Requiem for a Blue Jay

Even seven years out from the Saving Jemima year of 2017,  

the year I looked so hard at blue jays I nearly became one,

I am still looking at jays

 the way jays look at jays, searching their faces for distinguishing marks

Building galleries of dated images, to what end I'm not sure

Except that I need know each one for who it is.

You might not believe I have spent the entire day going through my photos,

matching face to face over the months they've been here

Aging and trying to sex the birds,

so I can recognize each one at a glance.

Hyperfixated, my kids would say.

OK, go ahead, label me, box me up.

I am well aware I'm not like the others.

I need to know more, need to know who.

You never know. Something might happen.

The part of loving blue jays that I don't recommend

is the sudden squawk explosion

the gravelly rasp they give when the hawk dives in

Shuffle of wings and cartwheel motion

as a small band bursts outward

from a sharpshin supernova.

Then, the rhythmic cries, 

strident first, with outrage then

passing through each color: fear to anguish

Into futility, then surrender

Crying, crying still, minute on minute

Unseen, talon-pinned beneath the briars

Slowing, then ceasing

The jay's life ebbing as it's

reduced to simple substance:

feather, meat, and bone.

A friend and neighbor, slowly

torn into small chunks

turned into food

packing the crop of a quick young sharpshin.

At my desk, now watch and wait.

Their daily peanuts sit untouched

The band of seven, too shocked to fly

Too rattled to eat.

I will know the victim only by its absence.

In days to come I'll study every face

Skeetles and Messi

Blobby Blue, Spangles

Taking the grim roll call of my teachers.

This afternoon I'll push through the brambles

edge along the north slope

Where the little blue Piper went down

Looking for the feather splash

For clues amidst strewn wreckage

The scrap of flesh, the drop of blood

And the little black box of knowing.

*Skeetles, 22 Dec. 2024

*Messi, 27 Dec. 2024

*Spangles, 13 Dec. 2024

*Blobby Blue, 7 Dec. 2024 

(Blobby always licks their bill after drinking)

Unidentified, 25 December 2024

*All four jays pictured reported to the yard today, December 27, 2024

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.

Real Life, Served Hot

When you see a sopping wet gobbler walking on a new-mown path, you know there's been too much rain. Wild turkeys hate hard rain. They hate getting their feathers soaked, for good reason--they can get chilled and die. So they resort to meadows and even lawns--anywhere they can go and not brush up against wet vegetation--when it's cold and rainy. I know to look for them in the meadow on such mornings, and am often rewarded.

It's especially nice when they come close to the deck, and I can creep ever so softly out and photograph them through the railings. Nice beard on this one. It's the height of turkey season here now, and there are more hunters in the woods than usual because they're bored and not working. I'm sure any hunter would like to bag this gobbler as a trophy. It seems so dumb to me,  get all excited about how long a turkey's beard is,  or how long his leg spurs are, but people do what they do. They're always counting coup on wildlife, lying in wait and calling them up, spreading corn in the woods, trying to kill them, then setting up ways to measure how "good" a gobbler is. To me, if he's out there and alive, he's good. He's no good dead, unless you're hungry. He won't get shot on my 80 acres, if everyone behaves himself.

I'd no sooner finished photographing this gent than another showed up on the other side of the meadow. Phoebe spotted him and sent me scrambling to get in position again.

You can see he's got a livid red engorged wattle, so he's probably been displaying down in the woods. 

He was headed for Bill's grave, which is the dark patch to the right, and backed by a blizzard of dogwood, and he stopped to gobble right there! If you click on the photo you can see the gobble posture: head thrown forward, a little awkwardly.

I like this shot because it says so much. The dogwoods tell you it's late April. The lone pine where Bill decided he wanted to rest. His grave to the left. And in the foreground, a crummy looking little shrub. That's got a story to it, too. The whole time we were living here, Bill was buggin' me about digging a pond out in the meadow. He wanted a pond smack dab in the middle of the meadow so he could watch for ducks and solitary sandpipers and yellowlegs and snipe and the like. Bill was a goal-oriented birder. 

Our argument hinged on the inescapable fact that this pond would be at the high point of a dry ridge. I told him, again and again, that I had no desire to look at a dry hole or a mud puddle, because I could guarantee that thing was gonna dry up every summer. Where's the runoff? I'd ask. 

So he had a test hole dug by our friend Mr. Crum when he was out here doing some bobcatting with his little dozer. And it holds water...sometimes. In spring. Some springs. And because you can't mow a hole, some shrubs sprang up and there they are to this day. With a hole. With a few inches of water at the bottom. That, I guess, is Bill's pond. That's as far as he got. I'm frankly glad it isn't a couple acres big with shrubs all around it. That's what I'm glad of. You can't mow a hole.

I've been watching jays. I have a lot of jays this spring. I watch them like some kind of addled eagle, all day long (when I'm at my desk). Because if I watch long enough, I might catch something like this.

On the right is a known jay from 2017 that I named Little Bit. See the little flash of white at the primary coverts? Unique. Nobody else has that.

In this shot, you can see the little bit of spangled white on Little Bit's brow, if you click on the photo.

I was under the impression that Little Bit was a male. In 2018, I had photographed it making a call that I thought was the male jay's "squeaky gate" call. 

Apparently not. Because LIttle Bit is getting fed by her mate here. I about fell over. Data points. Gathering them like a jay gathers acorns, all the time. Storing them away. Hoping to learn something. Learning every minute.

