Okay, here’s a funny picture of a young male Cooper’s Hawk new at this flying stuff.

It was quite windy today and the juveniles seemed to sense it wasn’t the best day to totally wing it off a perfectly good solid surface.  But that didn’t stop Kekoa from playing push-the-peregrine: he took great delight in scurrying down the runway towards an unflappable parent and making them fly off, again and again. Eric, one of the fledgewatchers, caught pictures of one such episode here.

Kekoa’s favorite spot was on the eastern end of the ledge, with his sister below him most of the time. Although Maya got in a good one: she made it up to that top ledge herself, walked towards him, and then looked she was going to keep right on going.

HEY! His beak opened and one could just hear him squawking, STOP IT! Or I’ll tell MOM on you!

She stopped just shy of shoving him over. You know, enough to get a rise out of him (almost!) , not enough to get herself in trouble.

Siblings.

The parents have again spent the day watching over their young, ready to swoop down alongside and show them how it’s done should they go over.

There’s one there right now: on the louvers below the little guy, who joined his sister in the nestbox but scrambled right back out again. I didn’t fly! I can’t go to sleep yet!

He is as I type on the lower ledge behind the nestbox, the parent present and watchful as ever. It’s quarter to nine.  He just snuggled against the wall. Cold concrete–not a warm sister.  Not even the wood of the corner that they like to put their heads into.  Crum. His eyes closed a few times.  He turned and looked dowwwwwwwnnnn, straight down. He turned back and huddled away from that for now.

It’s dark. How do I get back home! He’s thinking, but he’s outside the box.

Okay, I typed that and stopped to watch instead of doing the intermittent glance. He got up and started pacing that low ledge. C’mon, piece of cake, I’ve done the ledge-to-ledge thing before. He made it up there despite the dark, (yay!) walked along it till he could peer down into the nestbox where his sister was settled in for the night. Safety. At last.

And then suddenly he wheeled and flew off into the dark, wings spread wide and flapping.

Riffing on the line “They are other nations” in the Henry Beston poem that Evet sent.

A Peregrine Fledgling’s Cry:

I fledge allegiance
to the clouds
in my excited state of euphoria
and from the nestbox
which in them stands
all Nature
under God
the whole world visible
now liberty!
and free-flight
for all time.

Or at least they’re flapping their wings and fluttering around making plans for the party. The ground crew has gathered below with binocs and a sun tent and, I am told, much chocolate to celebrate the eventual liftoffs. And, I assume, a box and water, if you read last year’s story in that link about the rescue.

There was some excitement I missed this morning: Clara fighting off a Golden Eagle. You stay away from my babies!

The peregrines’ nest area is at the top of a multi-stories-high HVAC enclosure.  It has about a four foot high ledge along their runway and low ledges at either end, one side of which is now blocked off by the nextbox.

The previous years’ box had room at the sides for the juveniles to get past it and to look out precariously at the city lights below, where likely no one would see them tumbling in the dark.  It was replaced at winter equinox, the time least likely to disturb the parents.  They inspected the new after some protesting at installation and found it acceptable.

Maya and Kekoa, our surviving juvies, have to stray from the comfort of home and all the way to the far end of their enclosure if they want to read a book under the covers with the nightlights on. As far as I know, they haven’t.

I look at the top of the eyases’ world from those cameras and think, whoever did the cement work up there–if they only knew.  Always, always do your job well, for your own sake, even if nobody will ever know but you.  I’m sure they thought nobody on earth would ever see or care from the ground what this ledge was going to look like at 18 floors up.  They had no idea cameras would be trained right on their work every spring for weeks on end.  They had their chance to be stars!  A ledge-end in their own time! Instead, they decided that was for the birds. On the other hand, maybe the fact that the concrete is not well smoothed is a plus for the birds’ grip; I don’t know.

Putting that aside.  As usual, since Kekoa only had to grow to 2/3 the size of his sister, his featheration has been maturing faster. That boy wants to go! He flew to the upper ledge for the first time today and then raced up and down it: LOOK!!!  Did you even KNOW there were all those things down there?! This is just SO cool!!!

And yeah, he knocked a guarding-angel parent right off the wall in his eagerness.

There’s no flashlight reading going on tonight. They had a big day. They are zonked.

Meantime, the nest on the 33d floor of the PG&E building in downtown San Francisco had no surviving fledglings the last two years.  Yesterday, the first of their four took off into the air and he made it!  He flew again, to prove his point.  At last, a surviving new falcon.  There has been much cheering going on among their fans.

And to all a good night. It’s a big day ahead tomorrow and the next.

(It rained today and someone clearly got dumped on. Squirrels’ tails turn into mouse-laughingstocks when wet. This is after it was halfway dry again!)

Had a great idea. Found an old swatch.  Wait, that’s what I was going to–! And another.  Well now. Great mind thinks alike.

