Boy Howdy, Plum Pandowdy!

It's been so hot around here that one of our fans finally conked out from exhaustion and was replaced with three new ones. The Pacific Northwest spent June and July smashing high-temperature records (13 days with temperatures of 80 degrees or warmer in June...8 days of 85+ in June...plenty of 90+ days...new record high recorded in Walla Walla on June 28 of 113 degrees...that sort of thing).

Thanks to this scorching, it's looking a lot like September around here, with parched brown lawns and trees shedding yellow leaves and mountain ashes already flaunting bunches of orange berries. And it surely must have something to do with our ornamental plum tree producing a bumper crop of plums, probably for the first time in its life.

Ornamental plum trees are not bred to produce luscious fruit. They're just supposed to look pretty decked out in their frilly pink spring finery. Perhaps some quirk of timing in when the tree bloomed this year due to the heat caused more of its flowers to be pollinated, because it's pumping out plums by the bucketful.

The plums are perfectly edible, which is not the same thing as perfectly luscious. We haven't felt terribly inspired to pick them.

For one thing, our tree's branches are up very high, and we don't have the right sort of ladder to boost us safely up into the branches. For another, the fruit, while copious, is scattered throughout the crown, not easily situated for picking.

And gathering up the fallen fruit is a tedious and unproductive activity. The only way to do it without constantly stooping and looking like one of those drinky-bird toys teetering around the yard is to crawl on hands and knees, inspecting each grape-sized fruit for worms. Any that aren't infested with worms are bound to have burst open, because they hit the ground like water balloons. You can hear them crash from across the garden.

All that effort garners a few cups of puny plums, which, though resembling red grapes, lack that fruit's snap, pop, and zing.  They're mealy and mushy, with a seed that takes up about a third of the interior. Fine for jam, but pretty blah out of hand.

But I did have a nice bowl full of yellow plums from a friend. It was way too hot to bother making jam, but it's never too hot to make a fruit dessert to serve with vanilla ice cream. I flipped through the recipe books and settled on a plum pandowdy.

"Pandowdy" is one of those words that's fun to say but has murky origins. The recipe book claimed that the name came from the way the pastry was laid across the cooked fruit and then chopped into squares and pushed down into it--an action called "dowdying." I haven't been able to verify that anywhere. Though perhaps if you smash something that's literally an upper crust to bits, it becomes dowdy...?

I never got to the "dowdy" part, though, because I was impatient and made the classic mistake of not reading the recipe through before assembling it, so I ended up dumping some dry ingredients into the pastry that weren't supposed to go in because they were for the filling. Oops. There was no way it would ever roll out under a pin, so I just crumbled it into blobs and dropped it on the filling. Even dowdier than the original plan.

The end result was an extremely tart caramel-colored plummy dessert with mediocre chunks of pastry in it. Filling definitely needed more sugar, which could've been supplied by putting on a crumb topping instead of pastry--but a nice dollop of vanilla ice cream offset the tartness, so the pandowdy was history in a respectable amount of time.

It didn't inspire me to crawl around the garden scrutinizing fallen plums and collecting them for another recipe, however. I'm leaving them to the birds (robins particularly love fruit, and it's fun to watch them stab the orbs and shake them around before swallowing them), and to Luna, who's been joyfully hoovering them up for weeks. She is transported with joy that we have a snack-dispensing tree in the yard.

But for the resident humans, walking across the yard is like tramping around on a giant sheet of bubble wrap, and it'll be that way for a few weeks yet, judging by how many plums are still dangling from the branches. I must say, this ornamental tree looks extremely proud of itself.

Plum-Blossom Snowfall, Then Spring

While friends and relatives back east were being pummeled by snow, we were enduring a deluge of plum-blossom petals drifting to the ground. And that was before Spring officially arrived last weekend. It was supposed to pour both days, but Saturday proved to be bright and warm, and so we were able to get out in the garden and start prepping it for the growing season.

Barrels filled with soil in the sunny side yard.

A robin has staked out our front yard as his territory and sings from atop a blue spruce.

