The Phoebe

The phoebes have been nesting here for as long as I can remember. My father used to complain about them, though my mother defended them. He thought they were messy, and they are a bit. But they are indefatigable gnatcatchers, and they are cheerful, sociable birds. My mother liked them, and they have always been here. They build a nest on the porch, on top of the molding over the doorway, on the far edge, in the most remote corner of the porch. The nest is modest, made of mud and twigs, mostly, but they finish it, beautifully, with a coverlet of fine moss.

Now the female is brooding her eggs. When I come out on the porch I see her there, from the corner of my eye. I don't look at her directly, I don't want to alarm her. Her soft greys melt into the shadowy reaches of the dark porch wall. She sits motionless and brave, nestled deep into her refuge, alert, her bright dark eye watching. Outside, her mate perches on a branch of the ash tree, repeating his name. "Fee-bee," he says, over and over, "Fee-bee." But she says nothing. She sits still and silent, the eggs beneath her heavy and full, gravid with life.

June 2, Treetop

Christmas Day and the Pileated Woodpecker

          It was my grandfather, “Lawyer Sam” Scoville, who got us all watching birds. Besides lawyering, Sam was a writer and an amateur naturalist. He died when I was five, but by then the whole family was hooked. I read all his books: “Man and Beast,” “Lords of the Wild,” “The Out-of-Doors Club” and the rest. I grew up watching not only birds, but animals and snakes – everything in the whole big natural shebang.
         Five years ago, we took over the house that Sam built in Cornwall. One afternoon, watching the orange flash of a Baltimore Oriole high in our oak, it occurred to me that the bird’s family might have been watched by my own for many generations. It gave me an odd feeling. Of course I don’t think my grandfather had anything to do with it, but I was pretty sure that, if Sam were around, he’d be delighted to see me watching.  
         This Christmas I gave my six-year-old grandson a pair of binoculars and a children’s bird book. On Christmas morning we sat in the window overlooking the lake, leafing through the pages. He was keen, but I warned him that we might not see anything interesting at first. I was a little worried: beginners want showy, exciting birds, but what’s usually around are crows and sparrows.
        I heard a quiet, steady tapping, and I looked outside. Ten feet away was a big black and white bird, clinging to the trunk of the ash tree, drumming his way towards dinner.
        “Oh. My. Gosh,” I said. “That’s a pileated woodpecker!”
        My grandson looked outside, wide-eyed.
        The spectacular pileated is our largest native woodpecker, (except for the Ivory-Billed, which may or may not still be extant, somewhere deep in the southern forests). But the pileated is very extant up here.       
        “Pileated” means “crested,” and his crest is scarlet, with a zany point on the end like a jester’s. His bold black and white plumage is patterned like Venetian livery. He has a long  serpentine neck and a powerful bill. He eats boring insects - ants and grubs. You’ve seen the gigantic holes he makes, drilling for carpenter ant, but don’t blame him for damaging the tree: ants have already hollowed it out.
        He nests in holes in trees himself. (Though once a pair of pileateds took over my bluebird box. They enlarged the entrance, but no matter how large it was they still couldn’t fit inside. They were like giants trying to sit at a kindergarten table.)
        Like most woodpeckers, the pileated is shy. I know they’re around, but I rarely see one. So on Christmas morning I was thrilled to see it - scarlet cockade, Venetian livery, all of it.
        “Okay,” I whispered, “This is your first ten minutes of birdwatching, and you’re seeing one of the great American birds. This is almost a miracle.”
        “Yes,” my grandson whispered. 
        Of course I don’t think my grandfather had anything to do with this, but it was funny, wasn’t it? 

                                                                                   February 2013, Connecticut

Goose Goose Duck

If you drive up Town Street from the Lake, just before you reach Scoville Road you enter dangerous territory. The Scoville farm house stands on the right, and across from it, in a field on the left, stands the duckpond. The traffic between the house and the duckpond is serious. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to stop your car for the goose parade, but I have. There is no way through.

