And What Kills the Killer?

If these fitness trackers you wear like a lojack do anything, it's get us out, even when the sky weeps and the chill goes to your bones. I'm thankful for that, though I'm having a heck of a time reaching my daily quota (10,000 steps) when trying to get over a cold. In decent weather, I fly past that picayune mark  every day. 

We went out for a slog through the shredded wheat meadows, trying to keep the dog clean by walking on grass. (I'd just washed him after a muddy run down Dean's Fork). 

It was a day without much visual promise. And those are the kind of days you want to watch out for.

We were coming up the middle path in our field when we all saw this thing lying in the middle of it.

It had been rained on, but by the size and content it seemed to be an owl pellet, a big one.

I started speaking in tongues, the gibberish my family is used to hearing when we've found something BIG. Do you see what I see? I was jabbering in something other than English.

That's the entire foot of a raptor.  In the pellet of an owl. I know it's a pellet because there's very little odor and the bolus is made up entirely of bone and a few digested feathers. It's pretty fresh and quite cohesive. If this were a coywolf dropping, which by its size it'd have to be, there would be colored fecal matter acting as a binder, obscuring the bone fragments, and stinkin' up the place. Plus, I can't see a coyote crunching a raptor's foot down whole. What mammal would swallow talons like that? I mean, besides a Labrador retriever? that was for Floridacracker.

My mind was jumping all over the place. Though I had already figured out whose pellet it was, I was mos def going to figure out whose foot it was. I tried to imagine any owl gagging down the entire needle-taloned foot of a raptor. 

The only owl I could see being able to do that with any aplomb is a great horned. Nope, just can't see a doe-eyed barred owl gagging down a raptor's foot. 

My first thought was that it might be a barred owl's foot, since great horneds are known to prey on all smaller owls. It's a tough world out there. 

By the time we made it back to the house, I'd been turning that pellet over in my hand, and I'd figured out that this was not an owl's foot. How? 

These. These are two rows of scutes, or scales, that run down the tarso-metatarsus (the visible yellow part of the leg) of a hawk. Owls have feathered tarso-metatarsae. The part you can see is covered with fine hairlike feathers. What few scutes they show are all on the foot proper. The exceptions are some of the fishing owls, but they're in Africa, not here. The possible owls here in a meadowy-wooded part southeast Ohio are great horned, barred, screech and saw-whet, and they all have feathered shanks. 

So it's a scaly-legged hawk, with rather long toes. Bird-catching toes.

Bill asked, "You think it could be a Cooper's?"

Synchronicity being the word of the day (remember I'd just photographed that blazing beauty in the birch an hour earlier), I replied, "I think you've got it."

If this was a Coop's foot, it was a big Coop, a female. Just a hunch. I'd have to make some measurements to confirm it.

I thought about how the kill would have been made. The great horned owl, detecting a slight movement or sound from the Cooper's hawk, who was perhaps sleeping tucked into the Virginia pines on our oil well road. Owl flying soundlessly closer. Hearing her breathe, hearing her settle her feathers. Planning its kill. Coming in from behind, strong talons closing around the hawk's skull. Bringing her to the ground, severing her spinal cord with a single nip. The Coop may never have known what took her. I hope she didn't. For what else could kill a big strapping female Cooper's hawk? And how else to do it, but by surprise, in the night? She who surprised songbirds all her life, now facing the last great mystery, and ending up in pieces in an owl's pellet. Egad. I'm glad I sleep in a bed, in a room, in a house, under blankets.

This, amazingly enough, is not the best thing I've ever pulled out of a great horned owl pellet. On the shore of Selden Cove, Connecticut, under  huge hemlocks now long dead at the sucking mouthparts of wooly adelgids, I found the carving block of a great horned owl. And there I found a pellet that had the entire, intact skull and hard beak of a belted kingfisher. Swallow THAT. Great horned owls are the honey badgers of the sky. Great horned owl don't care. She's hungry.

Because I am a Science Chimp, and have been properly permitted to make and store specimens salvaged from window and road kills for most of my life, I happened to have on hand a specimen of Cooper's hawk, and I remembered that it was a large immature female. 

