When It's Right

This is a post about when it's right. When you find a place to stay that fits you, and better yet when you meet friends you've "known" for a long time without meeting, and when you do they're even better than you'd dared hope. Sometimes that happens.

I was blessed this whole trip to Sedona, Arizona, treated like some kind of birding royalty, put up in The Summit Resort, which had multiple pools, none of which I dipped so much as a toe into, because I was too busy putting boots to trail. I'd be throwing my stuff in the car for my next excursion, and I'd see a bunch of people lying on chaises around a pool, behind an iron fence, and I'd think, "Now why would I do THAT when the redrock desert lies out there just waiting to be explored? You can lie around a pool anywhere, anytime. You can't chase bushtits and ravens and desert cottontails anywhere, anytime."

After my festival work ended, I had a couple of nights for which I needed lodging. My soon-to-be dear friends at Scattered Light Jewelry, who were also in Sedona for the Sedona Hummingbird Festival, suggested Sky Ranch Lodge, up by the tiny perfect Sedona Airport, and it was a complete fit.

Lesser goldfinch at the fountain near the Sky Ranch Lodge's amazing overlook.

This is the view from the lodge's piazza. All Sedona stretched out below me. Wow. And scrub jays racketing through the brush.

I found this mantis nymph on some yucca in the lodge's extensive gardens and fell in love.

Once more, with feeling:

Needless to say, I was happy there. 

About those about-to-be-dear friends...

One of the great incentives for me to travel to Sedona in late July was the chance to finally meet Barbara Samuelson and Russell Strawn Smith of Scattered Light Jewelry .

I own a number of their pieces and love them more than I can say. 

See "A Tale of Three Pendants" for a detailed discussion of their metallurgical and aesthetic genius. I've been a true, raving fan of their work for a LONG time. Over a decade.

So when, in the course of Facebook nattering, I found out that Barbara and Russell were going to the Sedona Hummingbird Festival, that sealed the deal with wax and a big kiss. I was GOING. 

Look at them! You've seen their work on my blog, but in the flesh they're too good to be true.

Well of course when we met in the vendor hall it was all over. All we wanted to do was yak and hike and go find Indian food together. So we did.

Selfies, good and failed, followed. Russell: How do I work this thing? Your modern devices confuse me. 

Zick: Here. You put your thumb in front of the lens and Bam! Selfie fail! 

Barbara, behind us: Mmmmf.

At the glorious vendor mart at the Sedona Hummingbird Festival, I got me a couple more of their exquisite pieces, and every morning I mull: Shall I wear the acorn that opens up, or the Heart and Hand pendant?

Heart and hand. They swivel together on this ingenious pendant by Barbara. As they do in life, the heart's work is in the hand. One can't move without the other being attached, involved. Whether you're cooking, doing someone's laundry, weeding, painting, or making a piece of intelligent jewelry.

Russell's acorn pendant. Look at that finish! He makes the alloy on the lid himself. It's so beautiful. I've cracked the lid a bit as a hint

that this acorn opens up! I asked Barbara what I could keep in there. With a wry smile, she suggested two extra-strength Advil. Haaa. I was thinking of a dodo feather, but hey. Let's get real.

The sweet little latch.

Barbara and me: soultwins. Don't let those enormous soft eyes and gentle beauty fool you. She's a badass, just like me.

We went out to find the sunset and found this Chinese dragon cloud.

 And this agave. Barbara told me what it's like to strap an old agave inflorescence on top of your car and try to drive it home to decorate your store in Round Top, Texas (which is called Lark: Inspired Giving). It's not for toddlers. Those damn things are HUGE.

We drank in the sunset at Lizard Head, and reveled in each others' presence. We plotted on how we might get together again.

Everywhere we looked was beauty. When artists convene in the desert, look out. There's gonna be some heavy appreciatin' going on.

Agave sunset.

Look at those lovebirds! Just seeing them together made my heart fill up.

In such a place, with such lovely people. If only the sunset could have gone on all night.

