Parrot Games

Either Chet is preternaturally smart, or he got bitten on the schnozz as a puppy. All I know is that he was intensely curious about Charlie, always standing up on his hinders to take a closer sniff, and then all of a sudden he wasn't curious about Charlie any more. And, like most dogs in parrot-ruled households, he lets Charlie do whatever Charlie wants. Which includes chasing him at low speed in circles around the flat file, Chet play-bowing and yodeling and scuttling backward, Charles pigeon-toeing ticka ticka ticka as fast as he can go (which isn't very fast).

Charles is my 20-year-old chestnut-fronted macaw.

It's counterintuitive, really, for a 14-oz macaw to hold sway over a 22-lb. Boston terrier. It's all about the psi of Charlie's bite, which needs to be felt but once to make a permanent impression. Macaws are all attitude, with the bite to back it up. Don't get me wrong. I love Charles, and he loves me, and there's something really nice about having a bird on your shoulder while you're drawing birds all day. But they are, to put it kindly, insular, territorial, loud, and incredibly sloppy creatures. They throw what they eat; they shred paper and anything else they can get their beaks on. When properly fed, they strew fruit, vegetables, cheese, nuts, seed, pellets and occasional bits of meat and bone over a startlingly wide area. Charles starts each morning with 10 hours' worth of poop splatting onto newspapers beneath his perch. Think about a tureen of pea soup dropped from 8' up and you have the mess that greets me every morning.

I've had Charlie since he was 4 1/2 months old, a hand-fed child of captive-raised birds. He came into this world plucking his feathers, and will doubtless go out plucking. I'm just glad he leaves most of them. I sometimes confess that I bought this bird the first time my biological clock rang, in 1986. I didn't know it was going off, of course, I just knew I wanted a baby to take care of. I'm just as glad things have worked out the way they did. I'm glad I waited to meet Bill and have these particular human babies, the best ones I can imagine. But all these years later, I'm still fixing a hot breakfast for Charlie every morning.

A macaw's idea of a good time is to lord it over somebody else. That, and to hide under blankets, chuckle, regurgitate your breakfast, chew somebody else's possessions, and terrorize that somebody. Most of the time, peace reigns in the studio. Chet snores gently on his cushy bed, and Charlie preens and whispers in my ear from his station on my right shoulder. They're good enough friends that I can hold Chet on my lap while Charlie's on my shoulder. But every once in awhile, Charlie takes a notion to kick Chet out of his bed and steal his toys.

Baker, he of the expressive mug, tells the whole story with his eyes. And his posture, which is frankly horrible in these pictures.
There he goes again. Messing around with my blankets, in my bed. Rrrrrrr.


And you! You just laugh, and take your dopey old pictures. Do something, dammit! He's in my BED.


He is chewing my new Nylabone corn on the cob. Mother. He is shredding my very favorite toy. This situation is becoming intolerable. MOTHER!


One of these days, Charlie, you tatty old rotter. To the MOON!

A Change in the Weather

Friday saw a front come through with gusts of wind that had to be 60 mph. The sunrise that morning portended something big. If you were a sailor, would you stay in port today? Me, too. By early afternoon, the lawn grass was lying flat; our platform bird feeder was blown apart, the nails ripped right out of the base. Liam's willow, which had only just turned gold, danced wildly in the wind, losing hundreds of leaves with each gust. It turned from silver back to gold, its fronds whipping the light into a fine froth.
I knew it would be naked before the week was out. You have to love weeping willows, growing into the size of a barn in eight years. Leafing out in the spring before any tree with a crumb of sense even thinks about it. And then, hanging onto their leaves, defiantly green, until December. Turning gold all in a rush, and holding their leaves as we shop for Christmas trees. Yes. This is a tree what am a tree.
The cold came down, and it seemed right this time, more appropriate than 68-degree balm. Time for turtlenecks and indoor projects, mugs of hot chai and a fire in the fireplace. Today, Liam worked alongside me for much of the day, reveling in the newfound power of tracing paper. You can see his willow through the window, minus several hundred thousand leaves. It was planted the summer I was carrying him, in 1999, and it was barely big enough then to hold up a warbler.
He laboriously traced an image of Lightning McQueen from a boot box, then began coloring it with the markers Anne MacArthur (Mrs. Rondeau Ric) brought him from Canada. How many times I have sent silent thanks to Anne for this simple but perfect gift. This little marker rack is the only one our kids have ever actually used. They enjoy replacing the colors as they use them, and being able to see all the colors right there in front of them. It's a bit of genius. Organization, to my mind, is a strong foundation for creativity. To that end, I clear Liam's workspace every morning, and neaten up his materials, and that's all it takes to inspire him to spend hours on his drawings. How I love having my boy work with me, chatting, then falling silent as he concentrates. Like me, he usually has a tag sticking the wrong way out the back of his shirt. Focus. He's got it. He's saying he wants to be an artist now, and when a seven-year-old says he wants to be something, you'd better listen. I knew I was going to be an artist by age seven, and I knew I was going to study birds. Liam's chosen professions have mostly centered around trains until now. The one he hung onto longest was "cook in a dining car." He wanted to fix food for people in the dining car of a train. Phoebe used to want to sell popcorn in a movie theater lobby for a living. I think she wants to be a writer now.
The imminent arrival of my blogiversary has me in a reflective mood. I went back in the archives today to see when I made the first real post on this site: December 18, 2005. I started to look at past posts and found I couldn't. The only direction I can face now is forward.

