First of all, I apologize for the long silence. Again. I'm going to forgive myself because there have been Things Going On. Primarily, someone depending on me had to undergo some things that were immensely unpleasant, and do some things that were very brave, and I was very involved. It's all right now, or on the way to it anyway. Not that I myself have escaped further scathing by this thing called life, as, among other stuff, it turns out that what's going on with my left hand is arthritis. In a flash, right after the x-ray, the work with my ergotherapist went from "let's get your hand back to normal and send you on your way" to "the goal is to preserve as much range of motion as we can for as long as possible". It is what it is.
Obviously my creative endeavors have suffered throughout this period and although writing is for me often a matter of discipline, so is self-care, something I only recently learned the rudiments of after a lot of professional training (GP, physiotherapist, ergotherapist, and so on). So OK, this time I'm choosing not to condemn myself over the creativity break.
With that out of the way, let's get on with the show! As often, I'm basing this entry on on photos I've taken around the garden in the most recent couple of weeks. The theme of this one is the hard freeze we had, accompanied by a very
unusual amount of snow for this part of the Netherlands, and the current signs of spring returning afterward.
During the Frozen Times, just about the only animals I saw were my cats, other people's dogs, and birds. This is a good area for birds, and my garden attracts them in steadily larger variety and occasionally inconvenient numbers.
Here are some photos I took during the coldest part, when everything was frozen so hard that if I wanted to do something with an element made of ice, such as this one, I just had to leave water out in a mold for couple of hours.
At one point a large amount of snow piled up (well, not a large amount of snow if you're from somewhere like Wisconsin or Sweden, but it sure was a bunch for here) and turned into a very attractive dune, which then cracked, creating a magnificent crevasse, so I had some fun with it.
Lots of kinds of birds visited my garden during the winter freeze but I don't have pictures of them all, so I'll just mention while sharing some of couple photos I did get that they included jackdaws, Eurasian collared doves, magpies, European blackbirds, a veritable parade of tits, sparrows, starlings, once in a while a jay, and although it didn't actually come into the garden, I saw a goldfinch in a neighbor's tree. Other birds which dropped by but didn't actually come into the garden itself during the winter include feral ring-necked parakeets and several kinds of gull, among them Herring Gulls, Black-headed Gulls, and Lesser Black-backed Gulls.
These two blackbirds (above) have been coming around for a few weeks. I'm pretty sure the male (L) is the same bird as a juvenile which visited the garden and hung out for a few days last summer, and was probably born in the magnificent, 75-ish-year-old juniper grove which was until a year ago a beautiful backdrop to my garden, full of singing birds, providing me with privacy and company. A year ago, somebody hacked it out, displacing numerous blackbirds, an entire murmuring of starlings, some hedgehogs, and a number of amphibians which I proceeded to keep finding dead of cold in the alleyway and crying over. Now I just see all the way through some guy's house to the street beyond, where dump trucks and buses entertain me all day long. A little while after this male blackbird moved into the area and started investigating the honeysuckle where the Tree Bumblebee hive was last year, looking to be in a territorial way, the girl showed up. Now they're inseparable. I think they've decided to build their nest over in the neighbor's magpie-tree instead of the honeysuckle, but they're here in the garden every day, hunting and preening and lording it over things.
Many individual birds are familiar with my feeder; here's a dove enjoying some cat food in the snow.
Since things started warming up, the only other class of animals I've seen so far started to appear: arthropods. Specifically, isopods like this one, myriad very small things of an insectoid or potentially arachnoid nature, and spiders.
So far the garden spiders aren't out and about yet, although I did see one small hardy individual, but what we do have are stretch spiders, like this one which became my first-ever walk-in audition but then got shy and ran off – a shame; she was a natural.
There are others too. The type we have the most of at the moment is wolf spiders. These guys are a lot of fun. They're curious, active, and attracted to colors. I like to set up little scenes for them, and wait.
No set-up scene here, just a Wild Kingdom moment.
There are three other kinds of spiders which have turned up this year so far, all of which I find delightful. This first one is a crab spider; I've almost never seen them before, although they're pretty common, and I think they're absolutely neato looking. Here are a couple of pictures I managed to take of one.
Furthermore, we have these adorable little dwarf spiders all over the place, as I think is true of pretty much everywhere. This one, nearly 2 mm long, wants a hug.
This year, briefly, we had a star. A shooting star already gone off after new horizons. I named him Mooshroom (because of the song, obviously) and we knew each other for three glorious days. He (and he is a he, I looked it up) was very curious about me, tending to turn up shortly after I got out there to stare at the rock pile, and I about him. He is a jumping spider, specifically Heliophanus kochii.
Isn't he just beyond adorable? He's moved on now; maybe at any given time he's looking at me from a meter or so away, wondering what my biz is, keeping himself to himself, or possibly he followed a trail of prey or the thoughts of a girlfriend into some other garden entirely. Whatever, I'm glad to have known him.
Except for some flies and gnats and one hoverfly and these ants (which live in wood and hollow rose stems and walk along the fence all day, and which I recently learned parasitize the nests of another species), the only other arthropod showing itself openly in my garden right now is...
drumroll please!.... BEES! They're few and far between so far, but they're here. I've seen a few honey bees, one bumblebee queen, and a miner bee.
As for other signs of spring, inside my garden they comprise greening of grass, buds upon stems, the sounds of birdsong everywhere, the first shoots of bulb plants starting to spread their leaves – and in one sheltered planter, already bursting forth into crocus glory – that kind of thing. All around the garden I can see trees, most of them along city streets or at the playground but some of them in other people's gardens, and these trees are going green and yellow against a very blue sky (except when it's gloomy).
