Defying Gravity

If you have seen the play “Wicked”, you will have to pause for a moment after reading the title of this blog and sing the song.  A FABULOUS song wasn’t it?  I might also pose the question, “Is gravity getting your down these days?”  Probably, it is.   If you saw the last blog, I mentioned a T-shirt I saw in that ever-entertaining, catalogue, “Wireless”.  It said, “ GRAVITY-IT’S NOT JUST A GOOD IDEA-IT’S THE LAW”.   Love that.

I think we all know, from watching floating astronauts that, yes, it looks like fun to be weightless, but actually, when I take a sip of coffee, I am thankful it goes down my throat rather than floating up to the ceiling.  However, each day we are treated to the sight of animals that defy gravity on a regular basis- the birds.  Of course, they aren’t defying it really, but with the addition of feathers, bones that are hollow and a skull filled with more air sacs than yours or mine, flight can happen and up, rather than down, they go.

However, I can see from watching my “pre-K”, fledglings that flight, of course, takes some practice, and using those wings does take some getting used to. I imagine we have all watched a young robin or other bird species that is more than happy to nest in your immediate vicinity, take those first halting and not always, ending well, flights.  The fledgling that misses the mark in the tree and ends up on your lawn, chirping and chirping for mom, is a sight that was pretty common in June in NE where I grew up.  I was one of those interfering kids who would scoop it up, call it abandoned, and entertain myself endlessly for the next few weeks: finding it worms, meticulously changing its Kleenex nest, “teaching” it, I thought to fly, and then, weeping buckets when it did and left me.

But from my perch near the window, cast propped on a low table, I can see that beyond those tentative flights from the nest, getting the hang of what their wings can do, still takes a while.  The bird feeder nearest the window is hung on a “shepherds hook” and when my little flock of young Titmice come to feed, they more or less have to queue up for a turn.  Whichever one ends up on the curve of the hook tends to momentarily become a victim of gravity and starts to sliiiiiiddde down.  What is amusing is how far down it will slide before it dawns on it to flutter its wings and get back to the top.

Likewise my young and ADORABLE, Carolina wrens, keep alighting on the clothesline, which starts to swing, throwing them off balance and into a fit of fluttering, but still hanging on.  I can’t say I have ever seen any of the adult wrens chose the clothesline as a perching place.  Then there are the insatiably hungry, White Wing Doves which will tackle ANY bird feeder, even those expressly designed for smaller birds and have to beat their wings so much to stay on that I would think they are expending more energy than they are gaining from the seed.

Young Golden Fronted woodpeckers, trying to get at the hummingbird feeder also do more flapping than any adult one, as they try to cling on to the rim and still be able to bend their body to get that long tongue into the hole.  The adults anchor themselves with their stiff tail as they wood in a tree. That skill is coming to these young ones, but it clearly takes learning.

Life is a learning curve for all of us. And I say again, if I had to break a leg, and be confined to the house, I couldn’t have picked a better season to do it in.  If, for any reason, you find yourself indoors when you would rather be out, I invite you to your window.  If you are fortunate enough to have trees or even just a windowsill in the city where pigeons will roost, there will be something to watch. 

And I have a feeling, when the weight of this cast comes off in another 6 weeks, please God,  my left leg will have a rush of feeling like it is pounds lighter and ready to defy gravity too.  Or not; perhaps you who have had experience with this would say “au contraire”, it will feel like a leaden muscle less weight; just gravity, having its way with me again. 

Stay grounded everyone and may you find joy in watching those creatures that aren’t!

Living with Newtonian Principles

As I pointed out in a previous blog, the riding accident I had two weeks ago was a perfect example of the Newtonian principle of motion that states; “An object in motion, remains in motion, unless acted upon by an outside force”.  Check- got that one.  Now as life progresses, momentarily in a wheelchair, I am relearning another one, his third law of motion; “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”.

