Rabbit intelligence

If a rabbit defined intelligence the way man does, then the most intelligent animal would be a rabbit, followed by the animal most willing to obey the commands of a rabbit. ~Robert Brault

Bad bird photo of the week

Scaup taking wing...

So I happened to come across this article about a local duck phenomenon and made it a point to find my way there today, in my traveling from one end of the county to another to see clients. For many years this was THE place to go locally for huge numbers of Scaup, but in the last couple of years, not so much. I'd drive by, over the Oceanic Bridge hopeful, but nothing the last few years.

I found them there today, but completely panicked when they all took off at once from the water...

It was really beautiful, though.

(Darn camera!)

; )

Ruddies

There are finer, more carefully focused and composed photos from a chance encounter with a group of Ruddies the other day... but this is my favorite because the details give away so much about this little duck... the bluish bill, the outstretched neck and jaunty tilt of the tail.

They're usually easy to find in the neighborhood ponds and almost always bring a smile.

: )

My go-to book for historical bird names has a very long list for the Ruddy Duck; many of which are hysterical...

Dumpling Duck, Daub Duck, Deaf Duck, Fool Duck, Sleepy Duck, Butter Duck, Brown Diving Teal, Widgeon Coot, Creek Coot, Sleepy Coot, Booby Coot, Ruddy Diver, Dun Diver, Sleepy Brother, Butter-Ball, Batter-Scoot, Blatherskite, Bumblebee Coot, Quill-tailed Coot, Heavy-tailed Coot, Stiff-tail, Pin-tail, Bristle-tail, Sprig-tail, Stick-tail, Spine-tail, Dip-tail, Diver, Dun-bird, Dumb-bird, Mud-dipper, Spoon-billed, Butter-ball, Spoonbill, Broad-billed dipper, Dipper, Dapper, Dopper, Broad-bill, Blue-bill, Sleepy-head, Tough-head, Hickory-head, Steel-head, Hard-headed Broad-bill, Bull-neck, Leather-back, Paddy-whack, Stub-and-twist, Light-wood-knot, Shot-pouch, Water-partridge, Dinky, Dickey, Paddy, Noddy, Booby, Rook, Roody, Gray Teal, Salt-water Teal, Stiff-tailed Widgeon.

Edward Howe Forbush (1917) explains that many of the common names stem from the difficulty in hunting them...

(Stub-and-twist is a personal favorite!)

Goosethaw

A few warmish days here had the skunk cabbage showing signs of life.

What's not to love about this man?

Image courtesy Princeton University Press

He's handsome, smart, likes birds, has that incredibly cute accent, not to mention the humungous camera lens...

(which, btw MevetS, he handholds!)

Besides the avant-garde fashion sense (look at that blue jacket!) he's also, clearly, very brave. I imagine him to be risking life and limb to photograph Harlequins out at the end of the Barnegat jetty, don't you?

Have I mentioned that he's just published a book? And a book about birds, no less!

(swooning)

My momentary infatuation is directed towards Richard Crossley and his Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds. I'm planning to spend this Valentine's evening curled up with it by candlelight, maybe with a glass of wine.

Like with all tender new love, all I can say is, "Wow!"

and,

"He's sees birds just like I do!"

and,

"Where has this field guide been all my life?"

and,

"Gosh... it's so sexy when he uses alpha codes!"

; )

It really is a cool guide; his approach is unconventional and that's exactly what excites me most about it. I've not ever been one to rely on a field guide. I collect them, yes. But use them? Hardly.

This is a book I want to spend time with and get to know better. I think Richard Crossley can make me a better birder.

*Please note that, while Princeton University Press has kindly provided me with a free copy of The Crossley ID Guide to review, this is not my proper review. I promise to do that once I'm over the puppy-dog stage of love and can see things more clearly.

**Please also note that I have no personal relationship with Mr. Crossley, nor do I desire such. There was a brief interaction at the Cape May Hawkwatch this fall involving the ID of a sparrow, however. I am happy to report that Mr. Crossley did not laugh me off the platform at that encounter.

(Imagine the pressure of having THE RICHARD CROSSLEY toss a roadkill sparrow your way and demand that you ID it, in hand, before he'll even make eye contact with you.)

Thanks for that experience Wren!



Have a listen as he describes the book (oohh that accent!)

And Happy Lover's Day!

Secret garden

A couple more pics from the other day at Terrain - highly recommended for anyone suffering from the late-winter blahs...

Our lunch spot, happy with sun.

Set in a greenhouse, there is flowing water, antique stained-glass doors and plenty of sunlight!

There's an attached shop that sells all manner of pretty things.

More pretty things!

They also sell plants, but I was barely even tempted, considering my lousy luck with houseplants.

Wandering around with my camera I found lots of things, like the winter sky reflected in silver plant misters.

