Tag Archives: birds

Universal truth

Posted on November 22, 2012 | 2 comments

My friend Murphala has posted a lovely photo of a male North American wild turkey at her blog, FlourWaterYeast&Salt. In the comments, someone expressed gratitude at not being a girl turkey, which brought to mind the following:

When he was little, my son and I went to the Beardsley Zoo in Bridgeport one overcast fall weekday. Several of the habitats at the zoo feature native fauna, and many of the animals were active because it was cool and cloudy and there were very few people about. We stood for a long time watching the wild turkeys.

About half of them were on one side of the habitat, foraging and gabbling quietly among themselves. The rest of the turkeys, who had been loosely grouped together on the far side of the habitat, began to approach the others gradually, with a studied casualness that seemed almost stealthy.

As they neared the first group, the feathers on their breasts puffed out dramatically and their gait became a stiff and rather formal kind of strut, complete with head motions. The first group – now it was clear they were females – took one look at the approaching males and trotted off to the other side of the enclosure, gabbling to each other. It took a couple minutes for the males to realize that the females had left – it has to be pretty difficult to see around that puffed up chest.

When they did notice, they lowered their feathers and looked around, no doubt critiquing their performances and wondering where the females had gone. Once they figured out the latter, they began to deliberately stroll toward that part of the enclosure, and the whole drama played itself out again.

As with most courtship rituals, it looked rather absurd from the outside. “Silly turkeys!” we giggled together as we watched.

After a few more iterations, my son asked what they were doing and why. I explained that the boy turkeys (that group there) were trying to get the attention of the girl turkeys (that group there). His mouth opened in wordless astonishment. Really? I nodded. He turned a quizzical eye back on the turkeys, where the females again evaded the attentions of their would-be suitors.

“I don’t think it’s working,” he said with a somber shake of his head.

Some days, it seems there’s not as much difference between us and the turkeys as we’d like to believe.

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Birds and bees

Posted on August 12, 2011 | 8 comments

He almost missed seeing her entirely when he arrived at the entrance to the botanical garden. He glanced about in despair, silently cursing his lateness, but then he saw her. She was crouched next to one of the perennial borders, intently studying a plant near the edge. He walked toward her and tried to look casual.

“Hi,” he ventured. She looked up and smiled, her eyes brightening in recognition before she waved him over.

“Come look.”

He dutifully crouched beside her.

“See all the aphids on this new growth?” She pointed to a number of tiny green bumps on matching green stems at the tip of a branch.

“Yeah,” he nodded, leaning closer and squinting.

“Now look here.” She raised a leaf with her fingertip and revealed what looked like a tiny black and orange accordion with six legs. “It’s a ladybug larva,” she explained. “They eat aphids, and they’re all over this plant.” He craned his neck to better see beneath the leaves. Now that he knew what to look for, he found them easily.

“Cool!” he blurted, a schoolboy grin on his face. She beamed back at him, and for a moment it seemed as though time had stopped.

He jumped to his feet suddenly and brushed imaginary dirt from his pant legs. “Shall we look at the rest of the garden?” he asked quickly. He could feel the color rising in his cheeks.

“Sure,” she replied and stood, surprised that she felt light-headed and breathless. She told herself it was because she had gotten up too quickly.

As they wandered through the garden, she touched leaves and stems, then raised her fingers to her face to breathe in the aromas that lingered on her skin. She buried her nose in flowers, sifted soil through her fingers, and pulled weeds. Disarmed by her unabashed enjoyment, he found himself sharing her delight. They spied on insects, discussed combinations of color, texture, and shape, and made up their own names for plants whose labels they couldn’t find.

After a while they settled on a shaded bench near one of the fountains. A mockingbird began singing somewhere above. Its song, sweetly piercing, wove an intricate counterpoint to the music of the falling water.

“The air smells delicious,” he sighed as he relaxed against the backrest. She inhaled deeply and nodded. The fragrances of countless blossoms, released by the heat of the sun, now hung in the late afternoon air. Their mingled effect was heady and hypnotic; even the bees seemed inebriated as they bumbled from flower to flower.

“You must have been a bee in a previous life,” he chuckled, noticing her heavy-lidded expression.

She smiled slowly and replied, “And you must have been a flower.”

This surprised him. “Really? What kind?”

She leaned close in a conspiratorial fashion and murmured, “The kind that bees find intoxicating.”

