Swooping in an arc around the patio, and suddenly it was across the yard, having grabbed a small bite on the fly as a second finch hid stock still in the elephant ears. A few hours later something again caught my eye and I looked up: it somehow did a hairpin turn right in the olive tree and away. Whoosh!

A Cooper’s hawk in flight is like time personified: when you’re paying rapt attention, the moment stretches  from here to forever, and yet look away and it’s gone. How on earth do they go that fast? It’s like the speed at which little kids grow up. After they grow up.

I counted fourteen mourning doves under the birdfeeder this evening, a huge number; usually there’s just a few. I wondered if I wasn’t the only one noticing.

Richard was home when together we looked up to see the hawk do a loop clear around the awning pole–and then he looped again!

Silly bird. Don’t you know that if you cast on with an e-wrap the length between loops gets longer and longer as you knit across the first row?

Three days ago, the male scrub jay was raiding suet constantly, flying to his mate, and feeding her often and conspicuously, owning the porch to the yard to that part of the trees. All others must fear the stabby beaks–even the squirrels.

It has been clear that the Cooper’s hawk too of late has been making clear announcements of his territory, as raptors do around equinox and solstice; I haven’t seen him much, and his mate not at all anymore, but the sudden long disappearances of all other birds have been frequent the last week or so.

It was startling to have no jays yesterday morning. None. No sign. I could offer up any kind of food and it wasn’t taken, or at least not by them. I could actually have juncos and towhees come, unthreatened.

There was a sudden jet-scrambling flurry of finches–Coopernicus had been spotted, even if I couldn’t see him.

And then I watched something I’ve never seen before. He did a glide across the yard, as always, and then suddenly pulled straight upright in front of a tree thick with leaves: wings flared like a butterfly and standing vertical in the air, he feinted right, then left, then right again, trying to flush prey out.

While I wondered, how did he DO that?

Then he settled on a bare upper branch a moment and eyed the porch. And me just inside of it. Eh. No time for this, I need lunch, and he glided in a blink towards the redwood and was gone.

About two hours later a jay came back. A second hung far back but there it was, and when they left, they were fleeing to several backyards away rather than watching me for when they could make their move.

I knew the hawk had gotten a taste for jay. I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath for them.

Lemon juice with pears sounded kinda boring, and I wasn’t inspired by it enough to brave the thorns on the lemon tree in the dark. My mom once created a pear-lime pie that won a recipe contest, but there were no limes around. (Gotta get me a tree for that…)

But the idea of sour to balance the intense sweetness of the ripe Bartletts that needed to be used up got me thinking. Yes we did still have cranberries in the freezer. I was curious. And so:

——————

Pear Cranberry Pecan Crisp

2 c quick-cooking oats

~2/3 c brown sugar or to taste

most of a stick of (butter would be better, but for the dairy allergy in the household, I used) Earth Balance, melted

Shakes of cinnamon to taste

about 1/2 c pecan pieces

4 large ripe Bartlett pears, sliced up

About a half cup cranberries. Note that mine were still frozen. I think next time I would mix the cranberries and brown sugar separately before throwing it all together.

Bake in a buttered or cooking-sprayed 13×9 pan at 350 for about 35 min, maybe 40, depending on oven and pan: I waited till the cranberries were split open and cooked to early-mushy-looking; the edges of the pan should be good and bubbling.

——————–

I thought I was making breakfast last night when I did this but there was only a very little left by the time we three went to bed. It is safe to say we were very pleased with how it came out.

And on the wildlife front? I set out some suet crumbles this afternoon for the juncos and towhees that don’t care for the safflower in the feeders. A birdy-looking version of crisp, I found myself musing.

A jay showed up to steal the last big clump.

I ignored it. It had probably already gotten the rest of it when I wasn’t looking anyway. Go ahead, stare at me, I know the hawk has recently gotten a taste for jay meat–you’re letting down your guard, you know, you’ve got your face to the window.

Hey! You’re no fun! You’re supposed to shoo me away! It stared, just in front of the food but not touching it, waiting the signal.

All it got was a smile out of me. No, really, I wasn’t trying to feed it to the hawk, I was just curious how long it would take for it to give up and just grab it and go.

Now, one birding site I recently read claimed that scrub jays have a bigger brain ratio and are smarter than squirrels: they not only hide food for the winter, they remember forever where every single morsel went (which is why the squirrels watch the jays. A little thievery between friends.) And so, like the squirrels, you can never set out enough to make the jays be satisfied, despite the fact that in our climate there’s abundant food year-round. Hoarding is in their biology.

