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."

Of Signing Chimps, Water Ouzels, and 10,000+ Bottle Caps

Washoe, from Wikipedia.

Yesterday I was up well before night gave way to the dark gray of a Seattle March morning to catch a tour bus to Ellensburg to enjoy a Christmas gift from my brother and mother: attendance at a Chimposium held at Central Washington University.

Chimposium is an opportunity to learn about and visit the famous chimpanzees who learned to communicate in American Sign Language in experiments that started in the 1960s. I was fortunate enough to attend a Chimposium in the early 1990s, when the matriarch of the five-chimp troop, Washoe, was still alive; she was the first non-human animal to communicate in ASL.

Today, just three chimps remain, one of them being Loulis, who was raised by Washoe and learned ASL from her. It's a fascinating place and project, the story of which is well told on the facility's website here.

The two male chimps greeted us with a show of territorial superiority--swinging from ropes, rampaging around the room, spinning, bouncing off the walls, and the like. The female, Tatu, banged on the window and then retreated to a corner to watch us with interest. She's fond of traditional "girly" stuff, and I saw her sign "lipstick" as she gazed at the crowd, which consisted largely of women of retirement age wearing one of Tatu's favorite cosmetics. (The CWU staff reports that Tatu likes black lipstick best.)

The hour spent at Chimposium was bracketed by other sightings, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. Starting with the sublime: the beauty of the Cascades in winter, viewed from the comfort of a tour bus while it's being chained up to go over the pass. (OK, mixed with a little ridiculousness, as "Yanni" played on the bus's loudspeakers.)

The air was very still; the deciduous trees covered in snow made it look like the woods existed in both positive and negative formats.

I caught a glimpse of a small, chunky bird called the American Dipper just before the bus pulled out to resume our trip east, perched on a stone in the steam. The Dipper is also known by the far more wonderful name of Water Ouzel and is a remarkable creature: It hunts for food underwater, clinging to the substrate with its claws and walking about pecking up insects and larvae. It can also use its short, strong wings as flippers and stay underwater for 30 seconds at a time. Pretty cool.

I also caught a quick glimpse of a group of swans majestically gliding across a mountain pond. We whooshed by too quickly for me to check to see if they had a tiny spot of color at the base of their bills or not, which would tip me off as to whether they were Tundra or Trumpeter swans (I know, I'm a rubbish birder, forgive me), but the Tundra Swan appears to be more common and thus the more likely species.

The chimpanzees were sublime, too. It wasn't until we entered Ellensburg for lunch that the ridiculous began, in a delightful way.

Like finding out that we'd be eating at--where else?--a place called Rodeo City BBQ. Where signs warn you "Do Not Lean Back in Chair." You old cowpoke, you--mind yer manners.

And whereas most grocery stores are keen to hide the fact that vermin and insects might be lurking amongst their wares, or might choose to advertise sales on salmon, arugula, quinoa, melons, and the like if they are Seattle grocery stores, the market in Ellensburg takes a different approach:

After lunch (which consisted of decent barbecue and no bargain-priced maggots), I stepped out to visit another local attraction, a wonderland of fences and poles spackled with bicycle reflectors and bottle caps and bristling with nails, populated by everything from creepy mannequin heads to impaled teddy bears. This version of "It's a Small World" was Dick and Jane's Spot.

More than 10,000 bottle caps, two thousand bicycle reflectors, and hundreds of glass insulators and other odds and ends transform a once-humble house into a year-round festival.

Over at Chimposium, volunteers stress their efforts at "enrichment," activities and novelties for the chimps that get them thinking and help relieve the monotony of captivity; the artists who created this house are aces at enriching their own lives and those of passersby.

After pondering what I could do with all those spice jars, bread-bag plastic-tab thingies, toy unicorns, and other items cluttering up our house given enough time and a loaded hot-glue gun, I strolled up the main street in town and gravitated toward this inviting sign:

 Whew! Talk about enrichment! I'd just hit the jackpot. This was going to be fun. But no; alas, Bailey's Bibliomania had just closed down on March 11, for good, and indeed the books were being carted out of the store and onto a truck as I watched. Oh well.

