Babies, Bill, Baker

At the brand-new birding festival in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia at the end of September, Bill and I hosted a birding clinic for kids. It was a hoot! It was raining lightly, but there were gobs and gobs of bluebirds and cedar waxwings and woodpeckers, and we just put the spotting scope on them and handed out binoculars and had a ball hearing the gasps and exclamations of kids getting their first good look at a bluebird or a flicker. Great Swarovski optics help. Yes, that was a product placement, but one for which I receive no compensation. I'm just sayin'.

Look at the hands on this little guy. His mom is telling him not to touch the scope, and he's doing his best. Ohhhhh....baby hands, curled up, does that do as much for you as it does for me?

Barely more than a baby, he was so intrigued by what everyone else was seeing (bluebirds) through Bill of the Birds' scope that he insisted on having a look for himself. I'm not sure he got much satisfaction, but at least he got to be a big kid for awhile. Swarovski binocs, no less, dimpled knuckles. OK. I am a baby freak.
Sooo sweet. Agggh. He brought me to my knees. Gimme one of those. Of course, I was flashing back heavily to Liam's baby days when the only name he answered to was Po Po. I have a weakness for little blonde boys. I am the kind of person who chooses the grocery line that has a baby in it, so I can mess with the baby, talking to it, trying to get a smile; talking to the mom, just digging that baby. I was always a little afraid of them until I had my own. Now I can't get enough of them. I can feel Nature preparing me for the next life passage--watching my own "red-headed, limber elf" grow up. And someday have her own. Who I will walk off with for hours at a time, rocking side to side.

I was talking about Bill before I got onto babies. I miss him. Thanks to our mutual travel schedules, we'll see each other for parts of only five days in five weeks. Days which will be spent packing and unpacking. He returned from a week away in Panama on Monday, flying into Columbus, while I left for a week away on Monday, flying out of Akron. We did not meet in the middle. Not even a shared burger at Max and Erma's. Glamorous as all get out, traveling is.

So I'm feeling like looking at pictures of my absent mate. Holding a baby, so much the better. Sigh...

Bill is very generous in helping others see birds. He's famous for it at festivals nationwide.

He even helps little brindle people see birds.
Oh, yes, Daddeh. Now I see the vulture. Thank yew.

Chet Baker, that is a bluebird.

It looked bigger in the binoculars. Well. Do you have any new toys for me?

All right. That's enough sweetness and light. If you read the mountaintop removal posts here
and here, and they moved you, I implore you to read this editorial in the New York Times. It's short. One page. Read it.

In short, because both Barack Obama and John McCain have expressed opposition to mountaintop removal mining, the Bush Administration is rushing to remove the last environmental regulation remaining that slows permit applications for mountaintop removal mining, leaving more miles of Appalachian streams open to being buried in valley fill operations.

Somebody explain to me why coal companies should be exempt from environmental impact regulations. Because they completely destroy the environment, so there's nothing left to impact? Oh, I get it.

Isn't 1,200 miles of streams buried too much already? The huge coal companies, with the regulation re-writes by Bush administration lawyers, are tearing our mountains down around us, burying and poisoning our rivers and streams, burying and poisoning the people of Appalachia. Please, please read it, and then go here to take speedy action. You'll go to a page on ilovemountains.org that will help you both to find your Federal representative and virtually instantly email your opposition to this race to destroy Appalachia before a more enlightened administration is able to take hold. It is a nation of termites, getting that coal now, getting it fast, leaving a wasteland behind.

If you like this blog, you gotta pay for it somehow. Do it. Thanks, Patty, for the heads up on this fresh, sneaky and devastating assault on our mountains, our streams, our wildlife and our people.

Chet Baker, Baby Magnet

You gotta love this little cheesebox in her itty bitty Steelers dress and even tinier Krocs. Lookit those LEGS! The slightly bigger one is a piece of work, too. I like taking pictures of little kids as much as I like taking pictures of dogs, flowers and birds. They're in kind of short supply around our house.

