Edward Scissorbill

Edward Scissorbill is a local crow who stands out from the crowd even if you're not inclined toward crow-watching due to his deformed beak. The upper and lower parts of his beak (the maxilla and mandible, respectively) cross over each other, rather like a red crossbill's beak. Considering how cleverly crows use their beaks to manipulate objects and access food, you'd think such a bird would have a very difficult time surviving.

But I suppose a smart, omnivorous bird like a crow, living in a tree-filled urban enclave where the only predators are free-ranging domestic cats and cars, isn't stymied by a little deformity like this. (Yes, it's true, a bear and a cougar have both been spotted in this part of town in the past two years, but neither of them kept the same hours as the crows.)

I first spotted Edward Scissorbill during a dreadful winter about two years ago while walking the dog up an icy hill a block from home. He was scuttling about in the street with two other crows. I thought, there's a crow that won't survive the winter. But the following autumn, walking up the same hill, I encountered him again. He was sitting on the roofbeam of a garage, fat and glossy and totally unafraid even though the dog and I were only about 10 feet from him.

By this time I'd become aware of a scientist in Alaska who is studying deformed bills in chickadees, crows, and other species, thanks to a tip from a scientist at the University of Washington who studies crow behavior. So I started keeping an eye out for Edward and bringing along my camera while walking. I finally snapped a picture of him as he stood on a rain barrel outside a neighbor's house.

He appears to be thriving and even has a mate--I spotted the two of them perched in a tree a block away, close to their shaggy, basketball-sized nest. There were a lot of young crows squawking and learning to fly in that area a few weeks back; I assume they are his kids. That may be assuming a lot, but then again, I'm assuming he's a he, for starters.

At any rate, he rules the roost in this little area--I often see him sitting on an overhead wire, surveying his domain, and he even occasionally stands on the street sign as if to make it clear exactly what his address is. I know he recognizes me and the dog, too, as he calmly and carefully watches us go by without shouting at the dog or fluttering out of our way. Crows are famous for their facial-recognition ability, so this isn't too much of a surprise. But I wonder what his nickname for us might be.

Pony Book Summer

Ain't nothin' like a good pony book if
you're a horse-lovin' gal.

This was to be a summer of reading pony books--both old favorites and new discoveries. Like most plans, this one has gone awry, by and large for good reasons (that is, working with real ponies, for my daughter, and...wait, my reasons aren't nearly as fun; never mind). But while camping, we were able to indulge in a few pony books, so at least we read some equine texts before the autumnal equinox.

We burst out of the post with two vintage books--my daughter embarked on a Pullein-Thompson yarn we'd bought at a thrift store in England, while I ran with a vintage horse title picked up at a local Value Village: White Ghost Summer by Shirley Rousseau Murphy.

To say that this was a strange book is an understatement. I kept reading snippets aloud to my daughter in astonishment, provoking her to cry "As if!" and "OK, then," and "Suuuure" at frequent intervals.

In brief, White Ghost Summer tells the story of young Mel, a horse-loving girl, and her sisters and one brother, who all settle into a big, rambling house with their self-employed mom in San Francisco. (She is an illustrator, putting my daughter and I in mind of Jill's whimsical storybook-writing mother in Ruby Ferguson's books.)  The illustrations depict the house as a Victorian wonder complete with widow's walk.

This marvelous dwelling sits across the street from the beach, where Mel can see horses from the local riding stable, which is located in a vast and wild city park that also houses a beautiful zoo that has free admission. And of course Mel gets a gift of an entire summer's worth of daily riding lessons. Daily!

"Right," said my cynical daughter. "And I bet there is a nonstop county fair with free cotton candy, too."

For a while, that is how it went: I'd read aloud snatches of the book, aghast at the weirdness of Mel and the stunning pace of events; my daughter would react with astonishment.

"Listen to this! Mel tells her riding instructor which horse she will ride! '"I will ride that little bay gelding," Mel said to Mr. Blake. "You will ride that gray mare," said Mr. Blake.' Can you imagine telling your riding instructor what horse you will ride?"

"Oh, and this! This is what Mel says to a girl in her class: '"Playing tag [on horseback] is very good; it teaches you a good seat, and makes good hands. How are your hands?" The little girl looked at Mel and fled to her mother."

