First things first

The baby birds took flight this morning. As Jan was heading out the door, he called out that a few of them had left. Sylvia and I rushed downstairs and watched the nest for a few minutes, but the two birds that were left didn’t do anything interesting, and she got bored. So we went back upstairs, and by the time I was done with my shower the nest was empty. I wondered if the babies might return to the nest at nighttime, but it looks like they’re gone for good.

Have happy lives, little baby birds!

Our new neighbors are growing like gangbusters! Jan’s mom thinks they are house finches. That’s the best guess so far, though both of the parents who frequent our porch have near-identical coloring.

In a matter of a few short days, the babies have lost almost all of their baby fuzz and are now sporting adult feathers. They’re practically crowding each other out of the nest, and I’m sure they’ll be taking their first flights any day now.

April 30
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May 5

About three weeks ago we noticed that some birds had built a nest in a copper hanging thing (I have no idea what to call it—I think it may technically be a bird feeder that we have never gotten around to filling with bird seed) on our front porch. We think the bird is some sort of wren. It’s small, and it is totally terrified of humans. At least, it flies away immediately whenever anyone opens the front door from the inside or approaches the porch from the outside. So we figure it’s either scared of us or it somehow thinks that by flying away it will convince us to leave the nest alone.

We have left the nest alone, of course. The day we noticed it we took a quick peek inside to confirm that there were three little eggs in it, and since then we were very careful to avoid the porch so we wouldn’t scare the bird. Having birds nesting on the porch has done wonders for motivating pokey toddlers to go inside or outside; Sylvia, too, rushes through the portal “so the mommy and daddy birds will come back right away and won’t be scared any more.”

Earlier this week, Jan announced that the eggs had hatched. He knew this because, as he put it, “I saw the parent puking into a baby bird’s mouth.” Yup, that’s a pretty good indication.

Today I managed to get a few pictures of the nest and its inhabitants. I didn’t spend much time fiddling around with the camera or positioning to get good quality. The parent bird gave me plenty of dirty looks when I snapped the first photo from just inside house. I didn’t want to stress it out any more by lingering too long near the nest while it went to get more food. But I did manage to catch a glimpse of three little ones snuggled up together.

I just spent the last hour or so watching tonight’s total lunar eclipse (the last one for three years). For the first half hour, I observed it from my living room. But when the moon moved behind the branches of a nearby tree, I put on my heaviest coat, hat, and super-warm mittens (not thrummed mittens, but gauntlet-shaped, insulated snowboarding mitts with fleece liners, to boot—toasty, indeed!) and headed outside. I pulled up a chair and sat down to watch the disappearing moon do its dance over the barely snow-covered landscape.

It’s amazing how quickly the moon moves. You don’t really get a sense of it unless you spend a few minutes just watching it. One minute you can see the whole thing, and the next minute half of it is hidden behind some tree branches. (Hmmm. Maybe it was the tree that moved. Ents, anyone?)

It’s cold outside, but not so frigid that I’m miserable sitting outside for a little while. The sky is remarkably clear—I can’t remember when I’ve seen this many stars over eastern Pennsylvania. (The best night sky I’ve ever seen was over Canyonlands National Park, in southeastern Utah, where there were so many stars that it looked like someone had just thrown handfuls of glitter into the sky. Tonight’s was pretty good, though.) I even saw a shooting star.

Sylvia is sleeping now, and Jan is out. Even though I could hear the hum of the nearest major road (this is suburbia, after all), and even though all of my neighbors have their inside lights on (and sometimes their porch lights on, too—why do people leave those things on all night, I wonder?), the quiet and stillness and cold made it seem like it was just the moon and me out there tonight.