An Anna's hummingbird continues to rule the back yard and spends a lot of time and energy chasing an interloper away from the feeder and sitting on a branch chirping his indignation.

Meanwhile, the female hummingbird--whom the male chased from the feeder most of the winter--has forgiven her suitor his loutish ways and has a nest secreted away somewhere in the garden. He has gallantly decided to let her sip from the feeder.

Here she is enjoying some time away from tending to her eggs, looking rather like a tired mom nursing a latte in a Starbucks while someone else minds her children at home for a few minutes.

At night we can hear the spring peepers singing, a barred owl hooting, and coyotes yipping and howling. The morning brings a dawn chorus of robins, wrens, and sparrows with the flicker providing the drum section. I've always liked early-morning sunlight, especially on days when I don't actually have to be up early and can linger to savor it with a cup of coffee.

Treasure Trove of Trilliums

Vivid bouquets of flowers bedazzled this sunny Mother's Day weekend, showing up like unexpected flamenco dancers on the back deck. The chilly, rain-soaked weekend before this one offered a herbaceous banquet of a different sort, filled with native plants and greenery that flourished in soggy settings.

We spent that Saturday dodging downpours, slathered with mud as we dug up ferns on the forested property of friends whose home and gardens will soon be bulldozed to make way for a housing development. They also pointed out a few other dig-worthy plants--rhubarb, raspberries, heavenly bamboo--that it seemed a pity to leave behind. We drove home in a minivan packed with our new fronds (it's not easy to make new friends in a new neighborhood; fronds are quite a bit easier to come by).

The Sunday of that soggy weekend I enjoyed an early Mother's Day gift to myself: a "Tea and Trilliums" talk and tour at Cottage Lake Gardens, which is tucked right behind the library barely five minutes from my home.

Cottage Lake Gardens is perched on the shore of, not surprisingly, Cottage Lake, and is home to all of the world's 48 species of trillium, a lovely genus of wildflower native to North America and parts of Asia. Trilliums are named for their habit of sprouting threesomes: They have three leaves, three sepals (those green bits that surround the base of a flower), and three petals.

Tea, coffee, pastries, and fruit served up on antique Limoges china...I could've stopped right there. That was enough of a break from the daily grind.

Then, fortified with food as well as information about trilliums, we headed out into the rain to wend our way through the forested garden. There the trilliums reposed in groups along a meandering path, sharing the landscape with a wide variety of shade-loving plants.

What I found most fascinating about the trillium is just what a late bloomer it is. Not in terms of the season, mind you--it's one of the earliest bloomers when it comes to springtime (one of its nicknames is "wake-robin," because it's such an early riser it even wakes up the robin who's supposed to be the harbinger of spring). No, its peculiar late-blooming property is that about seven years pass before a trillium seed finally grows up enough to produce a flower.

The bulk of the plant takes the form of an underground, swollen stem called a rhizome. (If you've ever brought home a chunk of ginger from the grocery store, you've purchased a rhizome.)

Shoots from the rhizome poke up from the soil, with each shoot producing three leaves and a flower.

The flowers bloom for a few weeks, set seed, and are done for the season by the time other flowers are just thinking of getting out of bed.

This long adolescence and brief bloom, combined with the leaves' inclination to die back in dormancy during a hot, dry summer, puts an interesting spin on the whole notion of what, exactly, a plant is.

To the aboveground-dwelling human, a plant is leaves, flowers, fruit--the things we can see.

But I'd think a trillium would feel otherwise, if it had feelings. Its real self is a mole-like being that puts up a periscope of a flower and goes on a sunshine-buying spree with its leaves before returning to its underground digs and retiring with a brandy and a nice collection of books for the rest of the year.

First-year shoots (left) and older shoots (right)

It put me in mind of a 17-year cicada, which spends 17 years underground as a nymph, sipping from roots. Finally it bursts from the ground, climbs up a trunk, molts into its adult form, then spends about a month carousing, reproducing, dodging predators, and making a row before dying.

