Baker at the Beech

Recently, I joined the Nature Blog Network.

It's a consortium of nature bloggers, the brainchild of the estimable Mike Bergin of 10,000 Birds. It's the first such group I've ever joined. I live under a cyber-rock, if you haven't noticed by now. When memes or awards go around, and people are kind enough to tap me, it's like throwing that meme or award into some kind of black hole. The meme stops here. I am sorry. So I don't know nothin' about webrings or chatrooms or guilds, and I kind of like it like that, to be truthful. Picture me in a little lace cap, flailing my apron.

Anyway, the Nature Blog Network's central concept is to get all these good blogs in front of other bloggers, and thereby get them read by more people. It's easy to join, even for a Luddite like me. Just click on the link! I salute you, Mike Bergin. It's a noble goal. There are so many people putting the good stuff out for free every day. It blows my mind. I could easily spend all day every day reading blogs, but I don't, because I have to like, do a lot of other stuff, and somehow squeeze a decent post out 5 days a week. It's the same reason I don't watch TV, except for American Idol. A girl has her needs.

So imagine my giddy and totally overblown delight when my blog shot to #1 on the Nature Blog Network for a shining day, meaning it was getting the most hits of any of the blogs so far signed up. I even displaced Mike. Oh! The ecstasy! So I got all uppity and started thinking I was really something. But it was short-lived, because then some Real Blogs joined the network, and smooshed me back down to #7, where I struggle to stay. I don't know how these blogs get all those readers. 10,ooo page hits a day? Their writers probably do not live under rocks. They probably pass around memes and awards and read everybody else's blog and comment like crazy and do all those nice-person things I avoid. They probably lead upright, wholesome lives and visit shut-ins, delivering casseroles. They probably know all about webrings and chatrooms and Wiccan Web practices I am too incurious to investigate. I know when I'm beat. Visiting the Nature Blog Network for me now is an exercise in much-needed humility. But there's more.

In that narrow window when I was bouncing around between #1 and 2, tromping all over the other Nature Blog Network members, and loving every minute of it, someone posted the following review of my blog:

Sometimes some great bird photos and commentary, but more often lots of personal stuff about Julie's farm, kids, and especially her pet dog.

Pause to reflect. Hmmm. All that is true. Sometimes I get a decent bird photo. I'm not a bird photographer, but if a monkey bangs on a typewriter long enough...Sometimes I write something interesting enough to spark some discussion. Sometimes. But more often...uh-oh. Lots of personal stuff about my farm (minus the chickens and cows, I guess), my kids, and especially my pet dog.

One of the completely ridiculous things about tending a blog, and its resultant Web presence, is getting caught up in rankings and hit counters and numbers of comments and, in some strange bit of alchemy, turning all that in your mind into some real assessment of your personal worth. So I read that review with a small snort, and it still makes me laugh every time I read it. There's something about the words, "especially her pet dog" that sound so...I dunno...like maybe the reviewer doesn't exactly dig my potatoes. Like, just don't bother with this one. It's a thinly disguised--errrp---mommypetblog.

So, like the craven, groveling person that I truly am, I scrambled around and posted a whole bunch of my less crappy bird photos and tried to think up some great commentary. (Love me! Love me! I don't know who you are, Anonymous Reviewer, but maybe you'll like THIS?? or THIS?? Wait! What if I paint a huge bird picture and tell you all about it? Will you like THAT??) I was like Sally Field, accepting her Oscar. "You love me! You truly do love me!"

(Minus, of course, the Oscar, and the uh, love.)

Finally, I admitted to myself that it's true. I'm not a bird photographer, and I don't actually aspire to be. If I took fabulous photos of birds, I'd probably stop painting them. I need to keep painting birds.

I do like taking pictures of birds so I can share them with you. I like writing about birds, but there are too many other interesting things in the world to focus solely on feathers.

I like writing about my kids, especially as they discover the natural world. Except for a couple of lapses in which I gave too much information about their effluvia, I don't think I've crossed the line into mommyblogging.

I like taking pictures of Chet Baker, because it is obvious to me that you, my admittedly small but growing bunch of regular readers, enjoy seeing him and reading about his adventures.

It's true. What you're gonna get here more often is

lots of personal stuff about my farm, kids, and especially my pet dog.

And so I return to my roots.


Some of the beeches on the bit of forest I've been walking lately are old enough to wear pants. Cool how the bark looks like any other tree's on this beech's pants.

A bit of Boston terrier trivia: The breed is an American original, said to be the product of a cross between a white rat terrier (an extinct breed) and a bulldog. I see elements of both personalities in Chet Baker. He's got that kind of kooky terrier energy, that go-for-it nature that I love (and, in my own flabby way, would like to think I share). The energy is balanced by the bulldog's phlegmatic, comfy, loving nature, and is most often expressed when Baker flops down and sleeps for 12 hours straight, waking up only to get snorgled or move his lazy carcass to track the puddle of sun on the floor.

On a recent walk on our new ground, I stopped to marvel at a beech tree that was little more than a shell, with some pretty vivacious looking sprouts miraculously emerging from the rotted, hollow trunk. Chet Baker immediately sensed its critter-housing potential, and set about exploring it as only a nutty Boston terrier can. He vanished. I could hear snorfling and scratching, but Baker had been engulfed by the tree.

Clearly, he smelled coon and squirrel in the rotted hulk. There had to be a way up in there.
Using his rocket-propelled hinders, Baker launched himself up into the heart of the beech.

