Julie Zickefoose on Blogspot

Fat Bats

2012-05-20T03:16:00.001-07:00

I'm in Soldatna, Alaska now, finishing up our work at the fabulous Kenai Birding Festival with my best guy. This is a laundry morning, a repacking morning, a get-ready-for-a-big-day-morning, but I wanted to let you know what's been going on with The Battista Sisters. You remember, Mirabel and Stella, the two big brown bats we overwintered.

The Battista Sisters came to me in the first week of February 2012, having been found flying around a bedroom in an old house in Marietta, OH (Stella) and clinging to a brick pillar in a busy supermarket breezeway, six inches off the ground (Mirabel).

I took them in, they bonded and became inseparable, and I kept them the rest of the winter, waiting for the weather to warm enough to release them.

Oh, and I fed them. Mealworms. Boy did I feed them.

I plan to write this up elsewhere, and spent a good long day on the jet to Soldatna writing about it, but the long and short of it is that I gave them too much food and really messed them up. They came to me in the 17-18 gm range. I left the in the garage hibernating in cool temperatures and as of March 1 they were still maintaining a weight of about 18 gm each. Perfect. But I got sloppy and started giving them more worms, just dumping a bunch in their bowl every morning, and by April 16 they were each topping 25 gm. ACK! How did that happen?

It turns out that you have to ration them to about 12 a day. I didn't know that. I gave them all they would eat, and that's a lot.

This is Mirabel, and it's what a 25-gm big brown bat looks like. She looks like a flying sofa pillow, that's what she looks like.

In this photo, I'm blowing on her back fur to reveal a huge U-shaped roll of fat around her bottom under her sweet pink skin. Oh-oh.

See how her whole stern section (the furred part) is U-shaped? It ought to be deltoid. Yeah, so should mine.
This is how a 25-gm big brown bat flies. Which is, not at all. Scuttle-hopping is more like it. Baby got bat.

Mirabel, I got some 'splainin' to do. First, I'm sorry I got you into this mess. I thought I was helping you girls.
Second, I'm going to fix it. First, we'll get you a tent. A beautiful Wenzel Zephyr 9 x 13' screen house.
Whose most important feature is the "welded polyethelene floor" (see Mirabel's substrate, above) which is integral to the walls and will prevent you and sister Stella from escaping while you attend Bat Boot Camp with Mether.

Bat Boot Camp? What's that??

Sounds eeky (says Mirabel as she hangs inches from the floor).

Well, it's where Mether picks you up and tosses your fat little bodies into the air every evening, and she cuts your mealworm consumption by oh, 90% until you lose the extra baggage and are airborne again.

We'll install you in the tent and you can get out and fly whenever you feel like it.

Stella: We don't feel like it, thank you.

Oh, you will. You will. Or I'm going to die trying.

If you do a little math, bringing a bat down from 26 gm to 18 gm is like asking me to get down to about 97 pounds in 4 weeks. I beg of you, don't do the math.

Some said it couldn't be done, but I owed it to my girls, and I was going to give it one heck of a try. On the bats. Not me. I would need my Tahitian Vanilla Talenti Gelato to fortify me for the work ahead.

Chet Baker on Patrol

2012-05-17T03:45:00.001-07:00

He's getting a little gray around the eyebrows. Chet's most Frequently Asked Question: "How old is he now?"

I answer, "Seven. Eight in December." And can hardly believe I'm saying the words. How did that happen? How did my 2005 model puppy turn into a silvery gentleman?

I've thought about taking a Sharpie to the gray, sort of a Grecian Formula for dogs, but I know he'd hate the stink of the marker, so I don't.

It's been hard, not being able to run any more. This dog loves to run. He couldn't love it as much as I love watching his neat little thighs scissoring along in front of me. I've had to find other things to do. It hasn't been hard to find other things to do.

Chet's gone into summer mode, which is when he runs hourly chiptymunk and bunneh patrols around the house. There's always a chance he'll surprise something quick and furry as he burns around the corners on two wheels.

He watches for small disappearing cinnabar tails in the holey back patio stones.

Chet Baker! Are there any snakes?

I will check.

I find snakes by smell.

I have found them in these cracks before.

Chet Baker! Are there any deer out in the meadow?

I will check. I cannot see over the grass now. You should mow it. I have to climb the top deck to see durr anymore. But when I see a durr, I streak out after it, yes I do.

He loved his WVU basketball, even after he popped it (eight minutes) and tore a huge gash in its side.

That was about a dollar a minute.

Worth every penny just to see him race around the yard pushing it with his nose, then gnashing his fangs against it until it finally gave up with a sigh. GNARF GNARF GNARF GNARF ppppfffffffftttttt

This little dog, so dear to me

who lights up my heart with his smile.

There. There's your Chetfix. I needed one, too.

The Mighty Mighty Bluet

2012-05-15T08:40:00.000-07:00

There is great power in a tiny flower. The common bluet, Houstonia caerulea, triumphs over drought, frost, neglect and active persecution. It's a member of the Rubiaceae, a very cool family that includes partridgeberry (Mitchella repens), quinine (Cinchona), gardenia (!) and coffee (!!) Oh my!
How all those plants fit in one family beats me--tiny wildflowers and economically important shrubs that dictate land use all over Latin America.

There is a barren hillside on Rte. 821 not far from our house that blooms in early spring with blue. Misty blue, running down like water.

It's barren because the man who lives in the house above it takes a weedwhacker to the wildflowers that try to grow there. He has weedwhacked the Trillium grandiflorum and Solomon's seal into extinction. I see him, balancing on the rocks, whacking away, and I want so badly to stop and talk to him, but I don't. I think it wouldn't go so well. Besides, I find it interesting that someone would object to bluets. I'd rather watch than intervene, because the bluets are winning.

He prefers daffodils and variegated hostas, his close-mown lawn, to bluets. These rocky steep dry ledges are no doubt his despair. He can't get the grass to take on them, no matter how he cuts and whacks.

But the bluets don't mind. They don't listen to him and his machines. They go on growing there anyway.

You see, by eliminating everything else that once grew there, he's creating a monoculture of bluets. And they like that just fine.

And though I mourn the trillium, I like it, too. It's a little victory. He can't kill the bluets. They're too little to bother with. They bend their slender necks and let him have at it. They sing of life and springtime.

Take that! And thank you for your help, Sir!

Ta-DAAAAA!

What's Become of Sluggo?

2012-05-13T03:05:00.000-07:00

Wildlife rehabilitation is often a long road. Especially with box turtles. Sluggo is a longterm client. You may remember that he was hit in the spine by a lawnmower blade last summer. I couldn't do anything for the injury with its jumbled pieces of shell bone, so I gave him shots of Baytril, a strong antibiotic, to prevent infection, then just fed him and supported him in the ensuing year.

He won't use his back legs. He has feeling in them, and he pulls them strongly into his shell when you try to pull them out, but he doesn't use them to locomote. He drags himself with his strong orange front legs.

Lisa Fosco of Ohio Wildlife Center in Columbus believes that that's because it hurts to use them. Will that get better? We can't say. But like anyone who has a loved one who's suffering, you cling to hope.

He's a strong, beautiful gentleman with great color and a nice personality.

I took him in for evaluation at OWC. Lisa immediately set to picking and chipping at the dead shell and bone around Sluggo's injury.

The black part looks yuckky but it's actually a sign of healing. It's good, it's what you want.

Lisa cleaned him up really nicely using her fingers and a forceps. I was wincing but Sluggo couldn't feel it as the bone she was removing was long dead. She pointed to a deeper triangular divot at the bottom of the wound and said she thought that was probably what was keeping him from using his hind legs. Sigh. He's not done yet. The hard part is not knowing if he'll ever be releasable.

