Saving Jemima: Pre-Order a Signed Copy

Saving Jemima: Life and Love with a Hard-luck Jay is coming out September 10, 2019. I have an advance copy in hand. Every time I pick it up I feel grateful all over again to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for making such a beautiful book out of my stack of writings, paintings and photographs. I just shake my head. How lucky can you get, to work with the best natural history publisher on the planet to tell the story of an orphaned blue jay? She was some jay, but still. Lucky, and blessed.

Looks small here, but it's a healthy 6" x 9" x 1" Note jay-colored clothing on line.

For months, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do about getting signed copies to my friends and you, my beloved blog community. I have had a sense all along that Jemima is going to hit bigger than any of my previous books; my agent tells me it is the most commercially appealing thing I’ve done. You don’t have to have a special interest in birds to appreciate it. You just have to like a good story that happens to feature a bird. 

My first book to feature both paintings and photographs! Woot! It's so EASY to illustrate a book with photos! But I don't do anything the easy way, so I did 20 paintings, too.

I had the great privilege of reading it for HMHCo's audio book (can you hear the squeal?!) and that is gonna kick butt. I loved recording it, even though parts of it were hard to get through. Like doing about 8 hours of radio. All things considered, I knew that I was looking at signing and boxing a LOT of books this time around.

Each chapter head watercolor gets a full-page treatment. Design by Martha Kennedy, Chief of Design, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Co. Yes I am grinning ear to ear!

I thought about what it’s been like to fulfill book orders from my home. I've done it for my last three books. How keeping track of orders, inscribing, signing, boxing, addressing and mailing books is pretty much all I do for months after a book hits. How lifting the boxes and loading them into and out of my car messes up my back. I used to drive each load 20 minutes to the nearest post office. Now, I'd have a 40 minute drive. Given what's happened in the last seven months, I realized I wasn’t up for any of that. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that my energy—that wonderful energy that I use to produce illustrated books and (ahem) increasingly rare blogposts-- is indeed finite, and it can be quickly drained away. I've had to critically assess how I spend that energy, because there's a lot less of it now. Swimming in a whirlpool will do that to you. My rationale that fulfilling orders for signed books is “part of my work” looks thin to me now. It’s not. It’s something I’ve been doing, doggedly, faithfully, but it’s a long way from being my true work. The truth is, it doesn't have to be done by me. The writing and illustrating and thinking does. And that's how I should be spending my time.

Meanwhile, my family is not the only one that's had a rough time since December, 2018. Bird Watcher’s Digest has been turned upside down, losing its Editor/Publisher and chief visionary when Bill passed away in March. Then Elsa, Bill’s mother and BWD’s founder, who was still working at 85, died tragically just two months later. It was a staggering double blow. Everyone is still picking themselves up. Yet out of the unimaginable chaos and loss, an answer to my small problem became clear to me.

I decided to direct my sales to Redstart Birding, the magazine’s sales, optics and expertise branch, which Bill and Ben Lizdas created not long before Bill fell ill. I’ll design a custom bookplate I can sign, and that will be included if you order a signed copy. Short of attending one of my talks, Redstart will be the only place you can get a signed copy of Saving Jemima. And proceeds of sales from those who want signed copies will go not to an online sales giant, but to the magazine that published my first article and painting in 1986, and helped me build a wonderful audience for my writing and art. It seems like a win all around. I'm grateful that my sweet friend, Redstart's stalwart Swiss Army knife Angela, is willing to take on all those orders, that packing and shipping. It won't be trivial.

 I think you'll love the story of this feisty young blue jay, and how she worked her way into our hearts. How I wound up saving her at least twice, and she saved me right back. Old story, I know, but rescue stories are rarely one-way (ask Curtis Loew!), and each one is unique. And this rescue was a blue jay, the best and brightest bird I could hope for.

 

So if you'd like to help support Bird Watcher's Digest and have a beautiful signed bookplate in your copy, you can pre-order Saving Jemima at Redstart Birding. Hit this link:  ORDER JEMIMA

 The book will be released September 10, 2019. It's roaring up! I can't wait for you to have it in your hands, too!

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Jemima on PBS Nature! Tonight!

