I knew raptors don’t just give up their territory, but I’ve been hoping it all worked out okay: I’d been wishing I could see one around, just t0 finally feel better about it all–

–and there you go.

I had just walked into the room and sat down and glanced out the window when there, perched just above the other neighbors’ side of the fence, was a beautiful adult Cooper’s hawk. At last! The female, it seemed to me by size and shape. Breathtaking.

She took note of me taking note of her for a goodly minute.

And then she started doing the oddest thing. Now, raptors especially tend to bob their heads before taking flight as a way of measuring the distance with the different parts of their eyes. This one was bobbing its head.

But she was going up and down and side to side rather differently from anything I’d seen before, like she was rocking out to the bird music on her I-clawed. I wondered if she was watching prey in both yards?

Then suddenly she really shook her head, hard! Her shoulders too, though her wings stayed folded in–and on this bright dry sunshiny day, a sudden impressively massive spray of water went flying from her head.

Where did THAT come from?!

Oh wait. I bet you I can guess…

(That was just her warm-up act. Next thing you know, she’ll be singing koi-oke at the Grand Old Osprey.)

It is always easier to get to work on knitting that doesn’t clash with your clothes, and better yet, when the work in your hands will look fabulous with what you’ve got on (even when it’s for somebody else), it’s hard to put it down. A dozen more grams and it’s done.

Oh, and the squirrels and that bag? They quit even sniffing at it. They ignored the nuts in it. Even after I put peanut butter in it. Too scary.

Wow, how do I get them to react to my birdfeeders that way?

I finally took the bag out of the tall flowerpot this morning and put it down across the yard, the mouth open towards where I could see from inside.

It took awhile–and then the bag was suddenly doing a vigorous funky chicken.  A gray was trying the flower pot tactic: if I push this around there must be nuts I can get at underneath. He nudged it. He charged it nose first. He tried to wrestle it out of the way. No dice. He left in disgust.

Hours more and the alpha squirrel approached the mouth of it. (He’s black with a touch of white below his eye, he’s easy to spot.) He stopped halfway across the yard and did an anxious paw up, nose straining forward, tail straining backwards then protectively over him, then he shifted to the other foot and did a little dance.

It didn’t bite him.

A little closer. A little more trepidation. Finally he stepped into the wet cold bag and then freaked as the paper gave way under him and the top of it came down at his head. (The gray had left the thing angled upwards.)

But having gone in once nothing was going to stop him now. None of the others ever did dare come in. Alpha ate at his leisure, then came back for more later when he got hungry again, dashing out to safety the moment the almond was claimed, not staying in there one squirrel breath longer than necessary each time.

Moms rule. I got a squirrel to take just one at a time.

Behind me was a two-foot-high big empty flower pot.

You know, we could have fun with this… I plunked the tall bag in the center. Yes it looked as odd as the squirrel that tried to bury half a paper cup to grow more whipped cream. Threw a few stale nuts inside it and a few in the pot outside the bag. I like to mess with their little minds.

I’ve done this before, actually, but this is a new crowd, staking their claims on my yard as the season demands of the young and as the old give way to Nature. We do have hawks…

It took the whole morning of sniffing and standing then shying away, all of them. They knew their favorite food was in there, and I got a lesson in the keenness of their sense of smell; I’d wondered. They demonstrated. Eventually, one got the courage to climb up and then held on tight by its back feet, trying fervently not to touch the bag, its nose disappearing into the abyss, then pulling itself back up the same way.

There you go. The nuts in the pot  were claimed.

As soon as one does something they all can. One came by a few minutes later that even got up the courage to stand on the lip of the pot to try to get a good pawhold on the top of that bag so it could jump in there, too.

Paper being what paper is, the squirrel found itself doing a wild grab in the air and twisting back to earth and that was that.  And when it clearly worked out badly for one none of them wanted to try. The almonds are still in there–no chew chew through train of thought has arrived at their stations yet.

…And I’m not writing about the knitting because I haven’t yet during what has been a very busy day here. Wait: let me just go do one row, again, to get me started…

The hard part was making myself sit down finally this evening with pen and paper to try to work out the details of what I was beginning to visualize, to actually start to do the hard work. And if you ever want an answer to a teenager whining about what their algebra is supposed to do with their future real life, send them over here to give me a refresher course to tutor us both–I could really use it right now.

As soon as I get off this blog I’m going to cast on and hope I got the first word problem right. Yes, it’s bedtime–but “Begin; the rest is easy” holds ever true. Even if it’s just one row. Start.

In the meantime, our neighbors have a compost box, *with earthworms and kitchen and garden scraps turning out good soil for their garden to grow more food with, with the remains becoming kitchen and garden scraps and good soil to grow more food with, repeat from *, just on the other side of the fence.

And today after the rain stopped, there was a black squirrel totally splayed out on the fenceline. Ahhhh…heat!

Immediately below him there was steam rising from where I knew that box was.  (I bet they get all the robins.) And that happy squirrel looked for all the world like a cat that has claimed the top of the radiator on a cold winter’s day.

And on the wildlife front.

Young squirrels don’t have object constancy before maturity. I have thrown a nut into a large flower pot as they’ve watched and they were unable to figure out it was in there. Come Spring and a year old, though, they will.