To be honest, I thought I'd be leaving him in the care of someone who knows more than I do about such injuries, but Lisa wanted me to hang onto him. She made a good point, that he'd do better with individual attention such as I can give him (when I'm around, that is...) than as one of a bunch of patients in a rehab setting. So she sent him back home with me.

I took him out to see how he was doing.

He was tired of being in a cardboard box, that's for sure. I set him on the concrete and he peed in excitement. And then one hind leg came out.

He was making for the spiderwort tangle, and he really, really wanted to get there. And the other hind leg came out, the one I never get to see.

Truly, he more just dragged them than anything, but they were out and moving, and that's a huge start.

I thought that going forward I should try to get him to walk on concrete, because the second he got into the soft mulch he tucked them back in and dragged himself with his front legs.

Lisa showed me how to massage his legs, how to stroke his feet "so he knows he still has feet, knows that they're still there."

I hope he comes to trust me enough to let me massage him every day. Right now he remembers getting injections there and he pulls his legs in when I go to touch them.

I never visit the Ohio Wildlife Center without marveling at the job these good people face. Over 4,000 animals are admitted every year, the vast majority coming in right now through July. Rehabbers call it baby season. There were bunnies everywhere, little blind ones and ones that were big enough to nibble on dandelion greens and clean their faces with quick paws.

And there were baby ducks, standing in their food, dreaming of their mamas.

If you've any extra resources, please think of OWC. The people I saw hurrying around the clinic were so tired they were reeling and punchy, warmly accepting box after box of rabbits and thanking the kind folks who had brought them in. I left, resolved to keep working with my one little case, and in awe of the volunteer network the Ohio Wildlife Center maintains. And wishing I had a few lotto millions to shunt their way.

Victorian Village Guest House

2012-05-10T06:24:00.000-07:00

File under: Percs of the job. It's not all leading birding field trips in a frog-drowning downpour; it's not all lugging several hundred pounds of music equipment up stairs and down halls. Sometimes you get a treat. And the trick is to let those treats carry you through the next slog or meltdown.

I'm writing from the Victorian Village Guest House on Neil Avenue in Columbus, Ohio. This is my second stay here, and I'm delighted to say Bill is with me and also enjoying its considerable amenities.

I took the first series of photos in December, when I came here to speak to the Columbus Natural History Society.

I scurried around to photographically document its untrammeled glory before I turned it into a Zick den with my exploding luggage.

I love the bathroom. And the soap is French-milled lemon verbena and it is heavenly. The soap always speaks of the quality of an establishment. I left my Dr. Bonner's Peppermint bar in the dop kit.

Just made tea and toasted orange-cranberry bread in this lovely kitchen. It's so wonderful to stay somewhere new, clean and uncluttered, as opposed to old, ehhh and cluttered. There's even a teeny dishwasher!

It's quiet and peaceful, being set well off the busy streets.

The December vista. It's hard to believe you're in downtown Columbus! Doesn't it look like it's out in the country somewhere? The guest house was built on the footprint of a carriage house that was standard issue for these gracious manses in Victorian times.

From the excellent website: A step above a bed and breakfast, Victorian Village Guest House offers a 950 square foot luxury suite tastefully appointed with antiques and modern amenities. The suite includes a full kitchen, private bath, bedroom with queen-sized bed and great room with soaring 17 foot ceilings. Situated in the rear lawn of the Morton’s renovated 1895 Queen Anne style home, the guest house provides privacy & delightful 2nd story views of the lawn, patios & perennial gardens. A peaceful retreat in an urban setting, the guest house is truly the best of both worlds!

I would add that it's handy to Columbus' delectable Short North, where restaurants, bistros, antique and curio shops, and a fabulous dog accessory store await. If you want to buy costumes for your Boston terrier, Pampered Pooch is where you'd head.

All of that is true, true, true. And it comes with the neighbor's buttermilk tabby.

At this link, you can take a virtual tour of the place. Such fun! except that it makes me seasick because I'm such a dolt with the mouse. Blarrrgghh. Slow down, Zick.

I love computers. Except when they make me seasick.

The Greek yogurt, fresh berries, orange blossom honey and organic maple brown sugar granola makes it all better.

Yesterday afternoon as Bill and I were heading out to our smashing "Wine and Warblers" event at Columbus Audubon's Grange Center, I spied a feather on the sidewalk in front of our guest house. It could have come from no other bird than a black-billed cuckoo. It was very dirty and tattered, but when I washed it up, there was the small grayish-white tip, the tapered but not pointed shape, and the olive-brown shade that yelled black-billed cuckoo to me. As you can see, it's as long as a pen--about 5". I was amazed. Right in downtown Columbus!

But as I shot the gardens this morning, the songs of migrant Tennessee warbler, northern parula and even the dull wit! of a least flycatcher rang around me, and I knew it was possible that a black-billed cuckoo had molted a feather here, as well.

I molted a little when I stayed here, too. Allium and columbine:

The peonies weren't even awake when I made these photos.

Hey! wake up! I wanna see your yellow stamens.

At least the foxgloves were up and bugling.

A view back to the Morton's home. Ahhh.

I'm afraid the Victorian Village Guest House has spoiled us for future visits to Columbus. Or anywhere.

Oh dear. The bar is awfully high.

Check it out, check in. You will never want to leave. We sure don't. We're settin' here tapping away on our respective Silver Surfers with the fasty fast wireless Net. Please accept our heartfelt Thank You, Lisa and Jeff Morton, for giving us a taste of the truly wonderful in Columbus.

Contact them here.

Spring, All at Once

2012-05-05T03:47:00.001-07:00

Desmia funeralis, Grape Leaffolder.

Mmm, what a natty jet airplane of a moth! Perched on Nancy Love's gravestone at my little Methodist cemetery. I could not have told you what it was without David Beadle and Seabrooke Leckie's new moth guide, which makes me whoop with joy. What a book!! I'm getting it signed at the New River Birding and Nature Festival, where Seabrooke will be speaking and showing us all the fabulous moths. Giving them names, for once. O joy! I get to meet her and get my book signed! See, writers get just as geeked out as everybody else. (Postscript: She was Wonderful. Marvelous. Self-effacing but quietly confident, brave and magical, too).

Scattered, scattered, I am. On her way to the New River festival, Murr Brewster came over for a day and a half and a lovely night too and we emptied my greenhouse. Two women could not have had more fun, than messing about with pots and soil and deciding which geranium looked nice with which nemesia. I love that woman!! We decided she really just needs to live here. Think how much we'd get done. Or not. Yakkity yak yak yak.

The second we put them out, the "Graffiti Red" stellar geraniums were visited by swallowtails and this lovely male hummingbird, who had been flying into the greenhouse every day to say hello to the flowers. It made me smile as wide as Montana to be in the Garden Pod when he flew in, because he sounded like a gargantuan wasp from a Japanese horror movie in there.

Birds are flooding in. Oh my gosh. How can I do everything I have to do to get ready for the festival?? To keep my precious plants and bulbs from dying while I'm away this spring? There's an indigo bunting in the orchard, and they're flying over in twos and threes, zapping...

And there are sweet kids to be fed and run to the waiting bus...not for much longer! They get out May 23!!

but there's a faded scarlet tanager rasping away in the orchard, too...

and the woods is full of wood thrushes, and how can you do everything that needs to be done when you are melting away?

Twee-o. Tweedleay. bup bup bup twardle tee? Twowdly-oh Tee? Twee-o.

And the leaves drip and the song twines around my heart and squeezes it up into my throat.

Yellow-breasted Chats are Back!

2012-05-03T04:16:00.002-07:00

Mayday! Mayday! The birds are all here and I'm overwhelmed. Why can't they spread it out a bit? Today, we welcomed indigo buntings, magnolia, Tennessee, chestnut-sided, blue-winged and Nashville warblers; black-billed cuckoos, rose-breasted grosbeaks and scarlet tanagers; a pair of belted kingfishers, wood thrushes and red-eyed and yellow-throated and white-eyed vireos, to name just some. Ones in boldface arrived today.