Jemima's last visit was Christmas Eve 2017. But she has achieved immortality!

Way back at the end of June, a magical thing happened. Mark Carroll, a natural history cinematographer absolutely dripping in awards (his latest, an Emmy for his work with filmmaker Ann Prum of Coneflower Studios on PBS Nature's "Super Hummingbirds,"), arrived at Indigo Hill.

Through the magic of social media and college connections, Ann, wife of my birding buddy and fellow Harvard classmate Rick Prum (himself a MacArthur fellow for his work studying bird plumage, his book the Evolution of Beauty, and mating systems), had become aware of Jemima. It occurred to her that Jemima might be the perfect semi-wild bird to play the Avian Predator in Coneflower's butterfly special, in production for Nature.

Jem had been free since the 11th of June. Could I keep her around, train her to come in for caterpillars; get her to cooperate for the shooting? From those questions hung a big story and a LOT of stressing on my part. I laugh every time I think of it.

 

Working with Jemima and Mark to get video of her, in the wild, bashing and eating caterpillars, is a rollicking story in itself. For obvious reasons, I won't tell it here, but it's one of my favorite chapters in Saving Jemima, the book I'm working on for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Due out October 2019. I keep saying that so I will meet my deadline of Oct. 1, 2018. Yikes that's coming up fast.

It was such an honor to be able to make this sequence happen for Mark Carroll and Coneflower and Nature. As I'll relate in the book, it was allll up to Jemima whether or not to cooperate. You probably can't imagine what that was really like. Arrrrgh.

Jemima tickles Mark Carroll as he sets up a shot on a hot June day in our yard. Photo by Bill Thompson III

The result of Mark's work and my worry will air TONIGHT, Wednesday, April 4, at 8 pm Eastern, 7 pm Central, on PBS's Nature. I will probably be bawling my head off in awe and wonder as my tatty blue daughter does her worst to hapless caterpillars right on the TV screen in the living room where she played. I plan to put my iPhone on a tripod aimed at the TV so I can watch it over and over (I lack the ability to record otherwise). I hope you'll be watching!

I'm Back! Where's Jemima?

It's been a week, but I feel like I've just now returned from 12 days away, ten of them spent in the Ecuadorian Andes and foothills. I left on Opening Day of our weeklong gun season for whitetails, so I missed the whole bang-bangy thing.  It was very wet and not warm in the Andes, so these frigid Ohio temperatures weren't much of a shock. I had an 18-hour journey home, getting up at 4 AM in Quito and finally walking in the door, loaded down with luggage and fresh groceries, at 10 PM Friday night, December 8. The trip was incredible, awesome, fun as all getout, full of fabulous birds and wonderful friends who were all grooving on it together. I'll return. I have to!! There's so much more to experience!

 While I was in Ecuador, I dreamt of birds every single night, except for the night that I dreamt of my DOD. All the birds needed me to care for them. They kept getting into trouble, losing feathers, breaking wings.  Obligations, things I wasn't taking care of, birds that needed me--the theme of every night's dreams while I was away. I may have been having fun as a bird guide all day, but at night the birds reminded me of my true work. Finally, I was home.

After a fitful night full of dreams of--get this--living in a house with glass-free windows, where birds kept getting trapped-- blue-gray tanagers**, cedar waxwings, and hummingbirds that kept getting into trouble, all of which I had to help--I jumped out of bed, wanting only to see Jemima, at 6:30 AM. I hadn't had nearly enough sleep, but before it got fully light, I filled all the feeders and washed and refilled the bird bath and put all the best food out. Whole corn, cracked corn, sunflower hearts, black oil, peanuts in and out of the shell. And in the Secret Studio Window Feeder, diced cooked chicken thigh, walnuts, pecans and unsalted cocktail peanuts. Yep, got 'er covered. I was sitting vigil at my usual post when along came Flag!

**This is a cool thing the brain does in dreams. Blue-gray sounds like blue jay. So when I'm dreaming of blue-gray tanagers, chances are my brain is substituting them for blue jays. It's always about Jemima!

 Flag still wears her wide white eyerings, her surprised look.

