Everything but the Bird

Because my day was mundane beneath describing, we have another installment of Building a Bayou. In the last progress picture, the water had gone in, and I'd painted a neutral wash over it to gray it down and make it recede a bit. A lot of what's going on in the current series is furthering the illusion of water. Light passing across dust and scum on the water's surface will help define its plane. Ever since my painter friend Mike DiGiorgio turned me on to it, Chinese white is my best friend. With it, I can create semi-transparent white washes that are really useful in painting things like bayou scum or the top of a bird's feathery back, washed in light.
You can see a magical disappearing snag on the lower left corner of the painting. I put it in, and my friend, painter Jim Coe, objected, and I agreed with him. (I'm sending jpegs around to my artist friends, soliciting comments. It's a new experience for me, but lots of fun). So I flooded the area with clear water from a loaded brush, let it sit a moment, and then lifted the water and the offending, finger-like snag right off the paper. See, watercolor isn't quite as unforgiving as people would have you believe when they tell you it's so "hard!"

Oh, yes...the Bird! I don't normally "allow" myself to paint the bird until I have wrestled its habitat to the ground. As you've seen, there was a whole lot of wrasslin' going on in this painting, a tall order, lots of trees and leaves and shadows and water and scum. It was all to set the stage for the star, to make her white wing patches shine against the gloom. She's really small, not even two inches long in the original, and getting the expression on her face just right is a challenge at that scale. It would have been easy, by comparison, to do what my friend painter Bob Clem calls a "Big Fat Bird Painting," where the star is front and center and big and fat with minimal context or habitat. Putting the bird believably in a habitat that the viewer can breathe in is much more demanding.
Mike suggests that I run some yellow leaves behind her primaries--and boom! she pops out of the picture, as she should.
Why a female? Well, almost all the paintings out there are of males (nobody seems to be able to resist that dash of red), and I wanted to strike a blow for the girls. They've got a little more reproductive significance in a dwindling population, too. And the habitat's so colorful, a red crest would be almost lost in it. Last, seeing a female ivory-billed woodpecker is just that much more diagnostic, since female pileateds have plenty of red in their crests. So in she goes, and her reflection too, and I mess around making the reflection duller and duller, so you have to look for it.

What I'm after is painting the experience of seeing an ivory-billed woodpecker, not just painting an image of the bird. I don't want it to look like anything--painting or photograph--that's out there. I want it to be completely unique.

There are some fun little devices that you can use when establishing the plane of water. Sparkles are scratched out of the paper with a razor blade. You're scratching the paint off, down to the white paper, and they can bring water to life. But you don't want to go overboard. My sister Micky suggested a floating red leaf. Good idea! Did that.
It's almost done. Debby Kaspari suggests that I differentiate the green bush on the left from the mossy bank--oh, good thought. So I darken the bank and lighten the bush, and there's now definition where there was none. The roots in the foreground are judged a little problematic by Will Reimann, so I vary their treatment and insertion into the water, paying attention to how each one goes into the water. Agggh, there's so much to pay attention to, but I slog on in my chest waders, wanting to turn this bird loose.
Whether she's done or not, I'm finished with the painting, and I box it up and send it off to Arkansas, to decorate The Auk, and herald Jerry Jackson's important and thoughtful roundup of ivory-billed woodpecker events to date. Thank you, Jerry, for asking, and thanks to the editors and staff of The Auk for doing it proud in their reproduction.

Liam's Trains

Liam draws for much of every day. He works quietly at his own table, talking to himself as he selects colors and composes pictures. Every picture he draws has trains in it. But he imbues his trains with such personality that they're never dull. This kid can use a page!
He just figured out how to draw a face in profile, and he's been riffing on that for several days. I love watching my kids figure things out, and I rarely tell them how to draw anything. I will gladly draw something for them to copy, but they don't often ask. I suppose every mom thinks her kids' drawings are special, so there's no news here. But I think these little train scenes are the berries.
This one is supposed to say, "Boys Are Liam." Instead, it says "Boys UOR Liam." I think he misheard me when I spelled "are" for him. It's a rare double-page spread. Note that he's also drawn a girl train, in pink, and given her a fetchingly curved smokestack.

This is a night train, throwing light from its headlight into the darkness. Looks fast.
Phoebe drew this scene of a little mouse in a dress, tending her carrots. At 9, Phoebe is trying to get back to using the whole page, something Liam at 6 does with abandon. I have found that compositional skills come naturally to very young kids--they fill the page and go on diagonals and do the most wonderful big, bold things. And then self-consciousness creeps in and the figures get smaller and smaller, and the detail gets finer and finer, and everything is at the very bottom of the page and very small. But Phoebe's coming back out of that phase, and starting to do more with the blank page. Her drawings are so precise and sweet.
"I don't know why I drew this," she said. "It was stuck in my head and I had to get it out."

Gremlin's Gold

Phoebe and Chet Baker have invented the ultimate bedtime stalling game. It's called Gremlin's Gold. Every night, just as we're tucking Phoebe in, the Gremlin slinks dangerously into her room, drops to his belly, and laboriously crawls under her bed or dresser. The last thing we see is his froglike hinders, disappearing into darkness. The Games have begun. Once in his lair, the Gremlin glares out at us, waiting for someone to bring him his Gold.

Which is usually a tennis ball or reasonable substitute.

The Gremlin hoards his Gold in the safety of his lair, and only the bravest may dare to take it from him. He has a wild and fearsome aspect, daunting to the boldest knight or princess (but rarely frightening the Queen, who is after all Alpha Female). But enough about me.

Some tremendous tugs-o-war ensue. There is much twisting and grunting, but the Queen bars growling.

Stealing the Gremlin's Gold will anger him, and he will leap prodigiously to recover it.

If the Queen fires steadily and makes many exposures, one is sure to inspire great hilarity on the land.

All this before bedtime.

Country Goes to City

On the eve of our departure for Guatemala, Bill and I spent the day in Columbus--he at a meeting of the Ohio Ornithological Society, and I goggling at the big-city sights. First stop: Aquarium Adventure, where I stared at genetically-engineered zebra danios who have glowing jellyfish genes. The attendant told me that they breed true, passing the electric-orange coloration on to their offspring. For those of us who stay away from genetically modified soy products, having a fish that passes jellyfish genes on to its offspring in our living room is a bit of a stretch.