But...wait a second. Here were shelves of free books. Not much on offer...outdated textbooks, water-damaged romance novels, pamphlets...and then, serendipity: the perfect, absolutely ghastly book to find when on a field trip to visit chimpanzees at an institute where the animals are treated with respect and the utmost in courtesy:

A Honey of a Chimp, according to a 1980 Kirkus review, is "a classic example of the children's book as synthetic commodity."  The back-cover copy explains that little Emily wants a pet "more than anything in the world," but her dad's allergic to cats, Mom doesn't like dogs, and hamsters and fish are "too boring" while snakes proved unpopular with everyone but Emily.

So, of course, the family procures a chimpanzee. Hilarity ensues.

The chimp grows up, naturally, and Emily learns a lesson that all chimp-owning adolescents eventually learn, namely that "even perfect things can't last forever." Hopefully this does not refer to Emily's perfect face, given what damage can be inflicted by an angry chimpanzee.

My family, of course, knew better than to get me a chimpanzee even though Mom was allergic to cats and didn't like dogs. I got a camel, a capybara, and a right whale. That's just the way it was, kids, back in the '80s.

Sox and the Kitty, Continued

Django the Art Cat, as regular readers of this blog (all 2.4 of them) will know, does not consider the day officially underway until some article, preferably something highly absorbent, has been placed in the dog's water bowl. In a pinch he'll dunk hair elastics, but he really prefers paper, particularly paper towels and napkins.

Socks are a recurring theme, mainly because they are not only very portable for a cat but also because there exists a reliable source of them: the laundry basket of clean clothing in the hallway that the resident teenager is supposed to take upstairs right away.

Said basket actually sits in hallway for weeks unless thunderous ultimatums are issued. The result is that we actually have about a dozen socks that never, ever are worn in between washings. They go from the dryer into the basket, where the cat seizes one each day and transports it to the water bowl.

There it soaks up water and, if not retrieved and hung to dry in time, eventually becomes a magnet for dog/cat hairs, crumbs, and other debris. Then it is flung down the basement stairs to go into the washer again. Such is the cycle of life for these footloose socks.

There is a long sock striped in emerald and lime green that often ends up in the drink, but right now it's hanging out somewhere in limbo-land between hallway, water bowl, washing machine, and dryer, so I couldn't get a picture of that. Hence, I've substituted Django's installation entitled "The Cat-tain and Chenille: A Study in Pipecleaners, Hair Elastics, and Water."

He appears to be celebrating St. Patrick's Day. Did he actually foresee this holiday? Is the cat known amongst my daughter's friends as "Fat Looie" and "Mr. Stupid" actually smarter than he lets on? Unlikely, as he's not only mostly colorblind but also illiterate. Heck, it took every speck of his gray matter to become litterboxerate.

The Lynching of a Family Legend; or, the Color of Blarney

Every nation has its own abundance of folklore, customs, and traditions, but those of Ireland have so thoroughly saturated American culture that you could be forgiven for momentarily thinking that the Emerald Isle has more of this richness than others. Particularly as Saint Patrick's Day approaches.

(It's hard to believe that this feast day for a saint was celebrated quietly and without much fanfare in Ireland and only evolved its current boozy, maudlin, stupid-leprechaun-hat-wearing, kiss-me-I'm-Irish raucousness in the United States over the past 275 years.)

My maternal grandparents were Irish immigrants, so Irish folkways threaded naturally into the fabric of our household rather than in some corny Erin-go-bragh way. With their gentle Irish brogues and old-world ways, and my mom's own experience of growing up in an Irish household, the mists of Mourne were virtually in the very air we breathed.

Like every family, Irish or not, we had our own family folklore--and blarney (as in malarkey, hooey, a load of nonsense) was not a part of it. At least, not intentionally. Our folklore came with stalwart conviction. We never questioned it; there was no reason to. It took until the 1990s and 2000s for us to realize that some of the old chestnuts we'd been roasting, however, had been toasted a bit too much.

The first yarn to come unspooled was one of the most sacred of all: the one involving The Very Cane Used by Michael Collins Himself.

