June 14: Peonies

What better way to enjoy a summer evening after work than to have a drink with a friend on the outside deck at the Waterfront Restaurant, watching the sailboats cruising in for the evening while ospreys cry overhead? And later, back home, it's still light enough to stay outside a little longer to watch a gregarious flock of waxwings fly-catching in an oak tree, and pick the huge, fragrant peonies that had collapsed onto the lawn under their own weight.

Something of the sun
lingers now inside the house--
peony perfume.

June 13: Oriole

I experienced a strange synchronicity today--speaking on the phone with a friend, she told me that after the last time we talked, she hung up the phone and saw an oriole outside her window. It made her think of me. I couldn't respond right away because I was a bit freaked out. "Had we spoken of orioles last time we talked?" I asked. No, she'd just made a bird connection because of my interest. Then I explained that on the wall in front of my desk I have a big poster, "Sibley's Backyard Birds." When I talk on the phone, the bird I'm staring at, the one right at eye-level, is the Baltimore Oriole. In fact, I was absently looking right at it when she told me this.

From my eyes to yours--
an oriole's quantum leap,
vivid to us both.

June 12: Morning catbird

Unusual for me, I woke at dawn, the light bright under the bedroom blind. Instead of falling back asleep, I lay there for a while listening to the rush of the river and the early birdsong. It seemed like such a luxury, to know I didn't have to get up for a few hours, to just stay in my warm, comfortable bed and enjoy the natural music outside.
 
Catbird's song at dawn--
how long can I lie in bed
simply listening?

June 11: Nuthatches

The pair of White-breasted Nuthatches have multiplied into three. It's that time of year. The geese graze on the lawn with fuzzy grey goslings. Robins carry bills full of grubs to hidden nests. And the nuthatches spiral the trunk of the ash tree as a trio, teaching their fledgling the secrets of bark, of unseen insects, of how to forage with that tiny, pointed beak while perched downward. The bill of a nuthatch has evolved over the millennia into a tool perfectly suited for the task of picking insects off a tree trunk (as well as eating seeds). If only we humans could so easily determine what we are best suited for in life and make use of it exactly as we should.

Nuthatch is learning
how perfect its bill is for
getting what it wants.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

June 10: Awareness

Our cat has been especially restless today. I don't know if it's the warm weather, the sunny, open windows (she's an indoor cat, so sitting on the sill is as close as she gets to being outside), or the birds and insects that keep buzzing past the windows and glass door. Rather than curling up on her pillow for hours at a time--her usual habit, despite being a young cat--she's been wandering from window to window, or sitting in one spot that gives her a view of the bird feeders, alert to any and every motion outside. Just now, up on my desk, she's spasmodically following the path of a bumblebee on the other side of the screen. Her ears perk up at the sound of a crow whining down by the river. Seems this clear, sunny weather and the movement of air through the house has brought new sights and smells into her world, made her more aware of what's outside.

This morning I finished a great new book about how to start developing a deeper awareness of the world outside: What the Robin Knows by Jon Young (I include a link to the book so you can learn more about it, not to encourage you to purchase it from Amazon. I hope that if the book interests you, you'll get it at your local, independent bookstore.) Young's premise, put very broadly and simply, is that by developing an intense familiarity with the creatures that inhabit our world, especially species like robins that can give us learnable cues about what's happening around us, we can better understand the natural world and how we can become a less intrusive presence within it. The key is developing one's awareness through intimate, repeated observations. 

The book made me realize how much I have to work on in this regard, yet also that I've been following some of its tenets already. The other day, for example, I heard jays and crows making a racket out back that I was certain indicated a strange cat was passing through. I looked out the window and sure enough, there it was--an orange-and-white cat I'd never seen before, scuttling down the riverbank on the "cat trail" that the neighborhood cats all follow through our yard (usually without the corvid fanfare). Apparently I'd been unconsciously absorbing a little bit of bird language just by paying attention to my back yard.

This very afternoon, I heard the chip of a woodpecker in the willow over the driveway. Before I heard its complete call a few seconds later, I knew this was the local downy woodpecker that likes to hang out in that tree on his way to another tree in our back yard. So, I've gotten a little bit of a start on Young's teachings all on my own, but his book has opened my eyes to how much I haven't been paying attention to, focused as I usually am on seeing and hearing all the birds I can when out on the trail. His point is that it's not just a matter of knowing the names and songs of birds and what habitat they each live in, but of learning so much about them that when the robin in your yard makes a particular alarm call, you know to look up for the sharp-shinned hawk flying overhead. And, like learning a language spoken in more than one country, this knowledge then travels with you, enhancing your awareness of the natural world wherever you are and enabling you to interpret the behavior of the "robins" everywhere.

I recognize my

neighbors--robins, crows, sparrow--

but do I know them?

June 9: Getting grounded

Today was the first day after a full month+ of birding weekends that I could 1) sleep in--which I might have actually done if the cat hadn't been so physically aggressive about getting me out of bed to feed her at an early hour; and 2) work in my garden.

