So what would you do with a volunteer tomato taking over the yard, flowering month after month but never setting a single fruit while the other tomatoes do? Keep waiting? Rip it out before it takes any more nutrients from the cherry tree above?

So that’s what was on my mind as I stepped out the door to start the Tuesday watering.

I’d noticed the little junco for a few days now.

Clearly I wasn’t the only one.

There it was on the box again, right next to me as I stepped onto the patio. With one eye gone and the other warily watching the sky, it didn’t take off till after I went past it and turned back again.

That post yesterday about being the boss of this place?

There, up on the telephone wire. I mentally apologized to the Cooper’s hawk for wrecking his breakfast and quickly got back in the house and out of the way.

He stayed there patiently another minute or so, feathers unruffled but a sure thing gone.

For now.

I finished the watering tonight and went off to the first night of a new knitting group; Alex found herself with a copy of my lace shawls book as a thank you. May there be many happy memories there to come.

I was asked if I would, said sure no problem, and ended up back at the DMV to ask for a one-day permit for driving the PNO van.

And got told no, the buyer needs to come in and get that. But they spelled out all the fees he would have to pay and they were half what he was expecting. Cool. I’m quite happy to make his life easier.

Then this evening I was out working in the yard, noting how much faster the late sun fades now. The camphor tree had several thick clumps of thin, weak sprouts from where it had previously been trimmed by Chris’s crew and those had gotten tall enough to start shading a few fruit trees a bit and this would not do. It’s easier to remove those when they’re new.

So there I was with this big trimming hook overhead when suddenly to my left a raven took off from the redwood tree just past the fence, heading towards my backyard.

Watching it come, I waved my arms as if to shoo it away as soon as it came past the shed.

Darn if the thing didn’t do an immediate abrupt turnaround and go straight back to that tree. If it was testing me it was conceding that it had been caught.

I’ve seen you chase my Cooper’s hawks and trying to steal their catches. I know you would kill my songbirds’ babies and that your population has been exploding while theirs are just hanging in there. You know I own this yard. Not you.

Then it came again.

There was nothing I could have done to keep it from doing what it wanted to do.

I waved again.

It again braked hard mid-air as if its heels sought to connect with something to help and again it veered back to where it had come from, swooping behind the redwood this time as if to hide.

Here it comes again.

Once is an oddity, two is curious, three and more, definitely a pattern–I started counting, watching, letting the camphor take care of itself a moment; nothing here but that raven and me.

I surely looked ridiculous. I was just a powerless little thing on the ground and its flights were almost as high as the top of that redwood. Each time it came in in a path that would take it straight over my back yard and me in the middle of it, but each time I would wave my arms just before it was quite overhead and each time it would stop right there, wings raised high flapping hard not going one inch further, then sharply away. The times it spent disappeared into the back of the tree became a few seconds longer.

The thirteenth time it retreated at last not to the redwood but across the clear open sky above several neighbors’ houses, one beyond the other, getting smaller and smaller and gone.

Yeah, like I trust that–I kept staring.

One potato, two potato, ten potato, coming from the left again with the redwood having been cover for part of its way back and here it came again. Whether it was determined to go where it wanted to go in the path it wanted to go in if I would just stop paying attention to it or whether it was simply a young one having fun playing a game with me and enjoying the attention–and corvids do play–I don’t know. But from there we went through three more redwood-to-almost-t0-me runs.

Territory: understood. Dominance: mine.

Finally, on round sixteen, it really did head way away, faster this time, across that open treeless airspace and at last that was the end of that.

I know crows and ravens recognize human faces and teach their young to at least the second and third generation to respond to those same faces. I can only wonder if this one had a family memory of a human with a gun.

A flash of feathers caught my eye–the speed, the size, the color, and it was a Cooper’s hawk swooping down and straight up again in a tight vertical V: it wasn’t chasing, it was herding.

Three potential prey freaked and came towards me and the window. They hit but only barely and ricocheted away–just as a *second* Cooper’s hawk came zooming in after them! Two! Working as a team! Wow!

I went to the other side of the room to where I could hunch down and look up into the camphor tree way to the side. The hawk that was there didn’t seem to have caught anything for all that and as I wondered if I had distracted it too much, immediately it arose, flew across my yard, circled a stand of trees on the other side of the fence line and then back over to near where it had been. More obscured now. Ready to hunt again.

