Enter Flag

I wrote a blogpost with lots of video of a certain tufted titmouse doing all kinds of hopeful things: picking at terrycloth out of boredom, glugging down a big chunk of hard boiled egg yolk all by himself; picking up some special food I made for him out of a dish. And then everything suddenly went south and the next morning his head was upside down, and he was helpless again. Nothing I did made any difference. I kept feeding him and gently manipulating his neck, hoping to ease him out of it, but he faded before my eyes. He had a seizure and died at 8:14 AM on December 3. It was hard. I was very sad. I was mad at myself for telling you all his story before I knew how it would end. I'm not usually that rash. I usually protect my readers from the worst stuff. I wanted to spread some joy, that this little bird was going to have a fighting chance. And in the end, he didn't. That's how it goes in rehab, and especially with head trauma. Recovery is anything but certain. Those birds that hit your window, lie there for awhile, and fly away? There's always more to the story, and sometimes it's a story you don't want to hear.

Early that morning, right at daybreak, I was sitting in my recliner, staring out the window at the slowly lightening meadow. I was putting off checking on the titmouse because he'd been noticeably weaker when I tucked him in the night of December 2. I didn't even want to peek at him, so I sat and wrote in my journal and watched the meadow taking shape in the rising light.

And a doe came walking across the meadow, along the edge where I stop mowing the yard. I grabbed the living room binoculars (there are also bedroom binoculars, kitchen binoculars and studio binoculars--lots of binoculars) and studied her. I recognized her face instantly. My God, it was Flag!

                                                                             29 Oct 2017

Now, it was too dark to get a photo, but my binoculars picked up every detail as I scurried from window to window. I will say I recognized her from the first glance. The first thing I noticed were oversized buff eye-rings. The next thing I noticed were her smallish, rounded ears. I checked her body type: long, with rather short legs. Then I checked her bib--large but indistinct. Oh my God, she had big white flashes between her toes--bigger on the hind feet! It's Flag-it's Flag!! The last thing to check was her tail. When I finally got a good look at it, it was pale red on top, with no black on it--which is unusual. Put those six features together and my often muddled but occasionally marvelous brain spits out one answer: It's Flag!

                                 

                                                                           1 Feb 2017

It was Flag. I had not the slightest doubt. I had not seen her since March 2018! Where had she been?

        

 6 Mar 2018--the last time I saw her.

She'll never tell. Flag is very special to me. She is, as far as I know, Ellen's last surviving offspring. Ellen was the crooked little doe I followed for nine years. Ellen was killed by an arrow right along my driveway early on the morning of November 2, 2016, wasted, left for me and the coyotes to find.

Her twin fawns, Pinky and Flag, were only five or six months old. God bless Buffy for taking them on. Buffy had been Ellen's closest companion; I always suspected she was Ellen's sister. 

Here's Buffy in back, and Flag in front. 

Now, Buffy's in the lead. See how Buffy's legs and pelt are suffused with ochre? She was buffy all over, hence the name. 

                                                                             29 Oct 2017

This is my earliest photo of Flag, 14 Dec. 2016. What jumps out at you? For me, it's the white between her toes. What a gift that little marker is. 

                                         

Her twin brother, Pinky, had white toe flashes too.

          

         12 Jan 2017

By October 18, 2017, Pinky had grown his first spikes. You can see the pink nose for which I named him. 

I lost track of Pinky after that fall, as one loses track of bucks. It's not that I wasn't looking for him...it's that he never turned up again.  But Flag, being a small doe, survived. 

                                                                            17 Oct 2017

                                                                         9 Dec. 2017

                                                                              11 Dec. 2017

Here are those small rounded ears, that unmarked tail showing well. 

                                                                            17 Jan 2017

She reminds me so much of Ellen in these shots. Man, I miss those deer coming around. 

                                                                             4 Nov 2017

To have Flag come walking through the backyard, on the very morning when another soul had to leave, was such a gift. I had bonded pretty fiercely with that titmouse, and I was determined to see him through. I thought what I'd be seeing him through to was release, but it didn't work out that way. So it goes some of the time, too much of the time. Seeing Flag helped so much. She spoke of  persistence against all odds, of hope, just as my own hopes were being dashed. 