I called out to the kids, "Come down here by the washing machine and I'll give you a lesson in bird foot ID."  Phoebe replied, "Let me tweet that first, and I'll come down." Which made me laugh. She has made a Twitter account called (pardon me) @ShitZickSays

which has a rather intermittent feed, since I'm not the one tweeting away. I have no power there. But I do find it amusing, to have it revealed occasionally what my kids find amusing about me.

I pulled out my Cooper's hawk skin.  Laid the pellet next to it. Talon size looked real good. The big talon you can see in the pellet, that still has its outer sheath, is the inner front toe of the bird's left foot. The one you're seeing clearly on the skin in my hand. That's the killing toe.

Started dissecting the pellet. It smelled, disgustingly and surprisingly, of turkey. Turkey! And Phoebe agreed, recoiling, her nose wrinkling. This gory remnant should not smell like something I eat. I was so glad we'd finally finished the last of the leftover turkey soup from New Year's. I think it's going to be a good solid year before I want to smell turkey again.  Couldn't get it off my fingers...I remember my specimen prep days...yep. That clinging smell. Bleh!

photo by Phoebe Thompson

Back to science. Measured the talons, just to be sure.

photo by Phoebe Thompson

Perfect match. Not only did we have a Cooper's hawk's left foot, but we had a female Cooper's hawk's left foot. The talon in the pellet was ever so slightly longer than the immature bird's talon, which might mean it was an adult bird, but that's farther than I want to take my avian CSI. The foot belonged to a female Cooper's hawk. And that, my friends, is some nice sleuthing. Helps to have the reference resources right on hand, down by the washer...

Even the metatarsal length was perfect. This was a big female Coop. That's a foot-long ruler there. Dorsal view

and ventral view.

Look how perfect that foot is next to the specimen.

Here are the scutes, gleaned from the pellet, that initially told me it was a hawk's leg and not an owl's. I'm holding them up to the hawk's leg so you can see how perfect is the match. 

Just for fun, look at a male sharp-shinned hawk in the same setting.

He's 10" long to the female Cooper's 18 3/8".

Just the foot size difference is astounding. And we get so confused, trying to tell them apart.

Based on what I see on bird ID forums (10 gazillion photos of Cooper's hawks in people's backyards, all of them asking for ID, over and over and over), I have proposed to rename Cooper's hawk "FAQ Hawk."  Think it'll take?

The Cooper's hawk's head.  That rusty flammulation is typical, as are the fine, teardrop breast streaks. Young sharpies look messier, more boldly streaked, and lack the orange flaming.

And her label. Here comes the synchronicity again. Look who collected it. Well, picked it up dead. My dad, Charles Dale Zickefoose, on December 22, 1983. I was 25 and already well versed in skinning and stuffing bird specimens, thanks to experience both in college and in Amazonian Brazil, where I prepared specimens for a small museum at INPA (Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas de Amazonas). I remember her crop being dead empty, no fat reserves, nothing left of her breast muscles, either. She'd burned herself up trying to survive. HY means hatch year. I've got total length (TL), wing chord (WC) and other measurements. A pitiful 12 oz-- a well fed female Coop should weigh 16 oz or more.

On the flip side of the tag, badly oiled by age and fat in her skin, is her story. I found that a small twig had pierced her right eye, blinding her. She was probably diving into thorns to get a bird, James Bond style, and that simple accident ended her career.

I was so honored that my father would think of me and pick her up and bring her to me that I painted a life-sized death study of her, freshly dead. I'd show it to you, but I gave it to my brother. It's nice. I did a lot of death studies back then, learning from the birds how they are built, how things work and go together.  She did not go to waste. Someday she'll go to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, where they already have probably 150 Zickefoose specimens in their collection.

Here's one from that period of my bird-painting life, a pied-billed grebe that hit a wire in the night and plopped dead onto a golf course in Connecticut. You can imagine what the Cooper's hawk looked like, and see what I learned about it just by painting it, dead. Click on it to read the writing. It's life-size. I still have a penchant for working exactly life-size. It makes sense to me. Look how small the wing is for that dense, compact bird! Look how the legs work--like oars at the stern. Look at the bird of this hour.

