Survivor Peg

I got home from Costa Rica late Tuesday, March 3. Wednesday was a blur of scrambling around catching up, waiting for my lost suitcase to find its way home, waiting for The Biggest Snow of the Year to hit. The snow started that evening and piled up to about 13" overnight and the next day. 

The feeders were mobbed. I was so glad Bill had bought more seed while I was away. I got up early and suited up to shovel out the greenhouse and my paths to the compost, bird bath and feeders. The power was off, of course; we almost never have snow without losing power out here. Bill worked for a couple of hours shoveling out the walk and setting up and running extension cords to our Honda generator, which I had bought with literally my last $700 after a nine-day power outage two summers ago. I'd had it. I was done playing Pioneer. Life was hard for awhile after that, but I am very glad I bought it. Life's better now.

We plugged in the generator, only to have the power come back on. I unplugged everything and put the cords away. I had just finished doing that when the power went off again for the rest of the day. That was funny. 

We watched the birds filling up on our offerings, and it felt good. 

Even with all the beauty surrounding us, I began to fret. I hadn't seen Peg since I'd gotten back from Costa Rica. Peg is a crippled blue jay who was injured, perhaps by a hawk, in November 2013 with a break high on her right leg. I saw her right afterward, stumbling around with blood on her feathers, watched her slowly heal and adapt to living her life with only one functional leg--a tall order for a blue jay, for any bird. To my astonishment she migrated north in the spring of 2014, and returned here in November, to spend this winter with us, too. Though we see them year-round in Ohio, blue jays do migrate. Our breeders are replaced by birds from farther north, while ours go south in winter. You see them migrating in big flocks in September. Peg probably breeds somewhere in Canada. I am agog that she has made it this long, being unable to process food in her feet, hop on the ground, perch normally, or preen very well. She can't even scratch her face. Imagine.

Peg in January 2015

 Peg hadn't been coming in since the boys had run out of Zick Dough partway into my trip. And now this, this Snowmageddon. 

And then I saw her.

Uh-oh.

Oh, Peggy, my Peggy! She looked horrible. Her feathers damp and disheveled, something going on on her back...had the Cooper's hawk grabbed her??

She kept shivering her wings in that hopeless way of sickly birds, but made no move to preen them into order. My heart fell to my feet to see my sweet little friend brought so low.  And the temperature due to plunge below zero tonight.

 But I didn't stand there crying.

Though I had worlds to do to get ready for a talk and a flight to Massachusetts the next day, I dropped everything to make more Zick Dough  for my Peggy girl. Because the power was still off, I melted the peanut butter and lard over a low flame on the gas stove, then hand-mixed it in a triple batch in a big lobster pot on the floor, like I always used to do.  (That link goes to an amusing video). And you know what? That's a heck of a lot easier, faster and cleaner than trying to get it all in the KitchenAid mixer bowl, and trying to keep it there as the mixer throws it all over the counter. The trick, I discovered, is to keep it to a triple batch, and not try a quadrupled or even quintupled batch, like I used to do. It mixes up like a dream by hand when tripled. Bigger than that, and it's just too much to mix by hand without bending your best spoon.

But you can't get any more than a triple batch in a big Kitchenaid anyway. So why use the mixer at all? Hand-mix it. Big pot. Boom. You're done.

I put the still-warm dough out and called to Peg by name, but she flew weakly into the woods, and I never saw her eating it. I had to resign myself to the possibility that I'd never see her again. I had already photographed her, because I follow the arcs of birds I know, whether they're good or bad, happy or sad. I want to know what happens to my loved ones. My heart ached.

The next morning, before I left, I put piles of Zick Dough out on the deck, knowing the starlings would annihilate it before Peg could get to it. She was nowhere in sight. I waited around, hoping for a Peg sighting, but was skunked. I was there, however, to document my first instance of the strictly vegetarian house finches sampling the lard mix!

Caught him with the dough in his bill! Snow and below zero temperatures will do that to you.