17 Oct 2017

Look at what remains, she said. Look at all you still have that brings you joy. My mother and brother and Aunt Buffy are gone, but I'm still here. I have fawns you haven't met. And that might have something to do with the cur-dog you brought here, mightn't it? 

                                                                            30 Jan 2018

Yes, Flag, it might. I am going to keep watching for you, as I have every sunrise since I saw you. Like seeing a ghost, it was. I need a fresh portrait of you, little short-legged Garbo among does, small like your mother and your aunt, and so dear to me. Oh my gosh, I have just noticed the two small white dots atop your shiny black nose. I've looked, and they're in every photo. Attention. Attention. Attention. Nothing is too small to notice. Everything is important, everything is a clue.

I came in from a long morning of sawing sumac and hauling honeysuckle around 11 AM and was out on the deck tracking  Curtis when a big chocolate-colored buck emerged from the newly cleared area. Nice to have a way through the honeysuckle, innit? I had neither binoculars nor camera, and I raced through the living room, cursing, to get the closest pair of bins. The living room binoculars had migrated to the foyer. One can't have too many strewn around the house... I knocked over a hand-made end table in my rush, atop which, as it happened, was a box with an antique porcelain elephant inside.  (I had to stop to laugh for a minute while writing this; it's sooo Zick.) The table and box went flying. All this I noted as I streaked past, but Job One was to get the binoculars. Nothing else mattered. Happily, neither the table nor the bubble-wrapped elephant in its box were hurt in the least, while I have another spectacular bruise forming on my thigh, to join the bruises already there, from the butt ends of branches and cruel rose canes that I fight every morning in my "daily practice" of mano a mano combat with invasive plants. By the time I raced back, jumping over the fallen table, binocs in hand, the buck had leapt across the meadow and was but a dark tail disappearing into the pines. See, that's what deer do to me.  They make a blur of me. I want so badly to know them better, to trace their arcs, as I traced Ellen's and Buffy's. I will knock myself silly in pursuit of knowledge like that. And the only way to get it:  Be. There.

As I sit here writing, I'm thinking of a bit of Robert Frost's poem, "Birches:" 

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

And so I dream of going back to be.

It’s when I’m weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

From a twig’s having lashed across it open.

I'd like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

One of my eyes is indeed weeping from a twig's having lashed across it open. (God, the beauty and precision of Frost's wording).  It hurts, but I expect it'll be all right. The other eye isn't weeping; it's watching five brand new blue jays who have come to the yard at long, long last. They've finally arrived, weeks later than usual, and it's time to pile up the cinder blocks and build a new Cyanocity jay feeder for them. Hope I don't drop a cinder block on my foot, but I hold the possibility open. 

Right off the bat, I don't recognize any of them, but I'm peering, Popeye-like,  at the camera playback and sorting through each tiny feature, because this is how we learn.

                   

  For those who wonder, yes, Flag is named for the fawn in The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. A formative book among many formative books. I might have identified with Jody, who raised Flag, just a little bit.

Earth Day, Every Day

It's raining this morning. The continual soft patter of drops on the roof and windows is the Lord's way of telling me to sit down, for once. Take a load off, do something other than dash around, muttering, hauling the garden cart behind me, full of tools and piles of weeds and bags of bulbs needing to be planted. Steady rain is the only thing that will send me indoors in late April.

 

A quick, unsolicited and unpaid ad here: If you're looking for garden gloves, look no farther than Foxgloves. They fit like a second skin, breathe like nitrile gloves don't, and protect my hands from rocks and dirt and drying. This time of year, I automatically put them on whenever I head outside, so I'll be ready to pull weeds and grub around in the soil.  Never walk by a weed, that's my credo, and it keeps my gardens pretty clean. 

They wear like iron. Yet they're sensitive enough to use for planting. Amazing! I finally wore through the fingertip of my green pair after more than a decade. When I'm finally through gardening for the day I just wash my hands with soap and water while wearing them, remove them and squeeze them out, then lay them in the sun to dry so they're clean and ready for tomorrow. Best of all, they now come in Virginia bluebell blue!! Hello, Mother's Day gift! Get them here.