A cicada's short above-ground life seems puzzling to humans, but a trillium would understand it. It's the 17 years of subterranean life that's the real thing, not the brief party in the light of day.

Cicadas don't consort with trilliums, but other insects do. Pollinators of trilliums include beetles and ants. (An East Coast species, the red trillium, attracts these animals with a pungent odor that earns it charming nicknames such as “stinking Benjamin.") The most commonly encountered trillium in the Pacific Northwest, Trillium ovatum, puts on quite a show after it's been pollinated: Its lovely white petals turn increasingly deep shades of pink, transforming into a rich, velvety purple before the flower dies.

Beetle on wild trillium in a Redmond park

The plant offers ants not only protein bars in the form of pollen grains as reimbursement for pollination services, but also oily fast food attached to its seeds. These treats are called elaiosomes and are nutritious, calorific growths on the seeds.

Ants eagerly tote the seeds away from the trillium to share with larvae. The kids gobble up the elaiosomes while their indulgent elders toss the seeds on their own nutrient-rich junk piles outside the nest.

The trillium seeds, in a nice "Br'er Rabbit and the Briar Patch" twist, then happily take root in these middens. Pretty clever for a rhizome!

First Bird of the Year, 2013

Much better birders than I were probably up before dawn on New Year's Day, tallying birds for the Audubon Christmas Bird Count.

Seven a.m. on the first day of 2013 found me savoring the first cup of coffee of the year, loitering before opening the curtains for fear that the first bird I'd see this year would be one of the house (English) sparrows that have been mobbing the feeders this winter, doing their best (and failing) to keep other birds away.

My concern about the first bird I'd see is due to the "first bird of the year" game enjoyed by many birders (and non-birders). It's based on the idea that the first bird you see on January 1 is the species that becomes your theme for the upcoming year.

I don't vehemently despise house sparrows, despite their status as a non-native invasive species with a well-earned reputation for ousting native species from their homes and killing their young. (Though I would certainly despise particular individuals of this species if they messed with any chickadees, wrens, or other native birds nesting in our yard, and would do my best to thwart their sparrow-sized attempts at home invasions.)

But I didn't really cherish the notion of this pugnacious, unloved bird of the monotonous song being my first bird of 2013. So, being a clever sort of person after a hit or two of coffee, I decided not to open the dining-room curtains first, as that window overlooks the feeders, and instead open the kitchen curtains first, as that window looks into the feeder-less backyard. Brilliant, n'est-ce pas?


The first bird immediately came into view, along with a dozen or so of its comrades: American robins, voraciously devouring all the orange berries on the cotoneaster bush. Robins, of course, are daytime birds, so they wouldn't have been up til midnight carousing on New Year's Eve. Instead, it looked as if they were having their New Year's party shortly after sun-up. (Robins have even been known to become somewhat tipsy after gorging on fermented fruit, but the ones in my garden appeared to be businesslike teetotalers.)

Robins are famous harbingers of spring, but these revelers weren't heralding an early end to winter. The American robin is what's known as a "facultative migrant"--they typically migrate only short distances and usually only as far as they need to go to find food or avoid really bad weather.

In some places, such as the Puget Sound region, robins stay put year-round. Winter is generally kind here, and there's an abundance of fruit and berries to sustain them until spring brings a banquet of worms and insects.

Seattle Audubon's "Birdweb" site notes, however, that "most often the birds that breed in Washington migrate south and are replaced for the winter by birds that nest farther north." So I don't know if these birds are the same ones who'll be caroling in the neighborhood in April.

So what might a robin augur for the next year? If I'd seen a European robin, there'd probably be a cornucopia of superstition to draw from (and a load of birders tramping into my yard to view this wayward bird).

The European  robin (at right, below) is a completely different species, which American colonists had in mind when they named the red-breasted bird they encountered on this side of the pond. Europe's "Robin Redbreast" carries a heavy load of myth, legend, and lore on its 20-gram back.

A lot of this has been innocently transferred to the American robin by people unaware that the two "robins" aren't related. This made me wonder if American robins figure in Native American folklore.