"I'd flee, too," said my daughter. "What a weirdo!"

Mel's intensity makes one understand why other girls in the story gang up on her and stick a burr under her saddle at one point.

Mel goes on to become the stable's top rider in barely two months, and by the book's end she rides in a top-rated show and comes home with blue ribbons galore from the biggest events. That's when she's not busy with the mysterious orphaned boy who has a herd of pureblood Arabian horses hidden in a secret rock-enclosed meadow deep in the park that has never been discovered by park authorities.

And yet. I couldn't put it down. Neither could my daughter when I'd passed it along to her.

Although we still couldn't suspend our disbelief at Mel's meteoric rise at the stable and in the showing world (a feat far less believable than finding a hidden valley of Arabians in a city park, a story element akin to a doorway to Narnia in the back of a cupboard, or winning the Grand National on a piebald won in a raffle), the author's lovely writing drew us along.

The girls in the story, though eccentric, seemed like the sorts of people we'd like to hang out with. We'd love to live in sister Zee Zee's attic room, helping her put together a jewelbox of a dollhouse made with bits of glass and stone she found there. The older sisters were calm and supportive. The mother and one aunt appealed to me; they were, as Anne of Green Gables would say, "bosom buddies." (Their frequent longing for coffee indicated they'd be the type to drop everything to run out and grab a cup of java with you.)

And the character of Mel's pony, Buttons (a riding-school pony who, of course, eventually becomes her own) is well drawn. So often the horses in a story are just physically described and scant attention is paid to portraying them as the individuals they are; they often function as little more than transportation or a fulcrum for human drama. But Buttons is a full-blown portrait of a grumpy, loveable, irascible school pony. And the story is even told from his point of view at times, such as the occasion on which he runs away at night and hides in a thicket, listening to the commotion raised by the searchers hot on his trail:

"Buttons stayed where he was, ears twitching this way and that as the noises came from one side, then the other. When they got close enough he would slip away. But not yet. It was deliciously exciting to stand like a shadow and hear everyone thrashing about and making a great stir. He took another drink."

Which is pretty much what our cats do when everyone is frantically looking for them.

The book was published in 1967, when I was still learning to read, and I assumed the author was long gone; I am glad to say I assumed incorrectly. We did a bit of Googling when we got home, and found that she is indeed alive and has produced a well-received series of detective mysteries starring cats (written for an adult audience), among other works--and that she grew up on a farm where she rode hunters and dressage horses! There's a delightful interview with her on this site: http://www.sylviaengdahl.com/joegrey/author.htm.

My daughter and I agreed that this was one of the oddest horse books we'd ever read but also one of the most enjoyable. We were quite pleased that it had come along on vacation with us.

Front-row Seats at Cascade Lake Wildlife Dramas

We knew that a week of camping in the South End campground at Moran State Park on Orcas Island, Washington State, promised a plethora of wildlife sightings the minute we drove under the giant horseshoe of a sign that arches over the entryway: our first glimpse was of a Columbian blacktail deer whose standard-issue brown coat was splashed with puddles of white. By the time we'd reached our designated site, we'd already had our fill of deer, having passed three doe-fawn pairs who paused in their browsing only briefly to watch us go by.

Our site nestled on the very edge of Cascade Lake; we pitched our tent a dozen feet from the water. Then we sat on the vast, well-worn log separating land from lake, dangling our feet in the water.

Straight away, one of the many dragonflies skimming over the water swooped by to take a look at the newcomers in his territory. He hovered in front of us; the little probe droid certainly looked as if he were glowering. Then he was off to nab smaller insects and chase away larger intruders. Incredible, the dogfights waged among the dragonflies; I saw one dragonfly nearly drive another underwater.

This is, I think, an eight-spotted skimmer; the whitish tail, per
Audubon, indicates that it has become "gray with age" (one can
relate). These dragonflies' black-and-white wings made them
look like flying checkerboards as they flickered above the lake.

Dragonfly-watching is definitely enhanced by 90-degree weather. Early in the morning, their zipping, zigzagging flight through the mist over the water created an ethereal scene that I think could only be captured in watercolors; the slanting yellow beams of sunlight made jewels of their flickering wings.

