The Glimmering Miles of It

I'm like those birds, keas in New Zealand, who collect the shiny objects: I go out in the world, certain things glimmer at me, they resonate with something inside me it could be the waiting room of a veterinary clinic, an overheard moment of conversation, the way the light is coming through the trees. Whatever it is, it hits that spot in me that says, "Writing-worthy."                                                            
                                                                                                                                  -Pam Houston

It seems 2014 was a year of taking things apart. It is my hope that 2015 will be a year of putting them back together, in more meaningful ways. Being here again, finally, after a long absence, as I begin teaching the nature writing class again, is a starting place. At the Summer Community of Writers this past year, we participated in a writing exercise with Pam that asked us to find and reflect on a few of those glimmers. It occurs to me that last year - one filled with too-muchness - was overfull with them, those moments of utter importance, whether positive or negative. And there's too much to say in any thoughtfully organized way.

On companion animals: Shortly after my last entry, we lost Pepper, a loss that Z. took very hard and which we all still struggle with; we lost one of the cats this past summer, too, and the last cat is ailing.

On avian animals: That rufous hummingbird continued to try to overwinter, even into early January when the temperatures fell to almost zero and I was changing out the feeder nectar every 10 minutes because it kept freezing. My last sighting of him was January 7th, 2014.We bought a house in March and I convinced a neighbor at the old house to keep a feeder out this fall, in case he returned, but she never saw him. I am still hoping against hope he made it, did not freeze to death (as is common among hummingbirds). Our new house has a very puzzling lack of bird life. Even with feeders out, we routinely have very few visitors. Only saw a couple of ruby throats all summer. At our previous house, the birds could empty the feeder within a day. Here, I've filled it once in months and it's still nearly full. I am utterly disappointed. Especially because last semester I completed the Virginia Master Naturalist program and was planning to participate in Cornell's Project Feederwatch in order to gain some of my required volunteer hours for full certification. Perhaps a change of food will help. There is a pileated woodpecker who lives nearby, which is always an exciting sighting. I could, though, do without the resident catbirds, which mewl incessantly and annoyingly, just like a certain cat used to do.

On place: Despite the lack of bird activity and that I no longer have a mountain view out my window, it has been lovely to have a place that is ours again. We are within walking or running distance to both Wildwood Park and Bisset Park, places where we find ourselves often. Here I will finally make good on my promise to the girls that we will have a garden this summer. Gardening is unfamiliar territory and is a daunting prospect, given my inability to keep green things alive. It should be an interesting adventure. The landscape of this house is desperate and needs attention, another project once winter flees.

On travel: When I was younger, I used to travel a great deal, but those days have long been eclipsed by life. I have been teaching at Chatham since 2005, and last spring, had the first chance to be an instructor for one of our field seminar abroad courses. The other instructor and I took a group of 24 students to Belize and Guatemala for two weeks. I last traveled internationally twenty years ago and to say the experience was astonishing would be an understatement. This was full immersion in the natural world, in a place teeming with life and activity. The experience was helped by having a wonderful guide (he says, "loving nature is my language"), who knew I was most interested in the wildlife. And see wildlife we did - my spotted-bird list was impressive, and we saw monkeys in the wild, among so many other things. I hope to one day return. 

On teaching and writing: It was a conflicted decision to relinquish my hard-won full-time teaching job, but that life was wholly unsustainable. I have pangs of regret every day, but know that I made the right decision. Now I must be patient as I search for a more-right path. I did find, after years of searching, the right place for one of my essays, "Giant Forest." Now the task remains to return to and complete the collection. That project has been on hold for far too long, another of the many reasons I made such difficult decisions last year. 

All the glimmers, indeed. Many more to come.  