Those of you on Facebook (stay with me here, even if you aren't) will be familiar with the occasional "challenge" that goes around like a a flu bug several times of year. In the one most frequently aimed at me, people tag you (a way of getting your cyber-attention) and "challenge" you to post a nature photo every day. Um. Wut. I do that anyway. That's all I do on Facebook. I post nature photos every day. So...the challenge is to, what...post a better nature photo every day? A more naturey nature photo every day? Or are we just not thinking about this when we challenge a naturalist/photohound to post daily photos of nature?

That's kind of my first, gut reaction to Earth Day. I'll be making the rounds of my bluebird boxes or down on all fours, grubbing in the actual earth, when it hits me that humans have declared April 21 to be "Earth Day." The day we all talk about saving the planet. And I'll smile and remember back to the first Earth Day in 1970, what a big deal it was, and remember when the James River in Richmond, VA, when I was twelve, literally stank and foamed brown with pollution; when ospreys and eagles were so decimated by DDT that the females couldn't set their eggs without cracking them, and I realize that humans designating a day to talk about taking action to save the planet is important. It's important, like the massive bald eagle nest, stuffed into a powerline support, that  I saw from the bridge the last time I drove across the James River. It's important, like the osprey parachuting in to a nest full of healthy chicks on a channel marker in the Chesapeake Bay. I think about all the birds I thought I would never see, when I was twelve, and all around me I could see and smell the effects of humanity collectively soiling its own nest.

Coming of age in Richmond in the 70's was tough. The bulldozers were so busy making small roads into highways; wildlife habitat into shopping centers; leveling every patch of woodland and old farm and orchard that I and the wild things needed to survive. All I wanted was to get out of there, for they had left nothing for us. As I think about it, coming of age in Richmond has a lot to do with why I've stuck myself way out here in Appalachian Ohio, on the way to nowhere. And then I smile and shake my head. There's no getting away from humans and their nest soiling, especially when you live on top of the Marcellus Shale. However.

There are many things that have gotten so much better, since we started paying a little more attention to people like Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson. I think about Earth Day and smile. There is so much more work to be done. And this is the day we have designated talk about it. To plant some trees. To take children out into the field. And that's a good thing.  Then I go back to what I was doing, which generally has something to do with making this patch of earth friendlier for wild things. Spreading the welcome mat. Making an offering to them. Doing what I can here, now. When the larger world around you seems to have gone insane; when truth is called lies and lies are treated as truth; doing what you can here, now, is the only way I've found to hold on. Doing.

To-do lists are a vital mental anchor for me. This was yesterday's. If you're not hearing from me much, this is why. This list is late April for me in southeast Ohio.  I'm not talking; I'm at a flat-out gallop, dodging the rainy days, trying to get the living things taken care of on their immutable timetable, before I take off to distant places to... talk about it all.

I wanted to give you a taste of Earth Day on Indigo Hill. I was thrilled to see a sunrise after so many weeks of rain and clouds. I headed out toward it, like a moth, then thought to spin around and see what it was doing to the Big Red House. Oh!!

 

The old pear was lit from behind and within by the rare sunrise. A shelf of clouds waited to gobble the sun up, but I caught a little glow. 

The pear tree's awake.

Fruit good only for ferment

I've no use for that.

Its tall stately form

Great piles of ivory blossoms
Now those, I can use.  

 

A tire still hangs from its lowest branch, mostly for remembrance.

 

  Entirely for remembrance. Nobody around here swings on tires any more. We're all too big now. Even that little flame-haired elf would need to be wary of the old, rotted rope.

 

I've mashed together April 20 and 21 into a single Earth Day post, because that was when I finally got around to checking all couple dozen of my far-flung bluebird boxes. 

There were some lovely surprises waiting, better than Easter morning. 

Paas makes a nice turquoise, but it's not as nice as the one Mrs. Bluebird makes with her own bile. Bluebird egg blue is its own miracle.

A typical Gilbertson PVC box first clutch of four.

The very first box I opened on Earth Day was a wooden box, and it had a full clutch of five. Any more, five-egg clutches are a rarity in my boxes. I think it may be because the boxes are small--mostly round Gilbertson style PVC--and the birds adjust brood size so they won't be so crowded in them. I'm going to pay closer attention, and see if I get more five-egg clutches in my wooden boxes. 

