Happy Birthday, Red Angel

Happy birthday, Red Angel. I'm going to take you back to North Dakota, because we had such fun there, and because you still had all six wisdom teeth when we were there in June. I figured you would want to see photos of yourself just as the Lord made you.

You are an excellent driver (of golf carts). Even though Al Batt doesn't look so sure, Ann and Ernie Hoffert trusted you, and so did I. I would ride in a golf cart with you anywhere. I think that's about the happiest I've seen you in a long time, tooling around in a golf cart as the sun sank in the prairie sky, throwing your head back and laughing.

I love to watch you discover nature. You field a giant puffball tossed your way without squealing and dropping it. I like that. Maybe you wouldn't eat it if I cooked it up, but you get points for catching it.

You are a creative girl, a girl happy to leave mysteries for others to decipher. If there even are any others out here.

You are kind to animals (even ones that don't match your color scheme)

and to your little brother, and he loves you endlessly for that.

You are becoming a true connoisseur of food and eating establishments both humble and grand. And you show the makings of a pretty good cook, too. You're fun to be with

and highly attractive to strangers. Strangers have the best candy.

Almost most important of all, you're hilarious, and being hilarious is a prerequisite in this family. 

Did I say you're beautiful, too? Oh, sorry. 

Happy birthday, Beautiful. The white lilacs pale beside you.

Thanks to Ann and Ernie Hoffert for the magical gift of prairie places, their glorious gardens, and their friendship. 

The Golden Turtle

Run in the rain and

You'll find the golden turtle

Treasure of treasures.

Those of you who follow me on Facebook know that for the past year I've been writing a lot of haiku. They're direct outgrowths of the process of running. I'll have been running a year on July 30. I run 7 days a week, weather and travel permitting. I'm on my third pair of running shoes. I liken the Runner's Haikus to work songs. They take my mind off the heat and humidity, off the deerflies and the weight of my body as I force it up the hills and down the hollers.

 

 There are rewards for the running. This morning as the rain dripped off my hat brim and soaked my shoes I found The Golden Turtle, an old female who's weathered some hardship. All the toes but one are gone from her hind feet, probably courtesy of a short-tailed shrew while she was hibernating. Shrews do worse than that; she was lucky her head and front feet were tucked in.

This calls into question her viability as a breeder. Could she dig a proper nest with soft stubs for feet, without claws? I don't know. I suppose if she found soft sand or very wet soil, she might be able to dig a nest of sorts.

Damn shrews.

 

I don't like to pick up or move turtles unless I have to, to get them out of harm's way.  It seems disrespectful. So these photos aren't the best, but they're the best I could get without disturbing her unduly.  In this photo you can see her eye, a dull red, hallmark of an older female. 

I left her there by our driveway, and when I came back she was gone. Soft soil and shrewless winters to you, dear Golden Turtle.

Great Crested Flycatcher Family Photos

Watching these great-crested flycatchers going about their business made me feel a little better about my life. They never sat still, either. Even when they paused in feeding or cleaning up after their young, they were always looking for the next insect to snatch in mid-air.

 The rhythm of this old sycamore snag was so lovely, such a perfect spot for nesting flycatchers.  This is eastern North America's only cavity-nesting flycatcher, which I suppose is because it's eastern North America's only flycatcher in the genus Myiarchus. Ash-throated and brown-crested flycatchers (also Myiarchus)  nest in cavities in the West. I noted that the flycatchers had not added a trailing snakeskin to their nest. Most GCFL nests have something trailing out of the cavity.  Popular speculation holds that the flycatchers are trying to "frighten off predators" with a snakeskin, but the first one I ever found, behind my house in Richmond, VA, had a long piece of pink attic insulation trailing out of the hole! They'll use plastic, bark...a lot of different materials, leading ornithologists to conclude that they just like to have something trailing out of the hole...I was privileged to watch that nest and even see the babies, perfect miniatures of the "Wheeps!" as we called their parents, line up on a branch outside the cavity to be fed.

North Bend's lake, less than a decade flooded, offers a paradise for cavity-nesting birds in its huge stand of dead trees, protected by several feet of water. This cuts down tremendously on snake and raccoon predation, and pretty much eliminates squirrel and mouse predation. It really is a Brigadoon for cavity-nesters.

I could tell the flycatcher babies were pretty old, both by their voices and by the size and coarseness of the insects being brought to them.

 Not all the flycatchers' prey is winged. They do some gleaning, too. This might be a fishing spider, or a wolf spider. Whatever it is, it's a big 'un. 

Imagine having something that leggy stuffed into your mouth. 

With each delivery, the flycatchers took a drop-off.

Another fecal sac about to hit the water. Look at the beautiful rufous tail of the great-crested flycatcher..

More dragonfly on the way. The flycatchers followed a predictable pattern of perching, first pausing above the nest to assess the area, then dropping directly to the cavity.

 Insert insect in slot.

Pause to consider your next move. Repeat. 

The young will leave the nest at about Day 15, and be fed for about another three weeks. The literature says in general the young are flying strongly by that day. The only other option is a splashdown, and judging from the number of bass fishermen haunting the shallows, a struggling nestling wouldn't last long. I wish this beautiful family all the best. Feed 'em up!

Great Crested Flycatchers!

