Should have thought of this years ago.

Weird light reflections. A (very faint) smell Nature never made. The edges randomly flying up when a bird flutters down nearby and probably making a squeaky sound when they do.

Nothing has dared yet actually step on the stuff but I’ve seen some grand leaps sideways in avoidance.

We had been having so many squirrels of late.

Bubble wrap. That’s all it took. Just for a little while, while they re-learn some manners. I popped a bubble or two going by but resisted the impulse to squish them all–gotta leave some to do their job.

Maybe the peach clamshells next Spring could use an outer liner against raccoon prying–Christmas packages will be coming soon and let’s hope for no packing peanuts this year, I have other plans.

Meantime, we staked out the Page orange tonight and made it ready for a tarp come hint of frost. The weatherman says our nights are still eighteen degrees warmer than the norm but the fuzz and the fat on the squirrels and the layers of sweaters on me say that no, it really is getting chilly out there.

May tomorrow be warm with laughter and good folks and good times shared. Travel safely. Happy Thanksgiving!

Other food sources must be low this time of year because this past week or so I’ve suddenly had a ton of squirrels arriving here. Usually there’s just one or two or none, but these were all over the place (six, seven, eight, okay, who else out there? Get out of my tomatoes!) being both destructive (do not dig up my baby trees’ roots and you. will. not. come close enough to chew on my house) and getting into fights. Remembering the time one bit off part of another’s ear, I knew how violently territorial they can get–but for the first time I actually saw one work so hard at chasing all those newcomers away that it got slower and slower and finally was too tired to continue.

All for those nasty hot safflower seeds they don’t even like.

I picked all the cherry tomatoes that were big enough to have any chance of ripening off the vine.

Several times of late, too, I’ve seen one stay right there on the patio under the birdfeeder with Coopernicus just feet away, deliberately ignoring him other than quickly flipping around when he changes places so as to always be facing him: he has always come at squirrels from behind where teeth and claws can’t hurt and a tail can’t thwap in his eyes. I have twice seen him strafe them as if to grab but I have never seen him actually intend to catch one.

And clearly they know how he would hunt them. So a few have been brazen enough to dare him to try. They’d be heavy for him to try to lift and away with.

Remember, though, that female Cooper’s hawks are about a third larger than the males and that we now have a mated pair.

I have no way to know which it was.

I guess Wednesday’s rat tasted good.

I guess someone wanted a bigger helping.

This morning I woke up to soft tufts of fur right outside the door that I don’t let the squirrels get close to: black, a bit of gray, one bit of white–belly fur. Having gone there, it had had no room to escape.

It took about an hour before it even occurred to me to override the no’s from all the childhood parental rules about touching wild things much less from dead wild things and to tell myself, Listen: you’re a fiber artist. You’ve wanted for years to stroke their fur and see if it’s actually soft and now you not only can, you can spin it!

There’s about enough to make a shawl for a squirrel. A small squirrel.

And it is very, very, soft. I finally know.

(And then after gathering it into a jar I washed my hands thoroughly, twice. My Mom and Dad read this blog. Just sayin’.)

Coopernicus swooped in around lunchtime, perched on the lawn mower handle and communed with me a few minutes and allowed me to admire him up close.

Right when I needed it in my day and right on cue. Time to put down the stupid health insurance company why-are-they-charging-us-out-of-network and just go be one with nature for a moment.

Needed that…

Four o’clock good?

Yes, sure, c’mon by.

And so, curious, I weighed today’s two bags of persimmons. Forty-five pounds? I’d guessed I’d picked and given away about a hundred pounds so far but it looks like it must have been double that.

A crow somewhere unseen was scolding me for that taking as I worked, and I threw a few that had been chowed down on already in an outside bin–and so it begins. The fewer the fruit left, the less danger by mobbing gangs of ravens and their smaller cousins to my hawks later, but man, there was a lot of fruit left. I extended the pole the full twelve feet for the first time (though that does make it harder to avoid snagging leaves) and could have filled many more bags, but it was time to go get Richard.