Some Grant Circle-colorway pink yarn had jumped out at me today, enough to get me to go look up the site of the lovely woman I bought it from at Stitches East a year and a half ago to make sure she was still around. Yes! Cool. (She will perhaps remember me as the woman who picked it up in my hands and guessed the base on the spot. I grinned, Hey, I’ve knitted a lot of lace.)

So many things I want to do, so many things in the queue.

Meantime, my Mother’s Day present finally snuck past that rude, belching lout of a volcano and jumped across the Pond today and eagerly rang my doorbell.  Cashmere/silk/merino (watch the yardage carefully on those, they sell a lot of yarn that is great for practicing plying on a spinning wheel) in the limestone colorway, which as far as I can tell is undyed or close to it; the grayishness in their original picture showed the mill oils more than anything and it pretty much washes out. I have some leftover from a previous project and took the picture with that ball on top vs the oiled cone as it arrived.

My daughters bought me the new stuff.  Coooooool.  This knitting thing–I think they’re on to me.

So it is now hanked, scoured, and I am impatient.  I’ll just go knit up this little bit of pink while it dries, oh, you know, about 900 yards’ worth or so…

A new character showed up in the neighborhood with a stylish zorro streak on its other cheek and reverse eyeshadows– half circles of white right above its eyes, fluffing out to  make it look bug-eyed head-on. The wicked witch of the nest: I’m moulting! MOULTING!

And the other thing: I had the Red virus pass through about a third of my amaryllis patch last year, probably in part due to their lack of care while I was ill. One is supposed to throw away such bulbs quickly so that bugs and the wind don’t spread the disease.  I was in no shape, having had my belly unzipped twice, to go lifting any pots, nor did I particularly want to. Besides, there were memories in those flowers and I stubbornly wanted to give them every chance at hope.

Nearly all recovered and they show no signs of the virus now. From everything I’ve read, that wasn’t supposed to happen, I was risking losing the lot of them. But yet again, my amaryllises present a metaphor for what I went through as they look peachy-fine now anyway.

This is my prized Dancing Queen (yeah, I need to go clear away the old stuff). It may be a fairly small bud for this variety, but hey! I can’t wait to show it blooming.

And life continues on in its quiet, unspoken strength.

This started out as trying to keep them away from my birdfeeder. But it became its own reward.

I sawed through a loaf of hard-as-a-rock whole wheat/multigrain/multiseed Costco bread this morning–so healthy I for one can’t eat it and one certainly couldn’t in time in the quantities they sell it in–and I put it out by the trees with some old almond butter spread on.  The almond butter, being past its expiry date but having been kept in the fridge, was still good but had more value as entertainment factor by now, I figured, since the peanut butter purists here weren’t eating it.

Then I watched to see what would happen.

One little black squirrel discovered it right away and was in total heaven. He ran up a tree to savor a big piece alone, and then from up there munching away, clearly decided he didn’t want that bossy big gray male who was always giving him what-for to know where the loot was before it could be stashed away.

That gray got a whiff, though.  He smelled it.  He left the porch he likes to dominate, the birdfeeder territory, and started looking for it.  Where was it?  He’d been so busy he’d missed out.  He actually licked the tree trunk where the black squirrel had first stopped to eat, then sniffed some more, frantically looking for any trace of almond.

Then he spotted the little guy just finishing his bite. YOU! Over there!  GIMME THAT! He went chasing, bounding from treetop to treetop, both of them doing daredevil leaps that had me holding my breath.  Run for it!  Over and over, around and around, back down to the ground now–and every time they got too close to where the rest of those pieces of bread were, the black one did the most masterful job of using the gray’s bossy instincts to divert him and led him along in his pell-mell chase away from the stash.  Every time the gray got too close.  Every time.  The black one would risk getting caught–almost–so that the stash wouldn’t be.  Neener neener, can’t catch me!

The race was to the young and finally the bigger and older gray gave up.  Never did get any. It was funny as all get-out to watch the little young one outfox him and then see it sneak back and squirrel away the rest.

I decided to take pity awhile later and put out some more pieces of that bread, but too lazy to mix more of the separated almond and oil back together.  I put the plain tidbits out again at the base of that same tree–and this time the big gray found it.

And that little turkey turned to me, back inside behind the window, with a look that could only be described as You have GOT to be kidding me!!! No *almond*?!!

And the cheeky little thing turned its nose up like a cat at dinnertime.

He did come back later and grabbed one when he thought I wasn’t looking.

You know which one’s getting seconds tomorrow. And you know what’s going to be on it. Let the Wild Rumpus Begin Again!

The best thing I can think of to say is not mine to say at all; it belongs to the late Henry Beston and came to me courtesy of Evet, the moderator of the peregrine falcon group in San Jose.

