Category: Birds

I know I don’t blog about birds as often as I should, but hey, it’s not like birds aren’t getting their due in the blogosphere.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Far corners

If only the far corner of the world were some place we could retreat to. Those were the words running through my head when I woke up this morning. I’m not sure what preceded them in my dream, who said them or why. But half an hour later I came across a poem by John Haines, “Circles and Squares,” which admonishes, “A square world can’t be true,” and celebrates all things round:

[T]he tipi sewn in a circle,
the cave a mouth blown hollow
in a skull of sand,
as the cliff swallow shapes
to its body a globe
of earth, saliva, and straw.

When I logged onto the Internet an hour later, I saw that a brutal crackdown was underway in Burma.

*

The fat green globes that are ripe black walnuts have been raining down all week, going thump on the lawn, splat on the driveway, bam on the roof. Yesterday in my parents’ kitchen, a walnut falling on the electric line where it comes into the house reverberated like thunder. And when walnuts hit the drainpipes just right, they sound like rifle shots.

Both houses are ringed with the trees, which are also busy shedding their leaves. It’s astonishing that trees which leaf out so late in the spring and shed so early in the fall can gather enough solar energy to produce such dependably heavy crops of nuts. There’s something about black walnuts that defies reason. Gray squirrels in the winter often expend more energy excavating and shelling black walnuts than they get from the meat inside, according to the authoritative North American Tree Squirrels.

Currently, the squirrels are hard at work husking and burying, leaving little piles of walnut husks all over the farm. But much as the squirrels love them, for most humans black walnuts are more of an acquired taste. I find their pungency makes them better as a condiment than a main ingredient in most stews and pasta sauces. These days, I must admit we buy them pre-shelled and chopped fine from a local Amish store, which sells them so cheaply that it wouldn’t make sense to husk and shell them ourselves unless we valued our labor at only fifty cents an hour. But when I was a kid — and earning a 25-cent allowance a week — shelling walnuts was a yearly chore that I came to dread. The shells must be cracked open with a sledge hammer, and then one has to sift slowly through the meat to pick out small pieces of shell, which are hard enough to break a tooth on. And the husks quickly stain one’s hands a rich yellow-brown that can last up to a week. You can imagine the kind of teasing I came in for from my schoolmates: “Hey, Bonta! Did you’ns run out of toilet paper?” Har har.

Black walnut wood is famously dark, close-grained and beautiful, and farmers used to plant the slow-growing trees as an inheritance for their grandchildren. But they aren’t necessarily the best choice for landscaping, because their roots release a chemical that’s toxic to many other woody and herbacecous plants. Nevertheless, my mother says she’s tempted to write an essay for one of the birding magazines on black walnuts as an ideal yard tree for birders. How many other trees are virtually leafless for both spring and fall migrations? We eat supper out on the front porch whenever the weather permits, and Mom usually has her binoculars at the ready. Lately she’s been able to watch large numbers of black-throated green warblers flitting through the yard while we eat — all the while the walnuts are going bam on the flat roof above us. “If you want to see the birds, plant black walnuts!” she enthuses. And digging for the nuts keeps the squirrels away from the birdfeeders in the winter, too, to some extent. Unlike many birders, we don’t have to spend our winters at war with the squirrels.

*

There’s almost always a squirrel or two residing in our barn, which also has a few black walnut trees adjoining it. If you know where to look, you can find middens of empty walnuts that have been eviscerated by strong rodent teeth scooping out each hemisphere. These make excellent but thoroughly unpredictable projectiles, owing to their odd shapes. When we were kids, we used to turn the upstairs of the barn into a battlefield. Low walls separated the two hay mows from the central threshing floor, and we crouched behind them and hurled the squirrel-chewed walnuts back and forth at each other until most of our ammunition was spent. Then it was time to dash out onto the threshing floor and gather up as many fallen walnuts as we could before the fusillade became too heavy, using trash can lids as shields. The walnuts weren’t quite big enough to leave bruises, but they definitely stung.

Eventually the supply would run out entirely as walnuts disappeared into a thousand odd corners. Decades later we’re still finding them nestled behind stacks of old doors or at the bottom of dusty milk jars. I pick them up and remember for a few moments the violence my brothers and I used to perpetrate on each other, even without television or video games to show us how. I remember the constant apprehension we felt, growing up during the Cold War, that someday soon this round world would be blown open by a nuclear confrontation. Even then we understood that were no far corners to hide in; for better or worse, we were all in this together.