It occurred to me that everything I stopped to look at in Columbus had a common theme: Human engineering of other life forms. I had not gotten over the day-glo danios when I turned around and was greeted by these:
They seemed to be asking: Why? And I couldn't answer why someone would want to do that to goldfish eyes. I'm one to talk; I have a dog with a smashed face and goo-goo eyes. So it's all a matter of degrees, and we all have different aesthetic boundaries between cute and deformed.
I've had three people tell me they have always thought Boston terriers are ugly. All men, which might be a coincidence, and might not. I think women may have a different concept of what's appealing in general.

Remember Gomer Pyle? When he'd see something really amazing, he'd say Gaawwww-leee!
I was channeling Gomer Pyle at the Whole Foods Market. I have never seen eggs like they had there. They had organic and conventional Araucana eggs. This breed, originally from Peru, lays seafoam and teal and sky-blue eggs. They had emu eggs for sale. Now, I cannot imagine eating
an egg that has the potential to turn into an emu. I lifted one, and it was as heavy as if it were filled with molten gold.My final stop was the freeze-dried mushroom section. I got a whole new perspective on morels, which grow free in our woods, when I hefted this feather-light coffin full of dried morels.
Check out that per/pound price. Gaaawww-leee.
Sorry if this post is somewhat lacking in the poetic prose you have come to expect. I'm sitting on the floor of the Atlanta airport with a laptop, struggling to master an unfamiliar mouse and overcome the combined effects of our friend Peter's hot tub and Cabernet souvignon last night. More anon. Wish us luck getting to Guatemala!

American Idiots

Jammie photos by Phoebe Linnea Thompson. Fashions by Sears. Hair by Tina, just today. She zhuzzed it with gel.

Hooked, irretrievably hooked on it, shamelessly, popcorn-eatingly, hoot and holleringly hooked on this ridiculous show. I bathe the kids early, get everyone in their jammies, fire up the ancestral Zickefoose heirloom popcorn pan, fetch the dog and the macaw, sandwich myself between kids and hubby, and waller in American Idol.
The guys are smokin' this year, blowing the women out of the water, in my opinion. Taylor Hicks is my favorite. He's got music coming out of every pore in his body. Adorable. But I'm coo-coo about Chris Daughtry and Elliott Yamin, too. Killer vocalists. I don't want to like Ace Young,
because he'll have it made no matter what, but ooooh, lawd, the boy can't help it. He was born to please. Mmm, mmm, mmm.
I'll have two of those Ace units, please.

Liam likes sweet lil' Kevin Covais, a proto-nerd with the voice of an angel, the best. "Mommy, can I have the phone? I want to vote for that boy with the glasses." Phoebe's a Chris Daughtry fan. Bill's behind Taylor Hicks, too.

The subplot going on during our nightly Idolwatching is Pet Games. There has to be a subplot, because the commercial breaks are interminable. Charlie and Liam play Toss Harold (there are also Toss Thomas and Toss Percy variants, too).
Hey, Harold. You lookin' at me? You lookin' at ME?

Liam approaches Charles with a toy; Charles rushes at it; grabs it, and flings it off the back of the couch with a loud "OWWW!" Liam dissolves in giggles.
Take that, you saucy helicopter! OWWW!

Chet brings one toy after another to chew on our laps. For beauty so rare/ No dog can compare /To the Boston Terriere/ Is that his derriere?

Tonight Chet got both the speaker and the stuffing out of Patrick Starfish, so our never-pristine living room is once more a sea of Hollofil. That took some doing, and I give Patrick high ratings for durability, and Chet three stars for persistence.
I wonder if there is Hollofil in that big parrot. Here, parrot, parrot.

So if you were wondering what kind of losers would push the Olympic telecast into second place, and American Idol's audience share to a whopping 37%, you're looking at 'em.
'Em R Us.
Ace Young aside, there's really only one idol in my heart. He's got a lot of what they call The Most. He sings, and plays a mean guitar besides.
Sweet William von Heineken III and IV

I Wish These Were Mine

This bird is ALOFT!!

May I have your attention? Please look, just look at these paintings. My dear friend Mike DiGiorgio is painting some of the most beautiful bird portraits since Louis Fuertes. I absolutely cannot get over his handling of shadow on this swallow-tailed kite's white underwing and belly. If Mike can be said to have a mentor, it was the great Don Eckelberry. He made many pilgrimages to Babylon (Long Island) to hear what Don had to say about art, bird painting, and the wide world around us. I went with him once, too, and I'll never forget that night, Don's raspy voice and great booming laugh, Ginny's gentle counterpoint; the amazing original art on every wall and cranny in their beautiful carriage house/residence. How I wish Don Eckelberry could comment on these two works.

Can you tell how much Mike loves kestrels? This is a celebration of North America's most ornate bird. He's rolling around in its beauty. Mike's a soul man, a delightful and loyal friend, and such a wondrous painter. He is perfectly at home with watercolors. I'm going to try his favorite paper: Fabriano Artistico Extra White 300 lb. soft press. Wonder if it will make me paint like him? Worth a try, anyway.
Thank you, Mikey, for decorating my blog. It's not every day an artist is commissioned to paint North America's most beautiful birds--but I can't think of anyone better for a dream job like that.

The Giving Plants

The spring orchid show has begun. Burana Beauty, whose flowers opened a few days ago, is now in full color and scent, filling the room with a wildly sweet perfume. These flowers are so lovely they wouldn't have to be fragrant too, but they are. This plant is tough and willing and I love it. It's an honor to share a bedroom with Burana Beauty.

This is my favorite phalaenopsis, a keikei (offshoot) of one of Shila's plants. It was tiny when I got it in 2002, but it's my best phal. by far. See the kink in its stem? I was preparing for the Big Sit crowd of birders and naturalists to descend on us last October, and this plant was to be my table centerpiece, and its flowers were just opening as they are right now, and I decided to stake the blossom spike just in case it got knocked around, and I bent it just a wee bit too far and it snapped off in my hand. All that beauty, those months of beautiful flowers, snapped off, and there wasn't a darn thing I could do to fix it. I cried for two hours, I am not kidding. But the orchid's heart went on, and it sent out a replacement spike, and now, four months later, it is in glorious bloom again, and I am staying away from it with my big dumb fingers.

