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.

Those Flying Teddy Bears

“All that is round invites a caress,” writes Gaston Bachelard, and the chickadee is the embodiment of caressable roundness. With its big domed head, tiny bill, and widely-spaced eyes, he is the teddy bear of the avian world. Who can resist that baby-like charm? Grown men have been known to stand for hours, hoping that a chickadee will consent to pick a seed out of their outstretched hand. 

Everything about a chickadee--including his mating call: hey sweetie!--is sweet. I, along with every other pandemic prisoner depending for company and entertainment on the goings on at the feeder, am a sucker for that sweetness, so I feed them seeds and suet, and make sure that the bird bath stays unfrozen even in sub-zero weather. If only I could know every one of their tiny hearts’ desires, I would try to fulfill them, all in the hope that in return they would think of me as their friend. 

But last week I listened to a lecture by the ornithologist  David Hof , Ph.D. about the emotional lives of these birds, and got a shock. I’m sorry to say that chickadees are, by human standards, anything but sweet. In fact, you could say that a chickadee is a wolf in bird’s clothing, except that wolves are a lot nicer. 

I learned from Dr. Hof that chickadee society is as hierarchical as the most rigid caste system. Worse, all chickadee males outrank all females, with the lowliest male able to shoo even the alpha female away from the feeder, no matter that she is married to the alpha male. Like many birds, a male chickadee sings to keep other males out of his territory and away from his mate, but he does not apply the same standards to himself: if he covets his neighbor’s wife, he sneaks into his neighbor’s tree and has his way with her. 

I was not exactly shocked by this. I knew from watching endless nature documentaries that many animals, including the most endearing, form rigid hierarchies, fight over mates and territory, and commit adultery. A lustful nature is not necessarily incompatible with sweetness. But my remaining illusions were shattered when Dr. Hof related that, after spending hundreds of hours capturing, banding, and observing a tribe of chickadees, he had found one in the act of murdering a rival-- a brutal attack in which the beta bird of the flock went on pecking savagely at the alpha long after the latter had expired (the widow fluttered off, but I shudder to think of the marriage that she was later forced to endure). 

It’s not fair, I realize, to hold chickadees to higher standards than other birds. Among eagles, the biggest chick in the nest usually kills one or more of its brethren, and female eagles have been known to kill their mates. But eagles look like frowning, angry old men, with their flat heads, deep-set eyes, and enormous, downward curving beaks, so we are not surprised to hear of eagle cruelty. But the cruelty of chickadees feels like a betrayal, their fluffy adorableness a feint designed to take advantage of our good nature. 

Of course, the chickadees can’t help it, anymore than the male lion can help killing his rival’s cubs when he takes over a pride, or the stags can help giving each other concussions in their attempts to sire the next generation of fawns. Wolves are merciless towards strange wolves who wander into their territory. Chimpanzees bicker for dominance, and kill individuals from other groups. 

But chimpanzees, wolves, stags, lions, and chickadees are nothing more than furry or feathered envelopes engineered to protect the real culprits: the implacable genes that will stop at nothing to keep themselves going. As Darwin proved, the individual is expendable; it’s the species that counts. Which, when I think about it, is beyond depressing, but at least it makes it possible for me to look more charitably on the chickadee, and find it in my heart to forgive him.

 

Chickadees in Stick Season

Between leaf season and snow season comes what Vermonters call stick season, when the landscape is reduced to endless vistas of bare trunks and branches, all in shades of gray. The skies are mostly gray, too, as are the squirrels and the rabbits. The chipmunks in their little orange coats would add some color, but they disappeared weeks ago into their hygge holes. 

The birds that, like me, scorn to flee Vermont winters for places like Florida, also wear basic gray, enhanced with bits of white, black, and slate blue. The only spot of bright color outside my window is the red dot on the back of the head of the hairy woodpecker, and on his smaller cousin, the downy. 

I’ve been watching chickadees feed, and worrying about how they keep body and soul together. They swoop to the feeder, pick up a single sunflower seed, and dash off to a tree that, in chickadee terms, is the equivalent of a hundred miles away. There, clamping the seed onto the branch with their claws, they attack it with the force of a miniature jackhammer. When they are done with that seed, they shoot back to the feeder, get another seed, zoom to a distant perch, and repeat the process. 

How many calories are in a single sunflower seed--two? And how many calories does a chickadee use in those mad dashes to and from the feeder, plus all that hammering to break the shell? If I had to travel as far and work as hard for every morsel of food I would be a living skeleton—or more likely a dead one. 