I knew it wasn’t hungry. Eh, what’s a little suet between friends. Go ahead. I went back to what I was doing.

It kept waiting for me like a little puppy pleading with me to play the game. Oh, finally, okay, and I waved my arms to give it the good scarecrow try. And at that, it at last scooped up that beckoning beakful, just to let me know it was still the one in charge around here, and flew off satisfied at last.

Glad to oblige.

You just missed it, I told Richard this morning; the hawk just chased thataway. (Gorgeous picture at the link. Feather–and fan, said the knitter.)

Kissed him goodbye, walked back in here, and a minute or two later, there it was coming back again, swooping past the porch in front of me and rising up into the olive tree, wings and tail wide. I guess catching breakfast on the fly hadn’t quite worked the first time.

It observed my typing awhile.

Equinox is when day and night are equal; solstice, the shortest or longest day of the year. Next week is fall equinox and I always see Coopernicus more when the season draws close to those four times. It affirms its territory, it claims its place in the world.

By the light.

I missed it the last two weeks with that flare going on. I got my blood test results back yesterday–1.9 on the neutrophils is what it was like when I was on chemo for six and a half years, what’s up with that? Going and being in a crowd was just not the wisest thing to do; things are settling down and the bleeding seems to have stopped and the cardiac cough that was bugging me is almost gone too, so, why would I want to risk revving up my autoimmunity by being exposed to anything?

Because it was knit night. And I missed my friends. And Pamela’s moving away soon.

Coming onto the main drag on my way out, there it was. A Cooper’s hawk, quite possibly my male Cooper’s hawk. On the phone wires running just this side of the train tracks, looking down on the road I was on.

And at that moment I felt like everything would somehow be okay.

It was a very good evening to be at Purlescence. (Hey, and if you want a really good lace shawls book *cough* they’ve got it.) I was so caught up in the drama of go/not go that I’d utterly forgotten that Pamela and Sandi had been working on repairing my spinning wheels. Pamela had wanted to learn how for the sake of when she will be far from the expertise of the shop.

One turned out to be ready for me to take home.

Years ago I found a friend-of-a-four-times-removed friend who had bought an Ashford Traveler spinning wheel. Cute little thing. As far as I could piece together, she put the drive band on too tight and couldn’t get the darn thing to spin worth beans. (She also had her roving separated not in lengthwise strips but short fat wads.) Maybe someone told her she couldn’t get a high enough ratio on so small a wheel to make those linen curtains she was dreaming of spinning and weaving?

So. She bought a second wheel, an Ashford Traditional. Uses the same bobbins. Got a distaff for the flax.

They sat in her garage for years till the day we found each other. She sold me everything: her wheels, a goodly stack of books, all her fiber, getitouttahere, $150.

Eighteen years later, my Trad has had a hard life. One kid tried to balance her Welch’s grape juice on it and  stained it a permanent purple puddle; another kid tripped over it and his teenage foot smashed the flyer. That was after the wheel had fallen out of the car and smashed the original flyer and maiden. I bought new parts, again, but after the second blow it was wobbly and a pain to to use–the uprights had a tendency to wiggle apart as I spun and the flyer would simply fall out.

The Trav fared a little better but it was always stiff and arthritic, whatever the drive band. If you pumped the treadle just as hard as you could and then let go, it would turn maybe seven cycles before stopping. I read an article in Spinoff years ago that said it should be closer to 100. As if!

And now the Trav is glorious. It’s scrubbed, repaired, lovely, it works and looks fabulous. They’re not quite done with the Trad, but give them a few days. (Don’t worry about that purple, guys, it’s part of its charm now.)

I can spin again. Do you hear me, life? I can spin my own yarn on my own working wheel again! Thank you Pamela and Sandi!

One of the charms of the acrobatic little chestnut-backed chickadees is that they like to put their feet together and stab at a seed (which I often can’t see) held between them. Fearless little things, marvels the klutz watching them risking hammer toes from the other side of the window.

Not sure how I missed seeing it before, probably because they don’t have to with hulled sunflowers, but, scrub jays do it, too. I think there are some olives left in that tree. So it was that I got to watch a jay standing on a long 2×2″ that runs along in front of it over at that part of the yard, the bird’s long talons wrapped around the board as that big beak tore away at its prize.