Then I left for the airport. The boys kept putting the dough out while I was gone, but they never saw Peg.

I had a great trip to Massachusetts, speaking at the Mass Birders' Meeting at Bentley University in Waltham, reconnecting with wonderful friends like my birding mentor Bob Stymeist! You would think, having shown me my first Swainson's thrush and vagrant Townsend's warbler in 1977, that he might look older, but he's aged like fine wine. Whatta guy. He told me he'd come across my common eider specimen at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, and said it was the best one in the collection. To which I replied, "It's hard to screw up an eider. Two-inch deep feathers will cover a multitude of sins."  Imagine him coming across my specimen, noticing that someone had done a particularly good job on it; seeing my name on the tag, and remembering having shown me my first Swainson's thrush. How sweet is that? Even sweeter: being able to thank him in person for being so kind to a bouncing, undoubtedly pretty annoying, 19-year-old baby birder. Here we are now, all growed up, not 19 any more.

I had a wonderful visit with my sister and niece, took a hike with Phoebe and hilarious, wonderful grand-nephews Will and Max, then came home on March 9. I looked anxiously for Peg. No joy. Same all through the pouring rain of March 10. She was nowhere to be found.

March 11 had a surprise for me. I'd been faithfully putting out Zick Dough at the appointed, agreed-upon hour, and this time, Peggy kept the appointment.

Whatever had happened to her back in the snowstorm had resolved. Maybe it was just ice after all.

Lord knows she doesn't need another injury. I checked out her good foot. Looked better than the last time I saw her.

 Peg filled her gular pouch, then filled it again.

And, in the manner of all jays, she stuffed in just a little more for the road.

I love you, Peg. Wherever you've been hiding, welcome back. I'll keep you in Zick Dough until it's time to migrate. Promise.

PEG!! March 11, 2015, alive, preparing to cache some Zick Dough, and as well as she can be.

 I wouldn't have given you a nickel for her on March 5. But there's life in the old girl yet. 

Is it any wonder I love her so?

She's the subject of my next column, "True Nature," in Bird Watcher's Digest's May/June issue. You can subscribe here. 

Surviving a Country Power Outage: Part Two

Dusk comes so quickly in the winter. We don't realize it as we flip lights on at 4 pm, but it rushes up on you. There's nothing to do but try to read a little, talk, tell stories, mess around with the kids. I'm actually nostalgic for it, only a week later, because being without power and its attendant distractions narrows our focus; makes us appreciate each other and the simple things in life.We read the kids their favorite books from early childhood, making them laugh 'til they lost their breath. Bill is really good at reading Nuts to You. He does it in a most politically incorrect way, writing new verse on the fly. Here, I'm reading Big Lil and Little Bill with a similarly ridiculous attack. We also told them stories about their babyhood, always a hit.

We brought Charlie the macaw into the living room as there was no heat in the studio where he lives, and his happy clucks and chortles cheered us all. Chet and Charlie thought it was all grand--everyone together in the kitchen and living room with nothing better to do than play with them.People need more kisses in a power outage. This is something that dogs just know.

Every three hours, I would dip a spaghetti pot full of water out of the planted Amazon fish tank, bring it near boiling on the stove, and pour it back in the tank. Which, of course, was dark as night, everyone in suspended animation for the time being. I've read warnings that changing a tank's temperature by two or three degrees in a short period of time (is five minutes a short period of time?) can kill the fish.

Someone should have told my tetras and gouramis that they were about to die, because they frolicked and swam right into the stream of hot water like kids at a fire hydrant on a summer day, and all 50 plus denizens of the 40-gallon tank made it through three days of having their lil' hambones boiled just fine. Swimmingly. Oh boy, here she comes with the steaming spaghetti pot. Whee! My fish are so cute, up for anything. They beg shamelessly for treats, nibble my arms when I stick them in to weed the plants. And why not? Almost all of them were born and raised right here, so they've known only kindness. They've never been shipped in Styrofoam coolers from a massive farm in the Philippines, dumped into questionable water with sick and dying tankmates, chased and whacked against the side of the tank by a teen-aged boy with a net, put in a Baggie and twirled with a twist tie, and taken home shivering in a brown paper bag like most hapless pet store fish.

