The sun was almost gone. I stepped out the door to go water my tomatoes and blueberries.

A young dove was at the edge of the patio maybe six feet from me quietly pecking away below the feeder, but at my movement jumped off and waddled a few steps away in the yard, and then, with a better trajectory to the safety of the skies should it be needed, turned back to see. Feederfiller?

I played the blinking game. Predators are the ones who stare.

It went Oh okay, then, and did a little hop back up onto the patio towards me and resumed eating.

A finch flew in but flinched when I moved–and I heard the metal perch groan softly as the little bird’s weight left it. That has a sound? Who knew? The finch chirped a small scold as it left, and I heard that, too.  I wanted to hear it all.

A chickadee darted in briefly to the suet cage above my head as I continued to hold still, and then I carefully walked in a wide, slow path around the dove so as not to startle it away. Having begun to make friends from the same side of the glass at last, it seemed to me that the next time I might want to pull up a chair at my zero-UV hour with some sunflower seeds in my hand. Maybe, just maybe.

But for now I had to take care of my plants, too, before it got too dark to see that beautiful first blush of red on that plum out there.

There’s an old family tease as the siblings in both our families moved around early in their careers of, “I don’t see how you can live in such a dangerous place…”

Drab dry California-summer hills nearby, birds that blend into them… and every now and then something with color pops up. The chest on this one is bright orange in the sun.

I only get to see black headed grosbeaks a few times a year and it’s been a treat to have this one hanging around under the olive tree the last three days.

The plums and Yellow Transparent apples are growing fast with harvest next month. Then come the peaches, more apples, and the blueberries seem to just be nonstop…

Meantime, I stumbled across a pair of photos someone took today near where my brother lives–I was checking the Denver weather reports after his county had a tornado warning. Click on the one on the left to get the full effect of those tennis-ball-sized hailstones. Yow.

I’d smirk, because, you know, little sisters do that sort of thing, but you know I’d get thwacked with an earthquake if I did.

Another Mother’s Day photo to show off.

In peregrine news: last week the two San Jose females accidentally bumped their brothers off the ledge early. Both got an elevator ride to the roof for a do-over and both are flying well now and getting past the stage of trying to grab the side of the building with their feet on the way down.

Today, the first female took a good flight herself and landed on an outside stairway. Then, as if she’d forgotten she’d just used these flappy flappy things attached to her and they’d actually worked, she walked–!–up five flights of stairs. Just like any baby can go up them before they can go down, but, still.

Later the last eyas finally flew, too. And she hiked up the stairs like her sister.

So far it looks like we will have all four survive this year.

The San Francisco trio (their fourth died early) are about a week behind ours.

And then an old friend shared a link to a peregrine cam in Salt Lake City today. Wait–this one’s in color and the image is sharper. And it has audio! More firsts on the list of things newly heard: babies screeching and parents soothing and I’d had no idea they sounded like the sounds that keep coming out of my speakers, I’d only ever heard the parents’ strident defending of their young mid-air. This is so different. Almost like a cat purring, at times.

It is amazing how many of the city sounds below the cam picks up, too, including, at one point, a siren going by.

Given where that cam is, if anybody calls for an ambulance in the building my parents now live in, if that cam’s running and that tab is open on my computer I’ll be able to hear it.

Who knew a peregrine falcon cam could play kind of a backup Life Alert for senior parents. Mind. Blown. (Oh hi, Mom! Hi, Dad!)

I had tomato seedlings disappearing. Poof.

The clue fairy finally struck. And so last night I shook out a little Sluggo, organic-gardening-friendly anti-slug pellets that promise to poison only snails and slugs and simply be iron to fertilize your trees. No harm to animals or birds.

One more seedling disappeared last night and one more looked like it had lost one and a half of its two leaves, a sad little sight I had seen again and again. But it was a whole lot better than having half a dozen plants gone in a night.