(Nuthatches, I’m told, can’t grasp a seed with their feet, so instead they jam it into a crevice in the tree bark to hold it steady while they go at it with their beak.) 

I put a heater in the bird bath to keep it from freezing, and, after two years of ignoring it, the birds have fallen in love with it.  But again, as with feeding, drinking looks like more trouble than it’s worth. A chickadee lands on the edge of the bath, looks up for hawks and owls, looks down for snakes and cats, fluffs its feathers, peers right, then left. Takes a sip. Looks down, looks up, fluffs feathers, etc. Takes sip, then whooshes off. Again, how much water can that teensy beak hold? Three molecules? 

With the exception of certain squirrels, all the small critters outside my window seem to live with endless panic in their breasties. Like Robert Burns, who empathized so tenderly with the plight of a field mouse, I worry about what it must be like to live in a constant state of fear. Do the field mice and the titmice ever feel safe enough to relax? Or are they under constant stress, wondering when, if ever, it’s o.k. to venture out of their homes? 

Maybe the reason that I’m thinking so much about the stress levels of these tiny folk is that I, along with most of humanity, am also feeling endangered this autumn. Like the chickadees and their fellows, I think twice before leaving my place of safety, save my outings for food shopping, and don’t congregate in flocks. Peering nervously through my mask-fogged glasses as I push my cart down the aisle, I keep to myself, alert to invisible dangers. I do not linger at the checkout counter, but dash back to the house with my little bag of sustenance, there to eat in safety. 

I remember from Catholic school that reassuring phrase about God (Goddess/Ground of Being/The Universe) being somehow aware, and caring, about every sparrow (chickadee/nuthatch/titmouse) that falls. My hope in this bleak season is that She or He is mindful of those little birds, and of me and mine as well.

 

Sister Squirrel

As with most people who feed the birds, my relationship with the gray squirrel oscillates between grudging tolerance and rodenticidal rage. There is no lack of stories about the squirrel's diabolical cleverness in getting at food intended for the birds, so I won't bore you with mine. I'll simply say that when one of these plump uninvited guests goes anywhere near my bird feeders, I grit my teeth in aggravation.

Yet it wasn't always like this. When I first lived in an American suburb, I found the squirrels adorable, with their slanted eyes, monkey-like hands, and those cloud-colored tails that morphed into a question mark the minute they sat still. I thought they were charming and exotic, and I couldn't understand why so many people disliked them.

Now I do. I've been feeding birds and fighting squirrels for longer than we've been at war with Afghanistan, with mixed results. I've been wondering lately if it might not be time to change my attitude. Life's too short for hatred and strife.

The story of Saint Francis and the wolf of Gubbio comes to mind. There lived in the forests around Gubbio a fierce wolf who killed sheep, shepherds, and any citizen who ventured outside the city walls. One day Francis went in search of the wolf. He found him gnawing on a thigh bone and said, "Brother Wolf, why so much killing?"

"Winter is hard in the forest, Brother Francis," the wolf responded, "and I was hungry."

Francis made a deal with the wolf: if he promised never to harm livestock or people again, he would get the townspeople to feed him so that he would not go hungry. The wolf gave Francis his paw in agreement, and the people of Gubbio and their wolf lived in harmony ever after.

Like the wolf, my squirrels are hungry. Why should I begrudge them a few pounds of sunflower seeds, some measly suet cakes? Why not let them share the banquet that I so prodigally set out for the birds?

Maybe I'm afraid that, if I let the squirrels come to my feeders, more and more of them will arrive--huge invading caravans of squirrels that will drive the birds away and me into bankruptcy. Maybe I should build a wall around my feeders, a really high wall topped with barbed wire. Maybe, just to make sure, my husband and I should take turns standing guard with a pellet gun....

Or maybe I could go and stand beside the feeders and make a speech to the squirrels.

"Little gray Sisters," I would say, "welcome to my backyard. Here are my bird feeders. Here is my birdbath. You are welcome to all the water you can drink, and to the seeds that fall on the ground.

"I would prefer it if you didn't climb onto the feeders and dig out wasteful amounts of seed and suet, but I understand that some of you may not be able to resist the temptation. Whatever. The world is wide enough for your kind and mine and the titmice and chickadees, finches and woodpeckers.

"I will now go inside, take a deep breath, and try to see the beauty and innocence in your agility and determination. Pay no attention to the gray cat batting at you on the other side of the glass. He's never allowed outdoors."

