The Best Thing I've Seen In My Yard

There's this beautiful line in a Bruce Cockburn song called "Pacing the Cage." It always makes me smile and breaks my heart at the same time, because for me, it's the essence of creating art, which is a continual giving, giving, giving, whether most people realize or appreciate it or pay attention or not.

I never knew what you all wanted

So I gave you everything.

All that I could pillage

All the spells that I could sing.

It's perfect for me, that verse, on two levels, because on one hand, I feel that some portion of my brain is always engaged with coming up with the next thing I want to share, something that will make you smile or gasp or feel good all over, knowing that there is this little corner of Ohio where all the things that should be happening in the turning wheel of the seasons are still happening. That there is this sanctum sanctorum where the ironweed bursts into bloom and is mobbed by swallowtails, where box turtles are laying eggs, some of which actually hatch, where newly-minted hummingbirds are dipping into dwarf pomegranate blossoms and there is someone there to witness it and bring it to you. 

And on the second level, that verse is perfect, because the gods or God of all that is beautiful and perfect is lobbing beautiful and perfect things at me faster than I can field them, faster than I can photograph them. I could sit at my drawing table all day long in late summer and shoot out the window and never, ever be bored for a moment. So maybe He never knew what all I wanted, so He gave me everything. Or She. Or It. Or Dod.  Dod and Ida. I don't know who's behind this. I'm still trying to figure out why so much magic comes my way, every dang minute. I just know that it I am in a constant state of worshipful excitement about it, and grateful doesn't even begin to describe how it makes me feel. It takes me to an otherworldly plain. A star plain. That's it. I feel like I live on a star plain, right here on Earth. And I am thankful that I have the means to share it with so many people. 

I am getting little waves of migrating yellow-throated warblers, several a day. And every durn one of them stops to peek in my studio window at me. Today, this one was hovering right at eye level, again and again, as if it had come to call me to attention. I'm there! I'm there! I'm paying attention!

  I have several dozen photos of these exquisite birds from today alone.  Dozens from the day before, and the day before, and they're all different birds. Yellow-throated warblers. Of all the things. And just inches away from my face, so close I have to back up to photograph them. I just shake my head. It's all so, so beautiful, and it's all as if it were being choreographed to bring me to an ecstatic state. 

I woke up this morning to this. Tuberoses still exhaling their night perfume, Rose of Sharon rolling open, sheep-clouds trotting across a pearly sky, all of Nature singing, still dripping with the night's little showers. I knew it was going to be a wonderful day. Mostly because I get to be here, all day long, witnessing. I do not forget for one minute how lucky I am to be here. 

I did my morning routine, which is get up, let Bacon out for a wee, give him his blood pressure and thyroid pills in little sausage treat balls, then a liver bikket to top him off; feed the woodpeckers, finches and cardinals their peanuts and sunflower hearts on the deck; grab a small handful of koi sticks for the comets in the pond; walk around the house admiring the zinnias and purslane and gaillardia and crazily blooming roses; check the morning glories for buds; pull whatever weeds I missed yesterday, end up in the garage where I tote the black oil sunflower and thistle seed out to the studio feeders; check to see that the birdbaths are clean (scrub them with Comet and refill if not), and finally retire inside to open the laptop and see what's happened overnight. I opted not to run this morning because those little sheep-clouds closed in for a morning thundershower, what a delight! So I was at my drawing table when the Gang of Eight Squirrels appeared to chow down.

This is a recent phenomenon. We never had a solitary squirrel in the yard until years after our neighbor Gary died. Gary had been eating them all. I mean, all. If you ever saw a squirrel, it was deep in the woods, and it would leap like a scalded ape from tree to tree to get away from you. They never came into the yard. Humans live in yards. They were terrified. 

All that has changed. These squirrels have grown up for probably ten squirrel generations, eating sunflower seed at Casa Zick/Thompson. I am appalled at their numbers, but the most I can do is send Baker out to rout them every couple of hours to give the birds a chance. I broadcast seed all over the yard so the birds can get some, too. Then I throw some sunflower hearts for my brown thrasher, who otherwise laboriously pounds the black oil seeds open one by one, and we don't want him to have to do that. Everybody eats.

I had found an interesting splash of mourning dove feathers near the spruce a couple of days ago, and it didn't look like the big young Cooper's hawk's work. It looked different. Like something had grabbed that dove and not stopped to subdue it or pluck it the way a hawk would. Just grabbed it and carried it off. I puzzled over that. I'd seen a black and white housecat  slink through about three weeks ago, and I wondered if it was still lurking around doing its dirty work. No housecats allowed here. 

