Chet, Phoebe, and the Hula Hoop

On a pellucid afternoon in June, Phoebe came out of the garage bearing a purple hula hoop that dates to when she was young enough to like everything to be pink or purple. All she had to do was hold it up and let the beads inside it rattle to get Chet Baker's immediate and full attention.

Ruh ruh ruh ruh. Give it to me. 

Chet Baker, you're going to have to jump for it.

Not a problem. I am feeling springy on this cool evening.

I got it! I got it! oinka oinka oinka oinka

It is hard to carry in front of me. I will flip it over and run inside the hoop.

Oops. That is like having someone chasing me. And I am afraid it will go up under my tail, and there is nothing I hate more than having something ride up under my tail!

I will run humpty-backed to prevent that. Why is everyone laughing so much?

One of the ways to get something from someone is to give a mighty twist with your super-strong neck and wrench it out of her hands. 

You can bend a whole hula hoop doing that. But you will eventually get it. 

It was one of those evenings, the perfect conjunction of beauty, light and fun. Ahhh.

You may have noticed in viewing these photos that somewhere in the last five years our little girl has turned into something approximating a supermodel. Looks are good to have, they're fine and all that but we have confidence that she's going to have a product well above and beyond simple beauty. There's a fire inside her and it's not just in her hair. She's set to break out of the pack, and we can't wait to see what she'll do with her one wild and precious life.

This would sound like nauseating parental braggadocio but tomorrow is her SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY and I think it's probably OK to tell the world how wonderful Phoebe Linnea really is.

She knows much, much more about nature than any would suspect. She tries to hide it because she doesn't want to be the Ornithological Factotum of her high school, but it's too late. If anyone has a bird question they come to Phoebe.

If Phoebe tells me she sees a new bird in the yard, I drop everything, because it will be something really special. It started when she was about five and she told me she'd found a new butterfly. It was a Silvery Checkerspot, and she could tell it was different from the nearly identical Pearl Crescents that were everywhere.

She notices.

My little plan, it is working. Now, if we can just get baseball out of the forefront of her mind, we can continue the Science Chimp training. This may or may not be doable. Baseball is pretty much where she is at. And wherever you're at, there you are. And whoops! you're taking the whole family along.

Liam and Phoebe celebrate the Pirates' sweep of the series against the Kansas City Royals with a whiskbroom and the Jolly Roger. She wanted to take a full-sized broom but Daddy nixed that--too dangerous in the packed stands at PNC Park. She loves her brother and he loves her. And there is almost nothing that gives a mother more joy than seeing a sibling bond that strong and enduring. He knows how to make her laugh, that's for sure. And she includes him in everything she does without being asked. Just because she likes his company. 

Happy birthday, Beautiful!! and thank you for being a child of light.

All photos in this post taken with my new Canon  7D and its 70-300mm L series telephoto lens. Which I love so much, and which I got from Midwest Photo Exchange, a family-owned Real Photography Store. Call Sonnie at 

866-940-3686. He'll set you up.

Hog Island: Parulas and Chickarees

Hog Island: It’s really just a hop from the shore of Bremen, Maine, which isn’t far from Damariscotta. You can row it if you know what you’re doing, which my friend Jamie, Registrar of Hog Island Audubon Camp, confesses she doesn’t yet. Still, she got there, in a zigzaggy way.

 

Jamie's headed to the mainland from Hog Island to do something or other.

I'm standing on the shore laughing and photographing her against her will.
Glad nobody's photographing me trying to row a boat!

People come here to hang out together, to watch birds together, to learn about ornithology, to look at cool boreal forest plants like these northern pitcher plants, holding their oxblood blooms high above fat pots.

 They come here to get away, to be surrounded by water. There is something peaceful about being surrounded by water. Like nobody’s going to bother you here, because nobody can get to you. At least that’s my theory of why people love islands so much. Castle with a moat. We’re safe there.

 

So we were asked to come and lead field trips and give talks and play a little music, just do our Bill and Julie thing. 

Asked by our dear friend Scott Weidensaul who knows not just a little but a lot about everything.  His latest book is The First Frontier and it's ridiculously good. Scott was running this field camp, and he figured that the title of the course, “Joy of Birding,” seemed a pretty good fit for what Bill and I do.