Mute Dancer

I am sure that my friends have long tired of my obsession with this one very small creature, but I can't get over the rarity: As of today, our rufous visitor remains with us. I hadn't seen him in more than a week, and assumed, as I have erroneously assumed a number of times over these last few months, that he had migrated. So certain I was that I didn't bother to refill the feeder or ask the neighbors to bring it in at night while we were away for Thanksgiving. And yet there he was on the feeder this morning. So he arrived about 3 weeks earlier than last year, and he's already stayed 2 weeks past his departure time of last year - surprising to us all. I wonder what exactly is going on in his mind - or body - that keeps him here, whether there's a chance he may decide to overwinter. I know they are intelligent and able to survive almost unthinkable conditions; their symbolism in native cultures as "resurrection birds" is well earned. But it just seems that he must, must move on soon. How can he not?

In the meantime, I share a lovely article on watching hummingbirds by Diane Ackerman and another of Stan's wonderful photos. And wait.

A Space Filled with Moving

Just five days earlier, I had written here:

I am not-so-secretly hoping they will make another stop here, if they found their way south after leaving (though based on the indignity of the banding, I suspect the female may do anything possible to forget this place exists). It's tempting to think that our home may have imprinted on their flyway path, that we have developed something like a relationship.

And last Tuesday, 9/17, I glanced out the window to discover that my hopes were rewarded: A rufous hummingbird at the feeder! This one was an adult male, even more obviously a rufous than the two juveniles from last year, which were difficult to distinguish from the ruby throats. I immediately contacted Bruce from USGS, who helped trap and band last year's rufous migrants and notified all the local community birders. We theorized that it must be last year's male, now grown, because given their rarity in this area, it seemed too coincidental that we could have an entirely new migrant visitor. This is several weeks earlier than last year, and that adult males migrate earlier than juveniles also added to our theory this was the same bird. Bruce asked me to see if I could get a close-enough look to determine whether the bird was banded. Hmm. This species is much more skittish - hard to blame him, since he's been captured here! - than the ruby-throats, rarely perches, and I have poor eyesight. How on earth was I going to be able to see if his teeny tiny ankle has a teeny tiny bracelet?

In the week since, Stan was able to come out with his Very Fancy Camera and get a few photographs, to get some answers. Some cropping and enlarging and some keen eyes (not mine) were able to make out enough numbers to verify that yes, this is the male who visited us last October. Interestingly, after he left here, he was apparently captured and banded again, as he is sporting bands on both ankles. It's interesting to compare these to the similar images from a year ago; he is so much more vivid and colorful as an adult.

Bands visible - Photo credit: Stan Bentley

Rare moment of rest - Photo credit: Stan Bentley

We're all very curious to learn where he has been in the last year, where else he was trapped. Bruce plans to make the drive down from Maryland soon to see if we can trap him again and solve that mystery.

Noiseless & Patient

I'm not sure who noticed them first, but they are hard to miss. My first sighting was while walking out the door a few mornings ago. A thread had been attached to the door frame in the middle of the night and I tore it free with my exit. This particular Neoscona crucifera, a Hentz orb weaver, was nearly as startled as I was, as she - because we learned that it's only the females who spin webs - skittered up the side of the house. Their webs are impressive and stunning.

We've been in this house for three years but have never seen this particular species, but right now, we've got about half a dozen in various crevices outside. Z. has named the one outside her bedroom window "Orba," while the two other most visible ones are "Peg" and "Meg." She told me that some spiders spin different types of silk, some sticky and some not, so they can move freely across their webs. I guess I had never really considered why it is that spiders don't get stuck in their own webs. The orb weaver typically doesn't spend much time in one place, though, and several days later, most have moved on to new locations. Such excitement this morning when I woke Z. up  with the news that Orba had returned to her location sometime in the night. We're all hoping that there will be eggs and wee spiders (perhaps a thousand or more), before the frosts come.

 When I was in Pittsburgh last summer, one had spun an intricate, massive web along the entire length of my hosts' front porch. It was impossible not to stop and examine it, and I came and went every day, impossible not to admire how much effort and detail go into such a complicated - at least, complicated in my mind - endeavor.