I'm doing my combo of working a little bit and staring out the window a lot. It's around 7:33 AM, August 15, 2016. All of a sudden this spaniel-sized medium-brown BLUR races into my peripheral vision, flowing in one huge lunge up the trunk of a birch tree right behind the Bird Spa. OMGGGGGGG that had to be a BOBCAT!! It's hot on the tail of a fat squirrel which practically turns itself inside out spiralling up that trunk, then leaping wildly out of the crown of the tree to flump! to the ground and skibble to the safety of the nearby woods. I leap up just as quickly and start flailing around for my big camera, which turns out, after several darting sallies, to be PLUGGED INTO MY LAPTOP by its downloading cord.  I.E, it's  right at hand. OK. Stop panicking!!

I seize the camera and yank it, cord and all, away from the laptop, like I'm pulling out a bindweed  vine. By this time the cat has lunged back down the birch trunk and run into the backyard. I still haven't so much as gotten a clear look at it; I just know it's a bobcat because it was brown, it climbed a tree and didn't seem to have a tail. I'm sure I'm pant-hooting at this point, trying to motivate my body through the studio maze of prints and matboard and furniture to get it as fast as possible down the basement stairs and to the sliding glass doors of downstairs bedroom, where I am praying in rapid-fire heathen gibberish that it will still be visible. It's a small, scant hope, that the cat will have paused to catch its breath, but that small hope is so big it is bursting my heart.

And it has paused. It is standing about eight feet from the patio door. I shoot wildly through the heavy black screen and two layers of glass. It is here. It is a young male. And it is so, so beautiful.

I have come down here quickly enough to capture his look of disappointment as he thinks about the squirrel he might have been eating, had he not flubbed the chase. I guess that he might be a yearling. I don't think this year's kitten would be so big yet, or hunting on his own.

I keep shooting. I wish I weren't shooting through screen and glass, but this is far better than any bobcat photo I've ever taken, because I've taken none. This is my Most Wanted Ohio Animal. In my back yard. And I have my big camera on him.

He seems to get a notion, and trots toward the greenhouse, then reverses his course and heads for the orchard. I quickly sashay left and can now shoot through the glass door from behind a curtain, unobstructed by screening. Ohhhh yeah.

I love the way he keeps his tail curled up over his back. Still excited from the chase? Planning to spray a bit? Don't know. Just charmed.

I will him to stop for more photos. He does. I get overexcited and start punching the shutter again. I am so, so excited. There is a bobcat in my backyard!!!!!

BREATHE. BREATHE. Squeeze the shutter button. Don't punch it. You got this, Zick. 

You're going to need to click on this one to embiggen it, folks. Let your eye travel over every inch of that exquisite piece of wilderness, that puzzle piece of Ohio's fauna that has been missing until less than 15 years ago when our pitched efforts to extirpate bobcats finally trailed off into futility. When reforestation and their modest reproductive potential finally caught up with the heinous leg-hold trapping and persecution and habitat loss we have visited upon them since we first set ugly foot into their beautiful world. 

Look into those greengold eyes, those eyes that say "I see you. And I am not afraid. Thank you for the fat squirrels and mourning doves you supply me. You've got too many of them here. I'll take care of that." 

I know that, as long as I live, I will likely never take a better photo of a bobcat, in perfect health, in perfect light, with the Ironweed Festival going on behind him. And for that I will be grateful forever.

He turned to go, giving me a flash of his fabulous pied earbacks. Soft padded pink paw pads. Jungle spots and bars.  Tail still saucily curled over his back. Gotta love this cat! 

I'm calling him James, for my feisty, fiery friend in Honduras. It just fits. 

I kept shooting as he calmly walked away.  I had to drink this sweet cat in, every inch of him, while I had him in my sights.

As he turned, and I looked at his slab sides, it hit me that he really is still a kitten. A really big, really fierce kitten. Please come back as often as you wish, grow big and strong and smart, and help yourself to my squirrels. Thank you for your efforts. Tomorrow at 7:33, again? I'll be watching!

As he disappeared, bunnylike, into the ironweed, I remembered the bobkitten I'd tried to help in the  summer of 2014. 

I remembered how I had loved him, what a delight it had been to feed and shelter him,  

and how my heart had broken clean in two when he was taken away to a purely lousy fate.

And I smiled. Because in a very real and beautiful way, Bobkit was back. Here, big as life.

