Elegy for a Bird Feeder

 The finches (purple, house, and gold), along with their dun-colored wives and children, are gone. So are the titmice, nuthatches, chickadees, mourning doves, and woodpeckers (downy, hairy, and red-bellied). Also the rose-breasted grosbeak couple, the cardinal family, several tribes of unidentifiable (by me) sparrows, and all the chipmunks. Even the squirrels have fled. 

A bear was seen recently in our retirement community, and I had to take down the sunflower seed feeder, the suet cage (which needed to be refilled every day), and the squirrel baffle. If I had been living on my own, I would have taken my chances with the bear, but living where we do, I felt that I needed to be prudent. 

Taking down the feeders was one of the low points in a not-so-easy summer. The bear’s appearance coincided with the fledging of dozens of finches in the trees nearby. Four or five baby birds at a time would perch on the feeder, scrambling and fluttering on top of each other for their beleaguered parent to stuff seeds down their gullets. For hours after I took down the feeders the birds kept coming, and I could hear the insistent zik-zik of the young begging for food. I spent the afternoon in the bedroom, to get away from the sight and sound of so much disappointment. 

Then, suddenly, they gave up. Our yard is now bird-, squirrel-, and chipmunk-free. The cat Telemann, who used to spend his days leaping from windowsill to windowsill, lashing his tail and flinging himself at the glass in the eternal hope of catching one of the critters, now sleeps his life away. Sometimes—not often--a bird comes to the birdbath, drinks for a couple of seconds, and takes off. 

And sometimes a bee from the hives across the street perches on the rim and sips a drop or two. This is cause for much excitement—look, a bee!—kind of how you would feel if a unicorn emerged from the woods and approached your house. I had never thought or cared about the drinking habits of bees, but I do now. 

Still, talk about downsizing! After I gave up my goats and chickens, I assuaged my urge to nurture by feeding birds and squirrels. Now I’m reduced to offering water to bees. But bees, I remind myself, are better than nothing. 

The universe is doing its best to teach me lessons in non-attachment, but I am not a good student. I can’t wait for the first frost, when the trees turn colors and the bear goes to sleep in his cave, and I can put out the feeders again.

Winter Comforts

It's getting seriously cold and snowy here, so I spent part of the day yesterday making sure the animals and plants were comfy.

The hens got special attention, since my geriatric flock is now down to six.  One disappeared mysteriously before we left for my mother's funeral, and another, who'd been looking poorly for over a year, perished when the weather turned frigid while we were gone.  (In case you're wondering, when one of our chickens dies we take the corpse out to the woods to provide some wild critter's dinner.  It's always gone by morning.)

I gave the hens some extra wood shavings for bedding, and a "poultry hot-cake"--a cylinder of high-protein food that I hang from a string so they can peck at it and be both nourished and entertained.  And, for the biggest treat of all, I defrosted some "drone brood" for them.

Drone brood, given to me by a bee-keeping friend, consists of bits of honeycomb filled with drone (hence, undesirable) larvae. The hens had never seen it before, and they exclaimed appreciatively at this sudden appearance of insects in the middle of winter.  I'm saving the rest of the brood for Christmas morning.

The four apple trees and the espaliered apricot got their winter "socks"--spirals of white plastic that I wrap around the trunk to keep the rabbits from girdling the bark.  And I wrapped the potted fig tree  in a double thickness of burlap.  The tree is supposed to withstand temperatures of -10F, but I'm not taking any chances.

Then I went to work on Wolfie and Bisou, whose needs were purely cosmetic.  I was clipping their nails, as I do every couple of weeks and, for the first time ever, I nicked the quick on one of Wolfie's. But instead of having hysterics, splattering the room with blood, and never letting me near him with the clippers again, this most tolerant of dogs merely muttered something that sounded like "wow" and let me finish the job.