I'm still writing everything down, still picking things apart. And that grebe is still with me, like the hawk, stuffed  with cotton and with all its data intact on a tag. I'll save the hawk's leg, too, because it tells a story, and that's what I do.

I watched my little family make their way back to the house on this dreary afternoon.  I lagged behind, shorter of leg, always behind; and now carrying my precious find. 

But I was all lit up with discovery and curiosity, and burning with the certain knowledge that my Dad is still with me, placing inspiration right in my path.

This just in from Facebook friend Steve Huy:

 A friend and mentor of mine, recently departed, 
had studied raptors at the Appalachian Environmental Lab at Frostburg State in MD. His name
was Floyd Presley.

he told me that he was surprised at the number of Cooper's hawk remains they found in barred owl nests

apparently barred owls have a knack for picking off sleeping coops

We don't always know the whole story. We can pick at the edges...

Bird Messengers, Wading Dog, November Sun

Beauty lives at the same farm as the mini's, but she's in a different pasture. Every time I post a photo of her people chide me on her grooming. Walp, sorry, but I don't run with currycombs, and don't plan to. I shoots 'em as I sees 'em. Besides, Beauty's shy. I'm very lucky to be able to stroke her nose. Most of the time we just talk. I try to shoot photos over the fence.  It's easier said than done. This one came out well, made me laugh.

Chet and I forge on. The green is unreal. So vibrant, it's almost fake. I pull out my little pad and write a haiku couplet about it.

November's sharp green
Lies false on the bottomland
Like so much spilled paint
All around is gray
And the dry russet leaves who
Knew when to let go

We decide to go up a road that's flanked by a little run, as they call the creeks around here. It's very warm, 70's, and Chet wants to wade. I absolutely adore sitting on a sun-warmed rock and watching him walk spraddle-legged through the pools. Ker-plink, ker-plank, ker-plonk.

 

He's not much for swimming, but he sure likes to wade.

 

He goes up and down the streambed, obviously enjoying the different depths, lapping a taste from each pool.

He goes under the bridge, and rainbows spill over the abutment.

That's about how I feel right now--bathed in rainbows. In a tee-shirt on a 70 degree day in November in the Mid-Ohio Valley, infamous for its dreary cloudbound winters.

 

Such a magnificent doggeh. The lower I crouch, the more magnificent he becomes.

He enjoys being photographed. Good thing, that. I swear he smiles for me.

On our way back to the car I am musing that I haven't heard from my Dear Old Dad in a little while. I figure he's busy with Mom, who joined him last January. I am thinking about them and it suddenly hits me that Mom, Dad and their first child Donny are together at last. Tears of joy start in my eyes at the thought. I can feel their joy. I don't know why I'm thinking about this now, but when I'm moving for hours, I get a free-associative thought process that I can't attain sitting at a desk. I just empty my skull out of all the trivia and noise and let better things take precedence. I'm thinking about their reunion when a red-shouldered hawk silently launches from a dead stub just off my left shoulder. It flies on a long oblique angle right across the road in front of me, and I have time to get my binoculars on it. I trace it well into the woods, where it flares its beautiful zebra-striped tail and lands again, obscured. I see it settle its wings and can tell it's going to sit there for awhile.

I'm absolutely breathless with the synchrony, wiping my eyes so I can see better. Couldn't have a better message from Dad than that spontaneous thought, followed by a hawk messenger--the first species he ever used to contact me. I lower the binoculars and in my sightline in the creek just ahead are some heavy ripples. They could only come from a mammal, swimming. Will it be muskrat, beaver, otter? An enormous black mink loops out from the cut bank, swimming, its furry tail floating atop the water. I haven't seen a mink in years. And this is such a fine big animal. Its fur is espresso brown shading to black, and so shiny! I watch it through binoculars as it swims upstream, climbs out on a log, shakes like a small, lithe dog, and bounds through the dying vegetation on the streambank. I don't follow, because I don't want to disturb it, or introduce Chet Baker to a new animal, a tussle with whom he is likely to lose.

This is the creek where the mink swam by. It looks pretty tamed down, surrounded by hayfields, but a mink lives there, and I saw it.

I come home full of stories like this and it's so hard to tell them. The words just tumble out and I don't make sense even to myself, much less to Liam and Bill. All these random animal sightings, these unbidden thoughts about loved ones long gone. It all makes sense to me while it's happening, but it doesn't translate well into conversation.

