They say it’s your birthday

And once again it is. The evidence began early this morning when I looked at my g-mail and found that friends from earlier time zones had started sending me greetings and good wishes through Facebook.  Of course I did know it was my birthday and had seen a reminder last weekend in St. Catharine’s; namely, an invitation on the fridge to Levi’s 5^th birthday, which happens today and is being celebrated tomorrow, and which I know that the amazing M. will attend.  Shortly after I started the computer the phone rang, a call from St. Catharine’s with JE and M. singing Happy Birthday to me twice, first the slow version, then in quick time, a great start to the day.

Our house has systems and there are related chores, like reviving the fire in the stove and bringing more wood in from the shed, making the morning tea, looking at the bird feeders, checking the colour of the harbour (blue-grey this morning) and the direction of the wind (shifted from yesterday’s NE to NNE), and assessing how much snow fell in the night.  I am not the sort of person who easily stays in bed while others start the day and cater to my needs; I’d rather be the one who gets up and actually does these things, getting my day started through being active, and I’m especially happy to do that on my birthday.

There were many treats today.  Here are some:

• the sound of a song sparrow when I went to get wood, a song that started a few days ago, a harbinger of spring 
• a gang of white-throated sparrows that came to feed, one on each of the feeders, the rest picking around in the new snow for the seeds that got knocked down, ten of these little beauties in all 
•  a seagull against the grey sky, belly white like the snow, back grey like the clouds, calling as it glided on the crest of the wind 
•  breakfast by the dining room windows with Lorraine and our daughter E. and talk of old times, birthdays past, and the vagaries of our lives 
• a grey-white splash on the window next to me that I took to be a good luck birthday wish from the seagull (and that I cleaned off the glass a little later with hot water, sponge and squeegee, and a very long extensible pole) 
• our very first ski of this nonexistent winter over at York Redoubt, feeling the stretch in my arms and legs and listening to the swish of the skis through the snow, especially when I hit the right spot on the trail for a long stride, a long glide, and the elation of flying past the stone walls and cold trees 
• doing a short edit for JE and then meeting a graduate student in education to work with her on an assignment that explored belonging, group relations, and creativity 
• joining E. at the Fireside for drinks, martinis and margarita, in comfy chairs next to the fire, and enjoying the sweet taste of lobster cake snacks 
• then having dinner with her at Suzuki (formerly Doraku) with dragon roll, rainbow roll, other great rolls, our first sushi pizza, gensai tea, and a large bottle of Kirin Ichiban beer to share 
• the chance to reflect on the people I know through the good wishes they keep on sending to help me celebrate this day 
• and, finally, the chance to look back on the day, remember it all with pleasure, and have the time to write this, my 156^th blog post since I started this endeavour, exactly three years ago today

It was a treat all the way and all the day – I hope Lou Reed (now 68) and Levi (now five) had days that were just as good!  They say it’s your birthday, and it is, today!  Happy birthdays to you too.

Crows!

I didn’t realize when I got up this morning that today would be a day I engaged with crows.  After breakfast I did watch one from the kitchen window as it worked on the remnants of the suet cake in the rather beat-up green wire cage I put it in.  I always replenish the suet knowing that the chickadees and jays will come, but also hoping for a return of the downy and hairy woodpeckers from previous years.  No woodpeckers this year, but a problem with the crows.  I haven’t seen them do it, but they (I’m sure it’s them!) seem to have figured out how the open the cage and make off with the suet cake, a reminder of the small steak one of them stole from next to the barbecue back in the spring.  This time, however, I’ve used a twist-tie to foil their tricks, and the cake has stayed.

This morning’s crow flew up to the slender branch the cage hangs from, held onto the branch with one claw and the cage with the other, and managed to twist itself around to be able to peck at the suet from underneath.  I went to get the camera.  When I got back to the window, our neighbourhood squirrel, whom I hadn’t seen since late summer, was on the branch approaching the crow.  I wanted to catch this confrontation, but just as I carefully raised the camera, the crow flew down to the ground and left the squirrel to chip away at the suet.

Before we went for our Monday swim we stopped down by the Dingle in Fleming Park to check on crows.  Lorraine had her Bronica loaded with a roll of black-and-white in the hope of catching some on film.  We heard and saw lots in the distance, way back in the trees, and I even saw some chase a small falcon that swooped through their territory, but none came anywhere near us; the best we were able to do was attract a bunch of mallard ducks who kept pecking (if ducks can peck with bills like that) in the bright grass to find and eat whatever they were finding and eating there.

Later we came back, parked the car by a yellow barricade where we had seen a few crows, and made our way down to the stream hoping to catch them this time.  We had a small bag of cookies from Heppy’s (really good raisin cookies!) and decided to try to attract the crows with them.  I walked along the path, feeling like Hansel, as I broke off little bits of cookie and dropped them behind me.  The crows began to call out and follow me, and then I felt more like the Pied Piper with these wonderful birds flying from branch to branch behind me.