When the clipping and brushing were done I rewarded the dogs with a walk in the field to eat frozen deer poop.  Speaking of deer, I really should wrap the Leyland cypresses in the backyard in burlap, to keep the deer from eating them.  But they don't actually kill them, and I know the deer have to be terribly hungry to come that close to the house, so I may just leave the Leylands to tough it out.

The wood is stacked on the porch.  The chickens are cozy.  The dogs are groomed.  My only worry now is the black cat that hunts far from the house, at the bottom of the field.  I don't think he has a home.  How is he going to make it through the winter?  There's no way I can lure him to the house, with the dogs around.  I'd leave some food out for him, but I don't know where to put it so he'll know it's there.

Any ideas?

More Crimes Against Nature: Lemon

The list of crimes against Nature in my Vermont garden is getting longer.  Along with espaliering an apricot tree and growing figs in a pot, I am attempting to produce a crop of Meyer lemons.

As with the apricots (three in this, the tree's first year) and figs (nine, in ditto) the lemon crop will be tiny--five, if they all make it.  I have known every one of those five lemons from conception--in fact, I was responsible for the conception of one of them, because when the tree first bloomed it was too cold to take it outside and I had to pretend I was a bee and fertilize the blooms indoors with a watercolor brush.

Meyer lemons, the offspring of a lemon and a sweet orange, originated in China, where they are grown in pots as ornamentals.  They are sweeter and more floral in flavor than ordinary lemons, and their yellow-orange skin is thinner.  Although they had been in this country since the early 1900s, they were rediscovered at Chez Panisse in the 1970s and later popularized by Martha Stewart.  Fancy chefs love them and have figured out a hundred uses for them, most of which are way too complicated for me.

Last winter I was so assiduous with my brush that a dozen flowers set fruit, and I was concerned about how the tiny tree would bear their weight.  But I needn't have worried.  When the little lemons got to be a quarter-inch long they all but one dropped off.

When the weather warmed I took the tree outside thinking that the sun and air would do it good, but with no thought of further fruit.  It surprised me by immediately covering itself in blooms again.  This time there were real bees to do the job, and most of the blooms set fruit.  Again, most of them fell off, but four persevered. 

Now they are tennis-ball-size, but still green.  The weather is turning colder by the day, and I worry that the lemons will not ripen properly indoors, so every evening I bring the tree inside, and take it out in the morning when the sun begins to warm the patio slates.  If it doesn't rain for a couple of days, I water it.  If the wind picks up, I move it to a sheltered spot. 

The four apple trees surrounding the patio watch all this and smirk.  They have withstood ice, snow and drought.  They have been chewed by Japanese beetles, buffeted by high winds and had their flowers decimated by late frosts.  They have not asked for help with fertilization or insect control.  Despite all this, hardy New Englanders that they are, they have produced a mountain of deep-red, crisp, sweet apples.  Now, without any fuss, they are shedding their leaves and going to sleep.

I don't blame them for smirking.  Why go to all this trouble for five measly lemons?  Because I'm human, of course.  Which means that I'm attracted by what is exotic, and delicate, and needing extra care--the tender perennial, the long-finned fish, the white cat, the tiny dog.  It's not just aesthetics or, in the case of fruit, gluttony.  It's the challenge of shaking my fist at Nature, showing her that I can do some things she can't.

As if.

Blogging in the ER

You know how it is in American medical circles:  you say the word "twinge," followed by the word "chest" and, if you're male and in your 60s, the cardiovascular care machine roars into high gear.

Since the twinges and the chest belonged to my spouse, a couple of days ago I sent him to the cardiologist, who said everything looked fine but ordered a stress test, the results of which were terrific except that two more twinges happened, which caused him to order a further stress test for later in the week.  Meanwhile there were more twinges, so in my role as draconian health enforcer I made the victim call the cardiologist's office this morning, and the triage nurse said he should go to the ER, just to make sure that all is well.  Over the victim's protestations we drove off to the hospital.