But the others! These things have just been sitting there not growing for two weeks despite water, sun, soil, even a record-breaking heat wave, just holding still staying the sprouts Janice had gifted me with. It was bizarre.

But this evening when I checked they had a second pair of leaves and of a good size, even–all in one day! As if they were completely different plants, twice the size, twice the leaves, even the stalks were thicker.  And yet it had been a fairly cool day.

All they’d needed was a good night’s sleep and a good day’s work.

It had been the snails all along eating the new growth each night on every single one–of the ones that had survived their destruction. Wow. And gee thanks to whoever released his French escargot to the wild in the 1800s that then took over the whole of California, I mean, gosh, gee, who could resist such tasty land lobsters, there must have been such a market.

Not.

I had an older store-bought plant ripening its first tomato yesterday and last night a raccoon or possum reached right under the NuVue pop up tent and stole it. (Hah! Amazon has stopped selling this one because of complaints.) I had worried ever since mine had arrived that they could.

For the record, mine came broken like some of the reviewers there complained about (wish I’d read those earlier) but it was usable, if lopsided, so I set it up anyway. I rather wish I had not.  I now have an ad hoc collection of whatevers on it trying to hold down those edges to protect the rest.

My blueberries, on the other hand, are under a Gardman Fruit Cage, which has a pipe across the bottom holding the netting down via the entire structure of the thing, and the worst that’s happened was one cane poked through the netting and an animal pulled it farther and snarfed all the berries and leaves thereon. I tucked it back in.

Time to use up a gift certificate and order another Gardman.

And on a lighter note: squirrels? Or the loud, marauding ravens that took over the neighbors’ garden during their two-week vacation?  (They just got back.)

I went to fill the birdfeeder first thing yesterday morning when I found this just outside the door.

Oleander does not grow in my yard nor on my block that I know of and I have no idea where it came from. It’s highly poisonous, and we have young families around. I know we ripped ours out when we bought this place when our kids were small.

But there it was, backdoorstep delivery. A flower. I was charmed. (Watch that suet cage, they’re venturing into hawk territory now, you know they’re going to try for it.)

Hey, tell Parker: there’s a new kind of digger!

There were a few tomato pots where the seedlings simply vanished.

And then… I found a tomato seedling, couldn’t be anything but, planted quite nicely in an amaryllis pot  a few feet away.

Can squirrels really carry such a tender thing gently enough? Their digging ability can never be doubted, I mean, there’s a lizard species that depends on them to get past the hardpack. Look Ma, no teeth! Who knew. The thing looked quite happy there.

I scooped it out anyway and put it back where it wouldn’t compete with my bulb.

And there was a safflower sprout via my birdfeeder a dozen feet away growing in another tomato pot, the little farmer. Okay, out you go.

On the peregrine falcon front: it’s supposed to be a few more days before fledging, but one of the females turned and bumped her brother off the low ledge today when he hadn’t even made the hop-and-flight yet to the upper one to see the world in that direction for the first time. (Here’s his more antsy brother in a video from sunrise this morning.) He didn’t fly really but gently coasted, landing straight below the 18th floor nestbox. Safe!

And so Glenn Stewart, the biologist in charge, drove an hour from UC Santa Cruz, got the baby-in-the-box from wildlife services, went up on the roof and put the little guy up there where his parents would keep feeding him as he got the hang of this flying thing. Glenn wasn’t about to rappell a floor down City Hall to the box with the parents going for his head like he does during banding, the eyas just needed a little more time where humans couldn’t reach it.

Clara and Fernando didn’t even react with more than a glance to the familiar face that stayed further away this time. Oh, it’s you. Carry on.

(p.s. And on a happy for her, sad for us note, Nathania is devoting herself fulltime to her yoga business and letting the others carry on at Purlescence.  She will be much missed.)

Got a few Mother’s Day pictures to show off.

Got to watch the Bewick’s wren babies being fed by a parent again today–and now they can fly up as well as down. Solitary most of the year, interacting as a family now and I love it.

