Checking Out the Neighborhood

The winter is upon us with fearsome cold weather and wind; fearsome for us, anyway, with lows in the low 20’s F.  It’s not Minnesota or Alaska, but it’s more cold than I need.  So, given the cold weather, we chose yesterday, for some unaccountable reason, to drive around our next northern neighborhood—Delta, B.C. and particularly western Delta.

 Delta is exactly what it says: it’s the delta of the Fraser River, and like most deltas, it’s a sumptuous agricultural area.  It’s easy to forget that Vancouver is a river town because it’s also an ocean town with Burrard Inlet to the north and the Fraser delta to the south.  So, we were driving around in this freezing weather through farm land, filled with farm homes and farm industry of one sort and another.

There’s a lot to see that I hadn’t seen before.  We started in southwestern Delta on the Band Land of the Tsawwassen Nation.  There’s an exquisite cemetery (I’m a big fan of cemeteries…they say a lot about us).  It’s tiny with very simple wooden crosses for the most part, some standing straight, some easing into other positions as they will over time.  It looks old and it looks cared for, but not with that immaculate maintenance look that most urban cemeteries have.  And down the road from that, a spectacular ‘abandoned’ boat, which is only to say that it’s a lovely old wooden boat that is unlikely ever to go to sea again, but is conserved (if not preserved because preservation was just not in the cards) right next to a wooden house that is still preserved.  Yet further along the main road, here is a long house unlike any I’ve ever seen before; clearly a modern structure and it seems unlikely that it is based on some traditional structure, but it is surely a grand sight with its steep reddish roof and dormers (for lack of a better word) silhouetted against the big blue sky looking oceanward on a cold sunny day.

And on to the farmland.  It’s clearly farming in transition.  There are virtually no animals to be seen: 2 llamas, 2 horses, and 4 sheep were all I spotted, although maybe others were all indoors staying warm.  There are many collapsing buildings, barns and other out-buildings that please my eye in their state of disarray.  There are farmhouses that look like those in Iowa or Idaho, and there are farmhouses that look like they’ve been moved in from Greece or Italy, and farmhouses that look like they were designed for a sizable lot in Beverly Hills.  One house with a huge lawn, neatly cropped, was the home of about eight seriously-rusted pieces of large farm machinery.  A kind of museum, I think. 

The place is a very mixed batch.  At this time of year, there are still fields full of pumpkin residue, as well as fields with green cover crops, some kind of grass that I don’t specifically recognize.  But there are also great expanses of young blueberry bushes, the current newest occupier of farmland in Delta.  It would appear that blueberries are going to dominate the diet of the world.  And then there are the acres of also new greenhouses that are providing us with an abundance, year round, of red peppers and water-plumped, ‘vine-ripened’ tomatoes.  Not everyone, it would appear is happy with the greenhouses. 

Eventually, we ended up at the Reifel Bird Sanctuary to check out the sandhill cranes.  There’s a pair of them there who are permanent residents and this winter there are half a dozen visitor cranes as well.  We saw the great flocks of sandhill cranes in New Mexico (Bosquet del Apache) many years ago, and seeing hundreds of them fly in at dusk is in the same league as seeing thousands of snow geese flying around at Reifel.  The cranes’ feathers are just extraordinary, and you can stand around and talk to these birds, complimenting them on their lovely appearance.  They look right back at you with their bright orange eyes as if they understood every word and find you an absolutely fascinating conversationalist.  But they were pretty quiet, themselves.  The picture below is of their tail feathers.

And the mallards…thousands of them around the sanctuary, hundreds of them at your feet at any moment.  As we were leaving, I saw a three-year-old all bundled up in a pink snowsuit, standing a few feet away from her parents and surrounded by a hundred or so mallards.  They weren’t paying any particular attention to her; the flock was just walking along, as they do, slowly and with great disorganization.  The little girl’s mother called out to her to come along.  The girl looked around with great apprehension, raised her hands high up in the air, and called, ‘I can’t get out, I can’t get out!’  Clearly, she had no idea of how anyone could just walk through ducks.  One of life's skills that you can't learn early enough.

Birds Say 'Bye!'

This morning, it was far too dangerous to go outside the house.  For reasons not entirely clear to me, the near yard was filled with birds this morning, many kinds, whooshing to and fro so fast that it seemed like you would be impaled on a passing beak if you were out there, put well off your stride by a beating wing.  Pretty exciting stuff.

There is a mountain ash tree outside our kitchen windows, about 15 feet from the house.  Earlier in the week, I noted that it had an excellent crop of berries this year, that they were ripe, and that they had as yet been untouched by the birds who usually clear them out the minute they ripen.  The elderberry tree has already surrendered its crop (usually to cedar waxwings, although I didn’t see them this year), and this morning it was the mountain ash’s turn.

First came a flock of flickers.  Flickers are big birds (about a foot long and with a wingspan of 18-20 inches), and a kind of woodpecker. I don’t recall ever seeing them in a flock before, although the google tells me they migrate in ‘loose flocks.’  This was a small flock, but because they are so big, it seemed like a lot more than 6-8 birds.  When one of them lands on the end of the mountain ash branch where the berries are, the vibration makes all the branches shake and the particular branch can spring up and down a foot or more.  It makes for a lot of commotion in a tree.

