Kleppers!

I grew up watching “All in the Family” with my parents and older sister. We loved its edgy humor. In one episode, Edith Bunker (Jean Stapleton) comes home from shopping with an item she hadn’t intended to buy and never paid for, and becomes convinced that she’s a kleptomaniac. She turns to the camera, a look of abject horror crossing her face. “I don’ wanna be a kleppa!” she wails.

Well, I’ve been collecting incidences of kleptoparasitism here in my yard. Kleptoparasitism describes one animal stealing food from another. Cardinals, it seems, are good at it. This May, I was watching a juvenile eastern bluebird struggling with a large black beetle on the lawn beneath my studio window. An adult male cardinal flew down and displaced the bluebird, which dropped its catch. The cardinal masticated the beetle briefly, then dropped it. Perhaps it was distasteful. Perhaps the klepper cardinal was just being mean.
On August 11, 2005, in the midst of a severe drought, I was watching a robin foraging in the lawn for grasshoppers, there being no earthworms within a yard of the surface. I was feeling bad for the robin, which was processing a hard old crusty grasshopper, when an adult male cardinal came down, bumped the robin and grabbed the hopper. I commemorated that event in a watercolor. I couldn’t help but put a triumphant glint in the cardinal’s eye, and a kind of forlorn look in the robin’s, because that’s what I saw. They’re standing on crispy grass amidst birch leaves that turned brown and fell off the trees—in August.

But the third and most recent instance is my favorite. On May 28, 2008, I was sitting on the front porch, having just called my mom for her 88th birthday. I was idly watching an adult Carolina wren which was perched on the telephone wire. It had a big white moth in its bill, and it was hesitant to come to its nest, which was in a copper bucket just over my head, under the eave. As it perched there, trying to make up its mind whether to blow its cover and bring the food to its young (news flash, Mr. Wren. I put the bucket up there; I know perfectly well you have five babies in it), a large brown bird flew directly at the wren, bumped it chest to chest, and snatched the moth. The wren spiraled down to the ground, caught completely off guard. The brown bird flew right past my astonished face, and as it passed I caught bright rufous in its outer tail feathers and yellow on its belly—a great crested flycatcher! Wow!
How I wish I could have photographed the incident. I had to settle for a photo of one very pissed-off and mothless Carolina wren, who was doubtless wondering what the heck just happened. Nope, didn’t get a photo of the perp. Sorry. But maybe I'll do a painting of the chest-butting, moth-snatching flycatcher assaulting the wren. See? We'll never be able to completely replace artists.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, I would point out that in all three instances, I was calmly watching a common bird going about its business when the kleptoparastism occurred. I was certainly not expecting such cool behavioral interactions; they were completely serendipitous. There is much to recommend watching common birds go about their business, and then making a written record of what you observe.

Because, in the words of R.T. Peterson, "If you don't write it down, it never happened."

Beauty on Ice

Sometimes, when it's so cold you don't even want to stick your nose outside, the colors are so beautiful that you MUST put on coat, hat and gloves and do your duty as an intrepid liver of life. Chet and I walked out to the mailbox to see Phoebe and Liam off to school. The hayfield was a cluster of diamonds.Each stalk of dried Queen Anne's lace was that much lacier.Chet Baker made his way through all that beauty, holding up first one paw and then the other. See how his mouth is all drawn up? That's his cold face.
The milkweed pods had a special magic.Back home at the feeders, things were hopping.

Our gorgeous female hairy woodpecker paused in her search for more suet.

The male red-bellied woodpecker glowed like a hot coal in the single digits.A cardinal offered up his own coals, his tinged with ash.
It's good to get out on cold mornings.