Their eyes met, and time truly did stop for a good, long while.

(This week’s Red Dress Club prompt: Let’s get all steamy up in here and write about sex. But you know us. There’s a twist. You can’t write about the act. There are so many other possibilities; have fun finding them. Limit is 600 words. It can be fiction or non-fiction.)

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Carl Sagan visits my blog!

Posted on December 1, 2010 | 7 comments

There are — AS I WRITE THIS — millions, no wait, billions and billions (thanks, Dr. Sagan!) of starlings in my neighborhood. Every roof and tree is covered with them, and the sky is a constant swirl of stubby-winged black silhouettes. I would go outside and take a video, but the chances of being shat upon are exponentially greater than normal.

 

You’ll just have to take my word for it, somewhat substantiated by these feeble photos I was able to shoot through the skylight and various windows. (The birds are moving around A LOT so the still photos don’t really do them justice. Besides, the light is all wrong and there’s bird do on the skylight. Bleh.)

The cats are on overload: the older, calmer 0ne, having commandeered the window seat in my bedroom, has decided to squinch up her eyes and just listen to the cacophany; the younger, more hyper one is crouched beneath the skylight in my bathroom, eyes big as saucers, intent on the chaos wheeling overhead. The skittering of tiny bird claws on the skylight and the gutters is about to drive her bonkers. (A very short trip, as she is more than halfway there all the time anyway.)

I just had to share. My apologies to those who are a bit squeamish about this many birds all in one place.

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Four-and-twenty (thousand) blackbirds

Posted on November 3, 2010 | 5 comments

The fruit from ONE blossom cluster

Our trees are MUCH fuller than this one

The streets of our subdivision are lined with ornamental pear trees. In spring, each tree is so completely covered with white blossoms that it resembles a giant wad of cotton candy on a stick. These blossoms aren’t sterile, however; the fruit they produce is very small – about the size of a marble – but there are a LOT of them, hundreds (if not thousands) on each tree. Nearly all of the neighborhood streets in our quadrant of the city are lined with ornamental pear trees, hundreds (if not thousands) of them. That is a heck of a lot of fruit, even if they are small.

Monstrous murmurations of starlings (isn’t that a great collective noun?) gather on our side of town during the fall migration, drawn, I am convinced, by the bounty of fruit available to them here. They fill the sky from horizon to horizon at dusk as they begin to settle in for the night, wheeling and swirling like a great host of large, black leaves caught in a whirlwind. It’s dazzling to watch and quite mesmerizing. The din is very impressive, too, though not quite deafening. Starlings are sophisticated vocalizers (mynas are a species of starling) and have been known to include sounds such as human speech patterns and car alarms in their repertoire. The cacophony of thousands (if not millions) of them whistling, tweeting, chirping, squawking, and trilling at once is enough to leave one speechless with amazement.

I bring all this up because a smaller sub-murmuration (consisting merely of a few thousand birds) has landed in my neighborhood this morning. The pear trees, most of which still have their leaves, are a-quiver with the dark, fluttering forms of feeding birds. The branches of the shade trees, most of which have lost their leaves, hold rank upon rank of black silhouettes, preening and visiting with neighbors. All of them seem to be chattering, and it was the commotion of their conversations that first alerted me to their presence.

(photo by John Tittle)

I’m glad they’re here; I find them immensely cheerful and entertaining. I do confess, however, to having some Alfred Hitchcock flashbacks. I’ll probably stay inside until they move on to the next neighborhood, just to be on the safe side.

(Many thanks to John Tittle, of Red Wing Nature Notes, who so graciously gave permission for the use of his photo.)

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Lazy Friday blog post: “Stuff about me” quiz

Posted on October 22, 2010 | 6 comments

Seeing as this is Friday, and I am lazy AND running late, I decided to take a short-cut. I hope it is at least mildly entertaining.

A Facebook friend “tagged” me with the following, but since I have no idea what that means or what to do with it, I decided to copy the quiz and use it for a blog post. I may not be tech-savvy, but I’m resourceful!

Please feel free to do the same. If you do so and want me to read it, just leave a comment to let me know where to find it. Have a great Friday!

