Thanking a Glacier

My head was boiling hot. Actually, my whole body was boiling hot. I had just cut the grass on another sultry day where the normal mammalian trait of sweating to cool the body down just wasn’t doing the trick. So the only thing TO do, was to grab my dog and head, no more than a mile from my house, to Hoxie pond. My idea of heaven is to plunge in head first when you are soooo hot and instantly be cooled. Probably your idea of heaven too. Hoxie has always felt like my own personal pool, one that conveniently needs no chlorine or daily bacteria testing. And one I magnanimously share with others. Tuck and I use the “dog” beach, which is especially lovely, for it is on the far side of the pond and never crowded. One or two other chatty dog owners, one or two other frolicking pups.

And for this grand gift of nature, I have a glacier to thank. The Laurentide glacier that came to a halt here some 20,000 years ago created the bulk of the Cape we see today. Happily for me, this glacier left several large chunks of ice that didn’t melt at first, but left deep depressions. Where those depressions intersect with the water table, you get a kettle pond, which is what Hoxie pond is. The Cape is riddled with them. It practically looks like Swiss cheese when you fly over it, and so, for many of us, the hot days are made cooler, not just by a trip to the beach, but you can finish that up with a dip in a pond and get salt and sand off.


Plus there is no grander way to bird watch, than to float on your back and watch swallows come dive bombing in after insects and watch the Osprey eye you as perhaps some weird, fresh water flounder. It amazed me, that in a space of perhaps 10 minutes, I saw more action in bird land than I had on my entire nature walk I had taken some people on earlier. Tree Swallows, the Osprey, than two Redtails being dive bombed, just like the ones at the bog I walk around, by two Kingbirds. How often I wish someone would get on that “teleporting people” invention so I could instantly bring others to see what I am seeing at the same time.

If I wanted to, not only could I cool off in the pond, but, at this particular time of year, I could wash up too. Just like taking a bath at home only here, the soap is growing on a tree. Remember, when we talked about how you could practically tell the time of the month in summer by just using your nose? Well, end of July, early August means we are in the blooming season of the Sweet Pepperbush, and what is so cool about this plant is that you can lather up, just by using its blossoms with a little water. Conveniently it grows right along the waters edge, and, on the Cape at least, is a very common shrub. It reproduces by runners so you don’t even have to feel riddled with guilt for taking its blossoms. Its flowers are on a spike and if you look carefully, you will see that it blooms from the bottom of the spike first, then moving up to the top. You can tell when the season is almost done because only a few blossoms remain on the top of the wand. The ones that are finished blooming are on their way to becoming seeds that look like peppercorns and are the reason it is called Sweet Pepperbush. Sweet because it smells so sweet.


If you find some, just strip the blooms into your hand, one or two wands are usually enough, add some water and then rub vigorously. A lovely lather forms and in no time you are squeaky clean. It’s a cool thing to show your kids or grandkids how to do. Around here, I would say you have another week or so to ferret them out and give this a try. Do be careful to look for bees when you pick them for they love it too and rubbing a bee vigorously is never a good idea.

So, thank you glacier for providing the tub, thank you nature for providing the soap and thank you God, for providing the setting to begin with, and a moment in the day to enjoy it all.

The Bog- A Month Later

Finding normalcy, after any trip, takes awhile for me. That sense of waking up wondering “Where am I?” and, “What is it I am supposed to be doing?” seems to dog my first few days back from any trip, any where. But a centering thing is always returning to the early walk around the bog with the dog. Ah yes, here, here I am and what has happened in my absence?

For one thing, all the little fledglings that I fretted about; were they being gobbled by crows, soaked by rain, or just popping out of the nest too soon, seem to have managed just fine without my daily check ups. Not that I actually found that many of the nests. Only the Kingbird and Phoebe nests were known to me, the more secretive crows clearly were raising their various broods a few trees back from the forest edge and never seen.

But now, on that first day back, what a treat, for there were two youngish looking Kingbirds, diving on a youngish looking Red Tail Hawk, chips off the old Tyrannous block for sure. Mom and Dad would be proud. The hawk parents maybe less so. Young Redtails, and I am so glad to see my pair raised two, have mottled brown tails rather than the reddish color they will have by next year, so they are easy to spot. Plus they were, and there were actually two Redtails being chased, so quick to give up their roosting spot that they seemed new at this “chased by something one tenth your size” concept.

Every sprinkler head around the bog seemed to have a new Phoebe on it, so I take it their “repopulate the world with flycatchers” efforts also went well. And coming up to the slough, which has been empty except for the occasional Yellowlegs or Spotted Sandpiper had, and this seemed practically like a mirage, 6 Great Blue Herons in it! That folks, was a first for me. I have never seen so many together, I have never been aware of seeing a family together, but this is what this seemed to be, perhaps two pairs with their mostly grown, yet always, gawky looking young. Incredibly my dog didn’t even notice them, but they eventually noticed me and lifted off with pterodactyl like calls. The wildest thing is that a friend reported seeing 6 herons on her walk down by the salt-water marsh, and if I were a wagering type, I would bet they were the same ones. Very cool.

