Numbers Game

These Trumpeter Swans did not make our trip list
Out of territory and all
But they were just as exciting for me

I love Christmas Bird Counts. I can't say for sure how many years I have participated, but I have been married to Ralph for 40 years and they predate him on my dance card.

Black Ducks
Hooray for open water
Always a treasure on CBCs

Monday I joined the Montezuma count for the second time, which is a terrific honor for me. It required 4 1/2 hours of hiking through snow that ran around a foot deep and a close encounter of the really, really, really embarrassing kind with a scary bridge with which I would not be Facebook friends  even if it sent me a request, but I loved it. Sometimes I wondered if I would make it back to the car, but it is what I do...and really, it was great fun.

Cardinalis Cardinalis, looking for all the world like
a Christmas ornament

Highlights were an amazing Gray Catbird that my birding friend and mentor, George Steele, spotted on Howland Island, finding a Winter Wren myself (that is always a thrill for me) and meeting and getting to bird with Jim Eckler, who is a really cool guy.

Montezuma is a fabulous, ever-changing, ever-fascinating, wild, wonderful place, that rarely disappoints. It was a lot of fun to visit it with people who are truly familiar with all its faces and facets, and to see it in an unfamiliar season. Of course it's always fun to count birds...see above...

Waiting, yet again, for me to catch up

Thanks to George and Jim for putting up with my slo-mo hiking, bridge squeezing and crashing, and clambering over trees handicap. Their patience was impressive. I have the potential to do five more CBCs this year if I can stay healthy and the Good Lord is willing and the Creek don't rise and all.

Happy Birding, Merry Christmas, and a very Happy New Year to all...and yes, I have a bird count on New Year's Day as well.

Walking

I walk 10000 steps per day.

Sometimes that is a breezy delight, goes by quickly, and I end up with 12 thousand or even more.

Sometimes it is tedious drudgery. I don't want to walk but I do.

There is what I call organic walking, outdoors, in nature, in pursuit of all the little birdies for my obsessive listing of same.

Taken from the car on the way to walk

Sometimes it is laps inside the house with an audio book or my playlist buzzing in my ears. My favorite books for this practice are lo-o-o-ng ones like those by W.E.B. Griffin.

I figure any kind of walking is helpful in my ever-more-challenging battle to stay active and able. 

And surely we have found some beautiful places for the former sort of stroll. (There are also spots that are less scenic, require a bit of bushwhacking, which I hate, and intense tick checks upon arriving home.)

Here are some of the good places....also if you are in the area and want to join me for a stroll in pursuit of delightful scenery and interesting birds, hit me up...seriously, I would love to share.

See the bird?

Brown Creeper

Snow Geese

Not Dead

 

Snowing hard outside the hospital. Plow trucks weaving among the outpatients, trying to keep up with the fall. The ramp is long and snowy and the steps are way up the hill..

A long  way from the tiny, bent-over lady, dressed in white much like the snow. Frail, fragile, not much taller than a child and all alone.

Struggling with her cane to get to the bottom of the ramp through the snow that was inevitably building up between the cars where the plows couldn't go.

I was watching, thinking, "will she let me help her or will she be offended if I ask?" 

Before I could decide, a man came striding down the hill.

"Ma'am can I help you?"

She protested that she was fine, although she clearly wasn't, and was glad he asked. He was firm and gently took her arm and slowly helped her up the hill to the steps, and up them to the door, where she just as firmly insisted that she could take it from there.

Seeing him helping her along, others hurried to offer their help too, but she said, "No, he's got me."

I was never so proud of him...just coming out from a less than wonderful diagnosis himself, although not as bad as it could have been...but his mama taught him right.

Chivalry is not dead, even if it is getting older fast. There were plenty of folks who warned me against marrying him, but I am sure glad that I did.

Well done....

Tree Skins

 

Thanksgiving

 It's a quiet morning here at Northview Farm. I am the only one awake and I relish the peace and silence. The stars were so bright when I walked the dog today, that I swear I can feel them burning from inside the house.

Someone else is making the turkey this year and for this I am downright grateful. The boss has a set of new health issues and that is in the forefront of my mind most of the time. I am glad I don't have to race around juggling the oven and the microwave, turning the tables on the turkey, and all the other madness that goes with making Thanksgiving dinner.

I am glad too that yesterday I sent my mother's Golden Glow salad recipe to our daughter, Liz, who has taken over all the chaos. It was written in Mom's own words, joking asides abounded, and it was like having her here with me just to read it. That recipe has graced (or disgraced, depending on how you feel about gelatin salads) our family's holidays since my Grandma Lachmayer, all the aunties, and my mama, prepared the turkey dinner, while the men went hunting (that hasn't changed much either). I remember well how delicious, yet unsatisfying it always was, like swallowing wet air with a side of fruit and vegetables. I found mama's scalloped corn recipe and sent that one along as well. It was even funnier!

I am grateful the boss and I had another year to ram around the countryside chasing birds, mostly in the local 3-county area, with a couple of side trips to Western and Northern NY, and an adventure to OBX. I don't know how long we will be able to keep it up, but it's fun while it lasts.

