Liam is 25!

 My dear boy, 

  I never realized how having a birthday that falls on or around Election Day would factor into your life; all I remember was a rush of passion one February afternoon in 1999, and it gets blurry after that. Thus did biology deliver into my arms a nearly spherical baby boy who grew into a lanky wonder.

I miss you. But I always enjoy throwing together these birthday blogposts that celebrate you and the increasingly rare times we get to be together.  I'm so, so happy you're on your own path in Columbus, and that you've found a place where you're appreciated for the wonder you are, and can share a space with like-minded creatives and kind people. 

It's always such fun to see you in situ at Trader Joe's. Your coworker's heads all swivel, they smile knowingly as Mama Zick enters the store, tracking her boy.

You show me a beer made with (Trader Joe's oreo knockoff) JoJo's. Wut? And one called Mad Elf, a spicy Christmas brew that has 11% alcohol content, but "tastes like stinkbugs."

We start laughing and we don't stop.  I think one of my favorite things is to take you and Ayla out for a nice meal. 

All the better if Oscar and Phoebe are along, too! Addis Ethiopian Restaurant, North Columbus.

I love to go windowshopping with you, too. We mostly love to look at things we can't afford. 

Remember the 300 pound coffee table at Crate and Barrel?

This is how we know we're living in a gilded age. First, who could afford a 300 pound STONE coffee table? How much does it cost to ship? How many people does it take to carry it into your living room? Better decide where you want them to put it... FOREVER... because you're not gonna lift that thing EVER again. Much less dust under it. Or move it to wash the Ruggable. Sheesh. The impracticality of it all is overwhelming.

I love the little glimpses into your life that your too-sparse postings on Instagram afford me.  That's a really good whateverosaurus impersonation you're doing there, son! Look out! It's right BE-
HIIIND YOU!

LOOKIT THAT BOY!! That looks like a shirt your dad might have picked out, or worn. 

I'm just so thrilled you're having fun and exploring your new surroundings all the time. That you get to be around people your age (impossible back home; everyone has fled this town!) 

But no matter how far you roam, remember I am the little puff of ...wind...beneath your wings!

(they're set a bit low, I think).

I sure love seeing you in your new life with Ayla. What mother wouldn't be over the moon to see a photo like this one from June? Ah, you lucky kids. And you there, wearing my Dear Old Dad's pale blue eyes. He'd get such a kick out of you. He'd try to figure you out by interviewing you, then teasing you. Good luck, DOD.

You're getting Shaggier and Shaggier, and I love it! If you've got thick golden hair, rock it, son!!

I think I love this jazz club photo of you two best. I'm just happy that you live in a place that even HAS jazz clubs. I always knew, from the time you were a little boy and you got so excited when you smelled  

the "sweet French Fry air of town" 

that you'd find your place in a city. 

I can't wait to see you two for Thanksgiving. Your family awaits!

Happy birthday, darling Liam. I love you six hundred six sixty six!

Oh! and Someone has been waiting to say Happy Birfday to you!

                                                              It's Curtis. He's so patient. 

                                                                           OK go, Curtis. 

HADDY HADDY BIRFDAY WIAM!!

Wook! He miling!!

Tanagers Eating Weird Stuff

I have huge dark Chamaecyparis trees hanging over my north studio windows. This is bad. It cuts my light. Gosh, they were so tiny when I planted them 30 years ago! Who'd think they'd shoot up to 20' plus, and get so thick and plumy? In desperation to get my view back I have limbed them up, but their bushy tops still cut a ton of light, especially on those dark winter days when the sun seems to set at 3 pm. Good times! 

 One of the good things about having huge dark Chamaecyparis trees hanging over my north studio windows, however, is the intimate look they give me into the lives of birds. They feel safe in those dark trees and they do things most people don’t get to see, right at eye level. It’s my mini canopy walk, I guess. I’m perched on my high drafting chair and they’re a good 12’ off the ground, and I’m looking right into their eyes. One of the more thrilling birds who perched in there was a Cooper's hawk, on April 6, 2023.

                                                                                   

Most are songbirds, though, like this hatch-year female scarlet tanager who just calmly studied me as I looked back through the big lens. She was but a few feet away, and I was moving slowly, as always, so as not to frighten her. Sept. 16, 2024. My Canon is permanently to my left on the drawing table as I write or draw, and I've perfected a very fluid, slow way of hoisting it to my eye.

                  

                                         

The water features, especially the trickling WarblerFall, draw in forest birds like nobody's business, especially during fall migration. Look at this gorgeous young male scarlet tanager molting into his first adult plumage on Sept. 16, 2024. He starts with the lesser coverts and will gradually replace the fresh flight feathers with jet black ones. And by next spring, he'll be replacing those green body feathers with brilliant scarlet ones. 

I like how he looks like he's wearing a cape around his shoulders. 

