Animal Magic on Dean's Fork

By July 13, 2016, the Canada lilies I'd never known were there burst into bloom on the banks of the  pond. Blue campanula set them off nicely. I left a note on the door of the sometime inhabitants of the little solar-powered cabin nearby, to go look for these ephemeral floral treats. I like doing stuff like that, shining a little light into the woods for others to see. 

Wild bergamot in two colors, July 13, 2016

And who could forget July 24, 2016, my birthday, when I was showered with gifts by my favorite dirt road? I swear, it seemed all the animals came out to wish me well!  I'll admit that it does help to walk there at dusk, when they're coming out anyway.

Twin bucks, July 24, 2016. Gosh, ya think they're brothers?

One of the twins has better judgement. Can you guess which one?

The most beautiful skunk came out to show me his pink toes and nose.  He rumbled right up the road toward us. We had to climb a bank to get out of his way!

I recognized him from early morning skunk watchings I'd been conducting. There were three skunks living down there last summer, and I met them all several times. Skunks are a behavior-watcher's ideal animal, because each one is as distinct in markings as a smelly lil' snowflake.

But the best birthday present of all was waiting down in the gloaming, just as it was getting dark. My Hannah, the Loose Appaloosa, an apparition in the dusk.

And this evening, the last time I saw Hannah, she was more beautiful and kind to me than ever. I didn't know it was the last time. I simply treasured it, like all the other times I met up with her, and loved on her. 

She's gone on, I'm told, to live elsewhere,  about two hours away, with other horse friends. I miss her more than I can say.

July 24, 2016.

From that same day, a wood thrush concerto that now, in early April, seems otherworldly, unbelievably rich. It's hard to believe they'll be back soon and tuning their flutes in a matter of a week or two. This video was taken just below the dam, along a low wet meadow that's full of Joe-Pye weed and ironweed in August. Here it is in late July, with the thrushes spinning their silvery songs across the road.

By September  28, 2016, after a lush wonderful start and a hideously dry late summer, the pond had all but dried up. It was sad, but inevitable, because the half-dam the beaver had built didn't set back enough water to last through the drought. 

At least this drying out was gradual, not the cataclysm of September 1, 2014. I resigned myself to watching this little ecosystem briefly flourish, be destroyed, creep back to a shadow of its former glory, dry up...whatever fate and that lawless jackass brought, I'd be there to witness. Dean's Fork and I are too intertwined for me to turn away from it; its riches are so varied and precious I literally starve without them. Since I first started walking this road in perhaps 2007, it has become essential to my well-being. It is my habitat, in some ways even more than my home and gardens are. When I am there, I have complete thoughts; I write songs; I leave my corporeal body and commune with the animals; I connect to who I really am. 

The Unblinking Eye: Wood Thrush

  I can’t stay away from Dean’s Fork in late summer. Every time I walk, trot, lope or jog it, I see a new constellation of creatures, birds, plants. I never know what’s waiting for me. Early morning is magic, the wood thrushes are in full song even in late July, and the fact that all the other birds are mostly quiet only highlights their ethereal flutes. At any one point on the road I can hear four or more at once.

I’ve found several eggshells on the road, freshly pipped; clearly, this wild woods cranks out wood thrushes, and that makes my heart sing.

This one wasn't pipped by a wood thrush chick; it was predated, probably by a jay. It was June 10. I had just spotted a female wood thrush hauling a huge wad of nesting material across the road, and thought, "Huh. Looks like she's tearing her old nest apart and rebuilding it elsewhere. Wonder if it got predated..." when I looked down and found this empty egg.  That's situational awareness in action, and a small turquoise reward for paying attention. 

Just before Phoebe left for California in June, we walked Dean’s on a sparkling cool day. I wrote about it in her birthday post. One photo I left out of that post, out of consideration for my girleen, was what we found on the road when we scared up a family of crows who were foraging as we walked around a bend. I fought with myself for awhile about this photo, knowing the sensibilities of many who read this blog, but I find it so beautiful and powerful I knew I had to share it. Crows gotta eat, same as people, and what’s on their menu is baby birds. This wood thrush nestling, looking with an unseeing eye on a woods it will never get to know, moved me, but not in a take-down-the-shotgun-and-shoot-crows way. I love crows. I will always love crows, just as I love wood thrushes. Having raised a wood thrush, having been its surrogate mother, this photo is hard to look at. But it is. So much of moving easily through nature is accepting what is. 