Still. That’s a whole lot of fruit that won’t rot in their yard, that the crows won’t squawk over, and that will and is being eaten by people.

And that doctor who told me to work on my upper body strength? I am so on it.

A plea: please don’t put out rat poisons where the rodents will get eaten by raptors, who are still  coming off near-extinction from the DDT era. Thanks.

Hope this one was organic. As I typed this afternoon…

Wow! I was on the phone with my dad, watching squirrels ambling in no particular hurry down the fencelines, one near in, two off to the right and out of sight past the cherry tree. (The side of the house cuts off my view from there.)

Then suddenly a rat–a big, fat, round-looking (pregnant or winter-fluffed?) roof rat, endemic around here and they do like to be in high places–appeared on the neighbor’s higher fence to the left, jumped down to mine, and was starting off in the direction yonder bushytails had just declared as safe.

In the daytime? Man those things are brazen.

BAM there was the Cooper’s hawk right on it! Instantly from right where the oblivious squirrels had gone. Must have been in my camphor. The rat jumped back up to the neighbor’s fence as big wings flapped right over it or maybe it was simply Coopernicus pulling up at that intersection but then he wheeled and there he was on the ground in front of my baby Page tree as if to show me, Here, lady, I got it for you. Holding it tight and standing upright to keep away from any teeth or claws, wings mantling fully out to the sides to hide his success from any potential mobbing crows overhead.

I said to Dad again, WOW! as the hawk kept direct eye contact with me his whole time on the ground, his prey succumbing between his talons, watching me tell my father what I’d just seen. I was mentally thanking my parents yet again for teaching their children to appreciate and watch the birds.

Roof rats, though, are prolific non-native pests that decimate bird species here on top of the damage they do to houses and gardens.

“Glad to help you out there, lady, anytime, just, one meal at a time is all,” I laughed telling my neighbor later as she invited him to take them all, help yourself, don’t hold back!

Having shown me he got that one, he was off and away to where the cover from the still-leafy trees would help him keep his meal to himself.

First, a side note to Peter and Terry if you should read this: my father would like to offer you written memories of Marcelline, if only he knew where to send them. If you leave a short hey I’m here in the comments section, your email address will come to me and I will pass it along but it will not show on this site. Thank you so much.

Meantime, hawk sightings nearly every day of late and quite the territorial displays. Glorious. The male flew in next to the window this afternoon and–well, he was saying something right at me, but you’d have to ask him. He seemed to wait for an answer but all I could offer was that I loved having him there.

The crows are staying well clear.

Speaking of which. There are neighbors with a tall old persimmon tree that bears heavily this time of year.

The last year or two, whoever had been helping them harvest didn’t and once the fruit was overripe and grossly sweet, every crow and raven in miles was going at it for several weeks, the whole tree one loud heaving mass of flapping black wings, and when that source was spent they went looking for more to claim in the near vicinity–and they drove out my Cooper’s hawks for a goodly while. Hunting doves is enough work without being constantly mobbed and stolen from.

So I confessed to the one neighbor that I’d had an ulterior motive in asking his wife if they needed help with the picking: I love Hachiya persimmons, and I wanted to thwart those corvids.

Boy were they with me on that one.

And so it was that near dusk today, with their strong encouragement (Please! All you want! Take it! Give lots to your friends!) I went in their back yard and picked a big bag’s worth and then walked from house to house, offering it out.

One took the whole bag. Cool, that works.  I started over.

I was amazed at how tiring picking and carrying the stuff around could be.

They will ripen (they’re almost there), I will puree, and I shall have frozen persimmon for whenever I need a fix out of season. As long as I don’t inflict them on my husband, we’re good.

LauraN’s handknit octopus boogie-boarding a witch’s hat across a beanbag pumpkin.

Costumes were never my strong suit.

I just looked. Point two four inches? How was all that rain only .24″? They were predicting twice that.

Not a single trick-or-treater.