And then, right after the flicker flock flew in (How many times do you get to say that?  Not enough.), a big flock of robins came in to work the other side of the tree and then passed five or so minutes while the two brands shook each other out of the tree, with an occasional grab of berries in between the action.  On the ground beneath the tree there suddenly arrived a few juncos and chickadees to pick up the leavings, and then they were joined by a couple of spotted towhees.  From the fir tree behind the mountain ash, a pair of woodpeckers started bouncing up and down.  And then strolled across the deck, in front of them all, a yellow-rumped warbler.

It was like being at the opera.  Dramatic exits and entrances, big actions, and in the background a steady chorus.  The hard news?  We’re finished with the good weather.  They know more about this than meteorologists is my guess.  Time to go south.  Happy that we could send them off with a luscious berry picnic.

Birds of a Feather

In our yard each spring, we see nuthatches, juncos, goldfinches, house finches, chickadees, pine siskins, flickers, spotted towhees, brown creepers, sapsuckers, hairy woodpeckers, swallows, bald eagles (only very rarely actually in the yard, but they sometimes settle into one of our tall trees for short periods of time), two kinds of hummingbirds, winter wrens, and probably some others that I’ve forgotten for the moment. But our primary spring bird is the robin. They arrive early and stay late. And they nest and nest and nest, which the others must do, too, but I rarely see their nests. The robins, by contrast, build their nests where we can see them.

For several years, I had a robin who came back each year and built a nest just outside the door to my quilt workshop. She usually had two clutches of three babies each spring, and one year drew it on into the summer with a third one. She didn’t come back last year. But her last nest is still their awaiting anyone who wants it. Another Point Roberts abandoned house.

That robin, like most of our robins, has a bird brain. Which is to say that she has a perfectly good plan for her life’s work but it rests on an unquestioned assumption. Her belief is that the biggest threat in the world to her and her chicks is Ed and me. And because we are so dangerous, these lady robins build their nests right by our back door or the workshop door or the orchard house door so that the moms can keep a close eye on us. Which means that every single time we come in or out of the door, she has to fly up in a panic out of the nest and fling herself over to the over side of the yard so we won’t be thinking that there are babies in the nests and thus we won’t be going to eat them.

Since we are not interested in eating either her or the babies, her life would be a lot easier if she just calmed down and entertained the idea that we are the best friends she has ever had. But we’ve never had a nesting robin that thought that until this year. This new and improved robin set up her nest in the middle of the orchard, in a plum tree, and about 7 feet from the ground. It is right in the pathway of our trek back and forth from the little house to the orchard house, so we pass by her constantly. But, she is not interested in us; she is not concerned about us; she does not think we are going to eat her or her children. Maybe it is just that it takes robins 15 or 16 years to begin to trust people.

In any case, she’s got three little ones out there now and Ed photographed them this morning. He climbed up on a ladder to get this picture and they didn’t even look up. And she didn’t rush back from wherever she’d gone that moment to collect the worm breakfast.

Cranes and Peace

Christmas often comes late for me because people mail gifts to me when they’ve finally taken care of everyone who cares about getting them on time. I don’t actually do much in the way of gift giving or receiving at Christmas, but the things I do get are always welcome. What came to me in yesterday’s mail was a crested crane. It is a beautiful, delicate, and graceful little bird, about ten inches tall and made of fired, glazed clay. Its legs and crest are metal, its base wood. It is made by a Guatemalan artist, Marco Tulio Garcia Sol, whose work is sold in the U.S. through a friend of mine in Wisconsin. Awhile back, we had some of his smaller birds for sale here in Point Roberts down at the Blue Heron and this Christmas there were some tiny bird earrings that he made. The cranes are a new venture for him and my friend thought I would like to see them. And I thought other people might like to see them. (There is no website for the cranes right now, but if you are interested in them, email me (address is over there on the right column under profile, and I’ll send the site address to you when I get it.)

Cranes, crested or otherwise, are not birds I have a lot of familiarity with, although the first time I went to the Reifel Bird Sanctuary just over the border in Ladner, they had a kind of pet sandhill crane hanging around—he had flown in from other parts and just decided to hang around permanently. Or maybe not: I haven’t seen him there in the last few visits I’ve made to the reserve, so maybe he changed his mind and has flown back to the other parts. And once I went to the Bosque del Apache reserve, just south of Albuquerque in New Mexico, where you can see hundreds and hundreds of sandhill cranes flying in as the sun goes down. (And a Crane Festival in November of each year.) A pretty amazing sight. Cranes--at up to 14 pounds--are much heavier birds than herons although their wingspan is about the size, and I’m still amazed by seeing one heron at a time pretty regularly. Think if there were hundreds at a time every day and about twice the size.