Which is where we are now, attended by lovely people and waiting for test results.  So far everything looks fine.  He's in a hospital gown, chest dotted with electrodes, reading the New Yorker and twinge-free for the moment.  I'm fine too, my only source of discomfort being a baby's screams from the next cubicle.  There's nothing more upsetting to me than a baby's cry.  It sets off some primitive impulse to rush in and effect a rescue.  I don't remember being afflicted this way as a teenager, but it set in with a vengeance when I had my first baby.

On the way to the hospital--my husband drove, saying that if I did he would have a heart attack, ha, ha--we listened to Mozart's Piano Concerto number 21 on the radio.  It's the one that moviegoers learned to hum when the second movement became the sound track for Elvira Madigan.  The drive from our house to the hospital lasts about forty minutes, and when you start the climb towards the Green Mountains, it is lovely, even on a gray morning like today.

The music played, the scenery rolled along, and I meditated about our life stage.  I felt weirdly serene and clear-headed--I get that way whenever my spouse develops so much as a hangnail.  I hope that things turn out fine today--I'm pretty sure they will.  But episodes like this one remind me that these drives through lovely country on the way to hospitals or doctors' offices will only become more frequent in the years ahead.

Already, what with one thing and another, staying healthy has started to feel like a part-time job.  Some day it will probably turn into a full-time job, and eventually just staying alive will become a way of life. 

The glorious Mozart went on, but as the road wound its way among the hills there was a burst of static and the music was lost.  We drove around a curve and Wolfgang A. returned, only to be swallowed up by static again after a few measures.  It's kind of like my life these days, I thought:  moments of heart-wrenching beauty followed by times of static so harsh that all the music fades.

As we came down into the valley the reception improved.  By the time we reached the hospital parking lot the third movement, the Allegro was playing, and powered by its energy I got out of the car and followed my spouse through the wide glass doors of the ER.

After a couple of hours the cardiologist swept aside the cubicle curtain and issued a "not a cardiac event" decree, and I resisted the urge to kiss the hem of his garment.  The baby in the next cubicle stopped crying.
The second stress test will happen in a few days.  Meanwhile, I'm finishing the day on the patio (first time in 2013!) with the peepers going full blast in the woods.  The bluebird's wife has joined him at the nest box, and a honey bee just buzzed my glass of wine.

Zen Buzz

The rain came Saturday afternoon, and it was welcome after this Mediterranean-dry spring.  While the sun was still out that morning, I walked around and discovered that the side yard has been taken over by my former nemesis:  ground ivy, with its pretty scalloped leaves, its tiny purple/blue/lavender blooms, its disgusting smell, and its stems that break compliantly when you pull on them, all the better to keep the roots spreading below ground.  But this time I did not wish I had a canister of Agent Orange at hand, for  at that moment the ground ivy was literally, totally, covered with bees.  Honey bees.

Do you know how extraordinary that is?  Honey bees are far more endangered than elephants, and more crucial to our survival on this planet than any animal you can see with the naked eye.  They are dying by the zillions of unknown things which are our fault.  In the seven springs I have spent on this hilltop, I have never seen more than a single bee at a time.  Yet on Saturday before the rain, there they were, hundreds of them, feasting on ground ivy.

The stories I hear from local beekeepers are almost uniformly tragic.  For example:  three years ago, one woman's single hive gave eighty pounds of honey.  In the last two years, having received the same care and attention, all her bees inexplicably died.  You can see why those hundreds of bees on the ground ivy seemed like a miracle.

I  found a bee-free spot and cautiously knelt down. There were a couple of red and black butterflies with white dots on the wings, and some bumblebees flying around.  But mostly there were bees, fat, honey-colored, hovering not more than an inch above the ground, diving head first into the tiny flowers, and singing softly.  "This is what 'a-buzz' means," I said to myself.

