What I've Been Reading: April 2024, Part 2

 Books about the climate emergency, sisters, and birds

This Week (Birdwatching, Veggie Cooking, and Being)

My brothers-in-law, hitting the water with sticks, because this is the best thing ever. See the flock of swans in the distance?

Last week was full. Not busy, but full. I am reminded again of why I’m so stingy with my commitments, why I always leave huge chunks of blank space on my calendar: I get overwhelmed easily, and I like to create space. This week has felt kind of breathless, even though I haven’t been doing that much.

Last Saturday we spent an afternoon at the Riverlands Audubon Center with Zach’s two youngest brothers, Calvin and Preston, where we admired a rescued great horned owl, hiked around through the grasslands, picked our way through piles of dead fish on the lake shore, and looked for bald eagles (we didn’t see any, but we did watch a flock of trumpeter swans, which I had never seen in the wild before). Climbing a dead log was the highlight for Calvin and Preston. Rediscovering my love of birdwatching was mine. The next day as I took a walk in the nearby park, I spotted all sorts of birds— downy woodpeckers, chickadees, titmice, even a huge pileated woodpecker— and resolved to start carrying my binoculars with me from now on.

A big chunk of this week has been taken up with cooking: Zach and I have decided to do a two-week sugar detox, avoiding sweeteners, fruit, and (alas!) grain. It’s alarming how many vegetables you blade through when you don’t have tortillas or bread or pasta to give them substance; we can hardly keep up. I know that eating a more nutrient-dense diet is good for a while, but I’m happy to announce that I’m not going permanently low-carb any time soon. I love my grains!

In the meantime, I’ve been working on student papers, as well as draft three of my PCT memoir (I’m calling it “the hack n’ slash version”), and I’m probably going to start work on writing some grants for the Historic Frenchtown Association, a skill I’m eager to learn. 

Shredded carrots and beet greens with eggs and curry powder.
Actually delicious.

Right now there’s a bit more on my plate than I would like, but I’m trying to be intentional about slowing down and creating breathing space. I’ve mostly stayed off Facebook, and have been taking time to read, notably a reread of Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway. (I love love love this book— it’s the first book that made permaculture make sense to me, and I’m getting so much more out of it this time through). I’ll post a proper review when I’m done with it.

May we all continue to weather the winter gracefully! I hope today that you’ll fix yourself some tea and create space to just be.

~~~

Advice for Aspiring Birdwatchers

Whenever I talk about hiking or camping, I often find myself describing the birds— from sighting a summer tanager for the first time, listening to whip-poor-wills, figuring out what kind of owl was hooting “Who cooks for you?”, or simply discovering a swift trapped in my laundry room. Birds are second only to insects as the most common animals you’ll see out in nature. They are captivating, delicate, and fleeting. I love to watch them fly and forage, seeing how each bird, from the Canada goose to the black-and-white warbler, behaves in a unique but distinctly bird-like way. 

People have asked me more than once how I know so much about birds. The first answer to that question is that I’ve always loved them, and I always wanted to know what kind of birds were alighting on my parents’ feeders. A field guide soon answered my questions: black-capped chickadee, tufted titmouse, white-breasted nuthatch, Carolina wren, grackle, starling, northern cardinal. The more I studied, and the more I familiarized myself with the different groups of birds, the more excited I was when I’d see a bird I hadn’t seen before.

As a kid, I used a photo guide that sorted the birds by basic shape, and then by color. This helped me learn about the different groups. As a grown-up, I love the more precise guide that my grandma-in-law got me for Christmas: The Sibley Field Guide to Birds. These entries are sorted by family, so it’s helpful to know if what you saw was in the crow, finch, or swallow family. Its illustrations are superb, and the text points out “field marks” (distinctive features that help you identify the bird) and describes each bird’s song.

So, if you’re interested in learning more about birds, try these three things:

1. Buy a field guide (or check one out from the library), making sure it’s specific to your region. Spend some time looking through it and identifying the most common birds you’ve seen.

2. Find a good place to watch birds. (If you live in the St. Louis area, I highly suggest Powder Valley Nature Center, which has a huge indoor bird-watching area. For a more natural setting, Buford Mountain Conservation Area is full of birds.) Most state park websites have a note of good places to bird-watch.

3. Take notes, draw pictures, look through binoculars, and enjoy these marvelous works of creation!

~~~

Tom Swift

Today, I was sitting in the living room with Zach and some friends when I heard a strange metallic thump in the laundry room. I got up to check if the wash cycle was done, and as I opened the door I heard it again. I assumed it was just the air conditioner making weird noises. 

When I realized that I couldn’t transfer the laundry to the dryer because my back is strained, I asked Zach to take care of it, and returned to the living room.

A second later, Zach rushed back in with a terrified look on his face. “Guys, there’s a—” He paused, holding up his hands like two wide-stretching talons. “—thing in the laundry room!”

We all rushed into the tiny concrete room, wondering what on earth he could mean. I glanced around before I spotted it, lying on the air conditioning unit— a tiny soot-colored bird with ridiculously big wings. “It’s a bird!” I exclaimed.

Zach shivered. “When I saw it splayed out against the wall, I thought it was a giant moth!” 

It was hardly bigger than some moths, with a body as long as my palm and wings about as long as my whole hand. It had a tiny beak, two large black eyes, and a hopeless, rather grumpy expression.