Diamonddavej at en.wikipedia

A quick Google search reveals that they certainly do, and that the topic is much better served by digging into books; what's available online barely even hints at the role the robin plays and what it signifies, and it's all mixed up with a new-age dreaminess.

However, the scrim of information online is enough to suggest that robins in Indian lore were portents of spring, with songs created to delight humans.

The robin's pleasing nature is revealed in a story that suggests its rusty color is the legacy of a robin burned while fanning a dying campfire with his wings to save the lives of a boy and his father. (Interestingly, the European robin is also said to have earned his red breast by fanning the fire burning low in the stable where Jesus was born--though another tale has it that the red is a bloodstain the bird picked up as it kept a vigil on the cross, singing all the while.)

Well, it'll be another year before I post anything about the robin if I wait until I can get those books via interlibrary loan, so for now I'll gladly settle for anticipating a year of good fortune and joy. Any bird whose song is often rendered in field guides as cheer up, cheer up, cheerily has got to be a symbol of good things to come.

White-Crowned Sparrows, Not Robins, Herald Spring

A winter robin in our birch tree, December 2011.

The robin is widely acclaimed to be a harbinger of spring in the United States; a robin appearing in late winter inspires many people to share the news that they've spotted one and thus spring must be around the corner.

How the bird earned this reputation isn't clear. In many parts of the country (such as here in the Pacific Northwest), robins are year-round residents. In places where robins migrate farther south for the winter, robins moving south from Canada may take their place.

The robin/spring equation isn't even a holdover from English folklore, as far as I can tell. Long-ago settlers from England, wistfully recalling the flora and fauna of their country, dubbed the big, feisty American thrush a robin because it had a russet breast like the spunky little English robin back home (which was once classified with thrushes but is now grouped with flycatchers).

But English robins, like many American ones, typically stick around for the winter (and are known for singing in fall and winter).

White-crowned sparrow, Magnuson Park, July 2011.

To me, it's the sweet, clear call of the white-crowned sparrow that signifies spring's arrival. White-crowns hang around all winter in the Puget Sound region, but I usually don't hear this little bird's melody until a Saturday in April, when it rings from the thickets striping the farmland near the stable that's our second home.

The white-crowned sparrow has starred in many studies seeking to unravel the mysteries of birdsong. Much of what we know about how birds learn to sing and birdsong dialects is based on research involving this species. Yet its plaintive melody hasn't yet been rendered in handy mnemonic-device form, unlike the "Poor Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody" of its cousin the white-throated sparrow or the "Quick, three beers!" of the olive-sided flycatcher.

Any existing efforts labor just to catch the rhythm of the song--it's translated variously online as "poor-wet-wetter-chee-zee" or "more, more, more cheezies, please pink!", making it sound like it's after Cheetos rather than singing a melody that, to me, is like a balmy, languid, summer afternoon distilled into notes on a flute.

Field guides, alas, aren't much help. David Allen Sibley's white-crowned sparrow is a "doodly-doo, I don't know the words" kind of singer that trills "feeee odi odi zeeee zaaaa zoooo." The Audubon field guide sternly declares that the bird's song "basically consists of a clear introductory whistle followed by 4-8 whistles or wheezy trills on different pitches." The Kaufman guide simply states that the song "varies, with local dialects" and usually includes "clear whistles and buzzy or trilled notes."

Author-ornithologists seem to have more leeway when they write outside the confines of a field guide (which of course must use words sparingly so that the physical book doesn't get so cumbersome it can't be carried into the field).

Photo by Mike Baird/Wiki Commons

Naturalist and conservationist John Burroughs, for example, who lived from 1837 to 1921, called the white-throat's melody a "sweet, quavering ribbon of song" that was the "most plaintive of all the sparrow songs." In expressing its sound, he notes that "it begins with the words fe-u, fe-u, fe-u, and runs off into trills and quavers like the song sparrow's, only much more touching."

