There was a hummingbird dancing around my sour cherry blossoms. And then another hummer in the apple flowers, resting and eating at the same time: sometimes it hovered above a blossom but about half the time it could just perch there holding still and reach right in and drink, given the thick woody spurs the short flowers grew from, and so it did, as if it were enjoying some exotic resort on vacation. Pass the Martinelli’s.

I needed to go out and water the fruit trees for the first time this year. It made it feel like summer already.

I would think red would attract attention where you really wouldn’t want it.

On the other hand, those petal pieces would be soft and thicker and maybe stronger than a lot of types of leaves. Definitely gentler to the touch than the coir bits the Bewick’s wren has been wrestling off the seed pots. Maybe they’re at different stages of construction?

At first she just flew to the stalk several times throughout the day. Almost, almost–not ready. She really got going when the threesome of amaryllis buds turned red at the top of that stalk. I marveled that they could support the chickadee’s weight and when the first two flowers finally started to open today, I thought, that’s it, she can’t possibly perch on that. A single curving petal?

Try to stop me!

(No, no, enjoy!)

She was tearing off bigger pieces at the top now. Some of my friend Kathy’s dog’s fur from last year sat below, waiting to be claimed, but this tiny chestnut-backed, the smallest of all the chickadee types, wanted her babies cushioned by my favorite flowers. I tried quite a few times to photograph her at it but she’s not one to sit around and wait for me. There are nestlings to get ready for!

A late-season cold and rainy day. (It’s supposed to hit 39 tonight.)

We really need those. (Except for that last part. Brrr.)

I went outside well towards dark with a cupful of grass seed, sprinkling everywhere I’d cleared the weeds out from. Glancing up at the trees, if they don’t see me they can’t immediately snatch it all up and maybe they won’t even notice tomorrow.

Did you just guffaw at that like we did? But still–the ground is damp, the only question is what will grow as a result so we might as well try for a few survivors.

Now the only question is how many different species of birds we will wake up to out there in the morning.

The knitting. Hmm. No, if I say a single word it’ll give it away–so yeah. Later.

Meantime, the first Indian Free flower opened Feb. 23; at March 20 and after all those rains that tree is still blooming, although these last blossoms have no counterparts left on the other peaches for pollination. Such a pretty tree. So very glad I planted it. (Lemons and clamshell-protected peaches in the background.)

And the tart cherry–I counted in the neighborhood of a hundred buds today on that tiny tree.

The Cooper’s hawk swooped overhead while I was outside taking these pictures but I didn’t quite get him in any of them.

Michelle is moving and some of her stuff will have to store here for a little while. Eichler houses do not have attics nor basements. I am taking a break for a moment from getting ready for tomorrow’s input. (Your roommate gave you her piano? Cool!)

The little English Morello tart cherry tree that we planted last year, whose emerging leaves got utterly devoured again and again till I finally went out one night and discovered the pharoah’s plague of Japanese beetles swarming it–that tree. Big rootstock but the top stayed tiny, not much taller than my knees.

So I was just waiting for those bugs to come back. Meantime, the squirrels dug for them, the towhees stood near the tree and jumped backwards again and again, spraying bits of dirt out of the way and pecking at what were surely tasty shiny green/black goodies; me, I shook barbecue-grill ashes along the branches and the bottom of the trunk, figuring that was probably not the same as when I sprinkled it directly on the bugs last year and they all instantly fell off dying as the ash broke their joints. (And fertilized the tree.) But hey. A little preemptive Do Something. We all pitched in.

Tiny pops of green last week, later than the sweet cherry but not to worry–and no sign of damage. Every morning and every night I’ve checked. We’re good.

Yesterday was different, though: suddenly some of those round green buds started to turn white and tomorrow we should actually have flowers. Who knew! I had zero expectations of sour cherries this year–I expected the tree to still be in pure survival mode.

I guess it recovered better than I could see.

And for a total win, the thing is still so tiny that it fits under one of my small birdnetting tents. Easiest critter guard ever.

Looked out the window to see a black squirrel hanging upside down the trunk of the cherry tree. Wait–there isn’t even any fruit there yet, guys, c’mon! But given that the squirrels gnawed halfway through and destroyed a bunch of peaches the size of a small fingernail I chased him off and did a “And STAY out!” by baptizing the tree by sprinkling. With cinnamon. What I’d put out for the ants had gotten rained off and I hadn’t thought I at all needed to replace it yet but I was wrong.

Not a single critter has come back. That I know of.

We went out and bought birdnetting this evening, though we have not wrestled it on yet.

A few days ago a raven landed on the fence immediately behind that cherry, his mate in the neighbor’s tree just behind him, and with a my-territory-not-your-territory from me they promptly flew off; every time since then that they’ve returned to that tree just beyond the fence they have stayed behind a big limb as if to hide. But they have not come into my back yard.