Smaller damselflies, boldly striped in blue and black, also flitted over the water. When we floated out onto the lake in our ridiculous, polka-dotted, inflatable life preservers, the damselflies would perch on us as if we were nothing more than exotic, oversized lily pads. At one point, at least a dozen had settled on me, including a pair relaxing on my big toe. When a violinist practicing on shore began to play a pastoral piece, the Damselfly Club Med atmosphere was complete.

Temperatures dropped as the week progressed, and the dragons and damsels' activities subsided, but the wildlife show went on. A belted kingfisher rattled noisily from a perch nearby before her fishing expeditions; once she was chased in wide figure-eights around the lake by a pair of angry crows. An osprey hovered overhead one afternoon before folding his wings and diving into the water, then laboring skyward again with a fish clenched in his talons. Douglas's squirrels--red-bellied critters also known as chickarees--chuckled madly in the treetops and left middens of cone scales the length and breadth of the loop trail around the lake.

Some animals, of course, didn't hesitate to stroll right into our campsite, despite the presence of our large yellow Lab, Luna. A pair of cheeky song sparrows nearly perched on our knees to join us for morning oatmeal. A family of juncos, a bit more shy, foraged in an orbit around our table. A yellow warbler glowed briefly on a branch above us. Under cover of night, deer investigated the plastic bins that contained our food, as did raccoons. Fortunately for this timid camper, Orcas lacks bears, so one could get away with being quite careless with food--as long as you plonked a few heavy stones atop the cooler, furry bandits didn't make off with your meals.

This butterfly flew with all the grace of an intoxicated
tissue-paper flower. It stumbled and staggered all
over the place as if fighting a headwind even when
the air was still. Am pretty sure it's a pine white. The
Audubon field guide notes that "this strange white
normally flutters weakly, high among conifers" but flits
lower to sip nectar from flowers, as this one's doing.

Some birds were only heard, not seen; the yank-yank calls of red-breasted nuthatches tugged at the forest at dawn, and the fluting song of a Swainson's thrush spiraled through the trees at dusk. I also heard my first owl in the tomblike silence of 2 a.m.--the throbbing hoots of a great horned owl.

Best new-bird-for-the-list sighting: a merlin streaking after smaller birds by the water in the small town of Eastsound.

Didn't get to see the strange animal spied by my daughter while she was out on the trail one morning, though. Swept away by the beauty of the woods and the lake, she told us about all the wonderful things she'd seen, including "a mouse! The cutest little mouse! It had soft brown fur, and a long pink tail, and black eyes, and six cute little pink feet..."

"Six?" we asked, eyebrows raised.

She folded up with laughter as she realized what she'd said, knowing she was doomed; the "six-footed mouse" would now haunt her on all future camping trips. "How many feet did it have?" became the standard question to ask her after she spotted any animal after that.

Chickens, Vicariously

Gerty of the gimlet eye.

We are taking care of a friend's daughter's poultry operation for a few days this week. That is, four hens. Plus a few fish, a tankful of walking-stick insects, and a hermit crab. I learned only this morning that the supposedly sedate hermit crab is a trickster in disguise. Apparently, in the past, a gang of hermit crabs escaped their tank and managed to scrabble to all corners of the house; one got into the washing machine, another turned up in the dining room, and just one lily-livered hermit crab scuttled under a bed in the same room as the tank.

But I digress. Fortunately, the chickens did not escape their pen while on our watch. They were, on the whole, most cooperative, save for one stubborn gal who would not join her sisters in being gently herded into the coop for the night. She couldn't be allowed to wander her pen after dusk because raccoons as big as VW Beetles roam the neighborhood at night and would be quick to make a meal of her. After the other three hens had already settled in for the evening with gentle, satisfied clucks, this bird would flit to the farthest corner of a pen that was accessible to humans only by way of a gap under a guillotine-type wooden door that was about 2 feet high.

You can imagine my delight at having, finally, to creep through this gap like a commando through a layer of hay and chicken muck to grab the stubborn thing.

Fortunately, we didn't have to repeat this maneuver the next night because we knew the way to a chicken's heart is through its stomach. Or gizzard. Or whatever. A piece of bread crumbled into a corner lured the three cooperative hens immediately and eventually won over Miss Suspicious, too.