Saw a junco yesterday flapping madly as it descended onto the box but it didn’t know about this tuck your wings in thing and found itself lifted right back up in the air again and oh oops how do you stop these things? Bouncy bouncy bounce.

It’s the landing that’s the part they have to learn. Playing in the light and the air comes naturally.

Interviewer: so what is your take on global warming?

Guest: Well, in the San Francisco area, the fog is traditionally supposed to come in on *little* cat feet, but…

CUT!

A mountain lion was spotted trotting through the park yesterday and down a congested street in a highly populated area.

Details are a little squirrelly, but note that it came within a few blocks of where President Obama will be speaking Friday. Peace officers were watching it like a hawk but deemed its actions not a capital crime. Was it flushed out by Secret Service members trolling for cougars during advance staging? Some may find it hard to stomach that the animal may be in Limbaugh at the moment (there’s certainly no lion under oaf) but plans seem to be to release it in the Santa Cruz mountains, because, hey, that’s where commie pinkos Neil Young and Joan Baez both live, right? (Unseen from off camera: Now, now, let’s make a Concerted effort to Bridge over our differences. Yes? Gracias a la vida!)

Announcer, continuing: Cat’ll Rove pounced on the story. Next on Coyote News, where the only legitimate predator is our species, not theirs. Top of the food-fighting yank-your-chain and bringing you the latest.

All that lion knows is it’s going to wake up in some other cat’s territory and there will be a whelp of a lot of explaining to do.

(But seriously, to our relatives in Los Gatos, which means, yes, The Cats, and everybody else up there–keep an eye out and stay safe, y’all.)

And we had banding day in San Jose Friday at the peregrine falcon nest: two males, two females and happy fledging to all three weeks from now. San Francisco has three eyases, a bit younger than ours, to be banded this coming week.

John’s video, including footage from biologist Glenn Stewart’s helmet cam. At the three minute mark you get an eyas looking straight at you for their closeup.

Eric’s photos and videos taken from the top of the city garage fourteen stories below looking up and watching that long careful descent from the roof to reach the nest (yow), the parents zooming at the intruder. Remember that peregrines have been clocked diving at 241 mph–and they were not happy.

Link to the live cam feed is here.

While over at our house, I set out crumbles of a suet-peanut-insect mix yesterday, saw a tiny Bewick’s wren swoop in to grab some, and then watched as it flew to the top of the shed and fed a newly-fledged baby. Came back for more and then quickly back to a second chick, which had been quietly waiting its turn.

The peregrine came back from near extinction. Outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, my favorite little wren has yet to make that turnaround.

Doing my small part.

There you go, that’s a better picture of the color of the hat: the morning sun bouncing off the San Francisco fog with the trees below.

Meantime, the cinnamon sticks disappeared. No crumbles, no shards, gone. Huh. The cinnamon branch against the peach tree was left untouched but above it one of those sticks had been jammed between clamshells where the squirrels couldn’t reach it even if they’d suddenly stopped avoiding the stuff. No sign.

I finally got it: birds’ nests.

I wonder if they had any way to intuit that the non-native cinnamon would keep mites and ants away from their babies? Squirrels will line their nests with bay leaves to keep fleas away if they’re lucky enough to find any.

Or maybe they just were attracted to the size and shape and color and smoothness and light weight.  I don’t know.

Meantime, after very rarely ever seeing a single one, (like, twice, I think) –but I don’t think it was the cinnamon that called them–today I had a flock of fourteen elegant birds crowding the patio. They dwarfed the mourning doves, who kept well clear. According to Sibley, band-tailed pigeons are 13 oz to our Cooper’s hawk’s 16 oz–they are big. Beaks with a bit of a curve downward with dark coloring at the tip rather like a hawk’s. Cool.

They were skittish and didn’t stay long (Don’t move! You moved!) and I got no pictures, but, wow, my birdfeeder has never seen the like. (And no you can’t land on it–one tried.)