Today there were a lot more cherry blossoms promising of all the goodness to come–and two side-by-side raven-sized poop jobs on my car. I washed them off fast before they could damage the paint; I’m hoping we’re not going to have to buy a car cover. I mean, hey, I didn’t even do the fake dead crow thing yet, guys!

Tonight while weeding I found a third of those critter holes (possum? Raccoon? Skunk?) dug under the fence, a new one in exactly the shape and size of the other two and immediately below where that raven had landed, i.e. as close to the trunk of that same sweet cherry as it could get.

I think what we have here is a conflict of interest.

(So I got out a long-tangled hank of Malabrigo Rios and got that pretty and exquisitely soft yarn all wound up neatly, needing to exert total control over a frustration, any frustration, and turn it into happy anticipation. It’s beautiful now and ready to dive into. It felt great.)

Spring equinox is Saturday and today was definitely a hawk day. A Cooper’s swooped into the upper part of the redwood while I was pulling weeds in the back yard, a Cooper’s pair flew together low enough over my car for a good ID when I was a few blocks from home, there was a large bird announcing its opinion that didn’t sound like a crow while I was back to pulling those weeds, and when I went inside to fix dinner, a male Cooper’s perched on the now-closed yard-waste bin and had a fine time watching us watching him.

Good spot I’d made him: he could see into the patio alcove from there while blocking the escape of anyone hanging around the second feeder or the giant elephant ear below it. Nice. He approved.

Then finally while I was outside again pulling yet more weeds near the back of the house (did these all sprout since last week? I did here already!), well, there I was in the way and I just seemed to be making a habit of this–there was a sudden side blur close to the lemon tree with a crash-noisy landing a dozen feet behind me in the neighbor’s honeysuckle patch.

That was no dove. I know what their wings sound like and this one was silent until that very last moment.

I was torn between dashing a few steps to the side for a better look and allowing the hawk to continue to tolerate my presence like that (if it was still even there.) I stayed bent over those weeds. I do confess to a quick glance.

I’ve had my Coopernicus friend fly right up to the window before but I’ve never had one fly past me outside. It must have seen a chance it couldn’t miss. And frankly I’d been delaying his feeding his young long enough, most likely.

That bin might start spending more time around that spot. He liked it. Hey Mikey. I like getting to see him pretty close up.

Oh, and a p.s. on yesterday: I am told I missed one thing the stake president said in his talk: he said his socks were boring, all of them. All but this one pair, this one really cool pair, and he was wearing them right now.

(The photo angle makes the beak look a little smaller than it is.)

Coming out of Los Gatos Birdwatcher, my fob, which unlocks the car as you approach, was dead and my hands were full–I had to put everything down to pull the small key out of it, a task that requires adept fingernailing on the little slider thingy. And I did not want to damage the most fragile item in my hands. Argh.

The person helping carry the 20 lb bag of birdseed was fine with waiting however long it took me, just very patient, even though I knew the store was full of more customers waiting to be checked out than I think I’d ever seen when it wasn’t Christmastime.

Got in the car. Thanked the woman, who smiled, hoisted the big bag in and was gone.

Wait. No fob. Just the key in my hand, which only works on the door; you have to put it back into the fob to start the car.

Got out, found it, got in, had it in my hand…and again it had vanished. I hadn’t even felt it slip. I flashed back to my mom’s story of doing this with her car key when I was a teen waiting for her to pick me up from a piano lesson…for an hour…. (But that’s how she got back the piano bench cover she’d been needlepointing for her mom for a full year, with only maybe an inch of fabric left to do, when it suddenly hit her she’d gone through her knitting bag all. these. times. and–racing back to that grocery store!–so it was all good.)

No rescue-the-needlepoint story here to excuse my klutziness though. I was out and looking around the passenger side of my parking space when some young men, late teens, maybe early 20s started to pull into the spot by mine (did it somehow fall under my car?), but rather than being annoyed at me for making them wait a moment the driver opened his door asking, Are you looking for something? In a tone of, May I help you with your search?

Good people are everywhere.

I finally found my fob again and was off. Phew!

And suddenly realized, wait: no bag. That crow is just sitting on the back seat. What if the real ones see it when I pull into the driveway? I should pull over between here and home and cover it, I could have retaliatory corvids pulling off the rubber from the wiper blades for years! Which happened to the U of WA professor after capturing and studying his real crow.

I didn’t though, but when I got home I leaned over it, hoping to block any view from the redwood next to the driveway they like to perch in, took my sweater off and wrapped it around and carried my prize oh so carefully inside.

Would it work for ravens too? I’d wondered to the woman running the shop.

They’re not communal, she mused; I don’t know.