My Final Farm

Never more than a dozen hens for eggs, and two does for milk. A vegetable patch big enough for everything except potatoes and corn. Some apple trees, a plum, a pear, and half a dozen blueberry bushes. Given what else I was dealing with, my forays into micro-farming were insane, but at least I kept one principle firmly in mind: small is beautiful.

My adult life is marked by three separate ventures into self-sufficiency, all of them harking back to the  farm that kept my teenage mother and her family alive and fed during the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. When she wasn't plunging into creeks in the middle of the night to escape from bombardments, my teenage mother drank goat's milk and ate home-grown rabbits and pigeons and chickens and eggs and grapes and almonds and olives and cabbages and kale. Meanwhile, in their elegant Barcelona apartment my father's family quietly starved for the three years the war lasted, filling their stomachs with water from the faucet every night so they could sleep.

I was born five years after the end of the bombs and the hunger, carrying in my DNA the conviction that when times got bad you could grow your own food and survive, or live an urban life and starve.

My husband and I bought our first house from an older Austrian woman who had probably had some of the same fear-and-hunger experiences as my parents, and had filled her acre and a half with an ambitious vegetable garden, 25 fruit trees, a berry patch, a chicken house. I, who had never grown so much as a tomato in my life, plunged into self-sufficiency like a nun into her vows. That was farm #1.

It was succeeded by #2, after I had to give up my career following a diagnosis of CFS. I was in survival mode and thought, well, everything is going to hell in a hand basket, the least I can do is try to grow some food.

Farm #3, my best-loved, was in Vermont, where we moved when my husband retired. Besides the usual goats and chickens and vegetable beds and apple trees  there were for-real woods where I could gather ramps in spring, and fields where the nearby farmer harvested for-real hay. I used to stand in the front field watching my goats gobble dandelions and think, am I really here? Is this really mine?

But farming even on a micro scale and CFS don't age well together, and one day I threw my hands up and declared that it was time to be realistic and responsible and move to a retirement community on the shores of Lake Champlain. Still in Vermont, still beautiful, but not, by any stretch of the imagination, a farm.

I now live in a small cottage with all mod cons and never have to worry about dinner, which is served in the community center up the hill. But this hasn't extinguished my farming drive. My tiny enclosed porch has become farm #4, my final farm.

In it, on sunny afternoons, I sit with my dog Bisou and the cat Telemann. In a Japanese-style tub beside me Yin and Yang, the goldfish, lead seemingly contented lives, protected from Telemann by an electrified scat-mat. Pots of houseplants, the successors to my vegetable gardens, surround me: geraniums prompted into bloom by the light reflected off the snow, an ancient jade plant almost too heavy for me to lift, a Christmas cactus that my cat loves to chew. And, because I haven't given up on my dreams of self-sufficiency, a Meyer lemon tree and a Calamondin orange that gives enough fruit to make marmalade in case of an emergency.

Just outside the window are my substitute chickens.  Nuthatches, titmice, chickadees, finches gold-, purple-, and house-, and woodpeckers large and small eat the seeds and suet and drink at the four-season bird bath. Beneath the feeders, obese squirrels squabble over spilled seeds, and at sacred moments clever Reynard, my red fox, trots past on his slender black-stockinged feet.

Peace At Last Among The Birds

The war is over.  The bluebirds and the phoebes, unlike another bipedal species, have managed to keep things just this side of lethal.

The happy result is that a few days ago the phoebes' baby fledged and disappeared with his parents, whose squeaky-hinge cries now sound a new note of urgency:  that big baby hopping around in the underbrush needs round-the-clock feeding, protection from frogs, crows, snakes and foxes, and lessons in self-reliance.  Summer is half over, and the parents have eggs to lay and another brood to raise.

In the meantime, the bluebird eggs have hatched, though I can't tell how many.  A nestful of newly-hatched baby birds just looks like a mass of heaving protoplasm, and that's what I saw two days ago when I stood on a chair and peered into the nest box.  Their parents are on the wing, catching bugs for hours on end. To deliver them, the father bird perches on the entrance to the box and reaches his head in, but the mother goes all the way inside, then turns around and flies out.

In past summers the phoebes have used the same nest to raise their second brood.  This time, I don't know whether they'll choose to brave the wrath of the father bluebird and return to the nest on the downspout.

But until then, all is calm, all is bright.

War And Peace Among The Birds

How would you like to sit in my sun room one of these afternoons, gazing out into the verdant woods while the hens amble through the tall grass and the frogs sun themselves on the lily pads?