This morning at daybreak, I heard three peents from a woodcock in the field. Just three peents, no display flight. "I'm here. But it's too cold to think of love." I was glad to hear him, and I wondered what he'd been through. While we were gone, our feeders all went empty; all the Zick dough I'd labored to make up in advance had never been put out. It had been in the single digits and we'd had four inches of snow, topped with ice. I grieved for my bird friends, what they'd been through in the worst of the winter without me to help them. Today, I put out three feedings of Zick dough, and three bluebirds, a bunch of cardinals, a red-bellied woodpecker, and the leucistic junco Snowflake (who I've renamed Queen Frostine) came to partake. They're so glad I'm home, and I'm so glad to see them! I know they don't need me as much as I think they do.

I'm running around, re-provisioning, taking out garbage, doing laundry, cooking, watering, digging out. Treated myself to a Shila massage, trying to re-align muscles and bones bent by carrying a backpack full of lead-weight optics all over Guatemala and North America. I was amazed how much more in-tune I felt after some adjustment.

I hope frosty scenes like these will be a distant memory now, in the latest, coldest early spring I can remember. The daffodils are budding anyway. Here's a little titmouse. He looks as wistful for balmy breezes as I feel right now.It's about time for some Guatemala color, don't you think?

Attention-seeking Birds

This morning dawned brilliantly clear, standing at 18 degrees. Last night, the kids and I danced in and out of our warm house every ten minutes or so, dragging ourselves off the couch to check on the total lunar eclipse. American Idol; lunar eclipse. From the ridiculous to the sublime.

First there was a nibble, then a bite, and finally at about 10:15 the entire disc of the moon was covered in shadow. The snow, once brilliant silver in the moonlight, took on a dull pinkish glow, and the night deepened like velvet. The moon was viscous and dull, swirled with burnt orange and violet. My photographs are hopeless. Some things must be left to the pro's, with their tripods and timed exposures. Resting a 300 mm. zoom telephoto lens on the top of one's daughter's shivering head produces less than admirable results. She is tall enough to serve as a tripod now, but I needed a bit more light than was offered by the slowly surrendering moon.

Liam was spooked, and he didn't want to be alone in the house with the moon doing things like that, so he put his coat on and trudged out with me and Phoebe to look, too. I have to think that eclipses were strange and scary to early people who, like Liam, couldn't have understood what was happening. Lunar eclipses make my heart race, but solar eclipses make me run around in circles, helplessly wondering. Have you ever seen birds fly to their roosts in a total solar eclipse? I have, twice, once when I was a child in Virginia and once here in Ohio, in early May of 1993. I love freaky nature, nature that's bigger and stronger and stranger than any of us.

Cold as it was, it was such a beautiful morning. I scuttled from window to window in the house, snapping pictures of the birds clustered around it. They come here for the food and the cover, and yes, for the sight of me inside, and for the hope that I'll emerge to stoke their feeders full again. Make no mistake, they are hoping to get my attention by sitting close to the windows, looking decorative. Ahem? Sunflower's getting low. I am beautiful, no? Feed me.


Hello, Zick? Juncos like suet dough. They like it a lot. Here's my feathery butt. Cute, yes? Feed me.There's been a big influx of goldfinches lately. They love the gray birches we have planted all around the house, and they work on the seed cones as they wait for a place at the feeders.
Junco tracks give silent testament to the wildlife value of gray birches. Think of birches as showering food all winter long, and you have them from a junco's eye view. No wonder juncos like snow. It makes their food so easy to see.

I have to confess that the junco tracks are a bit more concentrated around the front door, where I throw suet dough several times a day.These are the tracks of a single dawn, in the twilight hours before I get up, put on my rubber clogs, and go out to slop the juncoes. Yes, it's ridiculous. We have a lot of birds at Indigo Hill. And I love each and every one of them, down to their little pink toenails. Don't think they don't know it. In cold like this, in late February, when the daffodils should be blooming, as should the Norway maples, they make me feel needed.Have a wonderful weekend. Ours started yesterday, with a snow day. Just another four-day weekend for my barely-educated kids. When people ask, "You must home-school, right?" I answer, "Yes, in the winter, whether I like it or not."