Bye, Bye, Hummingbirds

In the scant two weeks between now and my last blog post about the hummingbird nest in my friend's garden, the hummingbird chicks have gone from being nothing more than floppy little appetites with stubby, gaping beaks to needle-billed birds with buzzing wings. They now hang out with their mom in a treetop, where she defends them and feeds them with as much vigor as she did when they were tucked in the nest. My friend R.'s pictures are below. Enjoy!

The empty nest.

Little Miracles

My friend R. has endured a long and difficult winter. It was a tunnel of a season, and happy news made spring a burst of light, both figuratively and literally, at the end of it for her, her family, and friends.

And Nature, after having been so cruel, now saw fit to present a tiny gift: An Anna's hummingbird came and made her nest in a shrub in her garden, weaving it on a limb at head height and within arm's reach.

Fortunately for this trusting little bird, she selected a garden in which  nobody would disturb her, though she doesn't appear bothered by people peeping at her or photographing her at long range. She goes about her age-old springtime duties without any knowledge of the meaning with which we, the watchers, invest it.

The first nest she built, for example, was destroyed by a violently windy rainstorm. So, too, were the miniature pair of eggs she'd laid in it. Undaunted, she immediately set to work again, carefully constructing a new cup of wispy leaves, tiny feathers, and plant down, bound with spider webs and stippled with specks of lichen and moss. 

She weighs no more than a nickel, yet has the heart of a lion, persevering against all odds. 

We're certainly not the first to notice how fearless and determined a hummingbird is. Various Native American peoples credited hummingbirds with the power to stop volcanic eruptions, cause rain, create stars by stitching the night sky with their beaks, and fly above the sky to see  past the blue. 

The Aztecs esteemed a hummingbird god of war and sun and believed that the souls of fallen warriors became hummingbirds. Many cultures believed hummingbirds carried messages between the human world and The Beyond.

To the Maya, the hummingbird was the sun in bird form. An old Mojave story tells how a hummingbird brought sunlight from the underworld and gave it to humans. Its role as a pollinator of flowers was appreciated, too, and inspired the Taino of the Caribbean to consider the hummingbird as a symbol of new life. 

"Enough with the symbolism," the bird nesting in R.'s garden interrupts. "I have two 'symbols' of my own to tend!"

Soon after building her new nest, she'd laid two eggs--a typical clutch size for a hummingbird. Each egg was about the size of a jellybean. 

About two weeks later, the eggs hatched. The impossibly small chicks together weighed little more than a paperclip.

But what an appetite they proved to have! 

Now the female hummingbird spends the day feeding herself so that she can feed them. She carries a porridge of tiny insects and spiders mixed with nectar in her crop and regurgitates it into the gaping maws of the chicks. 

Anybody who has watched a hummingbird feed her babies is astonished that the babies survive it; they could all go on to careers as miniature sword-swallowers.

A typical day for a hummingbird requires lots of energy-intensive flying, including hovering beside flowers. A hummingbird's small size adds to its caloric demand: its surface area is proportionately larger for its size than a bigger bird’s, so it loses body heat more readily.  

So it's not surprising that a hummingbird has a high metabolic rate requiring lots of fuel. A hummingbird eats about half its weight in food each day and spends about 15 percent of its time feeding and another 80 percent perched, digesting.

It's hard to imagine how the mother bird manages to meet her own caloric needs, let alone that of two ravenous babies who also need to be kept warm. Or how she manages to survive and thrive despite the hailstorm that pelted us last week.

What about Papa Hummingbird?  Where's he during all this drama?

Well. Papa has nothing to do with the babies. He's too busy staking out territory and showing off his beautiful crown and gorget of iridescent red feathers to do any grocery shopping or spoon feeding. I photographed the one below showing off in Carkeek Park.

In barely three weeks, the chicks will be ready to leave the nest. Then each one will strike out on its own, having nothing more to do with its mom or its sibling. 

In the words of John James Audubon himself, it will fly "on humming winglets through the air, suspended as if by magic in it, flitting from one flower to another, with motions as graceful as they are light and airy, pursuing its course over our extensive continent, and yielding new delights wherever it is seen."

A Magycke of Unicorns

OK, so a bunch of unicorns is actually known as a "blessing" (one of the many collective terms for animals that have their origins in poetic works dating back to the 1400s and are not, as is popularly believed on the Internet, established technical terms--which in no way diminishes how clever or pretty they are).

Certainly being infested with unicorns would be a blessing, compared to the rabble of rats we recently paid to have eliminated, and the irritation of fleas we suppressed. (I realize that we may now have guaranteed that nobody will be visiting us anytime soon.)