We both got some shots of these intelligent black beauties.  Some even came close enough to catch the bits of cookie (the ones I didn’t eat myself) before they landed. 

I loved the fact that one brave crow came to within a metre of my foot, hoping I had another piece to donate to its cause.

And after we came back from buying more film, I found a black feather on the ground where we had been photographing.  For some reason, perhaps the lateness of the day, the crows were much less interested in bits of cookie and ended up flying off into the woods, but we had our images, ate the cookie remnants, and headed home.

I do love these birds, they are so smart and so beautiful, and I’ll bring cookies for them any day if it means they’ll come and engage with me!

Barred Owl

On Sunday we were working with a rented chipper-shredder, chipping and shredding high piles of branches from all the cutting and clearing we’ve been doing around here.  It was a good day’s work, shared with neighbours and friends, and we were all getting pretty weary towards the end of the day. 

While it is true that the chipper-shredder does the really heavy work, chipping and shredding whatever we feed into it, our job is to keep feeding it and that can tire a person out.  Se we ended up loosening and hauling branches and small trees from the pile, aligning the butt ends, tilting them up to feed into the hopper, and then pushing and wiggling and prodding them until they had made it through the blades and shot out in a steady stream of chips and shreds.   It was repetitive work that strained our shoulders, arms, and hands, and it took up the large part of our day.

So it was important that every now and again someone would turn the key to shut the machine down so that we could have a break.  It was around five o’clock when we took our last one, and we were all sitting on the back deck, pretty tired and pretty quiet, enjoying the peace of late afternoon without the noise of the machine.

That was when I noticed the noise of the crows.  I am used to hearing them talking and calling over the neighbourhood, but this was different, a real cacophony of sound, persistent and insistent, obviously riled up about something that had interfered with their routine.  I wondered what it could be but was too weary to get up and try to find out.  Then I noticed my neighbour’s wife coming in our lane from the path, and she told us what had happened.  Of course, it all made sense -- an owl had wandered into the neighbourhood, the crows and jays had found it, and now they were determined to chase it out.

Suddenly no one was tired, we all hurried through to their lane and up toward the main road, and there were the crows.  They got quieter and fewer with people approaching, and there, high up in a tree, was the owl.  It was a dark shape, much larger than the crows or the couple of blue jays that were also harassing it, and it puffed itself even bigger when the other birds got close.  No one had a camera or binoculars so there was nothing else to do but try to get closer for a clearer view. 

By the time I got under the tree the other birds had left and the owl was looking down at me.  It had the large round head with eye circles, dark eyes, bars across its upper chest, and vertical streaks down its breast that marked it as a barred owl.  Lorraine and I used to see one now and again over on the Middle Road when we first moved here, but it’s more than ten years now since I’ve seen an owl in the neighbourhood, and I’ve never heard one.

So it was a treat, and I stayed a while, looking back at the owl, noting all of its distinguishing marks, and wondering whether it had just dropped in or was going to be working in the neighbourhood on a regular basis.  Finally we did head back and start the chipper-shredder, and about an hour later found the branch we had been looking for, the last one.  It was getting dark as we shut things down, and I allowed myself to think about a cold crisp glass of pinot grigio that would be waiting once I had showered and changed. 

And I thought about the owl, more peaceful now that the crows had gone to roost, and wished it a good night.

Three bird stories

Two years ago, when we were having windows replaced and our deck rebuilt, I noticed a robin’s nest perched on top of the main carrying beam for the deck joists and under the deck itself.  I told P. the contractor about it.  He, it turned out, is someone who also pays attention to birds, telling me about the pileated woodpecker he has seen out behind his workshop and others he has noted in his travels, so he organized his work in order not to disturb the nest until the fledglings had moved out.  I appreciated that.

When we returned from Ontario earlier this month, I noticed that there were signs of three nests on top of the same carrying beam under our new deck.  It turned out that only one, the middle one, was occupied, and I would watch carefully from inside the studio to make sure I didn’t frighten this robin away.  She (or he) has been sitting on the nest for almost three weeks now, and I am sometimes scolded by one or the other parent if I wander too close, but so far as I can tell the nest and its occupant(s) have not been abandoned.

Last week I had found half a robin’s egg in the garden.  I figured that its neatly broken edge was a good sign, probably carefully chiseled open by the hatchling inside.  Then, a couple of days ago, I saw one of our neighbourhood red squirrels being chased by two ferocious robins up and down the shad bush next to the deck, more evidence that these parents still had something to protect.

When I checked just now there was no adult at the nest, so I waited a bit, watching one robin poking its bill into the wood chip pile and seeming to stay close to the nest.  Suddenly, from a different direction, I saw another robin fly up to the nest with a worm, feed at least one wide open beak, and nestle down over the young occupant(s) of the nest.  This made me happy. 