She was closely followed by Aunt Buffy, a stout little dachshund among whitetails. I love Buffy. She looks terrific, considering that she may be nearly as old as Ellen. Her eye, while still squinty, isn't weeping any more. Progress!

 My two wee does made it through hunting season! Not surprising. That's why I let myself fall in love with scrawny little does. The big bucks? I look, I admire, but I try not to let them take my heart, because they're all marked for death. If they make it through the bloody first week of December, well, that's a bonus, gravy. Good for them.

And that morning of December 9, I watched and photographed an armload of blue jays, but not The Blue Jay. I amused myself photographing them, gathering data, trying to tell one from the other in the flock of seven. I felt rusty, out of practice. This is Darko. He's had three different nicknames, until I realized that I was lookingat the same bird the whole time.

That super white face, contrasting with the dark breast and sides, is one good marker. Also his broad black eyebrows.

This is Lilac. Notice anything about this bird's overall color, especially in contrast to Darko? Yep. Pale. Lilac. Low-contrast. Even the lower throat is lilac-colored. Thin eyebrows. You see the subtlety I'm talking about. These are two extremes in coloration. Most are barely discernible from each other. I have to see a jay a bunch of times and take a bunch of pics before I can identify it with any confidence. I'm a real beginner at this.

But even as I watched and waited and wondered where she was, I knew she was here. I could feel it. My heart was happy and full of anticipation. Liam and Bill had been faithfully putting her chicken and peanuts, corn and sunflower hearts out each morning. At 9:07 AM she finally comes in. I photograph her without knowing it's her at first. Only when she takes several hops and jumps up onto the trunk of a birch do I figure out it's Jemima. These are little things a normal jay wouldn't do. A normal jay would spread its wings and fly. But she's here and Hallelujah! she's made it another twelve days without me around fuss over her! The boys had reported that her meat and peanuts were completely gone every night. The pessimist in me figured that the chipmunks must have defeated my homemade baffle around the tree by her feeder, because Jemima had never finished her meat. Surely something else was taking her food.

  Jemima grabbing corn to cache, Dec. 9

Pigging out on chicken, Dec. 11

But the Jemima I saw on December 9 was a different bird. She was ravenous, taking gullet after gullet-ful of meat. And what was different about that was that she was carrying it away and obviously cacheing it in the woods. When I left in late November, it was still warm--60-degree days. I was intrigued to see that, while she cached large amounts of corn and seed, she always swallowed and ate her chicken. If she did carry away a big gob of chicken, she'd fly to a nearby tree to process and eat it all. She knew that, when it was warm outside, she couldn't hide meat without losing it to decay. It was a different story now. I filled her meat bowl four times, and thrilled to see her visit at least ten times. She was in and around the yard from 9 until nearly 2 pm. At evening every scrap of chicken was gone, and I knew that Jemima had taken it all.

When she flew out the driveway, I followed her. I talked and sang to her. She turned around and flew toward me. No sweeter welcome home. If she could have said MAMA'S HOME!! I think she would have. She showed me how she uses the tangles to navigate to her feeder. Tree to tree she flutters. 

She was here with me for two days--December 9, the morning after my return, and she was back on December 11. And then she vanished again.  I haven't seen her or Maybelline since then. Is it driving me nuts? You bet your bippy it is. But Jemima taking off for a week at a time is just another thing in the great continuum of Things Over Which I Have No Control.

This continuum includes pretty much everything in my life. Jemima is here to teach me more about letting go. It's the one thing I'm worst at. My pitbull tendencies serve me well when it comes to writing my column, finishing books, getting that last illustration done under the deadline, and just generally persevering in the face of obstacles. But letting go of the people and creatures I love is a real challenge, because there inevitably comes a time when you have to. I think I'm programmed to love and hold onto them forever, no matter what. Jem's working on that in me.

I've held vigil at the studio window for six days. Maybe she'll be back on Day 8. Stay tuned. Until then, I'll be editing Ecuador photos. And you're gonna love 'em!!

Leaving Jemima (She's fine!)

