Bird Watcher's Digest and Me

 It has occurred to me that you might be interested in a brief history of my involvement with Bird Watcher’s Digest, the magazine I have been writing and painting for since 1986. I can’t quite believe it’s been 34 years! 

 

The magazine was launched from a brave notion, using my late in-laws’ retirement savings as they stood in 1978.

Bill Thompson Jr. and Elsa Ekenstierna Thompson, with Pokey. Clearly not 1978; more like 2009 or so. This is the den where a magazine was born. Now they're both gone, and the den is, too.

 My late mother-in-law, Elsa Thompson, took up birding in her 40’s, and thought there should be a digest for birdwatchers, since there was nothing of the kind out there. What a cool idea! It would have been between 1978 and 

1980 that I saw my first issue, featuring Roger Tory Peterson’s sooty terns, at Out of Town Newsstand in Harvard Square. Having only discovered that birding was a thing upon entering college as a lifelong but unconnected birdwatcher in 1976, I could NOT believe there was a magazine devoted to my passion! I remember standing there, reading it, marveling, and wondered if they would ever consider publishing my writing or painting. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t submit anything until 1986; I needed some time to hone my embryonic skills. Plus, the magazine’s interior was still being printed on newsprint when I saw it, and art looks ever so much better on glossy paper. 

My first cover, a stretching ruby-crowned kinglet, was published in 1986. Article after article, most illustrated by my watercolors, followed. I felt like the luckiest person in the world. 

 

My first 7 covers, spanning 1986-1992. I began writing for the magazine almost as soon as I started painting covers. The piping plover from 1988 has a big article about my work conserving piping plovers in Connecticut. There's a lot of personal history in these issues! To wit:

See that redpoll/junco cover, left, bottom row? Bill talked me into painting that for the Jan/Feb 1991 cover. He called me a lot more than he would have needed to, to get the painting over the finish line. By the time it came out on the cover, we were "talking," as my kids say.

 I didn’t meet BWD's (then) Managing Editor, Bill Thompson III until we collided at the World Series of Birding in May, 1990. We were married in 1993. Persuasive guy. 

I look at this photo and think, "Wha ha happen?" 

There followed a series of covers. Below are ones spanning 1993-1999. 

And here's 2000-2011.

Bill Thompson III was Editor and Publisher until he had to leave us in March, 2019. Though Bill’s bank of knowledge and energy was irreplaceable, Editor Dawn Hewitt comes as close as anyone could to filling his Size 12’s. Wendy Clark has added her considerable vision and energy as Publisher. I do my best to lean in and help the staff with anything remotely sciencey, as well as with thorny bird ID’s and bird feeding/housing/gardening advice. And I read every issue for scientific accuracy as well as flow and typos. By the time the magazine goes to press, it’s been by several mighty sharp sets of eyes.

 

I write a column called “True Nature” for every issue, right alongside such luminaries as David Bird, Mark Garland, Alvaro Jaramillo, Al Batt and Scott Weidensaul. Iowa’s fabulous Diane Porter writes frequently for the magazine as well. I also have a column in every issue of Watching Backyard Birds, which comes out in the months that Bird Watcher’s Digest doesn’t. It’s good to write a lot; to have to have something to show for all your rumination. I love sitting down to write a column, to winnow out all the things I see and then gather a lifetime of observations, to knead them all into dough and bake it into a story for our readers.

 

2013-2020.

35 years after that first little kinglet was published, I’ll have my 30th cover on the May/June 2022 issue! I've got something published in most issues, and I still feel like the luckiest person in the world to be affiliated with this magazine.

Here's the body of work as it stands...well, just the covers I've painted over the last 34 years. The articles and columns in many other issues are legion.

It’s pretty darned amazing that Bird Watcher's Digest is still humming along, cranking out excellent content for its beloved and very loyal subscribers. Chalk it up to love and sheer will. Thanks to that demon C-19, everybody’s been working from home since spring 2020—another thing that amazes me no end. HOW CAN IT BE 34 YEARS???

 

I guess what I’m winding up to is, “Why not subscribe now, when Bird Watcher’s Digest is having a half-off subscription sale?” I don’t know how they can give this magazine away for $15 yearly (and only $12 for Watching Backyard Birds!) I guess they’re banking on your loving it as much as I do, once you’ve gotten a load of it. Needless to say, it makes a terrific gift for that bird-loving friend—it can take you to the next birding level fast, wherever you’re starting from.

 

Publisher and Publisher Emeritus. Both worked their entire careers putting out the best bird watching magazine ever.

