Super-Duper Cooper Scoop

This is the bird we saw. Distance, small camera, gray day--best we could do.

There are plenty of signs that hawks live in our neighborhood (the avian kind, not the war sort--this is Phinney Hill, after all). Sometimes on a walk you'll come across drifts of fluffy gray feathers encircling the base of a telephone pole, or a sudden explosion of feathers in the middle of a parking strip that indicates ground zero of an attack.

But you rarely get to see the hawks themselves.

Twice, sitting in the backyard, I've been startled by a large bird flying bullet-fast at low level, getting no more than a glimpse of sharply snapping wings before whatever-it-is disappeared behind shrubs and trees. Once, during January's snowfall, a small hawk darted above the merrymakers sledding on the hill.

And once, in Fremont, while walking to a coffee shop early on a Sunday morning in spring, I nearly tripped over an American kestrel that suddenly landed in front of me and seized a mouse that I hadn't even noticed (but it had locked in on from above the rooftops). It stared fiercely at me for a fraction of a second before flying off with its prey locked in its talons.

That was it for neighborhood hawk sightings until several days ago, when my daughter and I went for a walk with the dog. A few blocks from home, we suddenly heard a loud "Bek! Bek!" Looking up, we spied a large raptor perched atop a conifer.

"Dang," I said. "Figures I don't have a camera with me."

With that, my daughter offered to run home and fetch it. And she did. (Unexpected acts of generosity from one's adolescent offspring are something I cherish even more than the sighting of a rare bird.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Accipiter-cooperii-01.jpg

I'm pretty sure this bird is a Cooper's hawk, a species known to frequent Seattle along with the smaller, similar sharp-shinned hawk. It appears to have a cap, unlike the "sharpie," and when it finally flew away, its tail had the rounded outline of a Cooper's (though I only saw it in silhouette against a dark gray sky).

There's also local lore to draw on to back up this assumption: Just last August, a local news blog featured photos of a Cooper's dining on pigeon in an area backyard, and Cooper's hawks have been mentioned in numerous newspaper articles over the past 20 years whenever there's space for an item about wildlife in the city. An old "Washington Birds" book published by the Seattle Audubon Society in 1968 also notes that the Cooper's "is perhaps the most common, or at least the most widely seen" of the accipiters (birds of prey with short, rounded wings and long tails).

My favorite local story comes from a friend whose son had a hamster, which he set outside in the yard in a hamster ball one warm afternoon. He was supposed to stay with his pet, but he skirted the rules to run inside and get a snack. When he looked outside, he saw a Cooper's hawk standing next to the hamster ball, staring hard at it. You can just imagine what was going through that bird's mind--perhaps the same frustration we all feel when confronted with newfangled, difficult-to-remove packaging.

Cooper's hawks prey mainly on small birds and are considered an important check on their populations. They're feisty birds, however, and aren't afraid to tackle larger prey, which accounts for their unofficial name of "chicken hawk."

Disparaging names like this one, which link a wild creature solely to how its habits may vex or harm people and their possessions, are typically avoided nowadays because they unfairly portray the animal as "good" or "bad" when it's simply trying to make a living, but it hasn't always been this way, especially for predators.

In Audubon's description of the species, the naturalist--who surely knew that predators play an important role in nature and who only had good things to say about crows--described the Cooper's with terms such as "marauder" and "miscreant" and its killing of prey as a "murderous deed." (However, he does also call it "daring" and attributes it with "courage," and doesn't outright condemn it, so he was probably just employing the flourishes so typical of nature writing in his era.)

Naturalist William Dawson, writing more than 100 years after Audubon in the 1923 book Birds of California, seems to be gritting his teeth as he considers the Cooper's, which, after all, dines on the little birds he loves: "One never gets a clearer insight into the possibilities of cruel rapacity then when a Cooper Hawk comes dashing up into a thicket where you have been ogling Sparrows....It is as though an emissary of the nether world had broken from cover; and one feels all the virtue of a just cause in putting him to death."

Fortunately, Dawson wasn't in the habit of going around potting hawks (whereas Audubon, in writing about his collecting habits, always puts me in mind of Elmer Fudd blasting at everything in sight). Sadly, a century ago negative attitudes toward birds of prey were encouraged by some leading zoologists, who seemed to have a chip on their shoulders regarding certain animals that no amount of scientific evidence would ever dislodge.

