On being thankful

I'm not cooking a big meal today. Just a regular weeknight dinner. For Thanksgiving this year, I'm feeding the birds.

A banquet is laid out on three feeder poles. Peanuts for the Carolina wrens and red bellied woodpeckers. Grape jelly for the orioles, both maleole and ladyole. Bark butter bits for the cardinals and pine warblers. Millet for the chipping sparrows. Sugar water for the hummingbirds (who aren't here at the moment). Bark butter for the downy woodpeckers. Sunflower seed for the titmice. Safflower seed for the chickadees, and of course for the mourning doves.

In the garden, there are acorns and beauty berry seeds, coneflower seeds, sweet gum seeds, pine seeds, poke weed berries, laurel cherries, and sugar berry nuts.

I'm thankful for these birds. They entertain and amaze me with their skill and diversity. I wish humankind were kinder to their habitat. They are brilliant and vital to our survival. If we could see our selfish way to saving their environment, that would be the greatest act of gratitude.

Ovenbird

A couple of weekends ago, my husband was looking out the back window at the feeders. He saw a little bird on the ground under the feeders and set about identifying it. We both looked through binoculars and talked through the field marks. Warbler size and warbler-like bill. Faint olive tones to the gray back and wings. A few streaks on the light breast. Head stripes, with a dark reddish brown central head stripe. The bird tussled with a half a peanut, dropped it a couple of times, then carried it off into the woods.

I went through Sibley's without success. Then my husband found it. A migrating ovenbird. A new bird for us, and what a handsome fellow.

The daily lizard and the annual flycatcher

One of the windows on the party porch is losing its netting. The strip of rubber that holds the netting into the screen has come loose, and the netting has curled down to one side. I keep forgetting when I'm out in the yard to attend to it. During the past few days, around happy hour, a lizard appears in the netting. He's not trapped. He knows how to get in and out. He's there to catch bugs. The cats noticed him, too. They know about window glass, but they still try to paw at him from inside the porch.

Yesterday a funny thing happened. The cats were waiting for the lizard to appear. They waited near the window, because now the lizard had appeared for several days in a row at the same time of day, they expected him. Sure enough, about ten or fifteen minutes later, the lizard was there. Cats are master scholars of recognizing and enforcing routines. At two o'clock, especially on the weekends when they hurry through breakfast so they can go outside, they start watching me and chirping that it's time for dinner, which is usually around four o'clock.

Another regular event occurred today. I was looking out of the window at the back yard, and there in the abelia bush was a little brown bird. I caught a flash of yellow at the neck. A juvenile great crested flycatcher. Every year the juveniles who have fledged from the tall trees in the back yard come down to the back of the house and look in the windows at us. They are curious. Then they remember, oh, right, I'm an arboreal bird, and they fly back up into the tree tops.

Fall in July

Today was amazing. It's July 25. There is heavy cloud cover most of the day. The high was 81 degrees at noon, and it's 79 now. I got my butt out to the garden and made the most of it, working out front where there is no shade until late afternoon. Got the grass edged by the Rose of Sharon. Got the mandevilla trimmed. With no freeze last winter, it was bullying everything around it. Pulled some more salvia which is also being a bully all over the yard. Tidied up the Alachua red climber rose on the trellis.

Sadly, where the salvia was muscling its way through the flower bed I used to have a twenty foot row of daylilies. Some survived, but most could not compete with the salvia. I lost Persian Market, and Mountain Violet, and some unnamed favorites. I will plant something in that bed later. For now, the focus is on clearing and cleaning up and mulching the beds.

Among the surviving daylilies was one that I had cross bred myself. Another survivor was a rescue from a nursery whose owner had lost interest in caring for all of his plants. So this is a tough little daylily! One of my favorite camellias is also from there, a very deep red double peony form. Every since I brought it to my yard, it has rewarded me by blooming heavily.

I could stand a few more days like today, heavy cloud cover and cooler temps.

Passion vine

One thing led to another. We didn't have a hard freeze last winter, and the passion vine never died. It uses my camellias and citrus as a trellis. I never got around to pulling it off, so it is really vigorous this year. I knew last spring that the first citrus I planted, beloved ponkan tangerine, was sick with the greening disease. Then I discovered the Duncan grapefruit was also sick. The tangerine was clear, but the grapefruit had vines. I agreed with the arborist that I would pull the vines off and they would take down the two sick trees, along with some others. 