Only–the 2×2 wasn’t completely steady. It moved, the jay lurched, it did a wheelbarrel roll onto its blue head and then its side and scrambled up fast and grabbed its meal to make sure no thieving squirrel had taken off with it. And then stole a peek at me: you didn’t see that.

Gotcha.

I got tired of the squirrel scrums. So I changed the birdseed to safflower a few weeks ago and the suet cakes to ones with chili peppers as the second ingredient.

This means the juncos and towhees only stop by when a little suet hits the ground, but it’s so much more peaceful out there. With the coming of fall and the need to fatten up, the bushytails have finally started coming by, but never more than one at a time, they don’t eat much when they do come, and they’re certainly not about to make any effort to get at the stuff. It’s like offering a kid boiled brussels sprouts.

This also means my supersoaker got shelved. I wonder if that’s why the Cooper’s hawk has come back.

I looked up this evening in time to see–wait, was he trying to land on the birdfeeder?!  Or did he just brush it while trying to flush out a potential finch on the other side that he couldn’t see through the seed (only, there wasn’t one).

Huh.

Then he flew to the barbecue grill and watched us for awhile and Richard got to see him too.  A bit late of a hunt; it was definitely dusk. Beautiful, beautiful bird. We communed, with his permission. And then he was off.

Meantime, in the political world, a cousin here said a cousin there was going to be speaking at the Republican convention–and so I sat with a project that had needed justthismuchmore for so long and finally finished it off while I listened. Okay, lady from Oklahoma, you forgot your ninth grade history, but whatever. The woman who yelled about too many regulations–she paused for applause and had to wait for it. Oh. Right. Clap. Not everybody did, and I wondered how many spills and polluting incidents had come to the audience’s minds: 14,000 people would not have gone to the hospital this month had the Chevron refinery that blew up in the East Bay here been better regulated. Fourteen. Thousand. It looks like it will be now.

About an hour into it, I went back and doublechecked the messages: oh. Today’s not the day. And then I looked at the list of speakers for the right day and did a doubletake–wait! That name from–! I *knitted* for her once!

If you see a red scarf…

The birdfeeders and patio were still deserted. It had been something like half an hour. And so I was  sort of paying attention, because that silence means all the songbirds know something’s up.

I looked up again to see that magnificent striped tail and wide wingspan sailing easily, breezily across right in front of the awning across from where I sat, swooping up at the last near the redwood tree.

The best sighting of my Cooper’s hawk (scroll down slightly) I’ve had in months.

Re Debbi’s comment Tuesday: she was right. See here.

Now, total change of subject.

Picture your hand with your fingers splayed out as far apart as they go–okay, maybe mine, then, I’ve got small hands. That’s about what I saw diving up and over the other side of the fence Wednesday, clearly in pursuit of a smaller bird even if I only caught the tail end of the scene.

I wondered if that might have been…

Then last night Richard called out to me in great excitement and I didn’t come fast enough: he had seen a hawk! But not our Cooper’s, it was really small, and it had a brown back, and it was yay big, and it was a hawk! And not the Cooper’s!

It was great fun to see him so excited. He said it was bigger than a mourning dove but not by much. I flipped through Sibley’s with him, but he wasn’t sure.

So while at the bird center today I mentioned it.

Sounds like a Kestrel, Linda thought.

Exactly! That was my guess. I googled Kestrel images and, scrolling through them with him just now, he said that definitely could have been it. They are a falcon species.

I have never seen a Kestrel in the wild in my life, or at least not in full yet. I have a whole new raptor to look forward to. Cool!

Re last night’s post: I’ve been there.

I was pregnant, my lupus diagnosis that explained so much was years in the future, and things were not going well for me.  At all. The obstetrician decided it was time to spell out the options.

NO!

If you don’t survive the pregnancy then we lose both of you.

No.

I prayed really hard to know whether I was just having the knee-jerk reaction of a mother protecting her child–as well she should want to; what should I do. Richard prayed too. Hard.

And, deep breath, I felt, I really felt, it would turn out okay. I went ahead with it and we both survived.

But I had that choice. No one but absolutely no one had the moral authority to make it but me alone with my God. No one. Not even my husband, much though I love him. This was my ordeal as the mother of my children and the wife to my husband and as me myself. I made that choice.

Those who vote for personhood bills say that my daughters and yours should not have that choice, that those Congressmen’s political power and their religious views on when life starts trump not just everyone else’s religions and views but our very lives.

The next president could well be choosing Supreme Court justices. Vote. Please, please, vote, please stand up for us all.