Where nature is concerned, I have an unblinking eye. I want to know what goes on out there. I want to know who pierced the egg, who halved the nestling, who left the toad eggs, the rabbit omentum strewn across the meadow. My first reaction is rarely “Eeew!” but rather “I’ve never seen that before.” Or, “Would you look at that!” I take it all in, and while I harbor an abundance of emotion, and it makes its way into my writing, I find that very little that I observe in nature really disturbs or upsets me. It’s the workings of man that do that. Those are all around. Those, I prefer not to write about.

We are blessed with wood thrushes here. This area-sensitive bird has vanished from so many smaller woodlots, forest fragmentation and the resultant incursion of brown-headed cowbirds taking a terrible toll. This is why I haunt big woods, why I am drawn down Dean's Fork again and again. There is an intactness about the place, a feeling that everything--from damselfly to box turtle to bobcat--is still here, in its place, safe, more or less, and undisturbed. It is my Eden.

To judge from their songs, wood thrushes must continue to nest well into summer, or why would they be holding territory with their music? Listening, one might conclude it’s for the pleasure of singing, but bird behavior is generally more directed than that. I made this little video in late evening on my birthday, in late July. At the end, I say, "It's my birthday, and I've got my Dean's on." Listen and swoon. Try to ignore the endlessly pippering baby cardinal, and dig those countersinging wood thrushes!

I think of this video clip as a rainbow after the thunderstorm. The thrushes sing, telling us that life goes on through all the predation events, the rebuilding, the sadness. These thrushes don't know that theirs is a declining species, vanishing everywhere due to habitat fragmentation. They only know that they must sing on July evenings, and light up some bird lovers' hearts.

Spring, All at Once

 Desmia funeralis, Grape Leaffolder.

Mmm, what a natty jet airplane of a moth! Perched on Nancy Love's gravestone at my little Methodist cemetery. I could not have told you what it was without David Beadle and Seabrooke Leckie's new moth guide, which makes me whoop with joy. What a book!! I'm getting it signed at the New River Birding and Nature Festival, where Seabrooke will be speaking and showing us all the fabulous moths. Giving them names, for once. O joy! I get to meet her and get my book signed! See, writers get just as geeked out as everybody else. (Postscript: She was Wonderful. Marvelous. Self-effacing but quietly confident, brave and magical, too).

Scattered, scattered, I am. On her way to the New River festival, Murr Brewster came over for a day and a half and a lovely night too and we emptied my greenhouse. Two women could not have had more fun, than messing about with pots and soil and deciding which geranium looked nice with which nemesia. I love that woman!! We decided she really just needs to live here. Think how much we'd get done. Or not. Yakkity yak yak yak.

 The second we put them out, the "Graffiti Red" stellar geraniums were visited by swallowtails and this lovely male hummingbird, who had been flying into the greenhouse every day to say hello to the flowers. It made me smile as wide as Montana to be in the Garden Pod when he flew in, because he sounded like a gargantuan wasp from a Japanese horror movie in there.

Birds are flooding in. Oh my gosh. How can I do everything I have to do to get ready for the festival?? To keep my precious plants and bulbs from dying while I'm away this spring? There's an indigo bunting in the orchard, and they're flying over in twos and threes, zapping...

And there are sweet kids to be fed and run to the waiting bus...not for much longer! They get out May 23!!

but there's a faded scarlet tanager rasping away in the orchard, too...

 and the woods is full of wood thrushes, and how can you do everything that needs to be done when you are melting away?

Twee-o. Tweedleay. bup bup bup twardle tee? Twowdly-oh Tee? Twee-o.

And the leaves drip and the song twines around my heart and squeezes it up into my throat.