We went sledding. This is our driveway. Impassable to all but pedestrians, but surpassingly beautiful.There were things about this power outage that were rare and lovely, as many as there were inconveniences. However...

By the third full day of this, I was tired of boiling aquarium water, tired of worrying that my fish and plants would die, tired of cooking from dawn to dusk, tired of washing the dishes and Tupperware, tired of cleaning out the refrigerator and deciding what to do with everything perishable, tired of the niggly business of surviving, and so was Bill. We both needed to do something else for awhile. He took a saw to the pine branches that were down across the driveway, gathered up the kids and fled to town (and a crushing workload at the office) in my 4WD Explorer. Here's our house (the tiny square tower on the left) in a Zhivagoan forest of icicles, as viewed from the road.
I couldn't leave the house, heated as it was by open flame, but that was OK with me. I went out and plugged my laptop into Bill's car charger so I could work. I had to run the car for an hour and a half to get the laptop charged to 90%. Let me know if that sounds green to you. It seemed pretty ridiculous to me, but by Wednesday I had to do something other than cook and wash dishes. I sat on the couch, running the battery back down, writing a chapter on ospreys for my book, shooting pictures of birds gobbling down Zick dough every time I looked up. Four male bluebirds at one time. Sa-weet!

Chet was curled up next to me, Charles on my shoulder, the fire gibbering and guttering away. It was pretty darned nice. And then the laptop battery died, and I opened the freezer.

Everything had thawed. Not cold, not even cool, but warm to the touch. Oh, feh! I don't know what I expected, with the kitchen at a steamy 70 degrees, the oven cranking away with its door open only a couple of feet away. I guess I hadn't wanted to know, and hoped for the best. I sighed, coming back out of my writerly reverie, realizing that the messy business of life will always and ever intrude upon art. I began throwing things out, dumping them into bowls and pots and pans and stacking the containers in the foyer. I looked at the line of pots full of lima beans and corn and sausage and frozen pizzas, sighed, got a muck bucket, and dumped everything into that. It was spectacular in a sad, wasteful, nauseating kind of way. The thing that bothered me the most was that we probably wouldn't have eaten most of the stuff, anyway. The freezer is where good food goes to die in my house. It lies in state with occasional brief viewings until the next power outage, when it is given last rites by possum, crow and coyote.

I should have a freezer the size of a bar fridge to keep me honest.

I was halfway through the freezer purge when the refrigerator gave a loud harrummph and the aquarium filter began to clatter. It was 6 pm, and I'd already lit the oil lamps for the long evening, already steeled myself to getting in bed at 8 PM and waking up at 2 AM, not knowing where I was or why my nose was so cold. I turned on the lights in the kitchen and continued with the grim task I'd started, knowing that I didn't want any of this stuff to refreeze and lie in state until next winter. Bill came in the door with a couple of nice bottles of wine and we poured a glass and drank it with all the lights burning.

In the morning, he hauled the muck bucket of food out to the meadow for the crows and coyotes, and set up the game camera to record the orgy.

Surviving a Country Power Outage

I must have known it was coming, a monster ice storm with a three-day power outage. On a trip to town on Monday January 26, I laid in food for us and for the wildlife that could have kept a whole regiment and all their pets fed for a week. Good thing, too. On Tuesday, I drove to Akron to pick Bill up, fresh from an exhausting trip to Florida. We got home just as the ice storm hit that evening, the roads rapidly becoming impassable sheets of ice. Tuesday afternoon, it started to rain on top of snow, with the air temperature standing at 26 degrees. We know what that means.
These are the kids' tracks on Wednesday morning, January 27, as they investigated the crunchy-glazed skating rink that had once been our yard. Photographed from the birding tower. It's been pouring all night and the air temperature is standing at 26.