And that pewee-lookin' bird with yellow below that Phoebe found for me? Get this: Pewees have wingbars and crested heads. She had it almost zeroed in. But she had found a pair of great-crested flycatchers, and they were tending a nest!

And not just any nest, but a glorious weathered branch stub in a sycamore. And it was low, and the birds were tame, as you will see. What a find!

 The pair was busy feeding young which might have been fairly well along, to judge from the prey items they were getting. I could hear them in the cavity, voicing "wheep!" calls just like their parents'. This is something unique about flycatchers. Even as little chicks, their voices don't vary much from how their parents sound. Flycatcher calls and songs are innate, not learned. So you could take a phoebe, a pewee or a great-crested flycatcher, just to name a few, raise them in complete isolation, and they'd still have a perfect song and call from the get-go. That's not true of most songbirds.  You could have knocked me over with a feather the first time I held a newly-hatched phoebe in my palm, and it said, "Chip!" just like an adult phoebe.

So this pair of great-crests is hauling in dragonflies as fast as they can. Not the first time I've wished I'd spent more time on odonates. It pains the Science Chimp greatly not to be able to identify the great crested's prey items. Please chip in if you can.

 The birds were bombproof, eyeing me but slowing down not one whit as I fired away from just below the nest.

Input, output...they carried away sizable fecal sacs of processed dragonfly with each visit.

 The original disposable diaper: the fecal sac.

 Fecal sacs are neatly encased in a mucoid coating which, if handled gently, leaves no residue on bill (or fingers, she notes).

 The bird carries them away for hygienic purposes, and to keep predators from keying in on the nest location. Birds love to drop them over water.

More great-crested family photos anon.

Watery Retreat

 
Me, out of Custodial Mode. A very rare photo by Bill of the Birds.

I don't know what's happening to this summer. I feel like I'm running constantly just to stay abreast of all there is to do. It might have something to do with having the kids home and needing meals all the time, something to do with processing two large loads of laundry each and every day; something to do with a huge fast-growing lawn and gardens needing weeding that go on and on; with the fishpond filter that clogs with algae every day, with the Bird Spa needing to be scrubbed and refreshed; with countless planters and hanging baskets and bonsai trees suddenly drying up and needing to be watered each day; with all the creatures from fish and turtles to macaw, dog, flocks of brilliant goldfinches and hummingbirds that need to be fed and cleaned up after every day. Add doctor, dentist, orthodontist and optometrists' appointments, music lessons and frequent travel onto that, and I guess I've figured out what's happening to this summer. Please ignore my antic punctuation in this paragraph. I got lost somewhere between the semicolons and the commas. I'm just lost in general, wandering around in Custodian Land, trying to figure out how it all got to be so too much.


I think I do a whiny I-can't-do-it-all post like this every July. I love summer with all my heart, but the chores seem to magnify then multiply, magically. Sometimes I hum "Lazy Crazy Hazy Days of Summer" and just laugh. I would love to be lazy. Even for ten minutes.

I would like to have just one thing to do at a time, like a woodpecker feeding its young. I'm sure she'd trade with me...

When it all gets to be too much I go back in my mind to North Bend, to the quiet waters.

To the miniature islets, planted just so. 

To the sunbathing heron, standing with her wings akimbo, baking her body lice. Lazy girl.

 I drift closer and closer until she breaks the pose and sets about catching some fish.

She waded in and caught an early dinner soon after these images were taken. I was glad not to have put her off her task. 

That's what I love most about canoeing. It's easier to slip in and out of birds' lives in a little watercraft. 

And no, you can't sex a great blue heron. I was just guessing. Something about the way she was holding her wings.

I  loved watching the kids discover nature with the help of David and Mary Jane and their big canoe. Liam was cautious about bass. He kept asking me if bass have teeth.

I kept flashing on the wings of red-headed woodpeckers. It was a magical day, a fecund day, full of all the things I love best. 

Best of all, the birds we came to see were busy making more red-headed woodpeckers.

and more noisy flickers.

and more great blue herons

What a treasure North Bend State Park is. What a glorious place. You really don't have to look too far in West Virginia and southern Ohio to find some really special places to hike and canoe. I'd wager that's true for a lot of places. One of my readers commented:  You're seriously making me want to get a canoe or kayak, although I don't think I have anywhere that beautiful and bountiful to use it! 

Well, I didn't think I did, either. You have to check out the parks. Maybe you've driven by the sign for a local park a hundred times without ever exploring it. They're waiting out there, and I've had tons of fun exploring the ones in our area one by one. I'm always surprised at the beauty and serenity that's waiting there in the shallow waters where the speedboats can't go. Canoes: That's what they're for. 

They're for sneakin' up on things.

 photo by Bill of the Birds

Blue skies and puffy clouds and dragonflies on the shore.

My totem turkey vultures circled and tilted, telling me this was a good place for my spirit to rest.

If one could have a totem butterfly, the Z is for Zebra swallowtail would be mine.

Phoebe would soon discover the next wonderful thing I needed to photograph. "There's a bird here that looks like a pewee, but it has yellow underneath. It's got a nest here."

Give 'em binoculars and what do you get?  Little poults who find wonderful things, and return the favor by pointing them out to you!

Those mystery birds to follow.