Watery Retreat

 
Me, out of Custodial Mode. A very rare photo by Bill of the Birds.

I don't know what's happening to this summer. I feel like I'm running constantly just to stay abreast of all there is to do. It might have something to do with having the kids home and needing meals all the time, something to do with processing two large loads of laundry each and every day; something to do with a huge fast-growing lawn and gardens needing weeding that go on and on; with the fishpond filter that clogs with algae every day, with the Bird Spa needing to be scrubbed and refreshed; with countless planters and hanging baskets and bonsai trees suddenly drying up and needing to be watered each day; with all the creatures from fish and turtles to macaw, dog, flocks of brilliant goldfinches and hummingbirds that need to be fed and cleaned up after every day. Add doctor, dentist, orthodontist and optometrists' appointments, music lessons and frequent travel onto that, and I guess I've figured out what's happening to this summer. Please ignore my antic punctuation in this paragraph. I got lost somewhere between the semicolons and the commas. I'm just lost in general, wandering around in Custodian Land, trying to figure out how it all got to be so too much.


I think I do a whiny I-can't-do-it-all post like this every July. I love summer with all my heart, but the chores seem to magnify then multiply, magically. Sometimes I hum "Lazy Crazy Hazy Days of Summer" and just laugh. I would love to be lazy. Even for ten minutes.

I would like to have just one thing to do at a time, like a woodpecker feeding its young. I'm sure she'd trade with me...

When it all gets to be too much I go back in my mind to North Bend, to the quiet waters.

To the miniature islets, planted just so. 

To the sunbathing heron, standing with her wings akimbo, baking her body lice. Lazy girl.

 I drift closer and closer until she breaks the pose and sets about catching some fish.

She waded in and caught an early dinner soon after these images were taken. I was glad not to have put her off her task. 

That's what I love most about canoeing. It's easier to slip in and out of birds' lives in a little watercraft. 

And no, you can't sex a great blue heron. I was just guessing. Something about the way she was holding her wings.

I  loved watching the kids discover nature with the help of David and Mary Jane and their big canoe. Liam was cautious about bass. He kept asking me if bass have teeth.

I kept flashing on the wings of red-headed woodpeckers. It was a magical day, a fecund day, full of all the things I love best. 

Best of all, the birds we came to see were busy making more red-headed woodpeckers.

and more noisy flickers.

and more great blue herons

What a treasure North Bend State Park is. What a glorious place. You really don't have to look too far in West Virginia and southern Ohio to find some really special places to hike and canoe. I'd wager that's true for a lot of places. One of my readers commented:  You're seriously making me want to get a canoe or kayak, although I don't think I have anywhere that beautiful and bountiful to use it! 

Well, I didn't think I did, either. You have to check out the parks. Maybe you've driven by the sign for a local park a hundred times without ever exploring it. They're waiting out there, and I've had tons of fun exploring the ones in our area one by one. I'm always surprised at the beauty and serenity that's waiting there in the shallow waters where the speedboats can't go. Canoes: That's what they're for. 

They're for sneakin' up on things.

 photo by Bill of the Birds

Blue skies and puffy clouds and dragonflies on the shore.

My totem turkey vultures circled and tilted, telling me this was a good place for my spirit to rest.

If one could have a totem butterfly, the Z is for Zebra swallowtail would be mine.

Phoebe would soon discover the next wonderful thing I needed to photograph. "There's a bird here that looks like a pewee, but it has yellow underneath. It's got a nest here."

Give 'em binoculars and what do you get?  Little poults who find wonderful things, and return the favor by pointing them out to you!

Those mystery birds to follow.

On Quiet Waters

One good outing in a boat can be absolute magic for the soul. Forget chicken soup. I need the sound of trickling water under a canoe hull, the gentle rock of a boat on calm water.

A couple weeks ago, we mounted an expotition to North Bend State Park, not far over the West Virginia International Boundary with Ohio. About nine years ago, a dam went in, making a long, meandering flooded lake with lots of fascinating elbows and appendices to explore.

David and Mary Jane, Chet Baker's West Virginia parents, alerted us to this place, and all the birds they'd found nesting there made us anxious to explore it. So they brought their huge aluminum canoe, and graciously took our kids in it, while Bill and I zooped around in our one-man canoes.

Get a load of these reflections.

It was immediately clear to us as birdwatchers that we were entering a gallery of cavity-nesting birds the likes of which we'd never experienced.

For the flooded trees all died at the same time, and this made for easy excavation by flickers, red-bellied, hairy and downy woodpeckers.

Flickers, in fact, were going nuts all around us, courting and fighting. These two males engaged in some terrific stunts and dances, vying for a single female. See their black malar marks, or "moustaches?" Those small black dashes on the side of their faces (not the breast crescent; both sexes sport that) mean they're boys.

The males kept engaging each other, approaching, posturing with bills erect. There was a whole lot of woika woika woika-ing going on.

The female flicker's the top bird in this photo. 

Very noisy and amusing, they were.  What a treat to see flickers breeding--outnumbering the starlings, which compete for the cavities the woodpeckers dig. This is one of North America's most ornate birds. All the spots and dashes of jet black on warm brown plumage--they wouldn't really need the golden underwings and tail, or the white rump, or the gray toupee, or the little vee of scarlet on the nape...but flickers have it all.

Sometimes when I see a flicker on the ground I'm reminded of Africa's beautiful hoopoe, which is why I sometimes call flickers the American hoopoe. But usually only to myself or to Bill, because most people have no idea why I'm calling a flicker a hoopoe.

Good grief, they were spectacular. I love this photo--it captures the crazy antics we witnessed as the three birds chased and swirled above the mirrored water. Yes, that's gold in the spread wing of the lower bird. Oh, for a bigger lens, better light, closer approach. But you get the idea.

But flickers weren't the only woodpeckers nesting in the flooded forest of North Bend State Park. There were red-bellied, hairy and downy, pileated too. And then there was the most beautiful woodpecker of all...Bill's totem bird. 

The place is absolutely lousy with red-headed woodpeckers. I hope you're swooning, because we sure were. Red-headed woodpeckers are durn rare any more. Why the loveliest woodpecker must be our rarest...sigh.

More of these red, white and jet beauties anon.