There was a naming contest among the local schoolchildren for the falcon chicks, and today the winners were announced.

Yesterday there would have been three.

Today there were two.  The blue-banded male had started earlier this week to show signs of being ill and had stopped eating; he bedded down for the night last night with his siblings around him and his mother standing guard on the ledge above, his father nearby, and by morning had slipped quietly away.

A member of the San Francisco group offered the comfort of coming to see their webcam, where their four eyases are toddling and exploring and well.

Evet offered Henry Beston:

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.

Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in
civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge
and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion.

We patronize them for their incompleteness,

for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves.
And therein we err, and greatly err.

For the animal shall not be measured by man.

In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished
and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or
never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.

They are not brethren, they are not underlings;

they are other nations

caught with ourselves in the net of life and time,

fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

I’ve been hoping that that evidence of a successful hunt yesterday morning (hit it, little Garfunkel: Lalalalaaala lalaaala. Feelin’ gravy) wasn’t the vivid-headed parakeet that had spent most of the previous two days here and that you could spot easily in the trees–but it has not been seen since.   Although the hawk or a cat are the more likely cause, squirrels do eat eggs and small or baby birds in the spring when they need protein and their caches of nuts are rotting or sprouting.

What did I tell that flighty little thing?  Never harass an animal that would eat you or you risk a coo d’etat.

Random other item: I don’t know if this link will still be valid by morning, but as the daughter of a modern art dealer, let me say, there are easier ways to diss the artists of the last 100 years or so and this was not one of them. One might say the UPS driver was making a special delivery of performance art to the Hirschhorn.  And it was a bust.

Last year, my friend Nancy gave me an amaryllis plant that had been given to her as a bulb kit but that had never bloomed for her; she thought maybe I could get it to this year. It’s gorgeous, Nancy, thank you, and I’d give it back now if you hadn’t moved away.

The parakeet came back to feed many times today.  I wonder, if I were to put a bird cage with an open door out there, whether it would climb right in and make itself at home–but I’m perfectly happy watching it being perfectly happy.

And yet.  Not so much when it hit the window flying in a panic along with the finch flock–going not quite in the same direction as the others, being not quite one of them. It seemed okay afterwards, but it sure sharpened the caged life vs. longer life question about it for me. I tell you–personally, I’ve gone for longer and found it’s okay for it to be that way.

This picture is for Rachel: I’ve started in on the Malabrigo Silky she wound up for me.

Meantime, I got the perfect Mother’s Day present from my daughter-in-law and older son: “Outwitting Squirrels.” Okay, you already know it’s going to be good!  And then the author quotes the owners of bird stores in Cabin John and Potomac, Maryland–I bet his kids went to the same schools I did.  The guy had great fun writing this.

My favorite part? His tale of a woman in Massachusetts who found some old LPs in her attic. She strung them on a rope separated by knots with her birdfeeder below: no squirrel could climb that stair-eo.

Then she got to watch them trying to jump down onto the top LP to hang downwards towards the feeder.  Here came the first: it got spun off into the snow.  Hey…! Cool! Do it again!

She described it as a line at Disneyland, waiting their turn. No food but almost as good.

I mentioned it to Richard and his reaction was, “Like the buffalo.”

Wait, the what?

And then he reminded me.  After the musk ox got reintroduced to Alaska, the buffalo did.  “Where the deer and the antelope play” had nothing on these guys.

Okay, so if I ever seriously think about parakeet cages I’m going to have to provide it a lot of toys. They’re members of the parrot family and can talk; I wonder if I could teach it to knit.  Or at least recite my line-by-line lace instructions so I don’t lose my place.

Dear somebody: your escaped pet (I can only assume that’s what it is) is doing fine, shooting the breezes, and has fallen in with a flock that thinks he’s a goldfinch on steroids. He let me open the door finally to try to get a better shot but that was it.   I was quite amused when he bossed the squirrel a bit.

All is well. Happy Mother’s Day!

(Ed. to add: the parakeet’s been back twice  now. I’m hoping it makes it a habit.)

For Mother’s Day weekend. Best kind of present there could possibly be is, simply, presence.  Actually, he’s back out the door with his sister and their friends, but I’ll happily take every moment I can get and I’ll even share, too.

Meantime,  Jocelyn has a bird in her yard doing karaoke at all hours, defying her personal noise ordinance.  And boy does that bring back memories.

This is a corner of the back yard I grew up with in Maryland. One year, a woodpecker having too much fun with the wood siding discovered the second floor of the house to be high, safe, and warm, and pecked out a hole big enough to raise her family in. Insulation! Ooh, soft! Bonus points!

That nest was between the plasterboard and the outside wall and right at the head of my sister’s bed.  Till the babies fledged, there was not a thing anyone could do but wait for the day there weren’t little chirping hungry woodpeckers at the crack of dawn. (While hoping for no obnoxious cracks from teenage birds getting plaster’d.)

