Birds of a feather

Maggie Langdon once said that artists are useful friends. If you have something, anything just about, you want to get rid of, an artist will take it and do something with it, or keep it around until they can find another artist to take it. Like artists will swap, too, and pass on stuff rather than send to the land-fill. Sixto gave me a wonderful thing several years back. This carefully made armature for a sword-fish made with sturdy wire, red marble eyes, and then half covered with paper machee, (which has dissolved since, the rains of yesteryear.) A project he had tired of. I hung it first over the door, but then it came down during a repair session and remained on the ledge outside my front stoop. This spring, I noticed a nest in it's lower abdomen, and tiny tiny egg. The most likely suspect would be a Bewick's Wren. We have plenty, and they will build in the most surprising places. Like an unfinished place above my kitchen! Indoors is considered fair game, and the birds fly in and they fly out after a bit of frantic exploration. Sometimes guided by a waving broom. But this one would have to be very small as the openings in the mesh armature are hardly more than an inch wide.

Well, I am not a careful scientist, and in extracting the little egg to get a measurement, I dropped the fragile thing, broke into pieces. But. Already, a hole had been drilled in the bottom and it was just a fragile shell, 1/2 inch in length!!!! Probably ants.

I had a nest of at least three Wrens hatch in that unfinished spot in the kitchen. That was back in the days before the dogs, and I had a cat or two around. When the babies began the pfledge thing, they would sometimes fall from the nest, and I witnessed the murder of one of them, Di, the black one with the white diamond on her forehead, reached the flopping thing before I did, and killed it, as cats are wont to do. AH. Nature, red in tooth and claw.

From my window, I can watch the cardinals and chickadees, the titmouse's and sparrows taking turns at the feeder and bird bath. They share it reluctantly with the squirrels who love the pumpkin and sunflower seed in the wild bird mix I put out for them. It is fun watching the cardinals, as the red papa bird will not tolerate other birds on the feeder, except in that magic mating season. He will give his darker, more subdued amour a seed, putting it in the beak for her convenience. They fly away happy to build their nest for the year. Some years the most spectacular pair show up, the Painted Buntings with their beautiful colors. At least the male has these iridescent ruby reds, emerald greens and sapphire blues. Almost as if a tropical bird got stranded up here before the last ice age, and managed to adapt, colors and all!!! His mate is duller than the sparrows.

Sometimes Mr or Mrs Roadrunner will bob around to see what is happening. These unlikely things give you a good idea what a raptor dinasaur must have been like. Of all the grown nesting birds, the things have survived out here in spite of the fire ants. I never hear a Bob-White anymore. Chief suspect: You guessed it. (I hardly ever find scorpions anymore either. The ethnic cleansers of the "lower" orders, those fire ants from the south...)

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Maybe, just maybe, I will be on my way to Austin tomorrow, to see friends and hear a band Josh Moore has joined. His Mom has the most beautiful voice of any singer I know, famous or un-famous. These are Tar Heels, Winston Salem Tarheels, at that. North Carolina has about as many musicians per capita as Texas!!! Just a bit quiter, more thoughtful, less showy. More Wren than Painted Bunting! But if you take the time, musicians like Doc Watson or Baby James Taylor deliver just as surely. Hurrah! the "Old North State forever" we used to sing.... sometimes called a valley of contempt twixt two great mounds of conceit. (Reference: hot-head South Carolina, and Virginia full of snooty snobs. Tenneesee, across the western mountains used to be us, so we mesh better westward.)