The other most obvious change, besides the profusion of young birds, is the encouraging collection of bullfrogs, bright green and ringing the pond. Some tadpoles are still in a sort of “frogpole” condition, more body than tail, and my dog is beside himself with delight at snuffling them out and then being dumbstruck each time by their disappearance under the water. Often I don’t see them, only to look down and then notice two huge bullfrogs right at my feet. Surprises me every time. It’s a healthy world that still has a peck of amphibians, and all with the right amount of legs and eyes. A needed antidote to the nightly news.

So, I guess I know which zip code I am in again. And although there is much work to be done, the heat is making that less appealing. Tonight I meet with my walking ladies and we shall head down to watch the terns complete their ever so long ministrations to their begging young. Next time we write, lets compare notes on the “begging sounds” coming from your trees and bushes. Hard to give up a free meal shoved down your throat. Perhaps the ones leading seminars on “Tough love” should be Cardinal, or Crow, or pick any bird species, parents! Until then, may you know which zip code you are in, and be out enjoying yourself when time and temperature allows.

Cape Cod to Croatia and Back Again

If I haven’t blogged in a while, and I haven’t, it is because I was lucky enough to go with my husband to Germany. There we joined our daughter who is stationed there, for one last Gonser style, “drive till you drop” fling, before she would be deployed for a year. However, only half the days were “drive till you drop”, as in covering a lot of distance. The other half had potential to be “drive till you literally drop”, as in, off the edge of a cliff into the sea. My husband’s view is, why pay an exorbitant amount of Kuna’s (Croatian money) to take the straight-as-a die, get-you-there-alive, highway, when you can careen back and forth, along the entire coast on a sliver of road that hangs by a thread onto the mountain side. Of course, you would take the latter. Which admittedly provided us with THE most spectacular views. For that matter, I was often asking my daughter to take the picture because the ocean was, after all, right out the front window, not the side. Which was somewhat disconcerting. But we survived, and the views of the aquamarine Adriatic and the medieval cities of Rovinj and Dubrovnik, the many Roman ruins, and incredible waterfalls of Plitvice National Park will be ingrained on our retinas for some time to come. We are a family that does more “ingraining on retinas” rather than taking actual pictures, so you needn’t fear this becoming a 200-picture slide show retell of our trip.

As the focus here is generally on the natural, allow me to share just one of many of the natural highlights of the trip. Personally, I am not very good at keeping historical facts straight, or architectural styles correctly sorted by century, and sometimes, it is just easier in these wonderful cities, to just look up. It seems, no matter what European City you are in: Vienna, Budapest, Munich, Rome, or, in our case, all of Croatia, in the evening if you look up, you will see that the air above you is alive with the wild kamikaze flight pattern of European Swifts (Apus apus). They look rather like swallows, but they are in a separate family and their wings are shaped more like boomerangs. Here in the US we have Chimney Swifts that you might be familiar with.


You would look up too, just to see what was making such a racket up there, for they come swooping in, at these crazy high speeds and they seem to always be screeching. “Screaming” is actually the term bird books use for their vocalizations, and the females “scream” is supposedly higher pitched than the males. That provided hours of amusement for me, for as my husband and daughter decoded the cities fortified walls, I was seeing if I could pick out high screams from low screams. I don’t think I ever got it. The books say the birds indulge in “screaming parties” in the evening, which is definitely what we were witnessing. As the final matches of the World Cup were playing on Jumbo-trons in every city, there were plenty of “screaming parties” going on at our level too.


Its amazing how constant their activity was. The birds that is, they were often chasing each other, sometimes, swooping in clusters, sometimes fluttering near a window ledge to presumably feed the young swifts whose nests were hanging, under ledges and gutters all over the main squares. And their wild revved up flight is just the way they do business. They fly continually for they eat on the wing, catching bugs in their wide mouths (No wonder no DEET was necessary on this trip). They sleep on the wing, something no book every completely described satisfactorily. How do they keep from crashing into the omnipresent Roman ruins if they are asleep behind the proverbial wheel? I am going to guess that like many animals their sleep isn’t a deep one like ours. Some ducks shut down half their brain at a time, one eye open-one eye shut, half-awake, half-alert. Perhaps they do the same. They collect nesting material on the wing and sometimes-even mate on the wing. The young that were in their nests are likely not to touch down again for the next three years when they will be old enough to incubate eggs themselves. For that, they are willing to do sitting down.

As far as birds go, Swifts are fairly long lived, 9-10 years, and they always return to the same nesting spot, so you can imagine these Dubrovnik birds may have been coming here for the 1400 years that the walled city has been there. Speak about being true to your school! There is a nesting group in Oxford that has been continuously studied since 1948! The longest ongoing study of any bird anywhere, which is what happens if you hang out in major intellectual centers, you will be noticed, tagged and dutifully recorded.

Their scientific name (Apus apus) comes from the Greek meaning, “without feet” for with a life always in flight, feet seem a little superfluous. Theirs are short and stubby, which explains why they always looked like they were wildly scrabbling to hang on to the ledge as they fed the young. Probably much the same as our car looked as it scrabbled along the edges trying to hang onto the road.

One, I promised to keep the number to one of my natural history highlights of the trip and so I shall. Back to blogging about bogs in future days. Weeks have gone by, and much has changed in the dynamics around the bog. That is what we will return to another day. I do think though, that if Swifts should swoop into an evening view, I would be instantly transported to a warm night in an ancient walled city in Croatia, or almost anywhere else in Europe. And that is a lovely thought.