About that Parallel Universe

I am not sure if I wrote about this here in the blog or in a letter to friends, but there are many times that, inconceivable as this may seem, I often feel like I am living in a parallel universe of my life on the Cape. Inconceivable, for in no way would you generally confuse Texas with Cape Cod, but here are some of the things that seem like carbon copies of my old life.

First, I am sure I have mentioned that volunteering at the nature center here is pretty identical to the joy I had working at Greenbrier on the Cape. (Minus the paycheck I suppose!) It provides an excuse to romp about in nature with enthusiastic children, to share the thrill of discovering something new. Often, as common as the flowers or deer scat may be, these kids, although this is their home, haven’t noticed them before. Yes, deer scat is a dime a dozen, but going further to decide whether the producer was, buck, doe or fawn makes it more interesting.
Whether or not it is “hot out of the oven and steaming” or dried up to raisinettes is something else to take note of. So the joy I am having at “work” is one parallel I am overwhelmingly thankful for.

Because of all the rain, and we have had a lot of rain, praise God, the world is looking as green as Ireland. And the parallel here is the intense and beautiful green of the salt marsh in June is mirrored in these lush green grasses that are not only along the Guadalupe River, but now in most any pasture that isn’t 100% limestone and caliche. (the local clay) My own yard, although mostly made up of these wonderful varieties of wildflowers, still has enough grass, trees and vines to look more like the Daintree forest of Australia than a Texas scene.

And although I recently wrote that the “Air was full of Vultures”, the other day, while out gardening, I heard that familiar twittery chatter, looked up and saw about 30 swallows circling overhead. Yeah! I still am not sure what type they are, I know who they are NOT, not tree, or barn, or martins, but maybe cliff swallows, the ones that congregate under a nearby underpass. For that matter, I was trying to identify them through binoculars as I waited at a red light, but the grayness of the day, and the worry that some impatient driver might not take too kindly to someone bird watching from behind the wheel, made me give up the quest, but I do think the ones over my yard are from the same crowd. And in a parallel to watching the tree swallows on the Cape, they have the same mysterious habit of being there by the hundreds one day, and all gone the next. I am not sure if they are nesting under the bridge. For the same aforementioned reason that slowing down to look for nests when the light has just changed would not be smiled upon. But if they have built nests than they seem pretty lackadaisical about their care.

One last parallel and I will let you go. Right about now, end of March, early April, on the Cape I would be delighting in the return of chipmunks to the deck. I always used to put out sunflower seeds in a large conch shell for them right outside my kitchen window. They provided hours of amusing antics, climbing in the shell to eat, chasing each other around the shell etc. Without fail some one or the other would turn up one day with only a stump of a tail, clearly having escaped a near death experience, and for the rest of the season it would go by the name of “Stumpy”, pronounced more like “Schtumpy” with a German accent. Well, no chance of a “schtumpy” here, or so I thought, for chipmunks don’t live here. But, what skitters across my path on the deck the other day, also returned from a season of hiding out? A lizard with a stump of a tail! “”Schtumpy” I cried out, “you’re here after all!”, just in another taxonomic category. How cool is that! And one of those things I instantly thank God for! Way to go! Little by little restoring to me so much of what I thought I had lost.

OK clearly, as always, I could go on and on, but I write this just to express my thankfulness that once again, and against anything I expected, “The boundary lines have fallen in pleasant places for me.” Praising the parallels while they are here, for we all know, soon, the summer will arrive, and comparisons may be harder to come by. But on this day, which by the way is wonderfully misty and foggy, just like the Cape, I am filled with thanks. Hope your day gives you reason for gratitude too.