Oh, and yellow-breasted chats. See, just one of those would have been plenty.

But too much of everything is just enough. I need a miracle, every day.

The yellow-breasted chats woke me up on May 1 as it got light, arguing and yelling from the tangle to the east and the tangle to the west. the former owner of our house was from the north of England. "Those are the rudest birds!" he said. "They fly over making the most awful noises!" Yes, indeed.

Chats have bred in our yard all but one of the 21 years we've lived here. For reasons unknown they deserted us in 2010, to come back in 2011. Now I hold my figurative breath until I know they're staying.

I look at our yard and overgrown orchard and know the changes are happening, that they're more chickadee habitat than bluebird habitat now, more redstart than prairie warbler habitat. Some birds go, and others replace them, and I guess I have to be OK with that, but please, please, chats! Don't leave us.

When chats sing they shoot their necks out and that glorious sunflower-yellow throat pulses and belches with a shot of stunning color.

Klook. Shep shep shep shep. Whoit? Geh geh geh geh geh. TSH TSH TSH TSH TSH TSH TSH TSH!

Yeh yeh yeh yeh yeh! Klook. Whoit?

And so it goes.

And it's even better by moonlight, because when they sing at night you know they're sleeping here too.

There are ten million things I should be doing right now. Packing for the New River Birding and Nature Festival this week, where I'll be speaking and singing with The Rain Crows and leading field trips starting Friday May 5. (thank you Kathy in Delray!!) Oops! That's tomorrow! I'm packing hundreds of pounds of books on the back of my carrier on my tiny Subaru. Sometimes I miss the Exploder.

Scrambling up more books to sell.

Planting the gladiolas and tuberoses which are sitting in muck buckets in the garden.

Potting the overgrown and sad bonsais who are languishing in their winter pit, 20 days late.

Running to town to do ten errands in two hours.

But I can't ignore the chats. They demand my attention and they get my unbridled adoration.

Well, almost all of it. Mether, are you coming? You have been with that birdie for a long time. And you and I are both soaked. You have a lot of things to do.

I know, Chet Baker. I'm coming. But there's this wood thrush singing...

Farewell to Mt. Auburn

2012-05-01T03:32:00.000-07:00

Every time I'm tempted to feel the least bit guilty that I spend every spare moment in Mt. Auburn when I'm in the Boston area, I see something like this and that feeling that I might be missing something or someone elsewhere is erased.

The prosaic takes on new and significant meaning for me here. A robin on a tombstone is a robin transformed, and an artist transfixed.

There is unexpected humor everywhere Hodge and I turn. She motioned to her left, laughing...

Ruth.

Yes, Edgar?

Something's come between us.

That one gets two butts up from The Mallards.

It's so lovely, it wouldn't have to smell so good, too, but Viburnum odoratum perfumes every turn in April.

And the yellow-rumps never look finer than in cherry blossoms.

Redtails of Mt. Auburn

2012-04-29T03:55:00.002-07:00

A very familiar sight in Cambridge these days is a wheeling redtail. Oh, what a magnificent, yet very familiar sight to see. Hodge and I are the perfect pair. I look down, noting small plants and insects and amphibians, and she looks up, never missing a single redtail. We nudge each other, and together make an entire naturalist.

I'm not sure when redtails took over Cambridge, but it was well after I left. I'm sure they weren't around when I lived there. Neither did Pale Male nest just off Central Park, either. Urban redtails are a new thing, a beautiful thing, a needed thing.

In Mt. Auburn Cemetery, they are busy making more redtails. Here's an active nest. How do I know that it's active, other than being told by my local authority?

Well, the camera reveals tailage. My new Canon 7D doesn't miss much, even high overhead in a thick pine. Like me and Hodge, we're a complete unit. I notice stuff, and my Canon 70-300 EF telephoto lens records it magnificently.

Flying redtails are a breeze now. Who could ever tire of seeing a bird like this spread out overhead?

So Hodge and I are watching a redtail sitting, on alert, in a tree, and all of a sudden it launches itself

almost flying out of the frame which was terribly exciting to me

and it lands and grabs an already quite dead and stiff squirrel that we surmised it may have killed yesterday

in this peaceful and rather appropriate setting

and it sets about tearing up said squirrel as we gasp in astonishment at the beauty of it all.

That's my Mount Auburn.

I was very pleased to get a comment from "Friends of Mt. Auburn" on my last post, offering me a private tour the next time I'm in town! Woo! I'll take you up on that, but I'm bringing Hodge along.

brief commercial:

If you like these photos and are thinking of upgrading your rig (highly recommended!) visit Midwest Photo Exchange on High Street in Columbus, Ohio, or on the web. Ask for Sonnie. He'll fix you up. I think you can see that he fixed me up! Finally having a camera rig that's as quick a birder as I am is an endless delight.

Birds and Flowers, Turtles and Frogs: Mt. Auburn Treasures

2012-04-26T03:44:00.001-07:00

When I was a college student I would walk to Mt. Auburn Cemetery of a fine fall day with a book I needed to read, and nestle between the cool forelimbs of this beautiful sphinx, leaning back against her curved but unmoving bosom, reading the hours away.

Now I stand and photograph her in the sharp April sun, wishing back that precise golden October light that made her embrace the perfect place to be.

The painted turtles know that light.

And so does this elderly red-eared slider. I guessed, simply looking at this lumpy individual, that it started its life in captivity. The irregular surface of the shell might indicate a calcium deficiency. But the kicker is that red-eared sliders aren't native to Cambridge, MA. Who knows how many years ago this big turkle was swimming little circles in the stinking water around a plastic palm tree, trying to live on Hartz Mountain brand dried flies? It was a dark era for turtles. I'm glad we don't do that any more. Well, not as much.

People let a lot of creatures go in Mt. Auburn Cemetery. Heck, I let a couple of goldfish go there one spring, before I went to Brasil for six months. Ludivico and Pustefix, are you still out there?

Maybe, said the bullfrog.

Probably not, said the great blue heron.

That's Hodge's little foot for scale. Eep, that's a lotta crap.

A morning that started in the 40's rocketed up to the mid-80's, and I threw on a pair of shorts and hurried to Mt. Auburn for a golden hour of photography before a full day of media and Fenway Park began. There were yellow-rumped warblers absolutely everywhere, it being only April 20. This oasis was just receiving its first wave of spring migration.

The rattling snap of ruby-crowned kinglets sounded from every hedge. They sound like miniature firecrackers.

Predictably enough, the pine warblers sang their mellow trill mostly from the pines. This drab little male came down into a maple to delight us, though. Hodge's life pine warbler.

And a great prize for me: a male palm warbler in stunning yellow and chestnut.

Where's the chestnut, you ask? On his hat. He's hopping up to a sturdy branch with a hapless caterpillar

and showing me his little chestnut cap as he beats it to a pulp.

Vicious things, those warblers, if you're tiny, soft and green.

Mount Auburn Cemetery (The Mothership)

2012-04-24T03:52:00.000-07:00

Here's what it comes down to for me. Cambridge equals Mt. Auburn Cemetery. Yes, there are wonderful shops and restaurants, but I don't have any money to spend; I've nothing to my name but hope that this new book digs me out. My last "paycheck" came a year ago, when I handed in the last of 320 illustrations for the book. So I don't spend much time around temptations that cost anything.

But oh, the temptations that are free for the enjoying...

All I can think about when I'm in Cambridge is getting back to Mt. Auburn. Forget the fancy food and the beautiful clothes...everything I need and want is there.

The place has a surreal beauty that completely captivates me. An arch leading to a landscape such as you'd see in a dream, Elysian light streaking across the greensward. I yearn for this place in all seasons, but especially in spring and autumn.