As the pain has subsided from the “ten plus tears”, thank you God, I have spent the week discovering how to do the things I usually do, at least housekeeping-wise, from a chair on wheels.  I love to vacuum, it’s a personal quirk but there you are, and because I have had dogs for some 28 years now it is good that I do.  10 days without vacuuming resulted in enough billowing dog hair to knit several sweaters, if I were a knitter, which I am not.

No reason I can’t vacuum from the chair, and luckily I still have one of the last rolling canisters.  Now, with the hose over my shoulder, fireman-entering-a building, style, I would roll forward, shove the wand ahead of me, and promptly roll backward.  Newton knew this would happen.  Well, there are brakes on wheelchairs so although it makes it tedious, I brake, push, un-brake, advance, repeat, repeat, repeat and the dust dogs are corralled safely in the canister

not me but you get the idea

This week I decided to add waxing all the wood floors to my wheelchair adventures, and, even though I had to fight that Newtonian principle all the way, I did it.  Go me! and the wood looks great.

Out the window, I see the same principle confounding the youngest of the Scrub Jays.  I have one of those cones you can put corncobs in, ostensibly for the squirrels, but the jays find it worth the effort to try and get the kernels too.  

 The older birds land a heavier blow, which knocks a kernel off; they alight to the ground, then either eat it, or stash it somewhere.  As an aside, I have corn growing in the wildest of places! 

Note to squirrels and jays: corn kernels aren’t keepers like acorns!   As I can’t leave the house for at least a month, no weeding, it will be interesting to see what becomes of my scattered-under-trees, corn plants.  Not much probably, cross pollination being key in corn.  But I digress. 

Whereas mature Scrub jays have the hang of it, the young ones, known by their gawky teenage look and gray rather than blue heads, are discovering Newton’s laws the same way I am.  Same law too: “For every action, there is an equal an opposite reaction.”  The bird pecks the corncob with its bill, which pushes it away from the bird, only to smack back at the bird a second later; Newton’s law at work. The bird’s grip on the trunk of the tree it hangs onto is nowhere near as good as the squirrels so the return blow almost knocks it off the trunk except for a flutter of wings that keeps it in place.   These young birds are not lacking in perseverance and so eventually it too can dislodge a kernel and down to the ground it goes. Hopefully to eat it, not bury it, for it must have worked up an appetite with all that work!

Again, these pre-K learning days for young fledglings are things I never would have seen if I were rushing out to my many volunteer places.  Newton and his many practical observations would have been just words on a page, long forgotten, but now they permeate my days. 

Next blog: “Gravity-it’s not just a good idea- it’s the Law.”  Saw that on a T-shirt and loved it!  I have a ringside seat to how, even fledglings with wings; learn a thing or two about gravity.  

More to come then from the one-legged, window Naturalist-  Pat

How to Eat a Walking Stick the Golden Fronted Woodpecker Way

Should insects ever become an important part of our diet, I have recently been privy to a demonstration of how an 8” Walking Stick is best tackled.  It was one of those “Thank you God” moments when I happened to look out a kitchen window at the right time and see a male, father I presume, offering this HUGE walking stick to his young son (the golden part of the males crest was already coming in).

First the father merely offered it to his charge; lots of “churrrss” from the young one but clearly not certain what he was supposed to do with this giant insect.  So the male, whap, whap, whapped it on the trunk of the tree and offered it again.  This time the fledgling put it in his beak while the dad held on to the other end and acted like it was getting the “juice” out.  Whap, whap again, more, not sucking, for they have no cheeks to do that, but whatever, opening and closing his bill on it to get the good insides and then, they repeated it again.  On the fourth offer the young one actually swallowed it; it was like watching a sword swallower!  Then, lots of beak wiping all around, more “yodelly” woodpecker calls and off they flew to another tree.  Lucky me, to see that!