Something else that has made me happy lately is the return of our yellow-shafted flicker (you can see the yellow shafts of its feathers here).  It calls from the top of the power pole behind our shed, and sometimes flies up from the edge of our lane when we drive in, its bright white rump patch always a delight to see.  Last week Lorraine and I noticed it outside the dining room window, working next to the magnolia bush.  It was probably poking at the anthill, and we had plenty of time to admire its striped brown back, greyish head, and the bright red patch on its nape.

Many years ago when we lived in Maitland we found a flicker lying on the road out near the Mill Pond.  Its neck was broken, but almost every feather was in place, and its beautiful body was still warm in my hands.  We figured the car in front of us had hit it on one of the deep undulations of its flight and took it to our taxidermist friend F. where we had the opportunity to see it every time we went to his house, perfectly mounted and perfectly perfect. 

Last week we were planning to barbecue some steak.  There were three, and I cut them in half because they seemed big, seasoned them, and took them outside on a plate while I lighted the barbecue, which was on our back deck.  While the barbecue was heating I went back in the house to top up my wine and munch on some snacks.  A movement outside the front window caught my eye, and I saw a black crow racing off with a grey and white herring gull chasing it.  Interesting, I thought, and went outside to put the steaks on the grill, but where there had been six, there were now only five.

I admire the crows, their amazing flying ability, sharp beauty, and obvious intelligence.  They perch on I’s roof next door and in our trees and tell each other what is going on.  I didn’t see any crows around when I took the steaks out, but clearly one of them saw me, and the steak was gone, carried off by a crow.  The gull was bigger, but the crow was fast and deserved its prize.  We enjoyed our steaks and even had some left over, and I seriously hope the crow got to enjoy the one it stole.

Christmas Bird Count, 2010

This morning at first light I went outside for firewood and heard the bell buoy in the harbour clang.  The swells must have been moving into the harbour ahead of tonight’s storm, which has rainfall and storm surge warnings posted, but the air was still, just as it was yesterday, the day of this year’s Nova Scotia bird count.

Yesterday was my first official participation in the count, something my older brother had suggested I might do when I talked to him on Friday night.  He is my one older brother (the other five are younger) and he has influenced my life in a number of ways besides getting me involved in the bird count. 

He is a statistician, still active in it even though he is retired from active teaching, which of course is a useful skill in the Bird Society, but he started out in university as a Math and Science student.  My highest marks in Provincials (my high official high school leaving grades) were in Geometry and Physics, and I think I won school prizes in both; my lowest by quite a long shot was English.  However, I had watched my brother’s study habits during his first couple of years as a university student and knew I would (or could) never work as hard as that, so I passed on Math and studied English instead.

I have been watching birds since I was about ten, when our dad pointed out to me an osprey hovering over the lagoon at North-side East Bay in Cape Breton.  I watched it dive straight into the water, struggle upwards with a fish in its talons, get enough height to shake the water out of its feathers, swoop up a little higher to shake again, and then fly away to its nest or a high perch to either eat the prey or feed its young.  After that I began to notice the eagles that circled over the big lake when my next younger brother and I would venture out there in the rowboat, and I’ve loved watching birds of all sizes and colours ever since. 

I think my older brother became a bird watcher later than I did because when we were talking about an eagle I had seen floating up the Shubenacadie River on a small ice floe, he didn’t remember the Bras d’Or Lakes eagles and ospreys I used to watch.  However, as a mathematics and statistics person, he became a much more careful and scientific watcher than I ever was, and it was he who often educated me about specific birds and their habits and songs.

On Saturday, the day before the count, Lorraine and I watched chickadees and juncos and jays on and under the feeder in the magnolia bush pecking at seeds and sometimes squabbling over them.  From where she sat she was able to see a male cardinal carefully approaching the feeding area under the bush (the jays are good at knocking seeds out of the feeder every time I fill it).  It was a great moment for me because I hadn’t seen a cardinal in the neighbourhood for almost a year, and I wished that I could do the count that day, as I could have included the cardinal, a couple of blue jays, and a pale goldfinch in its winter plumage.

We weren’t home much yesterday, but in the morning I refilled the feeders and in the afternoon I had a chance to watch for a while.  I saw my little crew of juncos working the territory accompanied by a couple of white-throated sparrows who are also regulars.  My happy handful of chickadees made a busy visit, but no goldfinch or blue jay to be seen, at least by me.  I was feeling tempted to bend the rules and report Saturday’s cardinal, but decided I couldn’t do it – something of that need for statistical accuracy kept me honest.

So I was delighted when the wary cardinal showed up and hopped across the snowy lawn for a quick feed and I added him to my brief list.  When I reported my stats to my brother last night, he told me that his group had observed thirty-eight species out at Cole Harbour, so I was happy for him, but I was also glad to have my numbers included in the total.   