Last summer, Shila and I went on the Marietta Garden Tour, which we try to do every year. Snooping around in other people's gardens is more fun than watching Cops (when you get to snoop around in their yucky houses). No, I'd say that the garden tour is the antithesis of Cops. Anyway, one of the featured gardens was our artist friend Anna's, and hers was full of whimsy and weirdness and fabulous plants. One of them was an absolutely enormous potted clivia (Kafir lily) in full orange bloom. I've always kind of wondered about clivias--they're terribly expensive, usually starting at $50., but people who love them really love them. They bloom when you need it most, in late winter, and they need to go dry and cold before they'll set buds. So I've admired them from afar, but I've never taken the clivia plunge. Shila and I were excitedly admiring this amazing plant and Anna smiled and walked over to another, smaller clivia, also in full bloom, and carried it over and put it in my arms. "I've just found a home for Baby Clivia," she said. We were blown away.

That was July 2005, and it's seven months later, and Baby Clivia is almost as big as her mom, and I got this feeling that she was up to something after a long, cool, dry winter; I'd just stepped up her water and light, and I looked between her long straplike leaves and there were a row of baby toes peeking out at me. So that's how the flowers emerge?? Amazing. I guess I always figured it would be a big old tongue-shaped bud like an amaryllis.

And she has made Clivia III, for whom I will find the perfect home.

The Bad Bad Dog

Sunny but cold, and Shila and I decided to do a noon hike to see what the icicles were up to. Right from the start, the energy was weird; I was preoccupied with Liam, who's been coughing, and Chet, who was misbehaving, and worry clouded my outlook. There was beauty everywhere I looked, but I felt a threat, too. I decided I was worried about an upcoming trip; as nice as it can be to get away, I hate the process of leaving my kids, this home; all the living things that depend on my care. Don't worry; I've been preparing blog entries in advance, and training a very bright little sub-blogger; you'll never know I'm gone...
The first thing that drew my eye was this lovely ice pattern, which morphed into a monster face.


So I took more pictures, and saw a crazed mandrill chewing a rock in the ice.

This elfin forest of moss sporangia was momentarily soothing.
Nothing scary there.
The ice castles were terrific today, thanks to zero-degree nights and continuing runoff from the steep hills. They were more gracile, less ponderous than the last batch, and decidedly dangerous-looking. I cheated death long enough to take this picture.
Shila and I quickly became absorbed in firing at the ice, and we crawled from one formation to another along the cliffside, sliding and slipping and thoroughly muddying ourselves.
Like a child who gets bored when his mom lingers too long in conversation, Chet was looking for trouble. There was something in his eyes today. I shot this picture, and then he vanished.
You guys are all wrapped up in icicles; I'm gonna go raise some hayull. Catcha later.
No amount of calling and whistling with my super-duper acorn-cap dog whistle would bring him back. He had never been gone for so long. Shila and I had a bad feeling that he had gone way down the stream and slipped under the fence to round up some cattle. Darn him!!
So we made our way slowly through the boulder field and slippery slopes, calling and whistling all the way (so much for that bobcat sighting!) to try to recover the prodigal pup. No response, no jingling tags, nothing. I hate yelling in the woods; it's antithetical to everything I stand for, but sometimes I have to yell in the woods. Durn dog!!!
Oh, great. So that's what that feeling of foreboding was all about. I always wonder if I've just taken the last picture of Adventurer Chet, alive... After an eternity of walking, calling, and waiting, Chet finally appeared at the top of the cliff, panting, a little dirty, and wild-eyed. If only he could talk.
Shila and I went on with our expotition in a desultory kind of way, heading for the ice cave with a chastened Chet sticking close by, for once.
We sat down beneath a spectacular icefall, and while we were admiring the leaves,
seemingly coated with that nasty white icing you see on Danish pastries (oh, sorry, Divine Stars of Mohammed),
a chunk of icefall, probably weighing several hundred pounds, suddenly separated from its mooring and thundered down right in front of us. Not a nanosecond of warning; one moment it was hanging, and the next it was shattered all around us. Had either of us been underneath it shooting pictures of moon eggs, well, we'd have been smashed flat.
The gap in the ice teeth was a turret of icicles perhaps two feet across and eight feet long. KRRRAAAASH!
Listen to your premonitions, Zick. The next time you have this feeling of foreboding, just turn around and head home.
So we laughed with relief for awhile and pondered the imponderable and started home. Chet disappeared briefly and came back with a red balloon.
Leave it to Chet to find a red balloon in the woods. He played with it until it popped and as I was coming over to get it away from him he swallowed a two-inch piece of it. I'm telling you, that dog was BAD today. I told myself that it would pass, just like a piece of gristle, or the rubber dinosaur he ate the first afternoon he spent in our house.
We trudged home, talking about this exceedingly weird chain of events. A truck pulled up in the driveway as Shila was preparing to leave. It was our neighbor from down in the holler, the one who owns the cows Chet likes to chase. He'd seen his cattle racing around the pasture, and had been amazed to see this little tiny dog in a blue shirt, as he put it, trying to round up his cattle. When he shouted, Chet had run and leapt into his arms. Not exactly the response he was expecting, but then Chet is not your average stray dog. He held Chet and carried him toward the house, read his tags, figured out where he must belong, and then he and Chet heard my super-duper acorn whistle and Chet leapt out of his arms and tore back up the stream to us. He just drove up to the house to make sure Chet had found us and made it home. He told me he wasn't worried that Chet would harm the cattle, but he was worried that come spring when the cattle had calves, they would no longer be playing when they charged him. I thanked him and apologized profusely on behalf of my bad, bad little dog with the blue shirt.
I am hoping that tomorrow brings wave upon wave of normalcy. I don't want to see any ice turrets, any mysterious woodland balloons, any trucks in the driveway, or the disappearing rump of my dog. I want to take Liam to the doctor, come home and clean the house, that's what I want to do. Urrgggh.