The Joy of Discovery

Every day a new flower. Every day a new butterfly, a new bird song. It is spring in Texas and I am reveling in the joy of discovery. And that, in itself, is an amazing thing. If you are a regular reader of this blog, and you are good at reading between the lines, you must have noticed my mindset when I first arrived in January was one of DOA “Depressed On Arrival”. The reality of leaving the Cape, set in, and I could see nothing good here. The house that I begged to own now looked overwhelming. What was I thinking, 2 acres of land planted in things I knew nothing about! Well, that was the DOA speaking. Now, thank you, thank you God, I see it for what it is, a daily teaching tool on what grows in this limestone, caliche (the clay that is prevalent in the Hill country) environment and I love it!

What started with a scattering of Wind flowers, which made me hesitate to cut the whole yard when I was mowing, has led to a yard that you can barely walk through without stepping on something blooming. These are wildflowers, at least I believe they are, and whether the previous owner scattered seed, or just that bless her, she didn’t use pesticides and they found sanctuary here, I am not sure. My neighbors on either side have cultivated green lawns and they seem so dull by comparison.

I am not sure how to do this without boring you, but here is a partial list of what I have found so far. I will try to include some pictures: clumps of Black Foot daisy
and Prairie Fleabane on the poorest looking of soils, Slender Stem Bitterweed, (a lovely yellow flower on a long stalk with a not so lovely name), everywhere, absolutely everywhere sweet smelling, and this will seem ironic, Wild Garlic and Wild Onion. Also omnipresent, Prairie Verbena as lovely as the Verbena I used to buy and plant on the Cape, here I get it gratis, and in the early morning and late evening, saucer sized yellow Stemless Evening Primroses cover the lower portion of the yard. Sprinkle in some Blue eyed Grass that used to line the banks of the cranberry bog back home, and of course the state flower, Bluebonnets and you simply have a naturalists delight.

The bottom part of the yard really does have rich soil. Years of rain washing away the topsoil from the hill, coupled with the fact that nearby is a creek and perhaps this is an old river bottom, means the growth there is particularly thick, think Sow Thistles with stalks the size of small tree trunks. The ground was covered with thousands of rosettes of what I assumed was a weed, a ground cover or sorts, but just yesterday it began to throw up stalks topped by the most beautiful purple flower. It is called Storks Bill for when it stops blooming it will send out this long, spike of a seed reminiscent of, dah, a storks bill! How cool is that! And from the profusion of them I shall soon have swaths of purple down there. And on top of all that, this yard of hidden nectar, means I have a parade of butterflies flitting about constantly. You will surely hear about them in the future.

But isn’t life amazing. Here I was bereft, thinking a Cape Cod naturalist would be worth a bucket of spit in Texas, but now I have wonderful places to volunteer, and a daily delightful chore of researching all that grows around me. I love a song by Sarah Grove, embarrassingly I am not even sure of the title, but it had been a theme song of mine for the last year. It covered the feeling of depression, but also covered the sense of hope, that God saw something else that I couldn’t see and how true that has turned out to be.

“From this one place I can’t see very far. From this one place I’m square in the dark (my DOA days) But this one thing I know in my heart. You can see something else, you can see, you can see, you can see something else.” And so He did. From that heavenly three months in the cottage in on the lake in Falmouth, to this yard that, at the moment, is blooming like a little Eden, He saw something else. And at the risk of being ridiculously repetitive, how I thank Him! And by the look of unopened buds on unnamed plants, there is so much more to come. Bloom on dear flowers, bloom on!

The Air is Full of ...Vultures!

I know I have written several times about how much I love it when the “ air is full of swallows”. Their graceful swoop always means the return of summer and then in the fall, on the Cape, it was always a thrill to see thousands of Tree swallows mass together, dipping and diving over the dunes, swirling in funnels like avian tornadoes as they psych themselves up for migration. Well, here in Texas, I am also thrilled to have swallows but, more often, when I step out the door, the air if full of vultures!