Distillation

Our last New Mexico sunset. Oh, how I miss it already. I wish there were a way to be two places at once.
My sweetheart, gathering light in the afternoon.

I found this dipper by spotting his chalky-pink legs all the way across the river. A 12x zoom brought him closer.

Here's what's really cool about blogging. Have you ever taken a bunch of pictures on a trip, and filed them away, and never looked at them again? Me, too. Blogging is a way of reliving the trip. Sometimes it takes until later for me to figure out the best moments of a trip. Then, they get magnified and grow, and I savor them that much more in the retelling.

Of course, writing about anything is a way of distilling it down to its essence, of defining it for yourself as you define it for your readers. And when Blogger works, and downloads the photos I ask it to, it's a pure joy. So I'm going back to New Mexico in my mind, this time in the comfort of my studio, with a noisy macaw on my shoulder, a glass of merlot at hand. The macaw keeps dipping into the merlot. This bird LOVES wine. Just like his momma. His pupils are pinning down to little dots and he's flinging drops of wine with each sip. I know. Wine's supposed to be bad for macaws. He's probably taken in all of a teaspoon. At 20, I think he's earned some merlot. I don't think you could kill this bird with a rock.
So I keep going back to the conflluence of the Red and Rio Grande Rivers in my mind. It was a magic place. The hike was moderately strenuous and really fun; the distances were vast and it was great to look down and see the trail we'd hike thousands of feet below us. Liam announced at the trailhead, "Taking this trail was MY idea." And that was the magic key to his contentment. He set the pace and led everyone else, at only 7 years old, and my main concern was that he took it too darn fast. I hustled along beside him, holding his hot little hand (and I did save him from four or five nasty spills). Though it wouldn't be my preferred way to hike, I was preternaturally conscious of protecting our considerable investment in this little bundle of DNA. Something about having your youngest tripping along next to a sheer cliff face awakens the cavewoman in you. He only pooped out near the top of our climb back up, and then it was for effect. A little dried mango and a glug of water, and he was on his merry way again.
Here are Caroline and Douglas. Caroline's a very talented graphic designer with her own firm in Boulder. She's also a musician, bass and guitar player and bewitching singer. Douglas is a professional rock climber. If you see a movie with a rock-climbing scene in it, or a cliff-hanging scene, or any scene that involves mountains and danger and falling, chances are Douglas was the technical advisor. Vertical Limit was his latest. He's also worked on a Rocky movie. The outtakes we saw from his films make my palms wet. Obviously, Liam was in the best possible hands as he considered his route down from the mini-ascent he attempted. People pay big bucks to get advice like this. Caroline and Douglas, and their two daughters Hazel and Pearl, were ideal company. Caroline knocked herself out to bring plenty of food from Boulder so we wouldn't be at the mercy of restaurants for every meal, and Douglas was always navigating and planning our next adventure.
So we hiked all the way down this amazing trail, which you can see shining on the peninsula waaay below the woman in the red coat, who I photographed for scale. And then we were at the confluence of the Red (left river ) and Rio Grande. I was staring down into the rushing teal blue water, digging the sound and power, when a dipper flew right across my line of vision. The river was roaring so loudly I couldn't shout to Bill, so I just took the little bird in. So round, so firm, so fully packed.
Seeing this little tennis-ball sized bird do a few deep knee-bends and then dive right into the cataract is quite humbling. I know that if I fell in I'd last about five minutes and then give up the ghost. But there he is, swimming underwater, popping up with a larva in his bill, and blinking at me with his weird white nictitating membranes. I'm sure they serve some social purpose, as little flashing semaphors to signal to other dippers. You can just see the white "third eyelid" in this shot of the dipper in its element.
I love this picture. It sums up bird and element. Oh, New Mexico. How we miss you.
William made chicken pot pie and brownies tonight. He did all the hard stuff and I made the sauce gloop that makes it into a pie. I can smell it all cooking. Perfect for a night with a howling gale. We'll fire up the gas logs and stare into the caveman TV after dinner. Poor B. had to make the brownies because he dropped the eggs not once, but twice. So he scraped them off the kitchen floor and added them to brownie mix. I can tell you that when someone is making you chicken pot pie and brownies, dropped eggs are no big deal. Especially when he cleans them up, too. He may be the perfect man. Ladies, can I have a HAYULL YEAH?