Oh! Here's that offer. And thank you very much for your indulgence. I hope you've enjoyed this retrospective--color, bird painting and a whole lot of love.

  https://birdwatchersdigest.com/promos/jz-holidaygifts2020.html

 

 

 

 

To Build a Fire

Feeling nostalgic already, I left the frost flowers before they could melt in the quick-warming sun 

and made my way down into the Valley of Orchids where on May 4, 2020, the kids and I found a population of showy orchis on our land,

                                                         Phoebe and showy orchis, backlit

one of the best and most unexpected things we've ever found here! There was a little bunch of them growing around a ring of mossy stones

stones that now, in November, look like this.

With awe and wonder, when we came down here back in May, it hit us that this mossy ring of rocks where delicate little orchids were growing  was a campfire ring the kids had built with their Daddy when they were very young. Late one January afternoon, as the sun was slipping down this valley, we had packed some hamburger, a cast-iron skillet, a can of beans, a little saucepan, silverware and bowls and various implements of fire and cavemannery down into the woods. I remember it clanking and rattling as we descended through briars and snow.

It was the coldest day of the year with snow lying deep, and it had taken absolutely forever to pick the site, gather kindling, get the hamburgers done and the baked beans even remotely warm, using the wet wood we scrounged from under the snow, and the feeble flames we tried to encourage by blowing on them. Many of Bill's highly exciting and hastily planned adventures were thus. A LOT of effort and brouhaha to accomplish something that would have been (as I muttered in my head) ever so much easier to do at home in the kitchen. 

My little saucepan and frypan all got black from the smoke and it was dead dark by the time we trudged back up out of the gully and home. Thank goodness he'd also thought to bring a flashlight! There were snow clothes piled deep in the foyer, icy puddles on the tile and lots of gear to unpack. That's what I remember, as unofficial crew, but I'm sure the kids remember it more glowingly!

And here we were, probably 16 years later, looking down at the ring of stones, remembering how good those burgers were, the taste of smoked beef mingling with the freezing air, when we finally were able to eat them. Remembering the trudge through the snow, and the sweet long-ago days when their big bounding dad had crazy ideas of what would be fun for all of us to do. 

I was thinking about all these things down on that little point of land, and I was thinking about how this land holds so many of our secrets, our memories and our joys, and just then I turned to my right to see a hollow beech, a miracle beech, with a shell of bark standing firm around nothing at all. It was missing its  heartwood.

I walked around to the other side of the tree. It doesn't look great, kind of cankery, in fact, but it gives little hint that it's completely hollow inside. 

There's a spray of leaves at the top, coming off live branches...it's making quite a show for all it's been through. 

The bark seems to be trying to meet itself on either side of the chasm, reaching out in strange protoplasmic shapes.

Trees never cease to amaze me, the way they find a way to survive the most awful insults-in this case, lethal heart rot. It takes a tree a long, long time to die, though, and it does a lot of living on the way.

And don't I sometimes feel like that beech tree, all hollowed out, but throwing branches and leaves out anyway, shouting "I'm alive! I'm alive! I get to be here! and hallelujah for that!"

because what else is there to do? There is so much to be celebrated on this good green earth. I get to cut trails on my own land, down to this magic valley full of snowy memories and spring orchids and beautiful oaks and beeches all year round. I get to bring my kids and dearest friends to this secret, almost-pristine hideaway that I actually own. That nobody's going to cut or ruin out from under us. I get to listen for the jingling bells of a good dog, circling around to come check on me as he makes his doggy dream rounds, free to run. And all that, my love of my work, and my wonderful kids and sisters and brother and friends, adds up to a life I feel deeply blessed to inhabit.

Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I finished hand- cutting the trail all the way down to the orchid patch, as a Thanksgiving gift to my kids and me. I tied yellow flagging all along trail, kicked rocks and logs out of the way, pulled up endless multiflora and honeysuckle plants, brutalized Russian olive shrubs that were too big to cut, and cleared head and heartspace all along the trail until it opened out into blessed beech forest you can see clear through.

Done with my labors, I came diagonally up a very steep slope, picking my way along a deer trail, and looked up at an enormous beech, thinking, "That's got to be our line tree, or someone would have cut it by now."

and sure enough, there were the foolish wires of human territoriality, buried deep in its elephant's skin. And stretching out behind it were the remains of a stone wall, a much more ancient and beautiful way to say, "This piece be mine." 

And scuffing around in the leaves a bit, I turned up a third way that humans serve notice; a surveyor's pin, demarcating the official edge of our property.

I felt the ancients around me--the old beeches; the people who nailed that wire to a young tree; the people before them who piled the shaly rock; the people before them to whom it didn't occur to mark anything.

 And the forest people who hide from us, and sometimes get hung up in our cruel wires.