A clearly new-around-here young gray spent a fair amount of time today trying to figure out how to reach a treat I’d made quite inaccessible; then, having spotted what he thought was a good idea, he explored how to get to the top of the barbecue grill. Which was not close.

It seemed to throw him that it didn’t feel like a tree. He wrapped a paw around the leg. Didn’t like it. Finally, after many tentative steps and much scouting around that took quite some time (can you climb up inside a closed plastic pipe? No you cannot), he managed that little bit of rocket science leap by leap to the shelf and then, standing at last on the cold metal at the top, king of the mountain, he turned his head this way and that, taking a good look around.

That huge sugarpine cone full of suet and seeds was still dangling above the porch. Getting higher up, though it might fulfill an inner squirrel imperative, hadn’t gotten him one inch closer after all. Dang. But… But…! He’d worked so hard for it!

But then…wait…how do you get out of here? He seemed to have forgotten how he got up in the first place. Down was not an option from that height. He studied how far away the olive tree was, the fiberglass ladder (he’d clearly already figured out you don’t want to leap onto that.)  It was leaning against a lopped-off trunk we’d left for the woodpeckers. And there, over there there was nothing but grass.

He was stumped.

And then I happened to open the sliding door. He panicked and took a massive leap to the tree trunk near that ladder–eight, quite possibly ten feet away. I was stunned. He was at the downward part of the arc by the time he landed and scrambled up, but he made it. Olympic Gold! The crowd goes wild!

The Washington Post declared it squirrel week, asking for photos; included in there is a black one with the outer rings of its ears and the bottom half of its face bright white, so odd that I had to look closer to make sure it was actually a squirrel. There are many reminders there of why these little animals are so funny to watch.

Richard had the presence of mind at that hour to tell her she could present it on her new phone at the gate, getting it to come up for her so it would be ready.

Did you hear about the TSA recently confiscating someone’s cupcake because of the “gel-like substance” on top? Our citrus sponge cake went unadorned last night. I cut a big chunk at 4:45 to supplement her two-flight airline pretzel supply, ziplocked it, and off she went, returning to the land where water comes in white in the winter.

We were back from the airport while it was still the dark of the night and fell back into bed while we could.

Just for fun: the snowboarding bird. The size, beak and use of a tool look like the crow/jay family, but I’m not quite sure what it is. Anyone?

I mentioned in the Fall having set a chair just forward of under the birdfeeder and discovering my wild guess was correct: the squirrels suddenly refused to take a long leap sideways at it to knock the seed out if they thought a competitor might be able to just reach right up there with a tiny leap and beat them to it.

And when they come at it from below, the cover shuts down fast over the portals.

Over several months, though, they eventually learned to jump a bit sideways from the top of the chairback to get a swing going to it; they might not profit, but the ones below looking up hopefully at the pinata certainly did.

So I experimented.

Newspapers to try to mess with their grip blew off or got ignored after a day or two. But then.

Newsweek did a cover story on the Margaret Thatcher movie coming out; with their logo plastered in red across her forehead, Meryl Streep’s face covers the front page.

With her pearly whites showing in that smile. Prominently.

More than a week later, the little bushytails have finally decided it’s okay to jump to the seat again, but they absolutely will not look anywhere but down when they do. The cover is hanging down sideways by the spine, it has been rained on once, but it is still a human face and it is very clear they recognize that.

They will not rise up on their hind feet now on that seat: they will not expose their most tender parts to those teeth.

A neighbor who is away saw our weather reports and sent out a request for help checking on a hose of theirs, mentioning vaguely about its being there for the raccoons; would we or whichever neighbor sees this first go check it out and turn it off for them just to be sure?

First, though, we got some Skype time with my in-laws and our older children who are visiting them, and of course Parker was clapping his hands back at the four of us here clapping and cheering him on. There is just nothing like seeing a baby happy to see us seeing him, and everybody else, too.

Which probably helped make it so that my husband was laughing when he stepped back in the door from the neighbors’ a few minutes later.

They have a koi pond. (Oh yeah, forgot about that.) There is, it turns out, a motion-sensored water sprayer to keep the raccoons from raiding their fish.

Iced at night or no, “It works,” pronounced Richard: he grinned as I typed back to the neighbors that, not to worry, the deed was done.

One of the first things Michelle asked when the kids got home last night was whether a certain package had arrived; it had. I picked it up to show her and said to Richard, “Looks familiar, doesn’t it?”

To which my daughter reminded me of a certain earlier Christmas where I’d told her of a favorite yarn, and a familiar-looking package had arrived: I opened it, I pulled out this lovely yarn, I knitted up half a ball’s worth of it and then suddenly realized, wait–I didn’t order this color, did I? (Checking name on box.) Oh my goodness.

And so I’d stuffed it needles and all back in the box, wrapped the box, and threw it under the tree tagged from Michelle to me. There. I wrapped it for you.

Needle deprivation. That’ll teach me.

You have to love a bird that looks like it’s sporting a sock-monkey’s smile.

Got the last of the to-go presents wrapped. Richard mailed them. Collapsed and read cover-to-cover the book “Avian Architecture” that Richard-the-younger and Kim gave me for my birthday.  Way cool stuff in there; I could rattle on all day now about bird structures! Who knew a bird colony on a cliff could look like barnacles on a boat.