A very, very, very small part of me would like to keep hens. I do love the sound of a contented chicken's cheerful prattle, not to mention the glorious, fresh, warm eggs containing plump, carrot-orange yolks. Actually, very much of me would like to keep hens, but nothing in me wants to clean chicken coops.

When I was little, I spent one glorious day anticipating the arrival of a pet chicken. I was playing with my toys when my mom wandered through the room and I idly asked, "Where's Dad?" She replied, "He went to get a chicken."

I didn't say anything, but this news certainly brightened my day. A chicken! How nice. Being only four years old and safely believing that adults, unlike children, lived in a world where they just did whatever they pleased without rhyme or reason whenever they wanted, I didn't even think to ask "Why?" or "Since when?" If my parents had suddenly decided to procure a chicken, well, OK then. It was no stranger than their suddenly deciding to, say, buy a new living room chair, or a sink, or baking soda.

By evening, however, no poultry was in evidence except for the one being prepared for dinner. I had to ask my mom "Where's the chicken?" a few times before she figured out that I'd misunderstood her and explained that she'd meant Dad had gone to the grocery store.

What else could I say but "Oh"? I was slightly dismayed that we weren't getting a new pet. But chicken was my favorite dinner. So there really wasn't anything to complain about.

Foghorn Quackhorn and either Henny or Penny

Before chicken-keeping became so popular in my city, we did get to dabble in all the fun of poultry without any of the work each summer for a few years, when we'd pack up the car and head for central Washington to spend a week or two in the little town of Manson, near Chelan. The owners of the cabin we rented had a glorious chicken yard: a large area where a flock of 20 or so birds wandered freely, scratching in the dust, snapping up insects, and dozing in the shade of a tree. At night, they tucked themselves into a decades-old coop.

Every morning and evening, we'd visit the chickens--a big thrill for my then two-year-old daughter. We tossed corn to them and sometimes fresh fruit, which drove them into a frenzy of feeding. Their passion for fresh fruit caused them to rain pecks on my daughter's red-painted toenails peeking out from her sandals. Fortunately, she thought this was pretty funny and not cause for panic, though we took care to put her in sneakers for future visits.

These chickens had great lives--even the young roosters, despite the fact that only one of them was slated to rule the roost and the others were all named "Fajita." The winner of this lottery was the rooster who proved himself to be a wise and noble leader who wasn't rude to the hens and who was also capable of refraining from attacking human visitors. The hens roamed all day and dreamed feathery dreams at night in the safety of their nest boxes.

The only two casualties we knew of were two hens who flew the coop: little Broody Hen, always picked on by the other birds and who, we like to think, went on to better things after she left, and a big Barred Rock hen with beautiful black-and-white zigzagging on her plumage who didn't make it more than 20 feet from the chicken yard before being eaten by a coyote, leaving only a small oval of feathers.

This little band we're minding consists of Henny and Penny, a pair of Barred Rock (I think) hens--one of these twins is the aforementioned suspicious bird, and the other isn't exactly in love with us; a big brawny Buff Orpington named Foghorn Quackhorn; and a clever Rhode Island Red (I think) named Gerty. Gerty follows us around telling us what to do and to do it quickly.

I think that Gerty is the only one able to read the inside of the coop door, which is covered with henny pennings.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

As it is currently the Year of the Tiger, I would love to be able to say that this big, fat caterpillar I found in my garden is the larva of a western tiger swallowtail, one of the few species of butterfly that flit through our neighborhood. But I'm afraid that would be a lie. A tiger swallowtail caterpillar is club-shaped and has eerie eyespots on its back that make it look like a creepy little snake lurking in the leaves, a perfect disguise for scaring off a hungry bird.

(Or a prying kid. I can still remember clambering through shrubs in our Long Island backyard as a kid and suddenly coming face to face with a hideous lime-green Something with enormous yellow-and-black eyes bulging from its head. I screamed and ran. Two decades passed before I figured out it was nothing but the caterpillar of a spicebush swallowtail butterfly.)

No, the sad truth is, I have no idea what this caterpillar is. I thought at first it was the young'un of the cabbage butterfly (also called the cabbage moth, even though it isn't one; in that sort of mood, you might as well call it the cabbage frog, or the cabbage gnu, since it isn't a frog or gnu, either). But that plump larva apparently has yellow stripes, not white.