That hapless raccoon. Here comes diabetes in a trash can, ready for the raiding.

TWO! I have *never* seen them hunt in tandem before.

The first hawk swooped down, appearing suddenly from above the awning and right back up above again in a half-circle to herd the prey. Then immediately after a panicked mourning dove bonked its head on the awning and staggered away out of there, the hawk’s mate burst out from among the elephant ears on the patio and after it.

Two! I had no idea the second one was there.

Maybe come spring I’ll finally get to see a Cooper’s fledgling toddling around my amaryllis pots again–it’s been a few years.

Meantime, the baby blanket: it is celebrating Aftober after all. I DID it!!

The pop-tent: one side on the ground, one side not quite and I can’t get it to fold flat anymore, so this is how we got yesterday’s story.

After swooping around the patio, today it was the hawk that landed on the edge of the square tomato cage. Wow, I really wasn’t expecting that.

What I couldn’t see was that he had flushed out a dove and it was now cowering somewhere at the bottom of that pop-tent–or somewhere right around there. The blueberries are in an identical cage next to it with room for me to walk between the two but not for his wide wingspan.

All I knew at first was that he hadn’t caught what he’d gone after and he was standing on that thing and looking at me. My iphone was a short stretch away and while I was debating reaching for the camera vs. scaring him away, he fluttered his wings and released his talons awkwardly from that thing, gripping again and shifting sideways a bit, giving me a good profile view: long and lean and nothing in his crop–he was hungry.

Suddenly he swooped in a very tight circle around that small cage and then again, reaching down into the canyon between with his feet till a flurry of gray suddenly exploded out of there at last in a panic. He was determined not to let it get away this time.

I had not noticed that during this, the neighbor’s very large white-faced black cat had entered the picture and was watching the show at the end of their fence at the T-intersection where it suddenly drops down a foot to mine.

And the mourning dove was going straight for that cat.

Wait, what? I mean, I know doves are hardly the smartest, but…!

Just as the three of them intersected visually from where I was sitting there was an explosion of small feathers and at first I wasn’t sure if the cat had taken a swipe or if the hawk had grabbed for it but from the trajectory as they poofed backwards not sideways, it had to have been the hawk. The dove still had its flight feathers and was using them for all it was worth but the hawk was right there closing the last of the gap.

And then they disappeared over the fenceline straight past the cat’s nose, so as usual, I got all the drama and none of the gore but thankfully the cat could only say the same.

The bottom photo here: note that there are two different sizes and thicknesses of birdnetting there. That’s where they meet.

The side of the house cuts off most of my view of the tomato cage (and cage it is) unless I get up from here and walk to the far side of the room to look across thataway.

But one small finch trying to perch on the near edge of it caught my peripheral vision and my attention: birds don’t usually land there. It shifted over to the metal pole bordering the thing where its feet could at least grip far more easily than directly on the netting but it would not leave.

Turned out (when I got to the window) there were three or four more–this was highly unusual–and they were on the pop-up, which has no such metal resting spots.

When I had the flu, the tomatoes got their second wind and started blooming and producing all over again: that one slug I’d killed must have been devouring every flower for over a month. But since I wasn’t paying much attention while I was sick in bed, the stalks grew outside the netting and there was no good way to scoot the flowers safely back inside without risking breaking them off.

I had that pop-up birdnetting tent that I had written off as a bad investment: the bottom edges could not be secured and the birds kept getting in down there and stuck. Pretty useless when the whole idea is to keep critters out.

But hey. If I leaned the thing all flattened out against those new tomatoes and their square cage, that would work.

And so I did.

Five nights into this a raccoon pulled the tent over on its head. Eating the plastic clamshell on the apple tree, falling as it broke 2/3 of the young peach tree off trying to climb it (and still not getting the peaches), pulling the tableful of clay pots down on its head–that raccoon’s had it rough here this season.

The tomatoes were left untouched. I put the tent back and the raccoon has now been leaving it alone.