The numbers may not have told anything of my delight at watching the birds, the poetry of their quick presences, but they did put our house and local birds into the record books for the 2010 bird count:

Dark-eyed junco                    10
White-throated sparrow       4
Black-capped chickadee        4
Northern cardinal (male)      1

The Descent of Winter (2)

We had a cold snap for a few days earlier this week, down to minus six or so each night and below freezing each day.  It provided an introduction to winter we didn’t really need because we know it’s coming soon enough, with the same inevitability, someone who is (I think) in Manitoba pointed out to me, as death and taxes.  But we now have a reprieve, and the skim of ice has gone from the frogpond, as well as our own little pond, though the parsley is not likely to stand up again this season.

One of the wonders of that touch of winter was the way splashing water glazed the surfaces it landed on.  Our small dragon kept on spouting, but the water lettuce and water hyacinths we left in the pond are not going to survive this coating of ice.

The morning after a light snowfall there were still remnants on the head of the garden column that Lorraine made.

And, as things warmed up a little, snow slumped off the hood of the car.

While the same snow coated the ice in the pond.

Since this mass of Arctic air moved on, I’ve been able to do a little more yard cleanup, picking up last scraps of firewood, putting pots under cover, and moving the raked leaves to the compost pile.  And the milder air has brought a new crop of moths to the outside light at night and let the crystalline garden soil soften up enough for me to get the last of the tulip bulbs in before everything solidifies again.

Now we can watch with wonder as three pertly perfect chickadees take turns at the suet cage, or the red squirrel makes a fool of itself trying vainly to keep two blue jays away from the seeds, running up slender branches after them and then having to rush down again as they fly back to the feeder for a quick peck.   

And we can wait for the lacy patterns of ice that will soon creep across ponds and puddles again, the iron grip that settles into the ground as it freezes, and the next snowfall that will slide down the air to cover everything as winter descends upon us one more time.

Three Blue Feathers

This afternoon I was picking up and bundling brush and branches from some of our trail clearing and garden pruning when I uncovered a blue jay's feather on the ground.  When I looked more closely, I saw that it was in fact two feathers together, most likely wing feathers because of their size and the amount of white on their tips.  Then I noticed a third, smaller feather, possibly from the same place and the same bird.

What had happened?  I worry about the jays and the other birds that we see around our house and grounds, mostly because of the calico cat.  Three feathers don't necessarily equal a dead bird, but they are a sign that something happened.  Part of the problem is our seed feeders.  I fill them up and a couple of jays usually notice pretty quickly, eat their fill, and then call to the other jays to let them know.  Of course the others come from around the neighbourhood – there’s a small gang of a dozen or so, I'd guess – and they eat too.

I’m happy to feed them, along with the chickadees, woodpeckers, juncos, and sparrows, but the jays are big, and they get excited as they feed, and within a day the feeder is empty and there’s seed spread all over the ground under it.  None of the birds, except for the woodpeckers, seem to mind eating off the ground, but unfortunately this is where the calico cat sometimes enters the picture.

This cat, which appears to have our neighbourhood as its private hunting ground by day (I believe the raccoons rule the nighttime), knows to run if it sees me.  After all, I do tend to favour birds over cats in this situation, and any time I have noticed it from the kitchen window stalking the small birds pecking seeds off the ground, I go out.  It takes off as soon as the door opens, because it knows I might be picking up a small rock, but there are so many times I’m not at the kitchen window or out in the yard.

However, jays are corvids, which means that they are smart, like their cousins, the ravens and crows, so I am always hopeful.  I know that the crows aren’t vulnerable, and it’s not just because they don’t come to the feeder.  In fact, they like to gang up on the cat, the same way they’ll chase the raven that sometimes strays here from over by York Redoubt, or an owl if it made the mistake of perching somewhere in their territory.  They call from Irene’s roof to our roof to the big spruce by our driveway to the white pines next to the house and there’s nothing happens around here that the crows don’t seem to know about.  One of my favourite recent moments was looking towards the clamour of crows next door and seeing the calico cat streaking across Jim’s long lawn with three crows dive-bombing it.

So three feathers with their brilliant blue barred with black and white on the tips means I need to watch for a jay with a slightly ragged wing, keep on keeping an eye on the feeder, and continue to hope that the crows are on patrol, the bright-eyed jays are alert, and the calico cat is still stalking in vain.

Small Broken Lightnesses of Being

A couple of weeks ago I was standing on our upper deck with my friend S. looking down at shrubs and bushes in front of our house.  In particular, we were watching a small brown bird, clearly a sparrow, which had landed on one of them.  He asked me what kind I thought it was, and I said, Maybe a song sparrow, though I wasn’t sure.  I told him that I thought a song sparrow had nested inside that bush the last couple of seasons, but we both agreed that the size of this one didn’t seem quite right.

