Sometimes November Isn't All Bad

 

 

 

 

 

Case in point - this photo. 

When else in the year would you get such an atmospheric shot? March? Methinks not. August? Ha! Look at that silhouette against that positively leaden sky. Wouldn't get that lowering sky anywhere else but November.

  
 Quick! Spot the Pileated Woodpecker against those sodden clouds.

  

And look - a lost pea sprouting away under the protective plastic on the soil-less medium of my potting bench. In April such sprouting is to be expected; this time of year, given the winds, rain, and cold, it's a minor miracle.

What's More Canadian Than A Goose?

 This bird causes much consternation to the Canadian population, particularly the younger ones. From day one, we must learn that it's not "Canadian geese" but "Canada geese." The "Canada" is never pluralized, even though the goose/geese must be. Confusing, but one of those quirky Canadian things, like poutine or spirulina smoothies.




Maybe it should be one of the citizenship questions.
1. Let's count birds: One Canada goose, two (insert correct version).
2. Do Canada geese like poutine? (the correct answer is "only if they're in Quebec, otherwise they prefer spirulina smoothies")

I won't touch the hot button topic of whether or not Canadians actually LIKE the Canada goose, because it's very contentious. They tend to be reviled for the frequency and quantity of their droppings, which tend to adorn - odiferously -  golf courses, parks and paths, and other places we Canadians like to walk. It's the intersection of the droppings with the footwear that causes the, err, revilation.

 FDPG and I were out walking today and we happened upon this little family, out for their own little walk. The babies reminded me of the duckling on the cover of my (very battered) copy of The Story of Ping.







I'm including this sideways shot because it looks much more interesting on its side. It's like a slightly crushed hourglass, don't you think?

Ceci n'est pas une pipe

Birds In Trees

I was watching a small yellow bird perching in the Granny Smith apple tree this morning, watching it flit over the branches, peck at buds, and wondering what sort of bird it was, when FDPG came up and demanded to know what I was doing with the binoculars. FDPG has a passion (verging on obsession) for knowing what's going on around the yard. I handed over the binoculars and asked her to look at the bird for me.

"What do you think it is?" I said.

"I know what it is," she said, "give me those binoculars." FDPG is nothing if not confident. (Realize that up to this very second she had not actually SEEN the bird in question)

She squinted through the binoculars, then shrieked "OHMYGAWD! LOOKATTHAT!"

"What?!" I say, startled. Did a hawk grab the bird off the top of the tree? Did the bird wave at her? Smirk at her? Pick its nose? I can't think of anything that would warrant such a sudden horrified shriek, so I grab the glasses and look for myself. The bird is no longer there.

"The bird isn't there any more," she says, unnecessarily. No kidding Sherlock, I think. This is our latest favourite household expression, but I seem to be the only one who knows how to use it. I decide that this is a Correct Use Moment. That shriek would send any one out of any tree.

"That tree is filled with caterpillars!" she tells me. "I think I saw thousands of them. Maybe more." And yes, FDPG does think, act, and speak in Hyperbole Mode most of the time. In fact, I think she was born in Hyperbole Mode.

But I'm used to Hyperbole Mode, so my attention is fixed instead on the mention of numerous caterpillar nests in that tree. Always that tree. My heart sinks. I didn't use a dormant oil last year, mostly because it rained every time I thought to spray. I also didn't reapply Tanglefoot around the base of the fruit trees. Truth be told, I didn't do anything to those fruit trees. And we happen to live around a lot of deciduous forest-type trees. Messy, bug covered, deciduous, forest-type trees that like to share their insects. Thus the THOUSAND UPON MILLIONS of caterpillars on my Granny Smith.

I sigh. "Let's go see what kind of bird that was," I say. "Let's get out the bird book."

And so we did. We think it was a Yellow Warbler. I wish I had gotten a photo of it, because it would have been far more interesting than a photo of all those stupid bloody caterpillars.

Argh.

If you're interested in what to do with YOUR caterpillars, you can do what I'm about to do and spray the trees with BT. It's an "organic usage" bacteria spray that causes the little buggers to get severe stomach cramps and die in agony. Well, I'm not actually positive that it does that, nor do I care at this moment in time, and when I was searching for a link to give those of you who don't know what Bt is, I discovered that its use is now considered controversial, which thrills me even more than the knowledge that my Granny Smith harbours many thousands of caterpillars because now I will have a pang of guilt when I spray, but I do know that it will kill the caterpillars.

Sturnidus vulgaris David Tennantius

This morning I made a remark about starlings, a bird we have here on the West Coast in PLENTY. A bird I harbor much ill will towards. A bird I would prefer to banish from my feeders. Charming commenter Samantha remarked upon my post. What follows is our conversation further to this subject.


(Charming Commenter Samantha) No idea what a starling is.

(Sheila) Wait, you have NO idea at all what a starling is? Let me enlighten you: horrible piggy birds that eat everything and anything in one fell swoop. They travel in packs of a zillion. They intimidate other birds and shove them off the feeder, then swagger on and gulp it all down. They probably even laugh like Nelson whilst doing so (HAW HAW). They are the bully boys of the bird world.

