green!

 

drama

 The swallows are back. Their soaring and powerful aerial acrobatics are uplifting, figuratively and literally.

 But they are late. They are late to the party here. Every year they covet the birdhouse in the back, but that spot was taken weeks ago by the bluebirds.

 

Every year the swallows protest the unfairness of it all. They start their mornings by dive bombing the nest for about an hour. They sit on the barbed wire fence and gaze longingly at the occupied birdhouse. I've even seen them sit atop said birdhouse while the female bluebird is inside sitting on her nest. In years past, the swallows have kept this up for a couple of weeks, but the bluebirds will not budge. Eventually the swallows give up and move on. This is what passes for drama here on the other side of the creek.

P.S. the photos above were not taken by me. I used them years ago on this blog. They probably came from flickr, but at this point I'm not sure whom to attribute them to.

spring ephemerals

 I've been drawn to wildflowers and astronomy in recent years. One reason is that if you know where and when to look for something, you can usually find it. The spring ephemeral season has started. Beautiful wildflowers bloom on woodland floors before the trees leaf out. It is a very short season. Finding some old friends in the usual places. It's a very short season.

Round Leaf Yellow Violet

on the way to the vernal pool

 

Trillium, on the Crossroads

Trout Lily, on the Crossroads

Bloodroot, on Rte. 133 near the town hall

 

poor man's fertilizer

 Old timers in Vermont call this "poor man's fertilizer." I wonder what Doug and Kim are calling this?

why?

 The spring season is something of an article of faith today with temperature of 35 degrees and rain; snowing in some areas. But the Village Snack Bar is open and Allyn has received a delivery of mulch from yours truly. Birds flocking to the forsythia bush in the back.

The forsythia season here is usually measured in days. This year we have had beautiful blossoms for weeks. I wonder why?

Season of birds

 Heard the sound of a house wren in the back. How could such a small bird make so much noise?

Lady in a Box:

Oh, Mr. Webb? Mr. Webb, is there any culture or love of beauty in Grovers Corners?

Mr. Webb:

Well, ma'am, there aint much--not in the sense you mean. Come to think of it, there's some girls that play the piano at High School Commencement, but they aint happy about it. No ma'am there isn't much, but maybe this is the place to tell you that we've got a lot of pleasures of a kind here: we like the sun comin' up over the mountains in the morning, and we all notice a good deal about the birds. We pay a lot of attention to them. And we watch the change of seasons; yes, everybody knows about them. But those other things--you're right ma'am--there aint  much-- Robinson Crusoe and the Bible; and Handel's "Largo," we all know about that; and Whistler's "Mother"-- those are about as far as we go.

Our Town

Thornton Wilder

Ira, Vermont

 

woodcocks

 A few days ago I got an email from a friend that lives at the Vermont Zen Center. She is also a reader of this blog. She had read about woodcocks and was all excited about them. The article she read mentioned some writing that Aldo Leopold had done about woodcocks in his masterpiece on wildness, A Sand County Almanac. She had seen where I had mentioned this work on this blog, and wondered if I knew anything about woodcocks.

wikipedia

 I am familiar with Leopold's piece and with woodcocks. They are an amazing bird. They have a mating dance every spring in the north country that is amazing to behold. I told my friend that I had actually seen woodcocks do their thing at the Center. She should look for them down by the bridge. I told her what to listen for, and how you can actually get very close to them if you move towards their location when they are performing the aerial part of their mating dance.

Aylie's email and enthusiasm about woodcock's reignited my own interest in seeing them again. I went out to the West Road around sunset and looked for them where I had seen them in years past. There are a couple of new houses in that area and I, and I was worried that the change in habitat had driven them away. That seems to happen so often these days. I walked around for awhile and didn't hear anything. I turned around and headed back to my car. Then I heard it, the peent, peent sound of a woodcock! At that point it was too dark for me to see them, but it was enough for me to know that they were still out there.

I drove home with the happy thought of recounting my adventure with an email to Aylie. When I got on the computer, there was an email from her. She said that they had seen one. She said that she was happy to report that they were still there down by the bridge in the spot that I had seen them years before.

I couldn't help but think of the first time I had seen a woodcock. Amazingly enough, it occurred at the very same Center in Shelburne when I had attended a Lovingkindness workshop with my friend Doug. We were heading for the car when all of a sudden he seemed to go crazy. "There's a woodcock!" he said. He showed me the stalking process that I mentioned here earlier. Doug is a retired state biologist. Actually, he helped to restore the wild turkey population to Vermont very early in his career. Later in his life he became well known within the area because of his work with rattlesnakes. He is normally a pretty soft spoken guy, but was a different person altogether during this episode, totally animated. It was pretty easy to see why he had become a biologist.

As is sometimes the case, I was filled with emotion as I read Aylie's email, but I was having difficulty naming it. I was grateful and the gratitude seemed to point in many directions. Grateful for Aylie, Doug, Aldo Leopold, and to live in a place where the miracles of the natural world can still be experienced; where they haven't disappeared completely. Just happy to be alive.