The third thing. I got the call from the UCSF researcher and we finished up our annual lupus survey but just before she could go I told her what I had done.

She was stunned. She was thrilled, and she loved that the color matched where she worked. She was so excited for her mom to be getting that soft chemo cap made just for her and she completely made my day by how grateful she was–she has no way to know how many more people will get knitting done for them rather than just thought about after she so thoroughly fed my soul in those moments.

After I hung up that did it: I sat down and undid the last ten rows and redid them to take out that one single non-decrease row right there that was making the back poof out funny. Yes it did. Out it goes. Should have made them all decrease rows as of one step sooner. Now it’s nice and rounded off at the top the way it needed to be and now it’s good enough for her mom and now it’s reblocked and tomorrow, now that it’s perfect, tomorrow it goes out in the mail.

It’s amazing the difference one single step can make.

Look! A clamshell tree in full fruit! Eighteen, I think, many covering more than one plum. It does give an interesting visual of the pattern of where the fruit set: the tree bloomed during a series of downpours and the center was clearly the most protected from washing out.

There would be just a few more clamshells if I had them, but the critters haven’t found all the uncovered fruit–yet. The diurnal ones will the moment a touch of color gives them away against the green background. For now, without sweetness to add to the temptation, it was probably an extra disincentive to have a few branches collapse and drop the raccoon to the ground last week.

XKCD shows how we could get young people with really good sound systems in their cars to helpfully distract the squirrels and crows away to the street.

Actually, what I really should do is buy a motion-detector-activated sprinkler system set to go off at night.  Our neighbors who once gave us 40 lbs of plums from their stately old tree before we planted our own say theirs works (and clearly, it does.) It’s just the $8888/pair/on sale hearing aids vs the chances of a good dousing that gives me pause there.  Not to mention I can just picture Richard waking up to the sounds of zapped scavengers at dark o’clock.

Hmm. Yes? No?

And we are back in peregrine nesting season, with four one-week-old eyases (chicks) on San Jose City Hall and, as of today, four hatched in San Francisco.

Momma Clara feeding the little ones here.
Huh. Hmm. Blog’s being wonky after an updating, okay, the URL is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLBgR_GxZiE&feature=youtu.be and sorry it’s not linking.

We will find out the male/female ratio at banding.

Another 4:47 am alarm and off to the airport again–only, no baby snuggles this time, just a fly-in fly-out bleary-eyed business trip for him and now home.

As I wonder what I forgot to pack for tomorrow.

Meantime, the last few nights a raccoon (I think–possums don’t jump, right?) has been getting up on the wooden box and shoving the plywood cover and the 2x2s supporting it partly aside to get at the leftover suet crumbles. It hasn’t gotten the cover all the way off yet, but it’s tried. One of these times it’s going to push a 2×2 out and smash its paws, which is the last thing I want; I’ve moved the things further under to where they’re less accessible in hopes of the animal not getting hurt.

The Bewick’s wrens like to dart into the tight space under that cover (why I keep that box) and it is the one place I can feed that endangered species where the other birds can’t or won’t go and I wanted to be able to set out food to last them while I’m gone.

There is now a full gallon of water sitting on that cover. Maybe those seven pounds will outwrestle the critter.

Yarn to take, yarn to take, between projects, I have no idea what yarn to take. Pattern, idea, I need something! I’m thinking I’m probably not going to be cone-iverous, though; that bit of cardboard would be one extra thing to squeeze in. Plain old prewound wool.

I have time to decide in the light of the morning.

After all that rejoicing over all those things I was hearing for the first time since I was twelve after getting the latest-and-greatest hearing aids a year ago, all of that was starting to quietly…fade. I was loathe to admit it. I was still occasionally picking up sounds I didn’t used to but I was often having a hard time hearing ordinary conversations again. It was quite discouraging.