Michael Collins, as you may know, was an Irish revolutionary leader who played an important role in the Easter Rising and subsequent events. He loomed large, physically, in life just as he still towers over Irish history and hagiography: he was fondly known as "the big fella" because he stood about 6 feet tall and had the build of a boxer.

Apparently, the oversized wooden cane that came into my mother's possession after my grandparents' passing once belonged to Mr. Collins himself. My grandmother was very much involved in the Rising (she carried weapons and messages), and before she left for America was given this cane by a comrade in honor of her service. Sometimes my mom would demonstrate how hard it was for her to lean on the cane because it was clearly made for a tall person. Such as Michael Collins.

Fast-forward to my mom's opportunity to share the cane--and its story--at an "Antiques Roadshow" event. It did not take long for the expert to gently debunk this cherished legacy. He merely had to point out the date of manufacture etched onto the cane. I believe it was 1936.

Michael Collins, however, died in 1922. (As my dad said to me at the time, his eyes crinkling as he suppressed a chuckle, "He was well past needing the use of a cane at that point.")

Ah, well. My mom took it in stride and thought it was quite funny, actually. And of course the new cane story became the new folktale to replace the old one.

Just this past weekend, however, a smaller bit of folklore likewise straggled to the wayside.

When I was little, my grandparents often invited an elderly woman named Agnes Dooley to dinner. Agnes was a friend who had likewise emigrated from Ireland. She'd never married and enjoyed being honorary "Aunt Agnes" to the four of us.

Every time we saw her, she'd slip each one of us a dollar bill: She would shake your hand, and lo and behold, when you withdrew yours from hers, you had a dollar bill rolled up in your palm. (She also slipped us a valuable lesson on one visit: Instead of greeting her nicely, we assaulted her with "Hi! Where's my dollar? Where's my dollar?" There were no dollars doled out on that visit, and we displayed much better manners the next time we saw her.)

Agnes, we were told, had once worked as a cook for the founder of Merrill Lynch. My mom recalled a story my grandfather told of his stopping by to see her and finding her weeping at the scullery table because she did not know how to prepare spinach and was supposed to be serving it that night. He helped her out and all went well. Mom also gave me some costume jewelry that Mrs. Lynch passed along to Agnes, as well as an old cookbook that had belonged to her and that she was said to cook from for the Lynches.

This weekend, I happened to peruse many of my cookbooks looking for a chicken recipe, and paused when I got to Agnes's book, which is held together by duct tape because the binding split long ago. It became clear that the bindings of the Merrill Lynch story could benefit from some duct tape, too.

For starters, Merrill Lynch wasn't just one guy. There was a Mr. Merrill and a Mr. Lynch. So Agnes couldn't have worked for Merrill Lynch unless she was in banking. Who was her employer? One piece of evidence comes from the jewelry: there's a brooch with the initials "H.M.," and Merrill's wife's name was Harriet. But the cookbook, dated 1949, is inscribed to a Lynch and, indeed, Agnes added in pencil that the book belonged to "Mrs. Lynch" in the 1950s.

Furthermore, the inscription appears to be made out to what looks like a "Willard" Lynch--a name I can't match up with that family's offspring. It's signed by a Jack Aaron, who could be anybody but probably isn't the actor of that name in the first part of the 20th century.

I suppose the details don't matter all that much, really. Agnes did work as a cook for some unspecified amount of time in the kitchen of a family associated with the founders of Merrill Lynch . Did the gifts come from the family she worked for, or did the Lynches dole out cookbooks while dining with the Merrills, or Mrs. Merrill give out jewelry while lunching with the Lynches?



"Yes, I'm happily serving you
 my very own children for breakfast!"

Who knows, and, I suppose, who cares. The main thing is...

• Granddad helped save Agnes's bacon by teaching her how to cook spinach

•  Agnes's profligate giving-away of dollars indicates she clearly didn't work at the bank

• We learned good manners

• There's a more valid six-degrees-of-separation between us and the Merrill Lynch founders than there is between us and Michael Collins

• I inherited a great cookbook with some wonderfully weird illustrations.