*

If it weren’t for Burma, I might not be here. My parents were both students at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and they first met at Burma-Bucknell Weekend in 1960. Bucknell had been founded as a Baptist university in the 1850s, and owing I believe to missionary contacts, was the first American university to accept Burmese students, within a year or two of its founding. In the century that followed, it remained the preeminent destination for Burmese students studying abroad, including, when my parents were there, a handful of saffron-robed Buddhist monks. Burma-Bucknell Weekend was an annual event attended by Burmese exchange students from all over the eastern U.S., and was also one of the biggest events of Bucknell’s social calendar. American students volunteered to act as guides for visiting Burmese, and that’s how my parents met: they were the last two volunteers left waiting for their charges. One of them struck up a conversation, and they’ve been talking ever since.

By 1961, they were — in the parlance of the day — going steady. Once again they had both volunteered for Burma-Bucknell Weekend, and were in the banquet hall when the Burmese ambassador to the U.S. suddenly turned pale, got up and left. Someone stood up and announced that a military coup had been attempted. The Burmese reacted with shock and horror, and the banquet quickly dissolved into knots of agitated discussion. Worried about their families, I suppose, most of the Burmese students returned to their home institutions in the following days. A few months later, another coup occurred, and Burma has been under military rule ever since. “We’ve always assumed that most of the students we knew were killed,” my mother says. Burma-Bucknell Weekend was no more.

*

So many buried disasters
built squarely,
their cities were walls
underfoot or climbing.

My feeling for you
goes out and returns,
even the shot from a rifle
falls in an arc at last.

So many boxes; the windows
don’t break soon enough,
and the doors never fail to shut.

(from The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer: Collected Poems by John Haines)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Discovery channels

It was truly a Discovery Channel moment. Well, except for the fact that I was in the middle of taking a leak. After some twenty minutes of fruitless stalking, I had given up on getting a good picture of the sharp-shinned hawks screaming at me from various hidden vantage-points around the spruce grove at the top of the field. This is the third year in a row that they’ve raised a family there, and while extremely secretive as long as the young are in the nest, as soon as they fledge, the parents become quite vocal, even aggressive. Just about every morning for the past week, my mother had reported getting close views of them, but by the time I got up there in mid-afternoon, there was no sign of them. “They probably come back each night to the spruce grove, and hang out there in the morning before going off somewhere else to hunt,” she suggested.

Thus it was that around 9:30 on a beautiful, cool, Sunday morning I found myself in the narrow strip of field between the back of the spruce grove and the edge of the oak-cherry woods, engaged in contemplation of the wonders of nature. My bladder was only about half-empty I realized two things: a sharpie had landed in the black locust sapling right above me, and a large stick had just snapped at the edge of the woods about 50 feet away. It had to be either a human or a bear. I zipped up hastily, and a moment later caught a glimpse of a large, black form moving between the trees.

To tell the truth, I’ve never been quite sure that the kind of nature shows featured on the Discovery Channel or in National Geographic specials are entirely a good thing. I mean, if the goal is simply to entertain and to inspire, they’re great. But I worry that such shows raise false expectations about the sort of experiences people are likely to have when they go outside, where, let’s face it, your chances of seeing charismatic megafauna doing exciting things are pretty remote on a day-to-day basis — not least because most larger animals spend the majority of their time doing essentially nothing. Worse yet, the average person’s failure to see nature-show-worthy spectacles in his or her own neck of the woods might lead him or her to conclude, subconsciously at least, that preserving local wildlife habitat isn’t as important as, for example, Saving the Rainforest. How else to explain public silence in the face of runaway exurban envelopment, despite polls that consistently show widespread public support for Protecting the Environment?*

Those of us who have come to crave regular contact with wild nature have done so despite, or perhaps even because of, nature’s consistent failure to provide highly entertaining spectacles. There are lots of cheap thrills, if discovering a new wildflower or a fresh pile of coyote scat is your idea of a thrill. But really, wouldn’t you rather go geo-caching, or roar around on a mountain bike or an ATV? As one of my more urban visitors said one time when I tried to get him to go for a walk after several days of sitting around talking and listening to music, “I’ve seen trees before!”