Russell borrowed my phone and produced this image. Please, borrow it more.  It is he who constructs the botanically perfect pendants, articulated, that move and open up just as the plant or flower does. He is an artist, but he's also a mad genius engineer.

Barbara made a portrait of me against a flaming sunset.

I felt more like myself out here than I had in years. Sedona makes me feel hopeful. Like there's a bigger world out there waiting for me, like I'm ready to start a new chapter. Maybe it's in the vortices.
But I think it's probably in the love of new, old, forever friends. Here's to meeting and cementing friendships, and making online connections real, in the flesh.

Photo by Barbara Samuelson

 bashed shin and bino bra--that's how you can tell it's me and not Christie Brinkley.

Now go buy intelligent jewelry.

Arizona Happy!

Iridescence on a young Anna's hummingbird: a fairly conventional fire-pink at one angle

and a bewitching emerald at another. For whatever reason, the complimentary color seems to be the reverse of many iridescent feathers; a pintail or rock pigeon's shell-pink neck feathers go sea-green at another angle; a ruby-throat's fire-engine red shows deep emerald, and so goes this Anna's gorget, shocking pink to lime green. I'm back here to edit this post, because a Facebook friend just asked, "Julie, how did you get to hold a hummingbird?" And I realized that not everyone is reading every little thing I write. Duh! In the social media world, we dip in, take a sip, and fly backwards and sideways out for another little sip somewhere else. So explanation is good. I was at a hummingbird banding demonstration, and that hand belongs to master hummingbird bander Steve Bouricius.

I took one last look at the hummingbird garden's red rock view and took off for the festival hall to give my talk. Sigh. I could stare at that all day.

My talks at the Sedona Hummingbird Festival went really well. The weeks of work it takes to build just one Keynote presentation are worth it. I've been told that I work too far too hard and for far too long on my talks. That I could totally wing it. But winging it is not how I do anything. I'm like an ox who knows exactly how big a load he can pull, who throws his weight into the yoke and gives it the power and time it takes to get that load from A to B. So when people come up to me after a talk with tears in their eyes and say that it changed their way of thinking or even changed their life, I'm less abashed and embarrassed to hear that because I feel good about the fact that I've given it all I've got. That happened in Sedona, and it was wonderful. I love being able to move people's souls. And I love how doing that takes me to magical places I'd never experience otherwise. Grateful.

On Saturday afternoon, after my talk and book signing, I had a couple of hours before I'd be attending a banquet. I'd seen what looked like a trailhead behind Yavapai Community college, very near where I was staying at Summit Resort, so I boogied up there with my boots on. I wanted to get into some of the desert I'd been ogling from the road.

A whispery, jittery flock of bushtits greeted me. These kinglet-sized birds, are members of a monotypic genus (Psaltriparus) and the only North American member of an Old World family (Aegithalidae) that includes the spectacular long-tailed tit of Eurasia. I thought about the ancient continental drift that might have brought bushtits to what would become North America, and felt very young, or at least recent. It's just cool that we have a bushtit in North America, sort of the way we have one Old World creeper (the brown creeper), from the 

Certhiidae, a family that's well-represented by a bunch of species in Eurasia.

 A Gambel's quail, waiting for his family of puffballs to follow. 

I couldn't get enough of the monsoon sky. It never rained more than a spatter on me the whole time I was there, but other areas got drenched.

I was so glad to be out there under that sky, and all I want to do is go back. 

I've never been to a place with such alluring hikes. I don't know how I'd get anything else done, living in Sedona.

Hummingbird Magic

Every festival has its clientele. I've worked a few birding and nature festivals, and there's a slightly different cut of people at each one.

I really liked the people I met at the Sedona Hummingbird Festival in early August. There was a kind of magic about them. And why not? The little beasts they hold so dear are magic themselves. 

This is Beth Kingsley Hawkins, artist, photographer, writer and all-around awesome spirit. She and her husband Ross are why I was there. They founded The Hummingbird Society, a conservation organization directed at hummingbirds alone, and the festival followed. 