Retroactive Remembering

I'm tempted to cheat on this blog a bit here, because I really ought to date my entry for May - when, according to the scribbled words in my notebook, this actually occurred - but really, it's September and I'm only now getting to this. It was a summer of too-muchness, and things that mattered fell too far to the sides of that unusually busy season, too busy to be fully present and to enjoy my most favorite of seasons. Leaves are changing and soon it will be a very distant thought. Next summer, though, next summer.

My purpose is that I wanted to record this year's arrivals for the archive:

Male ruby-throat first sightings: 4/18/13
Female ruby-throat first sightings: 5/15/13 (much delayed from last year)

My daughter's second-grade teacher-substitute for the next few weeks is a woman who was present for our rufous-hummingbird adventure, and with Z's homework, she attached a sticky-note asking if we'd seen them this year. We're still several weeks from the departure of the ruby-throats and the time when I first noticed the migrants last year. I am not-so-secretly hoping they will make another stop here, if they found their way south after leaving (though based on the indignity of the banding, I suspect the female may do anything possible to forget this place exists). It's tempting to think that our home may have imprinted on their flyway path, that we have developed something like a relationship.

Absolute All

“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring--it was peace.” 

—Milan Kundera
 

 

Pepper, Fall 2002 at the Pittsburgh Collie Frolic

What a difference eleven years makes for our favorite "foster failure." In the 'before' photo (2002), Pepper is about a year and a half old and suffering terribly from demodex mange. It took several years before she fully recovered, and many more after that until she grew in a typical collie coat (I sometimes think she'd rather have stayed hairless, since she hates grooming so much now). She was never meant to stay with us permanently, but she'd been in rescue for a long time already and was likely to stay there. She needed us, and we'd eventually discover we needed her.

 

In the video, Pepper is going on thirteen, is arthritic and is now mostly deaf, but she still knows how to have a good time with her golden retriever BFF Petie, even when he knocks her down in his excitement.

 

Three out of four of our pets are now seniors. I want them - Pepper especially - to be with us forever.

Many thanks to the amazing folks who volunteer their time with the Northeast Ohio Collie Rescue for bringing Pepper into our lives.

Presently the Floods Break Way

The New River can be seen in the background

Bisset Park is reopened (though many of us had been using it anyway) after the epic January flooding, and on Sunday we took Petie & Pepper to the dog park there for the first time since. While the city has cleared away all the debris, it's stunning to see how much the landscape has been altered; the paved and grass-covered riverway park resembles a sandy coastal beach. It's still unclear how much blame exists beyond that of the weather, but one thing is clear: it could be a very long time before the landscape will be the same, if ever.

For now, though, The Girls are enjoying playing in the sand.




Too-Muchness

What happens when you give two children cameras on a mid-winter afternoon hike through Wildwood Park? This happens: 268 new photos (a great many of which are of the ground and/or a certain child's sparkly light-up sneakers) and two dead camera batteries. It's amazing to me that, in a seemingly empty, dormant landscape, children are able to find amazement and images worth preserving. When I asked V. why she was taking so many photos, she said, "I just can't stop Mom! Nature is too beautiful!"

 

The Smallest of the Tiny

Mid-October, I glanced out the kitchen window at the flurry of morning bird activity at our two feeders. At this time of year, our visitors are the usual and unsurprising suspects: Carolina chickadees, tufted titmice, cardinals, wrens and sparrows (LBJs, "little brown jobs," birders call them). But then, something else I thought I saw: the characteristic hovering of a hummingbird in the smoke tree. But no, that couldn't be possible, not this late in the season. Even stranger was that this bird was brown, not the familiar green. Our large ruby-throat population had been gone for many weeks by then, the last of the nectar discarded and all the feeders washed and stored in the garage, awaiting their always-anticipated return in April. Perhaps, I thought, I'm just imagining things - wishful thinking. Or, probably just another LBJ.