I excused myself to go work on laundry and get out of its way.

Our friend Alice was at the wheel, I was on the passenger side, Richard behind me as we drove back from Oakland this afternoon.

Her eyes steadfastly on the road and not even glancing to the side, being an avid birder she motioned towards what had caught the corner of her eye, saying, simply, “Look.” Knowing I would want to.

White dots in the distance and nearer, a single crane standing sentinel, alone. A closer flock appeared as the road continued past the cracked-brown edges of the shore: there in the gray-blue water of the Bay, the white pelicans’ plumage shone brilliantly in the sun.

They circled to play a game of Go Fish and a beak of orange-gold was raised in success.

Someone fairly new to the area gave a talk in church today and introduced herself a bit. She mentioned her love of knitting chemo caps and how knitting for others in need had centered her when she was struggling.

Then she starting having aches and pains herself but shrugged them off–until she couldn’t: it was uterine cancer.

And that’s how they found out she had ovarian cancer too. The uterine had saved her life because it had given her symptoms.

And there were her friends from her knitting group, keeping her company during the long days in the hospital.

I’d wondered if her hair meant… It’s growing back in nicely.

Richard and I came home and shortly after we found ourselves exclaiming, Oh look!

He stayed a good fifteen minutes and I thought in my friend’s direction, Honey, someone’s looking out for you too now.

Richard, looking for his camera quickly (no luck) and wishing for a better shot than my iPhone could do at that distance wondered if it were a new hawk; I said, could be but could be the lighting. The fact that it let me pick up and point my phone at him says to me it’s my old friend Coopernicus back.

Equinox cometh and territories must be reclaimed. And so we are here.

Because, hey, they’re zucchinis, there was a new one this morning and a second by evening.

I scattered chili-oil suet crumbles all around the two: squirrel beware. (Edited to add in the morning, they got one anyway. The second was already 10 oz and it’s in my fridge now.)

Merino/silk, coming right up, meantime.

Tuesday was, as usual, watering day, as we hope hard for an end to the drought soon.

Wednesday, with the plants nice and plump and me away at my lupus group meeting, turned into steal-the-zucchinis day. And not just that: the squirrels tore open the stems of several leaves to get at any fluids they could. It’s been three days above 100 degrees in a row and I guess they’re desperate but I won’t have a plant if they keep that up. They did miss one last zucchini, and I would have given it one more day but I knew they wouldn’t so it’s safely in the fridge now.

I wasn’t letting them walk near my caged tomatoes after that. Which meant chasing them away a few times rather than letting them test my setup.

Probably because I hadn’t used the squirt gun, one large gray running down the fencetop highway this evening got to the edge of the property, turned around, walked quite deliberately back to its favorite spot up there and yelled at me.

Wait. That’s a squirrel sound? That’s way too low pitched. Can squirrels get hoarse? Seriously, can they?

The door was open and Richard was home and he opined that it had been a bird he’d heard. Too low for a squirrel.

Well, the sound was with it looking at me and stopped when I chased it away a second time and started up again when it came back to that same claimed spot and tried to give me what-all once again for interfering with its meal. Squirrel. Curious.

Oh and on a completely different note? I found myself driving behind a Tesla X today: DeLorean-type Gull wing doors, seven-seater SUV, and it seemed to actually have headroom enough for tall people. (Yo! Elon Musk! We need 6’8″ and 6’9″ers to be able to fit into your cars.) I didn’t even know these existed yet! Total fantasyland for us but that is one cool car. We got one of the first Priuses but we’ll have to pass on early-adopter status on this one.

Okay, do the click-and-drag on those doors. Do you see what I see? Wallace and Gromit? I’m dog-earing that page.

(Update 9/30: Turns out the X was actually released yesterday. What I saw must have been a company-owned car in pre-release.)

Michelle stopped by a bit, reporting that there had been a baby squirrel pawing at the window next to the door trying to figure out why it couldn’t just walk through that solid nothingness and go on in. She said it was very cute and it wasn’t afraid of her.

Right, you have to teach a city squirrel to be afraid.

She was telling me this just as a mama black squirrel and her slightly grayer baby were walking carefully, slowly down the fence line next to the kitchen, looking like it was its first exploration out into the world. I went from feeling like, you can’t humor those things! to, oh, that little one was just so cute. Even if I wish the squirrels didn’t produce a second crop of babies in August, I have enough of them to thwart. Adorable!