When I pulled the vines I thought there would be a shower of caterpillars. There were none the first day, not even one. The second day there were two. I moved them to safety. I speculated that the zebra long wings and fritillaries were laying their eggs on tender shoots instead of mature vines. I've noticed them doing that. But I fully expected to see the tips of the mature vines with some eggs or caterpillars. None. So I did just two days of pulling vines and left the rest as they were for now. 

Two days later I was pulling some weeds out front when I noticed a zebra long wing on a camellia, looking me right in the eye. It appeared to be newly hatched and letting its wings fill out. It stayed there for two  minutes looking at me and then flew away. I will continue to pull up vines and try to liberate the yard, but there will probably always be a few for the butterflies, over on the edge of the woods. 

I was sad about the citrus. My neighbor said, you don't have to cut them down. But the tangerine had progressed so far that its fruit were misshapen, and it was clearly trying its best to bear in response to the organic fertilizer I had lavished on it, in hopes that it would recover. It was far sicker than the navel orange I cut down two years ago. 

This leaves one other ponkan tangerine, a pink navel orange (for the orioles when they visit in the winter), and a pink grapefruit. I hope they will stay well. 

What they don't tell you...

When you go to the nursery to buy plants, they don't tell you everything. For example, they don't tell you, "The deer will eat that one," or "That native shrub spreads by underground runners." No, you find out the hard way, because even the garden websites don't tell you everything. Because if they tell you which roses the deer likes best, then you won't need to buy Liquid Fence to spray on the antique roses, and the impatiens (stopped planting those years ago), and the cut-leaf coneflowers (which are glorious and worth the trouble).

Belle Revived

I have had several pictures from Belle's new owner, now that she is refitted. She has a bimini top, a mast crutch, and new cushions for the cabin. She is very well scrubbed and looking happy as boat with some needed attention can be.

Boston Adventures

Back in February, my sister suggested a summer trip to the Boston Ballet. She bought front row seats. I bought a plane ticket. We would see Cinderella with my niece.

I thought it would be a good idea to leave a little earlier this time so we could get lunch at a cafe without being rushed. We drove to the station to catch the train into town. One person was on the platform. Then an older man arrived and observed to us that today is the Pride Parade. And a Red Sox double header. My sister was not aware of either, but we soon realized what that meant for the train. Sure enough, it arrived already full, and we squeezed on. Others were not as fortunate. That was to be our luck on the way back, as it turned out.

The passengers were literally of every stripe-- rainbow-garbed and Red Sox geared. Everyone was polite. After a few stops, the driver informed all of us that there was a derailment ahead that was blocking the tracks. We would have to get out and take a bus around the obstruction and get back on the train. My sister did a quick calculation and we decided to walk from Fenway Station to the Opera House. It was a little over two miles.

We could see the parade forming on a street parallel to Commonwealth Avenue, about 3 or 4 blocks away from where we were making our way through the brownstones. We arrived at the Commons crossing just as the motorcycle escort stopped. The head of the parade was coming a few hundred yards behind them. Everyone stopped. Then a couple of people crossed. Then a couple more. I said, let's go, and we did. We grabbed a couple of hot corn and cheese cakes at a stand in the park, and we made it to the ballet in time.

We had seen Cinderella before, maybe three years ago. It was our first time to the ballet together. This time, it was the next-to-last matinee and everyone seemed energized. The orchestra, the dancers, everything was engaging. Sitting right next to the orchestra pit was thrilling. Maybe because of where we sat, I particularly heard the bassoons' part. And with Prokofiev, every phrase seems to take an unexpected turn.

We tried to take the nearest train stop, but we walked back to Fenway Station because every train that passed us was full. By the time we got to Fenway the crowd had lightened up and we got a train.

Near Fenway Park earlier in the day, I noticed a granite planter with words carved into it, and on the way back I recognized the words. It was "The Season of Phantasmal Peace" by Derek Walcott. A little research turned up the fact that this was Audubon Circle, a revitalization project with several planters featuring poems with birds as the common motif, chosen by Robert Pinsky.

My other Boston adventure was going into the city on the train by myself for the first time. Again to Fenway Station, where I got off and went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. I had lunch in the cafe. A little Italian villa in the middle of Boston, full of Renaissance paintings, statues, and icons. It was a much quieter and less crowded journey than the trip to the ballet, but I will have to say it was a thrill to see the people of Boston turn out for Pride and baseball.