This is a starling: note the puffed out "I'm so cool and speckly and you're not, har har har" stance.







(CCS) Well, I know it's some kind of a bird but it could land on my finger and sing me a little tune and ... then it would turn into DT (Doctor Who lingo for David Tennant) and I would totally not care about what kind of a bird it was, I would be more concerned about the man balancing on my finger singing. But since it's DT, I could totally handle it.

(S) You're right - if it were to turn into David Tennant I would probably revise my strategy towards starlings. Completely. I'd probably feed them and encourage them and sit out all night, waiting for them to come to the feeders in the morning. I might even shoo away the chickadees and the bushtits and the nuthatches and the pileated woodpeckers and the downy woodpeckers.

Yes, I suppose there really ARE two sides to every story...

New Year News

I am happy to report that my side of the bedroom remains clear and uncluttered. As for FDPG's bedroom, well, let's just say I'm not buying any giant chocolate bars any time soon.

What about SuperLogic Man? Well, we'll say he's working on that one...

And looky here at what I've managed to do: it's called a Foil The Starlings feeder. An ice cream tub, upside down, with a metal suet feeder jammed inside. I've wired the metal feeder so it can be pulled out for refilling, but otherwise it seems to have genuinely foiled the starlings.

If you like and feed starlings or simply want me to feel a modicum of compassion for them I will preempt you and say you're wasting your breath. I don't like starlings and even if one rescued me from a burning building I'd still find them objectionable.

Piggy bullies, that's what I think about starlings.

(Gosh, Sheila, don't hold back or anything.)

I won't.

Long Time No Write

It's raining right now. Fall is a day or two away - official calendar fall, that is. The weather is still warm during the day, warm enough that light clothing is still the order of the day, so I'm not too sad.

Well, not yet. Give me a few more weeks of rain and I might alter that statement a bit.

We've let up a bit on 4-H summer madness around here, what with our fall fair officially over and school officially started. We're thinking about getting out the bird feeders so our resident bird population leaves off on the sunflowers, still waving languidly in the front garden, but these guys are grouchy about having to wait. Look at them - the glares I have to brave every time I go outside. Wait, is that a unibrow?

The garden did well, once the heat came our way. This was, as I've said before, the worst summer in memory. Yes, there were a couple of weeks there when it was hot, even at night, but for the most part most of my garden cronies are not thrilled with the state of their gardens this year. Things that did well? Tomatoes, pumpkins, peppers, berries (the blackberries were positively rhapsodic), tree fruit, beans and peas. Things that didn't do well? Cucumbers (pathetic, sob), eggplant, hot peppers, gourds. That said, for once I got the jump on the rain (and by extension the Potential Late Blight season) by bringing in most of my tomato crop while we were still basking in sun. The rest - the giant Roprecco plum tomatoes from the seeds my friend Samantha sent me - I wrapped in large sheets of plastic. So they are all out there sitting snugly while the rains drip softly down.

And in the meantime the birds sit. And wait. Expectantly. No pressure now, guys.

Today Was Too Much Fun

Like Ricky Gervais, I am being highly ironic. I am most definitely NOT having too much fun today. Why not? I hear you ask, because you are that most wonderful of Blog Reader: good at sympathetic pretension.

And if you're not, well, by all means pretend. I'm okay with that.

First, I slipped on some really slimy Post-ModernTimes Garden Produce out on the deck. I fell into a towel from when I'd cut the boys' hair, which had been sitting out on the deck in the rain (for longer than I care to tell you about but they had hair cuts over two weeks ago). It was, umm, airing. In the rain. That takes all the hair off it, you know. One less thing for the laundry. Anyhow, the two intersections were more than my Jane Austen self could stand: slimy compost + yucky towel = BeamMeUpScotty-itis. And when my bruised vanity whined to the kids they said what Richard had said earlier "You should have put that stuff in the compost LAST YEAR. That stuff is OLD. No wonder you slipped on it. It's already composted. And Dad's been telling you not to leave hair-cutting towels on the deck - remember that time the bees started nesting in that towel last spring?"

Hardy har har. Funny, my family.

Then, the printer ink ran out. At a Desperate Moment. A Critical Juncture. The black cartridge, it seemed. I refilled it. It left a residue over the next page I printed. A really gross BLACK residue. I should have refilled the COLOUR cartridge, I thought (note to self: let the printer know next time you refill a cartridge so you won't do this again). I then refilled the colour cartridge. Turned out I was - SIGH - wrong when I determined that particular thought. It was NOT the colour cartridge. It was my printer being ornery and old and exceedingly cantankerous. I dripped my florid way into the bathroom and watched the cartridge drip into the sink. My bathroom sink, my lovely white and clean bathroom sink, was suddenly awash with dark green ink, a peculiar green which diverted me temporarily with its amazingly lovely greenness, at which point I tossed the blotting tissues in the toilet to watch the colours diffuse and gosh was THAT fascinating but it didn't fix the printer, so I returned to the Scene of the Crime and contemplated its imminent death.