Not that many of our cabbage-butterfly larvae (known as cabbage loopers) ever survive to become yellow-striped green teenagers. Last year, we planted lots of broccoli, collards, and kale in our garden, so our little vegetable patch promptly became a mecca for fluttering crowds of cabbage whites ready to lay eggs on suitable host plants for their young. When I discovered hordes of little green caterpillars inching and munching their way through the crop, I looked for good ways to dispatch them--and there are many--before settling on a most excellent one: hire your money-hungry kid to find and collect them at a bounty of 10 cents per larva.

Our resident bounty-hunter amassed a fortune in this enterprise and even enlisted her cousin for an afternoon. The caterpillars went on to become snacks for a friend's chickens.

This one, however, wasn't gobbling up our crops. It clung to the stem of a perennial in a planter, a tall purple-flowered spike known as veronica or speedwell. (I fully intend to name a character Veronica Speedwell in that novel I fully intend to write one day.) So it was left unscathed.

We're guessing it might be the larva of a yellow Clouded Sulphur butterfly. But there are an awful lot of caterpillars that meet the description of "green with white stripes." If I had a dime for every species whose larva fit the bill, I'd be almost as rich as my daughter.

Dragons in the Garden, Part II

This dragon-like little creature lurks in a shrub outside my front door. I've seen others of its kind skulking in the garden, and have witnessed adult humans yelping and shrinking away from them. But these insects are not only completely harmless to people and plants, they are also a gardener's best friends.

Because these menacing mini predators are none other than the babies of that scourge of aphids, a ladybug.

In this insect family, it's the adults who are endowed with all the features that make people say, "Awww." They're pudgy. They're round. They come in Gummi-bear colors. They often have polka-dots. They trustingly walk on your arm. Sometimes they forget to completely fold their wings underneath their wing cases and potter around looking like church ladies with too-long petticoats or little boys who've forgotten to tuck in their shirt tails. What could be more charming?

(OK, they also ooze foul-smelling yellow fluid from their joints if alarmed. Nobody's perfect.)

The larvae, however, won't be winning any Beautiful Baby contests anytime soon. Upon hatching, they look a bit like deer ticks (minus one pair of legs). They grow into elongated little black alligators, eventually acquiring bright orange, red, or yellow markings. (Thus far I haven't been able to determine whether lady-beetle larvae are as foul-tasting to birds as the adults are and if these colors serve as fair warning to them.)

Mama lady beetle considerately lays her eggs on a leaf in a veritable smorgasbord of aphids, so when the larvae hatch, they blunder into a feast. I imagine that'd be like waking up in the morning surrounded by chocolate croissants. The babies tuck into the meal about an hour or two after hatching, stabbing aphids right and left with hollow mandibles and slurping them up like milkshakes.

Then they probably enjoy a nice aphid-dinner mint.

A typical larva with a good appetite may gobble up 30 to 40 aphids a day over the course of four or five weeks. (According to many sources, "the convergent lady beetle may eat its weight in aphids every day as a larva." This sounds like an awesome statistic until you realize that you don't know how much a lady-beetle larva or an aphid weighs. Still, that's a lot of chocolate croissants.)

But wait, kids! It's WORD PROBLEM TIME! According to a 2007 scientific paper, "Molecular sabotage of plant defense by aphid saliva," a typical adult aphid weighs approximately 1 milligram. If an aphid weighs 1 mg, and a lady-beetle larva stuffs itself with 40 aphids, how much does the larva weigh?

Adult lady beetles consume a lot of aphids too, but they're not as voracious as the growing youngsters, plus they can fly away if your garden runs out of aphids and other small chitin-clad snacks. The larvae can't.

I once watched a lady-beetle larva approach a cluster of fat aphids on a stem--so delighted with its find that it was nearly rubbing its hands (if it'd had hands) together with anticipation like a cartoon fox in a henhouse--only to be met by a hostile ant that was guarding the aphids; ants tend to little herds of aphids so as to enjoy the honeydew they produce. The ant was ferocious; the larva seemed surprised; the aphids were oblivious. The ant won the gladiatoral event, but sort of by default--the larva did what looked like a pratfall, falling off the stem in astonishment, actually a very effective "I'm outta here" reflexive response. This time the ant was the one to dust off its virtual hands, satisfied with a job well done.