With all the rain we've had and my complete lack of attention, the flower beds were out of control. Thankfully, the sun has finally reappeared. I pruned and trimmed a whole wheelbarrow full of leaves and weeds, and then, after the season's first trip to the local plant nursery, filled in some gaps. Now the sedum can see the light again, out from under the lady's mantle. The lilies aren't hidden under the monster hosta. And my herb garden has another year's round of lavender, cilantro, and catnip. Also, marigolds for color. A new "black" fuschia hangs by the front door, a bright blue verbena on the fence. The clematis is trained with string to begin climbing the porch rail. The lawn is mowed. Blue irises which my dad and I planted several years ago bloom once more against the white walls of the shed. Clumps of ferns burst up here and there in the backyard, which I generally let grow at will for most of the summer except for a path to the shed. My hands are covered with dirt despite wearing gardening gloves, and the soles of my bare feet need a scrub.

And I feel like I've regained some balance, grounded myself, quite literally, once again.

Pregnant peonies
tower over my garden.
I feel an odd pride.

June 8: Wet Field

This morning I led a small group on a bird walk on the Head of Tide Preserve in Belfast. The pathway through the old farm fields was supposed to have been mowed, but it's been so wet that our Stewardship Director wasn't able to get to it till this afternoon. So we waded through some very wet waist-high grass in the day's early hours, carefully listening and watching for birds, and seeing more than a few trampled patches where deer must have lain the night before. By the time we left, my jeans were entirely soaked through, but when you're really focused on what you're doing, that kind of thing isn't really much of an inconvenience.

At one point I made a side trip to check out an alternative trail--on my own so as not to force the group to get even more wet than they already were. As I started down the other trail, I flushed a ruffed grouse and her chicks. I should say, first I heard the loud wingbeats of a flushed grouse. Then I saw a lot of small, round brown things scatter up into the nearby trees. I got my binoculars on one, and only then realized it was a grouse chick, still spotted and fluffy with down. I had no idea that grouse chicks could fly while so small! With my next step, I flushed another chick; it had opted to hunker down rather than fly. It flew about ten feet up into a nearby tree. Off in the woods, meanwhile, the mother grouse was crashing around and giving a distress call in an attempt to lure me away from the chicks. I didn't want to accidentally step on one or distress her or them any further, and the trail ahead looked quite swampy, so I turned back and rejoined the group waiting in the wet field.

This is what it's like
to be a deer--belly wet
in tall grass, alert.

June 7: Flock

Driving back roads inland this morning through the verdant Maine countryside, I turned a corner and was surprised by a flock of little goldfinches that flew up like exploding yellow shrapnel--or, to fit the agricultural landscape, bright kernels of corn. 

Handful of tossed corn--

roadside goldfinches scatter

in front of my car.

June 5: Rhododendron

My grandmother's house boasted a huge rhododendron bush out front. When its big purple blooms opened each spring, she'd clip a few, bring them inside, and float them in a glass bowl. It struck me as very exotic presented this way (I had a fairly provincial childhood), so I decided then that it was my favorite flower. I thought that only I fully appreciated the patch of soft brown speckles hidden inside each flower, because most people don't look that closely, and purple was (and still is) my favorite color.
 
When we bought our house seven years ago, one of the first things I did was plant a rhododendron bush--something I'd been wishing for since my grandmother died 20 years before. Each spring I glory in the days when it's flowering. This lush rainy weekend seems to have been the trigger, as suddenly the bush is in full bloom. I clipped one of the flowers wet with rain. Now it floats in a blue-patterned Chinese bowl. It struck me tonight that those tiny brown spots look just like the freckling on the throat of a veery, a locally common thrush with a truly exotic voice.
 
Bold purple petals
hide a patch of soft freckles
like a veery's throat.

June 4: Female cardinal

During the rain today the female cardinal came chipping her way to my office window feeder several times. Each visit, I paid her the courtesy of stopping whatever I was doing and just watched her. While she doesn't eat her sunflower seeds with any particular grace, her peach-pink-orange bill is stunning, and her brownish, drab feathers are highlighted by rouge-red ones that catch the eye like lipstick transforming a plain face into a pretty one. The male cardinal has many admirers, but while the female might not be as flashy as he is, she deserves praise for the subtle way she wears her beauty.

Take a few moments
to watch the cardinal: beauty
comes in many forms.

June 3: Rain in the spruce forest

This morning I and others led a bird walk for the Acadia Birding Festival on Acadia National Park's Ship Harbor Nature Trail as the rain fell and the tide came in. We could hear waves crashing from beyond the wall of spruce trees, and in the treetops, the tinkling notes of the kinglet's song. Small rafts of eiders rode the swells into the harbor, unbothered by rain, shielded by waterproof feathers. From amid the misty tangle of trees, a white-throated sparrow sang loud and clear. Wet sweet fern, crushed by fingers, seemed particularly pungent. Mosses burgeoned, green sponges massed over the forest floor. Water had formed a small pool at the root base of a fallen spruce, creating a wet cave--what might hide in there? Walking the rain-softened trail, our footsteps were dampened, allowing us to hear well the repeated song of the black-throated green warbler. In the dim light, half-concealed amid wet leaves, the warbler's yellow face shone like a tiny sun.

Raindrops on flat leaves
are easily mistaken
for movements of birds.