Intruder

 Machine gun chatter of spruce-crazed squirrels, sentinel jays scream out their warning, intruder! Intruder! Intruder!

It's raining spruce cones again. Ripe ones now, so perhaps not as threatening as the hard green ones were earlier, but still I have to raise the thick hood of my father's old green Carhartt to stave them off sometimes. I wear it, partly because it is the warmest thing I own, but mostly in his honor. He passed down the love of the woods and the whole bird thing, and those are some of the best parts of my life.

In one spot so many cones are tumbling down from seventy or eighty feet up that I have to run (Imagine that...me, running!) to dodge them. (First time I have run since the days of chasing cows and I am amazed that I could. Didn't even kill me.)

I succeed in remaining undamaged, although some were mighty close.

Hah, hah, you missed me!

At least this time.

Anyone who imagines the forest to be a quiet place hasn't been there lately. The woods at the Blues at Burbine contain ten million, seven-hundred, and sixty-leven squirrels, both red and grey, along with a few dozen munks of chip, and as of Sunday, myriad migrating sparrows of all sorts.

Along with an occasional breeze rustling what's left of the leaves and the creaking of elderly trees and knees, it makes for a singularly unquiet place.

Which is fine by me.

 I do a lot of birding by ear and the noisy juncos and their ilk are quite unbothered by my visit to their domain. Most of the birds I saw yesterday were migrants, passing through or looking for a place to winter. However, at least one pair of Dark-eyed Juncos raised a brood of young right here in the woods this year. I got to see them shortly after they left the nest and hear them singing all summer long...which was pretty cool.

Meanwhile, I've been bringing home acorns for Ralph's chipmunks and carrying peanuts for our jays. They come streaming in from wherever they await, crying, "What has it got in its pocketses? Huh? Huh?"