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.