Meanwhile, I went around to the other side to peek in a rotted hole, and saw this:
I could see the wheels turning. Chet came around to my side and tried out that entrance, too. It looked like a breech birth.
So I ran around to the front of the tree and got this image of his soft, ottery throat as he gazed up into the hollow trunk:
What a little goofball. Even though it's blurry, this is my favorite shot from the session:
That, my friends, is the terrier in the Boston terrier. Because I am a primitive blogger, and my first attempt to embed a video will likely end in failure, I will refer you to a link for a video of the anthem, "God Loves a Terrier," sung by Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara, from Best in Show, a movie I would have been perfect for. I could step right into Catherine O'Hara's role without even STUDYING. Songs like this get sung in our kitchen every day! I am a Crazy Dog Lady. Christopher Guest, are you listening?

Dang! I think I figured out how to embed a video! It is my valentine to you, gentle readers.

A Rare Blue

If you're going to brag on your big sweetie, Valentine's Day is as good a day as any. I owe Bill of the Birds a life morph. For those of you who aren't avid birders, and who don't split lifelisting hairs, a life morph is a color phase of a species that you've never seen before. The flocks of snow and Ross' geese at Bosque del Apache NWR are fairly ubiquitous, and their members can number in the tens of thousands. The vast majority of those tens of thousands are white-morph birds. Big white goose=Snow goose. Little white goose=Ross' goose. Most people don't bother to comb through them. Bill did. And he found a bird that set the refuge afire: a blue morph Ross' goose.

Ross' geese are like shrinky-dink snow geese. Much smaller, more compact, much cuter, actually, with pushed-in faces and stubby pink and blue bills. Both snow and Ross' geese come in a blue morph, which can breed with the white morphs and are in every way still snow or Ross' geese, except for their plumage color. It's like red or gray morph screech owls--just a different color of the same species, nothing more.

Blue morph snow geese are not as common as white morph, but they're tolerably common and easy to find. Here's one.This blue goose's underwing is a map of color-coded feathers. Look at those gorgeous underwing coverts, especially the ovoid pad of axillars, which are long, flexible, gossamer- textured feathers in the wingpit, that serve to contour the bird in flight, so wind doesn't eddy in the angle between wing and body. Lovely!

And here's a blue goose flying with a snow goose, perhaps its mate or its parent.Blue morph Ross' geese are another thing altogether. Very, very rare.

Here it is: the hopelessly sharp and classy little blue-morph Ross' goose that Bill found, rarest of the rare. Sorry it's so blurry, but it was a long, long way off. That's a white-morph Ross' in the foreground.
Here's another shot, in which you can see a great big white-morph snow goose in the upper left, and a white-morph Ross' next to the blue Ross'. I was stunned by the beauty of the rare blue bird, really more black than blue, with its zippy black-drawn tertials, its perfect white head, and clean markings. Thanks, Bill of The Birds.
That about does it for the New Mexico posts. Sorry I'm jumping around so much lately, taking old preserves off the pantry shelf. We're getting ready for two trips back-to-back and our lives are like a whirling wind tunnel leading to those departures. Imagine going from the humid lowlands of Guatemala to the frigid, windswept plains of Nebraska in March without even getting to come home to change out your suitcase. That's what happens when you book a festival two years in advance. Another life lesson for the Chimp.

The Rising

I've been grasshoppering lately, but as an obligate ant-blogger, I went back in the pantry and looked, to find this long-overlooked post from November. I hope you'll forgive me the sudden jolt from my Ohio backyard to New Mexico, but I didn't want it to go bad on me, so here it is. I like this post for the dose of reality it brings to the romance of bird photography.

On the one afternoon we had free and together at Bosque del Apache, the light was perfect, the air was warm, the colors were stunning, and the geese were cooperative. I remembered having found a lot of waterfowl on one impoundment, and suggested to Bill that we go check it out for its photographic potential. Instead of canvasbacks and redheads, what we found was a mixed flock of snow, blue and Ross' geese. And they were doing the most amazing thing: rising up, flying over to a nearby cornfield, staying a little while, then coming back to the impoundment. We stood on the dike and watched in amazement, our cameras clicking madly. I was able to document one rise in a series of pictures, which I'll give you now:

1. The geese give a great clamor of calls and begin to lift off the water.


2. The wind from their downstrokes writes on the water.
3. They gain altitude.
4. They rapidly get closer. Autofocus is the only option. I'm firing madly and laughing like a hyena, but you can't hear me over the clamoring geese. See the ripples on the water? I'll tell you about that later.

5. The bulk of the flock is directly overhead now.

6. I turn to catch part of the flock going over.
7. The flock on high.
Now, about those ripples on the water. Take a look at this lovely flock, coming right over our heads. See anything to be alarmed about? Let's take a closer look.Uh-huh. Pretty much every bird that takes off lightens its load by pooping. That's what the marks on the water's surface are all about. And mixed with the exultation and clamor of their liftoff is a pattering rain of warm goose poop. These are big birds, folks. So the soundtrack from the photographers clustered on the dike is gasps of wonder followed by exclamations of disgust. I had a hat on, and I've been pooped on by everything from terns to macaws, so I didn't mind. They scored on the front of my khakis. That's what field clothes are for.
This is one of my favorite shots of the session, for its symmetry and the poetry of the birds' synchronous wingbeats. But I have to note, being an observant person, that the uppermost bird is in mid-poop. I guess that's what Photoshop is all about. If I knew how to use it, I'd probably still leave the poop in. Why delete any information? Information is manna to Science Chimps.

I'll take a patter of warm goose poop any day, for shots like these. Oh, how I'd love to be back in November's sunny New Mexico, as the sleet patters on frozen boilerplate snow outside.Just remember to keep your mouth shut, should you ever be so lucky as to witness a rising.