Female rufous - Photo Stan Bentley

Flashforward, two weeks later: There, examining the red-topped seed feeder I saw it again: Very definitely a hummingbird, and very definitely not a ruby-throated humingbird. I put sugar water on the stove to boil and went to the garage and retrieved one of the feeders. Over the next few days, the bird became a constant in the yard, and with my field guide and Google, I became fairly sure this was a rufous hummingbird. Really interesting because this species' habitat - and its migration route - is the western US, nowhere near Virginia. I thought of what Terry Tempest Williams says in her memoir, Refuge:


“...there are those birds listed as ‘accidental,’ one species, or at best a few, that have wandered far from their normal range.  They are flukes in a flock of predictable migrants.  They are loners in an unfamiliar territory.” 

Accidental indeed. In search of a more precise identification - and because I knew we had something both unusual and special in our midst - I turned to experts, first to some of the local university biologists and then to a local birder, Clyde, who had led a bird-watching excursion (yes, that's me in the video) I took a few years ago. Clyde helped distribute photos of the bird among the local birding community - most agreed, rufous - and then to Bruce Peterjohn of the USGS. Bruce maintains the national bird banding database and outside of work, spends time - all his own - traveling around the region to band these types of reported "accidentals." I got an email late on Thursday, 11/15 from Bruce, asking if he could come out on Saturday morning to try to capture and band the bird. Could I possibly say no to such an opportunity?

Male rufous - Photo Stan Bentley

So bright and early on that cold Saturday morning, a small group of us partook in that adventure, which the wonderful blog Ridge and Valley has chronicled so thoughtfully here. Our experience also made the Roanoke paper a few weeks later. We learned that morning that my identification was correct, but we actually had two different rufous hummingbirds visiting, a juvenile male and a juvenile female. To be able to see this species here in Virginia is rare enough, but to have had two birds at the same time? A once in a lifetime experience, and one I'm thrilled to have been able to share with so many other wonderful folks, and my family; my older daughter braved the cold to help out with the trapping and banding.

Male rufous - Photo Stan Bentley

Me, holding the male rufous just before release - Photo Stan Bentley

Sadly, the female appears to have fled as soon as the banding was completed - who can blame her, really? The male continued to visit for another five days or so before leaving. I had secretly been hoping they'd try to over-winter here before returning to their western homelands for the breeding season. Perhaps they will imprint on this place as a food source along their flyway, will sometime again visit us on one of their journeys. Safe travels to you, the smallest of the tiny.

Holdfast

A blog post about blogging, rather than nature:

Now that I have finally put the spring semester to rest, I have moved on to Major Summer Project #1: Repurposing my blog over at Wordpress. I have finally navigated the murky waters between the .com and the .org versions (I should go with .org, but I know myself and I am lazy about Important Things like backing up, so .com makes more sense), and spent most of the day trying to mentally and technologically prepare myself for the move. 

And yet. Much as I know I should do this, must do this, I remain conflicted. And the reason is completely superficial: Wordpress blogs are not aesthetically appealing. In the least. And that goes for even the *premium* templates (i.e. the ones that aren't free). Despite my, um, issues with Blogger over the past year, I have grown pretty attached to this particular place, both its content and its appearance.

The lack of visual appeal, however, is not enough to prevent the inevitable. I have - after recent lessons learned - saved saved saved - and will update with the new home when the space filled with moving is full. However unattractive it may be.

A Flash, Ahead of Creation

Perhaps they are of a time, as DH Lawrence says:

Before anything had a soul,

While life was a heave of matter, half inanimate,

This little bit chipped off in brilliance

And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems

But this year, they were late, by three days (from last year's entry). And I was impatient. I had filled and put out both hummingbird feeders almost two weeks ago, but it wasn't until today that The Girls and I saw the very first one. It appears that we may only have one or two right now - perhaps they were not in a hurry to move north, because of the warmer winter? - but soon the community will be thriving. I have learned that I can estimate how many hummingbirds we actually have: I count the number seen on the feeders at any one time and multiply by 6. That would suggest that in the height of summer, we likely have a community of more than 50 living in our nearby woods. And I'd say that's quite a lot.

