Two weeks ago, northern Vermont was awash in autumn colors. This morning we're awash in snow:
It may be time to bring in the lawn chairs.
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Two weeks ago a friend came to visit for a couple of days: G., a great guy -- older, from the Boston area. Lives on Beacon Hill (a locale he claims is getting wackier by the day). Given that the variety of birds in his neighborhood doesn't normally extend beyond pigeons, sparrows, maybe the stray starling or grackle, he spent a fair amount of time checking out the traffic at the bird feeders that hang outside the dining room windows here. There have been wave after wave of migrating birds making stopovers around the house this autumn, and the constant flow of diners at the feeders -- not to mention the sight of passing gangs of robins hunting through the grass in the yard, 30 or 40 strong -- kept him well occupied.
Among the waves of birds have been numerous groups of one particular kind, feeding in the grass like the robins. A bit larger than robins, a bit smaller than blue jays. Brown/gray heads; backs, wings brown, mottled with darker coloring; chests lighter, also mottled, becoming lighter down toward the tail; a bright red V on the back of the neck/head; and a marking like a bib or a black half-moon on the upper chest/neck. Distinctive looking buggers, vaguely familiar, though I couldn't place them. I paged through my field guide more than once, came up with nothing, finally resigned myself to ignorance. (A state of being I inhabit far more than I'd care to admit.)
The last morning G. was here, a crowd of the brown birds had shown up, were spread out across the grass, mixed in with an equally large mob of robins. G. asked about them, I confessed ignorance. We pulled out my field guide, he commenced some research. "I think," he finally says, "they're flickers." Woodpeckers -- birds I knew from childhood years north of Albany, N.Y., in the woods on the Hudson. Couldn't be, thought I. They're woodpeckers. I always saw them on trees in those younger years, like the rest of their wood-pecking brethren. I said as much to my friend, he replied, "I don't know, they sure look like flickers."
I repeated that they couldn't be -- flickers were woodpeckers, they hung out on trees, blah blah blah. I knew them from the woods, had never seen them doing the ground-feeding thing, and swore up and down to that effect. My friend remained politely doubtful, we went back and forth, me asserting at one point that they couldn't be flickers, that he'd have to take my word on that. Then I finally took a gander at the illustration he'd come across in the field guide.
Hmmm. Brown/gray head, dark, mottled back and wings. Light, mottled coloring on chest. Red V. Black, bib-like marking. Sure looked like the specimens out on the lawn. And according to the text, they were ground-feeders.
I began backtracking on my assertions, choking down small morsels of crow along the way. Then I went online and checked out three or four reference sites, all of which referred to the flicker as a ground-feeding woodpecker. (Pause to choke down a bit more crow.) And then I noticed that while each of these sites referred to the bird as a ground feeder, the only illustrations they had showed it working away up on the side of a tree. Which made me feel a teeny bit better.
A few days before this, another person in my life -- R., a loved one from Greensboro, N.C. -- sent a note in response to this journal's entry of September 29, suggesting that the jumbo arachnid I'd found in my tomato plants was a writing spider. That prompted some fast online research, during which I zipped through two or three web pages featuring pix and info re: writing spiders. What I saw appeared to be different enough that I figured it must be a different spider from the creature that had made a home for itself in my tomato plants, and let R. know that. My research, it turned out, had been too fast, too sketchy -- she supplied a bunch of other URLs that featured photos of writing spiders which were exact or close matches to the specimen on my webpage. In this instance, I at least had the sense to check out the additional information before drawing further buggered conclusions. And if R. hadn't sent along the additional resources to begin with, I would have continued blithely along in my ignorance.
And so this is something else I value about the people I love: every now and then there are those moments when they save me from myself. If you know what I mean.
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A bit of the New York Times' write-up re: the Quentin Tarentino film currently packing them in at movie houses in the both the U.S. and the U.K.:
"Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is rated R (Under 17
requires accompanying parent or adult guardian).
It has shootings, stabbings, beatings, beheadings,
disembowelings, amputations, mutilations,
eye-gougings, slicings, choppings, bitings and a
spanking. Also some naughty words."
rws 8:40 AM [+]