There are plants growing here that I don't recognize, and that is delicious. Anyone?

Venerable specimens of pink dogwood. They take me back to Virginia. So nice to see them growing so tall and strong in Massachusetts.

They join the beloved plants that I do recognize. My father wrote little poems. One had the dogwood as a lady in a lace dress, holding out her arms, proffering plates of divinity. In this case, pink divinity.

My camera, set on zone focus, preferred the dogwood blossoms to the black-capped chickadee! D'oh! Frustrating, but dreamy nonetheless. Maybe I meant to focus on the flowers...

Everywhere there are robins. This, a nicely faded female. I love robin architecture. Sometimes they hold their wings so low and straight they look like they're using crutches.

Her tiny cousin, the hermit thrush, just passing through on its way north. You can tell a hermit from a long way away by the rusty tail, and its habit of raising that tail suddenly, as if it were jerked upward by a string, then letting it fall slowly. Lovely habit.

I always pat this dog's head. He doesn't seem so forlorn on a warm spring day.

And who could, when the question marks are tickling the Viburnum odoratum, and its full vanilla-cookie scent wafts through the new leaves?

And the wooly fiddleheads are growing taller and taller?

And the geese are grazing in the goldgreen light?

To Boston!

2012-04-22T06:56:00.001-07:00

My dear friends and hosts John and Hodge, chatting as they wait for me to record a spectacular evening sky on Mass Ave. We all agreed that the hour when the sky goes peacock blue is the best hour of all. We'd walked all the way back to Cambridge from Fenway Park. Which isn't really all that far; it just sounds far. Ill-kept secret: I enjoyed the walk more than the baseball game. The Yanks hurt the Sox badly that day. Even though it was the 100th Anniversary of Fenway Park's Opening Day. Seems like they should've let them win, but I guess that's wiffleball, not baseball.

There was a lot of red and white in the stands. And Hodge pointed out that when you use the binoculars, nearly every shirt says RED SOX on it somewhere.

John showed me the Morse Code on the vertical white stripes on the old scoreboard. It's code for the first owners' names.

I had fun with my telephoto for awhile. This is NOT Daisuke Matsuzaka. It is Junichi Tazawa. Thank you, Hodge.

Even Big Papi couldn't slam the Sox to a victory.

And Saturday's game against the Yankees was an even worse rout. Oh well. It was great to be there, smack behind home plate with my friends John and Hodge on that auspicious day. Thanks to media commitments (I'm on a mini-book tour for The Bluebird Effect), I missed the opening ceremonies where past greats walked or wheeled out onto the field, and only was able to get there in the 7th inning.

I have some Cambridge blogposts coming up. Most of them are of birds and flowers, predictably. I told Hodge that taking me to Fenway Park is a bit like taking a dog to the Louvre. I appreciate it, it has interesting sounds and smells, but I'm sure I don't get it on the deep spiritual level that true baseball fans achieve. I find myself watching the flight patterns of mourning doves, who repeatedly enter the park from left field, fly along the top tier of seats, dip over right field, then exit at extreme back right field. What are they doing? Why would they enter a stadium crammed with yelling people? Do they have a nest up in the rafters? and before you know it I've missed the double play. Linus in the outfield with his blankie getting hit on the head with a baseball, that's me.

But I do see some interesting things in the city.

Big Cat Guy near Harvard Square. I think about him making his own big cat pants and sewing on a tail, and I wonder.

More anon.

A Real Simple Recommendation

2012-04-18T08:06:00.001-07:00

Dear readers,

My alert sister-in-law Laura brought to my attention that Real Simple Magazine is looking for a coffee table book to feature in its August issue. She knew just the book to recommend. Why, so do I. Now, it would be cheesy for me to enter the fray, recommending my own book. But you?
My putting you up to it wouldn't be cheesy at all, would it?

If you frequent Facebook (and who doesn't, these days?) and you feel like giving The Bluebird Effect a boost, or even its little sister Letters from Eden, and you do actually keep them on your coffee table because you love leafing through them, please tell Real Simple that. Here's the link to Real Simple's Facebook request for book recommendations.

Thank you so much! Let's give this book wings!

And while I'm at it:

BOSTON AREA ZICK ALERT!!

On Saturday, April 21 at 10 AM, I'll give a talk on my experiences raising baby birds at the Mass Audubon Drumlin Farm Sanctuary in Lincoln, MA. It's at 208 S. Great Rd, and the contact phone number is (781) 259-2200. We'll have a field trip afterward, walking Drumlin Farm's bluebird trail. There will also be a book signing, so if you haven't got your copy yet, come get one signed in person.

For Boston area folks, I'll be on the Emily Rooney show, interviewed by Kara Miller, on WGBH sometime around 12:30 pm Thursday, April 19, so tune in your radios.

And Joe Viglione will interview me on Visual Radio (that's TV, actually), at 1:30 on Friday, April 20 in Winchester, MA.

Back to packing and figuring out what to do with the bats and turtles and greenhouse while I'm away. Oh, Bill.....

Spring's Busting Out

2012-04-16T20:00:00.000-07:00

It's been a week and I haven't posted. Nobody's filed suit. Spring's like that. Everything happens at once and it's all just too beautiful for me to take in. But I try, I try.

The heirloom lilac, a lilac of truly titanic proportions, bursts into bloom alongside our 42' tall birding tower. She's going for 20', and Phoebe predicts we will one day pick blossoms by leaning over from the towertop.

A quiet little shot that turned out to be one of my favorites. I think it's the beautiful laundry floating behind, and that first petal falling that I love. This tulip came in an Easter arrangement from our church altar, and it just gets bigger and more beautiful every year. How often does that happen with tulips? Usually the chipmunks eat them or they just dwindle away. This one's a survivor.

There is a barn on the corner of our road that bursts into bloom each spring.

Wisteria, the thug of thugs in the plant world, has one week where it's worth tolerating, and oh, what a week it was.

I shot this barn in every light regime. There are many more photos, but these are just a few.

In the yard, the forsythia gives up its gold, shining all over my girl.

And then I caught her with messy hair and no mascara, the way I love her best.

She also shines on the field, jumping much farther than I would think any daughter of mine could, but then she got long stems from her daddy.

Another phoebe made the mistake of flying into the living room while prospecting for a home. He never came back. Oh, please, come back. We had to catch you to get you out, as you were panicking in the high clerestories.

No. I will nest somewhere without giant naked primates who hold me too close to their big mouths.

More springy things in my next post. I'm sorry they're not better organized. Neither is springtime, and neither am I these days.

Presenting The Rain Crows!

2012-04-10T00:01:00.005-07:00

Our CD is out! and I've been breathing down my wonderful Web Witch's neck to get a CD order button and page up on the blog and on my website. And she has done that!

Better than that, you can click on the button (see the little gray Rain Crows CD on the right sidebar?)

or on this link to listen to samples of each of the 16 yes SIXTEEN original songs on the CD!

So you don't even have to take my word for it that if you like reading my blog, you'll like the music our band makes. Give it a listen! Then it's up to you.

I can tell you this. I have about worn holes in this CD. I have every right to be tired of it, having been intimately involved with the creation of these songs in the past year and a half, and I'm not. I flippin' love it. And weirder than that, our kids love it. And so do their friends. Here they are, boogieing. If that's a word.

This is what the CD cover looks like. Our dear friend Joe Parisi at Flood Design designed it. It makes me laugh. And no, that's not me or Wendy waving. It's just some woman the photographer, Michael Northrup, also a dear friend, happened to be shooting that day.

Much of this music was created in our music/guest room down in our basement, with Chet Baker in constant attendance. He makes every single rehearsal, and wishes we would bring him to the gigs so he could meet and greet the fans.