Songs of the white-crowned sparrow do vary from place to place and subspecies to subspecies, and these distinctions were keenly observed by ornithologist William Leon Dawson (1873-1928). In his voluminous Birds of California, he describes one subspecies' song of "oh hee sween'tie chup ichin'" as having in it "the sprightliness of springing heather, the bright, compelling cheer of sunshine battling with glaciers for imprisoned waters, and a little of the wistfulness, withall, of whispering pines."

Another species trills "Hoo hooee, wheeoo hoo che wee che wee hee, chee oo chee chee wee che" (after which Dawson notes, "These imitations are very stupid, of course--about as expressive of Zonotrichian melody as a naked wire dummy is of a man." (The bird's genus is Zonotrichia.) A third subspecies, the one living in Seattle, he chides as a singer of a "prosy, iterative ditty" that ends with a trill of "a wooden quality which we may overlook in a friend, but should certainly ridicule in a stranger."

It was a northwestern bird's "prosy, iterative ditty" that led me to a white-crowned sparrow perched on the tippy-top of a conifer in a park on the Oregon coast in the early 1990s--it was a new bird for me (white-crowns are scarce back East where I grew up).

The next one I saw wasn't nearly as hard to spot: It had claimed the central courtyard of a local elementary school as its territory, and when I spent a few hours there as a volunteer cleaning and weeding, the sparrow hopped from tree to tree to supervise my work.

John James Audubon (1785-1851) had to work a lot harder to check out white-crowned sparrows (which he called "white-crowned finches"). "It is to the wild regions of Labrador that you must go, kind reader, if you wish to form a personal acquaintance with the White-crowned Sparrow," he wrote after an arduous trek through what sounds like a bog.

He then rhapsodizes about the sparrow's song:

"In such a place, when you are far away from all that is dear to you, how cheering is it to hear the mellow notes of a bird, that seems as if it had been sent expressly for the purpose of relieving your mind from the heavy melancholy that bears it down! The sounds are so sweet, so refreshing, so soothing, so hope inspiring, that as they come upon the soul in all their gentleness and joy, the tears begin to flow from your eyes, the burden on your mind becomes lighter, your heart expands, and you experience a pure delight....Thus it was with me, when, some time after I had been landed on the dreary coast of Labrador, I for the first time heard the song of the White-crowned Sparrow."

Of course, this didn't stop him from destroying a patch of habitat in his determined quest to procure a nest ("we returned with hatchets, cut down every tree to its roots, removed each from the spot, pulled up all the mosses between them, and completely cleared the place") and later shooting the "gentle and unsuspicious" nesting pair of birds.

Perhaps the white-crowns would agree that "oh, please, leave me be, be, be" might be a fair rendition of their song, but they're such friendly, cheerful little creatures that they'd be inclined to forgive Audubon his songbird slaughtering in the name of science. So I'll content myself with simply hearing "oh, spring's here at last, last, last."

Frozen Birds (and We're Not Talkin' Turkey)

A house finch contemplates the menu. We used to have lots
of these pretty finches in our summer garden, but they vanished
after a Cooper's hawk began frequenting the area, as did most of
the English sparrows. They pay us visits in winter, though.

The chickadees, juncos, and wrens who stuffed themselves at our feeders Tuesday morning got a much-needed energy boost to sustain them not only throughout the frigid day but also overnight, when temperatures dropped to a record-setting low for this date, settling in at a numbing 14 degrees Fahrenheit.

School was canceled for a second day in a row, which made for a lovely, dawdly sort of morning spent in PJs and bathrobe with a hot cup of coffee and the newspaper at hand. This slow time allowed for leisurely birdwatching at the feeders (which are stationed within easy viewing from the living room and kitchen windows; didn't want to actually go outside--that would be "brrr-watching").

And WHAT a ruckus there was. Somebody squealed and let slip that the eatin' was good in this little side yard, because there were many more birds and considerably more species tucking into the meal today.

English sparrows joined the crowd, shouldering aside the juncos at the suet feeder. A lone female Townsend's warbler slipped in among them briefly, her svelte form like a gazelle's in a herd of cape buffalo.