Mom and Dad eventually–they waited till they were really, really sure those birds were gone–got a tall ladder and plugged up that hole, hoping Momma Bird would get the message.  Woods, see? Tall trees, that way, go!

Two days ago, Clara flew into the nest and her children waited for her to come bring them dinner in their corner. She just stood there in the center. The message was clear: I don’t care if you do beakplants, you are old enough now to come over here and get it.

They grow and change so fast.  Today, she flew in with Pigeon Deplume’ and an eyas bounded over, grabbed it from her, and twirled away. Clara went right after it: gimme that! No! Yes! No! Yes! The two of them danced in circles three times, and on the fourth time ’round Clara succeeded in grabbing it back.

Now children. You will take turns being properly fed by me!

ME dooz it!

CHILDREN.

As one peregrine watcher put it a few days ago, (and I wish I could remember who so I could give them credit) “Mo-o-o-om, I ate all my pigeon; can I have some songbird for dessert?”

Their new dark feathers are growing in by the day.  Before you know it they’ll be ready for the Jerry Flew-us Fledge-a-thon.

(p.s. I took the qiviut scarf to Purlescence tonight. Universal swooning did happily occur. And today, for the first time, a spotted towhee showed up, identified after emailing with Sally, my expert.  It took a red-eye flight to get here.  Gorgeous!)

Let’s see, top, Little Lovely Malabrigo laceweight, middle, Stonechat Malabrigo silk/merino, bottom, 510-yard balls of Creatively Dyed sock weight–that’s 4310 yards and many hours saved for me, all cheerfully wound by (formerly) No-Blog Rachel today while we chatted. Did I mention she’s an angel?

She looked out my window at one point at all the activity going on: “You’ve got a nature preserve out there!”  I laughed, thinking of a guy back home back in the day who got fined for not cutting his grass.  He took it to court, telling the judge he’d created a nature preserve–there in the middle of Potomac, Maryland, the pricey and well-manicured town of many a political and media celebrity.

And also the town that runs alongside part of the C&O Canal National Park and part of the Cabin John Creek watershed preserve that runs for ten miles.  Those birds and animals needed more connecting points.

The judge was totally cool with the guy’s point of view.  Case dismissed.

Now, ‘scuse me, I’ve got some major knitting to go do. Thank you, Rachel!

They’re so cute when they’re little.

Eyasses, ie baby falcons, grow from their hatching weight by about 23oo% in their first month, according to the peregrine group.  I saw one today, now an adorable vaguely-birdlike white fluff ball with those round black eyes, picking up its foot and looking at it like, wow, what’s this? before plonking straight down on its beak.

Banding will be bright and early Monday morning.  Glenn Stewart from UCSC will rappel down the cliff-face of City Hall in San Jose two stories down to the nestbox ledge.  The babies will be too young to get away from him but already their full size, thus he’ll be able to put the correct and comfortable size bands on their legs. (With a hard helmet on as the parents whizzz by on the fly.)

And then the cameras will start chasing the little ones for ankle zooms as they waddle around their enclosed ledge.

The correct size in my hands has been 4.5 mm this past week.  I think, after that shawl I wanted so badly to get done and get given away but that took three weeks to do–even though that turned out to be the most right thing and the most right timing–I had a pent-up desire to Get Stuff Done.  402 stitches a row? I did 15 rows yesterday.  Nineteen more to finish the knitting part? Break out the icepacks again, it’s done. The cast-off’s tomorrow.

Bright and early, because my other yarns are ball-banding together and calling out, Knit me!  Me!

Next thing you know, some of them will be flying off to someone else, too.  Who and which and when, I’ll just have to listen and find out.

If things are a bit quiet on the porch, if there are no other doves around, occasionally a mourning dove will start people-watching. I’ll look up and there one will be, quietly observing me at my work: sometimes from the patio–they seem to prefer keeping close to the ground when possible–and occasionally, not very often but occasionally, from the back of the chair.

Where I saw that Cooper’s hawk perched, once. The gray concrete and the gray bird, yes, I can see why it would want to keep a lower profile.

It is, as far as I can guess, the younger ones that tend to do this, but I’ve found that when I return their gaze, when it’s just the one bird and me, no other birdly distractions, (the finches don’t count), I can slowly blink at them.

And they will start blinking back.

Bliiink.

Blink blink blink blink.

They have found a way to get my attention. Sometimes it gets them rewarded with extra sunflower seeds, scattered at ground level.  Hulled, too!  But the time spent sharing a small moment in time, just the blink of an eye, seems to be its own reward to them, and they are quite consistent about copying me.  I find it utterly charming.  Somehow, I matter to a small wild thing that has no reason it knows of to need me.

And life is good.