S. had told me a while ago about sitting very still on their deck with some birdseed in his palm and having a chickadee light there to feed.  I like this meaning of “light” as a verb; it says so much about the kind of touch this small bird makes on the hand that feeds it.  If there is magic in the world, perhaps it can be understood in the lightness of this touch.  I also admire S. for his patient stillness and willingness to wait for the bird to come to him and for the pleasure he found in it.

I thought about this a few days later when I saw a small shape lying on our main deck in front of the tall windows.  It was a white-throated sparrow, or what is usually called a white-throat.  There is much that I love about white-throats, but the loveliest is its song.  It reminds me of climbing the granite slope behind our old cottage in Purcell’s Cove many decades ago and hearing the white throats sing up there in the jack pines.  I knew the sound long before I knew the bird and learned how to mimic the five clear and haunting notes of one of its characteristic songs.  I can never hear a white-throat singing without thinking of those times and that place.  You can listen to the one I can whistle here.  You can see and hear it sing its other lovely song here.

I picked up the dead white-throat and noticed how its head flopped in my hand, its neck clearly broken.  I marveled at its compact shape, the neatness of its small white bib, the variations of brown in its flight feathers, the poignancy of its legs and feet, and the lovely lightness of its small being.  I know that birds have hollow bones and bodies that are lighter than you think they are going to be, but I am still amazed at the feel of one when it is lying in my palm.  It is always a small wonder.

I know that our windows are a hazard because of their height and the amount of sky they reflect, and birds do fly into them, though not always fatally.  At times I have watched small stunned creatures recover and fly away, and when I find small smears of feathers on the windows, or on the glass panels of the deck, I always hope that these birds managed to survive their impacts. 

A few years ago I found a sharp-shinned hawk on a path below our house.  It was lying on its side in the space between the blueberry bushes with every feather seeming to be in place and no sign of what might have killed it.  I carried its perfect lightness of being up the path and buried it at the edge of the garden, thinking of the beauty of its flight pattern, the mottling of its breast, and the sharp strength of its talons.

And I buried the white-throat, also in the garden.  I whistled its song as I filled the hole.

Since then I have noticed another one perched on that same shrub in front of the house.  I have tried whistling to it.  I am still hopeful it will whistle back.

Equi Nox: The Last Day of Summer

We had some serious summer weather earlier this month where it was so hot that Lorraine and I set up a table down in the studio (our basement) for several days so that we could work in the uncharacteristic (for here at least) heat wave.  But then, as it always does, the systems changed, it got cooler, and felt more like September.  I have even started to wear socks and shoes on occasion instead of my sandals, I heard the furnace come on one night, and when we look at the forecast now it is most likely to predict highs of 17 or 18, rather than the 33 or 34 we had less than three weeks ago.

So today, the last day of summer, was a treat, with sunny skies after some morning cloud, brisk southwest winds, and temperatures in the mid-20’s, except, as always with that wind, a little cooler along the coast.  That description does read rather like an Environment Canada report and does not do justice to the warm beneficence of today, the equinox, the day that the sun crosses the Equator (or, to be more truthful, the day the earth tilts in relation to the sun, and our northern hemisphere starts the long slide into winter).  It was a treat, a glorious day, and after doing some work in the morning we decided to head for Crystal Crescent for a celebratory picnic.

We weren’t the only ones, but the stretch of beach we stopped at was empty except for a little girl of two or three who was there with her dad, playing in and around the large castle and well he had made in the sand.  Others arrived on the beach, some with towels, though nobody went into the water except the dad who held his daughter so she could kick her feet in the waves, and still others hiked on out to the point or to the next beach, the one we have always called Cootes Cove or Mackerel Cove, but most people now know as The Nude Beach.

We didn’t bother going out there, but we did fly our kite after eating our sandwiches, and each of us learned how to maneuvre it well enough to keep it from crashing whenever the wind did a shift or a gust.

We also walked out to check out the gulls and cormorants on the rocks.

And we saw the seasonal asters, aka Michaelmas daisies (find out about Michaelmas and St. Michael, the great Archangel, here), harbingers of autumn reminding us that school is in and summer is really over.

Back at home I was walking in bare feet – after all, it is the last day of summer – to fill one of the bird feeders – after all, winter is coming – when I felt something cold on my ankle and saw a most beautiful spring peeper in the grass, the first I have ever seen.  It seemed a nice irony of the day that this tiny creature, this harbinger of spring that you always hear and almost never see, should be jumping across our lawn today and is in fact chirping outside the window tonight as I type this.

So it was a large day, and tonight is it, the autumn equinox, and the last day of this season, a nice end to a really nice summer.  This evening’s moon, a smidgen away from full, will herald autumn and harvest when it rises over the harbour tomorrow night, reminding us that the day has just become a little shorter than the night. 