I listen to the music and chew my toys. It is my favorite thing to do in the world, to be in the middle of the music. Chewing and listening. I know the words to all the songs. Sometimes they run through my head.

We Rain Crows have a lot of fun when we're together. This was our Halloween gig, when we all dressed up as characters from Scooby-Doo. Bill makes a very convincing Mr. Johnson, don't you think? Wendy is Daphne, and I'm pretty much in the zone already as Velma.

In MovieSounds Studio during recording last December. Wendy Clark Eller and JZ. Wendy and Bill wrote and co-wrote most of our songs. As the Shake and Bake girl used to say, "And Ah Hayulped!"

As you listen to the CD tracks, note the strong guitar presence from Bill Thompson III. There is some pretty amazing guitar work on this album, most of it from Bill.

He has a few to pick from.

Another guitar hero: our bass player Craig Gibbs. You'll hear him on bass throughout (although Bill grabs the bass for several songs) and on gritty slide guitar on "Dirt Road." He even tickles the nylon strings in some classical runs on "So Long." That's me on pennywhistle throughout.

One of the most amazing drummers we've ever had the pleasure of working with: Kage Queen. All of 19 when this photo was taken in January. Sooo tasty, and solid as a rock. We're so lucky to have him!

And the cherry on top? Fiddle from Memphis Symphony violinist Jessie Munson, who flew up from Memphis to play with us both on the record and at our CD release party at Washington State Community College in March. Bill and I will be playing with Jessie at the Potholes and Prairies Birding Festival in Carrington, ND, in June! Can't wait to see her again!

We played to a SRO crowd of 360 at the CD release party. I've never had more fun playing with any band. I'm sure that comes through in the photos, and I know, listening to it, that it comes through on "Looks Like Rain."

You'll find me singing lead (alto) on "Dirt Road," "Tell Me," and "Goes Down the Right Way." That's Bill and me together on "Meteor." The gorgeous soprano voice on many other tracks is Wendy. Bill's the guysinger throughout.

So give it a listen right here. And I will be more than happy to pack up a CD or two to send to you!

DOD, this CD's for you. I know you would have loved it.

My Right Toe

2012-04-08T00:50:00.002-07:00

D'jever notice how, when everything is coming down all at once and you're scrambling like a long-tailed cat in a room full of fiddlers, that's exactly the time your body chooses to say, "Slow down there, cowgirl, you have to sit down sometimes, too."

Would that it were something I could catch and then get over. Usually that's how it goes down. You get sick when you overdo it. Not me. Nah. What my body came up with is fancier than that: hallux rigidus, or osteoarthritis in my right big toe. Which doesn't sound like a big deal unless you have it, and then it is. As someone helpfully pointed out in a Facebook thread, "Hey! It's not cancer!" Which is true. It's not. It's something else, though.

I had it coming to me. I run every dang day. Or make that, I ran every day. I loved it so much. I got out there no matter the weather and I knew by the temperature and wind speed exactly which fleece or long-sleeved tee I'd wear. 51 and sunny? Short-sleeved tee and the gray fleece I got in a Woodward, Oklahoma Walmart, ugly but functional, perfect for running. 48 and misty? Long-sleeved tee and that same fleece. 34 and windy? Put the blue Nike jacket over the whole ensemble. And out I'd go and I'd listen to the birds and see who was singing and who had arrived or maybe who had just left and I'd come home and scribble down three or four haikus, every time. I'd have my morning to-do list completely figured out and I'd bite into the day like a hungry gator, spinning and twisting off big mouthfuls of my to-do list, gulping them down and reaching for more. That was running, and me.

When I was about three my dad was cutting a big tree in our yard in Kansas City Kansas and he misjudged how it would fall. It spun on its bole and came down right on top of me, standing safely with my sister way out and over to the side. I was freaking out and screaming because I wanted so badly to run away from that tree; I was terrified but my mom told my sister to hold me tight so I wouldn't get hurt and BAM that tree fell on me and smashed my right foot to jelly. I can only imagine what my parents felt as they lifted that huge limb off my back, wondering if they still had a youngest girl. They did. I had a stripe all the way down my spine where the bark had taken the skin off, and I had a cast up to my hip all summer but eventually everything healed OK. Marked by a tree. Not for the first time.

For 50 years, everything was basically OK. In the meantime in the late 1970's I was a contra dance gypsy for three summers and I piled in cars with a bunch of other young hippies in tank tops and long cotton skirts and felt crusher hats full of feathers and pins and flowers and we went from dance to dance all over New England. I had the smoothest swing of anybody and the pivot point was the metatarsal joint of my right big toe. I wore holes through my tap shoes and patched them with duct tape, right there under that big toe joint on my right foot. And my feet hurt after a dawn dance but everybody's feet hurt after a dawn dance. Especially when you've been leaping for the rafters in great balletic arcs in your talented partner's arms and landing on your right big toe.

me and my best friend Ruth who has also gone on to be a musician and mother and is one of the most hilarious people I ever knew. Martha's Vineyard, ca. 1977

Years went by and the dance gypsy became a renter and then a homeowner and along the way I dropped a refrigerator shelf I was washing, on edge, right on that same metatarsal joint and it hurt like hellfire. And then one night in the late 90's we were having a music party and one guitarist got excited and tipped over a tall CD cabinet and guess where the knife-sharp top edge landed? Yep. On my right big toe, neatly separating the metatarsal joint. I lay on the floor in a fetal position and bawled like a baby, didn't matter if there was a party going on or not. It was as if Fate had its fingernail right on that one toe of mine.

Enter running, two years ago this July, and in finding my bliss amidst the mist and the rain and the cold and the warm and the birdsong I finally wore out all the cartilage that was still left to pad that joint. And for the past week I have had exactly one night's sleep. The rest, nastily diced up by shooting pains in my big toe joint, pains like there is a crazy leprechaun with an ice pick and he's driving it into my poor old foot and the tears just roll down the side of my face and the leprechaun just laughs at 800 mg. of ibuprofen. He just laughs. And he saves it for the middle of the night, usually 11 pm to 4:30 am, go figure. I had no idea what was going on but by dawn of Good Friday by God I was going to find out. I found an orthopedic surgeon who would see me the same day and the kind nurse X-rayed my foot and said, "I don't see a bunion, but I do see arthritis." And the doctor seconded that, and showed me how the two faces of the metatarsal joint were not nicely rounded but flat against each other, banging together with each movement, and even looking at the X-ray hurt. There were some little bone spurs like shark fins which were to be expected, but he said all the pain was coming from that worn-out joint.

Then, speaking of hurt, he laid me down on the gurney and took out a needle and shot cortisone and Lidocaine right into that poor old joint and I thought of every foul word I have ever heard but somehow didn't yell them at the ceiling. I squeezed the kind nurse's hand very hard and she got me through it. It was a giant paper wasp with its stinger driving right in the tenderest, most abused part of my body. But whoops! it was Good Friday and it was time to fill the Easter baskets so I spent the next five hours after the shot running all over town buying stuff to put in Easter baskets, my foot quickly swelling past recognition. By the time I got home I was hobbling and by evening I was crawling and by night I was flat on my back weeping and Bill made dinner and Phoebe dug some Vicodin out of her cabinet, left over from her wisdom tooth extraction and I took one and last night I finally slept, slept the sleep of great dead singers and people without osteoarthritis in their toes. And the leprechaun went away.

But he'll probably be back in three months, which is how long a shot like that lasts. In the meantime I have to figure out what to do about it all. Do I stop running? (You might as well ask me to stop watching birds and writing haikus and leaning against old gravestones and thinking).