 

The place is infested with chickarees or red squirrels and oh how I wished Chet Baker could be there with me to chase them all. I don’t know how many songbirds manage to nest successfully there, for chickarees are bloodthirsty little beasts and there’s nothing they can’t climb to or sniff out. The island hikes are punctuated with their clock-winding chattery scolds.

 

Cute is as cute does, Mr. Egg Pirate.

Right off the bat there was a pair of northern parulas that made it their business to make about 90 people very, very happy. They built a nest and managed to hatch four eggs in this chickaree-infested camp and they foraged right over our heads completely ignoring us. They had babes to feed. The old apple trees were loaded with little caterpillars. You can see one hiding under webbing right in front of this female bird, and she nabbed it right after I got the photo.

Oh, I had me some fun with my new Canon EOS 7D with its EF 70-300 IS telephoto lens, and I was more convinced than ever that this is exactly the lens for me, who loves to dawdle near small birds and watch them do their birdy things.

Hover-gleaning.

What a gift these birds were, what a gift was their little nest. More anon.

I'm writing this Saturday, July 7, 3 pm. Our power just came back on, having been off for eight days. Today it's 100 degrees in the shade and we have had all manner of associated minor catastrophes going along with having no electricity. First there was the destruction of the Garden Pod, then there was a chest freezer leaking into and ruining our music room carpet, and this morning we discovered that the water heater had been in cahoots with the chest freezer because there's a small lake beneath it (and throughout the rest of the basement as well). We've done nothing since we got home but deal with one nasty stinky festering expensive problem after another, then sprawl exhausted but sleepless on piping-hot sheets until it's time to get up and start back to work.

This morning we took another count and we've lost probably a dozen large trees, some of which we'll have to deal with, some of which will rot where they lie. Seems like the wind picked off all the nice ones: a huge oak, our silver maple, our fruiting mulberry, our best wild cherry (haven for waxwings), a big black walnut, some great big Virginia pines.

June was pretty cool but I haven't much liked July so far. Still there are people much worse off than we thanks to this huge and horrible storm, and what we've lost are things and trees and appliances and about 8.2 gallons of sweat and money, not lives. Here's to the Washington Electric Coop crews who slaved around the clock in brutal heat to restore power; here's to our friends Dave and Marcy and Steve and Carol and Caroline and Keith who brought us a generator and a million extension cords and the last two of whom are even now replacing our water heater. My brains are like hot cornmeal mush now so I'll sign off with grateful thanks to good friends.

And thanks to you, dear readers, for your support in dark times. I'll keep the natural history stuff coming.

Wasn't That a Mighty Storm?

Wasn't that a mighty storm?

Wasn't that a mighty storm in the morning

Wasn't that a mighty storm

Blew the people all away.

This Tom Rush song has been one of my anthems since Saturday, June 30.  I sing it over and over, just that couplet, as I work. On Friday we were in Bremen, Maine, and I was romping around a butterfly meadow with our new teenaged friends Corey and Ben and Hunter and Jetta and Saphire, among others.

The weather was doing this:

 I had just seen two life butterflies on the same daisy plant--a Northern Crescent and a Harris' Checkerspot, and Corey had identified them for me, and I was about as thrilled and happy as I get. 

Let's do some thrilled and happy:

My life Northern Crescent.

My life Harris' Checkerspot.

Two life butterflies on the same plant. Wow.

I didn't know it, but at the same time I was so thrilled and happy, a storm was brewing up along the shore of Lake Michigan and it had big plans for the Upper Midwest. It would travel down from northwest to southeast at 90 miles an hour, with what was essentially a brief, violent, several hundred mile wide linear hurricane (technically a derecho, with violent straight-line winds) and it would wipe out trees and power lines and pieces of homes; it would remove roofs and topple whatever was in its way from Michigan to Virginia. Which was considerable.

We couldn't get cell reception on the island and of course there were no televisions or newspapers or radios which is the whole point of a place like Hog Island so we were innocent of what was happening to our home. The storm hit our home at 6:27 pm Friday, June 30. That's when the Poll Parrot clock in the kitchen stopped. Saturday morning we finally came off island and got a cell message from our dear housesitter Monica who, now that Charlie Macaw is gone, just stops in to feed the turtles and fish and water the bonsais. And all she said was, "This is Monica. Please call me."