A strutting song sparrow showed up to claim his share along with three of his lady friends. A vivid male house finch perched to methodically consume sunflower seeds. The Bewick's wren seemed alarmed when he showed up; he looked disgusted by the commotion and huffed off like a gourmet irritated by commoners cramming into his favorite restaurant because it got a favorable review in The New York Times.

Plump, sated robin redbreast.

Meanwhile, the big suet feeder hanging from the birch tree near the kitchen window swayed violently under the three-pronged attack by a trio of hefty flickers. Above them, two dozen or so robins huddled on the birch's branches, puffed up to the size of grapefruits. They'd just completely stripped the cotoneaster bush of all its blood-red berries and were not just glutted but also, perhaps, a bit tipsy.

The appearance of a starling momentarily startled the small birds, but as he was interested only in digging his beak into the suet, they quickly returned to foraging. But when two crows showed up to see what all the fuss was about, that did it. Everybody scattered.

Everybody, that is, except the chickadees. They kept a wary eye on the crows (who didn't hang around long) but didn't stop grabbing seeds and fleeing to cache them elsewhere for use throughout the season. (I saw one tuck a seed securely behind the wooden frame of our neighbors' window.) It's not uncommon for a chickadee to cache upward of 100,000 seeds and other tidbits. If they were human,  they'd have been champion Green Stamp savers.

Here's the starling, resplendent in his winter finery of dark
feathers stippled with the stars that give the species its name. I
recently learned that the base of a male's beak is blue and a
female's is--yes, pink! When I blow up this photo, this bird's
beak looks blue at the base, so I'll go out on a suet feeder
and say he's a boy.

I'm thankful the birds all got a good meal under their feathers to help them get through another bone-chilling night, and that the only frozen birds around here are the two turkeys I got for free at a local grocery store and stuck into the freezer for cooking early next year, in an inspired bit of chickadee behavior on my part. (I thought of putting them behind the neighbor's window frame, but they wouldn't fit.)

Bump on a Blog

"How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring blog!"

(with apologies to Emily Dickinson)

Right. So here's the first blog post. OK. Here we go. (?) (Psst, what do I do now?) (Not sure. Just write something.) (What?) (Dunno.)

Well, since the first animal of many to be mentioned in this blog happens to be a frog, we'll just continue the frog theme and link it to something that's just as fine as frogs, namely, a book. Specifically, the book I'm reading right now, which is Wild America by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher.

This book was the inspiration for Scott Weidensaul's book Return to Wild America, in which he retraces the steps taken by Peterson and Fisher as they spent 100 days trekking 30,000 miles around North America, beginning in Newfoundland, looping through the United States and Mexico, and ending in Alaska's Pribilof Islands. My father gave me this book on Christmas 2005, and immediately I was seized with the desire to track down a nice copy of Wild America so as to read that first.

And as luck would have it, I found an original copy, first edition, for next to nothing at a local thrift store. Dustjacket and all.

The two travelers are just now wending their way through the mid-Atlantic states, and Fisher, who is from England, is listening in amazement to the spring peepers and other frogs, not quite believing Peterson when he tells them that "these sounds that pipe and trill from a hundred throats on evenings in spring are love songs of the swamp" made by frogs as they "bleat, trill, peep, click, quack, or croak."

No frogs calling in my city neighborhood, but spring is slowly nudging the garden back to life, and birds are flinging their energies into song; there's a scrappy Bewick's wren who alternates between warbling beautifully and letting loose with grating, angry buzzes; a few robins advising one and all to "cheer-up, cheerily," and a starling who sits on the roof beam pouring out notes while whirling his wings like a feathered wind-up toy. Saw a bushtit flit by with a beakful of fur for its hidden nest. Black-capped chickadees whirl from one birch tree to another, and the crows sit in judgment on the powerlines out front.

The vegetable starts are all in and have benefitted from several days of chilly rain interspersed with "sun breaks"--a weather term I never heard til I moved to the Pacific Northwest. There's one coming now--time to get outside.