1. What time did you get up this morning? Alarm went off at 5:45 a.m. Feet hit the floor ten minutes later.

2. How do you like your steak? Medium. Pink in the middle is nice.

3. What was the last film you saw at the cinema? Toy Story 3 at the dollar movies. (I don’t get out much.)

4. What is your favorite TV show? Don’t watch TV.

5. If you could live anywhere in the world where would it be? Someplace where I didn’t need a car.

6. What did you have for breakfast? Smoothie made with strawberries, hemp milk, whey protein, and flax seed oil. Yum!

7. What is your favorite cuisine? Malaysian, because it incorporates elements of so many other delectable cuisines.

8. What foods do you dislike? Too salty and too sweet.

9. Favorite Place to Eat? Gunan Tahan, Malaysian restaurant in Amity CT that is no more. Alas!

10. Favorite dressing? My friend Dawn’s homemade Italian.

11.What kind of vehicle do you drive? Toyota minivan with automatic sliding door on passenger side.

12. What are your favorite clothes? Loose and flowing, like robes or muu-muus.

13. Where would you visit if you had the chance? Anywhere extraterrestrial

14. Cup 1/2 empty or 1/2 full? By definition it has to be both (I’m a double Libra, after all), but the empty half isn’t really of much use now, is it?

15. Where would you want to retire? Somewhere that I didn’t need a car.

16. Favorite time of day? Evening/late night (10 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. is my peak time.)

17. Favorite Season? Autumn

18. What is your favorite sport to watch? Baseball

19. Who do you think will not tag you back? What is this “tag” of which you speak?

20. Person you expect to tag you back first? Again I ask, what is “tag”?

21. Who are you most curious about their responses to this? I’ll be thrilled to death if anyone even READS it.

22. Bird watcher? When they are in my field of vision, yes.

23. Are you a morning person or a night person? Isn’t that covered in #16?

24. Do you have any pets? Two cats: one middle-aged and very sweet, one young and very stupid.

25. Any new and exciting news you’d like to share? I’ve been nominated for the Nobel prize in bulls**ting.

26. What did you want to be when you were little? First a doctor, then a pilot, then an astronaut. Didn’t follow through on that too well, did I?

27. What is your best childhood memory? My relationships with trees, the big maple in the back yard and the ancient juniper at church camp in particular.

28. Are you a cat or dog person? Yes.

29. Are you married? Yes. (Is it just me, or are some of these questions pretty uninteresting?)

30. Always wear your seat belt? Yes, and my car doesn’t move until everyone else is wearing theirs as well.

31. Been in a car accident? A couple: one very traumatic in childhood, though no one was hurt, and one minor fender-bender (literally) in adulthood. I was not driving in either case.

32. Any pet peeves? “all about me” quizzes that ask stupid and uninteresting questions.

33. Favorite Pizza Toppings? Anything but anchovies, though I’m rather partial to a white pie with fresh tomato, fresh basil, and garlic.

34. Favorite Flower? Whatever is blooming where I am. In my garden right now that would be marigolds, mums, Verbena bonariensis, hyacinth bean, and roses.

35. Favorite Hobby(ies)? Reading, crocheting, writing, cooking, eating, talking.

36. Favorite fast food restaurant? Chipotle

37. How many times did you fail your driver’s test? Zero

38. From whom did you get your last email? I believe it was from a gentleman in West Africa who wanted to confirm my contact information so he could send me my inheritance.

39. Which store would you choose to max out your credit card? Joseph-Beth Bookstore

40. Do anything spontaneous lately? Decided to answer this quiz

41. Like your job? The question is missing a subject and quite possibly a verb.

42. What’s your eye color? Gray/green with flecks of orange when I’m angry, or so my sisters tell me.

43. What was your favorite vacation? The time we went to Vail and I got to hike and read all day and we slept with the French doors wide open all night because there are no mosquitoes at that altitude.

44. Last person you went out to dinner with? We all dragged our sorry tails to KFC buffet last night because everyone was too tired to cook. Does that count?

45. What are you listening to right now? My great-grandparents’ clock ticking in the living room and the distant roar of the interstate.

46. What is your favorite color? Periwinkle blue. The color of cornflowers (chicory)

47. How many tattoos do you have? Zero

49. What time did you finish this quiz? 9:17 a.m.

50. Coffee Drinker? Only socially.

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Garden delights (an old-fashioned poem)

Posted on March 16, 2010 | 5 comments

Will you meet me in the garden
B’neath the rhubarb’s spreading leaves?
We will make for us a bower
And discuss the birds and bees.