A few Q-tips, a couple of "Clean Printer Heads" commands, and some "Why don't you keep track of when you refill the cartridges?" comments from the Teenager later, my printer was like Lazarus - returned from what had once seemed Certain Death.

Phew. I won't mention what the Teenager said when he went into my bathroom and saw the green and yellow unflushed toilet water. Suffice to say he wasn't quite as enchanted with the idea of Colour Experiments in the toilet as I was.

But it WAS cool.

Then lunch beckoned. For my kids - I was still reeling from The Towel On The Deck Incident and, not for the first time, wished there was someone else here to make lunch.

And dinner.

And maybe even breakfast tomorrow.

But alas, it was not to be. I might be a Jane Austen Heroine but I do not have Jane Austen assistants or servants around to maintain the fantasy, sadly.

So I made lunch (the humble tortilla, rolled up with peanut butter and jam). Afterwards, we went for a walk. Blustery winds. Blustery rain. Cosy hats and mitts. We threw many a stick into many a raging creek. We watched the clouds scutter. I contemplated my new boots and, for the first time that day, felt glad.

When we came home I watched this video ( mockumentary about eating sushi in Japan). FDPG and I laughed rather immoderately, considering. More gladness.

And finally, when I was standing in the kitchen thinking that I wanted to eat Japanese food for the rest of my life but wondering what the hell a Japanese dinner looked like if it didn't involve sushi or noodles, a very large pileated woodpecker landed on the deck.

On my hair-cutting towel. He preened a bit, then glanced over at me and squawked a couple of times.

He didn't sit there long enough for me to get a photo of him, but it was long enough for me to realize one thing:

He liked my towel. My horrible, wet, hair-covered, hair-cutting towel. He was complimenting me on my Towel Leaving Habits. It meant that he had a nice soft landing pad for his giant toes.

I KNEW I'd left it there for a reason.

Avian Notes

Here is our Primary Bird Feeding Station (and yes, we DO happen to have a Secondary Bird Feeding Station, as well as a Third and Fourth, but that's only because these bloody birds are all so bloody territorial).

This is where we have a suet feeder (which is more properly a peanut butter/bacon fat feeder but that's such a mouthful I tend to say suet feeder instead) and a seed house. The other stations involve large bird feeders and hummingbird feeders. I've also started scattering seed on top of an annual pot on the other corner of the deck, for when these feeders get too crowded. Because they do, especially with this cold winter we've been having.

At the moment it doesn't look like much, but that's because I shooed everyone away so I could get a picture without the frenzy that it usually is.

What I'm noticing this year in particular, more than last year or the year before, is how rotating the bird schedule is. Some birds are here all the time; some move around and only come here at certain times in the year. Right now it's Pine Siskin time. They hunch together on the seed feeder, even when it's windy. They are rather large to be hunching on such a small feeder, though, and tend to be the subject of great mirth to the kids as they swing about in the wind, clinging grimly. Last week it was Stellars Jay time. Most of the time, though, it's time for all the little birds: nuthatches, sparrows, juncos, towhees, bush tits, and chickadees (the black-capped version, according to some, is not on this Island, a fact I find rather surprising). And in between we have starlings, flickers, Northern flickers, woodpeckers, and the odd owl.

But I am feeling rather triumphant today, because I have foiled the starlings at long last. It only took me three years. I am nothing if not obsessed with thwarting these stupid piggy birds tenacious.

Here's my latest tip for keeping the starlings out of the suet feeder. I call it:

How Me and My Suet Feeder Managed To Foil The Starlings.

Take a large piece of chicken wire and wrap it around your suet feeder, leaving little spaces for the smaller birds to sneak in. Make sure there is at least 6" all round the suet feeder, including the top bit. The bush tits will be able to get in through the holes, but the chickadees and sparrows can't, so leave little slitty openings at the corners. If you know what a hamentashen is, well, that's the shape you're aiming for here. Birds with a long beak (flickers, woodpeckers) will be able to perch anywhere on this mess and access the suet feeder, but the starlings will have distinct difficulties getting hold without the entire thing swinging around madly. Once in a while you will find one makes it inside, but if you dash out when he's trapped you will scare the sh*# out of the entire flock when he finds he can't just fly away. If you are like me you will find this highly amusing. Eventually they will cease and desist, a thing you never thought possible.

Fly & Hummingbird

Well, perhaps the title should be Fly Vs. Hummingbird. Normally this is a Hummingbird Only feeder, but with the recent cold snap they've been duking it out a bit. Hummingbird is a wildly territorial bird and the spot you see Fly sitting on is Hummingbird's Spot. Hummingbird's spot. His very own spot. This is no small thing. Hummingbird did not take kindly to this usurpation. He buzzed Fly. At first Fly was spooked, but familiarity eventually bred contempt and now Fly sits here, as you can see, no doubt driving poor Hummingbird mad with irritation.