Two days ago I was telling Richard the squirrels had taken a deep bite out of a zucchini and left the rest–apparently they didn’t like it either. He chuckled. Today that zucchini was bigger and they actually somehow picked the thing and tried to haul it up the fence.

Good luck with that.

As far as I can tell they touched just the one and left the rest alone rather than taking a single bite out of everything and ruining the others to sit and rot. Given that they used to strip my underripe Fujis in a day–pick, bite, toss, repeat till gone–this was kind of amazing.

I think it means they’re hungry out there.

So far my now-clamshelled apples are still safe. Little fruity windows. No you can’t come in.

Got a note this morning from my next-door neighbor: she was taking some water saved from washing vegetables outside to pour on some of her plants and found the chewed-up bubble wrap in the farthest corner of her yard from our house. She had a good laugh and took care of it for me.

Good to know it’s not waving to the world from the top of the redwood tree.

Today: saw a Downy woodpecker, for the first time ever here, and it came again and again and again to the birdfeeder. Testing, testing, one, two, three, and no, you don’t peck through the tube, you have to go to the feeding portals. It figured it out quickly and was quite happy hanging upside down and reaching in. They’re not usually seedeaters, but this one was interested. Curious.

And last night.

What was THAT? we looked at each other. Man, that was loud! I could picture claws ripping up the foam roof as the animals scrambled around each other up there.

I grabbed the squirt gun, stepped outside past the patio in the dark and aimed the weak but hopeful stream in the general direction. I figured they don’t jump, so no worries there. Going back inside, the raccoon fight or whatever it was had ended, probably at the sound of the door opening as much as anything.

It wasn’t till today that it occurred to me that actually, given that we’ve had a few within a mile or so of our house, if it had been a mountain lion, yes, it could have.

Naaah….

The bubble wrap has disappeared, whether upward or downward in those trees I do not know. Squirrelwork!

Silly stuff aside, I want to learn how she does this. I want to understand the chemistry of all of it. If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a BBC article here about an Italian woman who is the last person keeping alive a tradition going back to, in her family’s tradition, the days of the Biblical King Herod’s great-granddaughter: she harvests byssus, the dried saliva of a clam, and adds a mix of spices that not only dye the clam silk but make it luminous.

The clam is a protected species but so is she–the Italian coastguard overseas her dives.

She is the Antonio Stradivari of fiber artistry. No one else can quite yet create what she does. She sells nothing and gives away everything according to the needs of those around her.

The reporter did not know enough to ask her how she changed the fibers into what she does, whether she works it still wet straight out of the sea or dried like her sample, whether she pulls it wide like a cocoon of terrestrial silk–is it all one long thread?–and spins it from there, or just how her yarn comes to be from its raw material. How is it done. I want to pull up a chair and learn (I’ll take my brother Bryan, he speaks Italian).

And I can only hope all the attention doesn’t cause poaching of her beloved clams.

Someone on the neighborhood listserv mentioned that SunGold kiwis were available at a certain Asian grocery store. Sun whats? Yellow kiwis? What–? I was intrigued, and I wasn’t the only one and so the thing happened.

They’re yellow on the inside, ready to eat when you get them, juicy, softer than the green types and a lot less acidic, have an essence of mango to them and they are really, really good. This specific variety was apparently new as of 2012 so there’s not a lot out there yet–if you can find some grab them. A lot get sent from New Zealand to Japan, so I guess that’s why the Asian grocer knew about them.

Dave Wilson Nursery sells a red variety. Who knew. One guess as to what I went looking there for, but, nope, not yet.

The other thing today, though, I did not get a photo of; the iPhone was right at hand but the moment had a great big Do Not Disturb sign all over it.

This past spring when I watched the ravens threatening and mobbing my Cooper’s hawks, stealing their prey and stealing their nest? I kept an eye out for a new big nest up high out there somewhere but it just never happened as far as I could tell.

A finch ricocheted off the window this afternoon, appearing unhurt but still I heard it as I looked up.

A few minutes later–clearly not in chase, then–a juvenile Cooper’s hawk flew in past the bird feeder following that same trajectory to that same spot. Only, he u-turned gracefully at the glass, brushing it ever so gently with the very tips of his wings as if to confirm for himself that it was indeed a solid surface: useful and a danger both, then. Alright.

