wildlife – whereIwonder&why

That Autumn Air That Just Talks Back

I just filled the bird feeders. My goodness those sparrows can squabble. Mostly male I might add.

You may or may not notice two sparrows flapping around the left hand feeder about to shove in, claiming their turns–the four on the perches have had enough time. Two more are on the sunflower feeder on the right. Also, somewhere in this picture, in motion thus a blur, is a nuthatch fearlessly approaching the sparrows crowd

Nuthatch has landed, all sparrows are amiable for the moment.

It must, the sparrow dynamic din, have something to do with the verbose air, the chattering light, the clatter of drying and dried leaves. Not in these pictures, because I cropped it out is the dogwood tree. Oh, here, below:

I wish you could see how deep-dark the red of the leaves really is. iphone 12 mini doesn’t really offer the means (or maybe it’s the photographer)

You know, it’s funny, bright color, clear red, yellow, green, also seems loud, very distinctly present–they correlate, light and sound, and, for that matter, clarity and sound. Light is just plain louder. Clarity is just plain loud. Is it so? Is it something in my body, in my mind that makes it so? Is it so without me present? Is a bell louder than a gong? Or just to me?

Ah questions. They run my life.

I’ll be back. I have to take the clothes out of the dryer.

Lovely, all done. I’m back and watching a young bicyclist pedaling up and down the street in front of my house. It’s also funny, this street, after one block length then jogs _/- and continues along for three or four blocks until it dead ends in front of a middle school. Well, this street can get quite busy during certain hours associated with schoolday start and finish, and it can also be suddenly busy for no known reason. Most of the time, I guess, if you clock it for 24 hours, it is quite unbusy. Anyway, the jog which is one house west of me, busy or not, is a challenge, in particular when a driver comes east on the street at a speed worthy of an urban arterial. Yet, kids bicycle it centerline, little kids play on it maneuvering and running behind their remotely operated small vehicles, and the local driving school has brand new learners pull to the curb, back up, initiate a U-turn or K-turn, generally in front of my across the street neighbor’s and my house (have you ever seen a brand new learning driver execute this turn, it usually takes long enough to hardboil an egg with much of that span of time spanning the width of the street!) I’m just saying…

So, this is turning out to be a bit of a rant on — on what? things that I notice that are unpeaceful.

However! They are small, they are manageable, they have caught my attention this moment, and will now be forgotten, until the next time they capture me, which could be five minutes from now or weeks. Anyway, there you are, I have groused into your life for a few minutes.

Think Robert Frost again, good fences make good neighbors–or not. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. (same poem, opening line).

Mending Walls

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Robert Frost

From The Poetry of Robert Frost by Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1916, 1923, 1928, 1930, 1934, 1939, 1947, 1949, © 1969 by Holt Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Copyright 1936, 1942, 1944, 1945, 1947, 1948, 1951, 1953, 1954, © 1956, 1958, 1959, 1961, 1962 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1962, 1967, 1970 by Leslie Frost Ballantine

August Crystal Clear Air

Have you ever thought about the myriad meanings attributed to the word air?

When I wrote the title above, I had just completed downloading several photographs I took yesterday at an estuary, marsh, beach on the north shore of Massachusetts. And just before downloading those photographs, I had been out in front of my house initially to bring in my recycling bin, which had just been emptied by the waste services, but stayed standing on the curb because the air was so weightless and light bearing (baring too!). In terms of weather, it is a beautiful morning.

yesterday morning, also beautiful, but bearing some weight and motion

Then as I came back in and opened my computer to begin this post, and proceeded to title this post, I was drawn to the thought of air. How many definitions for “air”. It is visual, it is actually, viewable sometimes and not to be seen other times. In fact Collins dictionary notes that it has 27 definitions. I will not list nor discuss them all. But after noting with my passing by neighbor that today is a beautiful day, the air is so clear, I, smiling, came back in and the thought that came to me when I raised my fingers to the keys of this laptop is that in addition air is audible; consider the definition (one of 27!!):

Air is a song-like vocal or instrumental composition. The term can also be applied to the interchangeable melodies of folk songs and ballads.

So air is music. Imagine a beautiful voice raised to praise a beautiful invisible yet not the least bit empty sensation. Sensations stand alone and yet they cannot be without having been noticed. Sensation, according to Collins dictionary, is a noun with five meanings.

Go where you want with these two words aka experiences aka actions aka recipients. (I had another connecting word that was not aka, but these days it is losing the meaning I intend for it, and I didn’t want to jar you with the more frequent associations that word currently brings; yet obviously I have by bringing this sentence into the text.)

Jar! think of that noun and verb. Ugh, I just looked it up. In addition to a created vessel and to a sudden poke (mental, physical, or emotional) it also is a computer file format that serves to aggregate, archive and compress a file and its associated metadata and formats.