I have written about the walking sticks before.  That very first spring in TX they were all over my porch and deck, hanging motionless in corners.  They look like they would make great predators but they are plant eaters and presumably the camouflage that is amazing IF they are on a tree, is to keep that little woodpecker breakfast interlude from happening. 

Here though, they have a propensity to hang out on my stucco walls.  “I can see you, you know.”  And so can everything else, easy pickings for these large woodpeckers.  The first spring they were everywhere, doing things that would make me shout, “Get a room!”  Second spring, hardly any, teaching me that, in Texas, just because you see it one year, doesn’t mean you will the next.  The vagaries of rain must be the reason.  Now, this spring, they are back, not as superabundantly as the first year but enough that they give me a start when I am hanging clothes and one is making like a clothesline.  Or walking on the porch roof to wash windows, finding a pair on the wall next to the window I was washing that only chose to move sloth-like away from me when the spray was getting too close.  Didn’t want to blow their cover as sticks by dashing away I guess.

It is a great moment, when you come upon an act of nature, in the act.  With my house confinement while the bone heals I hope to be ringside for many more such “on of a kind” encounters.  It is the silver lining to my broken tibia.  Not only more time to look, but: time to listen in on Animal Behavior classes from MIT, write this blog, see if I could ever sort out which anole is which and other things you are bound to hear about in the coming weeks.

Hoping your eye catches something too that makes you realize the gift of having ring-side seating for some little bit of life happening all around you.

Now you’re Ambulatory, Now you’re Not

I am 63, and so happy to be in shape and able to walk my dog, take hikes, etc.; to have two legs to ambulate on.  And really, I DO think to be thankful.  It’s often a short prayer I say, “Thank you God that I am ambulatory”. 

Well, it looks like I will have to change that prayer for a few months, switch it up to “Thank you God, broken bones heal.”  As I have pointed out before, the majority of these blogs are natural history centered, but occasionally, they become personal history, so here is a slice of my recent life.

I knew when I came to Texas that one thing that might soften the blow would be if I rediscovered my “inner cowboy”.  I rode horses when I was young and into my 30’s until having three children and jumping over fences just didn’t seem compatible; what if I broke something.  So, I stopped cold turkey.  Now just this past January, I got back in the saddle taking lessons in dressage for going over fences didn’t seem like a good idea at my age either. 

As it turns out, it doesn’t take balking at a jump to hurl you out of the saddle, but a simple stumble on the part of your horse while cantering can set the Newtonian law that “an object in motion, remains in motion unless acted upon by an outside force”.  My horse plunged down to his knees and I took flight in a cartoonish way landing directly on my head.  Thank you God for riding helmets and NOT breaking my neck, but somehow, and it will remain a mystery, I DID manage to break my lower left leg. 

Sooo, the life of this wandering naturalist will feature a lot less wandering for the next few months.  Still, I always claim nature and the glory of God are ALL around you, so the back yard view of huge live oaks will have to provide fodder for the next round of blogs. 

Actually, it has already, and because I was so busy with so many volunteer things, I didn’t have time to write.  Now I do.  Once the pain subsides a bit, I shall be back with tales of watching a Golden Fronted Woodpecker feed its fledgling, or try to feed it, a 8” long walking stick.  Bet I never see that again!

So for the moment, think of me as the one-legged, somewhat sidelined naturalist.

Mockingbird Wars

It’s that time of year.  War has broken out in my yard again and it is being waged on two fronts.  The first and very noisy front is the war between the rival mockingbird males whose territory meets at the fence line between my yard and the neighbors.  For the better part of the year they are neighborly to one another, but as they say,  “All’s fair in love and war”, so now that the SECOND round of nesting is under way (yes, my New England friends, here in TX the birds are already, as of early June, on their SECOND batch!), the males are going at it.

It’s easy to tell when a assault is under way, even if I am not in that part of the yard.  The constant “Name that Tune” song of the male switches suddenly into super scold mode and high speed chases ensue, one male driving the interloper out of his territory with maneuvers that would make the Blue Angels proud.

