Midday still--but not quite

Quiet time in the garden. I sit in the rickety Adirondack chair, put my feet up on the equally ricketty table, and wait. A vulture coasts by, and then another, passing over the crest of the hill above me. Aimless fly-bys, scribing wide figure eights without a flap. Now three vultures glide on their two tone wings, black in front, silver primaries in back, feathers missing and leaving big gaps, still enough to catch the lift and let the birds glide forever. If they didn't pee on their feet to stay cool or have such hideously naked heads and one giant single nostril in their beaks and didn't smell like dead stuff, then maybe I'd think they were cool birds and not just nice to watch in the sky but disgusting to see close up, perched on a dead deer by the side of the road.  Big floppy feet not meant to do anything but anchor a carcass so they can tear it apart with those ugly beaks. On the other hand, they'e been around much longer than us. I should be less judgemental.

A trio of finches flit into the neighbor's tree, staging area for the final dive down to my finch feeder, a sorry mesh sock that has been beaten up by turkeys. It's my eighth sock; this time I got tired of buying a new one at 8 bucks a pop and just decided to sew up the holes, so the sorry one I have now looks like a victim of a crazed plastic surgeon, all lumpy and stictched together in strange gussets. It's holding up but I can't imagine for much longer. Anyone know a turkey-proof finch feeder? Anyone as odd as me to actually need one, or care? 

These are lesser finches, and they have come here in droves now that I have the feeder. They are very small birds, half the size of a parakeet, with bright yellow bellies and olive-green backs. The males have smart black caps, like French berets tugged down over their brows, and they look definitely in charge, nipping at others who try to land nearby. I have so many finches now, as many as 10 at a time dangling from the feeder, because I've had at least 2 sets of young fledge here, learning how to land properly and eat from this feeder with their moms and dads. After much desperate flapping and inability to grab the mesh with their talons, and subsequent retreats to a nearby shrub, they figure it out--and never leave. As with the hummingbirds and their feeder, I have created junkies, who will flit around me when I try to refill the feeder, impatient to get another fix of thistle seed.

I'm a bird-seed pusher.

The first evening

August 7, 2009

 

It is only about 30 feet long and as many feet deep, and half of that deep is really hillside, so it’s not really much of a space, but it has more stories of life and death and adventure and wonder than almost any place I’ve been. It is my modest backyard garden, a sometimes flat, sometimes sloping plot bounded by my house on one end, plank fencing on two sides and deer fencing above where it meets the grassy and shrub and live oak –dotted slope. It seems docile, sleepy, sun-baked dull at times, but I know how much lives there and how much you can discover, or let discover you, if you are still, and you listen, and you watch.

 

Feeling sometimes overwhelmed by all that’s happened and continues to happen as I stumble and bump through life, I turn to this small patch for focus, solace, and the occasional magic.

 

Five minutes. In just that brief time I see a ground wasp cruising, hungry for moisture in the sucked dry earth outside my garden, then coming here where puddles cling to the base of geranium and lobelia pots perched on the low stone walls that bound the paved area where I sit. Puddles that are an ocean of water for an insect the size of my thumbnail.  But in some of the relative damp and wet—compared to the parched Northern California summer hills around me--there is a trap here, the sticky-sweet liquid of my hummingbird feeder, dangling by my kitchen window so I can watch the hummers zoom in to feed. The ground wasps like to drink here too, but crawl through the tiny openings made for the hummingbirds’ needle beaks, and then get then fall in, struggle, and drown.

Dead bug bodies keep me making fresh hummingbird food. Four to one, water to sugar, for my tiny, jewel-feathered junkies. They are buzzing me now, zooming just above my head as they come in for final sips as the evening fog tumbles over the headlands and kicks up a chill wind. Time to get their last flights in before dusk, and time to be still. Even if you’re a hummingbird.