Words are remarkably malleable. And think of a word in the myriad languages extant today, and in those that have disappeared. Why do we have so many languages? Why do we separate ourselves from one another? Why do we erect so many walls?

How did I get from the beauty of this day and its clear, musical air to heaving, burdening, disrupting walls? It seems, of late, it takes a conscious effort not to stumble down those descending stairs.

So, I am placing my hands, palms down on the concrete, and pushing me up. I am rising up to the light air that is what I breathe and is singing in my head right now. I am going to tell you that yesterday was such a day of beauty, as is today, and that I saw, count them, 47 types of shore and marsh and raptor birds in one perhaps two mile length of ocean back (these viewings, these soundings, these delights were not even while on an ocean beach, rather they were within the brackish waters that meet and converse with the ocean, river, reeds, muds and sand). Did I personally recognize them all without other voices speaking their names? No! I do not have that knowledge. Did I learn a few more things about these lovely, feathered, visiting and resident avians? Yes. Did I love being there with 14 other people, all of who knew far more than I? Yes. Did we have any moments of disagreement, distress, disregard? No. Yesterday was so lovely that even if I were standing out front this morning and it was 95 degrees farenheit and 95% humidity, I would have thought the air is so clear! It is a beautiful day! Beauty carries with it beauty.

Remarkable how much joy good can carry and convey and place before one.

I, as you who have been here before know, have not the finest “camera”, nor the most artistic “eye”, but here are more couple of photographs from yesterday. They include Greater Yellowlegs and/or Lesser Yellowlegs, Long-billed and/or Short-billed Dowitchers, Least and Semi-Palmated Sandpipers, and Greater and Lesser Egrets. I am not sure if the Yellowlegs I photographed are greater or lesser. I forget. I am not sure if I captured Long or Short-Billed Dowitchers. I believe I caught both Least and Semi-Palmated Sandpipers and Greater and Lesser Egrets. And among them a Herring Gull or two. But you will likely not be able to critique me anyway because the photographs are way too unsharp!!

Long- or Short-Billed Dowitchers, Semi-Palmated and/or Least Sandpipers,

Greater and Lesser Egrets, Herring Gulls, and someone else

I delight in the day.

It’s July 2025

My intent was, perhaps still is, subsequent words will tell, to offer one of my “places” of observation, a vague meander into what surrounds us where and a curiosity about why.

But I am kind of keening today. I am feeling a lament surging. It is hot in so many places on earth right now, increasingly HOT hot. And sources of relief–water, trees, breezes even, are increasingly being commandeered (or razed) for too rapid, unnecessarily abundant, personal and corporate and governmental storage in search of additional profit, in service to the desire for more. I am sad today.

I am stepping away right now for a bit, in hopes that my mind travels elsewhere before I continue this day’s blogpost. It is 12:13PM EDT right now. I’ll be back.

Returned. The bicycle is a ruse today. Not the day for pushing pedals nevermind in shorts and tank tops, not in, as my shadow indicates, full length jeans and long sleeves.

This, below, is from my backyard just about 15 minutes ago.

I am most appreciative that I cannot see the junk littering the skies above those fast moving clouds.

Here is a good statistic that I report from the backyard this year. There have fledged: two blue jays, a male downy woodpecker, two chickadees, a titmouse, a nuthatch, two female and one male house finch, a female house sparrow, a mockingbird, and a grackle. Most have proceeded through fledgling to immature to mature, and children then away. The nuthatch and blue jay immatures look to be a day, no more, from moving out. This morning I saw my first brown headed cowbirds of the season, happily, after the nests have hatched and mostly flown.

Immature/nearly mature blue jay, chasing through dogwood tree leaves after just ducked-out parent blue-jay.

Here is a bad statistic. In my town, about five streets away, they tore down four trees in deference to granite curbs and repaving, along a quiet, two lane, unmarked, headed nowhere major four block long street, and, based on the “grass” they have seeded in the earth edge between granite curbstone and asphalt sidewalk, these maples and lindens will not be replaced with new shade providing, nicely cooling trees. It will be another asphalt, granite, asphalt alley, inducing residents to install yet another air conditioner or whatever the latest multipurpose “energy saving” inhome unit combination may be, “efficiently using” piped in fuel sources rather than shade-giving, cooling, pleasing to the eye and body-temperature, trees. I stop at the top of the street, mid-street and look down its length and I am sad.

Around the corner and along a street one block from me, three homeowners have blacktopped the majority of their properties so to make room for parking their electric vehicles, their hybrid vehicles, and their low-riding audibly evident otherwise intended compact cars and ___-Tough pickups. What are we thinking?!

___________________

It’s July. It’s hot. The air weighs more than I do. What is wrong with our heads?

Here, cool down.

As I typed, the air has gained weight. I am ready to dive into this lovely, spring day Concord River, were it still this height.

I’m stopping. You are free to go, if, indeed, you stayed through to here.