When I got them I was used to soft earmolds, and the new ones, given that they had electronics in the molds as well as the main part, were hard. My connective tissue disease responds to pressure as pain and the hard ones soon hurt, so John-the-audiologist had to make the molds shorter–which meant I heard less and they fed back more but at least it left me knowing that someday they could make them longer in a material I could tolerate better and I would hear even better come the day. Something to look forward to.

But not if my hearing itself was going down again. And feedback can cause that.

Two weeks ago it finally dawned on me that this past year of finally, finally, slowly getting my weight back (due to the funky thyroid) from my big Crohn’s flare of ’09–maybe that was the problem with the hearing. One changes weight in the face and the ear canals first when the pounds go up or down and it changes how sound is transmitted. It was worth a shot. Ten pounds? John totally confirmed the possibility. So I went in.

This time I’m used to using the harder-material earmolds and this time I know to put them in and leave them alone, no fiddling, do nothing to irritate.

John did the impressions, he sent them off, the new molds came back and we chose to try for longer again. Yay! I went back to get them last Thursday glad they’d come just in time to be able to hear Parker and Hudson so much better…

…And the right one broke in the technician’s hand as she was affixing it, to her great surprise.

It was okay, though. I meant I went off to see the grandkids with one ear much louder, hearing all kinds of new things again, and the other ear not–giving me extra time to adjust to the EVERYTHING IS SO LOUD changes.

I got to hear Hudson saying Yawrrr at twelve months after the pirate book reading. How perfect is that!

There is still some small chance the replaced earmold will come tomorrow, before I fly off to a memorial concert in honor of my late Uncle David. (Just me this trip.) Either way: it is enough.

And what got me to sit down and write all this. I was watering my blueberry bushes this evening when a seagull passed at a goodly height overhead, its cry faint in the distance.

I knew it instantly. And almost as instantly I realized that I only recognized the sound from my childhood. After all these years I was finally gull-ible again. Wow. And it’s going to get even better.

One other thing. Being too cheap to pay Turbotax the $25 for submitting the state taxes over the ‘net, I went to the post office today. There is a place where the Bayshore parkland lies just past the next road, where, as I sat at my light, there were two lanes of onramps to the side and nine lanes of freeway behind, cars, cars, cars, and tucked between the ramps and me was an oasis of a triangled culvert.

Green and lush in a way few places are in the drought we’ve been in and with a bit of water at the bottom. Overflow from the marsh starting at the other side of the road ahead, it seemed.

The most magnificently colorful duck dove in there, too fast to be sure what type.

And I looked across at the wetlands ahead and the mountains away on the other side of the Bay and this one little wildlife-sustaining spot of thick and thriving and green despite all that hedged it in and thought, Nature adores a backroom.

Have you ever read something so good, so powerful, and so important that you immediately wanted everybody else to read it? And it’s not just for children–it’s for all of us.

Meantime, on a totally different note, lesson learned: a big heavy empty glass jar of peanut butter put outside for the squirrels to clean up for recycling is a hoot to watch, but the small plastic one? Not so much. One good taste and the thing knew he had to hide this treasure immediately and it was small enough that he could. Amazingly fast with it up the tree, across the shed roof, and maybe leaping to the redwood from there? Blink and he was gone. I really didn’t want him stowing plastic.

He’s just lucky he let go when the raven spotted it. I found it half-floating in the rainwater at the curb in front of the house, one long viciously-stabby black beak deep inside, a scavenger hunt won and not a bushytail in sight daring to challenge.

So that’s why it swooped across my yard…. They never come here.

We don’t feed ravens. They harass my hawk. And now that that one knows what the stuff in there tastes like, no more squirrels sneaking up on each other’s exposed backsides and wild leaps away. No more peanut butter jars.

(To the neighbors: I’m sorry I put it out there. It was wrong to have my trash show up in the street we share. In the future I will stick to birdseed. And hopefully you didn’t see that.)