Blogzilla, signing off.**


**Bill calls me Blogzilla now.

Child Labor Buys Studio Time

What a peaceful day it was. Our favorite neighborhood playmate McKenzie came over, and she, Phoebe and Liam spent the entire day counting the spare change that had accumulated around the house over the past two years. Honest, I didn't put them up to it; they wanted to do it! Soon Phoebe's floor was dotted with piles of coins. Each pile had been painstakingly counted, and if the piles got stepped on or kicked, the effort was for naught. Liam had to dump some excess energy in a safe place before being allowed to walk across the floor/minefield.
Chet, of course, took full advantage of this situation. I don't know if this is a breed trait, but this Boston terrier cannot bear to see anyone absorbed in anything, whether it be reading, counting change, wrapping presents, or taking photographs, while reclining on the floor. He identifies the focus of your attention, then simply sits on it. So Chet alternated between dragging toys in and chewing them atop the coin piles, or simply plopping himself on the coins. He so wanted to be a part of the process, but having no fingers, had to use his butt.
no, that's not a Boston pup asleep behind Liam, but the place-holder I bought Phoebe a year ago, when we were waiting for Chet to get old enough to be picked up...

The kids were amazingly patient with him and worked around him, quickly sequestering counted piles where Chet couldn't sit in them. When it came time to put the coins in rolls, I came in to help. McKenzie would count, while I started the rolls and handed them to the kids to finish filling. When all was counted up, they'd sorted and rolled more than $316.50! Each kid got a $10 roll of quarters for a good day's work.
note Chet, chewing a stuffed toy on Liam's chest, and the assortment of toys Chet brought in throughout the afternoon.
I've been amusing myself lately by tracking two of my commentaries on NPR's Most E-mailed Stories list. This is the first time I've had two commentaries air in the same week ("Blogging: A Boon or Blight to Marriage?" aired Monday, and "Bird Watchers Begin Great Backyard Bird Census" aired Thursday. "Blogging" was crazy--it hung in at #3 for the first two days, bopped down to #11, went back to #5...it didn't drop out of the top 25 until Sunday (today). I think that was because it got onto four or five major blogs, and there was a snowball effect as people heard about it and then checked it out. Meanwhile, "Bird Watchers" got as high as #4, and is still on the charts at #15 Sunday night.
Both were Editor's Picks on the NPR home page. Pretty heady stuff. NPR gave both Bill and me a link to our blogs, and mine has gone from picking up around 25 new readers each day to adding more than a hundred. If you're new, welcome!!
Today, though, I let the computer sleep while I worked on three drawings I'd started several weeks ago but never got time to finish. These are for the New York Breeding Bird Atlas. Here's a female blackpoll warbler, incubating.

Here's a northern waterthrush, feeding tadpoles to its young. Northern waterthrushes often nest in the upturned rootballs of wind-thrown trees. Thus, the roots protruding from the soil. The tadpoles came from an observation I made in Connecticut, where I was amazed to see a northern waterthrush catching wood frog tadpoles from its perch on a stump in a vernal pool.

And here's a Louisiana waterthrush turning her eggs. Their nests are very cleverly concealed in earthen banks. They stuff wads of wet, muddy leaves into an existing hole for a foundation, and they make a porch of wet leaves that then dries and is quite strong. I watched a pair build their nest and almost succeed in raising the young to fledging before a predator clawed them out of the bank near the Chute some years ago. I was heartbroken. I'd been so careful to keep a great distance, and only watch them through binoculars...but when there are 20-odd feral cats roaming the area from the nearby shanty, it's really only a matter of when they're going to find the nest. Another reason I must find a way to buy that land.

Charlie is never happier than when I'm working at the drawing table. He hangs out either on my shoulder or right by my left elbow, where he will be handy should I reach over to tickle him or preen the feather sheaths off his head. He's amazingly good about leaving my books and art materials unmolested, which is more than you can say for most parrots. He understands, I think, that sitting on the drawing table is a privilege which can be revoked for bad behavior. For my part, having his bird consciousness so close is a part of my creative process. If I forget to go fetch him when I first sit down at the drawing table, he lets me know! Parrots are excellent at letting people know what they need. AWK!!!

and extremely good at giving people what they need, too.

Rollergirls

When Phoebe or Liam get invited to a roller skating party, we always RSVP with a yes. I grab a totebag that contains my skates, which are equipped with Krypto street wheels and hardware dating back to 1976. They're about shot, but then so am I. Last summer the right front truck dropped off while I was executing a wide curly-Q (curlicue? curliqueue?) on the sidewalk by the Lafayette Hotel, and I went sprawling. My important bits (knees and wrists) were protected by pads and steel shanks, but I got a fabulous sidewalk burn on my calf from the accident.

I have been on rollerblades once, and know when I'm over my head. It's skates for me. Wider wheelbase, slower speeds, more maneuverability. Most of the older kids at the rink last night were on blades, and they were careening at twice the speed they should have been, with half the control they should have had. Almost lost my dear digicamera to a near-collision with a boy zooming by. Teen-agers are more comfortable with hairsbreadths than I am. I bark at them like a surly old dog until they give me a wider berth. Watch it! Maybe you're immortal, but I've figured out that I'm not.

I used to skate in college, commuting from the Radcliffe Quad (aka Siberia) to classes and friends' dorms along the Charles River, and occasionally skating all the way to MIT and downtown Boston. I had to look sharp when I got on the subway, and hide myself in a crowd, then tuck my feet under the bench, or the conductors would bust me for skating on the train. I skated in any weather except wet or snow, and thoroughly enjoyed weaving in and out of stalled traffic, leaping from street to sidewalk, looping backward around parking meters, and rolling wherever I went. My instructors adapted to my odd mode of transport, and tolerated my wheeled feet, once they realized that I wouldn't crash or fall. The dining hall ladies were cool, too. I used to fetch coffee for people because it was fun to take a tray of coffee cups around like a waitress at a diner. It's much easier to skate with a tray of drinks than to walk with it--smoother. The great evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr once reprimanded me for skating with a drawerful of bird specimens at the Harvard MCZ. But then he watched me for awhile and allowed as how I could still do it as long as I was careful.

Phoebe is going to be a killer rollergirl. Hallelujah, here she comes.
Her feet are growing so fast right now that I don't want to invest in a third pair of shoe skates until summer, when we skate the sidewalks and bike path, so we're renting for the moment. Liam, on the other hand, went around the rink once, hanging on to me, and was done.
Liam doesn't want to do anything until he's good at it. Which makes learning to do new things kind of hard. But he amused himself watching other kids play air hockey.
When we put some quarters in the machine, he had fun
until Phoebe scored on him--D'oh!
Gotta figure out how to get Liam to loosen up a little. I'll put him in skates and pads this summer and let him learn little by little on the sidewalk. That'll help with skating, at least.