Nevertheless, sometimes nature does — heeding the call of Oscar Wilde — imitate art, and this was one of those times. I snapped two quick photos of the sharpie before it flew over my head and landed on a taller locust tree a stone’s throw behind me. Then the bear reappeared at the edge of a milkweed patch an equal distance in the other direction. Jesus! Where to look?

Another thing about those nature shows: they’re culled from thousands of hours of film, taken by very talented photographers using very expensive equipment. My thrilling encounter with the black bear was fairly long by real-world standards — maybe a minute — and yielded one pretty good view, but the only picture I got was, as you can see, pretty darn lousy.

It was a medium-sided bear, possibly the same one my mom saw looking in her kitchen window last week. Mother black bears chase off their year-and-a-half-old cubs around midsummer, and these “teenaged” bears, like the one I was watching, haven’t yet developed the wariness of the adults. They’re still learning the ropes. As a result, this is always the busiest time of year for so-called nuisance bear incidents. You’ve just finished moving into your dream house in Ferne Hollow or Oak Pointe, and the next thing you know there’s a goddamn black bear going through your recycling bin like it owns the place. There goes the neighborhood!

This bear, however, seemed more interested in smelling the milkweed blossoms, which have a very sweet, almost cloying odor. It turned its head this way and that, as if breathing deep from a cornucopia of scent. Either that, or it had caught a whiff of Human, and was struggling to separate it from the powerful background soup.

I turned around to look at the sharpie, and realized it was sitting in full view for the first time all morning. I turned back toward the bear. It must’ve caught sight of the motion, because a moment later it was gone, crashing through the bottom corner of the spruce grove. In an agony of indecision, I snapped ten quick photos of the sharpie, then headed off after the bear, which I could still hear crashing around in the woods. I walked back along Laurel Ridge Trail hoping to cross paths with it again, but no luck.

An hour later, I had uploaded my photos to the computer and had just begun to go through them and realize how truly bad they were when my mom came back from her own walk down the hollow. She carried a large, orange and yellow moth on the end of twig, figuring I might want to photograph it. This turned out to be a royal walnut moth, the adult form of the famed hickory horned devil.

O.K., I take it all back: nature really is like the Discovery Channel — at least at the micro-level. Get a camera with a macro lens and you, too, can take eye-popping photos of wildlife in your own backyard: just ask Bev, or Cindy, or Rebecca. My mom was envious of my sightings up at the spruce grove, but her own find was the more interesting one, I thought. The royal walnut moth, like the hummingbird clearwing sphinx moth that came in to the bergamot in my front garden the previous afternoon, is not only easier to observe but also a great deal stranger than anything the furred or feathered tribes have to offer. And best of all, it’s not likely to flee if you stop to take a leak.

__________

*Logically, an environment can never be destroyed. That’s the beauty of abstractions: they make horrors seem manageable by removing all traces of the real world: no land, no air, no water, no endangered species or ecosystems; no messy places or individual creatures. This is why I call myself a conservationist and not an environmentalist.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Fred Waring and other Pennsylvanians

The first four photos in this post were taken with the kind permission of the curator of the Fred Waring collection at Penn State, Fred Waring’s America, which I visited on a sudden whim yesterday morning. Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians “taught America how to sing,” they say; I can’t begin to imagine what that means. All I know is that this golfing buddy of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, this once-renowned purveyor of bland, inoffensive, beautifully choreographed arrangements of big band music grew up in Tyrone, Pennsylvania, the only genuine celebrity my home town has ever produced. I went to grade school in the former high school that had been built on the site of Waring’s childhood home.

But it seems Fred Waring had his wild and crazy side, too. He devoured the comics, and his archives include hundreds of original graphic artworks drawn for or about him by the cartoonists he befriended. He was apparently also fond of wearing “distinctive and original, sometimes ‘wild-looking’, jackets,” as one display put it.

I grew up listening to the five-string banjo. My older brother started learning the melodic clawhammer style when he was ten, after a few lessons from my banjo-playing uncle, who was part of the New York City folk revival in the 60s and 70s. I love the sound of this most African and most stigmatized of American instruments.

The music Waring got his start with wasn’t Appalachian string band music, however, but the kind of post-minstrel proto-jazz then popular among the hipper white folks. It makes perfect sense that Waring would go on to become the Pat Boone of the swing era. Someone had to do it, and who better than a genial, slightly funky, nice-looking white boy from smack in the middle of a state which was synonymous, then as now, with middle America?

It must be said that Pennsylvanians come in all stripes, however. Later in the day I attended a function at Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center — also part of Penn State — and took the opportunity to visit the birds at the raptor center.