I wrote "The Thing About Jemima" in a long morning session, and by the time I finished it I was in sore need of a long hike. I think of the woods trails as my quickest route to deliverance. There's little that can be wrong with me that six miles won't fix. It's good to have a place to go that makes you feel better.  Truth be told, it's probably the walking that saves me as much as the place. If something's bothering you, get moving. By the time you get back, your primitive brain will have decided you've outrun the cave bear. You'll live another day. You'll look forward again.

It was a rare, sunny winter afternoon, and I could see right away that the animals were all coming to me. The white-throated sparrows were peeping and fluttering in the multiflora rose. A beautiful male eastern towhee sounded his "Joreeet?" then hopped back down into the thicket. I know the secret  towhee word, though, and I whistled it softly through my teeth. Seeureet? I whistled.

 

That got him back out! Huh? What?! Who said the password?

The afternoon sun caught his eye, and it shone like a garnet. He postured and gave me his good side, then switched around. And then he leapt to another sumac branch, and I caught him in flight. Except that he barely opened his wings. "Flying is just assisted leaping," he said. "Watch me."

I did. And I remembered, watching him, that all Jemima had to do was leap, and flutter some, too, and she could get through the forest just fine.

 

Thank you, Beautiful.  

It occurs to me that the title of this post may cause some alarm, so I rush to reassure you that Jemima's been in the past three days! She's been coming in the morning with a gang of friends, and she's been ignoring her chicken and peanuts, gobbling corn and seed with the ruffians instead. 

 That's her on the left. The one with no primaries.

 Taking a leisurely breakfast with Maybelline (now he's on the left).  These shots taken November 27 around 7:40 AM.

 

Hi Ma. Don't worry about me. I have my posse. They're pretty sharp. They look out for me.

 

It's incredibly hard for me to leave home, knowing she's hanging so close by, but I'm leaving for Ecuador tomorrow. And who knows, being Jemima, she could go on another 8 day bender while I'm gone. I'm prostrate with thankfulness that she decided to see me off this morning. Thank you Jemmy, thank you.

 I'll be away for 10 days, which neatly coincides with the week of whitetail gun season that started this morning. Blam! Blam! My least favorite sound, besides the snarl, crack and crash of logging. There's a beauty to that, for me to just leave the country while my friends go under fire. I can't do anything to help them; can't walk in the woods this week, so I might as well go explore some of the highest bird diversity on the planet, on both slopes of the Andes, with a bunch of beloved friends, right? Right!

Liam is on Jemima duty, and he has a full page list with lots YOU MUST's and boldface and !!!!!'s to refer to. Lucky Liam!

Back to Dean's Fork. We were on a walk when Jemima barged in, all blue and white.

 

Allis Chalmers was looking fine against a pillowy mackerel sky. As the saying goes, we'd be barely 24 hours dry, for sure--it would pour all the next day. 

I peeked into the upper corner of the canopy.

There was the phoebe nest!

 

The aging woods behind were looking very thin, but the grass still had an emerald sheen.

I kept hearing winter wrens. They sound a lot like song sparrows, but instead of giving one "Chimp!" note, they often pair them. Little rattles and trills give them away as wrens, too. They're hard to see, these far northern migrants. They come down to southern Ohio and it feels like the tropics to them, because they've been messing around the roots of wind-thrown trees in boreal forests all summer long.  I find them all winter long in stream beds among the tangled roots, popping out from under logs for a moment, then disappearing again. 

 

I took about 20 lousy photos, and then I got some good ones.  Please click on these to see his exquisite patterns.

 

I played about two seconds of winter wren song on Lang Elliott's BirdTunes, and this little character came boiling up out of the tangled roots to kick my a-s. His tiny tail was cocked straight up, and he was moving it the way Andrew McCutchen twirls his bat when he's thinking about clocking one out over the stands and into the Allegheny River. 

 

I really love these shots, the glow of sun hitting the forest floor and tumbled fallen logs behind the bird, the smooth Smilax brambles crossing, none of it fazing this little bird who chooses to live in jumbled disarray. 

 

He sang, and the world buzzed and sang around me, with the wonder of hearing silvery birdsong in gray November.  

I've split this magical walk into three parts, so you'll have something to amuse yourself with while I'm gone.  Next:   Remembering Hannah. 