Do I walk? Do I slowly lose my mind? Do I schedule a surgery where they'll screw those worn, flattened metatarsal ends together so nothing moves? Do I borrow a bit of cadaver cartilage and have a surgeon put that in there? I pore through papers in the Journal of Podiatry and the surgeons are in total disagreement as to what to do with "young" active runny adults like me. Fuse or implant? The one thing they agree on: It doesn't get better. Well, I don't want to be around when it gets worse. Because that stank. It isn't cancer, but it stinks.

Just this evening (Saturday) I have gotten up out of my chair and have forgotten my toe ever hurt. Which is a beautiful thing, even if it's cortisone-induced. I don't know if I'll run again. I sure want to. It's already shot, that joint. Will running make it worse?

It scares me, the thought that some doctors want to use screws and some want to use cadaver cartilage and nobody seems to have the answer. Nobody seems to know what to do with my poor big toe joint. Except the leprechaun, and he'll be back.

Oprah's Book of the Week: The Bluebird Effect!

2012-04-05T00:01:00.000-07:00

Tooty, toot, toot. Rooty, toot, toot. Sometimes I grab my little horn and toot it. This is one of those times.

The Bluebird Effect is Book of the Week at Oprah.com.

As in Oprah's Book Club. My book got the Big Point from the Fickle Finger of Fate.

What is a bird book doing there, in the first place, and what is a bird book written by me doing there?

The gods must be crazy.

Bill's been saying he's the Steadman of Whipple. All four of us went to Bar-B-Cutie in Marietta yesterday and ate a celebratory meal of fried okra. I drank a quarter of a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc that night, then quit. I'm a cheap date.

I try not to obsess about it, about what it might mean for book sales. I only check its Amazon sales rank about four times a day. That's not neurotic. It had been hovering at around 6,000, and now it's right up around 1,000. Meaning there are only 1,000 other titles selling better than it is. Which feels pretty good, for a book about raising baby hummingbirds and chimney swifts. There are an awful lot of books in this world.

This is pretty arcane stuff, the brass tacks of dealing with orphaned and injured birds. I think it's interesting; most of you think it's interesting, but would the general public?

I wonder. Maybe it's all just bizarre enough to get someone's attention, or maybe it's the 320 paintings and drawings that did it. Maybe it's the insanely beautiful production Houghton Mifflin Harcourt lavished on it.

Maybe it's just luck.

I think about it all as I grub in the dirt, pulling creeping Charlie off my asparagus shoots and throwing wads of weeds over my shoulder. I wonder if I may have written and illustrated a book that will sell well at long last.

A book that has crossover potential from the usual suspects (birders and nature enthusiasts) to Oprah's Book Club people. I know that Letters from Eden has that potential, but Oprah didn't bite when my publicist, Taryn Roeder, sent it last time.

I'm just grateful, that's all.

Fielding pre-order requests at the Midwest Birding Symposium in September, 2011. Finally got them all sent out!

All it makes me want to do is write more, and that's the best feeling of all.

If y'all want to go over to Oprah's Book Club page and leave a salient comment, I'd be much obliged. Don't worry. They don't send you a bunch of emailed stuff when you register. As always, nice reviews on the Amazon page for The Bluebird Effect help, too. There's a lady who docked it a star because one of the chapters is about ivory-billed woodpeckers, and everyone knows they're extinct! Hmmph. And another lady who said, "If you want my opinion, her husband is a saint to put up with it all!"

Well, howdy-doo to you, too.

That's not neurotic, to worry about that stuff, right? Whoops, slipped to 1,500. All right. I'm going to go pull some weeds, plant some peas. Uniform: Round House overalls, workboots and a sports bra. It's a look. And no, there are no pictures of it.

As always, you can hit the order buttons on the right sidebar if you want to buy a book personalized by me. I can't meet Amazon's prices, and I don't even try. As long as you have the book, I don't mind where you got it. It just makes me happy that you like it. I'm thankful for your patronage, thankful for this wonderful life lived amongst birds. The blue-gray gnatcatchers got in today, and a yellow-throated warbler was singing from a creek valley as I drove home. It's all beginning again.

ABA Bird of the Year, Part Five--Finis!

2012-04-03T04:04:00.000-07:00

See why I was so excited to paint the male evening grosbeaks?

Here are their ghosts...

By now you’ve gathered that most of the work of doing a bird painting, at least for me, is putting the bird in a believable setting. For me, painting the birds themselves is dessert, because it’s effortless and fun. Well, I shouldn’t say it’s effortless, because male evening grosbeaks are tricky to paint. I’m really excited to move on to the males, knowing what impact their colors will have on the whole piece.

The key to painting male evening grosbeaks is laying down a bright yellow underpainting and letting it dry completely. When I then stroke burnt umber over top of the dry underpainting, the yellow shines through. The final effect should conjure a good golden-brown honey mustard, with touches of pure hotdog-ready French’s on the coronet, rump and flanks. Mixing the two colors would give mud, which I don’t want; I want an overlay of burnt umber and sepia with glimmers of yellow shining through, because that’s what I see in the plumage of the study skins I’m working from.

Here, in the upper left corner, is the male I thought would work for the “iconic bird of the year,” but the general consensus at ABA HQ was that the pose was a bit odd. In the end, the pose was deemed too outré for use on a sticker or patch, so I drew another male (also from the same batch of life sketches) in a more typical and easily interpreted pose for this application.

That’s OK. I’m used to having my better ideas not work out in the end. Like having a flock on the cover…

I'm always saving something back for dessert. In this case it's the pink apple blossoms.

The painting's almost done, with pink apple blossoms painted in. I’ve done a bit of glazing of Chinese white on the birds to give their plumage a sheen, and shadowed the whites in their wings as well. They’re eating apple blossoms, something grosbeaks like to do in spring.

Here's a more saturated photo of the piece. Juicing up the blacks usually helps any painting.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this walk through the process of creating Birding’s new cover and its Bird of the

Year.

Stay tuned for information on purchasing this painting! No fooling! Proceeds go to evening grosbeak conservation.

New Bird Species in North America!

2012-04-01T00:01:00.005-07:00

The newly described Dun Mountain Warbler, Pseudoseiurus monochromis, as painted by ME!

Gentle readers:

I’ve been holding this story in for weeks. I’m about to burst with excitement. How often does a bird painter get asked to depict a newly discovered species—in North America?? It’s every bird painter’s best dream. But enough of my yakkin'. I’ll let the paintings and the press release speak for themselves:

Ornithologists from the National Bird Observatory (NBO) in Osprey Chalk, Connecticut, are pleased to announce the discovery of a North American bird species that is new to science. The dun mountain warbler (Pseudoseiurus monochromis) was recently discovered by bear hunters on all-terrain vehicles trying to reach forested habitat on the far side of a 10,000-acre mountaintop removal site in southern West Virginia. The species was described by ornithologists from the NBO, who were alerted to its existence when the West Virginia bear hunters (who were being filmed for a reality television show) remarked on camera that "it was the only thing we seen that was alive for miles around."

"This species has apparently moved into the expansive wastelands left behind by mountaintop removal (MTR), and is thriving there," said Patrick Fitzmichael, director of the NBO and chairman of the E. R. Hare Citizen Science Endowment at the NBO. "We found more than 35 nests in southern West Virginia in just one weekend of searching. We think that this population grew out of remnant bands of birds that were living and apparently breeding above the treeline in the Appalachians on scree slopes where no one in their right mind would ever go for birding or anything else."

The natural history of the dun mountain warbler is most unusual. It nests on barren, rocky ground in mountaintop removal sites, laying its eggs among the stones and exposed clay. It flips rocks and pebbles looking for invertebrates, colonizing recent MTR sites, scavenging prey from reptiles and amphibians to insects, even following earth moving equipment with an alert expression and pertly wagging tail, waiting to see what is stirred up by the digging.