One of those sneaky upper-level warm air masses was squatting over frigid southeast Ohio, dumping rain down onto earth and trees that had been frozen solid for ten days or more. Ice had been forming all night, a half-inch layer on every twig and wire, and I awoke at 5:15 Wednesday morning to the ominous sound of branches snapping in the woods, trees falling with a swish and tinkle of ice; rain pattering on a thick glazed crust of snow. Here it comes. I lay in the dark, marveling at the red glow of the clock radio, wondering what I should do to prepare for the outage, thinking ahead and behind to the outages before, knowing that when it came, this would be a big'un. I lay there a little too long.
At 5:58, the red glow winked off, and I hadn't so much as turned up the thermostat from its night setting of 62 degrees to at least start us off with a warm house. The dishwasher was full of dirty dishes. Blast! I'd have to do them by hand. And so much else.

We've got heat when the power's off, in the form of some gas logs in the living room, and our gas stove in the kitchen, which becomes an oversized space heater with the oven door open. That's it, but with curtains drawn across the kitchen entry, it's enough to keep our living space at 70 degrees, a huge blessing. (It did get down to 44 degrees in the basement, a bit too close to freezing for comfort...) Perhaps even better, we've got water, too, since we got gravity-feed town water about five years ago. And best of all, we've got an old gas water heater with an old-fashioned pilot, not one of those silly clickclickclickity electronic ignited things that needs electricity--duh!--to start. Having hot water in a power outage ROCKS. So Hard. If you can do dishes, get a hot shower now and then, you're really golden, because there are a lot of dishes generated by a snowed-in family of four with nothing better to do than cook rapidly spoiling food and eat it. We've survived a five-day power outage without water, before we got hooked into gravity-fed town water, and I found myself melting snow to heat on the stove to wash the dishes and endless Tupperware from all the food quickly spoiling in the powerless fridges and freezers. Yeah, two fridge/freezers and one chest freezer.

I can tell you that, however you feel about reading this blog, you do not want to be around me in an extended power outage without running water. In this one, with my running hot water, I was June Cleaver by comparison. Keeping my apron starched and cinched around my tiny girdled waist, my high heels clicking as I bustled about humming a happy tune. I will confess to hitting the wine about dark each evening. "Highball, darling?"A tree sparrow basks in a moment of sun.

The greenhouse is heated with gas, so life goes on there, too. Light comes in the form of some old oil lamps (the only way to go, much safer than candles) and our indispensible Petzl headlamps, one for each of us. Liam and Phoebe look really cute in headlamps, reading Captain Underpants or Calvin and Hobbes. Entertainment for the kids is drawing, reading, and playing together in the snow, and playing with Chet and Charlie, who goes from shoulder to shoulder cackling with glee.Don't be alarmed at his beak. It's not deformed--he's actually chewing the black drawstring cord of my sweatshirt here. He's ruined all our sweatshirts that way.
photo by Phoebe Thompson

All told, we're in fine shape, if somewhat cranky and out-0f-sorts as we shrug off our various electronic addictions. My major focus becomes cooking, as I don't want to lose all the fresh food I've laid in. So I got up Wednesday morning to a silent, dark house, started the gas fire, got down on my knees and lit the oven, washed the dishwasher contents by hand, and began cooking. I made a huge batch of spaghetti sauce and boned a bunch of chicken thighs. Started a soup with the bones and prepped a meal of chicken korma and stir-fried vegetables for that evening. Made the rest of the hamburger (we always buy family packs of everything) into burgers for the next night's cookout. Sorted through the fridge, making sure I had all the fresh food taken care of, and set a bunch of perishables out on the stoop to stay cold. Didn't want to deal with the freezer just yet. Which turned out to be a mistake.

Next: What do you do when it gets dark at 5 pm?