; )

What I see

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
~Henry David Thoreau

What do you see?

; )

Sun soaked

This is the photo I took at the beginning of our visit - a simple bread baked in a clay pot, a mason jar of ice water and the late winter sun streaming across the table where we gathered for lunch.

Every moment in the sun is a gift these days and I think we all might've stayed in that sun-drenched spot and happily chatted the afternoon away. We - myself, Julie Zickefoose, Heather from Wayne PA (who many of us know from her sweet comments on our blogs) and Heather's friend Linda met for lunch and a visit to the Wyeth collections at the Brandywine River Museum.

Julie is in town to speak at Longwood Gardens. Heather was our local guide and she picked the perfect spot for lunch - sun soaked and fragrant with the scent of growing things... a place to nourish winter-weary bodies and hearten a growing friendship.

More another day!

*%^$# rabbit!!

One of Freckles'greatest joys in life is digging through her litterbox and spreading the contents far and wide.

Ickk!

Somehow, I'd imagined that at 10 years old, she might've outgrown this miserable habit, finally.

Wrong!

Do your bunnies love to dig, too? How do you keep it from driving you absolutely f-ing nuts?

Help?!?

Along 30A

Slow down, you're here.

Lift

Comments a couple months ago on a post I wrote about falconry led me to Rebecca's blog and most recently to her book, Lift. A memoir, it shares the lessons learned in the practice of training a Peregrine Falcon.

I'm not very far into the book, yet, but expected from reading her blog that I would enjoy it. My impression, just 80-some pages in, is that she writes well and passionately about her falcon. Already she's spoken to one of the questions I raised in that earlier blog post, on training her falcon to fly to a lure:

"The falcon and I look at each other, both startled. Then he bows his head slightly over the bird in his feet, snaps the neck and looks back up. He allows me to meet his gaze, seeing deep into his falcon's eyes and I understand that I could keep this predator on a line forever, but he will never be my pet. Over that shared look our relationship changes just a bit, because suddenly, we both grasp an obvious truth. I am looking into the eyes of a wild peregrine. It's so soon, only ten days, but it's time to let him fly free."

Yes, it is dangerous to be bound to something that can break your heart.

She's lost her bird once already to the sky and reclaimed him, changed, after only five hours on his own. I'm looking forward to learning how their relationship continues to develop.

Year of the Rabbit!

Look out bunnies... now I have the perfect excuse for dressing you up in silly outfits!

; )

Social work puzzlers

Some things I've been pondering lately, courtesy of my clients:

How can you afford two flat-screen tv's, but not a kitchen table?

Isn't the appointment letter I sent you, a month in advance, that says I'll be there between 9am and 3pm on such-and-such a day enough notice so that you might at least be out of bed and dressed when I show up at your house... at say, noon?

And without some unidentified male hiding from me under the bed?

I hate when they do that to me!

Should I really have to explain to you why it's inappropriate to urinate in public?

Did you imagine, when you said your son was, "away with his dad" that I understood they were both housed in the same correctional facility? Geesh!! You made it sound like they were on vacation together, rather than both locked up on drug and weapons charges.

Did you think I wouldn't figure out that you're sleeping with your landlord in lieu of paying rent? Really?

Really?

I could write a book, I tell ya.

Sea mice

also Painted Duck, Mountain Duck, Rock Duck, Lord and Lady, Squealer.


"Harlequin, well named! Fantastically decorated, but still a thing of beauty! Delightful in color, elegant in form, graceful in carriage, rightly are its little companies called the "Lords and Ladies" of the waters. This is the loveliest of the Sea Ducks, but its beauty is reserved mainly for the cold and inhospitable North and the wave-lashed rocks of isolated ledges in the wintry sea."
--Edward Howe Forbush in Birds of America (1936)

Monmouth County Audubon's annual frozen pilgrimage to see the Harlequins at Barnegat Light was last weekend. We had a very small group... probably due to the especially frigid temps.

It's one of my favorite places in the world, but the walk out the jetty to see the Harlequins is not for the faint of heart. We were blessed that day with a gentle wind out of the right direction and a low tide... so the boulders that make up the mile long jetty were mostly dry and free of ice.

Still... I mostly walked along the sand beside the jetty... looking for Sparrows and Snow Buntings and Horned Larks and leaving the dangerous stuff for the foolhardy members of the group!

The jetty was constructed to protect the shoreline and prevent sand from filling in the inlet. It and a parallel jetty on the north side of the inlet are designed to keep the channel from the ocean to Barnegat Bay deep and navigable.

If you're lucky, as we were, a couple Harlequins will be feeding in tranquil waters at the very beginning of the jetty where there's a concrete walkway and a guardrail; oftentimes it's necessary to walk the full length of it to the roiled waters and slippery rocks at the very end to find them.

