Ruby

When you live in a place long enough, and you're lucky enough to be able to work at home and stare out the windows at the birds for part of each day, you can get to know them as individuals. It helps when a bird has distinctive markings--maybe missing feathers on the hindcrown, like one male indigo bunting who nested here for many years. Perhaps there's a drooping wing, like that of the bluebird we called Mr. Troyer. He nested in our yard for eight years, and I still miss him. There's a long story behind him, but that's one for the next book.
Speaking of distinctive markings, this is Snowflake (who I began calling Queen Frostine), a leucistic female dark-eyed junco who has been with us for three winters, growing whiter each year. She's a Zick Dough freak, and I'd love to think that we've just sent her to Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire or Ontario with an ample pad of fat for the flight, and a good start for the breeding season ahead. The last juncoes left on April 17 as they do every year. You can imagine how excited we'll be should Queen Frostine show up again next winter. She's our friend.

Ruby is a beautiful female red-bellied woodpecker. This is her third year with us (that I know of). Year to year, she's displayed a consistent mark: two tiny red bindis in her otherwise gray forecrown. She's also got really red nares just above the bill, which is a sign of her maturity, as is the faint wash of red along her malar (jaw) area).
Those two simple feathers, and the fact that I happened to notice them, elevate her status from that of Just Another Redbelly to a Named Bird, a friend. It's a human conceit, of course, that she's special because I've named her, but it helps me to feel a bond with her from year to year, and it makes me more interested in watching her behavior. There's value in that, if only for me as the observer. She's certainly interested in my behavior; she waits each morning in the willow or on the chimney for me to pop out with the Zick Dough. Recipe here. She's probably noticed that I have more gray streaks in my forecrown this year than last, and a bunch more than three years ago. Ruby, we'll talk.

Sometimes she's dainty about helping herself to dough
and sometimes she grabs the biggest glob she can find to bear off and cache.
I never tire of watching Ruby, of noticing what, besides those two little red feathers, makes her an individual.
Wouldn't you think she'd spread her wings for the leap down to the railing? I think she wants to avoid knocking the dough to the ground with the backwash from her wings, that's what I think.

I like Ruby; I like knowing that she knows me and looks forward to seeing me, too. She's not a pet, but neither is she just another bird to me. She's my neighbor, my friend.

A Raven Comes to Call

We live in Appalachian Ohio, but just in the foothills. What we have are hills, not mountains. The common raven nests at high elevations in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, but there may be but one pair nesting in all of Ohio, as we are short of mountains. Nevertheless, in the last five years, we've had four records of common ravens flying over our yard. As our eloquent friend and Ohio Rare Bird Records Committee poobah Jim McCormac put it, that makes us "the only Ohio backyard with multiple records of this jumbo croaker."
This is Liam's willow, planted the summer of his birth. Just to show you that it's indeed in our backyard.

The first record came on March 15, 2003, when my artist friend Cindy House and I were standing in our backyard. Bill was inside playing the guitar. Groop groop groop groop! croaked a raven. Cindy heard it and didn't give it a second thought, since she was visiting from Vermont where common raven was a yard bird for her. I heard it and started jumping up and down and flapping my arms and hollering for Bill. We saw the bird flying over the orchard, croaking all the way, but by the time I got Bill out, it was gone. Arrrgh. Anyway, it was #180 for our yard list. It was headed southwest.

On September 29, 2005, our friend Wezil Walraven, a professional bird guide, contender for Funniest Man on the Planet and all around sharpie, was lying out in a chaise in our front yard, skywatching, when a common raven flew over, croaking, and disappeared headed north. He figured it might be a good record, even though he was visiting from Arizona, so he mentioned it at lunch. I jumped up and down and flapped my arms again.

On April 7, 2008, while I was in Ithaca, Bill heard what sounded like a common raven flying over, but then a bunch of crows started cawing and he wondered if perhaps it was just an odd vocalization from a crow.

On April 9, 2008, Bill and I were preparing to take a birdwalk around the yard. "I'm going to leave my camera inside," he said, and I said, "OK, I'll take my long lens, in case we see something good that needs its picture taken." We had just rounded the corner of the house when we heard the unmistakable groop groop groop of a honking common raven. Our eyes bugged out and we shouted, "RAVEN!" at the same moment. The bird was huge, coming low over our driveway and the roof of our house, hollering all the way. It landed on our roof and croaked some more. This may have had something to do with the fact that Bill and I were croaking like ravens for all we were worth, trying to get the bird to linger long enough to be immortalized by my Canon. While flipping out that a raven was sitting on our roof, I was frantically trying to get my autofocus to listen to me. "Get it, Zick! Get it!" Bill urged, which helped a lot. My autofocus ground away fruitlessly, focusing on everything but the bird, so I switched to manual focus and managed to fire a couple of shots, to document common raven in our backyard at long last. Like the March '03 raven, it was headed southwest. A phalanx of crows came out to harrass it. I felt sorry for the raven, just croaking away, looking for one of its own kind. Bill realized that his bird two days earlier was probably being harrassed by crows as well.
The tail was a bit molty as you can see. The heavy bill and eagle-like wings are typical of common ravens. Man, it's nice to have a picture, however dull.

I've had a bit of friendly static from people who want to hear all about Ithaca and the Lab of Ornithology. The problem is that there is too much going on right now to carve out the time to write it up and edit all the photos. I've been working like a mule, reclaiming the yard from the grip of winter, tilling and planting, mowing (thanks Bill!) and weeding. I cleaned the pond, bleccch. Sucked up about ten billion toad eggs and then they laid ten billion more. Beats sucking up tadpoles, I figure. The peas and lettuce I planted April 9 are coming up! Meanwhile, both kids have softball practices two nights a week, which means I have to magically produce dinner by 5 pm and drive them to different fields for a four-hour block of time. Whee! While rehearsing for a Swinging Orangs gig tomorrow night. Here's the poster that Andy Hall, our awesome drummer/designer made.