Then one day Fly disappeared. Was Fly eaten by Towhee? Or has Fly gone to Greener Pastures? Only Hummingbird knows, and maybe that ACME van down by the creek...

Contortionist

Can you see the flicker on the feeder? The red shafted Northern Flicker, to be precise? He's got some pretty decent yoga moves here, methinks.

Making Things From The Garden

If you like saving herbs this is the time to be gathering them; once they flower (and from there go on to set seed) the taste of the herb can really change for the bitter.

It's easy to dry your herbs - what you do need is a space where they can dry without getting cramped or squished, because that encourages mold. Here's what I usually do: the day before I douse all my herbs with a thorough shower from the hose. This way you aren't rinsing and cleaning in the sink after cutting (and thus filling your sink with dirt or bits of garden debris). The next day, with the herbs dry and clean, I snip all the clusters I can and put them in biggish paper bags, which I then clothes-peg to a line in the basement. Sheila's Tip #29: write the name of the herb on the outside of the bag. One summer I harvested bag after bag of garden herbs, not realizing until much later that I was collecting the same plant every time. There I was, with 10 bags of dried oregano. Lovely. Sigh.

This is also the time to be picking flowers for medicinal salves or flavoured oils. If you've never done this before, here is a site that gives some basic salve recipes as well as some ideas as to which herbs to use. Here is a jar of St. John's Wort flowers, sitting in some olive oil. I add this oil to a skin salve. If you've never put St John's Wort flowers into oil, it's a very cool experience because the flowers turn the oil golden red.

Other plants that work well in a salve: plantain, comfrey, marigolds, apricot pits, sage, and mints. I like to add cayenne for the vitamin C/ skin-knitting aspects it has but this is not for everyone.

Calendula flowers sitting in oil. Yes, we do have a lot of bowls and glass jars sitting around the house right now. Mullein oil, plantain oil, you name it, I've probably doused it in oil at one time. Just don't leave them where someone might tip them over or you will have a Major Mess on your hands. Don't ask me how I know this.

My Hanging Gardens of Lavender.

If you want to dry your lavender, wrap the stems with elastic bands before you clip them to a drying line. As they dry the bundles shrink a little, allowing some strands to slip out (which can lead to the entire bundle falling onto the floor in a big messy pile, but again, don't ask me how I know this). If you use elastics the elastic will expand and contract with the widths of the stems. No more lavender all over the floor!

Love, Nebuchadnezzar.

Things To Do With Dried Lavender:

Baking: get a big jar of white sugar, and crumble several teaspoons of lavender into it, then seal it up and leave it for a few weeks. The lavender will give the sugar a lovely scent and you can use the resulting scented sugar for lavender shortbread, sugar cookies, or to enhance Earl Grey tea. Purists insist that you clip the bud before the flowers open. Some years I manage this, other years I leave it for the bees. The scent is certainly stronger before the flowers open but since I don't camp out in my lavender garden this is one of those Hit Or Miss Projects for me.

We've sometimes sewn it into sachets for clothes drawers. If you sew a little loop of ribbon on one end you can slip it over a hanger and scent your clothes that way. Add a little orris root and the scent should last that much longer.

FDPG likes to glue it onto her flower collages. You can also just leave it on the plant and let the birds pick it apart they want. Be warned, though: lavender is one plant that needs a good prune at the end of the season. If you don't you'll often end up with raggy bits that don't flower and a misshapen shrub.

Finally, here is the bird suet we make every whenever we accumulate enough bacon fat. I realize this has nothing to do with the garden per se but our family does a lot of catering to birds and insects, so this kind of fits in, right?

I freeze this stuff in sandwich bags because they exactly match the shape of my suet feeder.

Here's our recipe:

bacon fat (I collect it every time we eat bacon and store it in the fridge in glass bowls)
peanut butter
bird seed
other seeds & grains (oatmeal, flax, millet, sunflower, etc)

First you melt the bacon fat in a heavy pot over low heat, add almost equal parts peanut butter (I always freeze when it comes to adding equal parts because it seems like the peanut butter DISAPPEARS faster this way) and stir until the mixture is entirely melted. Turn off heat. Pour in lots of bird seed and whatever else you have handy. The idea is that you add enough seeds to make a thick, gloopy, stodgy mess. Mix it well then bag it. Then freeze it.

Walking in the Sun

If you look very carefully you can see our house up on the hill, behind those Garry oaks.
Well, provided you have really good eyesight...

It was a perfectly glorious day here on the Wet Coast today. The kind that lulls me into thinking that winter might not be so horrible after all. The kind that makes me think "Gosh, the winters here aren't so bad, really." The kind that gives me hope that I might, just might, not moan and kvetch my way through the rest of the winter. And yes, I do know that winter hasn't officially made it here yet. I do, really I do.

I should know better, shouldn't I?

Anyhow, with it being so sunny and all, and with me having woken up early and seen the full moon setting right across the street, surrounded with all that wonderfully atmospheric pink and blue mood lighting, I wasn't in much of a mood to make sure my kids did some improving schoolwork clean my pigsty of a house do anything, really.

