Checking the Frog Puddles

A particularly handsome American toad.

The summer posts will keep coming for awhile. My laptop is back at Apple, having given about twenty high-pitched death wails in a row (a nerve-jangling experience) before I removed the battery and silenced it. I'm working off a small reservoir of photos, now undoubtedly consigned to eternity, that I uploaded before the hard drive committed hara-kiri. Best case scenario will see it back here with its hard drive erased...again. I've got 40 days remaining on my 3-year AppleCare contract, pffft. Everybody make a little sacrifice to the technology gods for me. I'm working on Old Slow, who tries but can't do much any more, as her operating system is too old to accept upgrades. She says they hurt. But enough about me and my screwed up computer. Boooring. Frogs and toads, frogs and toads.

Bluebirds aren’t all we check on our rounds. This has been such a wonderful wet summer that our frog puddles on the oilwell access road have been stocked with taddies all season. Green, wood, mountain chorus frog, spring peeper, Cope’s gray treefrog and American toads have all successfully fledged from their muddy depths. Heavenly! You hear so much bad news about frogs lately I thought I'd pass along some good news.

The kids love to go look. In a concession to the abundant ticks on our place this year, they don kneesocks.

Liam was adamant that I not photograph him in red kneesocks, as he did not appreciate my observation that he strongly recalls Christopher Robin when he wears them. So I shot him from the back, to preserve his dignity, at least for the moment.



A child can get lost in a puddle, watching the tadpoles surface for a quick gulp of air, watching the water striders skitter on its thin skin.



Perhaps Indigo Hill’s teeny-weeniest vertebrate: a newly metamorphosed spring peeper.

If there’s a smaller spined soul on the place, the Science Chimp has yet to catalogue it.

A soul so small, yet to itself so dear (paraphrasing Bobby Burns).

Liam eventually relaxed his no-photos policy enough to make some goofy jumps while I crouched at ground level, hooting in delight. The Bacon joined in, but his leaps were somewhat less spectacular.



Phoebe’s “Let’s Go Bananas” t-shirt seems particularly appropriate. Here’s to kids who are willing to make beautiful fools of themselves. May they grow up into adults who feel likewise.

Checking the Bluebird Boxes

Two weeks is a long time to leave one’s boxes in bluebird nesting season. Lots of things can happen while you’re gone. One of the last things I did before leaving for Trinidad was check the boxes, and checking them will be one of the first things I’ll do on getting home. Right now, I'm putting away food from our apres-vacation trip to Columbus' twin emporiums of foodie pleasure: Trader Joe's and Whole Foods. I'm also spraying scale-infested orchids, burning trash, taking stock of the (well-watered) gardens, emptying the dishwasher, sorting mail, hugging Chet Baker and kissing Charlie, smooching the kids, reading 305 emails, cleaning Charlie's room, trying to figure out what's for dinner, tracking the rotten smells in the fridge...you know the drill.

The kids usually come along when we check boxes. Here, Liam gently touches some nestling bluebirds before Daddy hangs the Gilbertson PVC box back up on its post.



Sometimes one or more eggs don’t hatch, and when I’m sure there’s no hope that they will (after the other nestlings are three days old) I open them up to see what’s what. Almost always, they turn out to be infertile, and the embryo has never developed. Phoebe holds a couple of infertile eggs about to have theirselfs analyzed. She's working on her naturalist Vanna White chops.


And then there are the eggs that do hatch. I love opening the box at just the moment of hatching.

A bluebird hatchling, having pipped and cut all around the big end of his egg prison, wears his shelltop like a helmet. Enh! Enh! I closed up the box and tiptoed away.



When they’re very young, nestlings think I’m Mom, and they beg for food at the slightest stimulus.



It’s good to be back, and see things like this again.

Headed Home

Here's just a little bit of what I miss right now. Ohhhh, I miss my babies.

I'm writing from Port of Spain, Trinidad, where we've been at the airport for two hours, waiting for our delayed flight to Houston, and then to Columbus. It's green season here, and there are intermittent showers and rainbows. The airport is air conditioned. Having been mostly without climate and humidity control for two weeks, that in itself is a marvelous thing.

We had the most wonderful time. If you didn't see Bill of the Birds' blog post on July 24, go check it out. I got to touch leatherback turtles and all. There's so much more. But I'm just sayin'.

Two solid weeks of tropical birding and trekking around in monsoon season is something, my friends, and I feel like I've been on the vacation of a lifetime with my big sweetie, the first trip we've taken together for fun in four years. Mmm. But I'm ready to be home, ready to see how much it rained and how my plant babies fared, ready to hold and love our kids, who have been besporting themselves in Vermont with dear friends, ready to smooch Charlie and Chet Baker, ready to sleep in my own bed and cook my own food.

I have nearly full memory cards, and if you recall that's where my fun started a couple of months ago, with an overloaded computer and a constipated camera. We shall see...I'm braced.

Chet Baker to Phoebe: Happeh Birthday!

Hello everyone. It is me, Chet Baker.


photo by Phoebe Linnea Thompson


My sister Phoebe turns 13 today, at 11:49 AM. That was the exact moment that she came into the world. When they dried her off she had a little twist of bright red hair on top of her head. Everyone was amazed. Mether had been in labor for about a day and a half at that point but she forgot it all when she saw that baby. She says that baby looked right back at her and said hello with her eyes. If I had been there I would have sniffed her all over and then washed her face for her. I would have liked to sniff her ears and toes. But I was not there. I was not even born yet.