The plumage of the dun mountain warbler is described as dirt-brown and gray—or dun—which helps the bird and its cryptically colored eggs to blend in perfectly with their surroundings. Little is known about the dun mountain warbler's courtship, but field researchers were able to catch a short recording of its song, which is described as "a loud beeping tone similar to a piece of heavy earth-moving equipment backing up."

A spokesperson for the Consolation Coal Company reacted this way to the announcement: "We've known for years that our efforts to turn unusable tree-choked mountain habitat into nice, flat, open areas would be good for the environment. If a bird lays a egg on a mountain, what happens? It rolls to the bottom and breaks. The baby bird dies. We're happy that nature is finally realizing that our mining operations not only mean jobs for the local community, but they also make good places for birds to nest. Now THAT's family values, which is what we've always stood for."

Thus far, the dun mountain warbler seems to find its center of abundance in southern West Virginia's coal country, and NBO is mounting expeditions to neighboring states of Kentucky and Tennessee to survey MTR sites there. The future looks bright for this specialized but opportunistic species as mountaintop removal proceeds apace. The Obama Administration has recommended a study to determine if the species needs more breeding habitat. "We're ready to approve more than 150 MTR mine site permits if it means we can help this rare warbler survive and even thrive in the future."

The birding community reacted with great enthusiasm. Jeffrey Giordano, president of the American Birders' Society said. "This is AWESOME! A new bird for our members to chase after. This will certainly be our Bird of the Year for 2013!" (And I'm hoping I'll get to paint it then, too! I mean, not to be a Bird of the Year hog, but...who you gonna call, right?)

Bill Thomas III, editor of Birders' Watching Digest said, "This is the feel-good birding story of the year! More habitat for an endangered species--and a NEW one at that!"

The Old River Birding Festival in Oak Harbor, West Virginia, will be offering customized tours to see the dun mountain warbler from now through September. Contact the festival at www.birding-wv.com.

ABA Bird of the Year, Part Four

2012-03-29T03:53:00.001-07:00

We're still working on the Birding cover for ABA's Bird of the Year issue. Evening grosbeaks! This one, female.

I lay in the basic washes on the female bird first. I’ve been waiting for this moment, to see how her colors bounce off the colors in the road.

She looks flat here because I haven’t modeled her shape or shaded the underside. I just want to get her colors laid in first.

With a little shading, she looks much rounder. I’ll work on her more, but for now I decide to work on the landscape a bit more, now that I have her to tie it into the painting. I darken those stripey violet shadows coming across the road and the grass. They’ll give the sense of dappled sunlight, which I think is already coming across pretty well. The darker the shadows, the brighter the apparent light source. And violet shadows evoke reflected skylight and mix wonderfully with greens, which is more than you can say for a lot of colors. Cobalt Violet and Cobalt Blue are my two main shadow colors.

What I can say at the end of the third day of working on this is that all the planning and masking were worth it. The painting part is sheer joy. I love the way the female works with the dirt road in the landscape. Best part is yet to come: Painting the boys!!

ABA Bird of the Year: Part Three

2012-03-27T04:40:00.001-07:00

We're continuing to work on the cover for Birding Magazine, of the American Birding Association's Bird of the Year, the evening grosbeak.

You’ll notice the light regime changes in my progress photos. Normally I trot outside to shoot them, but sometimes I reach a key passage in a painting when it’s dark outside. So for some photos, I had to use incandescent light rather than the clean north light that usually floods my studio. This is a work-in-progress, and progress isn’t always as well-lit as we’d like.

The apple tree leaning over the road is a bit of a stretch, I know. I wanted to give the viewer the experience of pretending they are birding and seeing such a wonderful sight, so it was important to me to have a road in the painting, a place for the viewer to stand. A road stretching away gives the viewer a distance to walk into, so I stretched the truth a bit. Let’s just say it’s an apple tree that’s leaning so far over the fence it’s probably about to fall into the road and not worry about it, OK? It’s an imaginary apple tree, anyway. It won’t even break the fence when it falls.

This photo was taken by daylight—what a difference in color temperature! I like the way the sky turned out, especially near the lower left horizon. It feels springy to me. I’ve rubbed away the Incredible White masking compound with my finger and peeled off the masking film to reveal clean paper. I’ve had lots of fun with this painting until now, and it’ll only get better.

What fun I had laying in the brilliant spring greens of the landscape! I went ahead and painted right over the fenceposts because they would be so much darker than the grass. I could paint them over it without a problem. My secret plan for the road was to tie its color into the colors in the plumage of the female grosbeak. She being nearest to the ground, I think it’ll work well.

I start by painting the branches, and then I paint the birds’ feet and flower petioles all in one go, since they’re almost the same color. I like the way the foreground is starting to work with the background. The little buildings ground the whole composition, as do the fenceposts; they define the plane of the road and give the eye somewhere to go. I’m SO excited to paint the flowers and birds, and especially to lay in the sharp blacks of the wings, and the brilliant yellows in the birds’ plumage.

I paint those glow-in-the-dark green bills next, and for efficiency’s sake, I do them all at once. Once I’ve mixed the color, why recreate it for each bird?

ABA Bird of the Year, Painting Part Two

2012-03-25T04:34:00.001-07:00

Here’s what I use for masking out areas I don’t yet want to paint. Frisket Film is a transparent plastic film with low-tack adhesive on back that sticks to the watercolor paper. The artist cuts it in the desired shape with a small X-acto knife, then places it over the area to be masked. Masking the birds was a bit of an adventure. I cut one big piece of masking film by Frisket, and applied it to the paper. Frisket doesn’t much like to stick to the irregular surface of cold press watercolor paper, and that’s a big problem, because it’ll let paint creep under and ruin your nice white space for the birds and flowers. So I engineered the leaves and buds so they intersected the birds fairly smoothly and made one nice big area, and cut the shape a little smaller than needed. Then I ran around the outside of the big, irregular shape with liquid masking compound (I use Incredible White Mask) which has the consistency of thick whipping cream, but dries to a clear, rubber-cement like finish. This effectively seals the edges of the Frisket film and prevents the wash from creeping under it.

The masking compound, after it dries, can be rolled off with the finger or an eraser when you’re ready to remove it. In this case, it did a lovely job of sealing the edges. My results vary widely, and sometimes paint creeps under my mask no matter what I do. This time, I lucked out and got to skip the step where I peel off the masking film and spend a half-hour scrubbing out all the places where the wash seeped under it.

Time to paint the sky!

ABA President Jeff Gordon had requested a spring scene, something other than the typical snow scene most people are used to seeing. I wanted an active sky, a spring sky, a sky that could change and get overcast in a few minutes, so I used lively brushwork on paper that had been dampened by a fine mist from my trusty spray bottle. I didn’t worry about getting it all perfectly even. The sky outside the day I painted this was similar, so I just looked at the random cloud shapes and didn’t worry about where they were as I painted; I just laid them in as it felt right. I did a little scrubbing and lifting of the blue wash to better define the clouds, but I really didn’t want them to compete with the birds, so I kept them pretty filmy. Once a wash like this dries you can’t go back into it and work on it much, so when it was done it was done.

One thing I remember about EVGR is that they always seemed to stay so late in the spring that you started to hope they were going to breed. I remember seeing them in flowering trees in W. MA and even hearing them singing! So I decided to put them in a full-on early May scene, with the trees all leafing out and the grass already getting high along the fencerow. It could be anywhere where EVGR breed—Vermont or Maine, but it’s a scene from not far from where I live in SE Ohio, on Tick Ridge. Painting as I was in late January, I can’t tell you how wonderful it was to waller around in springtime for the time it took to paint this. I could feel the tall grass and the warm breeze and smell the unfolding leaves, that green smell when the sun hits everything.

ABA's Bird of the Year, as Rendered by Zick.