Housework? Ugh.
Laundry? Ick.
Think about dinner? Nope.
Grocery shopping? Boooring.

I did have to briefly fight the urge to pack up and head south in a caravan, chasing the warmer weather all the way to Peru or somewhere. Yes, I know, terribly mature of me. But there was a time in the not too distant past when I would have done exactly that. Well, a time in the not too distant past before I acquired a husband, three kids, a cat, a guinea pig, a hat collection, a cold frame, an asparagus bed, and a lot of fruit trees. It's kind of hard to fit all that into a caravan and still have my own private bathroom space, though, so now I tend to stay put, repressing my Inner Weather Diva until spring. Mature AND responsible, c'est moi.

Anyhow, it was a lovely day, so we went walking around Bird Lake. We put on our rubber boots, I grabbed the camera, and off we went.

We met the cat that lives at the lake's edge first. It purred and miaowed as we went by. We stopped to stroke it, and in the ways cats are wont to do, it stuck its bum right in my face. "She's so soft and furry," I said to FDPG. "That cat is a boy," she replied, "I just know it." "Did you check?" I asked. "Nope," she said, tossing her head a bit at my obvious thickheadedness. Max snorted as I said "But this cat hasn't got any testicles, like Toffee does. I think this cat is a girl cat." "Humph, it's black all over, it should be a boy," was all she said. Yup, I thought: black, furry, miaows a lot, that says male to me, too. But she was already stomping her way along the footpath.
Boy, does that kid hate being wrong.

We continued down the path.

We saw some lovely red rosehips.

We also saw a lot of bird nests in those lovely red rosehips. FDPG remarked at every bird nest she saw. Max remarked at every bird nest he saw. A few minutes after they'd both done so, Dominic remarked at every bird nest he saw. I found myself nodding and saying "Wow" a lot more than I'd expected to. And wondering if any of my kids needed hearing aids.



We walked across a wooden bridge, listening to the clamour of the birds in the bushes. They followed us along the bridge, flitting in and out of the dense scrub bush around us, and periodically zipping back and forth across the path. They were clearly delighted with the weather. Fortunately my Inner Weather Diva was too, and I was able to bask in the almost warm sunshine.










We paused at the edge of the lake, awed by the periodic carpets of algae, green and glistening in the sun. The kids got sticks and poked and poked, stirring up the sleeping turtles as they did so.

We had just started across the floating bridge when the kids noticed something weird on the surface of the lake. Spiders, seemingly millions of them, scattering across the water with the wind, all headed towards the rushes by the edge of the lake. They were slipping over the water, skidding and spinning, with the breezes. But these didn't look like your average aqua-arachnid. We stood staring, until FDPG shouted "We have to do something!"

I leaned over, with Max's bullrush, and scooped up one. We examined it closely, but it seemed rather nonchalant about its brief water trek. I put it on the rails of the bridge and we all watched it scutter away. It was then that I noticed more spiders, walking on the rails, hanging from the rails, swinging by their threads over the water. And they were all the same: small and brown.

What's more, they were all going the same way.

I think it was at that moment that I realized we were all wondering the same thing: was a basilisk going to rear up out of the water at any second? Something large, perhaps, named Aragog? Or a Chamber of Secrets, newly opened, and these spiders were heralds, warning us of imminent disaster. Whatever it was, we all felt slightly panicky, seeing those skidding, slipping spiders.

It was weird, not to mention slightly distressing, seeing them skating across the water. Some had obviously given up and were lying in little pathetic balls in the surface, while other, still energetic spiders zipped by them, buoyed by the wind.
So we did the only thing we could think of in the circumstances: we formed a Spider Rescue Team.

All thoughts of Chambers and giant basilisks were forgotten.


FDPG scooped them up.

















Max scooped them up.

















Dominic didn't scoop many up, but he did rush around yelling "We're the Spider Rescue Team!" in case anyone forgot.

And yes, I scooped them up too. When I wasn't documenting our heroic efforts, that is. I'm irritating tireless like that.

But eventually we tired of rescuing spiders, sad as that may sound. The supply of skating spiders seemed infinite. They were jettisoning all around us, endlessly. And while I do like little spiders, my urge to keep a loose Prime Directive of sorts reasserted itself.

"Come on!" I said, "this is getting tedious. Let's keep walking. Basilisks be damned."





Our duck friend, who had kept rather tight-lipped up till then, evidently agreed with us, because he pushed off from where he'd been loitering near the shore (guarding mysterious openings?) and paddled across the lake, following us to the other side. The kids wondered why he wasn't eating the spiders. "Maybe he has poor eyesight and can't see them," I said. The kids thought this was one of the more hilariously idiotic things I've said. Heck, we all have corneas, don't we?


So we continued wandering around the lake, the boys continuing to poke things with sticks.

Poke.

Poke.

Poke.

Ouch.