We walked all the way out anyway because the jetty and its boulders attract a variety of marine growth (like mussels which the Harlequins feed on) and which otherwise attracts fish, which, in turn, attract more birds like Loons, Scoters, Eiders, Mergansers and Long-tailed Ducks. Purple Sandpipers, Dunlin, Ruddy Turnstones and Sanderling populate the mossy crevices of the jetty.

Even if there weren't birds to look at, one could hardly be bored with the constant threat of a broken bone or a concussion with any misstep!

; )

I'd imagine the Harlequins to be something of a boon to the local beach communities which are otherwise mostly deserted in the winter. Someone has to serve chocolate-chip pancakes and hot cocoa to all us shivering birders!

Barnegat Light is, for those who love the sea and the immediate shore, a very special place.

Any ideas to explain the "Sea Mouse" name?

Bad bird photo of the week

Another bird on a wire.

: )

"Up yours."

Winter is nature's way of saying, "Up yours." ~Robert Byrne

; )

But it sure can be pretty!

(Same scene as yesterday, at Allaire State Park, only 5 feet or so to the left.)

Sometimes

Sometimes? The only thing to do is lift your face to the warm kiss of the sun. (This after reveling in the pure and simply joy of digging out from under yet another snowstorm.)

Strange bedfellows

All the little ponds here along the coast are frozen solid, mostly. Each has at least some open water and that's where all the birds are congregating. Fletcher Lake between Ocean Grove and Bradley Beach had this Great Blue Heron (who looks scarily hungry for some Mallard flesh!), many Mallards, a couple white domestic ducks, a Pintail(!!!), a Wigeon and a Black-crowned night heron sleeping along the shoreline.

A couple blocks away in Spring Lake we found a single Snow Goose feeding on the postcard-sized lawn of a beach house with a small group of Canada Geese.

Strange.

I find myself inclined to worry about wildlife when everything is frozen and snow-covered, but remind myself that wild things are good at surviving. They do much better than I ever could, for sure...

On learning that crossbills were still in the neighborhood

In Long Branch, we stand beside a maintenance shed
of the county park service,
with its four-wheel drive pickup trucks
its piles of road salt
and its border of Japanese black pines.
We spend frigid minutes
shivering in the wind,
the sun warming our faces
and the hint of a warbled song
drifting down in a shower of winged scales.

With tear-stained cheeks and icy fingers
we point past the chain-link fence
to a pile of dirty snow
and a small reddish bird with crossed bill,
quenching its thirst.

Beyond the small group of latecomers, I watch
the green expanse of the Atlantic,
the gray gull, small and perfect as a toy,
that glides across the horizon.
We head back to the warm car;
our pursuit complete,
the promise of cocoa
or an overpriced Windmill hotdog,
with chili and cheese.

- - - - - - - - - - -

I can't say anything about the Red and White-Winged Crossbills here at the Jersey Shore that hasn't already been said, other than that they're still in their expected place at Seven President's Park. For whatever reason, I waited until the coldest day ever to go see them. Neat birds... certainly worth the frigid temperatures.

Crossbills are the only family of birds that have crossed mandibles; what might look like a deformity is, in fact, an adaptation for the bird's feeding habits. Crossbills insert their closed bill into the side of a pine cone and then open it, tearing out the scale and exposing the seed within, which is then scooped out by their odd-shaped tongue. Aside from the quiet trilling, it was the sound of pine cones being torn open that gave away the Crossbills' presence and allowed us to spot them in the shadowed pine trees.

These birds have been present at the park for nearly a month and those of us that venture over to see them must present something of a curiosity to people in the neighborhood... enough that they drive by to ask what in the world we're looking at.

: )

Crossbills wander widely in the winter months, as do birders looking for rarities.

The paranoid poet

Between the poet and the grimacing woman
on a beat-up blue bicycle,
lies a blurred wasteland.

She hasn't always been this person.

Her squalid apartment
the letters scrawled in mad ink
that fizz by themselves in my in-basket

the dreamy smile
that makes her look, suddenly, young.

Walking the tightrope with her
ignoring the drop of the past,
avoiding looking down
to recognize the loss
and spinning, headfirst
into dizzying sadness.

The fear that I, too, might unravel
and spin off into nothing.

- - - - - - - - - - -

CM is a published poet, a librarian in a past life and a client of mine. She recently admitted that she suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and fears that she'll be evicted, now that her landlord knows the truth about her. She insists that her mental illness doesn't affect her ability to write poetry.


I worry about her a lot, visit her often and get almost weekly letters from her. Once or twice a year, she'll send me a poem. I treasure those.


The man with the "golden voice" has me thinking of such things... I imagine a government social worker, somewhere, cheering him on, knowing this was coming, all along.

- - - - - - - - - - -

Photo from the Howard Finster collection at the High Museum in Atlanta. I was there recently to see the Dalí exhibit and... wow!