I thought I would kneel there and become immersed in the motion and the buzzing and the bee-ness--an outdoor Zen moment not marked by electronic chimes.  But whom was I kidding?  Before a minute passed, I was fretting.  Just around the corner of the chicken house, the "Liberty" apple tree was blooming its little heart out, but the only pollinators on it were a couple of house flies. What were those bees doing loitering in the side yard?  The rains were supposed to last a couple of days, and pollination doesn't happen in the rain. Time was of the essence. Could I somehow scoop up some of those bees and deposit them on the apple tree? A chime went off in my head, signaling the onset of craziness.  I got up from the ivy, and left the bees to their work.

My attitude to nature, at least the nature around my house, is anything but Zen.  For the last couple of weeks, I have pruned everything in sight, covered trees with sheets at night, uncovered them in the morning, planted seedlings prematurely in the vegetable garden and watered them one by one, clipped the spent blooms off the Pasque flowers, espaliered the apricot tree, planted boxwoods, apples and blueberries, transplanted rhubarb and astilbes, and generally interfered with everything.  Why can't I just leave Nature alone?

I come from a pruning, espaliering, pollarding people.  In my corner of Catalonia, every cubic foot of earth has been plowed, planted, manured, watered and harvested, turned over and over by the human hand for six thousand years.  It's no wonder I can't let go of that.

Now at last the rain has come, and I'm forced to keep away.  I can hear everything outdoors--the bees, the ivy, the seedlings, the apple trees--heaving a sigh of relief.

A Frog! A Frog!

A medium-sized frog has taken up residence in my little tub garden. She hangs on to the edge of the tub with her hands, like a swimmer holding on to the edge of the pool. It's difficult to describe her color—a sort of greeny-bronze, depending on how the sun is shining and what parts of her are above water. Her eyes are big and they stick out of her head. Nevertheless, she looks remarkably relaxed, and the two Shubunkins, Alpha and Omega, don't seem to mind her.

A frog in a pond, in the middle of summer, or a honeybee in the lavender, or a bat at sunset--—what is so amazing about that? When my field zoology professor, not so terribly long ago, said that we were the last generation to see animals in the wild, I thought he was crazy. The world in those days was overrun with bees that we swatted, frogs that kids hunted, bats that we hated. Who could imagine their demise?

And here I am now, that selfsame biology major, taking note of the fact that in this entire summer, in my not inconsiderable plantings of lavender and melissa and chamomile, not a single honeybee has buzzed. Taking note of the fact that I did one evening in June see a bat, but none since. And rejoicing that a frog, a seemingly healthy frog with no extra limbs or obvious deformities, has come to stay in my pond.

My field zoology prof was a prophet, or nearly so, after all. What can we do, in a reasonable, realistic, practical way, to prove him wrong?

Buying Honey

We were on our way back from Bennington the other day, when I saw the sign in front of a small house, “Honey For Sale.”

“Stop!” I yelled, and we pulled into the driveway. We could see some hives in the backyard. Next to the sign stood a neat wooden cubby, with a cash box and a note explaining that purchases were based on the honor system. There were five-pound jars of honey, and lovely ocher-colored beeswax candles, and some plastic boxes full of honeycomb.

We bought two big jars and a pair of candles, and drove off with me feeling unaccountably happy. I suppose one reason was the serendipitous nature of the find: we weren't looking for honey, or candles, that particular day, yet there they were, in all their sudden glory. And the other reason is that we were doing something for the bees. Local honey is not always easy to find, nor are beeswax candles. Yet the best way to help keep colony collapse at bay is to patronize local bee keepers.

Local honey isn't cheap. That day we paid $3.20/lb. At Sam's, honey from the other end of the earth costs $1.92/lb. I was brought up to be a frugal shopper, to calculate price per pound, to buy the supermarket house brand whenever possible. So observing the “buy local” injunction is taking considerable readjustment on my part. It's a good thing I grow my own vegetables, because I don't think I could bring myself to pay the prices at the farmer's market.

But bees are a different matter. I've been gardening outdoors for three months now, and I've seen wasps and bumblebees galore, but not a single honeybee. The bees need help. Plus, they are charming and mysterious and produce, literally, sweetness and light. If you take all that into account, local honey is a bargain.