An Agreeable Gaggle of Gregarious Greater White-Fronted Geese

Spring’s bird choir is tuning up, which reminds me that I never got around to writing about some of the birds of autumn. I’m sure you’ve all been on tenterhooks waiting to hear about that, and have passed the winter in a state of nervous agitation, so I am happy to now be able to quell your anxiety (though I realize splitting that infinitive may spark more unrest in your soul…sorry.)

Late last October my friend P. and I were walking briskly around Green Lake when we nearly stumbled upon three plump, taupe-and-white geese nonchalantly wandering across the path. 

They seemed mildly surprised to encounter us and baffled by the notion that we expected to proceed along the path, as if they had no idea that we were bigger, heavier, and moving faster than they were, and just continued their leisurely stroll, turning their heads to blink at us in bewilderment.

In fact they were a lot like many Seattle pedestrians, who amble haphazardly across the street without looking right or left and then seem surprised that you had to brake abruptly so as not to hit them.

I’m sure these geese were not at all interested in what my genetic makeup was, but I was keen to know theirs: What manner of goose were they? They certainly weren’t the Canada geese that frequent area lakes, nor were they the scrappy ruffians that used to patrol Green Lake, the dumped domestic geese of various breeds that banded together with half-Mallard, half-domestic ducks to fill what we used to call Bad Duck Cove.

When I checked various field guides, I was convinced these were migratory Greater White-fronted Geese—at least, until I doubted this identification and became convinced they were domestic geese showcasing the graylag-goose ancestry of the barnyard breed. 

My friend, however, sent along some pictures of immature White-fronted geese, which showed the youngsters as lacking in the white facial feathers and dark belly feathers of adults. In addition, a list of birds spotted at Green Lake over the years confirms that White-fronted geese are sometimes seen in fall as they migrate from tundra and taiga nesting grounds to winter feeding grounds farther south.   

These clues, combined with what seemed to me a lack of that deep-bellied keel typical of a barnyard goose, have me fairly well convinced that these were young migratory White-fronts.

Different subspecies of this bird are found circumpolar in the northern hemisphere. Across the pond, they’re typically stripped of their “Greater” designation, though, which keeps the European birds from getting ideas of grandeur. (Or gander.) 

In the United States, they’ve also been known by more colorful names, such as Laughing Goose, Gray Wavey, Marble-belly, and Specklebelly, any of which I think are much better names. 

The doddering lack of concern evinced by the geese at Green Lake doesn’t appear to be unusual, from what little I’ve read. The 1930s-era publication Birds of California notes that hunters were able to sneak up on white-fronts grazing in a field by hiding behind obliging cattle and horses, which puts me in mind of cartoon characters tiptoeing from shrub to shrub.

John James Audubon writes that “of the different species [of goose] which visit…they are by far the least shy.” Other than the fact that they’re “delicious” and that the bird’s intestine is seven feet long, he doesn’t offer up much else about it other than descriptions of its appearance.

With a word like “Greater” in the goose’s name, it stands to reason that there must be a Lesser White-fronted Goose, and there is: it’s smaller, highly endangered, and found in northern Eurasia. 

There is also, quite marvelously, a laudable effort called the Fennoscandian Lesser White-fronted Goose Conservation Project. Now that is an organizational name I long to see on a T-shirt or in a Christopher Guest film.

Home Cooking: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Cookbooks line the shelves in my kitchen, and recipes clipped from magazines form slippery, teetering piles on the dining-room table. Which is kind of funny considering that 99 percent of the time, like many a home cook in charge of feeding the family, I resort to the same tried-and-true recipes (or tired-and-true, in the case of some of them).

Add to this the fact that one family member (She Who Shall Not Be Named) is not on speaking terms with onions, peppers, celery, tomatoes (if they're not in sauce form), greens (if not food-processored into specks and blended into soup or sauce), lamb, tofu, most fish other than salmon, nuts, and...oh, anything she's not "in the mood for" on a given day, and the menu shrinks even more.

Still, one gives it the old college try now and then, with its roster of hits and misses. Hence the good, the bad, and the ugly of home cooking.


The Good:

A cake. Rarely is a cake Bad or Ugly (though, when it comes to Bad, I can remember a disastrous cheesecake baked with Sweet & Low made by my German grandmother's roommate, the mean Mrs. Schulkopf, whom my dad kept mistakenly-on-purpose referring to as Mrs. Holzkopf, or "wooden head"...and as for Ugly, look no farther than Cake Wrecks).