I'm Having Blue Jay for Thanksgiving

Thank you for the overwhelmingly positive and beautiful response to "The Thing About Jemima." I  spend way too much time worrying about reader reaction to this or that revelation that's been bothering me for months or years until I finally up and say something. It was just wonderful to be able to say, "Here's the deal, and here's the kind of reaction I can handle, feeling as I do about it, so please let's stick to that." And to have everyone, to a person, come through with flying colors, writing lovely positive sentiments that are actually helping me through the glory, the wonder, the hope and, let's face it, the pain of it all. 

My Instagram and Facebook friend Denise wrote, 

"Thank you for sharing her plight. I can now pray for her safety."

To which I replied, "Oddly, that makes this near-pagan feel a lot better!"

Denise: "Ha ha! You be you, I'll be me. We both are for Jemima!" 

So thank you for keeping Jem and her anxious foster Ma in your hearts. When I got up November 20, I hadn't seen her for five days. But it was an easier wait than the eight-day Jemima-free marathon I'd lived through before my last series of sightings. The weather this week had been lousy, cold and cloudy, then warm, with torrential rain, then cloudy and cold, and it just didn't feel like blue jay weather to me. And I barely saw any blue jays around the feeders or yard. That didn't keep me from my vigil. I watched. I waited. I got a little writing done. I did not curl into a ball. But mostly, I hung in there and had faith that she'd come back at least to check in. Baby steps, improvement. 

I raised the blinds on the morning of November 20 and saw the red stain of sunrise spreading into a clear blue sky. Ahhhh. I will see my Jemima today, I thought. 

And sure enough, as soon as I put the corn and seed out, jays were bouncing all over the place. But not The Jay. 

So stuffed with cracked corn they look like bad taxidermists' mounts. Look at the leftmost bird. Glurp!

They're not Jemima, but oh they gladden my heart. I'm trying so hard to tell them apart as individuals, but it's really tough when the cast keeps changing.

A chipmunk (one of the scrappers from a previous post) streaks through and startles a jay into a little corvine capriole. Boing! Ha ha!!

Once again, Chippy sends the jittery jay airborne, while a red-bellied woodpecker says, "Ga-aaw-lee! What's up with you two?" Even brazen blue jays never quite get used to small bloodthirsty mammals zooming right under their feet. Nor should they.

Gosh, I look at those immaculate, intact wings, and just sigh. Jemima should be so lucky. But then it occurs to me that if she were that lucky, she might be in Georgia right now. It is what it is, and I am tremendously blessed to still be seeing a bird I released in mid-June, in November!

I tell Liam, "I know Jemima's going to show up this morning. I just have to be patient." The new bunny who is frequenting the feeder area (post the mid-August cleanout by Cindy the Bobcat) is amusing me greatly. This bunny has rather short ears and a very fat bottom, and it has a habit of coming out of the tangle behind the rhubarb, squirting up into the air with friskiness, then running back in. Soon it will be corn-fed and even fatter of bottom. Maybe I'll call it Julie.

So I watched the bunny for awhile.

And then she appears, at 8:53 AM, flying in from Stage Left. I'd know those tatty wings anywhere.

I start dancing around the studio snapping photos and laughing. I'm transformed from my everyday loose bundle of hope and anxiety to something approaching pure joy. I call Liam in and we holler endearments to her through the glass. She doesn't mind. 

What were you ever worried about? I don't understand you and your handwringing. I'm off doing my stuff. You go ahead and do your stuff. We'll get together now and then. That's how it goes.

My wise friend Margarethe, who has raised several corvid species and studies them always, has been sharing her experiences. Nothing like the voice of experience! She advised that Jemima's absences could get longer and longer as she builds independence and social networks.  She imparted this wisdom:

"You are both lucky and terribly exposed to hardship because you live right in Blue Jay territory, so Jemima could stay around. But as a juvenile, she still might have to join a more distant flock and find a new place of her own. Her disappearance could have any kind of reason. You seem to be extremely lucky as a mother. Now your Jay is giving you the experiences of anxiety that many face with their human teens. Open your heart and both joy and pain are inevitable. Lucky you."