No less a luminary than William Hornaday, one of the saviors of the American bison and founder of the Bronx Zoo, described the Cooper's hawk as "companion in crime to the [sharp-shinned hawk] and equally deserving an early and violent death." (Then again, Hornaday thought caging and exhibiting native African peoples in his zoo was a dandy idea.)

People still get irritated, of course, if predators make off with their chickens today, though most people (including farmers) are now aware of the beneficial services provided by raptors. Online comments about the pigeon-eating Cooper's in my area, for example, ring with pro-hawk endorsements and anti-pigeon invective (with the only complaining about nature's ways coming from one oddball vegan decrying the hawk's act as "terrible"!).

I'm thrilled to have spotted the neighborhood raptor at last. Now I don't have to go out and buy a hamster and a hamster ball to better my chances.

Chocolate chocolate chocolate chocolate chocolate...

"All I really need is love, but a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt." --Lucy van Pelt, Peanuts by Charles Schulz

I'm taking that suggestion to heart this Valentine's Day, having just consumed a Hershey's kiss before writing about the happy chocolate discovery we made very recently.

That chocolate discovery may be the answer to the question that's haunted me for nearly 30 years--to wit: Just how did my grandmother make that incredible chocolate frosting (not to mention the yellow cake it frosted)?

I've written before about my Irish grandmother, Mamo, and the wonderful baked goods she produced in a tiny, cramped basement kitchen in Elmhurst, Queens, New York. Most of her recipes, sad to say, went with her to the grave. She rarely wrote them down, and nobody thought to ask her for them while she was still healthy and baking.

I can remember her bringing a cake each time she visited us--it was always a double layer cake, always square, and always transported in a sturdy Jacob's Irish biscuits tin (which, unlike her recipes, I have on my kitchen shelf). I know that the yellow cake was pale and dense, more like a pound cake than a traditional American layer cake.

I figured I could someday reproduce a semblance of the cake if I tried out enough pound cake recipes. But the frosting? I've frosted many cakes over the years using a variety of recipes, but none came close to the chocolate confection that rippled across the top and along the sides of Mamo's cakes.

That frosting was rich, deep, chocolaty, and sweet, but it also had a sour tang that made it more complex than sugary. Its texture was special, too. It wasn't frothy like buttercream, or perpetually soft and spreadable like frosting from a can.

Once on the cake, it hardened just enough to have a crackly feel to it. It wasn't as stiff as fondant, but it was solid enough that Mamo could peck it all over with a knife to stir up tiny peaks that froze in place, solid enough that you could peel a sheet of icing off the cake and eat it like a piece of toast (I speak from sneaky childhood experience on that last point).

I'd pretty much given up on unearthing some secret treasure trove of Mamo's recipes by now; my mom had a small stash that Mamo had given her when she got married, but no pound cake or frosting recipes were among them. I assumed that Mamo, who had worked as a waitress in a cafe associated with the Dublin store Arnott's as a young woman and learned to make pastry there, was simply able to make that frosting from memory.

Over the holidays, however, I happened upon a small booklet Mom had given me many years ago. It came from the Elmhurst house, she noted. It was a promotional cookbook published by Walter Baker & Company, Inc., the producers of Baker's baking chocolate squares.

You can see where this is going, but it could've taken a long time to get there, as there are more than 20 frosting recipes in the little book. Much as I would be glad to bake 20+ cakes and frost them with chocolate and taste-test them, there isn't time--nor would I ever be able to walk off the calories. (And though my daughter would surely help with the tasting, my husband would be of no use: he is known to cut frosting off cake to eat it plain because he finds frosting too sweet.)

I knew Mamo wasn't above using printed recipes--though she cooked from scratch most of the time, she was happy to use products such as Bird's custard, so I can't imagine her sniffing disdainfully at a promotional cookbook. Flipping through the pages, I quickly discovered several that were dog-eared, one of which contained frosting recipes--and one of those had a cook's thumbprint right beside it.

Fortunately, we had a birthday to celebrate in January, so I baked a yellow cake using a recipe from Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook (it wasn't just like Mamo's, but it was dense and very good) and whipped up the newly found chocolate frosting recipe. Right after it was slathered on the cake, it became brittle, and though the peaks I stirred up were nothing like the choppy ocean Mamo created, it was still a satisfying seascape.