Hmm. An infestation of unicorns would probably mean lots of sparkles and rainbows. I could deal with that.

Anyway, I did happen to notice an uptick in unicorn sightings this past week.

I encountered this at one of my favorite coffee shops, Java Bean in Ballard:

A day or two later, this sign appeared in another coffee shop, this time in Duvall:

Then an ordinary trip to the grocery store--about the most mundane errand imaginable--yielded yet another unicorn sighting (and this one even *lights* *up*):

Shortly after, I was browsing in a bookstore and took a photograph of a book I wanted to remember to check out later on at the library...and when I looked at the photo online, tucked way up in the corner (cropped and enlarged here for your benefit) was yet another unicorn, on a different book.

It's not like we have a shortage of unicorns at home. There is this one in the bedroom, created by the Resident Teenager back when she was the Resident Kindergartner:

 And its twin, in the bathroom:

And this goofy little guy, leaning against a Belleek butter dish...

who lives right next door to a unicorn crafted out of an old flocked toy pony by an artist friend.

We are blessed with unicorns, indeed.

("Right, blessed," says Charley. "Sure, yeah, blessed, whatever. Go away and let me sleep.")

All Summer In a Day, Seattle Style

Kerria flowers in bloom in garden.

"It had been raining for seven months; dozens of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands. A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again. And this was the way life was forever on the planet Seattle, and this was the life of the men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives."

With deepest apologies to Ray Bradbury. But really, after a Seattle winter, one feels an awful lot like Margot locked in the closet.

So it was with hopeful and astonished delight that we soggy, mossy denizens of the Pacific Northwest saw the sun rise and yea, verily, shine upon us starting on Friday and continuing pretty much nonstop through Easter Sunday.

This makes us stop and take pictures of blue sky and the sun shining on things because we just can't believe it's true. Plus it might not happen again any time soon. (Indeed, the gray is back today.)

Sure felt good.

Tulips for sale at local grocery store.

Django enjoying the sunlight.

Luna likewise basking.

Pebble gets her fair share of sunlight, too.

Pity, Party of One

Roof has rats.
Dog has fleas.
Seizures, too,
If you please!

Car is making
Funny sounds.
Me, I rage
At excess pounds.

Hubby is not
Sleeping well.
Apnea?
Tests will tell.

House a mess.
Yard a wreck.
Budget, too,
Has gone to heck.

Child vexed
By plans for summer.
Camping again?
What a bummer!

Why not a resort
With sand and sun?
Why not the moon,
My precious one?

But others' lots
Make me humble.
Nothing for it.
Mustn't grumble.

At least I have
A roof! (With rats.)
So here's a picture
Of some cats.

A Lazy Blog Post about Faces in Places

Too busy dealing with work deadlines, rat infestations, and lacrosse schedules to write a proper post. So, for your amusement, a backlog of photographs having to do with faces spotted in various places (which does not actually mean I am writing about freckles).

Five of them exhibit the brain's tendency to "see" faces in things that aren't faces (or, as scientific papers dub it, "perceptual face/non-face classification"). It's the hardwired recognition system that causes people to see Jesus's face in a pirogi and the Virgin Mary's in a grilled-cheese sandwich (though there is still no explanation for why these faces could not be, say, those of John Travolta or the checkout clerk at the Ballard Fred Meyer, or for that matter, why anybody would choose to communicate with humans by mysteriously appearing on food items).

You know what I mean--if you're an American kid, you probably grew up looking at one of these non-faces at the breakfast table every morning: the face on the milk carton. Not that of the poor missing child, but the one that shows up in the visual instructions for how to open the milk carton:

"I'm SO happy to see you. Hope you like your Cheerios!"

You can find them on park benches (such as on the ones in front of the Bellevue Library)...

"Oh noooooo! Let's bolt before we get sat upon!"

and in your office...

"We're just so gosh-darn glad you like your new printer cartridges!"

and in your kitchen on things other than food...

"Can I make you some more coffee now? Huh? Huh? Please?"

and standing around sternly in your local park...

"Don't mess with me. I see you. These are shades, not blinders."

The last one is not in the same category as it really does depict faces. We spotted these two among the underground shops of the Pike Place Market in Seattle.

Er, Justin...? I think you might be being stalked.

Ha. I just noticed that Justin Bieber really does have a clip on his shoulder.

Erin Go "Bleh"; or, I Hate Leprechauns (but the Craic Was Great)

Erin go bragh-less.

Saint Patrick's Day this year coincided with a visit from my sister, who lives clear across the country.