Agreed on  my luck as a mother to humans. And agreed on that open heart--how, being open, it's ready to love, and to hurt, too, always. I tell myself, "She's a BIRD." She's a bird. 
How does a bird get so deep into my heart?  

She picks up some corn and flies up to the birch. With a good leap and a lot of flapping, she can get some altitude. Enough to get off the ground and into a tree. Yay for that.

And she appears at her buffet, this glorious stained-glass medley of blue, black and white, and you'd never know there was anything amiss, really, unless you noticed that she has no primaries poking out from under those gaudy tertials. 

She loads up on chicken, swallows some of it, then comes back to stuff her gular pouch full.

Ahh is she not the most beautiful? To think she used to let me kiss the top of that sweet head. 

Full up, she hops to the top of the arbor vitae and exits stage left, toward the back yard. This is a new direction! She flies to an ash tree, hops up to near the top, then launches herself into the clear blue air.

Her flight is lopsided, because she has more feathers on her left wing than her right. Phoebe: "She looks like some kind of crazy falling leaf."

But by God she makes it into the crown of the big pine, one of three that Bill and I planted in the winter of 1992. It's the last pine standing. The other two fell last spring. Jemima needs this tree. I need it, too. Please keep standing, Pine. You're a very useful tree.

She disappears into the needles and I can see the branch shaking as she disgorges and pecks apart the wad of chicken she brought. Her moveable feast.

Full as a tick, she puffs out her feathers and lets the sun warm her belly. She rests for about ten minutes. I'm so proud to see my Jem in the very top of the pine. Altitude is her friend. It's her 

hardest -won treasure. 

When she's done resting, I'm lucky to see her launch back toward the feeders. She uses the altitude she gained to have a really good flutter-glide back into the yard, making a grand entrance as jays love to do. I'm agog and thrilled at this bird's adaptability. At the fact that she can disappear for 5 days, 8 days at a time, then show up fit as a fiddle and twice as fat, to gladden her Ma's heart once more. 

How I would love to know where she's been. How far she goes. And how she does it.

This time, she comes in and finishes her chicken, which had been faithfully refreshed each morning, but lying untouched all week. Then she loads up on dry-roasted peanuts and heads toward the east hill. 

I run to the front window just in time to see her launch off the phone line on her long diagonal flight (the 130' one, but who's counting) to the east hill. She amazes me. The robin is also impressed.

I know I probably won't see her again today. And since Liam and I are heading east for Thanksgiving, I know I won't see her for at least another five days. And then I'm home for two days, then headed to Ecuador for ten days. Am I a nervous wreck about it all? Of course. Do I think she'll survive my leaving? Yep. If she needed my subsidy, she'd be there every day. 

But now I'm writing this post, all aglow with the thrill of having seen her at all. I learn so much from her every time she stops in. 

I turn back to my work and, through the closed windows, I hear the croak of a raven! Ravens are rare vagrants to southeast Ohio, but I've had a real run of sightings in October and November. I think I've seen two different pairs and maybe 3 singles. Oh, bring them on!! When I hear a raven I run out onto the back deck, because I have the best chance of photographing them over our meadow. I'm pretty sure that when we take in the game camera, there will be ravens on it. I don't think it's a coincidence that they inspect that part of the meadow--the meatpile is there! 

Sure enough, I'm incredibly lucky to see a raven, being harrassed by a crow.  And even luckier to get a sharp shot of the action (with willow tree photobomb).

Every time the crow dives close to the raven, the huge bird goes tokatok! It sounds just like someone knocking on a hollow log. A most amazing, loud, sonorous, percussive sound. 

My friend Greg Neise did a little Photoshop magic on my photo to better compare the relative shapes and sizes of crow and raven. Crow: top. Raven: lower bird. Look at the difference in their bills! And the length of that raven's wing! 

Seeing this pair of corvids, right after having such a wonderful session with Jemima, feels to me like a great  blessing, a benediction. A lucky sign.

What better Thanksgiving bounty than three corvids in one yard? And Jemima, well and independent and still, somehow, flying free. Keep her in your heart.

This post is dedicated to my sweet friend Melanie and beautiful Alex

 @myecocentriclife on Instagram. Go give her some love.

Sending it with a chorus of blue jay yells and all the love in the world.