Mr. Gibeaud has been skating for over 50 years. He tightened up my trucks for me, and then presented me with my own personal wrench. It was a good night. Lots of laughs, good sore legs, no bad wipeouts.

Big Ol' Day

Howdy. I've been on the road all day. This will not be the poetic post you might be expecting. Because we're heading back to town for dinner, and then I have to put on roller skates and skate around with Phoebe and Liam at the funky rink in town.

Yesterday, I was in the middle of cleaning the greenhouse when Bill, who just happened to glance at my e-mail, told me that my NPR editor had requested a timely commentary. Those two words, used together, congeal my blood. They mean, "Write something now, to be recorded ASAP."
The Great Backyard Bird Count commences today. It's a joint effort of the National Audubon Society and Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It's a very cool concept: Get volunteers all across the U.S., Canada, and Hawaii to count birds in their own backyards. Combine the data (they're expecting 100,000 participants this year) and get a snapshot of late February bird populations across the continent. The Count is in its 9th year. Last year, 52K people sent in their records.
So, in between beheading geraniums and repotting, I wrote the commissioned commentary (actually, it was more like a press release) about the GBBC. Today was entirely devoted to: Refining two additional commentaries (the usual quirky Zick stuff about birds doing things nobody knew they do), editing the aforementioned piece, and getting my carcass to Athens, 1 1/2 hours away.
Recorded the three pieces from 1-1:40, jumped back in the car, hit the store and reprovisioned the house, and walked in just in time to hear the Great Backyard Bird piece air at 4:20. This is the first time I've been on NPR twice in the same week, and both times the piece aired in the first half-hour of the show. KOOL. Here's the crazy part: the blogging commentary that aired Monday is still sitting in the top 10 most e-mailed stories, even as another airs. Sharon told me that a blog was the place for shameless self-promotion. So there you go.
Needless to say, I counted birds all the way home. The kildeers are in!! and I counted three. Turkey vultures were circling! (about a dozen). Kestrels were everywhere. Spring is here, spring is here, and I love it, even though it's going down to the teens in the next few nights. Those blooming water maples and budding willows are going to have to shiver.
Today is very special for another reason. It's the one-year anniversary of the day Phoebe, Liam and I drove to SE Pennsylvania to pick up the tiny puppy, Chet Baker. We started the day with a big cuddle in bed, treasuring this amazing being who makes us all so very happy. I don't know how one little animal can make such a huge difference in four lives, but he does, and I'm not about to question it. I'm just going to go give him a big hug, and a fabulous stuffed crab with googly eyes and lots of Hollofil to strew around the living room.

Building a Bayou 3

I think by now the Auk is in everyone's hands, so it's all right to go on with another installment of Building a Bayou, the blow-by-blow of how this cover painting was done. When we last left our heroine, she was cowering on the edge of the cold bayou, unwilling to stick a paintbrush into the water. So I began by tickling in the most colorful reflections, to give the viewer guideposts that would tell the eye that this was a mirror image of the forest. It's strange to paint the same forest upside down and I had to fight the urge to turn the painting upside down. I wanted to paint the reflections more loosely and not get too caught up in their detail.
This is all about illusion. I had plenty of time to think about what makes a reflection look different from the image it's mirroring, and what makes water read as water. By this time, I had painted in almost all of the reflected forest. It was cool how it began to look like a reflection now.

The thing to do, now that I'm up to my knees, is de-emphasize the water. I took a few passes over it with neutral washes, to gray it and blur it a bit, so it wouldn't draw too much attention from the forest. And bang! it looked a lot more like water.
Phew. Now I could go back to the forest, and start fine-tuning the darks and lights, preparing to paint in The Bird. Ironically, in most of my paintings, the focal point is a bird. But I rarely spend more than an hour on painting it. All the effort and sweat goes into creating a believable setting for the bird. It's not that the bird is an afterthought--no, it's the motivator for the whole work--it's just that there are a lot fewer things to consider in getting the bird right. I will add that painting the reflection of a flying bird is a stinker. I had to figure out what it would look like from underneath. And then I had to figure out where its reflection would fall on the water, because that would tell the viewer how high it was flying. More on that later...we're almost there!

Trailing the Bobcat

Bobcats are one of the hardest animals to see. I've seen two in my life: one in North Dakota, sunning itself by a prairie pothole. It was the size of a springer spaniel, thick-necked, muscular, burly; it must have been a male. I had a bit of trouble convincing Bill it wasn't a house cat until we got it in the scope, and it stood up, flicked its six-inch banded tail, and stomped off. Fantastic. I was dancing around like a spider on a griddle, I was so excited.
Before that, I had my best-ever life look at a bobcat on the trail that leads through Sta. Ana National Wildlife Refuge in south Texas. I had been trailing along on a nature walk, lugging 7-month old Liam in a backpack, when he started to caterwaul with hunger. I waved the group on and sat down to nurse him (Spicy water!) All was silent. I heard a slight crackle of leaves and the loveliest male bobcat on the planet stepped out onto the trail only about 12 feet away. He was spotted and striped and flames of rufous ran up the inside of his legs and over his ears. He pretended not to see us but oh, he did--he paused, looked over his shoulder and bolted into the underbrush, where he switched his tail and stared into my eyes with a gold-green intensity that made my heart turn inside out. Oh, thank you, Liam, for making me wait for that bolt of grace.
So I am laying for our bobcats. I've photographed their tracks and today I've found a place where one must like to hang out--an enormous dry ledge-cave on a very steep part of our neighbor's land.
A bobcat had left its calling cards, pretty fresh, at the edge of the cave (kind of a No Trespassing sign to the ubiquitous 'coons).
Bobcat ca-ca is broken into segments, like Tootsie Rolls. And it doesn't smell nice, but they don't bury it when they want to send a message. This was not here a week ago.

Chet's spine hair rose up, something that doesn't happen when he sniffs coon scat. I got such a vivid image of a big, thick-furred bobcat wedged under the ledge. I don't know whether Chet sent it to me or not--he didn't need to. I thought, This is where I would go in a downpour, if I were a bobcat. I might even sleep here all day. Who knows. Maybe he heard us coming and slipped out, down into the ravine. What a thought.