Phoebe likes it when I put my paws like this. We call it Steamboat Round. Cats think they are the only people who can do Steamboat Round, but they are wrong. Certain dogs can do it too. Certain handsome, flexible, sleek dogs like me, Chet Baker.

Phoebe said that the thing she wanted to wake up to on her birthday morning was a kiss from me, Chet Baker. I can understand why that would be so. I give the best kisses. Mether and Daddeh took me into her room this morning and I gave her a whole bunch of kisses.

I kiss Phoebe all the time, because she is the sweetest girl I know. She is very smart and funny and she picks ticks off me and makes me do my tricks and takes me for walks where we look for bunnehs and chiptymunks. I am learning how to run alongside her when she rides her new bicycle. It is fun. I am not supposed to cut in front of her, no matter what I see. Unless it is turkehs. They are the best things to chase. We spend a lot of time together.

However she is getting very big, and last week Mether was talking to her and all of a sudden Mether walked right up and touched her nose to Phoebe's, which is something I do all the time, and then Mether gasped and said something about Phoebe being taller than she is, which she is, I had noticed it awhile ago. Mether who is five feet five inches and who wishes she were taller so her Body Mass Index would look better says it happened overnight, while everyone was sleeping. Since Phoebe has always been taller than me I did not see what the big deal was. She is thirteen now, she should be big. If she was a dog she would be in the Old Folks Home.

It seems to me that Phoebe is just going to keep getting bigger and bigger. She is probably going to keep getting more beautiful, too. I am not sure she can get any smarter but she can probably learn a lot of new tricks. I do not know what is going to become of that girl, but it is something good I am sure.

Dictating my thoughts to Mether always makes me sleepy. My eyes start closing and my head droops and I fall asleep right where I am, which is right where I want to be.


I hope that Phoebe will always let me sleep on her lap, because she is the sweetest girl I know.

Happeh Birthday, Phoebe.

Love,

Chet Baker

Fledging Day for the Wrens

When you start seeing pale feathery necks and throats, you know those babies are getting big.


Carolina wrens do not stay in the nest very long. They develop at an incredible rate, being capable of flying at only 12 days after hatching! Please pause to think about that. On Day 1, it's a squirming pink blob of protoplasm the size of your thumbnail. On Day 12, it's almost fully feathered and capable of flight. FLIGHT! What were you capable of on Day 12? Sucking, sleeping, crying and pooping, that's what.

Even I could walk on Day 12, Mether.


When you've been around baby birds a lot, you just KNOW when they're going to fledge, almost as well as their parents do. Carolina wrens give a special squirking call when they get to fledging age. These birds got real jiggy around 10:30 AM on June 23, then settled down for the rest of the day. I knew, knew, knew that 10:30 AM June 24 would be the witching hour, the day they left. And wouldn't you know it, I had an interview scheduled on WOSU Columbus for 10-11 AM on June 24. I had to be up in the tower room, blabbing on the phone about me and my book, Letters from Eden. Can I get an ARRRGH? I mean, these birds were fledging as I was speaking and there was nothing I could do about it. Well, there was something I could do about it. I could give my camera to Phoebe, and SHE could capture the moment I'd been waiting a month to see...

First baby on the rim. Mom below. Photo by Phoebe Linnea Thompson.

Not only that, but my camera battery crapped out on Phoebe as this was happening. She couldn't find my spare, so without bothering me (because my kids know when Mom's doing an interview, nobody can interrupt), she grabbed Bill's camera, put my telephoto lens on it, and resumed shooting. Fledging was not going to wait for me, she knew that. Now that, my friends, is a useful twelve-year-old girl.



She is very useful as a pillow, I know that, Mether.

If you'd like to listen to the interview with WOSU's wonderful Charlene Brown (and hear how jiggy I was, knowing the wrens were fledging right downstairs!!), listen here.

Photographing Kids

Liam on the Pig of Good Fortune.


When I take photos of other people’s kids they invariably stop what they’re doing, spin around to face me, and flash a camera smile, one that has nothing to do with anything, and isn’t a happy smile anyway. It’s just a face they’ve been conditioned to make when they see a camera. Who wants to see that? I want to see what they were doing before they noticed the camera.

He doesn’t know how beautiful he is to me. He doesn’t understand why I take so many pictures of him, but he usually doesn’t mind, either, and that’s why I get photos that mean something, not just grinny static snapshots, but little pieces of his soul.

When he does pose for me I wait until he's almost done posing to take the photo. When he's done making the face, the real Liam creeps back.


Phoebe is proving as elusive as a fawn where photography is concerned. I have a tough time catching her off-guard. It's all part of growing up, of half-hour showers and picking out just the right outfit for any situation, no matter how inconsequential; of the self-consciousness that comes from having your body change overnight into something entirely other than what it was.

So I stay back, behind, hoping to find her lost in thought or in something she's doing.

And marvel, because every image tells of the growing.


She waits for the bus, dawn finally painting the sky before she boards. It's been such a long, dark winter, and we'd just gotten a little daylight to enjoy when Daylight Savings Time plunged us back into darkness. It seemed counterintuitive, to call it that, to take it away on the blessed morning end. Finally, the birds are singing when we meet the bus. Just in time for school to end.

She stands under the sentinel pin oak that has weathered so many storms, so many fences, so many snowplows and graders, even had a chicken of the woods fungus poking out of its belly button two years ago. Still it stands, and each morning it watches this young sapling grow.