And on a lighter note, just because I need it after writing this so very personal story out loud for all the world to criticize, come see here–scroll to the bottom. Barn owls are nesting on the 11th floor of the Marriott near the airport here. It’s clear they have closed off access to that balcony:  they “are letting the owlets enjoy their stay in peace.”

And the staff is handing out stuffed owls to the children staying at the hotel, probably sparking an interest in birds in them for life. And perhaps their own children’s to come, as my parents taught me.

I just think that’s really, really cool.

And. My brother-in-law Ned was in town and took us all out for dinner after he got away from work. Much love was enjoyed by all. I can only wish his job flew him out here more often.

I decided yesterday, as I watched a steady stream of three dozen crows flying over the houses down the block but well away from mine, that maybe I should appreciate my scrub jays better. Maybe they keep their cousins away?

But the moment gave me an instant flashback to my childhood in a different place and climate, when you could look to the skies and see thousands of birds of a size together, spring or fall, coming or going going going for days and days till they were gone.

One of our resident pair of the beautiful bossy stabby-beaked blue birds showed up Sunday with the entire tip of its tail somehow bent 90 degrees down. That means broken feather shafts straight across and I wondered how on earth it had done it. Its flight and landing seemed ever so slightly less certain to my human eye, but I wondered if I’d imagined it.

Apparently something else would say no, it noticed it, too.

We had had just the one pair since late spring; they have dominated my yard and brooked no intrusions, and I actually got to see the female begging its mate for food in a territorial display on the fencetop.  They were clearly different from any we’ve had before: they didn’t know they could land on the birdfeeder. I’d never seen ones before that wouldn’t. I’d been waiting for one of them to try it out.

After just that one day I never saw the broken tail again. The next day, there were at least three healthy jays fighting around my yard, swooping back and forth, terrorizing the finches, and one of them ever so briefly landed on that feeder after all, hopping immediately away as it swung wildly–whoa, that didn’t work! It swooped off to chase another jay as if it were its fault, they argued, and at last by today we seemed to be back to two jays again. Whoever they were.

Nature seems to settle its fights fast.

And then.

I saw one swoop into the tree this afternoon with such speed that it made me look up and then he tumbled down in a fake and beat it out of there with all that he had. Right behind him was–the Cooper’s hawk! I haven’t seen him for months! There, upper left in the photo, there he is. It felt so good to have him back. He gave up the chase and settled where the other had been.

I definitely think he’d gotten a taste of jay and wanted more.

They only came back  a long time after that to grab food on the run, hightailing it immediately across the yard the opposite direction and out of here.

The sheriff’s back in town.

Michelle thought of it first.

Me: When was the last time you saw your cousin Jonathan?

Ryan: I don’t think ever!

And so a trek was made over the reservoir and through the redwoods and we spent the evening at Richard’s aunt’s and uncle’s up in the mountains. Jonathan and his wife and young sons came north to his folks’ to meet us in the middle. Potluck salmon and salads, chicken on the barbecue, fruit and homemade bread on the beautiful deck overlooking the woods that Jonathan had built for his folks for his sister’s wedding (she has two kids now too). Ice cream, blackberry pie, dairy-free homemade cookies. Good people, good food.

And it was late enough and non-reflective enough and shaded enough by those towering trees standing sentinel that I was actually able to be out there. I cannot begin to describe how liberating that felt.

On our way home in the deepening dusk, a large hawk swooped near the road as we passed. Just to to add that perfect extra touch.

(p.s. at midnight: Go Curiosity Rover! Go NASA! Well done!)

Wow you guys. From zero last night to $730 as I type for Sam’s walk for lupus research. I woke up this morning, clicked on the link, and nearly burst into tears. Thank you cannot begin to describe it. Wow. Such a rush of emotions. This is our last month having to pay Michelle’s big COBRA health insurance bill, I feel terrible that I cannot quite yet make the effort I want towards Sam’s walk, and yet you all… Wow. Thank you.

On a side note for all the gardeners out there, I learned something today: the San Jose Mercury News is running classic Gary Bogue columns online, unwilling to let their wildlife specialist go in his as-of-last-week retirement. A woman had written in once to say that she had finally cured her squirrels of attacking her tomatoes.

By hanging red glass Christmas ornaments on them. Ooh, shiny! And the darkest reds are the sweetest, right?

One bite and they never touched them again.

This just in via Sherry: I’m thinking this Youtube video is of a Harris hawk? One could say the falconer is just kinda hanging around. Or perhaps, within the context, all strung out.

From sky divers to sky, diverse.