I saw a strange giantess of a creature, silhouetted against the grass, and stole her soul for my own personal amusement. Yes, Gentle Reader, this is about as close as you'll ever get to seeing me. But hey, it's a pretty good likeness of me: two legs, long coat, shoulders, head.

Entirely gray.

Yep, that's me.










The kids dashed off into the rushes, playing hide and seek with each other, until Dominic remembered a cougar sighting we'd heard about here a few weeks back and raced back to the path, telling FDPG breathlessly that "Gosh, a cougar could attack us at any moment."






And after all that fun and excitement, we went home, winding slowly along the path in the bright afternoon sun, basilisks and skating spiders forgotten. We walked along the paths where we'd seen grasshoppers laying eggs among the rocks in late summer. We swung on the rope swing over the creek by the willow. We watched FDPG slide along the mud when she fell off the rope swing over the creek by the willow. We watched her scowl. And then we climbed the hill, and Toffee came bounding down the road to meet us. "Well, at least we know he's a boy, don't we, Mum. He has testicles - I can see them," muttered FDPG.

Preen Away Your Sorrows

From The Globe and Mail (September 8th, 2008):

"It's not just people that commiserate with each other when their team loses a contest - birds will also draw comfort from their friends if they are beaten, The Times of London reports. Green woodhoopoes, an African species, have been shown to bolster morale with group preening after rival gangs defeat them in singing contests. Andrew Radford, of the University of Bristol, England, who carried out this study, said it was the first time animals other than humans had been shown to intensify bonding after a loss. He reported his findings in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society. Dr Radford compared the birds' behaviour to that of football fans who try to outsing their rivals before retiring to the pub to celebrate or commiserate."

And in that same section, an intriguing new approach to motivating your students:

"A handsome teacher in China is offering pupils autographed photos of himself to encourage them to work harder. Ji Feng...is so popular among students that a lot of them were asking him for pictures. 'I came up with the idea of giving them my signed pictures as a reward' for exemplary work, he told the Nanjing Morning Post, 'it is absolutely not narcissism, but a way of encouragement. And only the students who perform the best can get such a reward."

I don't think I'm photogenic enough for that, somehow.

Cooper's Hawks & Squirrels

I wish I had specific photos for you, but I don't. And we're not living in some alternative computerized universe so I can't take out my eyes, plug them into some USB port in your hip and show this scene to you either. Hmm, put it that way and I feel sort of glad we aren't living in some alternative computerized universe...

I can describe it, however (wait, get back here! I'll make it sort of funny. I mean, death and mutilation can be hilarious in the right context, no?).

Scene of the Crime
Time: 7pm PDT
Place: Backyard, chez moi

We're all busy going about our after dinner activities: I'm checking my email, Max is trying to sneak more slices from the loaf of bread I baked for dinner, Dominic is walking around saying "I loved that soup" over and over again, and FDPG is still sitting at the table, looking very pained, because she hates that soup. Typical after dinner scenario.

Then Richard, who is our ever so fetching Dish Boy for this Act, pauses the Ron Sexsmith CD and yells "Come here! QUICK! Cooper's Hawk!" The kids all rush to the deck to see why he's yelling.

I glance at my emails. I've seen that Cooper's Hawk a million times. I haven't seen that email before. What to do? It's a Lady and the Tiger scenario. Hmm.

I pause.

I consider.

I go see the hawk.

Turns out I made the right choice. In the back yard, perched in a rowan tree, is the Cooper's Hawk. He's sitting weirdly low to the ground, and about 5 feet away from him is a very angry squirrel. I'd even go as far as to call this squirrel enraged. Spitting mad, even. And it keeps charging the branch on which sits our usually very low key Cooper's Hawk. The squirrel is making an awful lot of noise, squeaking and shrilling and rushing around wildly. At one point it charges up the branch and throws itself at the hawk. The hawk almost falls out of the tree and then flies off clumsily. Very clumsily. It perches in another nearby tree, obviously quite confused. It's not every day he has squirrels hurling themselves at him.Blurry Picture of Cooper's Hawk for your viewing pleasure

The squirrel, however, is still hopping mad, and races off to THAT tree, but this time the hawk is out of reach. So the squirrel races off to the nearest Garry Oak and races up that, making a racket the entire time.

At this point we all rush outside to see what they might have been fighting about. I bring my camera for this bit. In fact, as we're all jostling down the stairs, the twins yell "Did you bring your camera?" to me. Now I feel rather indelicate laughing in the face of grim death, but then it was a little on the funny side. "Yes, of course I brought my camera to document a little Death in the Backyard. Why wouldn't I?"At the base of the willow tree, where the kids have their rope swings, is a small pile of white feathers. And one small yellow-feathered beak.

Max climbs up the willow to see if there is any other evidence. There is: a small drop of blood and some more white feathers. The Cooper's Hawk is now off in the Garry Oak. The squirrel is still chattering loudly and madly in the other Garry Oak. They have obviously reached an Impasse. We all stand in the back yard and wonder.