The Nature of Technology

Before I began teaching my annual nature writing class online in Chatham's low-residency MFA program, I taught on-campus incarnations of the same course. One of the course requirements, then and now, was that students keep a nature journal, which has a long tradition in the nature writing genre. Students are asked to choose a single place and to visit it roughly weekly all semester, staying for at least twenty minutes each time, and then writing about their observations and ideas gathered while there; students also craft entries in response to directed prompts to accompany their place-focused entries. This is my favorite assignment of each semester, as I eagerly look forward to reading students' notes and ideas as they develop a relationship - sometimes positive, sometimes negative - to their individually chosen places.

With the transition to strictly online teaching of this course, I have necessarily had to adjust this project. In on-campus classes, students were asked to - gasp! - handwrite their entries in a paper journal. And the results were often astonishing. Now students keep nature blogs, because it would be very difficult to try to weekly read and evaluate the handwritten journals of students who are located all over the country (and sometimes abroad, such as this semester).

A former student friend recently scanned and posted to Facebook some of her journal pages - scattered throughout this entry - from that summer course five years ago.

And seeing these images again reminds me that, as much as I still enjoy this assignment even in blog form, as much as I feel the nature blogs are often just as inspired and as creative as the handwritten nature journals were, I miss that medium. A lot. J. gave me permission to share those images and some of her thoughts on keeping her nature journal that summer:

"Most of [these pages are] just musings on time spent in a community garden down the street from my house when I lived in Pittsburgh. I was taking a nature writing course, and one of the assignments was to choose one place, visit it often, and write while there. It was an amazing assignment. The act of sitting in a place for longer than I normally would and writing about it was a wonderful way to open my eyes to the many layers of beauty the garden had. Drawing became an extension of that, a way to still my mind and focus my attention on what I was surrounded by. The longer I was there, the more I wrote and drew, the more I could see. I couldn't believe how beautiful eggplants were in their various stages! One evening, just after sunset, I sat in front of a plant that had white bell-shaped flowers and started to draw it. The blossoms were closed when I began the sketch, but each time I looked up to capture another detail the blossoms were open wider. Whoa! So I stopped drawing and literally sat there watching these flowers open up before my eyes. No time lapse photography needed!"

Amazing stuff, really amazing!

A Return, Very Grudgingly

I've been missing for a long while, but not entirely of my own too-busy doing. Sometime between my last post here in July and this past December when I logged in again to post in preparation for the new semester's nature writing grad students, the Blogger automated software mistakenly detected this innocuous nature blog as *spam.* And, with no notification to me, via email or otherwise, that program went ahead and deleted the whole thing (I'm still wracking my mind to try to figure out what content in here would have suggested something nefarious or inappropriate). Apparently Blogger is so big now that it is impossible to speak to an actual human and the only way of dealing with issues is to post to their help forums and hope that someone who replies is actually someone in authority who can fix the situation. It took me over a month, during which I admittedly had to get pushy and cranky on their "help" forums, but that persistence paid off and the blog was finally restored.

I am now, though, very conflicted about its continuance, and about posting new content. I also have used this platform with the nature writing students, required dozens of them to have used it over the last several years. This was an awful experience, and I also am admittedly still irate (downgraded from enraged) about it. And I hate the idea of continuing with this platform after such an experience, either for myself or with my students. I decided that I wanted it restored for the sole intention of backing up all the content and exporting it all straight over to Wordpress, and then I would delete this one myself for good. I realize now that it will be many months before I have the time to do that, create an entirely new blog and essentially start over. I can't imagine that I won't want to post during that interim period, so I have now decided that I will just try to set aside my annoyance, post until then, and proceed with the I'm So Over Blogger Plan. 

So, know that this home here is simply for now. Because I have perfected the art of holding grudges. 

In the meantime, in local news, am very excited that the annual Radford Roosting Festival (the renamed  Vulture Festival) is upcoming and takes place during the Kindergartener's (the renamed Preschooler) birthday weekend festivities!