The birds on display are permanent residents, too badly injured to survive in the wild — less shadows of their former selves than living ghosts, some of them. They may never again rise on thermals over farm fields or ride the wind currents along a Pennsylvania ridge, but they and their handlers regularly tour the state, visiting classrooms, county fairs, and the like. I’ve seen them in action, and I think it’s fair to say that these birds, however diminished, are celebrities everywhere they go.

I can’t help wondering whether some such diminishment might not be a prerequisite for achieving celebrity status, in fact. We crave an encounter with wildness, with what we dimly sense to be a more authentic reality than our own, but without the danger and disorientation full contact might entail.

Shaver’s Creek also includes several miles of trails, a boardwalk over a wetland, and a beautiful little herb garden with a lily pond. Yesterday, the water lilies were in full bloom, and when I bent down to snap a photo of one of them, I realized that a green frog (Rana clamitans melonota) was sitting in meditation right next to it, like a Buddha that had just decamped from his lotus. I circled the pond, snapping photos. He never moved.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Under surveillance

common yellowthroat

Another cool, dry morning. Ee-oh-lay, the wood thrushes intone. Ee-oh-lay. Witchedy witchedy witchedy! answers the always upbeat common yellowthroat. Somewhere out of sight over the valley (well, with the trees leafed out, almost everything is out of sight now) a helicopter begins circling. That deep whup whup whup, growing nearer then farther, drowning out the more distant birds, provokes a kind of nervous reaction, and the next thing I know I’m over in the herb garden pulling weeds.

Who or what are they searching for, I wonder? One night two months ago, at around 10:00 p.m., a helicopter circled the farm with a searchlight for close to fiteen minutes. My brother was just starting down the hollow toward his car, which was parked at the bottom. He said he had to duck behind a tree to avoid the helicopter’s searchlight. When he got home, he called up the local police station to ask who was missing. Nobody, they said. Did they have any idea why a helicopter would be searching Plummer’s Hollow? No, they didn’t.

I say “weeds,” but most of what I pull is grass. It’s kind of an anti-lawn. If you let the grass go, it can crowd out the dandelions and gill-over-the-ground if you’re not careful. Just as I was finishing, about twenty minutes later, I noticed the helicopter sound fading into the distance. Or maybe it was the other way around: my compulsion to pull weeds faded with the ‘copter sound. At any rate, moments after I went inside, a male ruby-throated hummingbird zoomed in to the coral bells next to the walk.

I wouldn’t have thought anything further about it, except that the same thing happened this afternoon, too: I pulled a few weeds, went inside, and a few seconds later a hummingbird zoomed in to check out my work. I think I’m being watched.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

I and the Bird 49: the Wordchaser

shithead

Welcome to the 49th edition of I and the Bird, the carnival for bloggers who love birds. I’m calling this edition — with a nod to my fellow Pennsylvanian Rob Fergus — the Wordchaser. I’m less of a birder than a bird appreciator (for street cred, I can only point to my vice-presidency in the local Audubon chapter), but I chase down poems the way a life-lister chases birds.

Past editions of I and the Bird have showcased the host’s own creativity, with sometimes extraordinary results. But this time I want to turn it around and focus on the linguistic creativity of the contributors themselves. Poems, like birds, are everywhere; it’s just a matter of training ourselves to recognize them — a metaphor here, an alliterative passage there, and something lovely dark and deep lurking just beyond. And with a little bit of editing, the English language naturally resolves into a rough iambic pentameter…

gnatcatcher on scarlet oak

Each line in the “found poem” below is a link to the post I lifted it from. I’ve altered nothing but the punctuation, and I’ve included an audio version for those who may have trouble hearing the poetry at first. I’m hoping the excerpts will read like riddles, enticing you to click through and discover their original contexts.

Lots of good things happen unbidden. Sure they do:

A Golden-winged singing in the far field;

A chance encounter with a small flock of Cockatoos,

Little cotton balls above their legs;

Fallouts of migrants at coastal “fire-escapes;”

Antshrikes, antwrens and antbirds churring and flitting.

A Bobolink flew up out of the field and circled me,

The super nova of the forest, the gaudy Prothonotary.

I knew instantly what it was! There was no mistaking

An immature Bald Eagle in January with a broken wing.

They make the most amazing murbling noises

(Audubon would have said something like that).