Years ago, when the kids were little, Beth and Ross came to visit. We were going around my then very modest gardens, and we watched a ruby-throated hummingbird apparently feeding at my Peace rose, slipping its bill between each of the huge tea rose's petals.

Well, we knew it couldn't be getting nectar that way. Or anywhere on a tea rose. When the hummingbird left, we parted the petals and found a beautiful pool of rainwater cradled inside each petal. The bird had been drinking.

How does a hummingbird know it can drink water that way? 

A hummingbird knows flowers.

This is Deandra. She and I were friends from Hello. I had the honor of sitting with her at dinner and the conversation never flagged. She is simply fascinating, one of those people you wish you could propagate, take a cutting, make more. 

I went through my images and found some that capture just a touch of what hummingbirds are all about. 

Black-chin in corkscrew willow

Black-chins in trumpetvine...

Flying sideways, of course, why not if you can?

Eyeing a honeybee...

and diving for sweet nectar

the bee in hot pursuit.

Hummingbirds, briefly contained...what a concept, corralling a hummingbird...

The large but incredibly deft and gentle hands of Lanny Chambers, a furious tiny throbbing life in his fingers.

Processed and ready to go, they lie unbelieving for a few moments...

and eager fingers get the chance to touch lightning, something they will likely never have a chance to do again

and then it's time to let him fly.

But sometimes they lie, shellshocked, and don't believe they're free. This Anna's lay still on an eager palm.

They've had quite enough of the touch of strange fingers and hands, so Lanny rouses them back to the real world by blowing gently on them. Wind! Hummingbirds know wind.

Liftoff!

I'm charmed by the experience, this big gentle man with a way with tiny birds, and the people who've come to see them. 

Banding Hummingbirds

I got distracted by my gardens, and when I get distracted, you do, too. As if you have any choice as to what goes up here.

When we left Zick, she had successfully disappeared into a backyard outside Sedona, Arizona, and spent a delightful couple of hours photographing hummingbirds. The garden was the site of a hummingbird banding demonstration for the Sedona Hummingbird Festival, led by master hummingbird banders Steve and Debbie Bouricius and hummingbird researcher Lanny Chambers of hummingbirds.net. That's the awesome website that has a wealth of information about watching and feeding hummingbirds, and even posts a map of rubythroat sightings as they make their way north on migration each spring. I was very excited to meet these amazing people. 

Lanny was excited to meet me, too, which was nice. Also he was holding an Anna's hummingbird, which adds spice to any meeting.

The banders were working under a tent, quickly processing hummingbirds that Steve Bouricius was bringing them from the wire cage traps in the garden. 

They set traps around the feeders, allow the hummingbirds to enter and exit the traps for a day or so, then hand-trip the traps when there's a hummingbird inside. 

The birds are quickly caught by hand as they rise to the top of the trap, put in soft mesh bags, and brought to the banding table. 

 In a yard this full of flowers and feeders, you can catch a lot of hummingbirds!

I watched with fascination as Lanny processed each bird. His hands moved so deftly, so gently.

Full tail-spread.

When it was time to weigh the bird on a gram scale, he gently wrapped it in breathable nylon so it would lie still. A little hummito.

The bird gets measured, wing, bill, and tail; it's aged and sexed; it gets its fat checked and its nasal grooves looked at; its gorget color assessed...the columns on this chart are astounding. I wish I'd had time to ask the million questions swirling in my head, looking at this data collection effort. 

Lanny selects a band of the right size for the species he's working with from the incredibly tiny rings in his neat little case.

He teases the hummingbird's minuscule leg out from the nylon wrapper

and gently applies the band with a tiny pliers. He's got some massive cheaters he uses for magnification.

Afterward, Lanny offered the bird to me to release it, a very special honor. I'd have been thrilled to do it, but I have had the chance to touch many hummingbirds in my life, so I gave the honor to someone I sensed hadn't.

She was into it.

And after lying perfectly still for a few moments, the little Anna's got gone, banded now and with all his vital stats now points of light in a galaxy of data.