A Battle Over Wild Things

A few weeks ago, after our conversation, Next Door Neighbor B. took it upon herself to ask the landscapers to remove - physically and with the help of what I assume are noxious chemicals - the chocolate vine that climbed our trellis and balcony out back. I guess she got it into her head that all the snakes in the New River Valley were climbing it and using our porches as a vacation spot. Or something. I'll admit that it was a wee bit out of control, but it also produces the most delicious-smelling spring blooms I've ever known. And the fact that she did this without asking, informing, or notifying anyone, irks me. Greatly.

Hmm, guess which house is ours?

It turns out that snakes are not the only sign of nature that B. has issues with. She came over to speak with J. earlier, about "doing something" about our front yard, which, in her estimation, is far too wild. She kept repeating how it really has to be to be "cleaned up" right away, so that it looks "neat and tidy," and went so far as to claim that its current state violates the HOA rules. Landlord P. clearly disliked the orderly, condo-cookie-cutter lawn of this complex, clearly has a love of a diversity of plants and trees. And while I'll also admit that some of the trees, in particular, could use some trimming back, I find B's complaints equally irksome and quite puzzling. If not for this yard, we would not have the hummingbirds and house finches and cardinals, the squirrels and the new-resident chipmunk, the caterpillars and praying mantises, would not be able to eagerly await the blooming of another, mystery flower. Is there something inherent dangerous here, in this version of nature - besides the bees and wasps and annoying June bugs - that I'm missing? I'm having trouble understanding why instead we must accept one that is tamed and controlled and trimmed and sprayed, sometimes to death.

Our offensive yard, up close

While we are merely renters, this is one battle I will gladly fight.

Gratefully, Is What Is Best

We arrived home last night, just at dusk, tired, emotional, anxious after a journey that took hours longer than it should have - the usual snaking snarl of D.C. Beltway traffic - stopped at a light along Tyler Avenue, when J. noticed a firefly land on the windshield. We've been eagerly anticipating their seasonal arrival, impatiently, The Girls peering into each evening, hoping and waiting. And so far, we have been left still waiting. Like the hummingbirds, they have been much, much later than in previous years, so much so that I've gotten worried. Last night it was too late for Z & V, so I promised them we'd sit outside tonight. What I didn't tell them was that I looked, while bringing in carloads of stuff, stood outside the house peering into the evening. And I saw a single blink. I did some research today, which revealed that all 2000 species worldwide are declining; some biologists have even whispered the word: endangered.

For good measure, and because I know a kindergartener who will love it, I have signed us up to monitor fireflies in our neighborhood, with the Boston Museum of Science's annual Firefly Watch. Maybe the winter was not quite right and they really are just delayed this year. At least, I hope so. I cannot imagine a world, a childhood, without the magic of fireflies.

Deep, Strange-Scented Shade of the Great Dark

I was outside just now, giving the last of the breadloaf to the birds (oh, who do I kid? to the squirrels, really), when my next-door neighbor B. approached me to give me a most-serious warning: she'd seen "several" snakes in her yard and she wanted us to know to look out for them. Upon inquiry, I learned that they were native black rat snakes. The largest in Virginia, a bit imposing certainly, but still harmless. B. proceeded to tell me of how she kills them when she finds them.

I was reminded of a passage from Lisa Courturier's essay, "The Hopes of Snakes":

That the unease over the snake was disproportionate to the actual danger of the creature was not relevant. The concern seemed to be: Who does this snake think it is, venturing out of the trees to travel in the open grasses where stood people just now realizing the snake by their feet was not a child’s toy but an actual live serpent?...our awareness and direct experience of serpents is so limited that what we believe about them functions as a sort of anti-knowledge. In the absence of contact, the snake’s life forms in the human mind as a nightmare of slithering, of fangs, of constriction, of venom, of being swallowed slowly, and in full.

For B., for many people, clearly the very idea of a snake has become much more frightening than the snake itself. So much so that it becomes impossible to consider anything other than that idea, anything that might be closer to truth. Last fall, I opened the attached shed out back to discover a fairly large black rat snake coiled up inside. I guessed that it was seeking shelter from the torrential rains we'd had. I was startled to see it, surprised - especially considering the shed is off the second-floor balcony - but not scared really. And the next day when the rains had cleared, when I took Z. out to see it, it was gone. Last week, we found a tiny dead snake in the road and we all looked at it for a long time.