I found their beds.

I found where the heat of their bodies had ironed the oak leaves. 

It's good to find the beds of the forest people

and to go from smilax to smilax, 

looking at the hard-won patina on their leaves, the only real color in the woods now.

I cut multiflora and honeysuckle like nobody's business, but I leave most of the smilax, because it belongs here, and several crazy, wonderful caterpillars need it.

I love those little leathern hearts, beat up but still glowing through the long, slow autumn.

Now, while the turkey brines and everyone is still asleep, Curtis and I are going down to check our work.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. 

Finding Frost Flowers

It was a typical crisp blue morning walk, November 18, with Curtis in high spirits and me following his lead. I love how his bells give a Doppler effect as he comes tearing by like a tiger train. 

 I never know where we'll end up on beautiful mornings like this. We often end up in strange places on gray mornings, too. 

It was a rare morning with the temperature around 28 degrees in this beautiful, protracted autumn. I was drawn down a trail I've recently re-opened, one I last cut when Phoebe was in a backpack on my back! I remember swinging the boltcutter style clippers as her sweet drowsy weight shifted from side to side. I was a pack mule then, and I still work like one. I have this idea that I'm going to cut trails to all my favorite places on our land. It's rather a big job, but oh what a delight it is to be able to walk without getting whipped and snagged! I'll git 'r' dun!! The trick is taking tiny bites of the 1,000 pound pumpkin,  not trying to eat it all at once. 

We came out into a badly overgrown gasline cut and my eye was drawn to white structures in the weeds.

First I saw one

and another, and another...

and it's fitting that this one is shaped like a heart, because I love love love finding these little things on a frosty morning!

Frost flowers! FROST FLOWERS!!

blooming only when the nights dip into the 20's (Fahrenheit)

followed by bright sun (or not, as I think about it; I don't think the sun has much to do with it, except that sudden dips of temperature like that generally are followed by bright sunny mornings)

The best ones look like ribbon candy. Far as I can figure out, frost flowers form when very cold temperatures shatter the cells in a still-moist plant stem, creating thin fissures through which water and

sap ooze. The liquid freezes as it is extruded, and the plant just keeps taking up water, probably through capillary action, because at that point, like the Wicked Witch, it's not only merely dead; it's really most sincerely dead. 

Now, I've seen people claim that the only plant that makes frost flowers is wingstem Actinomeris alternifolia, and I've seen them on wingstem, but I've also seen them on asters. And these were a first for me, because they were all on pennyroyal Hedeoma pulegioides! (Update: Nope, this is American Dittany, Cunila origanoides)

This is Ditanny,  after frost, of course. It smells divine, even then. A very potent inhabitant of dry  clearings. 

My father Dale Z. called it pennyroyal, and pronounced it "PENnaroyal" and, as was his way, sought out herbal drops containing it, many decades before that was considered a cool thing to do.  He was fascinated with horehound, too! My dad, man. What a guy. So I knew the smell of "pennaroyal" somewhere in my bones, knew that's what it had to be the first time I ran into it in this clearing back in about 1993. "Huh!" I sez to meself. "That must be pennaroyal!" And I was close, but it's dittany.

 I'm so curious now, to know what makes a plant eligible to produce frost flowers. Wingstem and asters are composites, but dittany is a mint. I looked and couldn't find frost flowers on anything but pennyroyal in this clearing. More data needed. More data is always needed.

Frost flowers, to be quite honest, look at first glance like Styrofoam packing peanuts scattered in the leaf litter, and I'm sure many people don't even think twice to wonder what they are when they see them, but do please think twice, and get down and admire them before they're gone.

The best ones look like ribbon candy, spun silk. You have to get down on all fours to shoot them properly, on elbows and stomach to shoot them best

and I am happy to say that I am still vulnerable to dog bombing while trying to make photos of them.

This dog is not as liable to step on my subjects as the first one was, but like The Bacon, he seems to linger in the background longer than might be expected or even proper

and what are the chances that a photographer would end up with two dogs in a row who are terrible camera hogs

who know exactly what they're doing and even leer a bit as they zip through my careful compositions

two dogs who are shameless, deliberate photobombers

unless that first little photobomber somehow arranged to have another sent my way

or perhaps is coaching him from his pile of fleecy blankies inside a Dogburger of softness in the Great Beyond?

It's thoughts like this that flit through my mind when certain dogs do certain things that fill me with joy 

and make me wonder if somebody somewhere is pulling strings so I won't miss him so terribly on those cold crispy mornings that Chet, having practically no fur on his undercarriage, wasn't so keen on

the mornings Curtis loves like I do.