Trust me, you would not.

You would soon feel jumpy, anxious and stressed out, and you would beg to be led away from the big windows, away from the blows and noise of the war between the phoebes and the bluebirds.

A month ago the phoebes, who in past summers would rear their broods in the front porch, instead made their mud nest on the elbow of the downspout by the window of the sun room, about five feet from the wooden nest box that's attached to the wall of the garage.  They flitted merrily from the apple tree to the nest and back to the tree, catching bugs on the wing, wagging their tails in that phoebe way and singing their rusty-hinge phoebe song.

And then the bluebirds arrived.

This is the same pair that colonized the nest box last summer.  How do I know it's the same pair?  Because the male has the unfortunate habit of throwing himself feet first against our window, over and over, day in and day out.  After a series of bangs he flies to the nest box and tweets for his mate, then attacks the window again, purely, I've concluded, because he likes the percussive effect.  (I've written several posts on this in the past, so I won't describe again our many failures to discourage him.)

Now he's back, having flown all the way from Rio or perhaps Asuncion, to his favorite nest and his favorite window.  But he wasn't expecting to find the phoebes, and they, needless to say, don't like his incessant banging on the window just inches away from their nest.

The result is war.

It's really hard to watch the little brown phoebes perching on the apple tree, wanting to get back to their eggs.  But the blue maniac is there, flinging himself against the glass, and they hesitate.  I don't blame them.  When the male phoebe makes it all the way to the roof of the garage, his enemy flies at him, sky-blue feathers glinting cruelly in the sun, and scares him away.

One hot afternoon, as the temperature reached the 90s, the battle raged unabated, the combatants panting, beaks open wide, as they flew at each other and tumbled in the humid air.  I worried that they might fall dead of heart attacks.   If merely watching the commotion stressed me out, what was it doing to the birds themselves?

Of late, though, the phoebe seems to be spending more time on her eggs, and the bluebird's window battering is perhaps a tad less violent.  Could it be that the two pairs have resolved their differences, and the little phoebes and the baby bluebirds will have a safe and peaceful childhood?

This is such a hopeful thought, on so many levels.  After all, if birds can do it, maybe there's a chance for us.

Semi-Silent Spring

Where are the birds? 

On our hill, this slow spring has been curiously bird-free.  I do hear the occasional chickadee and goldfinch.  The bluebird hung around singing for a few days but nobody joined him, so he left.  I've heard an owl or two in the woods, and the woodpeckers are keeping the percussion section going as usual.  But what about the dawn chorus?

I should be waking up to red-winged blackbirds trilling in the field, hawks whistling in the heavens, and the rusty-hinge song of the phoebes.  Instead, I wake up to blue sky, bright sun, and silence.  The phoebes are here and building a nest, but they aren't singing.  And where are the thrushes?  Every morning when I open the door of the shed to let the hens out I listen for that magic flute in the woods, but if the thrushes are there, they too are silent.

It's a weird year for frogs as well.  By now there should be at least a dozen sunning themselves on the patio by the pond, but so far I've only seen one.  He is big and hefty, and lets out an occasional dispirited croak.  I hope some friends join him soon.  Bisou misses the frog parties even more than I do.

While we wait and hope for the real thing to arrive, here is Amy Beach's "Hermit Thrush At Morn," which is almost as mysterious and enchanting as the live bird:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV4H41jDGaQ

Phoebe Mishap

Every summer for the last three years, the phoebes have raised two batches of babies in their nest inside the eaves of our front porch.  They make a mess on the porch floor, but that is a small price to pay for their close familiarity and conscientious bug eating.  Between the phoebes and the frogs, I have yet to see a single mosquito around the house this summer.

But yesterday afternoon I saw that the nest had fallen to the floor.  It was actually two nests, one built on top of the other, and there was a dead nestling trapped beneath them.  Right up against the wall of the house was its sibling, alive and cheeping weakly.  It was smaller than a soup spoon, all beak and new feathers.  I turned and walked away from the disaster scene.

It was the best I could do.  Even if I'd known what kind of bugs it liked, and in what quantities, there's no way I could have caught them.  It probably needed water, too, but how much, and how to give it without drowning it?  My only hope was that the parents were aware of their surviving child, and would take care of it.  I left the nest debris and the dead baby right where they had fallen, so as not to alarm the parents.  It occurred to me that the flies gathering on the little cadaver might provide some easy meals for the parents to catch.