The snake in the road

The snake in the road, close-up

I explained to B. this morning that as long as I see them in places they're meant to be - our yards, for example, or even in the shed - I generally just leave them. She gave me a very puzzled look. I realize now on reflection that implicit in her warning was reproach: our yard is the only one in the complex without a small lawn, without grass, the only one that the weekly landscapers know to just leave alone. It is, to her and probably to all the other neighbors, disorderly, unkempt, untamed, with various tall plants and groundcovers and trees. B. claims that she has seen snakes climbing the unruly chocolate vine crawling up the trellis out back too (which would explain the snake in the shed).

Yes, ours is a too-wild place that invites wild snakes.

In Which Patience is Rewarded

Perhaps it is our higher elevation. Perhaps it is just that they were languidly enjoying the warmer climates and didn't want to leave. Perhaps the journey just took longer than usual. But although they were a full month behind others in the area, this afternoon I looked out at the feeder I've been diligently refilling in vain for weeks, and there they were: no fewer than three male ruby-throated hummingbirds. In Pittsburgh, when I would stand at the bus stop at the end of my block each April and see the giant magnolia tree finally in full-pink bloom, or finally see the mated pair of red-tails rebuilding the nest in the ancient oak along the parkway, I'd trust that winter was truly over.

Here my faith is placed in, to borrow a lovely phrase from a current student (thanks BG!), the "smallest of the tiny."

A Return, Long Anticipated

Earlier, standing in the kitchen looking at the birds outside on the feeders, I got to wondering where our ruby-throated hummingbirds might be, right now. Tomorrow is the equinox, after all. Then I remembered that there are much-more-obsessive-than-I people out there who are tracking their migration. And I checked the map and discovered that some were sighted, right in our area, this very day! I am boiling sugar water and have pulled the feeders out of storage. They will go up first thing tomorrow. J says that he *thought* he saw one earlier this morning. But they truly herald the real return of spring!

Unwelcome Guests

I was sitting at the kitchen table early yesterday morning working on a frustrating essay revision for an upcoming publication (though, perhaps not - if these revisions are not *accepted,* I'm pulling the piece) when I heard The Sound. Unmistakable. Too familiar. The clicking, whirring sound of a recently awakened, stupidly flying, crashing-into-everything stinkbug. It's a sound that drove me from my last house and is one I decidedly do NOT welcome in this one. And sure enough, I looked up and there it was, clumsily circling the ceiling fan. But it landed on the wall, and I unabashedly scooped it into a tissue and flushed it. The Preschooler has been lately trying to figure out the subtle nuances of the concept of *hate* and I told her the other day, "Mummy doesn't hate anyone." Then I paused and thought, and added, "No, that's not true. Mummy hates stink bugs." The Toddler found one on the couch this morning. It became something of a joke among my students this semester, my utter loathing for these horrible, awful creatures. We kept finding them in our classrooms even into December and I am sure I came across as irrational in my reaction and finding them.

Someone really, really, really needs to find a solution to the Stinkbug Problem. Really. But, it doesn't sound like we're making much progress.

Local Culture

Preschooler: Mommy, why do we all have to turn to bones someday?
Me: Well, because nothing on the planet lives forever and ever.
Preschooler: Except plastic.

I've been too busy this semester to post about the recent controversy over what to do about Radford's vulture populations, but it's clear that the mitigation plan imposed a few months ago was effective. And I'm still conflicted about it. The childcare center mentioned in the article is attended by both of The Girls. And really, their huge presence on the playground there had made a huge mess, probably a health hazard. But, despite its apparent success, I'm not sure this was the most humane approach. I miss seeing hundreds of them roosting in the trees in Wildwood Park. They are still here, though. It just takes more mindful attention to see them. I wonder, too, if Buttercup the Vulture is among them; one day a few months back, after years of being in rehabilitation, she saw a flock (is that the right term?) flying overhead and just took off. I like to think so.