A cardinal

I came upstairs shortly after 9 to check things on the laptop, but first I had to close the window a little because the breeze was still blowing and it is a little cool. I noticed a movement and heard a flutter on the deck outside the window. I had the camera close by but don’t have an image because the light was already too low and I didn’t want to panic our visitor any more than she was already panicked.

I have worried that something happened to the male cardinal that was so present the winter and spring of 2009 because after last summer there was no more lyrical singing from the pine trees and no more flash of red as the cardinal we considered ours headed for the relatively secluded feeder that is under the canopy of the magnolia in front of the house. Of course he wasn’t ours, he was the neighbourhood’s cardinal, and I wondered what had happened. I talked to my older brother who is a much better birder than I am, and he reassured me that our cardinal might not in fact have been caught by a cat or other predator and might have just moved on. I was relieved to hear that, but it didn’t stop me from missing his bright presence over the past year.

JE in St. Catharine’s has had both a male and female cardinal come to his feeder, and he did point out that the female is even more wary than her wary mate. I had looked at images of the female and had watched the trees in our yard closely, especially when the male made his careful way to the feeder. However, I had never seen one, and once our male was gone for at least a year, I figured there was little chance of seeing a female around here.

Thus, I was both surprised and delighted to see a female cardinal on our top deck this evening. The only problem was that she was trapped there. I watched her fly over and over against the glass panels, fluttering her wings with her bill touching the glass and then landing again on the bottom rail. I wanted to go out and find some way to either help her or frighten her enough that she would fly up and out, but I resisted. I was worried I might make her hurt herself, like breaking a wing, so I stayed very still at the window and watched. Each time she would walk along towards the gap between the panels, a gap that was plenty big for her to get through, I would silently encourage her, but then each time I thought she would make it she would look at the sky and fly up against the glass again. And again.

So I saw my first female cardinal again and again, captive on our deck, and wondered what I could do to help her escape, until she finally found her way to the gap and flew off as I had hoped she would.

So if she is in the neighbourhood, maybe he is too. I filled the feeders today and will keep my eyes peeled and my ears tuned for any sign of her happy red partner.

Footnote: I do realize from checking about cardinals that this one might have been an immature, so it's possible I may still not have seen a female -- should have had the presence of mind to note what colour its bill was!

(Un)bearable Lightness of Being

A person could, with some justification, accuse me of looking at the world through rose-coloured glasses. In fact, my sunglasses, which I have been wearing a bit lately, do give a rosier hue to the tops of the trees that are responding to the warmth and light this spring, and they give a wonderful blue-green cast to the water in the cove. So yes, it may have some truth in it, both literally and metaphorically, but I don’t really care; when small events inspire a small sense of uplift, I say go with it, cherish it, because there’s enough of the other to offset the mood.

As W.S. Merwin put it so well, towards the end of his “A Message to Po Chu-I” in the March 8 issue of The New Yorker:

the wars are bigger now than ever
greed has reached numbers that you would not
believe and I will not tell you what
is done to geese before they kill them
now we are melting the very poles
of the earth but I have never known
where he would go after he leaves me

In the absence of knowing where the goose will go, or where climate change, wars, and greed will take us and our children and grandchildren, there are still some things to lift the spirit, like:

the pair of eagles circling and engaging acrobatically over the harbour when I stopped at the mailbox

the tiny perfect chickadees shifting to their spring song

the whistle in the wings of the two mourning doves in our maples

the return before sunrise of the song sparrows’ songs

the blue flash of jays at our feeders

the small red dot on the downy woodpecker’s head

the crows exulting in sun and wind and sky

the soft grey and bright white of the gull’s glide

Yesterday I joined S and the girls down by the wave sculpture at the waterfront (they sat in its shadow for the photo), and last night, in the black sky, I caught the bright sharp crescent of the newest moon just before it set.

These are all small things, perhaps, and there was the ominous reminder of someone's swastika sign on the wave, but, like our three amazing children, their wonderful partners, and three equally amazing granddaughters, there are things and moments to be cherished here and now and there are the promises they bear for our future moments.

Yesterday was March 11 (again)

Today is March 12, and once again I can say, Yesterday was March 11. Yesterday was, like today is, a gorgeous sunny late winter day, with the promise of spring in it, a happy day.

When we came in last night, there was a message on the phone. It started, as JE’s messages so often do, with his gentle and thoughtful voice saying, Hi guys. He went on to tell us that he would be out later and that he phoned because it was his “Champagne Anniversary”. I didn’t immediately figure out the champagne reference, but then I remembered champagne birthdays (mine happened when I was two and I doubt that I noticed it). It wasn’t that I hadn’t been thinking about it often throughout the day, since March 11 is as important a day in our lives as September 11 is in some other people’s; it is, after all, the anniversary of the day we took JE, our second son, to the Emergency Department to try to get some help. We drove past the Abbie Lane yesterday, looked up at the windows on the sixth floor, and remembered. It is the day when he said, eleven years ago, “March 11. It is raining.” And it is the day he was admitted to 6 Lane Long Stay for diagnosis and treatment of something that roughly matched the list of symptoms for bipolar disorder.