But I couldn’t get it to go entirely flat again. Almost but not quite. I could only hope it wouldn’t trap anything.

House finches are a squabbly lot. They play king of the mountain, they attack and peck and keep their fellows away from the best perch or sometimes any perch on the feeder, guarding and owning it all unless a bigger bird lands. MINE! They will often chase each other around and around the base of the platform feeder despite there being plenty for all.

And yet. They flock.

This afternoon one small finch wandered in at ground level and got caught inside that unwanted sliver of space within that leaning birdnetted pop-up. She was desperate to fly out the top. Which she could not do.

Those other finches had felt compelled to leave the feeders to flock with her in her extremity. They were forsaking food at a time when the area was hawk-free to go over to where she would have the comfort of their presence close by, even when it was uncomfortable for their feet or at least difficult to hold onto after landing.

That first finch got my attention but the fact that there were others tipped me off. I went outside, sun or no sun, knowing it would just take me seconds, and I tipped that tent.

Her instinctive need to escape up was tempered by the fact that I was now towering over her and so down she went to get away from me–and at last discovered the opening at the bottom.

I have never heard finch wings so close nor so loud as she beat it out of there at the speed of predator evasion. I marveled at the sound. (I still do that. A year and a half later I’m still hearing new things with these better hearing aids and I love it.)

Of all the species of birds that come to my feeders, it is these that squabble the most over what seems such dumb stuff to me that are the ones that are the most steadfast in looking out for their peers in their moment of need.

Writing it in case I need to look up later what which when: the antibiotics aren’t quite enough on that cystitis yet (but far better than not having them), while the Crohn’s tries to hog the attention. I think I need to move up that GI appointment.

And so: I put my feet up and got 21 rows of 189 stitches done so far today.

I happened to be outside for just a few steps’ worth when I saw, ascending above me and then very high, not one but two hawks. Definitely not turkey vultures but hawks. Gliding on the thermals, circling away and then back around to each other in an intricate dance, and if I had wondered at all if Coopernicus still had the mate I saw him courting in February that definitely seems to be a yes.

In several minutes’ watching there was one single leisurely wingbeat to catch the best of an updraft as they gradually spiraled into the distance.

Then this evening I went out to water the pear tree. Coming out the door, I glanced at the neighbor’s redwood: it and the silk oak just past the other side of our property are the two that the ravens and the hawks are always duking it out over.

No sign of any bird at all.

The pear was near the silk oak and as I approached, again, all was still, just leaves in the breeze. There’s almost always something up there but–

–and then a burst of movement from fairly low down and close by as the Cooper’s hawk cakked at me for invading as it stormed out of there.

Surprisingly soon a mockingbird, and then a second mockingbird, flew onto the telephone wire across the fence at a third neighbor’s, watching me, tails set towards where the hawk had gone–I seemed to be more interesting, but they were not ready to sing yet. (I was remembering the night when one had been singing relentlessly in hopes of a mate and so, window open, Richard had sung a song back at it. Birdly silence as it listened, and then–it sang his tune back to him!)

Wait–I forgot to sing to them to get them going. Well then.

Another half a minute of watching them and me and then finally convinced it was safe, a raven, one single raven, suddenly flew from behind the mockingbirds, giving the most subdued half-hearted single caw I have ever heard out of one of them. It was going sideways from the trajectory of the Accipiter Cooperii to arc around my yard, not quite directly over, flapping hard while heading towards that redwood now that it knew that the hawk would not be there to challenge it. See?! King of the mountain! So there!

Hawks glide smoothly even when their wings are going. Corvids’ bodies kind of bounce up as their wings go down and slump down as they lift their shoulders up for the next beat as if they’re just barely keeping this heavy thing airborne.

Airdancing this morning, make-a-break-for-it dancing in the evening. And even though the raven would tell you the results are up in the air, he was just winging it. The hawks are definitely the more talon-toed.