The other morning when I went out to walk the dog, there was an avian tornado all right, one comprised of about 35 vultures, a mixture of Turkey Vultures, and Black Vultures. Clearly someone in the wild kingdom wasn’t so wild anymore. But it is often that way. I have started volunteering at a Wildlife Rescue place where not only do I see numerous vultures riding the air currents as I drive, but when I arrive, the place is lousy with them. Some are there opportunistically for, after all, the “rescue” part implies some animals aren’t completely up to snuff and might need a sanitation crew to take care of the clean up after. However, others are there for they themselves have been injured and, lucky for them, the Rescue people found them before their brethren did.

One Black Vulture that is there, hmm I think his name is Sam, was raised by someone with a kind heart but not very schooled in the nutritional needs of vultures. As so often happens, this animal has deformities caused by a lack of nutrition in its growing period. Think misshapen shells in turtles that need a ton of calcium in their diet to form the shell and often don’t get it in the hands of well meaning amateurs. Here in Texas deformities that often crop up are the misshapen hooves of deer that have been fed deer corn. Again, the well intentioned but uninformed people who set out “Deer Corn” don’t understand how bad it is for the deer. You see it sold everywhere, grocery stores, hardware stores -”low price, stock up”. However, feeding a deer corn is rather like raising your child on cotton candy. Little nutrition but yummy I guess, so they are happy to consume it. However they pay dearly for it later. Not only with deformities but sometimes it can cause death within 72 hours. They don’t have the intestinal enzymes to digest it and in short order their digestion fails. It’s sad. But I digress.

Back to Sam. Humans raised him and because vultures easily imprint on their caregivers he is happy to be where you are. My first day, I was in a building that houses all the sheets, bedding and laundry and while I washed bedding, Sam was happy to keep me company, pecking at my shoes, untying my shoe laces and every now in then attempting flight. If it wasn’t sad that he can’t fly, his antics would win some mega bucks on Funniest Home Videos. He starts flapping, and then because his wings aren’t symmetrical (one of his deformities) he spins in a circle, finally gets about a foot or two of lift then spirals down again. Like a helicopter spinning out of control, luckily it is only from a foot or two. Then he starts again; pecks your shoe, unties your retied laces and flaps about. It made my laundry job far more entertaining then it is at home.

I guess we should include a word about Black Vultures here to get the credit for being an informative blog. First of all they are more social than Turkey vultures and that’s why you see them in such large gatherings. There is strength in numbers so where they couldn’t hold their own, one-on-one with a Turkey vulture, as a group, they drive them away from carrion. They fly higher and flap more often than Turkey vultures do and hold their wings in less of a “V”. An easy way to identify the Turkey vulture is that it looks like a V when if flies, all the better to catch the wind at low altitudes while it glides over the countryside sniffing out decaying animals. Both types of vultures have excellent senses of smell, tough stomachs that aren’t affected by the rotting things they eat, and both nest far from people.

They don’t actually build a nest but just lay the egg on the ground, in a cave, a hollow tree, or an abandoned building, as long as it is secluded. They say the vulture pair will check out a potential nesting sight for a couple of weeks making sure its not a human hangout. And they don’t spread disease and some people think, but rather prevent disease from spreading. So, even if you grew up with the cartoonish version of the hulking, sulking, vultures that spelt certain doom, don’t believe it; they are doing us all a service. And if a camera ever catches the whirl-a-gig act of Sam, I predict one of them will be famous. And I will be able to say, I knew him when!

Still Confused by Seasons in Texas

The oak leaves are falling, but there are no apples in the orchard.
The oaks are turning golden but there are no pumpkins on the porch. Rather there are lambs frisking about, birds building their nests and butterflies filling the air. How weird is all this for a displaced Yankee! March and time to get the rake out!

But that is the cycle of the Live Oak. How naïve of me to think, “Hey Live Oaks, always green, I guess I won’t have to rake in Texas”. Silly me, of course pines that are “evergreen” shed their needles once a year, and clearly these oaks weren’t planning on keeping the same leaf for the 200 plus years of their life, so March is when the change out occurs. I heard they would just, WUMP, all fall off at once, and with all the trees I have hanging over this Titanic size deck (its true that absolutely everything is bigger in Texas) I would have a lot of raking to do. But they didn’t WUMP, instead they are making a lovely swishing sound and because they are small leaves they really look rather lovely on the deck, so multi-colored.