The bobcat cave was just a part of Chet's excellent day. With everyone else in school, he was #1. I gave him a DentalChew, and he decided to take it outside to bury it, something I normally try to prevent. Those things are expensive.
I've been reading Elizabeth Marshall Thomas' books lately, starting with The Hidden Life of Dogs, continuing with The Social Life of Dogs. EMT has to be one of the coolest people on the planet. Her book, The Harmless People, a loving portrait of the !Kung San Bushmen of the Kalahari, is an amazement. She applies the same gentle observational and interpretive powers to her small pack of dogs, following them on their rounds and watching their social interactions. So I decided to follow Chet with his DentalChew.
He was concerned that I was watching him; I could see that, so I dropped farther back. He took off for the orchard with a casual, nonchalant gait.
He tried a number of different sites before finally deciding on a brushy corner of our woods. In the house, Chet buries all kinds of things--biscuits, chew bones---but he doesn't have much to work with, and I'll find bones in my shoes and treats under piled-up computer cords. Here, his broad nose served him well, and he pushed leaf litter and twigs over the chew until it was all but buried.
Sorry, Chet, but I'm not interested in donating your chew toys to the coyotes. When I thought he wasn't looking, I stuck it in my pocket to recycle. But he saw me, and gave me a baleful look. Durn humans. I had that thing buried.

Walking with Liam

I feel the days when Liam is a little boy, home from school, slipping away. I treasure his impish presence in the house. I love his voice, his scent, the things he says. Today we took a long walk. He was grumpy and teary when we started, so I let him pick the route (he favors the Loop), and then settled back to watch the fields, woods and sunshine work their magic on his mood. He relaxed visibly, stopped fussing, and started to live. We stop a lot and drop into our own reveries, watching the sun sparkle on the creek.
Liam likes to hold conversations while we walk; in fact, he talks most of the time, but his voice is so soft and sweet that it's like music to me. I like asking him what he remembers from his early years.
"Liam, do you remember nursing?"
"Oh, yes."
"What was it like?"
"It was like taking a drink of water when you're 30 years old. Spicy water."
I had to suppress a hoot so as not to interrupt our conversation. But he comes out with stuff like that all the time, and it's all I can do not to laugh out loud. He's another universe unto himself. Quirky and strange and always original.
The rule in our family is that as long as you're wearing jeans, it's OK to slide down embankments on your rear. Liam goes out of his way to slide down embankments.
His nickname is King of the Woods. But every now and then the King of the Woods slips his warm little hand in mine and he's still a little boy. I know it won't be long before he'll have other things to do than hike with his mom, so I make it happen now.
Boston terriers aren't much for quiet reverie. Chet noses around in my pocket until he finds his leash and initiates a game of tug-0-war. The only brand of leash and collar that has survived such antics is Lupine Leads. They have a money-back guarantee, even if they're chewed. And they're gorgeous. So far, Chet has chewed four collars into oblivion, but his Lupine collar and leash are as good as new.
Liam and I sat on a wooded hillside watching Chet course back and forth. I never tire of watching his muscular, lithe trot. And when we're in the photographic zone together, he poses as if he were doing it for a living.
This is my favorite picture, though; it captures his springy strength and catlike grace. For as much as we love making over him and teaching him tricks, he's really happiest in the woods, following his nose, just being a dog.

The light today was so gorgeous--it has a springlike intensity now that's turning the maple twigs bright red against the blue, blue sky. The water maples in town are all blooming. Whee!
Spring starts for us in February; the signs are all around and stronger every day. Bill and I stood out on the deck talking tonight, catching up and looking into our future for a long time. We were hoping the woodcock would be back, but it was a silent twilight, the light draining from blue to orange in a line over the trees.

Nature Girl Gets Pinched

There is a difference between altruism and the inability to say no. So when a tiny library an hour distant calls up and asks if I will give a talk for their coffee break series, I gape like a goldfish for awhile and then say yes. I know I will kick myself later, when I've got to practice my slideshow and find the old projector and wipe the hairballs off its lens, load up the car and blow an entire day getting to the tiny library. Today, I overslept and had to get the kids dressed and brushed, pack their lunches and (an extra wrinkle) make sure all their hand-made Valentines made it to school in one piece. I had to feed the animals and the wild birds and then get myself cleaned up, dressed, and packed for the show, put the kids on the bus, and hit the road--all in 50 minutes.
But I enjoyed the ride up the Ohio; it was a pearly bluegray day and the great blue heron rookery was looking hopeful and ready for tenants.

I always love seeing Mail Pouch barns, an icon from my childhood that's still a common sight around here.

I shot pictures through the windshield, out the open window... Oh yeah, having fun. Life gives you lemons, you make beef stew.
The funny thing about little Ohio towns is that you can be in deep doo-doo before you've even seen a speed limit sign. I know every speed trap around Marietta dead to rights, but I was out of my territory. This little kitty gave me a knowing look as I came into town.
aren't you going a little FAST, Missy?

Ooh, 35 mph. I pumped the brakes--OK, slammed them on, and decelerated. Lights flashed in my rear view mirror. Oh, turbobummer.
I looked at my watch. I had left a half-hour to set up my nasty old projector and deal with whatever lighting and screen situation I'd encounter, to strew my offering of books and cards and stuff to sell, hoping to at least make my gas money back. And I knew this small-town officer would take every bit of that half-hour in painstakingly checking my license, registration and proof of insurance and then writing me up some god-awful ticket. I could see I didn't have a snowball's chance of impressing him with my "Give Turtles a Brake" and John Kerry bumper stickers, my nature girl altruism, traipsing along on my way to give a talk on hugging hummingbirds at the library. I told him I was sure his radar was correct; that I knew I was speeding, but would he mind expediting the process, because I was due to give a free program at the library in five minutes.

That hint rolled off him like water off a duck's back. He was half my age, and he was gonna stick it to me. Ever notice how the younger the cop, the less mercy they seem to have? 46 in a 35 mph zone, that's what I was doing, and he must have clocked me just beyond the place where the speed limit mysteriously changed from 45 to 35. They've got it all figured out in these little towns, just where to lurk to maximize their chances of grabbing the inattentive out-of-towners and hummingbird huggers.
He wrote me a ticket for $90, which was $90 more than I was making for my day's work. I thanked him very much.
I staggered into the library at 10:03, to find 14 retirees sitting expectantly, smiling at me, eager for their morning's entertainment. I didn't feel very entertaining, but I smiled and said, "Well, I'd have been here a half hour ago, but one of your finest just wrote me a $90 ticket for doing 46 in a 35 mph zone. Heh heh heh." Now there's an icebreaker.