     The geese belong to Thalia Scoville, widow of my cousin Ralph. Thalia has lived in that house for decades; she can’t remember when she first got the geese. They’re not exactly pets, they don’t have names. But they aren’t used for eating, either – too much grease, says Thalia, and too tough. The eggs aren’t taken, either. “They lay them in such big clutches you never know which egg is fresh,” she says. Really, the geese are kept for parades.

     Thalia’s geese are tall and handsome, brownish grey with darker trim. Their long necks, erect carriage and heavy bodies mark them as domestic; their coloring suggests descent from the European greylag. (This was the goose made famous by its decision to call Konrad Lorenz “mom.”) They move slowly. I won’t use the undignified word “waddle,” because they are nothing if not dignified, but they shift from side to side as they walk.

     There are about fifteen of them now. On a hot day they cluster, squatting comfortably in the dusty barnyard, or on the lawn, under a tree. Some sit, some stand. One of them may balance on one foot, doing goose yoga. They’re relaxed, until, mysteriously, the moment arrives. The geese look around jerkily, giving little bugling trills. They stand and gather, then, honking companionably, they begin the parade, as though an inaudible whistle were blown. Down the driveway they go. The ducks and guineaufowl follow, caught up by the excitement. The honking is  muted and melodious, like jazz musicians, jamming on oboes.  

At the road the geese walk single file. Bobbing heads held high, yellow webbed feet turned in, they march majestically across Town Street. Traffic comes to a halt. Once a police car arrived, during the march. The policeman honked. The geese honked back. He turned on his circling light. The geese ignored him. He turned on his siren. The geese maintained a flawless goose-step. Their mission was to reach the other side of the road, not to get caught up in altercations about right of way.

On the far side they scramble up the bank, surprisingly awkward. A wing or two flaps out, for balance.

The pond is calm and empty. By now the ducks have also gained  the far side, guineafowl scuttling behind them. One by one the geese cross the grass to the pond. With a heavy fluttering rush they launch themselves into the water. Suddenly graceful, they float, their long necks erect, their snobbish heads aloft. They look down at us over their yellow bills, like dowagers looking over their lorgnettes.

They have arrived. They are superior. They’ve accomplished their mission. And we are allowed to drive on up the road.      

                               

                                                                                                             August 13, 2012, Connecticut

Ghost Cat

 

My mother, who turned 100 last summer, has been coming to Cornwall all her life. She says the biggest difference is the return of the forests. “When I was a child it was all open land,” she says. “All farms.”

Most of the Northeast was farmland until the railways opened up the great midwestern grain fields, in the mid-nineteenth century, and, after that, big agriculture slowly moved west. Cornwall farms lasted longer than most, but here, too, in the last half-century, open pastureland has reverted to woods and brush. Which is not good habitat for cows, but it’s great for mountain lions. The lions were here long before we arrived, but around a hundred years ago they were hunted out, the species extirpated, and the  habitat destroyed for pasture. 

Now the habitat is coming back, and it seems the lion is too.

It’s a fabulous animal: our native Mountain Lion is the fourth largest cat in the world. He has more than 40 names: cougar, and puma, and panther, catamount and painter and mountain screamer. (His scream is something you never want to hear.) He’s big, around 120 pounds and 8 feet long, and he’s beautiful, lean and supple, with a tawny pelt and a level green stare. He’s powerful: no other species preys on the mountain lion, and it takes a whole pack of wolves to overcome him. He’s shy, elusive and solitary, with crepuscular habits. His primary prey is deer, though he’ll eat rodents. He’s rarely aggressive to humans.

But is he here in Cornwall? Last year the DEP declared the Eastern Mountain Lion officially extinct. However, this doesn’t include the Western Mountain, a close cousin who has officially appeared in Connecticut. The lion killed last summer, on a highway near Greenwich, was a Western, from North Dakota. Mountain lions are fabled roamers, and the Western lions seem to be reclaiming the east.  I asked the Fish and Wildlife Department about this. “Why wouldn’t mountain lions be back? All the other big predators are back in the northeast – black bears, bobcats, coyotes,” they said. “It makes sense for the lions to be back.”

Certainly Cornwall has the others. And we’ve had a lot of mountain lion sightings. My friend Jane saw one on Cream Hill Road. My friend Julia saw one, carrying a cub in her mouth. And my cousin Martha, sitting on her glassed-in-porch one evening, watched a mountain lion slide quietly along the outside of it, two feet away. It was stalking something, maybe a field mouse.