Then Toffee saunters over, completely oblivious as to what must have just transpired right under his nose. He sleeps all day right next to the rowan tree, nestled in a pile of straw in the asparagus bed. He is not the slightest bit interested in our Cooper's Hawk and Squirrel Experience. We try to tell him but he simply flops down on the grass and offers us his belly to scratch. When we ignore him he attacks our ankles. Max throws some of the feathers on him to see if we can get him into Hunt Cat Mode. As you can see, it didn't seem to do much. Catnip works way better.

More In the Way of Bird Books

Here's another new purchase for the school books. I very nearly bought this one, but it didn't have a Black-capped Chickadee call in it, so I didn't. The Black-capped Chickadee is the first bird Max attached himself to when we studied birds (I even bought him a Black-capped Chickadee Christmas tree ornament that year), and it seemed a bad omen not to see the little black cap included, so I bought the one you see here instead. It not only has the black cap, but Max's new favourite, the Red Winged Blackbird (if you want to hear its call, click here and then click on #84698).

I like this book. It's skewed slightly in favour of the East Coast of North America, which niggles at me vaguely, being here on the Wet West Coast of Canada as I am, but when all is said and played, it's pretty fun stuff. And no (just in case you have an eight to twelve year old boy there, wondering) cats are not fooled by the calls. A dog might be, but cats are way too smart for this sort of game.

One Small Square

It's hard to see this picture very clearly, I agree, but I'll describe it to you, if you like.

This was one of the things we did for the local Science (and other stuff) Celebration, organized by some friends of ours. It was inspired by the One Small Square books, which we happened upon last year and were quite taken with. (I'm giving the amazon.ca link for this book because the Canadian link shows the cover of the book) When we were discussing what we might do as our science entry, I suggested this, and initially Max (the Skeptic) said "That's not very interesting, I mean, just how much can one little area in your garden change in a month?" Now that remark, I feel compelled to point out to those of you who do not know the obsessed to the point of zealotry gardener that I am, was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. How much can the garden change? Hello? Have you not been watching me obsess over the plants for the past, uh, 11 years of your life? I felt like saying, but being the relatively mature adult that I am supposed to be am, I repressed it and instead used that old chestnut: "Why don't we try it and find out?"

And so we did.

Here's the first post I wrote about our initial attempts.

We took pictures of the garden from where I thought I'd taken the last one the exact same position each week.

We shooed Toffee out of the square.

We drew pictures of the plants and went to our botany books to identify them.

We shooed Toffee out of the square.

We sat quietly and watched the various birds come and go in our small square. Max made notes of what we saw, being the keen birder that he is.

We shooed Toffee out of the square.

Mostly we enjoyed watching the garden change over the six weeks or so that this project took. I found it so therapeutic that whenever I felt the vague rumbles of Grouchy Mum, or the mutinous mutterings of the Greenridge Enfants Terribles, I'd shout "Let's go check the small square!" and we'd all race outside, excited and delighted for the most part. And even if the kids we weren't so excited and delighted with the change of venue, by the time the kids we had been outside for twenty minutes they we were more often than not infused with enough fresh oxygen to cheer them us up until it was feeding time at the zoo lunch time.

And then it was time to put it all together into a Presentation. We took a colour photocopy of the book cover, altered it slightly, and then mounted the photos and made detailed sections of what the kids had seen. Max did the bird drawings, FDPG did the insect drawings, and Dominic did the Silly Comments (which sustained us in the wee hours). We included a photo of Toffee sitting in the square, seeing as how he'd done so much of it (and convulsed the kids each and every time he'd done so). And when they'd finally finished it, they were quite thrilled with themselves.

And lo and behold but only yesterday Max said to me, apropos of nothing "Wow, it's amazing how much the garden has changed in just a few weeks, isn't it?"

I tell you, it warmed the cockles of my heart to hear that. Sometimes these things are worth the effort.

Ever wonder what the back end of a peacock looks like?

Well, here you go. I just happen to have a picture right here:

















Not quite so glamorous, is it?

This shot was taken at the Petting Zoo we volunteer at. Max collects their feathers, I photograph them, and they lounge around like the spoiled super models they are, soaking up all our adoration.

One Small Square

And more signs of spring!