On second thought, though, it occurs to me, what if a raven tries to eat it? Mmm, tasty. Not. I guess then it would just look more dead?

But I am really grateful to that bird store for such a nature-friendly idea for keeping the crows from raiding my fruit trees, not to mention the warning not to be seen by them at it. They so deserved that sale.

I made sure not to put it where it could be seen through any window from any angle. I am having to resist putting it out there tonight. I think I want to wait till the cherries, now in early bud, start to look edible.

Right?

The dishwasher is fixed, the dishwasher is fixed!

Those tight pink apple buds I photo’d earlier finally opened up when it wasn’t raining and the air was a little warmer.

The fig tree: nine days ago and now. The tether to the fence was to brace it against a serious windstorm we had last fall, while it still had its big leaves, and it came in handy again these past few days.

The early blueberries are halfway along.

And the peaches! I found a dozen actual beginning peaches before it started to rain and I bugged out of there.

That’s the good part. The bad part was that the squirrels had already gnawed off half the outermost part of six of them. They are now clamshelled–although, peaches fruit on new wood and much of it was too tender to hold up one of the bigger clamshells the fruit will need later. I quickly scrounged up some small ones and they worked just fine for now. The rain held its breath till I could finish.

Re the knitting: I’m working on a cowl in dk weight, a gift from Dragonfly Fibers. Yarn is Traveller, color is Peony. It’s been 10 grams worth of yarn per pattern repeat and I have enough yarn to do one last repeat, which I would start with at the next stitch. Except that after 93 grams, it’s already a lot of cowl. But I can’t stand to not use every bit of a favorite Stitches yarn.

So I’m throwing it at the blog for the night and deciding in the morning.

Rain rain rain rain rain, much of it in fierce sideways gusts, 1.3″ of it today, wonderful wonderful (cold dark go get a warmer sweater) rain.

My English Morello tart cherry early this morning, responding to all the lovely water and with no sign of Japanese beetle damage whatsoever. We are winning that battle (link to how) this year. And that was the last time I dared take an exposed iPhone outside.

The dishwasher that was backed up last night that I hoped I’d gotten going didn’t stay going. But the sink is just fine…! Crud.

That thing at the back of the fridge?

See, after twenty-six years of lupus and Crohn’s, when I have a good day after a string of bad, when there’s a task or even a fun thing pulling at me I do it while I can, even when I know I’m overdoing. “Today I can do this” is my stock inner phrase and these had to be done. Go.

I cleaned the fridge. The dishes (well, most of the dishes. I can only stand in place so long but I got two good tries out of it.) The laundry, because they were predicting falling trees and power outages with our wind advisory and flash flood warnings–and sheets and fevers and yeah. Meantime, Richard braved it out there, his oversized umbrella flipping inside out several times in the short steps from car to doors as he hunter-gathered into the wilds.

And I made good headway on my new project. I mean, isn’t it, like, a rule that you have to knit and watch the rain?

Coopernicus showed up on the telephone wires, feathers being blown backwards from time to time, rousing and shaking off the deluge. He people watched back for a bit. I could see his beak open as he commented an aside to the unseen.

We’re good for a few days now. My stars, (glancing up), it’s 11:08. G’night.

More energy, less fever. Yay! Missing a mini-family reunion, not so yay, but sometimes you just don’t get to do what you wish you could do. Those flying home to Texas and Hawaii can wave hi from afar with me.

Well maybe at least I could snap a nice picture, and so I went outside when the sky took a break. Love love love how this one came out. And while I was snapping away I glanced up into the gray sky, anticipating more rain warning me to bug out of there, to see instead two hawks air-dancing above and I stopped and I watched them court till they were out of sight and away.

Coopernicus and his mate, no doubt, and their appearance broke through my own little cloud as I wished them a successful season rearing a new family.

The anticipated, delayed rain had finally begun today after a drought-dry February.

Rather than a thousand petals all over the ground, Adele’s peach simply bloomed all the more.

Took it easy today. Cold, just a cold, no autoimmune attack, just a plain, ordinary, mild germ like everybody else gets: normal is good. Napped for three hours and came to thinking wow, I guess I really was tired. Made chicken soup. Tried to talk myself into working on my new knitting project. (Stitches yarn!) Tried on the now-dried blocked one and hoped the recipient will love it as much as I do.

And then finally I went to see what 69F had wrought out there.

The Fuji apple had started to wake up, that was new, just the first few leaves here and there. The sour cherry’s buds grew, too, even if not quite ready to open yet; I doused them in ashes from my friend Krys’s barbecue to kill the Japanese beetles I knew would be right on any new growth. I’d been watching to beat them to it. The squirrels have been digging around that tree and I figure they’re going after where those bugs are hiding during the day.