I’m kind of jealous of the sightings. I’d love to see our lion.

It’s a gorgeous notion, that if we loosen our grip on the landscape it will revert, sliding silently back into its own deep current, filling up again with the beautiful wild creatures that walked so lightly on it once. My mother would like this.                                                            

                                                                                                 January, 2012

You Turkey

                                  

            Recently, in a fit of worldiness, I had the car washed.

            I’m not sure why I did this. It goes against my Puritan grain, and besides, it means rain within twenty-four hours. Still, I did it, and at home, I parked in the driveway, feeling satisfied. The black car looked gleaming and handsome against the autumnal landscape.

            The next morning, from inside the house, I heard a series of drumming thrums outside. I listened, puzzled: they were loud bellicose thuds, syncopated and irregular. I looked out the window: the polished black car was under attack.

            Our land is owned by a flock of six big wild turkeys who stalk back and forth across it at all hours. They move in lordly fashion, pausing to peck up tidbits from the lawn, the driveway, the rocks. The flock is all toms, and I think of them as rejects from a group of adults, rebellious adolescents who were kicked out. It’s easy to see why: they have poor social skills. They’re big and awkward and foolish-looking, with their gawky carriage, their slow, jerky walks. They are deeply disdainful of us, and when they see us they jerk their necks in outrage, trading exasperated comments. There they are again, they say to each other. What are they doing here?       

            That day, when I looked outside, the flock was spread out raggedly across the  hillside. They were walking that weird turkey walk – head low, body crouching and gliding, long neck jerking spasmodically.

            But one of the toms had stopped on the driveway: he’d seen an enemy. Passing alongside the polished black car, he’d suddenly spied another turkey walking right  beside him. When he stopped and turned, the other tom did too. When he raised his head and lengthened his neck in a threatening manner, the other tom did too. When he swelled himself up, puffing his feathers, weaving his head and leaning forward, the other tom did exactly the same thing. It was an outrage: a complete newcomer, challenging this big tom on his own territory. The tom darted his head out and struck hard. Bam! Bam-bam! Bam! Bam!

            The other tom did just the same, hitting our tom bang on his own beak. It was uncanny, how perfectly coordinated they were, how precisely one tom mimicked the other. It was like the famous scene in Duck Soup. The two toms seemed magically joined at the cerebral cortex.

            When I couldn’t stand it anymore I went down and opened the front door.

            “You idiot!”  I shouted. “That’s you! You’re attacking yourself!”

            The tom gave himself one more warning look and turned back to me.

            There she is again, he muttered. What’s she doing here? He hunched over crossly and began stalking up the hill in a threatening way, headed for the woods, talking under his breath.

            My car still has the dents from the fight, a little battered ring near the fuel cap. It will be awhile before I get it washed again.

 

                                                                                                                 January 2012 

Duet

 

A few nights ago, around midnight, we heard something that reminded me of one of the Random Acts of Culture. Maybe you saw the YouTube film of Macy’s department store in Philadelphia, suddenly transformed by anonymous singers who were performing the Messiah. This was a little like that: suddenly, through the cold, silent night, we heard singers, two bright voices, harmonizing in an exquisite and nerve-wracking duet. Their song was eerie and haunting, lunar in its cold loveliness. The night was transformed.

Coyotes, of course. Cornwall has an active resident population. My cousin Fred Scoville told me that a pack of them took eleven of Thalia’s geese in one night. Which sounds like a good-sized pack, though it was probably only one pair of parents and their pups. Connecticut coyotes hunt in packs only until the pups are grown, and then disperse.  Coyotes are monogamous, and the main social unit is the mating pair.

The coyote (canis latrans) is a medium-sized member of the Canidae family. Originally from the western plains, they’ve moved east, breeding with big Canadian wolves, so our Connecticut coyotes are slightly larger than their western cousins. They’re beautiful animals, with luxurious bushy coats, slender pointed noses and long prick ears. They’ll  breed with dogs, though coy-dogs are rare. (Mixed offspring rarely survive, since pups need both parents for support. Also, like mules, coydogs are often infertile.) Coyotes are opportunistic, and will eat almost anything, which is why they’re so successful as a species. They’ll eat garbage, insects, mice, rabbits, small deer - even small pets, I’m sorry to report.