Something about it makes me belly laugh. We are very much looking forward to playing for other parents from the school, and to making lots of tips which we'll donate to Phoebe's class trip to Pittsburgh. I have no idea what to wear, but it will not be cropped pants, nor will it be hula pants, nor a purple squall jacket. It will be something in between, or perhaps beyond. Purple cropped hula pants?

Have a wonderful weekend. We will!

Digging the Corpseflower

The pear and the Russian prune hedge are just coming out; the forsythia's in full swing. Let's pray it doesn't freeze them all to black like last year. I don't trust God's rainbow promise. Spring in Ohio is usually brutal.

This is the time of year when the whitefly and aphids get so bad in the Garden Pod that trying to spray for them is like cleaning the house while the kids are around; like shoveling the driveway while it's still snowing. So I took advantage of a couple of warm thundery days last week to give everyone a two-day bath, washing the sticky aphid pee off the leaves, bumming out the whitefly colonies. I repotted plants that couldn't live another minute in their small pots, trimmed things back, groomed off the dead blossoms and leaves. And had to load everything back in when it dropped to the 40's Friday night. Sure enough, we had a mild freeze Monday night, which meant that I had to empty my linen closet to drape my 16' tall heirloom lilac with sheets. The whole garden looked like a yard sale, with sheets and pillowcases on everything. I'll stand out there with a space heater if it means I can save the blossoms this year. They all froze off last April 13. That is not going to happen this year if I have anything to say about it, because last spring nearly killed me.There is a terrible lot of biomass in that greenhouse by mid-April. Terrible. You can't even move in there without a clippers in your hand. But I've got to deal with it until at least May first.The bougainvilleas have done terrifically well this winter. I love these prickly old things, whether they're blooming or not. Good thing, because as soon as I set the pots outside, that's the last I'll see of flowers until next January. Go figure.

Sauromatum venosum, or corpseflower, is a truly icky plant. That's why I love it. A member of the Araceae, or jack-in-the-pulpit family, it has a long blackish-red spathe and a greenish spadix that it sends up in early summer from a bulb that can attain truly titanic proportions. The flower smells like something died. See my post, "Look, Darling, The Corpseflower is in Bloom!" from March 2006, when nobody but Mr. Gold Wow Powerleveling Runescape had much to say to me. The miracle of it all is that it's hardy over our Ohio winters. I plant it right near the front door so I won't miss it when it blooms, because that dark blackish-red color kind of fades into the background. This is the flower of a 1" bulb. You can imagine what a 6" bulb puts forth...Peeeee---yewwwww. But don't worry. The flower only lasts a couple of days. Then it sends up a single fantastic 2-3' wide pinnate leaf on a long stem that's speckled like a gecko. Sauromatum, with flowers that smell like rotting flesh, isn't for everybody, but the bulbs multiply and I've sent them to two similarly twisted friends already since I got my first, tiny bulbs from my friend Dave about three years ago. By the way, the rot smell is to attract fly and beetle pollinators. It works. I found the blossom among the hostas last year by following the smell and the sound of buzzing flies, expecting to find oh, maybe a dead raccoon. Mini-Baker fix, just so you know he's still alive and kicking. Sorry for the dearth of doggeh posts. I've been traveling and gardening (working like a mule). Bacon is still up to his old tricks.

I wanted to send a bulb to a special friend in New Jersey before they started growing for the spring, so I gingerly forked around where they were lying, dormant, under the soil. I was a bit concerned that all the tubers I dug up had soft gooshy spots, but I scraped out the rotten pulp until I got to firm living bulbflesh, washed the bulbs, and replanted them. I don't think there's much that's going to stop these things.
You can see where I scooped out the flank of the huge bulb. I still think it's going to grow fine; in fact it's already working on its flower. Weird enough for you, Chet Baker?
Mether. These are yucky. I am not a squeamish dog, but I have to wonder about a person who would plant something like this by her front door. There are other people in this house, you know. Namely me, Chet Baker. This bulb is bigger than my head. Do you remember last year, when I found the flower? Well, I thought it was something lovely to roll in, but it was only a plant.

Here's an excerpt from Scott D. Appell's wonderful writeup on the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's web site:

This tuberous aroid, hailing from the Himalaya, is considered to be subtropical (tolerating a minimum temperature of 41°F) and technically has no place here, but I am including it because I cultivated a four-foot-wide colony of it in Columbus, Ohio (Zone 6), through decades of freezing hibernal Midwest temperatures. It could prove hardy for you too! Considered a horticultural novelty, the voodoo lily tuber will produce its purple-mottled shiny green spathe and purple-brown spadix on a windowsill even without soil or water. The early-spring inflorescence grows up to 15 feet tall and emits a profoundly strong smell of carrion. (When I grew the plant, it attracted every fly in the neighborhood. "Did one of your cats die?" a neighbor inquired.) After its inflorescence fades, each tuber produces a single dark green, two-foot-tall leaf divided into numerous lance-shaped segments. The leaves have puce leopard spots on their petioles, and in large clumps they make an impressive tropical foliar display. By midsummer, the foliage shrivels away, but in fall, clusters of attractive red berries appear. The tubers multiply rapidly, making propagation from offsets easy. Plant the tubers six inches deep in fertile, well-drained soil and partial shade. With adequate protection in the colder areas, the voodoo lily can be hardy from Zones 6 to 9.

He grew 15' tall voodoo lilies in his Columbus garden?? Sounds like a soulmate. Stand by. Pictures of flowers in May or June. I just hope I'm here for the blooming, because it comes and goes in a couple of days.