Will you come at daylight’s breaking
To the hawthorn wet with dew,
Find with me a guarded nest there
Perfect sized and shaped for two?

Will you share with me the twilight
Of the arbor’s shaded room,
Suffer sweet intoxication
‘Mid the roses all in bloom?

Will you nill you, I shall have you,
Queen of bees and knave of hearts;
‘Tis the dance that we were born for:
Come together, draw apart.

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The king and the tern

Posted on October 21, 2009 | Leave a comment

Once there was a king who lived near the sea. He liked to walk along the beach in the mornings, where he especially enjoyed watching the shorebirds in flight. The way they swooped and dove and rode the wind thrilled him, and he often found himself wishing he could soar as they did.

In time the king befriended one particular tern who regularly glided along beside him on his walks. The two became close companions, and the king invited the tern to come live with him in his palace. The tern agreed, being very fond of the king. The castle was spacious and lovely but not very conducive to flying, and the king no longer went walking on the beach, with his friend so close at hand.

Years passed. Recalling one day how inspiring it had been to see the tern in flight, the king suggested that it accompany him on the beach as when they first knew one another. To his surprise, the stiff sea breeze tossed the tern like a leaf, bouncing it off rocks and slamming it into the sand. Rescuing the battered bird, he asked it what was wrong.

“I’ve been too long away from the sea,” explained the tern. “My wings aren’t used to riding the winds as they once did.”

Dismayed at this discovery, the two friends sat on a large piece of driftwood and talked. They decided the tern could regain some or all of its flying prowess, but not if it returned with him to the palace. The king didn’t want to be parted from his dear companion, but he could not rule his kingdom from the beach.

Together they sat at the water’s edge, listening to the pounding of the surf and considering the possibilities.

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Full moon with star-crossed lovers

Posted on July 8, 2009 | Leave a comment

Tonight is the full moon — always a good omen for lovers — and this full moon happens to fall on Tanabata, the Japanese Festival of Stars.

The sky emperor Tentei (known to us as Polaris) has a daughter whose skills at the loom are unsurpassed. Her name is Orihime (we call her Vega), and she weaves the finest and most beautiful cloth ever seen. From it she fashions exquisite clothing and Tentei will wear nothing that is not made by her hands.

Once long ago, Orihime grew sad when she realized that she spent so much time at her loom and needle that she would never meet someone special and marry. Upon learning of his daughter’s grief, Tentei arranged for her to meet Kengyuu (Altair to us), who cares for the cattle of heaven. The two fell in love and were soon happily married — too happily, as it turned out.

Besotted with one another, the lovers neglected their duties. The celestial cattle repeatedly turned up in all sorts of places they didn’t belong, and the sky emperor himself began to look a bit shabby as his clothing began to show signs of everyday wear and tear and he had nothing with which to replace it. Tentei felt he had no choice but to separate the pair so he placed them on either side of the great river of the sky (the Milky Way).

If Orihime and Kengyuu attend to their responsibilities with diligence, Tentei permits them to spend one night together each year: the seventh night of the seventh month. On that night, the boatman of the moon will ferry Orihime across the great river to her beloved. If, however, either of the lovers has not performed his or her duties as expected, Tentei may cause it to rain, flooding the river and making it impassable. When this happens, magpies, harbingers of joy and symbols of marital bliss, flock together to form a bridge of their wings and bodies so that these most ardent of lovers will not be denied their one night together.

Love does indeed conquer all, even the dictates of the emperor of heaven. May we remember this and pursue those passions that enliven and inflame us to the neglect of all else.

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Listening to chickens

Posted on May 12, 2009 | 2 comments

I have just finished reading Catherine Goldhammer’s wondrous memoir, Still Life with Chickens. I took a chance on it because it had the word “chickens” in the title, and to my absolute delight I found a kindred soul within its pages. I liked Ms. Goldhammer from the very opening of the book:

I did not have a year in Provence or a villa under the Tuscan sun. I did not have a farm in Africa. Instead, my diminished resources dictated a move to a run-down cottage in a honky-tonk town where live bait is sold from vending machines. (p. 1)

Right away the reader knows that this is not going to be one of those soaring, romantic stories from which movies are made. This is not escapist literature. Instead, it is a tale about a woman whose heart leads her more deeply into her own life — not just any life, not the good life or the life she always dreamed of — HER life. And interestingly enough, reading her story placed me all the more firmly in my own life, like a hen settling down to roost. I could imagine myself faced with the same choices, and I could imagine myself choosing as she did for much the same reasons.

