Woodpeckers From My Life List

Today, on the playground I was distracted from a truly delightful mommy conversation by the lisping call of an acorn woodpecker! Right there in the middle of a suburban play area, across from the plastic twisty slide...there was a colony of acorn woodpeckers, Melanerpes formicivorus!!!  I took a minute away from my totally normal friends who are not magnetically drawn to woodpeckers and got to see them working away at peppering their telephone pole cum larder with holes, each one a storage hole for a meticulously shelled acorn meat. Totally exciting! I had wanted to see these guys ever since reading about them as a little girl. Most woodpeckers are pretty solitary, feeding from suet at windows around other individuals but mostly operating solo unless its mating season. This woodpecker builds a larder of acorns together with other frien


ds, male and female and shares nesting and incubating duties with other couples....its like a commune woodpecker! So California! I love it.

 When I was maybe 10 or so my sisters and I found an old woodpecker nest by mistake. We were knocking over deadwood in the area of the woods where we liked to play and we snapped open a deceased maple tree about six inches in diameter and there, in the snapped open trunk with a carved open cavity with the old nest, a shockingly minimal pile of woodshavings leftover from the excavation in the bottom. We were pretty fascinated by it and I remember feeling so lucky to find such a hidden thing. Google "downy woodpecker nest" and see how many people are getting glimpses inside of one. Its a pretty rare pleasure.

Anyhow, this was a whole new woodpecker that I had never seen before....we have no woodpeckers here in our yard at Orange Blossom Cottage, just jays, towhees, mockingbirds, crows and lot of assertive little hummingbirds. I miss them. They are a fixture of northern feeders and were an iconic part of my childhood bird watching. I used to leaf through field guides and make mental lists of birds and flowers that I wanted to see someday that seemed exotic and faraway...things that had range maps that were nowhere near Michigan. And there I was, a responsible 36 year old mother, transfixed by the sight of a one of those birds on my  imaginary lists, while suburban mothers around me offered their children goldfish crackers and placidly reapplied sunscreen. Its truly fantastic how life doesn't always wait for a "natural moment" to hand you a wonderful pleasure. I had to take a minute to swallow down my mania before I was ready to go back and join the group again. Some of the best victories have to stay private because only truly odd people can sometimes understand our own little fixations.

We spent a long time more lingering there while the kids shrieked and ran through the splash pad and we moms had many enlightening, comforting and hilarious conversations, someone got stung by a yellow jacket and we pack and unpacked our lunches over and over as kids ran in and out of our circle taking and returning bits of food and stray flip flops. I love a good playground lingering anyhow, especially if its with ladies that fill my cup and make me smile but my favorite kind of open ended recharge session plus a childhood bucket list item....that's a secret victory if ever I heard of one! And its only Monday, folks!

Interview With A 7 Yr Old Inventor

This is homeschool. Ru spent all of quiet time working privately on this project and then showed up at my side while I was working and said, "Hey, Mom. Look!"

Bird Study + Lego +Free Time + Seven Year Old Brain......

                                        =This!

 Sometimes my kids drive me crazy. Sometimes they amaze me.

Poetry Friday: Nest Song

Happy Poetry Friday! Its nesting season and all around the house we are watching pairs of birds defending territory, mate and build homes. In honor of all the bustle I am using one of my natural treasures as a writing prompt. I found this sweet little nest wedged into a dooryard shrub after all the leaves had come down in winter in the center of a secret maze of branches.

Ornithology
A bird is a dandy, a primping sheik,
A textile wizard, with a needled beak.
A nest is a circular, spiral of life,
An egg cup holding potential flight.
A chick is a greedy, squeaking wheel,
A pin-feather craft with a wobbling keel.
A flock is whirling, southward gust,
A chattering ballet in the autumn dusk.
A birder is a lonely and  desperate scout
A sentry of skies and feeder lookout.
A old nest in winter is his private proof,
An avian placard on the cupola roof.

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend! We are celebrating Ru's 7th birthday and there may be some bird watching, some nest hunting and eating of malted milk ball eggs.

Wee Sculpters

Had to share these cool paper-mache sculptures the boys have been making. We've been studying birds in science and Ru had the bright idea to make models of some of the birds we've been reading about. They carefully sculpted and painted them themselves, using our big family bird book as reference. Mostly the littler boys are playing along while Ru and I read about birds together. Jolly times though, learning about how the blue jay's favorite food in the world is acorns and how long a cardinal lives vs a blue jay! Next up he has a plan to make a life sized model of a blue jay nest, complete with stones picked from the beach painted to look like songbird eggs. We may present at our local monthly homeschool sharing night!

Poetry Friday: A Moment of Peace

Happy Poetry Friday to you all! I hope the weekend carries you off into a pillowed August dream, full of sunbeams and ripe peaches, distant lawnmowers and cicada song.

Image via Wikipedia

Today I am playing with a little poetic device, one of those mind tricks to peer out over the edge of "the box" and get my brain thinking differently. I started with a list of one syllable words with the challenge being, to try to write a poem of entirely one syllable words...in fifty words or less. I can get too wordy way too fast. I need to work on being succinct, so this is me, practicing.