The afternoon lull had set in, but we pressed on.

We spotted the lapwings again, out in the glasswort–

How high above the water the white flashes!

Who knows how they knew they were there,

Bird with bird, birds with the very air.

Red Knot, that salmon sensation, doesn’t persist;

I can’t pry them from their hidden nest.

Tomorrow perhaps. Perhaps the day after,

I will spot snipe both close and in good light,

Hundreds of ruddy turnstones, a least sandpiper,

Dendroica cerulea by sound as well as sight.

In their minds, they’re following the food,

Catching arthropods as they attempt to flee

In dewy grass, or ground on the sole of my boot.

I wanted to see the Gray-crowned Yellowthroat;

How it arrived on the window sill I know not.

It was dusk by that time and no hope of a decent photo.

The bird stretches its wings and simply lets go.

hunger bird

Sources: Julie Zickefoose, Thomasburg Walks, Trevor’s Birding, Living the Scientific Life, Gulf Coast Bird Observatory, Drawing the Motmot, The Birdchaser, Bell Tower Birding, Richard Guthrie, Bird Treatment and Learning Center, The Egret’s Nest, Birds Etcetera, The Hawk Owl’s Nest, Ben Cruachan Blog, The Nemesis Bird, The Flatbush Gardener, Fragments from Floyd, 10,000 Birds, Marcia Bonta, The House and other Arctic musings, lovely dark and deep, A DC Birding Blog, Cup O’ Books, Gavan Central, Tick Magnet, Antshrike’s Bird Blog, Bird Ecology Study Group, Wrenaissance Reflections, Dzonoqua’s Whistle.

The next edition of I and the Bird will appear in two weeks at A Blog Around the Clock. Send submissions to Bora: Coturnix AT gmail DOT com.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Mood indigo

black knot

The middle of a warm afternoon in May. The new leaves have reached about half of their full size, and the steep end of the mountain is so green you want to shout for the sheer wonder of it. Below on the railroad tracks an east-bound freight has been stopped on a tip from someone down the line who saw a figure sitting in an open boxcar. A dark-skinned man in handcuffs is being placed in the back seat of a police van. Cars line up on both sides of the crossing as the police sort slowly through three gym bags full of personal belongings, right there on the brick sidewalk beside the station. Where is he from? What language does he speak?

phlock

A line from an obituary: He was truly an honest man and enjoyed tinkering with clocks.

He was. I knew him. A good man who shouldered a great deal of sorrow in his life, including the deaths of both his adult children.

You ain’t been blue, no, no, no.
You ain’t been blue till you’ve had that mood indigo.

indigo bunting

We came home from shopping to find an indigo bunting — the first one we’ve seen this year — sitting on the metal table next to the door, motionless except for a slight trembling and the blinking of its eyes.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Teacher, Teacher

Didactic by day, the ovenbird sings
another, more evocative melody just before dawn.

It sings about leaves that kept opening in the darkness
& the horizon drawing tight around the cabin.

The schoolmarm had been dreaming of other people’s children,
& woke with a head full of mucous & a pounding headache.

Her brother had taken the team to the back field,
left the sow to turn the garden with its snout.

She grabbed the ax and went to win back the sky:
girdling trees, he’d smirked, is no work for a man.

The rain came. A thrush started singing
from a branch that had yet to get the news of its death.

She circled a basswood,
fitting it with a bright new corset.

__________

It probably helps to know that “Teacher, teacher” is the usual onomatopoeic rendering of the ovenbird’s daytime call.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Otherwise

Prompted by the image I’m using as a header for my online book, Spoil.

Up to my ears
in accidents &
old weather,
the no-news
that rarely manages
to be good,
I begin to feel
a little like one
of those tablets
from Moses’
first trip into
the clouds —
fragmented,
impossible —

while overhead,
the pink Sinai
of a crabapple tree
abuzz with every
kind of hornet,
bee, & model-
thin ichneumon
plays host
to a scat-
singing catbird
who pauses just
long enough
to snatch another
stingered morsel
out of the air.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Over our heads


Canada warbler flight call (from here)

At the peak of migration along any major flyway, tens of thousands of warblers, sparrows, thrushes, vireos and other birds can pass overhead on a single night. As they fly, they emit very short, high-pitched bursts of sound. The calls intensify as they descend to roost in the hours before dawn, with birds on the ground responding to birds still in flight. Sometimes, birds even key in on spring peepers — maybe because after all that flying, the first thing they want is a drink of water!