"So how was your day?"

"Great! I saw some clouded sulfurs that made me think of Mom and Dad and Donny all being together again, and then this red-shoulder came shooting across right in front of me, and I'm sure it was Dad, and then there was this mink that he must have wanted to show me!"

I can say, "I saw a tree that looked like a magic hand shooting cloud webs!" but without a photo, what would that mean?

So it's nice to sit down, throw a lasso around all that, and write it for you, in a way someone might understand. Maybe even me.

Spirit Light

I wish I could convey to you the richness of having this audience of readers, of all that you bring to me. You might think that I'm just dishing out the content and you're taking it in without giving back, but oh, you do give back in so many ways. Lucy from Minnesota has helped me figure something out that has been puzzling me. Well, I'll never truly figure it out. At least I hope I don't. There should be things that pass understanding.

I remember a long time ago a reader wrote me to suggest that I take Free Will Astrology off my list of Useful Links. He thought it made me look kind of wifty, and he preferred not to see me as such. Hmm. I do believe there's something in astrology, however they've recalibrated the calendar. I feel like a Leo. I know Bill's a Pisces through and through. Liam's a card-carrying Scorpio. I love to guess people's signs based on what I've observed. I believe there are compatibilities and dysfunctions that can only be explained by the stars.  And what's wrong with any tool we might employ that helps us better understand our fellow human? Just because it's nothing anyone can prove doesn't mean it lacks validity.

The older I get, the more willing I am to believe that there are Unexplainables in this world. Things that no one can quantify or predict, results that can't be reproduced. Phenomena. For me, it's all part and parcel of listening to the little voice inside me, the one that tells me to look there right now! or get out that door before I miss my appointment with the merlin who's perched, waiting for me just around the bend. The one that tells me what a baby bird might need in its diet to thrive, or what might be going through someone else's head at any given moment. The voice that tells me what I need and how to get it, whether it happens to be a missing mineral or inner peace that I'm lacking. The more I dampen the big voices all around me, the ones that tell me what I should be doing, the better I hear the little voice, the one that connects me to the Universe.

So this churchyard has been calling to me, this building high atop a hill, one that's suffered the indignity of having a water tower plopped right in its front yard, and magnificently survived it. It stands, unheated and alone and miraculously unvandalized, year after year as unseen hands sweep it and let the birds out and mow its little cemetery and stack the unknown headstones when frost heave and mowers displace them.

I think Waxler Church has never been more beautiful than the morning of December 28, when the sun finally burned through our permacloud and set it in stark relief against a turquoise sky.

I prefer to photograph it from angles where the water tower doesn't show, but I see it bombed the photo above, sticking its face into the right margin.

The oldest stones you can read date from about 1840, and most of those are auf Deutsch.

I wander about, finding children, like six-year-old Earnest. Someone still puts flowers on his grave. Who?

I find my neighbors, who are both still alive, and am comforted that they will rest here eventually. 1974 doesn't seem that long ago. Married on DeLoris' birthday. Sweet.

I stand amazed before the stone of Lester and Linda, at the scene of bucolic (ox-filled) fields, Linda watching Lester atop his tractor, a dog by her side. I knew them both, slightly, the way one knows country neighbors, to wave to and sometimes stop and chat with. I'm touched by the intricate engraving on the stone, the way the tractor's clearly identified as a Deere. 

Linda told my neighbor Beth that Lester came home one day from working in the field, sat down in his recliner, and "his heart blew up." She lived in the little house for 14 more years, selling fresh brown eggs from the hens in the big pen beside it. I remember once when her Hereford bull got out and allegedly knocked down a mailbox on our road, and its owner brought a frivolous lawsuit against her, the way some people will, defying all logic and decency, just wanting a fight for its own sake. Yep, go after the widow who's trying to run 30 head of cattle by herself, atta boy.  Linda went, head hanging, door-to-door, asking for character witnesses. I helped as much as I could, writing a letter to the judge in her defense. None of that's on the stone, but it's inside me, and I think about it as I kneel by their stone. None of it matters now, but it mattered then, the case of the Errant Bull, the Widow and the Litigious Neighbor.