As her birthday is in March, we decided to combine celebrations and enjoy an extra-special day, starting off with homemade brown bread and ending with the stock-in-trade St. Patrick's Day meal of corned beef and cabbage.

From what I've read, this dish seems to be more of an ex-pat iconic sort of meal than what the Irish actually eat on St. Patrick's Day.

Many sources indicate that beef, corned (cured with salt for preservation) or not, was too expensive for most of the Irish population to obtain and was principally a dish for the well-off. As a holiday meal, corned beef was considered a special Easter feast and not a St. Paddy's one.

Some sources suggest that corned beef was actually invented by Irish immigrants in the United States in the late 1800s and, over the next few decades, this "tradition" was exported back to Ireland (though Darina Allen, the doyenne of Irish cookery, states that "corned beef has a long history in the Irish diet" and that corning beef was the most important industry in the city of Cork between the late 1680s and 1825.

On March 17 in Ireland, it seems, a family would more typically tuck into a bacon joint (cured pork).

The main dish for the day ought to be a bit of a question mark, I suppose, since the holiday itself is a bit of a bùrach (Gaelic for "mess").

My maternal grandparents were Irish immigrants, and St. Patrick's Day didn't seem to be a big deal to them. My mom didn't make any special meals or fuss about the holiday, either. They all thought the onslaught of leprechauns and harps and shamrocks was silly, and pointed out that St. Patrick's was a feast day for a saint and that in Ireland people went to church in the morning and celebrated in the afternoon (and until the 1970s, pubs were actually closed by law on March 17).

In recent years, I've wondered a bit about why it's OK to depict Irish people via the stereotype of a pipe-smoking leprechaun hoisting tankards of beer. Not that I felt all picked-upon and insulted (in fact the issue doesn't twang a single nerve, I just think it's all stupid, and I really do hate leprechauns).

Pig, shamrock, shillelagh: check.

But I'm old enough to recall the Frito Bandito being kicked off TV as an insulting depiction of Mexican people, and I can't imagine other ethnic groups being celebrated in the form of a grotesque figure with a drinking problem.

(Though it does appear that even in modern-day America, one can go a step too far in depicting the Irish as nothing but a bunch of drunks: various Irish heritage organizations took Urban Outfitters to task a year ago for their insulting images of Irish people.)

Of course, Irish stereotypes that are entirely flattering can be pretty cloying to people of Irish extraction, too--the principal one being the Wise, Twinkly-Eyed Storyteller, usually male and typically clad in an Aran sweater, smoking a pipe, and wearing a flat tweed cap.

This individual often appears in films to the tune of Irish pipes and whistles and speaks in a way that suggests he's got direct links to an ancient world of selkies and spirits that we mere modern mortals have cut ourselves off from.

This droll, wise being makes my  mom's eyes roll whenever he or she pops up in a movie. I once loaned her a copy of The Secret of Roan Inish, which I thought she'd find charming, but she found the uber-Irish islanders even cornier than corned beef.

He's very clean.

She got a kick out of the old grandfather in A Hard Day's Night, however (the one who, when arrested by British police officers, starts hollering, "I'll go on hunger strike! I know your caper. The kidney punch and the rabbit clout. The third degree and the size twelve boot ankle tap....I'm a soldier for the Republic! You'll need the mahogany truncheons on this boyo!" and starts singing A Nation Once Again.).

Being the daughter of a woman who really, truly, for-the-record did transport guns in a baby carriage during the Easter Rising in Dublin, my mom no doubt heard lots of talk about the Troubles and knows the difference between a patriot and a poser.

(For the non-Irish-affiliated among you, having a grandma who transported guns in a baby carriage is frequently claimed by Irish wannabes but is not always true, just as it's unlikely that all the people claiming to have a Cherokee great-grandmother really do have one, as many Cherokee themselves have noted.)

Faith and begorrah, but I have digressed. I was going on about corned beef, wasn't I? Which I have made for the first and last time. It cooked up just fine, but it's nasty. Almost as nasty as leprechauns.

Not that the rubbery, salty corned beef was the star of the occasion. We also had pork shoulder, carrots, mashed potatoes, cabbage (of course), and an orange Bundt cake for dessert. And the craic (pronounced "crack" and meaning fun, talk, and laughter) was great; I woke up with a pulled rib muscle the next morning, from laughing.

(Honestly. This is not just a cliche about side-splitting here; it must be how the term came into being.)

Next year, however, we go back to our standard St. Patrick's Day  meal of roast salmon, mashed potatoes, and cabbage.

Now please excuse me while I go look for me shillelagh.