It hit all the right notes with me, a la Proust's madeleines, so I'm pretty sure this is the recipe she used. I'm happy to conclude that it is. Now if only I knew why her lemon tea cookies were tender and crumbly and mine, using the same recipe, turn into road turtles, my baking life would be complete.

Cocoa Frosting
(a forgiving recipe; I accidentally used 1/3 cup butter instead of 3 tablespoons, but it still came out fine and not too buttery)

2 cups sifted confectioner's sugar
1/8 tsp salt
3 Tb cocoa
3 Tb butter
3 Tb hot milk
1/2 tsp vanilla

1. Sift sugar, salt, and cocoa together.
2. Cream butter until soft; add part of sugar mixture gradually, beating thoroughly.
3. Add remaining sugar mixture alternately with hot milk, beating well after each addition.
4. Add vanilla.

Makes enough frosting to cover tops of two 9-inch layers, or top and sides of 8 x 8 x 2 inch cake.

Weekend Wanderings

Dog and I went for a long, long perambulation this weekend. (She is so attuned to the word "W-A-L-K," I dare not even type it, let alone say it.) The forecast: scattered signs of spring despite heavy gray clouds, chill, and drizzle.

Daffodils (with snowdrops in background) blooming in the Rose Garden.

Jigsaw bark of a pine (possibly Ponderosa?).

Crows...always crows

The Valentine's tree on Phinney Hill wears its hearts on its leaves

Woebegone Weimeraner in window

P.S. If you're a horse fan, I have my daughter's cell-phone pictures from behind-the-scenes at "Cavalia" over on my horsy/kids' book site here.

Snowy Owl Is No-Showy Owl

Snowy owls have drifted far south of their Arctic realm this winter. It's been a virtual snowstorm of snowies, with owls showing up as far south as Oklahoma.

One owl even ended up in Hawaii, at an airport of all places, though as far as we know it arrived under its own wing power and not via Alaska Airlines. (Unfortunately, this historic appearance of an Arctic owl in tropical Hawaii ended badly for the bird: it was shot by federal employees who feared it would interfere with air traffic.)

The snowy owl wandering around Seattle has enjoyed a much better reception. It spends a lot of time in beautiful Discovery Park, hunting for voles in the meadow.

And it's even lounged around on buildings I pass by all the time, except, of course, when I've been anywhere near them--namely, the roof of a church across the street from the local library, the roof of the Australasia exhibit at the zoo, and the roof of a house just a stone's throw away from my own.

Unfortunately, circumstances right now are such that I can't make a road trip to the Pacific shores of our fair state, or even up to farmlands north of here where snowies have been sighted, so I keep hoping that the Ballard-area bird and I will bump into each other.

I had high hopes when I walked along a hillside street recently and saw a flock of crows and gulls apparently mobbing something that was moving slowly from building to building, but it turned out to be just an elderly man shuffling down the sidewalk, pausing now and then to toss handfuls of bread crumbs into the street.

Short of hanging voles from the feeders outside, I'm guessing I will miss out on the Great Snowy Owl Irruption of 2012--though on the same day the owl was spotted cuddling up to a heat vent on a nearby roof, I heard a big thump on my roof and a frantic scurry-scurry sound. Squirrels frequently cavort on our housetop, and I wondered if perhaps the owl had attempted to snatch one of them.

Later, I found these feathers on a shrub under the eaves--though I have absolutely no proof they're from a snowy owl; for all I know they could be from some neighborhood chicken. I just really, really, really want them to be snowy owl feathers.

But what birder hasn't done the same thing with a real live bird glimpsed through binoculars? It's a cinch to see a rare, out-of-range Greater Lesser Spotted Pitwot flitting through the local woodland when you know perfectly well that it is far more likely to be the common Lesser Great Speckled Wotpit indigenous to your area.

February's Spring Fling

February in Seattle often surprises with a sudden flush of springlike weather, a tease of what life could be like if only March and April would follow the same script instead of sulking and reverting to chilly gray. In many years, our red plum tree has burst into fairy-pink bloom just in time for Valentine's Day.