Wildly grateful for family, blessed brothers, aunts, an uncle, cousins, nieces, nephews, clever, cute, and talented grandkids, and for our three adult children, each and every one of who could put on today's magical meal and do it well.

Love you guys, and Happy Thanksgiving to all. Hugs!

Connections

With today a whirlwind of blistering change, a chimera of magical technology laced with an underlying horror story full of nightmares, I find myself thinking about how many other changes my generation has seen and our connections with all that ancient history. 

I walk my ten-thousand steps a day listening to W.E.B. Griffin's Corps series in audio book form for the second time through...I read the paper versions too, a while ago. I was not born until two years after the Korean War began and was a baby when the armistice was declared but I am still connected to those days. My uncles must have served in occupying forces because I remember being awed when they came home on holiday leave...Christmas I think...in starched and pressed khakis, (remember starch and ironing boards?) bearing gifts from the other side of the world. My mother had a jewelry box that sported mythical dragons if I remember rightly and we were always warned to be extra careful when we pawed through the paste gems admiring it madly.

And even farther back to the Day that will Live in Infamy, Peal Harbor. Once again I was not born yet, but my parents were. Mom was 8 and remembered the day well. She and her siblings were playing upstairs at the house that grandpa built with his hands, in many cases of used lumber with nails he straightened before using them. There was a landing at the top of the stairs there, with not much of a railing at all and kids could perch over the edge near the kitchen listening to all that went on below. There must have been a radio....or maybe someone came by and told them...but she remembered the hushed tones of shock and horror that rose from below with the warm scent of dinner cooking and the oily air from the kerosene stove, on that fateful day.

And so I am connected to these world events and others, even if I didn't experience them myself. Listening to the books, remembering the stories told at family gatherings before everyone had a cell phone and no one told stories any more, makes me think of historical events like these as closer than the passing years would make them in real life.

I still find it a challenge to throw away a good cardboard box, a battered tee shirt or a still functional length of string, because my grandparents lived through the Great Depression and knew the pangs of hard poverty and loss. They saved everything until it was truly past any possible use and even long after that. I try to be more sensible, but our house is cluttered with things we might use someday.

As I listen, I see Ken McCoy, the main character in the books, as looking like one of my handsome twin uncles in grinning photos from their military days when their visits home were worthy of the utmost joy imaginable. I still feel the energy of Grandma and Grandpa Montgomery's kitchen when all the brothers and sisters and their kids gathered to eat good food and love one another.

I guess that makes me old, but I treasure the connections. I remember the people, the houses, one that exists only in memory, and the tales of times before mine, and the plentitude of years between, and feel connected. 

Shiverish

 

As I sit in a house built of bones of old forest with elixir of beans from a far southern continent, I savor the flavor of seasoned fall gourds...or a reasonable chemical facsimile thereof... plucked sunny from fields just to sparkle my drink.

Somebody's sorrow gourd
Found in the parking lot of a place we bird

I shiver.

The cold has come, is coming and will come. I have made it through my annual challenge. Why must I compel myself to make it harder?

I don't know.

But every year from April to October, I wear shorts.

Every day. 

I count it as a personal failure if I break out my sweats during that interval, but I soldiered through all the way into fall. The weather cooperated.

This year, fool that I am, I decided to shoot for THRU October and have done just fine.

Up until now. The temperature is going well below freezing. The garden is toast....but I am.....not...

Four more days...

Just four more days....

Brrrr...

Also, it is time for two of my most hated jobs of the year. We must dig the cannas and put the insulation board and tarp over the big front doors, in futile hope of keeping out the north wind because that is where they point.

 We stall, and stall, and stall, every single year, until it simply essential to do the job and then we shiver and complain through it.

The cannas are worse. However, the hummingbirds love them so we perservere.

Happy Fall y'all.

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?"

Why is it

 

That there is a soul-deep joy in putting out the plants in the spring, in planting the cannas, in starting tomatoes and whatever strange and mysterious flowers that Becky has bought for me, yet bringing them all in is like a husky black cloud glooming up my day?

I don't know, but there are three rows of canna lilies out there to dig and store, plus a whole batch of the dwarf ones in pots to haul indoors. Ugh. At least the houseplants are in and safe.

BTW, this year and last I saved seed from my favorites of these little ones and grew new plants from them. I tried starting the seeds in peat pellets, which worked somewhat, but germination was poor at best. However I put some right out in the dirt in big pots in the spring and got lovely plants that bloomed eagerly. At five bucks a plant this is a real economy...plus I do love a garden challenge.

We had an incredible haul of tomatoes this year. They must love the hot dry weather we have had. There is still maybe a peck or two out there, mostly pretty green, but we will pick them all and see what happens. Becky has offered to see how fried green tomatoes do in the air fryer, so we can probably use them one way or another. (Update: nothing left out there now, but the Husky Red Cherry tomatoes that haven't ripened yet.)

I am not a winter person, and tending my myriad houseplants over the winter is a poor substitute for a real garden and cheerful flowers any place I can fit a plant. However, October Big Day is Saturday, and the sea ducks should be drifting through in the coming weeks, so there's that....

Happy Fall to All.