That didn't sound good to me. That sounded like something that's so bad you can't say it over the phone. So while we were waiting on our breakfast in a little cafe in Damariscotta, surrounded by hundreds of pounds of luggage and our tired kids, I called and Monica said, "Oh Julie. There was a horrible storm, but your house is OK. Your house is OK and I don't know how to tell you this but your greenhouse is gone."

And she started crying.

I didn't cry but this fast reel of images started flashing across my mind, gathered over the twelve or so years I'd been enjoying that little greenhouse. Images of it stuffed to capacity in April, waiting to be emptied of its fecund treasure.

Images of neat pots of the geraniums I love most and always say I can't live without: Frank Headley, with his icy white leaf edges and salmon single blooms. Grey Sprite. Rosina Read. Little various abutilons and mallows and cacti and whatever. As long as it has a bloom and will thrive in that small sunny space, it had a home with me.

Apparently, it helps to be pink to be included in Zick's Roster of Favorite Plants. 

I look at these images, taken over the last decade, and remember how the greenhouse healed me. How I could suddenly get that winter lump in my throat and just get up and march down and clear the ice away and kick the cinder block aside and open that door and enter a humid, peaty, fragrant little room of salvation. There was really only room enough for one person in there. 

You didn't need any more than one person in there. One person and her plants.

I never opened the door without saying, "Hello, ladies!" It was the plants that made the place, the plants and the sun and the warmth all winter and the smell of gardenia, jasmine and heliotrope when a temperate Ohioan had no right to be smelling those things. The eye-hurting magenta blooms of bougainvillea in January. Luxuries which became necessities.

Now, I always emptied the Pod by May 1 and planted everything out in planters and baskets. So nothing was inside it but some baker's racks and a little gas heater. 

Which is a good thing because that storm I told you about blew my Pod to smithereens.

 Took the mulberry tree while it was at it.

 And took about a third off Liam's willow, which is only twelve but is one hell of a piece of biomass. Even a third of it took us all morning to cut up and pile and clear away. Now you can see right into the tree. I wholeheartedly approve of this piece of surgery. It's always been full of birds and now we can actually see them, and the part that would have eventually broken off and fallen onto our house is gone. So for that I thank the storm, that mighty, heartless storm.

I think differently about trees close to the house now. I don't ever want trees close to the house, not big ones. That's another reason to love birches. They don't get big enough to ruin much when they come down.

                               

We cleaned up the bits of Pod and had to throw away the frame and footers, they were so badly twisted. The ceiling was smashed, so all we have are the sides, and we aren't sure what we should do with those. It seems to me that any kind of frame we'd try to build around a geodesic dome would be more than a couple of bird writers could engineer. So there it lies, in a neat stack next to a silent, powerless house. The Garden Pod was a prototype that never went into production, so there's no hope of finding the manufacturer and getting a replacement frame. It's shot, kaput, blown away. Someone with more brains and time than we have could probably build something using the walls, which are nice double thermopane plastic. Oh, it was a beautiful greenhouse. If you're out there, make yourself known. We've no room to store something we can't use.

We're ending our sixth day without power, breaking our previous outage record of five days. I'm sitting in a town park composing this post, waiting for the scissorgrinder cicadas to start their evening song. It's cooler here than in the house. The incessant heat brings on a kind of lassitude and eventually a mild despair that is a strong deterrent to blogging, hence the silence. Besides, there is a lot of work to do in the aftermath of a storm. We're tired.

We started throwing food away last Sunday morning and I was still at it the evening of July 4. The last to be cleaned out was the huge chest freezer in the basement. Everything had to be thrown away.  I documented it in a series of artful photos. I call this Cornish Hens, Mango, Potstickers and Seafood Blend.

And I call this Nine Degrees of Suppuration.

  At the end of the second day of cleaning it out, I decommissioned the chest freezer right then and there. By the time I had sopped up all the reeking frozen bird juice and blueberry and popsicle drippings in the bottom, by the time I'd disinfected every surface, I had decided to make it a suitcase storage unit instead of a vault where good food goes to die. Lord knows we have suitcases to store. They don't stay unpacked for long. I mean to change that. When you're gone all the time, these things tend to happen.

So I alternate between singing Mighty Storm and Pieces of April, an old classic by David Gates and Bread which came to me as we were picking up pieces of my greenhouse. The subconscious is a beautiful thing.

So was the Garden Pod.