“Get a sheet,” I said, and within a couple minutes I had gently cupped the bird in a sheet and taken him outside. I place him on top of our trash can, still on the sheet, to let him rest. He closed his eyes, wiped the dryer lint off his face, and sat perfectly still, eyes closed, claws clutching the sheet. A few times we wondered if he had died and I had to look closely to see the slight rise and fall of his back.

We discovered he was a chimney swift, and I named him Tom. We sat on the front stoop next to him for a while, but at last decided to leave him alone. I checked on him about an hour later and found him at the base of the trash can. When I tried to pick him up, he flew straight up in the air, fluttered pathetically sideways a few yards, and crash-landed next to the neighbor’s house. I gently picked him up and placed him on the neighbor’s windowsill.

A few minutes later, I checked again and found him gone, but nowhere on the ground. I hope that he is now flying free and eating lots of mosquitoes to make up for his harrowing experience in the laundry room.

Europe: Ant Invasion and a Peacock Palace

The work on the farm is mostly routine: milk the goats, process the milk, make cheese, pick berries, lead the goats down to pasture, do dishes, help with supper. However, every once in a while, things get exciting. 

Pictured: the ant's new home (I'm wearing my mask from today)

The first exciting thing happened two days ago. It began as a simple project: moving wood from a pile by the forest to the back porch. We had a nice assembly line going and everything was fine… until we found the ants. They were massive, black, spindly-legged creatures, crawling over the wood, swarming up the wheelbarrow, wondering who in the world was disturbing their (freakishly immense) nest. They weren’t aggressive, but they did bite, and it hurt when they did. 

Till, seeing that there was no way we were going to exterminate a nest this big, suggested that we move the rotted wood a few yards away, and try to get the ants to move with it. Simple enough. I wisely remembered to tuck my pants into my socks before we began the project.

This was after I brushed off well over half the ants.

Within minutes, there were so many ants swarming on my feet that I could barely see my shoes. They raced up my pants legs, onto my shirt, heading for my jugular vein to put an end to me… okay, maybe that’s a bit dramatic. But it’s no exaggeration. Every three or four seconds I had to pause to swipe my hands over my thighs, knocking the encroaching horde back to the ground. I couldn’t look at my feet because I would freak out too much. Alejandra and Shanie approached at separate times, but had the same reaction at seeing my feet: a horrified gasp, followed by, “You are covered in ants!”

I wish I had a picture of that flood of insects, but I certainly wasn’t going to strip off my socks and shoes, get my camera, try to put the ant-infested items back on, and then take a photo. I love you, readers, but not that much.

At last we moved all the rotted wood, and I tore off my shoes with several involuntary shivers. I wanted to save my socks, but there are so many dead ants still clinging to the cloth with their rigor mortis mandibles, I think my stockings are beyond hope. Rest in peace, penguin socks.

Today, our unusual project was much more pleasant, even though we had to put on masks because of the dust. It involved cleaning out a stone outbuilding, putting in fresh straw, and then herding the resident peahen (female peacock) into it. The reason? She has babies! Five little peacock babies! Now she has a safe place to raise them. I thought I was going to die of girly cuteness today, even though the chicks aren’t any cuter than a baby hen. I managed to snap a few photos of them.

I enjoy milking and herding and cheese-making, but it’s nice to have a change in activity every once in a while. Even though I was lucky to escape the Ant Incident alive.

You can only see three here… the other two were straggling.

The fifth baby is hiding beside her breast.

~~~

Magical Ducks

Actually, Mary is a bigger duckophile than I am. (Let's not even mention pigeons…)

My duck obsession began when I was 16. I was visiting Florida with some friends, and we took a walk around a suburban neighborhood and discovered a duck pond. We took about eighteen different pictures of the mallards before it suddenly occurred to us that we have ducks back in Missouri. We were mystified. Had these birds cast some sort of strange spell over us?

Four years later on my first solo trip, my sister Mary joined me for the last week I was in Bellingham, Washington. She fed a gaggle of mallards her breadcrumbs, and I wondered why my hands felt compelled to take photos of this occurrence over and over. A few days later, as we walked along a wetlands boardwalk on the outskirts of town, Mary pointed across the water about twenty yards away. “Look! Ducks!” She fumbled around in her backpack before yanking out a Clif Bar, which she waved to the mallards while quacking at them.

“Uh… Mary, they’re not going to come,” I said, looking around to see if anyone was watching. “Besides, you don’t want to feed them your Clif Bar. Those things are expensive.”

Even as the words left my mouth, I saw that the two mallards were paddling over. Mary tossed them pieces of her energy bar, which they happily gobbled up. That was the day I learned my sister was the duck whisperer, and that is my excuse for my obsession. (Yes, I know that those ducks were probably conditioned to respond to human interference. Don’t confuse my theory with facts.)

The spell continues. Everywhere I go, I feel the strong urge to take pictures of ducks. “Hey look, Shafter,” I whisper to myself. “There’s a mallard— whoa— and it’s in California. Now that’s not a sight you see every day! Snap a shot!” See a mallard in Missouri, no big deal. See one in North Carolina… now, that’s a memory for a lifetime.

WHOA! Washington ducks! What could be more exotic?

Ducks just confirm for me that the ordinary becomes magical when you travel. Now, if I could just carry that sense of wonder into everyday life at home…

~~~

I love this guy's "Why is my
life so horrible?" expression