On Sept. 22, I was shocked to see a young male scarlet tanager eating a brown marmorated stinkbug, which would have to be the most odious mouthful a bird could ingest. But there he was, crunching it down like a toasted almond. 

Maybe a little gag reflex happening here, but the bug went down the hatch. Zow! 

The same day, I was thrilled to bits to see a young male summer tanager come in to drink at the WarblerFall, then perch in the Chamecyparis! Unlike the scarlet, summer tanagers don't breed on my land, though I do have the mix of Virginia pine and deciduous trees they seem to like. 

Summer tanagers are a late summer and fall phenomenon here, and they are almost always hunting hymenopterans when they're here. I've had them catching yellowjackets off the deck railing! 

Summer tanagers have an old folk name of "bee bird"  because they are notorious for staking out beehives and feasting on their occupants, often catching them in air. My old friend Hank had one spend a Connecticut winter at his beehives in Old Lyme, living on honeybees. He was happy to donate bees, but he did offer other foods, hoping to cut the damage. This is where the extra long, strong beak of the summer tanager comes in really handy. It's good to distance your eyes and face from an angry bee, wasp or hornet. 

This young bird was looking for something, and there was plenty of what he was looking for in my yard.

I have mentioned the absolute Jobian plague of yellowjackets that ruled my life and land all summer. I couldn't go anywhere without having to walk through swarms of yellowjackets, which spent the summer coursing low over the ground, looking for prey, and stinging me and Curtis. Curtis was stung nine times, and I was stung four times, and it was a huge drag. Yellowjacket stings hurt for a couple days and then itch for a week or more. I came to loathe those insects, which always seemed to be in between me and what I was trying to do. There were three huge ground nests in my backyard alone. In September, I accidentally mowed over a nest and got two yellowjackets down inside my hiking boots, stinging the blue-eyed crap out of me as I tried to stop the rider mower and slap them out of my socks. That was fun.

So I was thrilled to see the summer tanager chewin' on a yellowjacket in one of my birch trees.

He masticated that thing into a pulp before he swallowed it, stinger first. You want to make really sure the wasp's head is separated from its body before you pass it through your tender esophagus. Just looking at this photo hurts me, but that bird certainly knows what he's doing. Anyway, my theory as to why summer tanagers have evolved that big honkin' beak is to help them in their quest for stinging insects--an unexploited resource! They can quickly and safely process a large stinging insect with a long, strong beak. From seeing bees hit my windshield and leave a clear puddle of nectar, I imagine that they are sometimes quite sweet to eat, though I doubt I'll ever find out. 

Score two tanagers and a couple cool sightings of Tanagers Eating Weird Stuff for the WarblerFall!

If you haven't got your plans yet, by all means go to warblerfall.com and join the growing family of folks who know the magic attraction of moving water.

And remember, a WarblerFall makes a fabulous holiday gift. All you have to do is fill in your credit card info, and your recipient's email, and the plans will be emailed to your friend. You'll have to give them a heads up to look for it in their email.

Crazy cool bird sightings will follow! Thanks for your support. 

Tadpole Story 4: Where Will They Go?

On August 20, there was a passing sprinkle. Not enough to register in the gauge, or to help at all, but enough to embolden the first mountain chorus frog to move from its leaf to the container edge.

Then it did a move worthy of Cary Grant in North by Northwest.

'

And just as desperate (Grant played an innocent man mistaken for a spy and relentlessly pursued by the FBI).

When the droplets dried up, I couldn't find the froglet. And I wondered where it had gone. Where could it go?  For those of you getting rain this summer, it's probably hard to imagine gardens and forest without a single damp spot in them. Rock-hard soil and everything limp, wilted, parched and fried. That's what's going on here. There is no water, anywhere, in the soil or the leaf litter or in the streambeds. Lakes, rivers and ponds, yes, there's still water there, but how is a frog the size of my pinky fingernail going to get to them from the top of a dry ridge? It is going to dry up and die as soon as it leaves the pool. I know it in my bones. And I know I have to do something about it.

If these things are going to start metamorphosing, I realize that I have to put them somewhere where they will have both a body of water and moist surrounds. I can't give them that on this sunbaked ridge. Once they're out of the pool, and instinct tells them to disperse, it's out of my hands. And, after months of heavy work and lots of expenditure on water, they are dead. 

You see, I've messed with everything. And messed it all up. The tadpoles would have died the first time the puddle dried up in May! But I couldn't let that happen. That puddle would have dried up ten times had I not been hauling water to it. So I made my own bed here by carrying tadpoles from May into mid August, when by all rights they should have long since returned to the soil. But I said no. And what I didn't know when I made the commitment was that the rains would stop completely, and there would be no water for them anywhere. Oops. Now what?