Today was one of those February days that flirts with May. The sky was a blue that went on forever. Everything seemed freshly created and sharply drawn. Chickadees chortled, starlings whistled, and Bewick's wrens prattled. When I went to check on my p-patch garden for the first time in months, I saw that it had been busy while out of sight, out of mind.

The vetch I'd planted as a winter cover crop had done its job, creating a miniature emerald forest that crowded out the weeds.

A few calendula were in full bloom, which made me really happy because they were volunteers, plus I'd always wanted some of these flowers and since they spread so vigorously I now have a founding crop to transplant into my own yard. What a cheerful sight, to come across these Mediterranean plants blazing on a late winter day.

Nothing much is sprouting in the back garden, but the witch hazel has thanked us for moving it into a sunnier location last summer by blooming for the first time in years.

There were also fluffy gray feathers drifted around the base of a telephone pole--evidence that the local Cooper's hawk had made a meal of a pigeon.

A nice bonus to this unseasonable dollop of spring: One doesn't feel compelled to roll up one's sleeves and get cracking on spring chores, because it's just going to get cold and sloppy again. It's totally a free pass to just turn your face up to the sun and turn your back on anything resembling work.

Summer's Hummers Are Winter's Glitter

Why it has taken me two decades to put up a hummingbird feeder, I cannot say. Miniature birds cloaked in dazzling jewel tones buzzing around like radio-controlled helicopters outside the living room window go a long way toward livening up a gray Northwest winter day.

It never ceases to amaze me that such a tiny puff of life can survive this far north in winter.

Seattle’s maritime climate generally soaks us in drizzle, mist, rain, fog, and all-purpose grayness for most of the winter (and a good chunk of autumn and spring)—not exactly the lush, warm paradise you’d envision for a hummingbird. Throw in a few subfreezing cold snaps and snowstorms, and you’d think the hummingbirds were goners for sure.

Instead, here we are, lingering over coffee, watching this iridescent creature sipping sugar water as snowflakes buffet its thumb-sized body.

When the female (at right) visits, she typically perches, feeds, then flies away. The male, however, tends to hang around between meals.

On this snowy morning, he alternated sips with perching on a limb of the red-twig dogwood, where he sat shaking his head, fanning his tail, and flicking his wings to shrug off snowflakes. It was hard to tell if the flakes were irritating him or if he was enjoying a shower—the actions were so much like those of a rufous hummingbird I’d seen bathing in a fountain last summer.

When he took refuge under the birdbath, however, it was clear that he wasn’t charmed by the snowflakes.

The sugar solution in the feeder (a standard 4 parts water/1 part sugar confection boiled, then cooled) stayed liquid until the temperature hit 29 degrees, at which point we brought it indoors to thaw.

While it was gone, the hummingbird continued to visit, hovering in the spot where the feeder normally hangs. He pirouetted around the empty space, as if the feeder would magically appear if only he viewed it from the right angle, forming question marks in the air with his flight patterns.

An awful image entered our minds at the thought of hummingbirds attempting to sip from a frozen feeder—an avian version of the tongue-frozen-to-a-pole scene from A Christmas Story.

Fortunately, “hummingbird tongue freezing” does not seem to be a problem recorded in the halls of birdlore, though some hummer fans sound an alarm about purported “perch hypothermia.”

("Perch hypothermia" is a supposed syndrome in which hummingbirds topple from perches after feeding on cold sugar solution, which supposedly wouldn’t happen if they hovered in front of the fake red flowers instead. I can’t help but feel there’s a strand of Protestant-work-ethic at work here: “Encouraging hummingbirds to be lazy and sit on perches is the work of the devil”).

Our visitor, by the way, is specifically an Anna’s hummingbird, a species that has expanded its winter range over the past 50 years. My decades-old Audubon bird encyclopedia notes that the Anna’s is the only hummingbird to winter in the United States and that it only nests in California; both statements are now false.

Hummers of other species, for example, are now known to winter in the southeastern states. The existence of exotic flowers in gardens as well as hummingbird feeders is reputed to have aided and abetted the expansion of hummers’ ranges, though it’s likely that other factors are driving it, too, and the increased presence of the hummers no doubt inspires the setting-out of feeders.