He landed on the edge of the wooden box, right at his father’s favorite spot for people watching, and chose to observe me sitting quietly observing him.

In awe.

What a gorgeous bird. Deep chestnut marled with the brilliant white in the chest lit up in the sun, the back that would later be blue-gray a matching brown. This was not the baby hawk bouncing around in the amaryllises that I got to see a few years ago, this was a raptor who was well into learning how to command the skies on his own. Who knew his own power. And yet he came down to me.

We took each other in and I silently welcomed him to my home. Y’all come back now, y’hear?

Wings lifted high, tail widening–and rounded, confirming Cooper’s, not Sharp-shinned, as if there were any doubt, and he was off.

He swooped back the other way a few minutes later towards the redwood. I laughed in delight.

And so a new generation finds its path.

The shawl: blocked. Done. I totally love it.

Remember the bubblewrap around the awning pole to keep the squirrels from jumping onto my bird feeder? It worked for months.

Yesterday, however, the lower two-thirds of it disappeared. What was left was still around the pole–but chewed on. What on earth eats bubble wrap?! I could not find the rest anywhere.

Till suddenly in the early evening there it was running down the fence line, a squirrel tripping over it each step as it glanced sideways at me with its mouth very full, looking at me like, I *know* you want this, it’s MINE now! It leaped into the tree in a sudden panic, struggled mightily to continue, snagged the thing and gave up and fled.

Oh now that looks lovely. (I apologized to my neighbors. They laughed and said they couldn’t even see it from their side.) That’s their tree growing straight over our property in front of the redwood, and under there is the 60-year-old corrugated roof to our shed gently blanketed in decades’ worth of redwood needles. There’s no climbing on that thing–it would collapse in a heartbeat. The limb lopper can’t reach. At least it’s not at the top of the redwood.

But I guess for the moment we’ll just have to let its freak flag fly.

Meantime, we got a card in the mail from the Census Bureau, which was doing a mid-decade test to see if they could move the whole process online. And so by force of law our household was to fill out their questionnaire at this URL by tomorrow, with a phone number to call if that weren’t possible, in which case they would send out an in-person census taker.

The thing checked out and yes they were actually them so I took care of it.

Richard walked in the door tonight to find me doing my best John Denver impersonation. Sing it with me: “I Filled Out Your Census!”

I was watering one of the peach trees tonight and standing maybe three feet from the Meyer lemon when movement right at the near edge of it caught my eye.

The only time I’ve ever seen a California Gnatcatcher up close before was when one was fleeing crows and struck the window, falling onto the sidewalk. Joe Lerma saw it happen, the guy working that day installing our new furnace and ductwork, and the little thing’s recovery awhile later meant the world to him. Good guy.

Right there three feet away, then another, then another, a trio flitting through my dwarf lemon with more dancing just over the fence.

It felt like having that Disney Snow White thing down just so.

They were apparently eating the mosquitos that had been trying to home in on me. Hey! Cool! Help yourselves! An ant on that leaf? Dessert.

The lemon tree must have been the perfect spot for them: lots of dense thorny cover to zip in and out of.

I had my iPhone in my pocket for the timer function re my hose and when I pulled it slowly out and aimed it at them they allowed it. I snapped away, trying hard to get them and that hummingbird that zoomed into the almost spent flower I had nearly cut down not five minutes earlier but had left for that very reason.

I know there’s one and I think there were two gnatcatchers in this photo. Tiny little birds. All cheer, no fear.

It was a three steps back kind of day. A little discouraging, and the fever had begun to come in cabin flavor too.

And yet, when I had to crash and go lie down again, look who fluttered in. Same as yesterday: a dove in the camphor tree outside the clerestory window, keeping watch over her little flock by day. I watched her consider a few spots, then walk over to where there’s this little horizontal leg in the limb where it was just right. She turned around and around there, checking out all angles, just making sure of her safety, then back to facing me.

It was a good spot. She stood there a moment, then quietly settled down on her feet. She let her wings relax to brush the limb and then she simply shared the day with me for a good long time, however long I might need her, it felt like: she had all the time in the world.

When my first attempt at a picture was a complete whiteout she even let me walk closer for a better one, although she did lift her wings a bit.

Then she let it be.

It was strange and normal and lovely all at once, and I am grateful.