A couple of hours later I checked again and the nestling was still alive, and cheeping louder.  I wondered how it would survive the night, away from its sibling's warmth.  I wondered whether the critters that hunt in the dark would find it, and was glad that at least we had nothing to fear from the porcupine. 

Today, he or she is still there, glued to the same spot, cheeping.  There is some poop right near him, which I'm interpreting as a sign that he's being fed.  The last time I checked he was quiet, and I had to get really close to see the tiny vibrations of his feathers.  I guess even baby birds have to take breaks from eating.

The parent phoebes are flying back and forth from the bird feeder which they use as a perch (they don't eat seeds) to the plum tree in front of the porch.  I'm sure they know their child is there.  Now I'm worried about the temperatures in the mid-90s that are forecast for this afternoon--but the porch faces north, so he will at least be sheltered from the sun.  I've put a small dish of water nearby.  It's the best I can do.

Rites Of Spring

Two chicken-sized birds appeared on a tree behind the house this morning and sent the dogs into a frenzy of barking. They were clinging upright to the trunk of a nondescript tree (all trees are nondescript these days, without their leaves), going round and round by making little sideways hops, but always keeping the trunk between them.

They had long beaks and black-and-white plumage, and bright red caps shaped like those silly pointed bikers' helmets. They kept on opposite sides of the trunk, so it was hard to compare them, but one did perhaps have a tad more white on the wing than the other. So, according to the bird book, that one--the one with a bit more white--was a female.

In which case, the coyly peeking and chasing around the tree trunk was a prelude to mating. Or, if they were two males, they were establishing territory, as a prelude to ditto. It's also possible that they were two females, but if so, the books are silent on the reasons for their behavior.

In any case, in between shushing the crazed dogs and adjusting my dusty binoculars, I did establish that the two birds were Pileated Woodpeckers, the largest woodpecker species in North America if you don't count the mythical Ivory Billed W.

I looked up that weird word, "pileated." It comes from "pileus," a felt cap worn by Roman soldiers. But wait. Didn't Roman soldiers wear plumed helmets, and those little leather skirts? Perhaps that was their summer outfit, and they reserved the felt caps for the colder seasons. If so, what was the rest of their plumage like?

The Incredible Eleven-Foot-Tall Sunflower

Several times in my gardening career I bought packets of sunflower seeds and planted them carefully in fertile, loose, well-watered soil.  None of those seeds ever came to anything.  On the other hand, I have had amazing luck with sunflowers planted by the birds.

Whether they drop the seeds by accident or by design, before or after passing them through their tiny digestive tracts, is a mystery to me.  All I know is that every summer a forest of sunflowers springs up around the bird feeder.  This year's crop was exceptional, but it is almost over by now.  I have pulled up the dead stalks and the empty flowers and thrown them away, with one exception:  the eleven-foot-tall sunflower.

This amazing specimen, planted by the birds in the narrow flower bed between the patio and the back porch, suffered heavy damage in a summer windstorm, which bent its stem about a foot from the ground.  I assumed that it would die then, or at least ripen and wither on schedule with its peers.  But even now, when all the other sunflowers are resting in peace on the compost heap, this one is still going strong.

                                                                                                                         
Today, before clearing out the flower bed of its summer detritus, I intended to dispose of  the bent-over marvel.  But as I put the pruning shears against the inch-thick stem, something held me back.  Not only did the plant have a number of ripening brown flower heads, but no fewer than seventeen Van Gogh-bright blooms. It would have been a crime against Nature to rip it out.

In its bent-over condition, however, it was impeding my access to the flower bed.  I called my husband, and he dragged a ladder out of the garage, and I handed him a length of green baling twine and pointed upwards, and he fastened the sunflower to the porch's rain gutter.

Now it stands in solitary splendor at the end of the denuded flower bed, calling to the chickadees who planted it to come and feast on its ripening seeds.

I never knew that chickadees were farmers.

What's With This Weather?

Tomorrow will be the third day in a row of temperatures in the high 80s/low 90s. The plant life around here is revved up to max: the irises have shot up over night, the lupin blossoms are a foot long, the buttercups in the field have made an early appearance, the poppies are moribund, and the spinach, alas, is bolting. When I went out to give the hens some extra water this evening, they were panting. If this continues, next thing you know we'll be putting camellias in our hair and talkin' Southern.

The humidity, praise be, has not yet risen along with the temperatures, and this keeps me just alive enough to look around and notice stuff. Which mostly has to do with bird life, these days. The teeny humming birds have been about, as have their rivals, the bumblebees. A wren is trying his/her darndest to make a home in the little house attached to our back wall. But he/she keeps trying to force stiff sticks crosswise into the hole. Are all wrens this way, or is mine mentally challenged?