Dwarf Pink Heronsbill
It was a lovely day here on the Island, sunny and warm - most welcome after a few days of cold, wet weather, but for some reason we all felt uninspired and tired today. I was actually feeling restless and vaguely crabby, but one of my New Year's Resolutions was to keep a sock in Grouchy Mum's mouth, so I did my best to repress it. These sorts of days make me despair a bit, partly because I feel compelled to do something about the ennui and partly because we end up getting on each other's nerves when we're all like this, and that's never fun. Plus, the twins are young and still of the inclination to follow me around looking for excitement and adventure; it seems a waste not to enjoy the attention while it's still sweet and adoring.
So, tying an anchor to Grouchy Mum and tossing her overboard, I bagged some library books, a yard stick, some sketch pads, some string and pencils, and out we went into the Great Backyard (I wasn't energetic enough to get us all into the Great Outdoors so we settled for the backyard). Since we were ostensibly exploring the world through botanical eyes, we examined the various plants in the yard for sepals, petals, pistils, and leaf patterns. We sacrificed a few daisies and dandelions and anemones in the interests of Exploration. Some of us used a magnifying glass and some of us took pictures (Sheila coughs discretely). Then we sat in the grass and I read aloud while the kids lolled pleasantly in the warm sunshine with their eyes closed (Grouchy Mum peered over the side of the boat and glared somewhat but I managed to keep her sock in). We read Flowers, another in the brilliantly photographed David Burnie-penned DK Eyewitness Explorers series, How Seeds Travel, which has some very good pictures of seed pods and is technical enough without being too dry, critical considering I'm balancing the interests of 6 year olds and 11 year olds, The Sunflower Family, another lightly technical-yet-absorbing look at seeds and flowers, The Life Cycle of a Tree, How Do Apples Grow? and the charming but sadly out of print A First Look at Flowers. And then it occurred to me, after we read One Small Square: Backyard, to create our own Small Square in the backyard. Since it was there. And so were we. So we did.

As you can see from the picture, we strung up some lines to mark out our Small Square (give or take a few slants). I was tempted to choose a more heavily populated area of the garden in the interests of immediacy, but opted instead for a bare area so we could see the contrast when it fills in. We decided to take a picture every week for a year, if we can manage it.

The kids sketched the Square, and then we went over the plants we could see already: a scrawny fuchsia stem, feverfew, violets, pulmonaria, corydalis (have you ever noticed how the corydalis flowers look like the head of the monster from Alien? I've named my corydalis Sigourney because of this), lupin, and a teenie tiny columbine. I put the shovel into the ground so we could see what was under the ground, but sadly it wasn't half so exotic as the picture they had in the book (which was teeming most unrealistically with animals, insects, worms, and microscopic things, says Grouchy Mum). The twins began to sigh. Oops, I thought, Sheila, this ship is foundering. I dropped the shovel full of dirt back into the place it came out of, wondering glumly if the sun was over the yardarm yet (to continue our nautical metaphors) and what do you know but a little chestnut-backed chickadee swooped right in under my feet. He swooped out again almost as soon, but when he left he had a little bug in his beak. This thrilled everyone present (except for the bug of course) and things began to look up again. Grouchy Mum receded into the depths.

One of the suggestions the author makes in One Small Square is to sit with your eyes closed, listening to the sounds of the yard. So we sat, listening to sparrows, red-winged blackbirds, bushtits, and chickadees. We live quite near a bird sanctuary, and there's a lot of bird life in our back yard as a result. Max is pretty keen on birding, and has developed his call recognition skills over the last couple of years, so when we hear unfamiliar calls we usually ask him to identify them. But one bird we couldn't identify. It had a thin and piercing sort of call that sounded quite distinct from the sparrow and chickadee chirps, but we couldn't see what was making the sound. We wandered around under the Garry oaks, and eventually we saw it - a red-breasted nuthatch (sitta canadensis). I don't know why but we'd never noticed it making those calls before, but we hadn't. If you click here you can hear it for yourself.

Then, it was time to go in and get ready for Cubs.

But wait, there's more!


Here's the charming little Corydalis Sigourneyius.

Look at that jawline!
Is that or is that not the Alien head? Some days I expect to see them come after me, their little jaws snapping at my heels like bad tempered terriers (or aliens).











A frittilaria. More properly: Meleagris. Also known as the chequered lily. Deer resistant and naturalizing, apparently. About 8" tall so far.















Finally, my Narwhale. Atmospheric, isn't it? Oh I know, it's really a piece of driftwood, but it looks like it might actually swim away, don't you think?

Downy Woodpeckers In Our Midst

Look at this. I had barely put the peanut butter in the feeder when the downy woodpecker was on it. I still had my hand on the lid when he started pecking away at it! In fact, when I opened the peanut butter block I reached up, with the block in my hand, and three bushtits landed right on the top of the block. I had to brush them off in order to get it into the feeder.

When I took this shot I was about 3 feet from the feeder.

The bushtits, sparrows, and this downy woodpecker are the most relaxed around us, even though we frequently burst through the door heading out to the deck and shriek and wave (we're waving and shrieking at the starlings). We've all come to the conclusion that the other birds know this, because they ignore us now. They remain on the various feeders. Some of them look rather apprehensive, but that's about it.

Cooper's Hawk

We have been seeing the Cooper's hawk more and more of late. I'm not conversant enough with the habits of hawks to know why he's suddenly showing up so much, but he has started landing on a certain branch in the neighbouring Garry Oak. The same spot on the same branch - every time.

Here is the section on Cooper's hawks from our bird book (one of the superlative Kaufman guides). These are great books, if you are looking for a bird or insect guide. Very good photographs. Anyhow, what we see is the adult male Cooper's hawk. In flight they are dramatic birds - with a strikingly beautiful underwing.

And here he is, sitting in his spot. See him there, perched at the top, sort of in the middle? That's our boy, minus dead starling.