Going to Wikipedia I discover that another name for our Chinese elm is Lacebark elm. Who knew. How perfect for a knitter’s home. I’d have taken a photo of the trunk earlier if I’d known–but I can definitely say that that name fits.

But what started all this was an odd enough sight that I stopped and simply watched for awhile: five squirrels and surely more where I couldn’t see, all hanging upside down with the ends of their tails just barely wrapped around the branch above them, hanging onto the very flimsiest of limbs. In tandem. Three of them in this shot. The one in the foreground pulled his head up when I pulled the camera out.

They were reaching for the very ends of the twigs and bending them back towards them, working rapidly through the small flowers.

But they didn’t seem to be eating the flowers, rather, pushing their noses side to side through them: they were searching for the bugs that seemed to be hiding in them. Every now and then one would pull itself triumphantly upright hand over careful hand, one paw, a second, a third, a fourth, rock-climbing the air back to a steadier spot. Wait oh whoops! Almost! as a fragile twig broke off and fell below while the thing scrambled wildly.

But a big black beetle. Now, that was worth sitting up in a good spot where you could enjoy it with two paws free to hold it as you bite off the best parts first.

I’ve seen those bugs. The past few Octobers, they’ve come down through the heating vents (they seem to only fall, not fly) trying to find a good place to overwinter. They have no business being inside my house. (To everyone back East dealing with their cousins the invasive stink bugs that also like to come in in the Fall, I know I really have nothing to complain about, but I still don’t like them.)

This year, though, the furnace and the damaged, gaping ductwork across the roof have been replaced. (Thank you Joe Lerma!) The trees have been cut back from over the house. If a bug gets shaken loose it will fall to the ground outside where it belongs.

The squirrels are getting all the bugs. They’re not in my house anymore and it is Fall again and they’re not coming back in.

I cannot tell you how wonderful that is.

I had to go outside today and look up: yeah, we did cut that thing way back but I guess the raccoon could still have fallen out of that tree onto the house but he really would have had to work at it. Was he dodging a large owl?

Or more likely feasting on the big black beetles that settle in on the undersides of the leaves this time of year and just stepped a little too far out on a thin limb and scrambled for the roof rather than the ground. I’ve seen the squirrels the last few days stroking the leaves and then grabbing and munching the bugs before they can escape, so I know they’re there.

But whatever, there was a tremendous crash right overhead 11:30 last night followed by a wild clumpy skittering.

Woke up to raccoon prints on the skylight–well that settles it. Rocky Raccoon meets She Came In (not!) Through The Bathroom Window.

Y’know, this is probably the same raccoon that pulled my tableful of heavy clay tomato pots down on its head, that ate, not just chewed but ate an apple-sized chunk out of a plastic clamshell and then the Fuji apple inside. And never, ever touched another one again.

I think this one’s not too bright.

The hawk flew in yesterday to within ten feet from my face in a mad pursuit, and then, having lost its prey somewhere in the elephant ears, it landed right there, looking for that wayward breakfast wherediditgo. He glanced over his shoulder at me, we looked each other in the eye and I apologized, nope, I don’t have it, sorry for disturbing you. (I’d half-stood to see over the window ledge. That probably wasn’t too bright. He took off.)

Today he swooped into the olive tree, gave the yard a thorough looking-over and then dove straight down below the roofline and straight at me–and then pulled hard straight up again to surprise whatever was there. Probably a dove on the ham radio antenna.

I later saw two ravens passing overhead in a hurry and heard not crow nor raven but, from the other side of the house (thank you Oticon hearing aids and Kim and my son for the bird-sounds book!) the distinct call of a Cooper’s hawk on full territorial alert: And STAY out!

While I quietly got almost two more repeats done on the blanket. My grandsons arrived early. I expect their sister will too. Making good time.

I would make her a bird afghan if I didn’t know how much fun a baby would have pulling the intarsia apart. Maybe a dress next with a single wren motif on it.

With thanks to Lisa Souza for that title. Love that colorway.

Got up early this morning and maybe I surprised them.