 If you are foolish enough, as I certainly am, to see what the ruckus is about, watch your head.  Last week I decided to go down for a closer look and nearly got hit upside the head by the bird being driven out.  But isn’t it always amazing, that even though clearly I wasn’t their focus of attention, yet I was somehow still on their radar for, at the last minute, he swerved up and over me and a crash was avoided.  Impressive.

The other front to this war is the one I am, once again, losing badly. The “Who can pick or peck the peaches first” war, or plums, or apples.  This house came with fruit trees, not the most bountiful trees and I am not sure why that is.  Is it my lack of gardening expertise?  Maybe not enough water, but whatever, we are never talking about a bumper crop.  So, sadly, there is not enough to share peacefully with one another. 

This year I actually thought these rather non-stop wars between the males would keep their mind off the fruit, but that was wishful thinking.  The plums were coming along nicely, getting red, soon to be purple and I was holding my breath, maybe they would let them be.  But dive-bombing each other sure works up an appetite, so this past weekend, they had at it, and I was forced to gather the rest, still a bit green to finish ripening on the counter.  And we are only talking one bowl of gathered fruit; they once again enjoyed the bulk of the bounty.  To the victor go the spoils.

Now, because I never learn, and also because I know a peach really doesn’t ripen well if picked too green, I am presently hoping, no doubt in vain, that they will leave the peaches alone just a day or two longer. I will be holding my breath as I walk down there this morning to see if the fruit is  on the branch or on the ground.   I really should net the trees, but many have grown too large, an admission of a timid pruner.

 Ah well, back East our supermarket chain had a slogan “Strive for Five” meaning 5 fruits and veggies a day, so I should just accept and embrace even, that I am helping this generation of mockingbirds “Strive for Five”, so that they would be in tip-top shape for the aerial battles that are bound to continue.  Your welcome birds, I hope you enjoy them.

Mystery Solved!

A wind chime hangs outside my bedroom; it makes a lovely yoga meditation bonging in a breeze, a more continuous sound in a storm.  One day, in the midst of a thunderstorm, I noticed it was moving, but hardly making any noise.  When the storm ended I went out to look at it wondering how a wind chime could break when I noticed bundled grass sticking out of each chime.  

Now who was the perpetrator of that?   Some overzealous nesting wren that just got carried away stuffing things? That didn’t seem that likely for never could a wren wiggle into this.  Nor a hummingbird, for nest building is really a pretty preprogrammed thing and they use spider webs, lichens etc.  and  not even the diminutive hummingbird could get itself into one of these tubes, so who?  Some one who was tired of the clanging?

Then, last week, as I was hanging out the clothes, along comes a lovely black wasp, one with a thread waist, and trailing from its legs, was a long piece of grass.  WOW, this is the guy!  And it heads for a small hole in an iron chair, disappears inside and slowly the blade of grass is drawn in behind it.  Amazing!  So, off to Google and it turns out, indeed it IS one of the thread-waisted wasps, Isodontia Mexicana, to be exact.

These are non-aggressive wasps that live throughout North America and make their nests in any existing long holes, a favorite supposedly being behind your storm windows or in my case in a wind chime. 

 They line the nest with grass, make separate chambers, laying one egg in each and then go off to hunt for a nice juicy grasshopper or katydid 

 which they will sting and paralyze, not kill, so that the emerging larvae can dine on fresh grasshopper as it grows.  Then, that larva will pupate and emerge as this lovely black wasp with amber wings.  Won’t I be lucky if I get to see that! 

So, no Zen like wind chime for a while, but I am hoping that when they emerge they must push out the plug, so once the grass is gone the music shall return.  The chair they it is nesting in might need to be sat in with caution for a while.  But a small price to pay for getting this window on an event I never knew about before.  Life is full of such marvelous mysteries and when one gets to be solved it is sweet indeed.