 Home. With me.

 Leaving scratches on my birch tree, scratches from great big claws on toes that are very far apart.

Yes, this is the Best Thing I've Seen in My Yard. Ever.

The squirrels squir-squir-squirrrred for about an hour after the attempted murder, which made me laugh out loud.

I laughed again when this squirrel climbed all the way down a little tree until it bent over, before he got the nerve to come to the ground for seed again.

You should be afraid, you little rascals. You should worry when you come into my yard. James is on the prowl! There will finally be a price on your fat little bottoms!

While you're at it, James, take a chipmunk hors d'ouvres. Please.

So there you go. There's the story, and it's just one little piece of a day here in Paradise. It's past midnight now, and I've got to turn in, but I wanted to give you everything. xoxo jz

Bonk!

My studio has a rack of three fixed-pane windows, facing north. To them I owe countless Bird Spa pictures, constant bird sightings, endless hours of gazing and wondering, and a pure north light on my palette and paper. On those windows are six FeatherGuards, designed by a Bird Watcher's Digest subscriber (and marketed by my husband) to deter collisions. They're lines of monofilament, strung with colored chicken feathers. Usually, they work. In the height of migration, with a bunch of crazy juvenile birds bouncing around, we still get some strikes.

Bill was out in the blind and I was at the drawing table inside when we heard that sickening BONK that means something has brained itself on the glass. We're so attuned to it after 7 years that we can tell which window it's hit by where the bonk comes from, and the pitch of it. A big window makes a deeper BONK. I always jump up and go digging in the flower beds for the poor thing, to see if I can help, or at least take it out of the way of predatory chipmunks (like Bob.)

You never know what the bird is going to be. You always hope it's not badly hurt.

Sometimes, what you find takes your breath away. Oh.We get one or two yellow-throated warblers here every year. This is a big, robust warbler with a long, slightly decurved bill, large clinging feet, and strong legs. It hitches around on the trunks and limbs of sycamores like a black-and-white warbler, and nests in natural cavities. (One of only a couple of warblers that do nest in cavities; the other being the prothonotary.) They nest sparingly right in the center of Marietta, which, as a river town, has lots of huge holey sycamores. They nest all up and down the hollers and runs near us, the low-lying ones with sycamores. I wish this bird were still called the sycamore warbler. It's so hard to keep from confusing it with the common yellowthroat, in name at least. All apologies to Geothlypis trichas, this bird has it outclassed six ways to Sunday in the beauty realm, don't you think?

Usually, we see them in fall, and they are almost always in a weird place--in the bird bath, on the deck railing, climbing up the beige stone chimney (which I think looks like a sycamore trunk to them), and once inspecting the LEG OF A TRIPOD we were using!!

This one was in a pile beneath the studio window. Rats, rats, rats, rats. Please be OK.

Might as well give you a good preen and fluff while you're down for the count. I have a feeling we'll be taking some pictures of you. There's Bill's doghouse blind behind me. He was trying for some bathing beauties, but never dreamt he'd see this.photo by Bill Thompson III

Of course the first call that went out was for the kids to come see what the window had wrought. Ohhhhhh! What a pretty bird! Is he going to be OK?photo by BT3

Gradually, he began to come around, and realized that Zick's fingers were not where he wanted to be. He moved up into one of the birches, higher and higher. You would have to be the most beautiful warbler on the planet, wouldn't you? Do you like butter?

The next morning, we saw a yellow-throated warbler preening calmly in the top of that same birch. It was a strong coincidence, if coincidence it be. He was fine, healthy, with it, but unconcerned about us standing just below him, snapping pictures. Singing a few bars in between rearranging his feathers. I pray it was the same bird, ready to continue his migration south. Given the paucity of YTWA sightings here, it seems likely. In my experience, if a bird can grip with his toes and open his eyes immediately after impact, the foreseeable prognosis is better than if he can't. He's not singing here. He's still panting.Compare these photos with those taken of the bird we saw the next morning in the same birch tree. Pretty darn similar. But so delightful to see this bird preening,
stretching his wing and tail
scratching his throat with his little yellow-soled foot (note that the feet match the window-stunned bird's!)
and being devastatingly lovely.
I'm going to think it's the same little fellow. Chances are. It's two visitations from heaven, that's for sure. Take care and stay away from windows, little scrap of beauty.
Thanks to B. for letting me borrow your camera for the preening shots. I love that gargantuan fixed 300 mm. lens. I just don't love carrying it around.