Don’t do the ash thing to the far more tender leaves of a pear, though; I tried it last year and got what looked like fireblight, the disease, but was actually a more literal version. All the leaves that grew after that were perfectly healthy.

Yesterday, we saw the resident Cooper’s hawk being squawked at, his tail tucked in tight as he dove high into the redwood tree. Four crows tried to harass him there. Two quickly gave that up as a bad idea and flew to the top of the next tall tree over to yell king-of-the-mountain from a much safer distance. (Have you ever noticed how they need to be at the tippy tippy top to declare dominance even when it can’t support their weight and they swing and sway wildly? Trampoline trees.)

Clearly, as soon as I kick this bug I need to go back to Los Gatos Birdwatcher and buy one of those rent-a-cr0ws that they’re hawking. For Coopernicus’s sake.

The first flowers on the Indian Free peach opened. The Baby Crawford sprouted five tiny buds today, with a hint of pink at the tips–not bad for a one-month-old.

Clara laid her first egg of the season near the top of San Jose City Hall today.

I saw not the usual redtail hawk in that area but a peregrine falcon in the hills above town today, well outside of Clara’s territory, and wondered if it was one of our old hatchlings.

And I’m going to stop writing and get back to my knitting and man, does it feel good to wrap wool around wood right now.

More plum blossoms after the rain! (Snail deterrent at the base of the trunk.)

I looked out a back window this morning in time to see a large flock of crows fly across the neighbors’ yards, easily a hundred birds, coming and coming and coming (and just avoiding flying over our yard. Smart birds.) This surprised me because I’d been seeing fewer corvids around since a reported salmonella outbreak killed a lot of songbirds this past fall and I assume the scavengers who ate them as well, since that would explain why rather suddenly they weren’t everywhere all the time. (Newspaper link from last February on their then-population explosion.)

But here these were.

And so when I got to Los Gatos Birdwatcher to buy my monthly birdseed, I asked: “What’s the best way to keep the crows out of my fruit trees once things start ripening?”

The young clerk, unsure of herself at first, half-asked back, “Bird netting?”

And then it came to her and she brightened and added, “Or you could get on our rent-a-crow program.”

Wait, your what?! (Okay, this I had to hear.)

Behind her, she gestured, were two stuffed quite lifelike crows, one upright, one not so much. You put one keeled over in your yard for a week.

“At night,” the middle-aged woman behind her working on the books interjected without looking up.

At night, the younger one nodded. They’re rented for a week for $10 or you can buy one for $36–“And all the crows come and they hold a funeral for the dead crow. And then they all leave and they don’t come back because they don’t want to be where a crow died.”

Having read Marzluff’s book, Gifts of the Crow, yes, those are behaviors they do and yes definitely you’d want to put it out at night and I was glad to be reminded of what I’d read–because otherwise they would think you had killed it and they would teach their offspring to retaliate against you to the third and fourth generation: attacking, pooping on your car, stealing the rubber off your windshield wipers, you don’t mess with crows. Now, going outside and swinging my arms like I do they’re fine with–they understand territory claims and it’s an accepted thing. But hurting one of their own. Oh no. They will get you.

No soft fruits yet (lemons don’t count) so I told the women I was going to go home and have a good laugh with my husband–and then I was going to come back next time and buy one of those. (That way I know for sure I’ll have one available next year too no matter what they might be selling or renting then or not, but I didn’t say that.)

I need me a toy crow. Definitely. Feet up. Do not go out at dusk but only at the darkest of night and given the city lights I’d still put a hood half over my face. I can’t wait to loan it to my neighbor whose persimmons will be in full production come December when all my trees are done for the year.

I’ll have to drive the car away for hours the next morning after I put it out there so that they know I’m gone and that they can land in my yard to pay their respects.

Those leaves at upper center aren’t in front of the fence: they’re under it. That’s a skunk-size hole. I can stop feeling guilty now for cinnamoning the root-eaters over to the neighbors’ garden. Gophers beware. (Besides, how often do you get to cheer on a skunk?)

Meantime, wow, what a news day. My condolences to Justice Scalia’s family and friends.

I can talk about money being the megaphone rather than the actual speech another day.

So. About that Republican debate tonight where Rafael Eduardo Cruz was talking about his dad’s humble underwear and Trump was yelling LIAR! at Jeb when he wasn’t yelling it louder at Cruz and he almost, almost threw in the pants on fire part and you just knew he wanted to and Rubio got into a shouting match with Ted and Jeb and back to Trump… Cruz accusing Rubio of saying things in Spanish on Univision and Rubio shooting back, “You don’t speak Spanish!”

Dig a little deeper, guys, keep going–as Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian put it, Some Jerry Springer guests have more decorum, this is great fun to watch!