Growing up, I watched a lot of PBS: Nova, Nature, and all sorts of stuff. This was before all of the quasi-educational channels hit their stride on cable television. (I find the History Channel and the Discovery Channel particularly bad, with their low-information-density programs full of fast editing, far too much use of unnecessary–and bad!–computer graphics, and dramatic voiceovers. And is it just me, or does anyone else think that the History Channel is way too fond of bad reenactments, usually involving scowling men in sandals pretending to be Roman soldiers, splashing on foot through streams while invading some dark and foggy land?)

I have particularly fond memories of watching David Attenborough’s programs. So I was pleased when, looking for some animal documentary footage that might be fun to show my daughter, I came across his series The Life of Mammals. I just watched the first disc (thank you, Netflix!), and all I can say is “Wow.”

It is good stuff. Phenomenally good. The content is fascinating, of course, but what’s even more striking is the presentation. In addition to Attenborough’s avuncular style, there is the best wildlife cinematography I have ever seen. Ever. Take a look at this clip:

(It doesn’t hurt that I have long been interested in sloths. Amazing. Top speed 0.3 km per hour, yet the species has managed to survive.)Now that I think about it, this is some of the best cinematography I have seen period, wildlife or no. Some of the shots are jaw-dropping–for example, a bat flying at nighttime approaches a spider web and, with a skin “pouch” between its feet, delicately scoops up the spider at the web’s center without getting ensnared in the sticky silk.(How do they film something like that? Jan hypothesized that they probably used gobs and gobs of film, with the camera at high speed. He’s probably right. I’m not sure that digital has the clarity that the close-up shots demanded. Or maybe it does–I really don’t know anything about cinematography.)

Disc one goes in the mail tomorrow. I am looking forward to seeing the rest of the series.

Oh–and it gets Sylvia’s stamp of approval, too. She was especially fond of the bats, the giraffes, and the elephants. And the hedgehogs (which are currently among her favorite animals, thanks to this book)–she loved the hedgehogs

The mid-spring flowers are all gone now, with just a few azalea blooms holding on. The dogwoods are fully leafed out, and the last of the lily-of-the-valley–a charming, fragrant flower that appears for only a week or so–said farewell a few days ago. Now we’re surrounded by rhododendrons, for which I have a soft spot after living in coastal Oregon, where the “rhodies” grow wild in the mountains and the arrival of spring with is celebrated with a rhododendron festival. The early-summer flowers are showing up, too: lilies, roses, dianthus. I love them all, but I’m especially fond of the blooms that bravely show up when there’s still a chill in the air, reminding us that, yes, spring is indeed just around the corner.

Every spring, when the forsythias, dogwoods, magnolias, lilacs, azaleas, daffodils, and tulips put on their annual show, I’m reminded of these words penned by Emerson. Of course, this phrase is part of a longer passage about humanity’s inability to escape death, but I still like it in the context of thinking about spring and nature and renewal.

My SP10 hostess, Kerry, has asked everyone in her group to post about their favorite flowers. That’s a really difficult task, because I’d be hard pressed to name a flower I didn’t like. I even find dandelions sort of appealing.

Right now, though, I’d have to say that my favorite flowers are these giant red tulips growing in my front yard. Jan and I moved into this house in the fall a few years ago, and shortly afterward his father, who is Dutch and lives in the Netherlands, came to visit. While he was here, my father-in-law, a horticulturalist who knows pretty much everything about plants, planted about three hundred tulip, daffodil, and crocus bulbs around the house, mostly in the front. Squirrels dug up most of the crocuses, but every spring we get to enjoy a magnificent display of yellow and white daffodils, followed by tulips in almost every size and color imaginable.

Whenever I go for a walk in the woods in the spring after (or during) a rain, I’m always struck by the contrast between the water-dark wood of tree bark and the tiny new fresh-green leaves. The contrast is especially strong with dogwoods, whose just-opened new flowers are a pale green. It’s easier to get a sense of this ethereal quality when in an actual forest and not in the suburbs, surrounded by neighbors’ homes. But the half a dozen dogwoods on our property (a happy legacy of previous owners) are enough to take me a real forest in my own Proustian moment.