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!