There's something about the friendly, wide-open face of a Boston terrier that attracts adults and kids alike. They just look like nice doggies, perpetually puppylike and cute. And they are. Chet Baker loves little kids and babies; he strains at the leash to go greet them. At 2 1/2, he's ceased jumping up on people except when he's home and greeting them in the driveway or at the door. So there's little danger that he'll bowl anyone over, and parents appreciate that.
Chautauqua is a bastion of cute, cute babies, little pink bald babies, lots of strawberry blonde ones, and even one that was almost the spitting image of Phoebe, with wise ice-blue eyes and tufts of red hair. Her name was Maya, and I ate her up with my eyes, remembering. Of course I had no camera. Rats.
But I was armed and ready for this little Steelers fan. Oh, my. What an angel, set on earth. There are lots of folks from Pittsburgh up here.
This sweet little boy was enamored of Chet, but already had been taught enough about dogs to offer Chet the back of his chubby little hand to sniff before petting him. Babies know so much more than we give them credit for.
photo by Bill of the Birds

We're in what I dubbed the Dog Zone of the big open-air amphitheater at Chautauqua. It's over on the right side, and during a big concert there will be five to ten different dogs there, listening with their owners just outside the gates. I prefer hanging out in the Dog Zone to sitting on the hard wooden pews, because if we feel like having some ice cream, we can saunter off without offending anyone. Also, I am now a dog person.

It was really fun to have Chet up in New York with us. People enjoy meeting him and asking about him, and we enjoy introducing him to them, and to other dogs. The most common comment: What a nice little dog. I 'd like to have a dog like that. (Sure to make any dog owner glow inside.)photo by Bill of the Birds

This was Baker's third season at Chautauqua. He was just a puppy of 9 months when he first came here. He knows the apartment like the back of his paw, and it was hilarious to see him scoot down the stairs and charge around inside, remembering the place and its smells when we first arrived. He was ecstatic when we arrived and put his bed in the living room, because for the entire ride up (7 hours) he was apprehensive that we might just drop him off in the kennel on our way here. That dog thinks too much. He was to sleep all the way home, knowing the destination.Note taut leash. Most of the time, Chetty pulls so hard on that thing you could twang it like a banjo string. It's an UpCountry Lead. Man, those are nice leads and collars. Hard to go back to the cheap stuff when you've used them! His pattern is the lavender dragonfly, called Meadow. Phoebe thinks it's a bit fey, but I say he's man enough to wear lavender.

There are so darn many fancy dogs up here that I was sure we'd spotted my first duck-tolling retriever. But he turned out to be a golden retriever x border collie. Jeff Gordon, my personal dog guru, had him guessed right. Overall, Chet's been a perfect gentleman on this trip, at least when meeting strange dogs. I'm discouraged about his leash skills, though; he pulls like a husky no matter how many times I correct him with a sharp word and yank of the leash. Like, hundreds of times. Chet, no pull! (yank). Chet, no pull! (yank) CHET! NO PULL! (yank). Stop. Take him by the muzzle. Talk sternly to him. Resume walking. Chet! No pull! That's the sound track for our walks. I'm about desperate enough to get him a Halti collar, though I wonder whether it will work on his super-short nose. He is as strong as a husky, too. My arms are sore! Any tips on leash-straining dogs would be more than welcome. To save you time: We also try the ploy of stopping dead when he's straining hardest; of shortening up the leash the more he pulls, and even of turning around and going the opposite direction for awhile, then going the direction he wants to go when he stops pulling. Arggggh. I will not resort to a choke chain, or something that hurts him when he pulls. We probably wouldn't have this problem had I been willing to do that.

Footnote: I did make some progress in our last walk, when I pulled the leash straight up, momentarily lifting his front feet off the ground, every time he tightened up on it. That got his attention, and he was better after that. But, to allude back to Katdoc's training advice, which is never to try to make your dog other than what it was bred to be, I feel like I'm fighting a basic breed trait: boundless enthusiasm for life. It's part of what I love about Chet. And I think it's what makes him pull at the leash, so eager for the next experience. But man, I wish he'd shape up.

Now I'm going to sit back and collect advice from dog people. Let's see what y'all can do.