"That was you?"
"We saw you stopped there!"
"Oh, that's just terrible!"
"He's always grabbing people right there, and he always blocks the road!"
"Let's go down to the mayor's office and talk to them!"

That last suggestion sounded pretty good to me. It could be kind of a Milagro Beanfield scene. I hoped they meant it. I could make placards for them. We'd march together on Town Hall.

So I gave my talk about homesick hummingbirds and bird-eating bullfrogs and other nature esoterica, sold enough books and cards to cover my costs, took a picture of the happy people filing out of the library (having forgotten their promise to accompany me to the mayor's office)

and set out, alone, to find the mayor.

My first stop was the mayor's office, which also seemed to be the fire and police station. The cruiser that had nabbed me was sitting ominously outside. I forged on, my jaw set.
There was a big NO SMOKING sign on the door, and two more inside, one in Spanish. The office was thick with cigarette smoke. Hmm. I squinted through the bluish haze and found a clerk. "Would the mayor be in?" I asked. She put her cigarette down. "Is this about a citation?" she replied. Answer a question with a question. I realized I was still holding the ticket in my hand. Duh. I am soo smooth.
"Well, yes, it is."
"He's not in his office. He's not going to be back until late late this afternoon," she said, a little smugly.
"I expected that. I was told he lives nearby."
"Well, yes, he does, but he's probably busy." She looked at me significantly. I wondered how busy the mayor of this itty bitty river town could be. Pretty busy, from her look.
"Would you mind telling me which house is his?"
"Gray with white trim," she said, a little sheepishly, then looked down and started shuffling papers.
I walked outside, looked around and found a gray house with white trim. I knocked on the door. It was not the mayor's house, but the occupant told me which one was.

I knocked on that door. Dogs barked and a TV blared.
The mayor and his wife were watching TV. Bob Barker was holding a Pet Quiz. They invited me in. The TV went on with its business. Two doberman mixes sniffed me all over, seven times. Luckily they liked me. Probably because I could have aced the Pet Quiz with both hands tied behind my back.
"My name is Julie Zickefoose. I'm a freelance nature writer, and I was coming into town this morning to give a free talk for the library's coffee break, and I got written a $90 ticket for doing 46 in a 35 zone. I'm sorry to bother you at home, but I just hoped that you might be able to help me out. It seemed a little harsh, when I was coming here to do a public service."
That sounded good to me, and I hoped it sounded good to the Mayor.
He said, "Here's what I can do. I'll cut it to $50, and I won't give you points on your license, but that's all I can do."
I took it, thanked him warmly, kissed the Dobies on their long noses, walked over to the police station, paid up, and headed home. I stopped to admire some geese planing into an embayment along the Ohio. There's grace all around, all the time, even on crappy days. My heart lifted.

I got home at 3 p.m., with just an hour left before I had to pick the kids up and start dinner. Phewwww. Whatta day. The phone rang. It was my beloved editor at NPR, telling me that my commentary on blogging would air this afternoon on All Things Considered.

Beats getting a speeding ticket in an Ohio river town. All things considered, it was a good day.

Blue Skies and Tracks

I got up late this morning and the juncos were worried I wouldn't get up at all. They wrote me a message in the snow, but didn't get time to finish it. I think it would have said, COME ON JULIE!

Durn birds are getting uppity. I hurried out in my bare feet, leaving a human pugmark in the midst of their tracks. That was the theme for the day, as it turned out: tracks!
There's a mass of cold Canadian air over us, surreally blue skies and crisp, sweet tangy oxygen. I drove into town this morning to take Liam to his grandma Elsa's to make valentines. Almost didn't get there for pulling over and shooting out the window. Here's one of the surest signs spring is coming to southern Ohio: manure spreaders at work. It's too cold to catch the scent, unfortunately; I have wonderful associations with the smell of manure, of time spent on my uncles and aunts' Iowa farms, of endless hours in and around horse barns. I love it!
Another spring sign: red-shouldered hawks coming out of the woodwork, screaming, working out their territory boundaries. They're fearless this time of year, and a bright blue sky brings them out around every curve in the road.
If I had nothing else to do in the world I would make watercolors of some of these barns and skies and fields lightly covered in snow. I'm absolutely itching to paint, but I have to give another talk tomorrow, so that's not going to happen. Rats.
I was beside myself when I saw a couple of inches of snow on wakeup, because I've been waiting all winter for a cat-tracking snow. Specifically, a bobcat-tracking snow. I know they're here. Last summer, I found one set of perfect 2" pugmarks and a scatpile with scratches all around it, right in our meadow by the oil well. I didn't have my camera, resolved to return in the afternoon to record it, and was foiled by a thunderstorm. So Shila and I set off to see what we could see. I never thought we'd hit the bulls-eye...

We hadn't gone far along the stream when we found large, round pugmarks criscrossing the stream--atop narrow, slippery, snow-covered logs. Certainly not the kind of place a canid (other than the Tennessee Turd-Tail) would go. Perfect! There were a few places where the claws even showed, which is understandable considering the slippery substrate (cat tracks generally show no claws). Notice how the forepaw (larger, rear track) has only one claw mark. And it's just a hole in the snow--indicating a sharp recurve to the claw. The smaller hindpaw shows two claws. A canid can't retract its claws, so all will generally show, especially in snow. A cat can have one or two claws out, the rest retracted. This thing was scrambling up sloping snowy boulders and tiptoeing across narrow logs--very catlike. Chet was galvanized by its scent, and he overlaid the cat tracks with his own--I barely snagged this photo before there was a lacework of Boston tracks atop them. The tracks were twice the size and breadth of Chet's, almost perfectly round--bobcat. How wonderful to finally have documentation that they're here. Shila and I were wishing Chet could speak, because he seemed to know what he was smelling. Suddenly Shila got a mental picture of a furry bobcat face, and she was sure Chet had sent it. Dogs are thought to think in pictures, and animal communicators (psychics, if you will) get those pictures. This is the second picture Shila's received from Chet. The first one was of a multiflora rose thorn in his paw pad, a few weeks ago. We came in from a long hike, and Shila asked, "Do you ever check his paws when you come in, for thorns and stuff?" I answered, "No, I haven't, unless he's limping." We both looked at Chet, and he was moving fine, and we forgot all about it. Sure enough, an hour after Shila left, Chet was limping, and I found a rose thorn in his pad. I called Shila and she said a picture of the thorn in his paw had suddenly popped into her head, which is what made her ask the question out of thin air.