The fact that they hadn't metamorphosed in a normal time span (6-8 weeks) tells me that they somehow sensed that to leave the puddle would be to die. Why change into an air-breathing frog if there's still water here, and there's absolutely nowhere else to go? I lie awake at night, considering all the possibilities. Do they need to feel the wide swings in barometric pressure that accompany storm fronts? Do they need rain sluicing into the puddle to assure them that it's safe to leave? I don't know. I just know that their development had been arrested, and nothing was happening for them. And now that I've taken them in, they're changing, and I have to do something to meet them where they are. At the very least, I have to get myself out from under the need to continue caring for them.

The trees are dropping their leaves on August 20. It's so very sad. August, normally a time of wild abundance in insects and birds, is eerily still and silent. August has been canceled. We're going straight to October.

I can't let them keep dispersing into the desert, only to die, after three long months of toil.

They're so perfect; I owe them better.

 What a rotten pickle to be in! 

The only thing I can think to do is to take them to the beaver pond on Dean's Fork. 

The one whose dam had, for years, had been dynamited by a local jerk who didn't even own the land it was on, until he got a nice visit from the wildlife officer. A little bird tipped the officer. Only then did he finally quit destroying the beavers and their habitat, against the express wishes of the landowner. I feel a very strong sense of stewardship over this pond. 

I pour the three tadpole tubs slowly through a strainer to catch all the tadpoles.

They look so much bigger and stronger than they did when I brought them in nine days ago. 

Lots of strong hind legs on these gray tree frog tadpoles!

I found two dragonfly larvae (which had been feeding on the tadpoles!)--here's one of them

and one tiny froglet in training. I put it in a Tupperware so it wouldn't drown in all the sloshing, because once they crawl out, they have lungs and have to breathe air.

I poured everyone into a joint compound bucket, loaded them in the car, and headed for Dean's Fork. 

Curtis, who hates water, came down the steep bank to make sure Ma didn't fall into the pond. I'm not sure he'd have swum out to rescue me had I plunked in.

I cast a last long look at the pond that would finish the work I started in May with these tadpoles. Had I known what keeping them in water would entail over the next three  months, I'd have taken them straight to the beaver pond. But I had to learn the hard way, which seems to be the only way I learn.

I've spent the entire day gathering photos and videos, importing them, and writing up this experience, for you of course, but for me, too, so I have a record of it. I want my photos of different tadpoles and young froglets to be out there for people to refer to. I wanted to document the story of trying to keep a tadpole puddle going in an historic drought. I want to remember what it was like so I don't try anything like this again. 

Though I can’t manage to post on my blog more than once a month or so, writing up this foray into the frog world feels more like my real work than the stuff I do all day. It’s personal. It couldn’t be done by anyone but me. That’s the difference. 

Next time, if it ever rains again and if spring comes to this parched ridge, the first time the puddle dries down, I'll scoop the tadpoles up and take them straight to Dean's Fork.

Sure I will.

Postscript: After I wrote this, it got hot again, so hot I was glad the tadpoles were free in the beaver pond. It was as if the sky was trying to kill everything beneath it here on earth. I thought it couldn't get any drier, but it did. Despair doesn't quite describe how that felt. My friend and conservation hero Nancy Stranahan, also suffering for all her plant and wildlife friends through this horrible drought, read one of my posts about the drought, called me on the phone, and helped me get to that place of giving up. I had to let it go, and tell myself it likely wouldn't rain again until November. Just throw up my hands and say, OK, I'm going to keep watering, but I will not keep hoping it will rain. Weirdly, that helped. Giving up, expecting absolutely nothing, was the only thing that helped. 

I will always be grateful for Nancy's intervention. I picked up the pieces of my mind and got back to work. 

And then it began to rain again, in a tentative way, on Wednesday, August 28, at 6:23 PM. A great rushing sound came from the north and there was lightning and thunder and a downpour so sweet and so badly needed I nearly wept. But I laughed instead, like a lunatic. I walked around in the rain and lightning, unafraid, smelling the petrichor, until I was soaked. I splashed in tiny puddles. I raised my face to the sky and let it beat down on me. We got 0.4". On August 29 we got 0.6". And then on August 31, we were gifted with 1.2", and the leaves that had been furled came unfurled. The white snakeroot that was limp as Kleenex has burst into bloom. So has the mistflower. It's too late for the trees, most of which have yellowed and dropped their leaves, saving their energy for next spring. The ground is deep in yellow and brown leaves. I don't know which of them will make it through the winter. It looks like most of my spicebush has died, and many dogwoods. But you never know. Maybe they'll come back. There won't be any dogwood flowers next spring, that much I know.

It will take many more such rains to begin to catch up, but I rolled up several hundred feet of hose today, and with the hours I don't have to spend watering every evening, I did a three-day deep clean of my house, which had been like a neatly kept dust museum through the drought. I simply didn't have the energy to clean. It all went into watering and worrying, getting up the next day and doing it all over again.

Thank you for reading after this long hiatus. It's felt good to talk with you again. Even though, in the age of Facebook and Instagram, nobody comments on blogs any more, I appreciate your time, and I know you're out there.