It isn’t easy being an alektorophile (someone who loves chickens). Most urban people think of chickens simply as an entree and most rural people think of them as a chore. In truth, few people think of chickens at all. It is rare to find anyone who appreciates and admires chickens as creatures, and rarer still to find someone who gives expression to those feelings. So it was with utter delight that I read what Ms. Goldhammer has to say about chickens.

She introduces the chickens by explaining that they were superficially intended as a bribe to secure her tween-aged daughter’s cooperation with the unavoidable move. A page or two later, however, Ms. Goldhammer reveals deeper motives:

I had wanted chickens for a long time, along with a goat or two, but my husband — who had put up with, but not been happy about, cats, dogs, gerbils, snakes, and fish — had drawn the line at livestock, and I figured I better not push it. (p. 19)

(I feel such affinity with this statement that Catherine and I are henceforth on first-name terms.) She is divorced from her husband, and chickens have come to represent the thousand little sacrifices that people make to be with each other. These “chickens of the mind,” as she calls them, are as much an enticement for her as they are for her daughter; they draw her forward into each next step of her journey, each new day of the life that is becoming more surely hers.

Chickens of the mind pale in comparison with chickens in the bathtub, in the library, in the back yard. Flesh-and-blood chickens are much more of an investment in time, energy, and worry, not to mention dollars, than their up-front cost (a couple of bucks per chick) suggests. Late in winter, Catherine is at the end of her rope, and the added complication of chickens feels like the last straw. Then a workman tells her about his ninety-three-year-old aunt who keeps chickens because, she says, “They’re what gets me out of bed in the morning.” (p. 140) Catherine has to concede “that if Leonardo’s ninety-three-year-old aunt could do it, I could do it.” (p. 140)

In addition to all the practical things Catherine accomplishes in pursuing her life with chickens, she gains the wisdom and humility to see them as teachers. To her they become “Zen priests, with minds like cloudless skies.” (p. 154) A neighbor asks Catherine not to put up a privacy fence because the chickens are soothing to watch, like fish in an aquarium. Pondering the chickens’ attraction, she writes:

…although the chickens were busy, they were not in a hurry. They were calming. They were funny, although they had no sense of humor. They puttered, but in a serious sort of way. Chickens take themselves very seriously, actually. They have a sort of mindless gravitas. (p. 168)

She begins seeing the Buddha in them, realizes that nearly every piece of wisdom in the Tao Te Ching could be said about a chicken. “I had followed the chickens this far,” she says, “and would follow them farther. They were still talking to me, singing to me, telling me a story.” (p. 173) Because she has the audacity to listen, they tell her a story of her life.

Catherine concludes her tale much as she begins:

I did not have a year in Provence or a villa under the Tuscan sun. I did not have a farm in Africa. It turned out that my life was not someone else’s book. It was not a picture and it was not still. It was moving, variegated, unpredictable. It was a life, with chickens. (p. 176)

For the reader who has the audacity to listen, Catherine’s story will in turn tell a story of the possibilities of the reader’s own life.

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Baby robins in my hammock

Posted on May 11, 2009 | Leave a comment

They’re actually on the deck because we took the hammock down to mow and haven’t put it back up, but I mentioned the hammock in my previous post about robins, so it seemed appropriate. Usually the newly fledged robins hang out in my hammock the first day they leave the nest, attended by anxious parents who chirp encouragement from nearby planting beds where juicy worms abound.

I can see why the fledglings find the hammock attractive. It resembles a roomy nest, with space enough for everyone to spread their wings. It lets them get out of the nest of their hatching, like their folks have been after them to do, without having to be so high off the ground. Most of all, it allows them to temporarily ignore their parents’ frantic importuning and get their bearings, a luxury that landing on the dangerous ground does not afford. They preen and fluff their feathers; sometimes they just hunker down for a bit, taking in how really huge the world is.

Eventually they gather sufficient wits and nerve to launch themselves from the hammock and join their frazzled parents for the inevitable foraging lesson. They don’t go back to the hammock; I never see adolescent or adult robins in it, only comical, barely fledged babies who look surprised and somehow pleased with themselves to have fallen so fortuitously into this unexpected safety net.

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