The phoebe nest in the front porch is brimming over with babies. The parents reused last year's, for which I'm grateful, since phoebes building a new nest make a mess that even the sloppiest construction crew would be ashamed of. The phoeblets in their nest have a funny way of all facing in the same direction, looking vaguely military. I worry about the parents, hunting food from dawn to dusk in this heat.

For days I'd been concerned about the robin nesting in the very center of the lilac bush against the back of the house. It's not been a good season for lilacs--a late hard frost did in most of the blooms--so it's been time to do the annual pruning. But I wasn't going to touch the robin bush until those amazing blue eggs had hatched, and the babies had fledged. Every time I went to the vegetable garden, which is close to the lilac, the robin would fly out, with a big, grouse-like whirr, all the way into the woods. I hoped she would learn that we were harmless, for her children's sake, before the eggs hatched.

This morning, when I watered the tomato plants, the lilac bush was silent. I peered in, and the nest was gone. Only a couple of yellow strands of grass remained around the trunk where it had sat. The dogs sniffed and sniffed the ground below it. Something must have come in the night--possum, raccoon, fox, who knows what? I only hope the mother bird woke up and got away in time. I know from my hens how vulnerable sleeping birds are.

The heat came on so suddenly, that Wolfie shed all his coat at once. When I brushed him today in the shade of the big white ash, I could have disguised a good-sized Lab with his brushings. Even Bisou let go of a couple of handfuls of her red coat. I brushed Lexi, too, though her arthritic body makes her leery of the brush.

I'm going to go refill the water tub/bird bath as soon as I finish this, so even the small birds can reach the water without falling in. We'll try to hold on to the idea of spring through tomorrow's heat, and hope for a return of primavera before the weekend.

Wildlife P.S.: as I was about to hit "publish post" Wolfie started barking, whining and generally going crazy in the direction of the woods. I opened the screen door and he rushed out, and a minute later came prancing out from under the trees, tail high, ears back, and the first painted turtle of the season in his mouth. Wolfie is addicted to painted turtles--has been since his first spring. And painted turtles are addicted to our backyard. They come out of the woods, where there is a nice safe swamp for them, and cross our backyard and take off down the field to who knows where. Wolfie catches them, and if I don't get there fast enough, crunches them in his jaws the way you would crunch into an apple. And eats the contents. What I'm wondering is, how did he know, just now, that that turtle was in the woods?

The Phoebes Win

A couple of years ago, a pair of Phoebes built a nest in our back porch. At the time, this was just a roofed passage between the house and the garage, so we had no worries about mud on the flagstones, and plenty of opportunity to watch the proceedings.

It all started with much to-ing and fro-ing and dropping of bits of mud. Overnight a cup-like structure appeared against the wall, and then there was silence. By standing on our tiptoes we could see a pair of pin-prick eyes looking out: somebody was sitting on eggs.

Our comings and goings didn't seem to disturb the Phoebes as summer went on. Eventually, jack-in-the-box-like maws popped up out of the nest whenever we went by. And the parents were always near, perching on the clothesline, wagging their tails and squeaking “phoe-be, phoe-be!”

The babies grew bigger and soon there were five fully feathered, bright-eyed Phoeblets sticking out of the nest. And then they were gone.

The next year, they came back. By then we had enclosed the back porch, so they tried to nest in the front porch. They made such a mess of mud and droppings, however, that we strung up a length of fishing line just inside the eave to discourage them, and it worked. I felt a little mean, but I enjoyed the clean porch.

This spring, they returned. Who knew where they had been, and what trouble they had gone to to find us? Since they weren't trying to nest directly in the way of the front door, we decided to let them stay.

They built their usual neat nest, and then seemed to disappear. I thought that maybe our attempt to inhibit them last year had succeeded again. But in the last couple of days I've seen a bird on the nest. Something is clearly going on, and I am rejoicing.

It's not just the bird on the nest that encourages me. At all times of day, in the trees and bushes in front of the porch I can spot a Phoebe, husband or wife, with its slightly disheveled looks and wagging tail, waiting for me to get out of the way so it can get on with its parental responsibilities.

There are white droppings on the porch slate floor. Whenever we go in or out, a pair of shiny eyes marks our every move. I love it that the little family likes us so much, and that we have shelter, and plenty of bugs, for it to prosper on.