Image by rpongsaj via Flickr

The Bracelet

In the pink new day
While my spouse snores
I sip back stoop tea
And let my ear wind
Skeins of high bird song,
Sweet thread with no heft,
Each scale thrown in a loop
Eyes closed, I knit them snug
A braid of peace for my wrist.

Today, you can find the other Poetry Friday participants offering all kinds of great verse at Karen Edmisten's blog. Hop on over and have a little look see!

I'll be back, on Monday!

Hawk's Nest

We have a gigantic white pine towering over our house. It is about two or three stories taller the top of our big three story colonial, a giant of a tree. I love the feeling of it's sturdy hulk staking the property lines to the top of our hill. The neighbors say that there were once several big pines like that scattered on our lot. Now the only one left is that one lone giant, rooted just over the hedge on the nuns property (yes, our next door neighbors are a convent full of extremely warm sisters).

Our drive in October

Even though it is a magnificent tree it is perilously close to our house which means both that in the fall our drive is showered with a stunning carpet of golden needles in the fall and that I sit shuddering in my bed every high wind rainstorm that we get, listening to the old tree creaking and moaning right over our heads wondering if someday it will fall crashing into our roof and saw off our master bedroom or go galumphing through to the sunroom below.

Image by Tilton Lane via Flickr

When the tree guys starting coming by giving estimates to chop down the diseased hemlocks and the large straggling chokecherry we sure thought wistfully about making a call on our neighbors to discuss dismantling their giant in the bargain. That is, until we realized that the pair of red-tailed hawks we've seen wheeling over the house had mated and nested, right in the top of the great tree. I can't blame them. I'd nest there too if I was in the neighborhood. The have clearly picked carefully the biggest, most secure spot in the area and although I'm sure it is a bit chilly in a stiff wind (the tree is at the tippy top of the hill we live on top of) it has to have a regal view and feel like the best place around to bring up your young. We nested next door, clearly we thought it was a good spot too.

The king pine

The whole idea of taking the tree out will have to wait for a later date but more importantly, in the meantime we have the privilege of having a family of hawks raised up right next to us. I am pleased that I decided to go for bees instead of backyard chickens and thinking fondly of the effect on local bunny rabbits and voles that might be so unlucky as to discover our vegetable garden.

One of our hawk parents leaving the nest

 You can already hear loud cheeping when you walk down the driveway and see one of the parents swoop out of the tree, heading for the heat vents high over our hill. I haven't been able to locate the nest so far, somewhere in the heart of the tree, far from prying eyes but I keep looking, figuring one of these days I'll figure out where to look when I see the parents looping in and out. Now I need to get out, on the double, and get a pair of binoculars.

Related articles

• Hawk Cam | Live From the Nest (cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com)
• High-Rise Hawk in a Tangle (cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com)

Books and Birds and Buds

There is a pair of hawks swooping around our block lately. They shriek together while they soar high over the convent next door and in the morning I often watch them preening in the tops of the very tall maples across the street. I stand in tadasana and then swan dive down towards my yoga mat while they shift and ruffle feathers and the wind silently blows their tails in chill flutters. I hope they will decide to nest nearby. I'd love to see a nesting pair of hawks raise their young. I've never seen birds so big so familiarly. And maybe the local feral rabbit count will go down too which could be good for my vegetable garden, eh?

I am slowly getting bits and bobs of the house together. Today I moved some of the rugs and art work around and yesterday I figured out how to hang a mask I wanted to display. It's all stop and go and a painfully slow process but I feel like at least the motion is forward. And I know that soon...I'll be all outdoors minded and it will be all that I can do just to make myself wash the dishes, hang the rest of the house.

View into the sunroom/studio

Ru and I are reading aloud the rest of The Little House books again...we have worked our way through the first two and are beginning the third and A is reading Farmer Boy at night. I am not sure why I use the phrase "work through" the right label is "burned through" or "tore explosively through" or some other wildly manic phraseology. It is all I can do to keep the reading sessions down to an hour at a time. He's so thrilled to listen that he will beg and beg for it continue no matter where I leave off. If only I didn't want to sit there reading all day long myself. Heh. I don't know where he gets it.

The last of our snow, in that little sloping pile behind Dee.

The latest garden plan at the moment is a standard, tree-form wisteria. I was ready to give up the wisteria dream. All garden types say it is absurdly invasive and no matter the heartbreaking beauty of the plant it is evil and it will send four million runners all over your lawn and worm a thousand robust fingers up your gutters and then beginning to tear lustily at your siding.

Promising looking buds on our forsythia!

Yes, but I do love it and I have dreamed of having wisteria for years and years and A says I shouldn't live so safely. Claim a dream. I'm thinking that the grafted tree form varieties I've read about seem safer...less prone to runners and wildly unkempt habits than their vining relatives. How does this one look? The next question is: "Do I have to keep it in a planter in order to survive co-habitation with said plant? I wouldn't put mint in the ground to save my life...am I insane to consider plunking a wisteria down?

Related articles

• 13 Reasons to Grow a Vegetable Garden. (frugalupstate.com)
• Hawk's Nest (wvcabins.wordpress.com)
• My Hawk Friend (40dreams.wordpress.com)
• How is a hawk's nest different than a blue jays (wiki.answers.com)
• Yep, the FDNY rescues hawks, too (nydailynews.com)
• Proud to Read Aloud (thereaderonline.co.uk)