And they’re singers: they have at least ten different variants of vocal sounds, including growls, woofs, barks, howls and yelps. Woofs and growls are short-distance threats, barks and bark-howls are used in greeting, lone and group howls provide location information during separation, and a group yip-howl occurs after a reunion.

The song we heard the other night was clear, passionate and very potent. At first I thought they were hunting. I’ve heard them sometimes in full cry, voice after voice declaring itself, yodeling up to the top of the scale, then drifting into strange, four-part harmony. But this was different: discrete, full of sudden energy, rising at once to full pitch, and then, just as suddenly, stopping.

Coyotes breed once a year. In Connecticut, this happens between January and March.  The female is only in estrus for 4 to 15 days, so there’s a small window of opportunity. According to my book, there’s one other occasion on which coyotes vocalise: before copulation, the pair may sing a duet.

I don’t want to start rumors, but I think last week our local  coyotes had a date night.

                                                                                    February 2012, Connecticut

Margaritaville

 

My garden is divided into two countries, north and south. They’re separated by the mason line, a stone walkway.

In the north, the garden rises sedately toward the woods, interspersed by stretches of stone  ledge.  It’s a quiet space. The plants are harmonious, the colors subdued - white, pale rose, mauve: lambs’ ears, a pale pink anemone, the white cloud of calamintha. The floating spires of cimicifuga, misty-topped artemisia. The boldest color is the deep purple of heliotrope, the most dramatic shape the towering nicotiana sylvestris. The stone steps are threaded with creeping thyme. It’s a pretty New England garden; Sissinghurst is clearly an ancestor.

In the south, everything is different. Just past the stone walk the ground drops steeply into a rough ravine, a  dry watercourse running through it. At the end of the ravine is a rustic wooden bridge;  beyond that, the meadow.  This garden is not well-bred or decorous: the reverse. Native blue lobelias have colonised it, thrusting their bright, bold spires everywhere – among the ostrich ferns and Russian sage and valerian. This harsh lobelia blue is actually the mildest color down here in the south: I’ve let in the cardinal flower, the native red lobelia, with its six-foot spires of  dense, saturated red.  “A bit showy,” one of my gardening friends said tactfully. She’s wrong: it’s not a bit showy, it’s completely over the top, and it’s spreading fast, popping up wherever the blue has not. That’s not all. Another gardening friend handed me two small potted annuals last spring. “You can put them anywhere,” she said. “They’re Mexican sunflowers, bright orange, about six feet tall.” In the north they’d look shockingly out of place, but down here in the south, with all those pushy lobelias, they strike a triumphant chord. My Mexican sunflower friend also gave me two vines, which I planted at either end of the bridge: now scarlet-orange blooms  clamber along the railings. Red salvia makes a fine scarlet mist, threading along the banks . On either side of the bridge is the tall elegant native milkweed, asclepia incarnata, whose soft pink flower strikes a muted counter-tone to all the brassy hot notes. Creamy clethra blossoms makes thick swathes through the rioting parade.        

The point of all this is the visitors: lots of these bright-hued plants are native, which makes the southern garden a destination, a flight hub. Butterflies flutter through all day: on the milkweed are clouds of amber-colored monarchs, yellow tiger-swallowtails, russet great spangled fritillaries and iridescent pipe-vine swallowtails. The butterflies hover absent-mindedly, then alight. They breathe with their wings, inhaling, exhaling, lifting dreamily off. Zillions of bees,  focused and serious, climb in and out of the clethra. Cadres of hummingbirds, those tiny avian helicopters, swoop up and down the  cardinal flower spires. Fat striped monarch caterpillars march lumpily along the bridge, on their way somewhere else.  It’s a thriving community.

The northern garden - so decorous, so pretty, so polite! - has bees among the calamintha, not much more. Everyone else has gone to Margaritaville.     

 

                                                                                                                  August 8, 2011