I know I keep going on about the beauty of these oaks but they really are something. If you have been anywhere in the south you have seem them festooned with Spanish moss. Here they are a home to Ball Moss that would make you think you had a zillion nests in your tree for from a distance that is what they look like. But it is an epiphyte that hangs on to the tree but does no harm and provides a home for countless insects. There are even celebrity Live Oaks scattered about the country. Maybe you are familiar with the Live Oak in Louisburg, LA that is said to be over 1,000 yrs old,
or the one in Aluchua, Fl that is 85’ high and able to be seen from space!

And how do you like this for a historical fact I have to relearn. I, as a good Bostonian, always knew that Old Ironsides was made from such tough oak that the cannonballs wouldn’t penetrate thereby giving it its name of Ironsides. But, in my provincial New England way I assumed it was made from a local New England variety of oak. But no, even though it was built it Boston they used, you guessed it, Live Oak from St. Simmons Island in GA. So, there you go, you learn something new everyday!

At any rate, I have said before that the Live oaks out this large window that I am typing in front of were the reason I chose this house, and they have not disappointed. The stove-top doesn’t work well and, once again, the smell of sulfur has returned to the hot water but the oaks have remained glorious. And bless them; their acorns are also home to Curculio beetles that I love to teach kids about. I haven’t picked up an acorn yet that doesn’t have the telltale hole in it. And, a wasp gall rather like our Oak apple gall on the Cape, parasitizes these oaks so I have so many wonderful artifacts right in my own backyard that I can use when working at the nature center.

But, raking in March, that will still take some getting used to. And too hot for hot cider. But we humans are supposed to be adaptable creatures so I will do my best. Raking will need to wait though for I bought my tomato plants today and need to get them in the ground. In MARCH! At best, I was planting one potato on St. Patrick’s Day on the Cape, now the whole garden needs to be by the Ides of March! Crazy eh? And again today it is close to 80 tomorrow a high in the 50’s. Maybe I should hold off on those tomatoes after all.

When the Swallows Return to.."fill in the blank"

I consider it a banner day, a day with an extra shot of joy, when I see my first swallow of the season cutting through the air with that graceful swoop and dive they are all so adept at. With my New England roots, I don’t expect this recipe for happiness to arrive until April or May, but I am not in New England any more. So imagine my surprise when on Feb 18th I was treated to the arrival of the first Purple Martins at the nature center I am now volunteering at. Yippee, Martins, the largest of all swallows!

This was followed the next day by a sudden appearance of a large flock of swallows
(hmm guessing, Rough Winged swallows but it was too gray a day to be sure) swooping in and out of a bridge overpass. In TX then, it is already swallow time.

The Martins arrived on cue, just as we were showing a group of 4th graders the gourds that hang in a circle, a kind of Condo for the martins when they return. Just as we were explaining how they would be coming up soon from Brazil, (now that Carnival is over,) in zoomed a pair, circling around us and then popping into the gourd to see what had changed over the year. Amazing! We could never have staged such a thing! The kids loved it!

Now on the Cape I wasn’t near anyone with a Martin house, so mostly my joy came from watching the Tree swallows, lying on my back floating in the pond while they swooped in for some tasty bugs. However I have been reading up on Martins and are they ever fascinating. First of all, now wild is this? All the Martins east of the Rockies, which is clearly a good chunk of real estate, will only nest in man-made Martin houses. You have probably seen one, maybe you even have on. A small condo of houses, sometimes built as one unit, apartment like, or by providing separate housing by hanging several gourds in a circle.