Yesterday it wasn’t raining, the sun was bright, and the chickadees had begun to sing their spring song. The song sparrows were also around, also singing. The jays were busy at the feeder and suet cage. A hairy woodpecker stopped by for its feed. And the bright and agile crows were calling some message from the tops of our maples.

JE, who also notices birds and would have happily noticed if he were here, called yesterday on his champagne anniversary. I was sorry we missed the call because there was much we could have talked about: the peregrine falcon that landed on his fence a couple of days ago, what the inimitable M has been doing and saying as her world and the words she uses to describe it continue to expand exponentially, how the balance of the semester is shaping up for S, and how he himself is doing and what he is thinking eleven years after the fact.

We will talk about those things when we connect, but that last one is one that we already know something of the answer to; his March posts give some indication, and our recent visit tells even more. Our son, who has struggled with mental illness and the side effects of medications and who has had to make himself and his condition known to a number of different psychiatrists over the years and then to try to forge a good working relationship with each, has managed through self-discipline, self-reflection, and continued vigilance to establish a life and a way of being that is creative, productive, and filled with love. As our friend Brian, himself a psychiatrist, told us, JE's life is like a miracle.

It may be that, and it is a champagne anniversary, a celebration of a difficult struggle, strengthened by adversity, a day to celebrate.

March 11. The sun is shining.

Good Snow

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Last week when I was driving AZ home, I pointed at the dirty grey snowbanks (or perhaps icebanks) and told him I thought we needed some new snow. He agreed and on Monday we got it. It was the reverse of our usual storms here in Halifax, where we often start with a good fall of small dry snow with wind out of the northeast and end up catching the back side of the system where the winds come round to the southeast, milder air is pulled in, and the snowfall changes to rain. It can be quite a mess and there’s often little chance for skiing. This one started Monday afternoon with nice little cold snowflakes, but it changed quickly to wet snow mixed with rain, so I went to bed without much hope. However, the norwester that often follows these storms blew in and small dry snow kept falling through the night, so that Tuesday morning brought us a lovely little winter wonderland.

A nice thing about not working fulltime is the opportunity to grab a good snowfall when it happens here, because quality snow like this doesn’t often last. So Tuesday morning we got our ski boots out of the basement, found the gaiters, waxed the skis, loaded the car, and headed for Crystal Crescent Beach.

Here’s what I call quality snow. It’s bright and white and cold and dry. It forms little curls and crumbles at the edges of the skis’ tracks. It makes blue shadows and shines with tiny sparkles in the sun. It swishes under your skis and falls in small clumps off your poles behind each push along the trail.

Quality snow shows where a large hare jumped a metre and a half across the trail. It lies on the needles of the balsam firs, just like in the amazing pencil drawing Harry did. It tracks the movements of deer mice from one clump of grass to another. And it falls off the seed clumps in the alder bushes when the chickadees flit and fly through there.

It is the snow that must have made people look for smooth boards to strap onto their feet to glide on. It is the snow your ski grips when you get a good Nordic stride going and the snow you fly through on the small downhill runs, keeping your balance as you remember the feel of step turns. And it is the snow that took us out the trail to the beach where we watched the leftover storm waves crashing in the sunshine on Tuesday.

It has been a remarkably good week for snow for Halifax. More fell on Wednesday, and we had bright sun and blue skies the rest of the week with temperatures nowhere near the melting point. So Thursday and Friday were more great skiing days, and today we went coasting with the girls, sliding down a short steep slope in an old quarry and landing with red cheeks and snow in our faces.

There’s rain forecast for Monday, so all we can count on right now is one more day of good snow and one more day on our skis until the next stretch of great winter weather arrives (we hope!).

Wild Life

If you are a regular reader of this blog you will know that I pay attention to, and sometimes write about, birds that live around us, and it is true that their feathered presence and bright activities have always been engaging to me. In fact, just starting to write this post reminded me of the sharp-shinned hawk I found years ago on the path at the lower end of our property. It was lying there on its back, small talons curled tightly, and no mark on it to show how it had died. I marvelled at its delicate beauty and feathered lightness in my hand.

But this post is not about birds, it’s about mammals, the wild ones that frequent our property. The largest, and in some respects the peskiest, are the white-tailed deer. Before we went away to Istanbul they discovered my vegetable gardens and harvested whatever suited their taste. They browsed the yew just below our deck every winter and severely trimmed the euonymus by the back door. They are fond of tulips and the only way to grow them here is to put little cages over the bulbs in the early spring to keep their leaves from being chewed off by white-tailed grazers. Our neighbours, S&S, erected an eight-foot fence around their vegetable garden, but their shrubs and bushes are still vulnerable in winter when the deer stroll by, which they do with relative impunity.