As for the Anna’s (which now ranges as far north as British Columbia), it even starts courting, nesting, and laying eggs in the northwest before the end of February. A midwinter walk is filled with hummingbirds’ squeaky conversations.

Photo (c) Alan Vernon, from Wiki Commons.

Last January I jumped out of my socks while admiring a female Anna’s perched low in a tree when a male hummingbird swooped in my face, wings whirring loudly, and shouted “PEEK!” in my ear, all in the snap of a second as he reached the bottom point of a courtship dive and then swooped upward again. It was as if someone had made a giant check mark next to my head.

Every time I see the hummingbird sitting quietly on his perch outside in the cold, I long to scoop him up and bring him inside to warm up, but he’s quite capable of enduring the chill despite having the fastest metabolism of any warm-blooded vertebrate animal (apparently even more frantic than that of a shrew’s).

At night, his heart rate drops from a typical 250 beats per minute to just 50 beats and he slips into a state of torpor. This ratcheting-down of his metabolism, combined with a crop full of nectar as a bedtime snack, enables him to survive an ice-cold winter night as long as he’s tucked safely out of the rain. It’s a tactic used by other hummingbird species, too.

According to naturalist William Leon Dawson, writing in 1923, even hummers living in tropical places go into torpor when conditions are bad: in Chile, a hummingbird “habitually weathers extended storms and bad nights in a comatose condition…Some perish in this fashion, but most of them revive with the returning sun.”

First thing in the morning, the little bird must surely anticipate a hit of “nectar” the way I do my coffee. Devoted hummingbird fans don’t settle for bringing in the feeder at night to avoid freezing and setting it out again in the morning—they’ve come up with ingenious ways of preventing freezing.

Their methods including hanging a “trouble light” near the feeder, strapping a hand warmer to it with duct tape (yay, duct tape!), cloaking it in heat tape, and stringing Christmas lights on it (though with the introduction of LED Christmas lights, this pretty ambient-heat solution will surely be phased out).

All this is a far cry from the way Thomas Nuttall, a naturalist friend of Audubon’s, treated a poor little female Anna’s when he happened upon her nest:

“My good friend Thomas Nuttall [writes Audubon], while travelling from the Rocky Mountains toward California, happened to observe on a low oak bush a Humming-bird's nest on which the female was sitting. Having cautiously approached, he secured the bird with his hat. The male in the meantime fluttered angrily around, but as my friend had not a gun, he was unable to procure it.”

I’d like to kick Nuttall in the shins for his action, never mind that he was advancing our understanding of the new world’s birds. Poor little mama bird, bravely guarding her bean-sized eggs, and her poor mate, zealously guarding her in vain! (The bit about the gun is astonishing: What on earth would be left of a hummingbird blasted with a shotgun?)

Most of the news of the day is guaranteed to make me feel that we’re going to Hades in a handbasket, but when I read accounts like this, I take heart that perhaps there’s a flicker of hope if our species is capable of going from catching nesting hummingbirds in our hats to decorating feeders with Christmas lights.

Slush No Be Get Respect

Hello. Me slush. Me here now in Seattle, snow go away. But me no be happy. No. Slush sad. And mad. Why?

Well, think us. Everybody all "Oooohh, snow so pretty, snow so nice. I hope it snow."

Nobody ever say "Oh, slush. Slush nice. I hope it slush."

No, no. All day it be "Ew, slush. Yuk, slush. Ugh, hate slush. Snow gone, now just slush."

And poor slush name! It be for bad things! See book of words (no be drop it on slush now): say slush be "refuse grease and fat from cooking especially on shipboard," "trashy and usually cheaply sentimental material," and "unsolicited writings submitted (as to a magazine) for publication."

Slush no be hang with such trash!

How you feel you hear that all day? It not fair. Snow think it so great. People make snowmen, throw snowball, cut paper snowflake, go slide snow on hills. But make slushmen? Have slush fight with slush fort? Put slush on windows? Stay slush resort? No. Slush no be good enough.

OK, I kind of...slushy. Still. I be water, and you body be like 60 percent water. Oh, me ice, too. You know. Ice, all sparkle? Put in drinks? And me snow! What not to like? Wear rubber shoes, you like me fine.

You like me cousin Slushee, all blue orange red lime. Just say.

You no can see slush tears because so water, but slush sad.

When slush comes to love, find none!