Back in the day, maybe hundreds, possibly even a thousand years ago, they nested in old woodpecker holes but for reasons we can only guess at, the Indians began providing gourds for them to nest in. Now a lot of people are under the impression that Martins eat a lot of mosquitoes like the other swallows and therefore it would have been easier than spraying some prehistoric Off around. But the truth is they fly really high when seeking their food and mosquitoes lay low, so never the twain shall meet. Damselflies, dragonflies and a zillion other insects are on their menu, but not mosquitoes.

Stokes has a book devoted solely to raising Martins and he theorizes that because a colony of Martins aren’t shy about mobbing larger birds of prey or vultures, that the Indians may have appreciated their help in keeping scavengers away from their drying hides and meats. Whatever the reason, the habit continued with the settlers and with bird enthusiasts today, so why knock a good thing? The official term is “behavioral pattern shifting” when a species switches to a whole new way of doing business. I just find that amazing. West of the Rockies, where I take it no ancestral people were tending to their housing needs, they still nest in old woodpecker holes like a normal bird!

The ones we saw that day, may linger, or continue north. They have often been mistakenly referred to as scouts but that would imply that they were checking out the route and going back to say they have made reservations, come on down. Not the case. These are the adult birds that are heading back to be the first to get the prime real estate. The subadults come straggling along anywhere from 2-8 weeks later. Now, here is something else interesting, last years young will NOT return to their birth sight, but will look for someplace new. Neither will the ones in their second year, they are staking out greener pastures too. However, by the third year, they head back to their native site and will stay true to that for the rest of their years. Interesting yes? The thought is that this will keep the group from inbreeding and make for a healthier flock. And because all those 1st and 2nd year Martins are looking to relocate, you, the kind person putting up a Martin home, if you situate it correctly will probably get some takers. There are entire books on the subject of exactly how to position such a house and what it means to be a Martin landlord if you are interested.

Depending upon where you are geographically then, you may be anticipating the arrival of your swallows soon, or perhaps you have a few months to go. The Capistrano swallows, which are Cliff Swallows have a whole festival fashioned around their return. They arrive at the mission of San Juan on the feast day of St Joseph March 19th and leave on Oct 23rd the Feast of San Juan. Good Catholic birds it would seem! Again, nature never ceases to amaze.

There is more that could be said about Martin behavior, a fascinating subject too, but we all have our limits to how much we want to hear on a particular subject and I imagine you have reached yours. Till later then… enjoy that world around you that is new every morning.

Time to "Spring Forward"

No, it is not time to put our clocks ahead an hour, but mentally, this Yankee living in Texas had better set her clock ahead by two months. Clearly, Feb is the beginning of spring in Hill Country. In my yard I have two little sticks of forsythia that have bloomed at the beginning of Lent rather than at Easter. Plus I have been treated to some lively chase scenes between the Carolina chickadees, which usually signals the territorialism of the breeding season has begun. Even the Bluebonnets, that the area is famous for, have come up enough that now I know where not to mow. February but is sure feels like April. Probably the best thing to do is to just toss out the calendar and take each day as it comes. Today, Feb 23 its 80, summer in my Cape Cod mind, but tomorrow it will be a high of 60, clearly fall! So lets just forget any idea of four seasons for the next few years.

I know I have mentioned this before, but the Chickadees here, although they look almost the same as my Black Capped chickadees from home, are Carolina chickadees.
And the telltale difference is in their sound. The Black Capped Chickadee gives a two call note when claiming a bit of the woods for his own, “fee-bee”, whereas the Carolina goes for a lengthy oratorio of 4 notes, “fee-bee, fee bay”. Not a huge difference, but enough to make you look twice and realize you may not know what you are looking at. However, both species, when excited or agitated about another pair coming too close get the same excited hysteria in their call and often the chase begins, one pair routing out the other interlopers.

Reading about Carolina chickadees I read that they probably parted from the Black Capped some 250,000 yrs ago. They, like the Black capped, love insects when they can get them, but switch to seed eating at your feeder and elsewhere in the winter. On the Cape mine came to the feeder pretty much year round except when they were nesting and raising the young, then if you are going to be catching insects for the kinder, why not have a few yourself? Happily for the gardener they eat aphids as part of their diet so welcome them in.