 

You can just barely see in the photo below that the base of the nest is made of maple petioles. Those are the stalks of maple flowers, and they are bright red when fresh. I know who made this nest. It's the same female who nested here last year. She's new to the box. 

 

I knew right away I had a new female in 2017, because her nest style and material selection was different from that of the bird who'd nested there for at least four years previously.  Here's her nest from May 4, 2017:

 

It's the most beautiful bluebird nest I'd seen. It was a like a layered cake. A Carolina chickadee had started it, with fresh green moss and bark fiber and fur, and this little gal took over with red maple petioles, dry grass and pine needles. And then she laid five perfect, dark-blue eggs. Just like she did this year.  

There were other reasons I knew this was a new tenant in the Church box. The former hen laid very pale blue eggs. And usually, all but one or two would be infertile. So years would go by with broods of one or two chicks. I'm not sure why this was. Perhaps her mate was infertile, and the fertile eggs resulted from extra-pair copulations by the female. In other words, she may have had to go find a fertile male in order to have any success at all. It seems to me that if a hen consistently lays eggs, most of which are infertile, but then always has one or two that are fertile, the problem may lie with her mate. We know that bluebirds, like many species that we believe to be monogamous, sneak around on each other, seeking mating opportunities with neighbors. I may have been seeing evidence of this in the single fertile egg in each clutch.

Whatever her problem, this benighted female either passed on or changed territories, and we were in full productivity mode again. 

I was so excited to find a full clutch of beautiful blue eggs from the petiole-fancying bluebird that I showed them to the woman who was carefully mowing the cemetery lawn.  I wanted to see her face light up when she saw them, too. And it did!

 

I put the nest back in its box, and watched her get off the mower and pick up a small American flag in her path. She shook it out, dusted it off, rolled it up, and stashed it for safekeeping as she mowed. There was a reverence in those small actions that moved me.

When I got home, I checked the driveway boxes. The one up on the right bank had treasures. Even cooler was the fact that the nest was made up largely of deer hair. 

I wondered if the hair could be Ellen's, as this is where I'd found her two Novembers ago. 

 You can be sure, since there is so much of it, that the bird got the hair from a carcass. Hair doesn't biodegrade very quickly; it lies at the kill site for many months.  As I thought about it, this nest could well be constructed of Ellen's hair.  For more on Ellen, click here: Fair Ellen: A Remembrance.

 

The thought pleased me, that my sweet crooked doe might have left something behind, that wound up cradling blue eggs and nestlings. And the wheels, they go 'round and 'round.

I am always pleased when my kids point out things they've found. Liam called me to the deck railing to identify an unusually large bird dropping. Squee!

A good inch long it was. And there was an identical one, but dried up, presumably from the same bird, from yesterday. I just realized, looking at this photo, that it even lies at the same angle, and at the precise same distance from the railing's edge. Same bird, much? Situational awareness, people!

 

I was happy to be able to tell Liam this was left by a mourning dove who had been sitting for a long time on its eggs. I can't specify the sex, because both sexes of mourning dove take long shifts on the nest. While sitting, they don't defecate, so when they finally do leave to grab a bite, they make these marvelous compacted bird-turds an inch long, with maybe four poops-worth of droppings in one tidy packet.  I wouldn't know they were made by a dove unless I'd raised several. One becomes intimate with droppings when raising birds.

'Tis the season for marvelous bird droppings.

Speaking of marvelous, that second planting of Buttercrunch lettuce I started in March has really kicked in. As the plants I'd started in October 2017 finally began to bolt after feeding us all winter, I pulled them, one by one, and planted new seedlings amongst them,  adding a couple inches of aged cow manure to the containers as I went. There was never a break in the continuum of delicious lettuce. On this Earth Day, I filled my shirt with huge, impossibly tender leaves. I head up to the tower room to pick every other day, and Liam and I gorge on salad with homemade tahini dressing every night. We can barely keep up, and we're totally spoiled by the safe, clean organic greens coming out of the tower. Container-grown lettuce--it's the only way to go. You should try it! Anybody can do it, anywhere, given good sun. And when spring finally comes, I'll move them outside on the front and back porches, where they'll get partial sun and be protected from baking and bunnies. A little shade makes much nicer, thinner, sweeter leaves. Elevation foils rabbits and slugs.