Looking at my new crane, and thinking about prior crane exposures caused me to think about cranes more generally. Anything that splendid must have a lot of symbolic history. I had a vague sense of cranes being associated with New Year’s, so it seemed particularly appropriate to be thinking about cranes, but when I googled ‘cranes myth,’ I found nothing about New Year’s but lots about other things. There is mythology of cranes being the first birds on earth. What a good piece of work that would have been for evolutionary work: starting a little high on the achievement scale, I’d think. Still, if you had birds like that around, I can imagine why you might begin to think of them as a kind of Platonic bird, a bird that holds the essence of all other birds.

Cranes are good luck and hold the promise of springtime, as well, and I’ll keep that in mind as we go through January, which is not looking like it’s going to give way to crocuses by Valentine’s Day. And then, the biggest crane phenomenon for our lives, they are symbols of peace. That could be a constant reminder in a world that is desperately in need of some serious peace. Enough said about the Middle East right now, but surely not enough being done for peace there.

The crane as a peace symbol comes from a Japanese girl who died of leukemia secondary to being in Hiroshima at the time of the atomic explosion these many years ago. Before she died, she wanted to make 1,000 origami cranes. She didn’t quite make it, but her school friends finished the thousand, and a lot of publicity followed and now there are cranes for peace everywhere and origami crane festivals to further them.

So, I ended up spending much of yesterday afternoon figuring out how to make an origami crane. There are plenty of good instructions on the net, even if I’m a little slow about being able to follow them. And while folding, I was asking myself whether there’s some way to make origami cranes out of fabric and into a quilt, but they may well be too three-dimensional for that kind of project. But I’ll keep thinking about it. And about Peace! If there were something more to do about it, I'd do it.

Birds in the Hand

We don’t much feed birds in the summer because (a) they can find their own food; and (b) since we come and go, we’d just as soon they not get used to our providing their food; and (c) the bear is perfectly crazy about bird food in the form of seeds, not birds. In the winter, it’s another matter, but only if a lot of snow or very low temperatures are involved. Then we feed them on an emergency basis, figuring they won't get entirely used to the idea that they aren’t going to have to do their own foraging the rest of the time.

This past ten days, now, it has been steady snow and very low temperatures, so it’s bird feeding time. Of course, because we don’t usually feed them, they don’t know to come to our house for food and we don't get very many of them. On the first morning of the snow storm, we put out sunflower seed under the carport, which was protected from snow, but saw nary a bird for at least 48 hours. Then a single song sparrow showed up, although it didn’t exactly look like one: much bigger because his feathers were so puffed up to prevent heat loss. He didn’t mind us watching him from behind the door or even talking to one another (normally, they move away even if they’re not eating the second they’re aware of us). I guess that’s a situation in which concentrating on food seems like a very good idea.

By the fourth day, a second song sparrow had joined in the eatery work and the next day a rufous-sided towhee (perhaps literally) blew in. They all looked so cold and so needy. It made me feel like I ought to at least open the door and invite them into the front hall to stay. But opening the door would indeed cause them to fly away.

Birds eat and eat and eat. And they kept it up. Yesterday, day nine, a second towhee arrived. And today, day 10, all four were here for continued Boxing Day eating. The snow was back, too. We all six of us (counting Ed) spent the day at home, sort of. Food being available here, but no Boxing Day shopping at all.
(The photo is the song sparrow, taken through the window and in very dim light.)

Home for Christmas

An Anna’s Hummingbird has made the trip over to Point Roberts in order to be home for our White Christmas. Apparently, she (it’s a she, note the white tip at the end of the tail) is doing her homecoming at Rose’s. Anna’s are not the most frequent of our hummingbirds on the Point. That honor belongs to Rufous Hummingbirds. All our hummingbirds arrive in mid-spring and then disappear sometime around July. I always assumed that they went south, but when I looked up info about them on Google, I found that “Christmas Bird Counts document the presence of Anna's Hummingbird throughout western Washington in the winter.” Apparently, it winters as far up as southern Alaska. Hardy fellows, given that they didn’t come up past California until the second half of the 20th Century.

Certainly surpised me to find they were up here as winter dwellers. I’ve never seen one in Point Roberts much after August, let alone in the winter. Up farther north, here on the Sunshine Coast, we had a Xanthus Hummingbird who showed up about ten years ago around Christmas and then wintered over. Since the Xanthus is a Baja, Mexico, resident and never comes this far north, it was quite an event and people came from all over to look at it. We drove down to look at it and we definitely saw it. But that was about it for me. I can’t imagine coming here from 1,000 miles away to see a bird whose picture is readily available in any bird book as some people did, but I guess that only goes to prove that I’m not really a serious birder. But I knew that already.

Anyway, the householders who had the Xanthus put out a visitors’ book and graciously welcomed this weeks’ long string of visitors. And then come February or so, the Xanthus disappeared. Holiday over. One of the bird scholar people up here speculated that it had been blown up this far on the winds of a winter storm system coming up from the south. Ah, the lives of birds: more unexpected events than I might have thought. I tend to think it’s just food—for themselves and those noisy broods.

Does this Anna’s need a Visitors’ Book? No, probably not. Just needs a lot of sugar solution, for which she can thank Rose. And thanks to Renee for the photos!