Dragons in the Garden, Part I

Every flower in my garden sparks pleasure and satisfaction in me when I see it, but the ones that plant themselves and spring up seemingly out of nowhere to shout "Surprise!" are my favorites. In this category of "Best Impromptu Performance," the award would definitely go to the snapdragons.

I've purchased and planted snapdragons in the past, but in recent years there's been no need to do so, because their descendants send up spears of color every spring not only in the pots that held their parents, but also in the most unlikely corners and dry spots in the yard.

And what colors! Snapdragons blaze in sunset colors of orange, yellow, pink, red, purple, and red-purple. And lavender, melon, ruby, and crimson. You can also cleanse your palate (or "palette," in this case) with snapdragons as white as cumulous clouds. Any of these may also boast fringes and highlights in other colors.

My current crop of snapdragons tend toward the cooler colors--there's a lavender, a pink-purple, and a nearly-black purple snapdragon growing in the front yard as well as one crisp white plant. Recently a yellow and plum snapdragon snaked out from the rockery wall over the driveway.

Snapdragons range in size from petite six-inchers to tall three-footers; mine seem to top out at about two and a half feet. The shortest one grows in a pot outside the door. It's about 18 inches tall but makes up for its short stature in bulk: this plant is a five-headed dragon, with each flower-bedecked raceme curving in a different direction.

Some of these 'dragons may actually be springing back to life in the manner of a phoenix, because snapdragons (which are native to the Mediterranean) are actually perennials, though they are generally regarded and sold as annuals in the United States. My growing zone in the Northwest, however, is often likened to a Mediterranean climate (though without the spanikopita, ouzo, and endless-summer "Shirley Valentine"/"Mama Mia" romantic atmosphere).

Did I know they were perennials because I'm, like, a totally know-it-all gardener in touch with Earth and all her children? No, I did not. I had to look it up. In the process, I learned the following:

The snapdragon's scientific name is Antirrhinum majus. "Antirrhinum" is derived from Greek words that come together to mean "like a nose." Since "majus" means "larger," this poor flower's name basically means "big schnozzola." Fortunately, its common name "snapdragon" comes to the rescue here. Gently squeeze the sides of a snapdragon flower to see it snap its jaws, and you won't be in any doubt as to how it acquired this evocative name.

And not just any insect can come along and dip into a snapdragon flower's largesse of nectar. Oh, no. Only one of the right size, with enough heft to make the flower's lower lip drop, will be able to burrow into the blossom. This lucky insect is typically a bumblebee (honeybees are apparently too light to tip the lip).

The flower welcomes this pollinator by providing a landing platform complete with "conical epidermal cells" (what you and I would call by the more technical name of "tiny little bumps"). This provides traction for the bee, a no-slip grip mat to help it get a foothold. Studies show that bumblebees shun mutant flowers that lack these cells.

But other studies show that some naughty bees don't live up to their end of the bargain, either, and drill into the flower from the side so as to nab the nectar without doing the work of burrowing and thereby getting daubed with pollen. Very bad bee-havior.

In other snapdragon news: In Europe, the flower was believed to repel witchcraft and other trickery. The Victorians, those wacky purveyors of fun who created a whole language of flowers, labeled snapdragons as symbols of presumptuousness (Who would one send a bouquet of snapdragons to, in that case? To a presumptous suitor who sent you a dozen red roses?). And like many plants, it's found its way into dishes, though please take heed that I am not suggesting you do so; I've merely read that its seeds were used to make cooking oil and its petals and leaves to make tea. (One book I found online will even tell you how to whip up a dish of Pan-Fried Pork with Snapdragons.)

A snapdragon that manages to avoid being brewed, stir-fried, or pressed will no doubt be glad to hear it has not only dodged being known as the Giant Nose Plant but also that "snapdragon" is unlikely to yield to such other common names for the plant as toad's mouth, dog's mouth, lion's mouth, rabbit's lips, and lion's lips.

Oh, and incidentally, even though snapdragons may seed themselves freely in the garden and aren't native to the Pacific Northwest, they're not considered invasive--unlike the dalmatian toadflax that looks a lot like a yellow snapdragon and sometimes passes itself off with the alias "wild snapdragon," but is really a very distant cousin in a completely different genus that the snapdragons would prefer you not mention at all.