The Carolina chickadee caches its food, which can make you feel less guilty about those days you don’t fill the feeder as early as you should. An article said they tended to do this at mid-day and then eat it later in the day, or in the next few days. I vaguely remember an article that was mostly dealing with the elasticity of brains that pointed out that the chickadees brain grows by ¼ the size when it is caching food. Maybe we should put down the crossword puzzles and start squirreling food around your house and see if our acumen improves!

Other signs of it really being emotionally April rather than Feb is the return of Purple Martins to a gourd complex they have at a Nature center I am volunteering at. We had a group of third graders the other day and just the way it often seemed at Greenbriar, the students arrive and it’s time to, “Cue the nature”. With this group of third graders we had just started talking about migrants when in swooped two early arriving Martins, checked out the houses as if on cue and then took off again. But to go into Purple Martins now would task your attention span so, shall we save it for another day? I think we shall. Who knows perhaps by then it will be a different “season” too.

Not Knowing Who to Expect

The trick of changing geographical locations so completely, is that I am pretty much in the dark as far as who to expect, bird wise, to show up at the feeder, or in the bushes, on any given day. After living on the Cape for more than a decade, I could anticipate the arrival of the “first” of this or that species. Noting when the Juncos would first arrive in winter and when they would, almost overnight, decide to leave. A friend has told me that Red-wing blackbirds are in the marshes already, our first sign of spring in that latitude.

But here in TX, I am clueless. I have had robins and cedar wax wings in my neighborhood, and I assumed perhaps they wintered here. But then I was at a nature center where they were calling us out of a meeting just to see the amazing group of 20 or so robins in a nearby tree. So my ho-hum response to the robins in my neighborhood should have been one of more enthusiasm for maybe they only pass through this area on their way to wormier pastures. And of course, I would never want to be a show off and say we had a roost of 8,000 robins on the Cape one winter. It would have been bad form.

I tried checking out a book I got on Western Birds, only to show another deficiency in my knowledge base. Raise your hand if you think of Texas as being in the West. I thought it WAS the West. Not according to the Peterson Field Guide Series. Yes, a small corner of TX is included, but otherwise I guess I would find the who’s who of Texas birds in a southern book. In the small corner of Texas the book does cover, it says Cedar Waxwings are occasionally present in winter. Again, it seems I should have lept about more enthusiastically when I saw them.

On Feb 6th a hummingbird came buzzing by my head. Wow, was it an early scout, or do some over-winter here? It has gotten pretty chilly so they would have to be pretty hardy to survive. I was under the impression that there may be zillions of hummingbirds here, and in the summer maybe there will be. However, it seems, from what I can glean from this book, that there may only be two types. The Black-chinned hummingbird and the Ruby Throated Hummingbird that is said to arrive around March. Googling Black Chinned ones, I see that they arrive before the Ruby Throated. Perhaps then, this was an early scout, or a hardy one that waited out winter. Either way, I did know to get excited about that and wondered if it was time to stir up some sugar water.

And this morning, the first flock of ducks I’ve seen, flew overhead. They had longish necks and in my uber enthusiastic way I jumped to the exciting conclusion that they might be Whistling ducks. Black Bellied Whistling ducks are said to be in this part of TX but the book didn’t say when they were here. In the gray light of morning, and the huge gap in my knowledge here, I of course couldn’t know.

Herein lies the rub. When I was on the Cape, I wrote this blog to share with you what I knew about what I was seeing there. However, here in Texas it seems I will more often be writing about what I don’t know. And who knows, perhaps there is a reader out there who knows all about Texas birds and other flora and fauna here and would like to chime in. Or take over. In the meantime though, with your patience, I will just plod along, sharing what I am learning and what I have yet to learn. Occasionally, there might be something useful, such as , if you want a bird book on TX don’t buy the one on Western Birds! Till later then…