Good is the very essence of this simple Bundt cake, which not only tasted delicious but also obligingly slipped out of an intricate Nordic Ware pan with all its peaks and valleys intact. Anyone who has ever begged, pleaded, and wheedled a Bundt cake to come out of its pan will appreciate the simple prettiness of this baked good.

Usually half the cake comes out with a plop, leaving the rest to be pried out with a knife. I once had to blow-dry the outside of a Bundt pan to get the cake out and since it was going to attend an auction to be at the dessert table, many repairs with frosting and powdered sugar were required after it stopped sulking and crept out onto the serving plate.

After struggling with unsticking cakes stuck in nonstick pans (even resorting to thoroughly greasing the dratted things with butter and Crisco and liberal lashings of flour), I finally got in touch with Nordic Ware (which still actually employs people in the United States to answer its emails, people who are free to depart from a script and really chat with you). A lovely spokeswoman there informed me that Pam baking spray (the oil and flour one) is the only way to go. It worked a treat. Plus, she sent me a free nonstick pan to compensate for my frustration, something I certainly didn't ask for or expect. Wow! Now that's customer service.


The Bad:

The Bad was born of ultimate thrift and planning on my part.

There were a lot of heels from whole-grain loaves of bread kicking around in plastic bags in the bread drawer. In this household, these heels would remain in the bread drawer yea, verily, unto eternity if I, apparently the only one with opposable thumbs, did not pick them up and put them into the food compost bin (or resign myself to weary morning after weary morning of having toasted heels of bread for breakfast).

So I decided to be Becky Home-Eccy and dry them in the oven to make bread crumbs. I'd done it before. What could be simpler? (Though the last time I dried bread in the oven, She Who Shall Not Be Named opened the oven the next day, puzzled over the dried slabs, and then just threw them away. In this case, "throwing away" was unwanted but accomplished. Why? Why? But I digress.)

Unfortunately, I heated them the eensiest bit too long. Oh well, they're bread crumbs; who cares. I decided to use the lot when I industriously made two meat loaves a week later, using my mom's old recipe but substituting ground pork for beef, as I always do. The proportions of bread crumbs to meat weren't exactly as dictated by the recipe, but meat loaf is forgiving, right? And look! How thrifty! And I can freeze all those leftovers for future meals!

Well, meat loaf is forgiving...up to a point. The taste of over-toasted, very strong-tasting whole wheat  bread crumbs overpowered everything else, and the meat loaf was dry, to boot. Or, as my family felt, "should be booted"--into the trash. My daughter took one bite and, being of unvarnished editorial opinions, shouted, "Yuk! Ugh! Bleh!" My husband, being British, stiff-upper-lip, and understated, merely said that he preferred my "other recipe," but quietly ate his meal with lots of ketchup.

I jammed the leftovers into the freezer, distraught at the thought of wasting all that food. And--shhh, don't tell--pulled it out a week later, shoved it all into the food processor, and went through the ridiculous process of turning meat loaf back into ground pork. Then I mixed it all with two bottles of Prego traditional pasta sauce, heated it up, and served it on spaghetti. Nobody was the wiser; they thought it was Bolognese sauce and came back for seconds. Shhh.


The Ugly:
The Ugly is so Ugly I cannot share the pictures of it, and in fact I deleted the images from my computer because they were so horrific. I am happy to say, however, that the Ugly was also very Delicious.

It was a Beef Wellington made from a recipe in Jamie Oliver's book Jamie's Food Revolution, with pork substituted for beef. It was a smashing success. It even obligingly stored itself in leftover form in the freezer and tasted fine after thawing and reheating.

However, it definitely wasn't photogenic. It looked scrumptious on the plate, but the pastry had split open to reveal the filling, so when I uploaded the photos and looked at them on the computer screen, it appeared as if I'd been taking photos inside a veterinary surgeon's operating room.

I have spared you this grisly scene. Instead, feast your eyes on the cover of Jamie's book, and the adorable visage of Sir Jamie himself.

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.