2012-03-22T04:14:00.001-07:00

It’s an honor to be asked to paint The American Birding Association’s Bird of the Year. It’s a special thrill when the B.O.Y. turns out to be a bird I adore, a bird that’s part of my personal history, dating back to my childhood in Virginia, an unprecendented and never again repeated invasion of the birds in the mid 1970’s, and the first and most fabulous feeder my father ever built for me.

The Bird of the Year is chosen carefully. Most of all, it’s spotlighted for conservation reasons. Evening grosbeaks are declining overall, and we’re not really sure why. Research is needed. Many yearn to see this bird, but fewer and fewer do. In southeast Ohio, it’s been almost twenty years since an evening grosbeak has so much as lit at our feeding station. If any species deserves the limelight right now, the evening grosbeak does. See ABA’s special page devoted to the program, which we hope will result in greater attention to its decline and research as to its causes and, we hope, eventual arrest.

Part of the push is the sticker/badge you see above, and part is a cover for Birding that features the chosen species. I was asked to do both.

My first, and most grandiose idea for this magazine cover was a flock of evening grosbeaks in flight. Color, motion, forward movement for the ABA…it was all so appealing. I was soon to bump up against the hard reality that a flock of birds doesn’t work very well on a vertical magazine cover. To make a flock, it takes more than three or four birds; it takes a village of birds. After a couple of days of drawing, I just couldn’t get around the reality that each bird would have to be less than an inch long to get a decent number of them all on the page. I am too old to paint inch-long birds. Just getting all their eyes in the right place would be an enormous challenge at that scale, not to mention all those tiny flight feathers.

The magazine cover’s vertical format means that in order to get more than one or two on the page, you have to stack the birds one atop the other. I considered asking editor Ted Floyd to print just this one issue of Birding sideways, so I’d have more space to play with. Shouldn’t be that big a deal to reformat the whole magazine and staple the short side, right? The proposal died aborning. I kept struggling with the vertical flock.

I worked on that for two and a half days and threw in the towel. Then I tried just a few birds. But still they were small, small, small, and I didn’t want to paint small. I wanted big fat juicy birds that you could caress with your eyes. Birds with structure, birds with volume. Grosbeaks are neat chunks of mustard and butter, hearty well-built streamlined units. I decided to perch them and heaved a sigh of relief as I put my flying grosbeak drawings in a drawer for later.

I went into my old sketchbooks from the last time we had evening grosbeaks at the feeders in the early 1990’s. I was so glad to find some lively sketches, which brought the living birds right back for me.

I knew I wanted a nice male to be the “totem” Bird of the Year, just for color and graphic appeal. And I decided to be a little bold with the pose—looking head on at you over his shoulder, which would show the nice white wing patches, the bright yellow rump and coronet, and the massive bill. I hoped it would work. I didn’t want it to be boring, and the best way I know to avoid boring is to go right to the living bird.

Here’s the final drawing, transferred to tracing paper, then to be transferred onto watercolor paper. I do this by taping the drawing made on tracing paper to the back of the watercolor paper and putting the whole affair on a light box. You can also tape it to a window—the poor artist’s lightbox. It’ll give you the same effect, which is a strongly backlit setup so you can see to trace, but it’s a bit harder to draw vertically!

I’ve now traced the drawing onto the watercolor paper. You can see the watermark on the Winsor-Newton paper in the upper left corner. Everything’s on the paper now; all that remains is to take a deep breath and start masking the birds so I can paint a sky behind them.

Rhubarb, Full Circle

2012-03-20T03:58:00.001-07:00

When we last left the Horticulture Chimp, she was grubbing out two baby rhubarb plants from an abandoned farmstead in North Dakota. Ann Hoffert had just seen and heard her life veery, and everyone was happy. Except perhaps the rhubarb plants, which rode to their new home in Ohio in the Chimp's boot, got potted up, yellowed and dropped a couple of leaves and then shrugged and made more. It was mid-June 2011.

The rhubarb went into the Heirloom Bed, where only the most special vegetables and flowers live. It's full of sandy loam and manure, memories and dreams.

The rhubarb liked it there with the asparagus and the spearmint and the old birdbath my dad made out of a disc. Disc, like a disc from a tractor implement. I'd be using it as a birdbath yet but it rusted through, iron being iron. I took it to a welder to fix it but it rusted through again so now it is an odd and not very pretty lawn ornament, unless you knew my dad, and then you'd think it was beautiful.

The rhubarb grew and grew, spreading great flat leaves to the sun, making lovely red stems full of tart flavor.

September rolled around and Ann Hoffert came to visit and attend the Midwest Birding Symposium with her lifelong friend Terry. Who is wearing my binoculars in this photo but don't be confused. I'm a little taller.

I took them for a walk down Dean's Fork (a must-see for Ohio guests)

and Ann Hoffert was so happy to see my habitat, as I am always so happy to see hers

that she hugged us both as we took in the old houses and barns of my favorite dirt road.

I shook her down a pawpaw and showed her tall ironweed

and great lobelia

and an adorable young guy who was checking the oil rigs in a homemade truck made out of plywood, Plexiglas and an ATV

and we went home and I made Ann and Terry the perfect avocado and homegrown lettuce and tomato BLT (I am drooling just looking at this)

and we ate and talked and for dessert

I had finally harvested the rhubarb

and mixed it with fresh September local apples

and covered it with cobbler crumbs cut with almonds and coconut

and butter and vanilla

and baked it (this is before baking; we were too busy eating to take a post-baking picture)

and served it, this rhubarb that had grown beneath the singing veery, Ann's life veery;

rhubarb that had come home in a boot from North Dakota and was now growing happily in Ohio, donating stems to a dessert I'd made that was now on a plate in front of our dearest North Dakota friend.

It's for full-circle moments like that that I live.

Veeries and Rhubarb

2012-03-18T03:37:00.001-07:00

One of our new favorite destinations in North Dakota is the area up near Devil's Lake. Devil's Lake itself has a refuge where you can drive through and see bison lolling in the grass.

The babeh bison are a nice color of orange.

and very sweet.

We saw a light pole in someone's farmyard. They must do a bit of hunting...those are all whitetail antlers. Yow.

and we walked up our favorite road, which is our favorite because it is heavily wooded and you can see things like redstarts and vireos and thrushes and tanagers there. Those are hard birds to get on the prairie!

It was like walking out of North Dakota and into Pennsylvania. So we've learned over the past two years that if we want a nice fat Big Day list, we must hit this one magic road near Devil's Lake.

And on that road there is an abandoned farmstead

with a not-so-very-old house, which is unusual in itself

and just across the road from there is an overgrown place where once upon a time there might have been a garden

and growing in that garden was a beautiful plant in full bloom that looked to me to belong to the dock family (Polygonaceae) and it hit me that this must be rhubarb abloom.

And at the same time we heard a veery sing deep in the woods and Ann Hoffert had never seen a veery so Bill whipped out his iPhone and called that bird right in.

So not only did we have its breezy song sending shivers up our spines; we had the Real Bird Right There for Ann to See.

Which was wonderful. But the Horticulture Chimp was beginning to hyperventilate, because that blooming rhubarb had obviously done it before and dropped a few seeds. There were baby plants at its base. And though the stems were not yet red, there was something very familiar about their leaves. The Horticulture Chimp dropped to her knees. "Ann, is this rhubarb??" She bent over, looked. "Yes, I believe it is."

Well, it wasn't long before the Chimp had a pointed stick and had begun digging doggedly around the root of the giant rhubarb plant, and it became clear that the babies were actually root propagules, which made digging them out that much more interesting and effortful, a little dirtier.

But the HortChimp always gets her plant.

photo by Bill Thompson III

Two, in fact, which she dampened down with water from a bottle, wrapped in plastic bags, and stuffed in her boots for the long flight home to Ohio. Because she had always, always wanted rhubarb in the garden, and North Dakota rhubarb from right under a singing veery would be ever so much more special.

But it gets better...