I last saw a deer here a couple of weeks ago when I took Dewi, who was here for a sleepover, out the lane for his evening walk. While he was sniffing dead goldenrod and clumps of snow I looked back toward the house and saw the elegant shape of a large doe stepping across the driveway and heading through the path to our neighbours'. And yesterday morning, when I checked the feeder in the magnolia bush, I saw that it was pretty much empty and the hoofprints in the snow told me that one of our friendly deer had figured out how to bump the seeds out of it and munch them on the ground.
Another feeder visitor is a quick little red squirrel. It is quite different, I think, from the large grey characters that Jon Eben contends with in St. Catharines with their languid city ways that border on domesticity and their skill at getting past the most creative obstacles to clean out the bird feeders. My red squirrel is a wild creature, more modest in appetite, with stashes of spruce cones under the edges of granite boulders and in tree root crevices, and I have no objection to its helping itself to some seeds now and again. It scolds us from bare branches, moves with a rust-coloured and fluid grace up and over and around our rocks and trees, and hangs from the suet cage while it nibbles its snacks.

There are snowshoe hares as well, though I more often see their tracks than their beings. Early last winter I watched one make its way down the slope next to the house, crouching under our pine trees, probably feeding, though they usually eat around dawn and dusk. What struck me then was the mottling of its coat, the white beginning to predominate, but the grey-brown still very much there as the season changed from fall to winter. Driving to the airport very early on the morning of the 3rd we saw a pure white one just beyond our road, perfectly matching the snow that had fallen that night. It’s an amazing feat, I think, this changing of colour to match the season, and I still puzzle about how such a feature could have evolved (though I guess without it I’d have no snowshoe hares to look at).

Of course there are also chipmunks, likely hibernating now, raccoons, though they are less in evidence since I’ve put a stronger bungee cord on the green bin, and deer mice, whose tracks I see in the snow and keep hoping they will stay outside the house since I don’t love catching them in traps. I know that there are foxes around, and others talk of coyotes, but I haven’t seen either yet, though I would love to. I’ll keep watching, however, and I’ll keep you posted – you can count on it!

Feeder birds - the size advantage

Today I was standing at the kitchen sink soaking my fingernail, the one that got blackened when I was laying flagstones in the new walkway, and looking out the window. The seed feeder and suet cage are in the small red pine outside the window, strategically placed so that anyone can watch from the kitchen window. They had both been empty for a while, and it wasn’t until a couple of days ago that I got round to pouring the seeds in and putting a suet cake in the cage feeder. While I was working outside, moving soil and bits of sod to fill in next to the walkway and helping Lorraine prune the magnolia, it struck me that birds didn’t seem to be coming to the feeder; that is, the seed level was not dropping the way it did a few weeks ago when a small flock of about two dozen blue jays regularly and noisily visited, along with a red squirrel who hung onto the feeder and the seed bell I had hung, and helped themselves until everything was gone.

So while I soaked my fingernail, I watched the feeders. Within a minute or so, three chickadees showed up and took turns hanging on the suet cage and pecking at the cake or picking seeds carefully from the tray of the feeder and flying off to eat them. They were delicately beautiful, the way chickadees always are, and I was happy just to watch them, since I had to soak my fingernail anyway and their activity was consistently engaging.

Within another minute or so, I saw a flick of movement behind the trunk of the pine. Almost immediately a small woodpecker worked its way around the trunk, looked at the suet cage, and flew over to it. The move was aggressive and it was a bigger bird, so the chickadees quickly flew off to different branches and left the woodpecker to address the suet. I admired its agility, the white stripes on its black wing feathers, and the shape of the white patch on its back. It made me wonder whether this was a downy or a hairy woodpecker, since they are exactly alike except for size and beak shape, and I hadn't seen either kind for a while.

I didn’t have long to wonder about it because a pair of my much larger blue jay buddies showed up in their cocky blue and grey splendour. Their moves were as aggressive as the woodpecker’s had been, and it was gone in an instant, so they proceeded to chase each other away until one decided there were enough scraps on the ground that it wasn’t worth fighting for a spot on the cage. So I watched these two beautiful birds working the territory, but again it didn’t last long.

Another woodpecker, much bigger than the first one (which was, then, clearly a downy), landed on the pine trunk and flew right over to the suet cage. I realized that this one, a hairy woodpecker, was almost exactly the same body size as the jay that was on the other side of the feeder. Here, for the first time, there was no size differential, and surprisingly – for me at least – the two birds shared the little suet cage. Of course I didn’t have the camera close by to catch the two together, but I did catch each of them clinging to the cage.

And that’s really all. There were no bigger birds to chase either of them away from the feeder, and my fingernail had likely soaked long enough, so I dumped the water and took one last look out the window. The blue jays and the hairy woodpecker were gone, but a pretty little chickadee was there pecking carefully at the suet cake.