More Filmmakers Visit!

To "Jack," who keeps leaving strange comments on recent posts along with a handy link for home security systems (or whatever): OK. You're at least looking at the pictures and trying to leave a semi-relevant comment. Please stop with the ads. It's tacky to pimp your stuff on my blog, and you're ticking me off. My readers aren't interested in a home security system. They're here for the birds and bugs and dog, not your links. So cut it out.

Think that'll work? Me neither.

Not long after Michael Male left, Lang Elliott and Wil Hershberger arrived, intending to make high-definition films of insects. I assured them that this is a very buggy place, and they found gold in these thar hills. It's amazing what comes around when you manage for diversity in vegetation, and plant gardens like a schizo monkey.

Lang and Wil had been here before, when they were doing the field work for their incredible book The Songs of Insects (Houghton Mifflin, 2007). The book comes with a CD in back, and it finally let me identify the myriad whirrs, chirps, cheeps and clicks coming out of our meadows. The photography, some of which was done right in our basement guest room of our very own crickets, trigs, cicadas and katydids, is stunning. Why, we just used their book today. The kids found a dead cicada in the yard, and we identified it as a Robinson's cicada, green morph (Tibicen robinsonii). What a pleasure to be able to do that, and know its call, too. A good book is a beautiful thing.

Now Lang and Wil are filming for a soon-to-be-unveiled online project. They found our gardens and meadow a wonderland of color and insect song. Here's a long-spurred meadow katydid singing on my Perovskia, or Russian sage.

Here are the spurs in question--actually cercae. They look like a bull's horns, turned inward.



Lots of bug ID is done at the naughty end. Wil is forever talking about how one bug's genitalia differ from another's. OK. I'm down with that.

Wil is in back, Lang in front as they flood the bug with light and film him singing his dry prolonged shirring rattle.



We all must spend time at our laptops, and Chet Baker makes sure that time is extra enjoyable.

Any guest who visits Indigo Hill sooner or later winds up in the Seat of Honor at our kitchen table, with a lap full of Boston.

I am glad to have our 80-acre sanctuary used for such purposes, for its abundant diversity of life to be recorded and catalogued, photographed and appreciated. If I have to trek to the grocery store a few more times than usual, wash a few towels and maybe some grotty field clothes, it's worth it. When those photos and recordings and films go out to the world at large, a circle is completed. We like to share.

Up to a point. Hear that, "Jack?"

Filmmaker Visit

We have been graced this past month by visits from some illustrious naturalists. First came Michael Male, who with his wife Judy Fieth creates absolutely amazing films about nature. We know them mostly from their work with birds (their eastern warbler video is soon to be followed by a western warbler DVD that is mouthwatering).

Here is Michael with a camper top of his own design and construction. It reminded me of the enormous snow plow blades you see on the front of locomotives in North Dakota. Imagine making your own camper. He confessed that it's very heavy and probably overbuilt, being made of marine plywood. Still. Anyone who can custom build a truck topper with a queen-sized bed and a pop-up top and tons of storage has my immediate respect. Just thinking of doing it in the first place gets major points with me.

Michael has spent the summer in North Dakota, filming ducks in the pothole region where they court, breed and raise young. He went out to North Dakota the same time we did, and he's only just come home! To do his filming, he made a huge floating blind with a shelf all around the inside. He wore waders that go up to his chest, climbed in the blind, and kind of walked it around the edges of the ponds as he made his groundbreaking films. It was a very cold, wet summer in North Dakota, and his was very cold, wet work. I thought he probably needed a couple of really nice meals and a comfy bed with some headroom, so we made that happen.

Watching some clips of wild ducks pottering around on the water, I felt like a louse on a duck's back; they are that close up and that sharp. They are just breathtaking. It's rare to see a film that takes you so completely into a creature's world. Michael has worked with David Attenborough and the BBC and National Geographic, so he's on a level most wildlife cinematographers hope to attain.

Mether, this would be a boring photo without me, Chet Baker, to spice it up. So here I am, on Michael's lap.

I wish I had something to show you. You can just make out the ducks on his laptop screen in this photo. They more than fill the frame. You could see their duck eyelashes. To see some of Michael and Judy's work, go to their website, www.birdfilms.com.

Michael had the most fun with ruddy ducks, and his series on bubbling male ruddies (they very rapidly duck their heads and beat their breasts with bright blue bills, making a fountain of bubbles in the process) just blew me away.

Chet Baker was his usual hospitable self, making sure Michael's blood pressure was nice and low for the ride home.

Orchids Again, but Wrapped in Dog

You may remember my blog from last November, when I picked a sultry warm day and repotted every durn one of my orchids, spread 'em out on the front lawn and about kilt myself bending and stretching and fetching and washing and spraying.

Normally, you shouldn't have to repot an orchid more than once a year. But I had bugs. Lotsa bugs. Tiny white bugs aswarm in the medium and awful awful Boisduval scale and mealybugs around the base of the stem and regular goopy sticky scale all over the underside of the leaves. It was verging on horrible. By the time an orchid starts to look peaked from bug damage (mostly being sucked dry by scale), you had better jump to fix it. Mine were not yet looking peaked, but I wasn't going to wait for that. See, they talk to me and tell me when it's time to intervene.

Last November, I repotted most of my plants in mixed bark medium, and therein lay the problem. Bugs just love living in that stuff. I decided to knock every single plant out of its pot and take a hard look at the situation. Sure enough, the plants in bark all had bugs, and the plants in Aussie Gold, which has diatomaceous earth in it, were virtually bug-free. OK. I had ordered enough Gold to redo almost everybody, and I went for it. Thirty-two times. Sigh. There are thirty-two of them.

There followed three days of futzing around with orchids, capped by a washing and spraying extravaganza. I won't use anything stronger than pyrethrins, which is probably why I continue to have bugs. Fine. I'll continue to have bugs, and I won't croak young.

There was orchid medium dumped everywhere, hoses and bags and trays and pots...it was ridiculous. But the weather was glorious for it all--raining and warm--and nobody got sunburned, least of all me. I just sat out there in the rain soaked to the skin and dealt with it. Enjoyed myself, in a painful, back-breaking kind of way.

The sun finally broke through, but by then everyone was potted and taken back inside.

I think the hardest part of any job is cleaning up everything you've pulled out while doing it. Blaa. You want it to be over, and then there's cleanup.

Mether, I get very tired just watching you. You are never still, do you know that? You should nap more. Look at me. I nap all the time and I think everyone would agree I am more lovable than you.

Chet Baker, what kind of thing is that to say?

Forgive me, Mether. It's just that you have been diddling with your orchid plants for three days now and you have barely done anything with me. When will you be all done?

When the last plant is washed and sprayed and potted in sterile medium, Chet Baker, that's when I'll be done. But you know I love you more than all these orchids thrown together. Don't you?

Yes, Mether. And I also know that your readers find me much more lovable than orchids. I am the whole reason they put up with your plant stories. And I would add "hamster stories" to that.

Well, all right, Chet. You've got me there.