To human ears, the night calls of migrating songbirds are hard to tell apart, and many are so high-pitched as to be virtually inaudible. But with the help of a microphone, a recording device, and a computer outfitted with special software, these night flight calls can be identified by species — and increasingly also by age, sex, and even geographic origin. Last night I attended a talk by Mike Lanzone, the coordinator of field research for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Powdermill Avian Research Center, which has been gathering flight call data at two stations in western Pennsylvania for several years. Mike explained how they learned to take advantage of the birds’ tendency to reply to similar-sounding calls with calls of their own. As a now-routine part of their bird-banding process, all captured birds are placed for two minutes in large cotton tubes outfitted with microphones, where they can flutter about and call in response to recordings of other flight calls. At the same time, a feather sample is taken to analyze for DNA and stable isotope signatures, which are compared with data from museum specimens, in cooperation with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Using this data, they can figure out where each banded bird was hatched and raised.

The point of all this extra effort is to assemble a continent-wide map of night flight call dialects, as well as to hone their interpretive techniques. As the Powdermill website puts it,

Statistical analyses of intra- and inter-specific variation in flight call notes will help facilitate more robust methods for distinguishing species-specific flight notes using advanced software, and information on age, sex, and energetic condition of birds in relation to flight call rates in captivity will aid in the translation of the number of recorded calls overnight into an accurate estimate of the number of individuals of each flight-calling species that passes over a location in migration at night.

Presuming that Mike’s hypothesis is correct — that flight call dialects do exist and are distinct enough for computers to tell apart — in a few years, it should be possible for linked networks of listening stations across all major flyways to generate year-by-year summaries of population trends for a wide array of passerine species. They’ll be able to detect if a local palm warbler population in the Northwest Territories, say, has suddenly suffered a decline, and can notify folks at Northwest Territories Wildlife and Fisheries to look into it.

With all this data, though, Mike admitted that they still can’t answer the most basic of questions: Why do birds emit these calls in the first place? Their conversations are figuratively as well as literally over our heads.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Breaking news

trailing arbutus 1

Things are unfolding quickly with the onset of warm weather. By yesterday afternoon, there was already a blush of green on Sapsucker Ridge, which is dominated by wild black cherries. Unlike sweet cherries, they leaf out first, and then flower. They also exude globules of resin, appropriately amber-colored, with the consistency (though not quite the stickiness) of rubber cement. You can find them glistening among the forest litter: too brown to be an amphibian egg mass, too translucent to be excrement.

black cherry sap

This morning, the flowering cherry beside my porch was in full bloom as I sat outside before sunrise listening to the birds. For the second morning in a row, I heard a new song for the year: Trees, trees, murmuring trees, one of the two calls of the black-throated green warbler. Like most warbler songs — and unlike, say, the song of the hermit thrush — it’s not exactly melodious. But there’s something very exciting about it all the same, an urgent, whispery summons to some great event.

sarsaparilla confab

After finishing my coffee, I went inside for a book of poetry and, as I do so often, picked up Tranströmer’s collected poems. I resumed my seat and opened the book at random to a poem called “Lament.”

Whistlings from the greenery — men or birds?
And cherry trees in bloom embrace the trucks that have come home.

A goldfinch still in its winter plumage darted through the cherry blossoms, snapping up a couple of insects and singing all the while. Warblers may not warble, but goldfinches certainly do!

A couple poems later, I was surprised by a pair of mallard ducks flying low over the yard in front of me. What the hell? I jumped up and ran to the edge of the porch to watch. They banked and circled the field, then came back a second time. Then a third. The fourth time they wheeled around and came in for a landing right below the house on the bank of the stream, about fifty feet from the porch. I stood stock-still, watching as the female explored the bottom of a log, then poked slowly along the stream. The male stood sentinel for a few minutes, then waddled off in pursuit, quacking authoritatively.

It wasn’t hard to guess what they were up to. Though we don’t have a real pond, just a couple of vernal pools, mallards have nested in the field at least twice before. I don’t think it’s a good spot for them, with many predators and no body of water to offer a refuge. But that didn’t stop me from hoping that we’d be found worthy. I guess nobody wants to feel like they’ve been rejected by a duck.
__________

See also the Dharma Bums’ latest report: clear on the other side of the continent, another seemingly unsuitable yard has just been adopted by a pair of mallards.