The real point of this post is to show you something wonderful. In mid-April, I answered a plaintive call from Geoff Heeter at the New River Birding and Nature Festival, based in Fayetteville, West Virginia. I have given a keynote without fail every Friday of that festival for the last 18 years. EIGHTEEN YEARS. I look forward to it sooo much. I love the festival, its organizers, Opossum Creek Resort (where it's held). I love the birds and mountains and wildlife. I love being around my old friends and making new ones. I love taking my dog, whether Chet or Curtis, to charm and entertain the people who come. Last year was Curtis' debut and he did not disappoint. 

I also love the fact that the festival raises money for an education fund that brings nature education into Fayette County schools. I really love that. 

But the festival had to be canceled this year, and we all hated that. 

Geoff wanted me to do a virtual keynote. Uh oh. I am real good at real life, at showing up and entertaining people. I am not good at virtual life, unless you count this blog as virtual...

So I thought about it, and decided to take my phone along and set it on VIDEO and just record a normal Zick morning on the bluebird box trail. 

And amazing stuff started to happen. 

One after another, amazing things happened. Was it because I was recording? Was it because life is just amazing, and when you make a video of it, you realize how jam-packed it is? I'm not sure, but I am so glad Geoff Heeter asked me to do this. Even though it took me most of a week to collect, edit, string them together, make transitions, and then consult with my kids to figure out how to present them in a goof-proof way for my "virtual keynote." Which actually came off without too much of a hitch, as long as you don't count the entire day I spent freaking out before we figured out how to put them all on a YouTube playlist for easy access. Virtual anything...bleh. These videos though...YAY!

Without further ado, I refer you to a series of five very short videos. Clicking this link will play them all in order. And you won't be sorry. It's a Day in the Life, Zick Style.

http://tinyurl.com/zicklife

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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What Makes a Blue Jay Raise Its Crest?

One thing I have noticed about blue jays, having watched them closely for a year and a half now, is that they almost never raise their crests unless they are agitated, angry or (as in this bird) simply fluffing all their feathers. It's rare enough that I was thrilled to get this photo.

So it amuses me to see artists' depictions of blue jays with their crests invariably, perkily, straight up. They have a crest, the thinking seems to go. So they must keep it up, right? Wrong. Blue jay crests are raised only very rarely, and for specific reasons.

 

 I bought this decorative plate at a consignment store in Hendersonville, NC this April. I'm sort of building a collection of blue jay stuff (in a very desultory way; my collecting gene is weak). Not on purpose, just picking things up as I find them, or as people give them to me. Knowing blue jays as I do, though, I look at it and wonder what those cute babies did to make their mama so mad. I worry that Baby 2 is about to peck the eyes out of drowsy Baby 1. Maybe that's why Baby 1's eyes are shut. Also if I saw a blue jay with underparts that white I'd flip out and name it Glacier and take a million photos of it. Sorry. I've been living among blue jays too long. I've gotten a bit testy.

Now, cardinal crest rules are completely different from jay crest rules. Cardinals raise their crests all the time, and it doesn't necessarily indicate anger or agitation. It can, but they also raise them when they're singing and eating and just looking around being chubbeh, like here. A very roundish cardinal.

I was thinking about how long it had been since I had been able to catch a jay with its crest up when something changed in our yard.  Suddenly everyone was going around with tall crests.

They were flighty and agitated.

Even the hairy woodpecker, usually a mellow bird, had some big hair going on.

This is how birds tell each other that something evil  this way goes.

And this is the cause. On Nov. 17, this adult male sharp-shinned hawk spent most of the day hanging out in the woods just beyond and to the north of the feeders.  If you click on this heavily obstructed photo, you can see the glint in his garnet-red eye.

He normally strafes the feeders several times a day, then disappears into the orchard. I always thrill to see him, even as I worry about my jays. But on this sunny warmish day, he was oddly relaxed, sitting with one foot pulled up into the floof of his belly feathers. Perhaps he had a full crop.

 

All the birds know that as long as he's puffed up and standing on one leg, he's not going to launch an immediate attack. But oh, that eye. You don't want that eye to fix on you, don't want the pupil to draw down to a pinpoint, because you might suddenly become lunch.

So after a period of utter panic and sitting frozen still, they gingerly resume their activity, but they all keep one eye on the hawk the entire time. Hairy Woodpecker is looking directly at him. She keeps her crest fluffed to tell all the other birds to beware.

The jays were almost nonchalant about the hawk. After all, they weigh nearly as much as he does (3 oz to the male sharpie's 3-4 oz). Hard to believe that hawk weighs only that much. A female sharpie can weigh up to 7.7 oz. I can't say I've seen jays virtually ignoring a big female sharpie!

They did, however, pay him the homage of keeping their crests up as long as he was around.

He returned for another camp-out on November  22, one of those dull gray days when not much seems to be happening. And up went the crests again.

It's the birds' nonverbal way of saying danger perches, preening and dozing, in a nearby tree.

When he mounted to the top of an elm, all the jays' alarm bells went off at once.

And when he finally took off to the northwest, a salvo of jeers followed him.

He'd be back, and next time, I'd witness his work.

Yes it is a cliffhanger, but a very small one. I'll be back, too. :)

Painting so hard on the LAST TWO illustrations for Saving Jemima. I made it through the Ecuador trip and Thanksgiving and Liam's coming home, and now I'm back at the drawing table, working with joy and verve again. Unstructured time for composition, thought and drawing...it's a beautiful thing.

I have a list of stuff I have to get back to when those paintings are done. So if you have sent me an email asking about a possible speaking gig, and I haven't replied, please know that there's a stack of email not being ignored, but simply waiting to be answered. First things first. Gotta finish this book!