Someone has planted a landscape rose next to a stone. Wisely behind it, because those roses have growth power to burn and would soon overtake and cover the stone. Looking closely, I see the tattered remnants of last summer's nest in the upper right branch of the bush. From the materials and placement, I surmise that this nest belonged to indigo buntings. It's a classic bunting site. They usually choose a shrub so small and spindly that no predator would think to look in it for a nest. The other choice would be field sparrow, but the materials suggest bunting. Perfect. I want to come back in spring and listen for their song, confirm my hunch that a cocoa-brown female bunting sat her speckled blue eggs in this nest.

I wonder whose stone it might be, so I move around to take a photo.

Ada Louise Hune. She passed in 1947 at the tender age of 15. This bit of information hits me with a wallop, I with my grace-filled 17-year-old daughter still sleeping in her bed at home. I photograph the stone and linger, thinking about how perfect it is that an indigo bunting would raise its family here, with Ada below.

When I get home and upload the photos, I'm startled by what I see. Yes, I was facing into the light, and it was low early morning light, but I've taken probably 4,000 photos with this little gizmo and have never had my iPhone react to light in this way. A shimmering rainbow orb hovers before Ada's stone. I haven't Photoshopped it. I don't even own the program. This is it, just what the camera saw. As I look at it, I'm filled with wonder and joy and peace, as if Ada has somehow managed to send a message from beyond, as if she's thrilled I noticed her and her bunting nest and stopped to linger and think about her, wonder who she was. My nose starts to sting and my eyes well up at the thought. Something has happened here, but I don't know, can't say what. Something. The little voice is speaking.

And then just a few days later I get a letter from a reader, Lucy from Minnesota, who lost her husband in the last year and as it was happening wrote to tell me how much this blog and especially the antics and voice of Chet Baker meant to her and her family. She'd read his Facebook status updates to her husband Arch, and even after he lost his ability to speak, she could tell how much they brightened his day. Cavendish, their Boston terrier, still looks for Arch in his office each night before they go to bed. That's how we met, through Lucy's letter of gratitude those months ago. I was deeply moved that Chet and I, with my silly way of channeling his thoughts and desires, had had a small part in making Arch's passing a little gentler for Lucy and their two beautiful kids. You never know who you touch when you reach out. It's invisible, but it's there nonetheless. I feel it.

I hadn't shared this photo with anyone yet. I hadn't written about it, either. It was locked up in my mind. In her letter, Lucy unwittingly gave me a key to understanding what might be happening here. I'll quote  her.

" I don't share this with a lot of people, but I see "spirit lights", and sounds like you do too. (Well, I am not aware that I do, but my camera seems to!) We really miss Arch's human energy and being the family of 4 our kids have always known. Seeing lights is not the same as a warm hug or a heart to heart conversation or a shared laugh but at least you have some reassurances. 

"When you and Chet posted the blog about visiting the country church I kept re-reading it. Not only because it was so perfect, but because I saw so many sparkles and orbs on and around my phone I couldn't clearly see the words. You really woke the dead on that one. Your thoughts were wise, and sometimes funny, and the parishioners must have been delighted by Chet's return(?). Lord knows where that fella was before he chose the ZT family. I wanted to message you right away, but it was our last day on the island when I read it and we were busy still taking things in. Anyway you probably were aware you stirred things up a bit and I think they all got a kick out of it. I look forward to future visits you and Chet might make to that lovely cemetery and church and really hope the RainCrows get to play there. I think the spirits do too. "

Wow. Could those be spirit lights around Ada Louise's stone? I never even knew there was a name for them. Perhaps someone with experience in the paranormal can look at this and tell me. Lucy?? I just know that there's got to be a reason burial grounds are sacred across cultures and centuries. Something's happening here. I feel the Waxler Church and the people I know there calling out to me. Not in a spooky weird way, just in a "come see us" way. A good way. Like they enjoy the new living energy I bring to their resting place. Like they like to hear me sing in what was once their church, and just maybe still is.

Turkey vulture totem feather, mystery message from above, lit now by the morning sun. I have come here to see this, the light of this hour.

Whatcha lookin' for, little man?