Inspired by Shila's ability to receive, I'm going to try to get some of those pictures myself. I have been able to send a few to Chet. Once I was calling him away from chasing cattle, and he was ignoring me. I stopped calling and concentrated hard on a picture of Chet, being trampled by a cow. He came running back, his ears flat to his skull, and cowered at my feet. Maybe it was a coincidence, but he looked like a dog who had gotten a message. Later that same day, we were resting together, and I sent him a picture of the same awful scene. He flattened his ears, looked at me, and moved closer.

We had loads of fun shooting ice pictures again, this time in late afternoon light. Shila is given to flopping down to the ground to get the angles she wants.
Chet takes full advantage of this, and he'll make a beeline to pounce on her, steal her hat or gloves, or just give her a very thorough face washing. He's got a pink washcloth, and he's lightning fast with it. The more Shila laughs the worse he is. We all get to hooting and cackling. I'm sure the bobcats know exactly where we are at all times.
On the return loop, we stopped dead in the trail at an area scratched bare, with a pile of duff and leaves in the middle. The hair went up on Chet's back. I dug down into the pile and found dead-fresh bobcat poo. Shila, who's changed a litterbox or two in her day, confirmed my hunch that the scent was cat. This photo doesn't look like much, but the area scratched bare was a couple of feet across.
So. Bobcats walk our land, breathing the same cold Canadian air that we do. That's a good day's work.

Ice Castles, Shrew Bones, Career Choices

The day Ora Lee died, Shila came over and we went for a healing hike. I hired a sitter for Liam so we could revel in the hiking without having to cajole him up and down the cliffs. It was well worth the investment. The creek had dropped since this skim of ice formed, leaving it suspended like delicate isinglass in mid-air. The struggle was to get to the ice panels before Chet did; he delighted in patting them with his paw and watching them shatter. We made our way down the creek with mounting anticipation, knowing that we were in for a treat. We'd had some rain, and night temperatures dipped into the twenties. An ice kingdom worthy of Zhivago awaited. I loved to think that, while we went about our lives and ate and slept and worked, these enormous pillars of ice were silently forming.

It's hard to appreciate the scale of the cliffs at Beechy Crash without a human or canine element, so here's Chet, scrambling about like a mountain goat.
These might be the best icicles we've seen, formed under perfect, still conditions on a snowy night. Every icicle was polka-dotted, and we wondered about that until Shila figured out that snowflakes had fallen on them and frozen in place.

We lay on our sides and backs to get the best angles, hooting and hollering with delight as we discovered one bizarre formation after another.

At once point it occurred to me that, should a rack of icicles suddenly break loose, Shila and I would be smashed, impaled, or worse. We thought it was probably an acceptable risk, considering the photo ops.
Beneath the daggers lay the most enchanting moon-eggs of ice, softly glowing from within.
These are only a few of the dozens of images I took away from that hike. Here's Shila, beholding the spectacle.


We could have stayed there until nightfall, firing away at ice.

The woods was alive with birds; a sharp-shinned hawk, a couple of pileated woodpeckers, and a red-phase ruffed grouse greeted us as we came down into the Chute. I was particularly delighted about the grouse, as I have started to see him at the same passage in the Chute every time I come through. This tells me that he is beginning to think about drumming on one of the mossy logs that litter the forest floor. There was a year when I didn't see a grouse there, and I missed him sorely. Now there's one living there again. I hope he doesn't mind being flushed once every couple of days.
We moved on to the barred owl tree, where we found the crawfish-loaded pellet. It has dried out enough now so that I can identify the fur in it as opossum. Interesting. Even more interesting was the pile of shrew bones I had overlooked until this hike. They were under the same tree, only inches from the flashier pellet and whitewash. Look at them!! You can tell they're shrews by the bizarre sharp RED teeth. I'll go a bit farther and guess that these are short-tailed shrews--just by their size. The short-tailed shrew, Blarina brevicaudata, was rather recently discovered to be North America's only venomous mammal. It bites its victim (say, a white-footed mouse), then follows it until it drops, paralyzed. They're even said to bay while trailing their prey. It's in frequencies beyond human hearing, but it's undeniably baying. And doubtless nerve-shattering to mice. Eek!
There's a gorgeous little pelvis on the upper left, with a row of holes for nerve insertion. And that's a vertebra on the dime. It's so great to look at bones with Shila, since she's a craniosacral therapist and knows all about bones. We do comparative anatomy with all the bones we find.

Speaking of shrew bones...seeing them catapulted me back to the summer of 1976.
When I was just out of high school my father strongly encouraged me (heh) to get a job as a typist for an insurance company. Yes, it was a rather bad fit for my nascent set of skills. All day long, I transcribed dictation from insurance adjustors. I corrected their grammar and syntax as I went, and I think they appreciated it, even as it embarrassed them. There were two things that kept me alive that summer: watching the pigeons who bred on the window ledges of the building (and there's an amazing story in that, but I'll save it for my next book). The other thing that kept me going was visiting this young woman who worked in a garage studio in the alley where I walked on my lunch break. She was ethereal, pale, with crinkly blonde hair. And she made the most delicate and unearthly jewelry out of shrew skulls and bat skulls and fine silver wire. Could there be any greater contrast in employment situations? Here I was, trapped like a roach in a flourescent-lit insurance office, retrofixing barely literate memos on an electric typewriter, giving names to pigeons on the ledges because they were more interesting than my co-workers. And here she was, an Artist, crafting exquisite jewelry from exquisite things, her studio open to the humid Richmond summer. She was kind to me, and didn't mind my questions and creativity-starved presence for a half-hour each day. God bless her!
Needless to say, I made it clear to my dad that I could find my own damn jobs from that summer forward. Which, I now realize, was exactly his point. Find a career you like or I'll choose one for you. I think you'd make an excellent TYPIST. You got a better idea, kid?

And I'd like to thank the Artist. I wonder where she is, and if she's still looking for shrew bones.