Anyway, there you have it, a grab-bag of thoughts inspired by realizing it was Earth Day as I walked from one bluebird box to the next, breathing in sweet balmy spring air and feeling indescribably grateful for everything I get to see, do, and witness out here in the middle of nowhere, on the way to nothing.

Plucky's Gift

What ever happened to that half-winged mourning dove?

You know I wouldn't leave you hanging if I could help it.

I had this whole post written on a plane. And the Internet swallowed it. The photos stayed but the text disappeared. Never had that happen before. Now I'll probably say something completely different than I did while hurtling over Kansas at sunset. One of the things I like about blogging is that I have no idea what's going to come out when I sit down. I started this one, and what came out was "One Day in Light" (the last post). When I'm blogging, I enter into a conversation with you, and it can go anywhere.

I saw the ghost of Ellen on March 11. I'm at the point where I can recognize certain deer naked eye at rather long distances. I raised the blind in the bedroom and saw Ellen against the west border of the meadow. The camera revealed that it was actually Flag, her daughter. All the little Elleny things in her gestalt at several hundred yards, that added up to Ellen for me, made me smile so big. It was like a visitation from her mama.

 

Nobody would give a passing glance to a small plain doe like Flag, unless they had known her mama, and come to love her so. I grow fonder of Flag every day.

 

I almost never see Flag without Buffy. Doughty little Buffy. I'll always wonder if she was related to Ellen, because they were always together, too, though they didn't get along very well. 

 

I have watched Flag take corn right from under Buffy's nose, and have never seen one iota of aggression between them. That's saying something, because I've seen Buffy fight.

Here's Buffy kissing Flag back in January 2017. Flag was still a little fawn. She'd just lost her mother in November.

Buffy, left, Flag right, today. See how much warmer-toned Buffy's hair is?
Buffy's also got tear tracks from her weepy left eye.

Buffy gave me a good laugh on March 8 when she stamped me. Deer stamp when they see something they don't like. Which would be me, through the window, at my drawing table.

 She stamped me with both front feet!

 

 Come on, Buffy. You know me. Stop punching more holes in my poor mushy lawn.

I do notice a difference in these two (the only ones who come in to clean up the jays' corn) and the other deer at Indigo Hill. Buffy and Flag are much more approachable in the field, more likely to watch me pass at a safe distance than the others, who all bound off. They know the Corn Lady, know my schedule, know my voice. It feels good to be recognized, even if I can't throw my arms around their necks.

Speaking of recognizing...A small gray female mourning dove, the avian equivalent of Flag, came walking in from the direction of the trumpetvine tangle on March 1. 

  

 Nothing to distinguish her on the left side, unless you were to notice the fresh white edging on her secondary wing feathers.

 

But on the right side...oh yes. Hello, Plucky! Look at that regrowth! There's still a lone black primary exposed, one of the two that remained after the hawk attack. But here come the primaries!

Luckily, she gave me a closeup.  It took only two weeks for all those feathers to regenerate. That, to me, is amazing.

In a few more days, she'd be virtually indistinguishable from the other doves.That won't stop me, and hasn't. I'm still looking for a small, grayish dove--probably less than a year old-- with a pale cheek and fresh wing feathers. So far, I haven't seen her again. But I take that to mean that she no longer needs to hide in the vines and gobble down grain at my feeder simply to survive.

 

As is so often the case,  I find myself scrutinizing groups, looking for one special creature. It may seem silly to some, but for me it's time well spent. Looking for Plucky taught me that each mourning dove has a unique spot pattern on its wings. Like this one--likely an immature, who is sprinkled with small dots.

 

And this mature male, with his iridescent neck and large oval spots on his coverts and tertials.

 

 I'd never realized that about mourning doves before Plucky came into my life. And I will recognize her should she appear again, as her wings are very lightly spotted.  And that's something to be able to say, that you could pick one special mourning dove out of a flock. That's the gift of close observation.

When Plucky finally took flight March 1, she corkscrewed as she went, but not nearly as badly as she had before. No longer would she have to walk from the tangle to the feeders and back.

Plucky had gotten her second chance.