash every part in very hot water with a little dish soap. Yep, soap. I rinse thoroughly, allow to dry, and refill. I use brushes and Q-tips around nectar ports.
If you've got mold problems, you're putting too much solution in and letting it sit too long. Put out only as much solution as will be taken in two or three days. If that means going to a smaller feeder, so be it.
The other thing that really helps, I've found, is to use filtered water for nectar solutions. Since I got a water filter for our home (it has four filters and a UV finisher) I used only that water for nectar, and I never have mold. But then again, I never let it sit for longer than five days in cool weather and three in warm weather, whether they're drinking it or not.

I also boil up 1:1 sugar-water concentrate (one cup white table sugar to one cup water) and store that in a jar in my fridge. When it's time to make up solution, I add one part concentrate to three parts filtered water. Much, much easier than mixing the 1 part sugar, 4 parts water solution every time. If I make several cups of concentrate, I've got nectar fixings for a long time. And I'm not taking up a bunch of room in my fridge with dilute solution. Been there, done that!


Hope this helps.