There was a swoop and a flash of large tail and so I sat down to watch a moment. A finch had hit the window in a panic and was cowering in the elephant ears.

Another swoop back the other way. And then suddenly a third and out of here–followed by a wheeling around from out of nowhere (how did a big black thing like that hide?!) somewhere in the neighbor’s tall trees and then a second, likewise wingtip to wingtip ground to air and turning on a dime: two ravens, trying to steal from the Cooper’s hawk, who’d gotten a good head start on them.

They knew he’d had a successful hunt, even if I didn’t.

Coopernicus had staked out the birdfeeder and they had staked out him. Through those trees and away for all they were worth.

I was typing away, the afternoon nearly gone, Richard off to the office for a meeting and just me at home in the quiet house.

Motion with a hint of size caught at my peripheral vision. Oh I hope! Knowing to move slowly, I reached for my glasses, put them on, and turned carefully sideways.

The low light didn’t do his coloration justice but it was enough.

The vertical beam between windows half hid him, as raptors prefer. It was the Cooper’s hawk, now perched on the handle of the dolly that’s been left just on the other side of the window from the couch specifically for him.

He–and by those long lean lines and smaller size he was most definitely male–watched me and allowed me and stayed. We took each other in. I had needed it and he had come and he allowed me to love him all the more for it for at least a full minute.

And then in easy leisure he spread his great striped wings and with no particular speed–and believe me Coopernicus can speed–he flew away in curving sweeps that let me follow his going all the longer.

(There are photos of him on it from earlier this year here.)

When my daughter moved to Alaska I wished I knew more about the place and my brother-in-law suggested I read James Michener’s “Alaska.”

Being sick is a good time to catch up on reading and I am finally plowing through it, even if it’s as endless as the coastline of that state. I like that at the front he has a list of, this is historical, this is fiction.

But man oh man he drives me crazy. Describing the Great Hunt that nearly exterminated the species, I want  to tell him, river otters wouldn’t have seven foot long pelts, dude, are you crazy? They’re cute little things. It would be quite a stretch for sea otters for that matter. If you didn’t ever go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, couldn’t you at least have cracked open an old-school encyclopedia? Then, oh oops, mid-chapter he switches the description of what they’re hunting to sea otter without mentioning it and river otters are never heard from again.

Wikipedia on Sea otters: here. 

And river otters: here.

History is his thing, and he does give a lot of it.

But Michener’s character development too has had me going Nah AH a few times and actually laughing out loud this evening. C’mon, how is this supposed to be believable? Sorry, but if a woman (an Aleut) was sold into slavery and then repeatedly (he describes it most delicately) gang-raped and beaten and later one of the thugs wants to marry her to keep him from being shipped to certain never-to-return well north of the Artic Circle, having her faint in ecstacy at the preaching of the Russian Orthodox priest, making it so she willingly saves her primary tormentor’s soul (after having gotten away from him for a good long time) by marrying him and entering a life of saved Christian bliss while with that conversion severing from her life the shaman who had been her life support through all her trials because he was of the wrong religion now–James, James, honey, it just ain’t happenin’ for me.

Haven’t gotten to the end of the chapter yet but she did turn her back on her people and did marry the evil man she’d so hated. I’m hoping for a better ending on that particular subplot.

But what Michener did do was make me want to go sort out more details on what actually did happen then between the Russians and the Aleuts and all the other countries that in the 1700s were trying to move in on the lucrative otter pelt trade while claiming territory.  Yes, the Russians did enslave and kill many of the Aleuts. Not just the animals.

Not only did they nearly exterminate a keystone species in the marine ecosphere, the author says that 70% of the otters the white man shot simply vanished down into the ocean before they could get to it, destroyed and gone.

Now that I believe.

We’re still working on recovering that species. We’ve got a ways to go. A bad die-off a few years ago made headlines when they said toxoplasmosis from house cats finding its way down to the coastline was the culprit, and they were working on it.

Well, that’s one for the history books.