Everywhere, the seeds which were scattered by the winds and the birds and thrown into nooks and crannies all winter long are starting to break out. I don't see any nasturtiums yet, but an interesting dandelion-relative I bought last year for fifty cents as a scraggly little thing with stunning little bright red and orange flowers appears to have seeded that whole corner of the garden. I see crocuses, I see daffodils and tulips coming, but mostly I just see the barest signs of life coming up to speed.
Where one can really see spring being born is in behaviors. For example, the sparrows are in a nesting way but the females aren't ready to mate yet. Sparrow societies are non-monogamous matriarchal oligarchies. A group of top females runs things, and the males earn the right to mate (and corresponding bigger black chest patch) by being good at things like foraging, nest building, sentry-duty, and defense. They dare not object to any kind of treatment whatsoever by the girls,
although a female who turns into a bully or otherwise stops being a team player will be ousted from the leading council by the other ladies in short order. Yesterday I witnessed an event exemplifying this relationship: I was sitting in the living room, minding my own business, when I heard the sound of a sparrow fight kicking off right outside the window. It sounded fairly epic, so I wandered over there to have a look. Directly below me on the ground, the sparrow Queen (below) was in the middle of a fracas with three males who had obviously overstepped their bounds in some way, probably by crowding her with their look-at-me posturing.
She'd grabbed one of them by the feathers of his shoulder and no matter how much he screamed and begged and scrabbled at the ground with his claws, she dug her feet in and held her stance and did not let go for a full 30 seconds. The whole time he was piteously crying out for freedom, a second high-status male was dancing around in a tizzy, unwilling to intervene lest he be ostracized and left mate-less, last to gain access to food, and perching in exposed places. He was yelling and waving his wings like a hysterical bystander trying to save a drowning person by panicking about it onshore. Behind her, her favorite (below) was trying to de-escalate things by very gently tugging on the tip of her tail repeatedly. It was one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
Finally, the Queen did let go of the hapless screecher and he fled into the ivy while she pivoted on one claw point and launched herself at the twittering, dancing male. He booked it. Observing how the cards lay, her favorite instantly transformed himself into a silly bouncing appeasement machine. He twirled and fluttered and hopped, carefully keeping his back toward her, showing off his best white shoulder patches and fanciest tail fannings. She beat the crap out of him anyway.
Also nesting are the magpies. None of them nest in my garden because it is very small and they nest in big-assed trees, but I can see three such trees from my garden, in which are four nests. A group of magpies is called a charming, and ours is apparently around 20 birds strong but I only see between two and six at a time as a general rule. In the mornings, they seem to get excited, and do a lot of aerial displays which I'm still trying to get decent pictures of. The nest in the best location – from my perspective as a
photographer and, given how long it's been there, apparently also fitting their own criteria for what makes a good nesting site – is directly visible from my backyard and I can't wait until I can get my hands on a telephoto lens. They're always communicating with each other, mostly in grunts and mutters and cackling noises but occasionally (at least for me; I'm sure they do a lot but I'm not there to hear it) in soft, lovely, gentle, twittering song. They all know that I'm that weird person who puts out food and points a big detachable eye at them a lot; they warily ignore me when they think I'm looking, and study me intently when they think I'm not.
I talk so much about "my" jackdaws that I'm not going to go on about them right now except to say that Freddy is doing fine, if looking a little harried because of the early nesting season, and his mate Forky has been around again the last few days too, meaning that
they're probably gearing up for eggs.
Crows never visit the garden, but they watch me, in ones and twos and suddenly yesterday in a group of eight, from the surrounding trees and seem surprised when I notice them. Sometimes they join up with gulls and magpies and occasionally other birds to form a mob to chase hawks. Here is a reasonably good picture of such a mob,
and a terrible picture of one of the hawks. I'm not very good yet at tracking birds on the wing when they suddenly appear.
That said, some kinds of birds you can hear coming and follow a predictable path, and although I wouldn't describe myself as anywhere near good at it yet, it is sometimes possible to actually get pictures of geese. Sadly, when the whole mass of snow geese flew over a week ago, I was in the middle of one of those completely stupid moments when I didn't even have my camera in my hand in the first place. I try to avoid that happening, but sometimes it still does. Here are some White-fronted Geese instead.
We do get Egyptian geese, of which so far from the garden I have only managed one blurry photo which I'm not going to share here, and we get Canada geese like these (right). They do not fly to the Netherlands from Canada, nor do they "live here". This is a flock – or rather, the descendants of a flock – which got blown all the way to Sweden in a storm a very long time ago, live there, and migrate to here for some reason.
One very seasonal visitor isn't actually a seasonal bird at all but this one's appearances are, if it's even the same one. It's a Great Grey Heron. They live all over the place around here, standing around in the little canals at the windmill or along roads, by the bigger canals over on the other side of the freeway, on top of herring stands, in the parks and at ponds, you know how it is. This one, or a one anyway, has shown up a couple of times, around this time of year, and spends its time stalking the neighbors' roofs in a stately fashion and staring at me. My theory is that this is around when frogs start coming out of hibernation and looking for ponds and the like in which to lay their eggs, and there are plenty of ponds around here. I like this guy; I hope he comes back.
And then there are the tits. We get coal tits, blue tits, great tits, penduline tits... you know, all the tits. They're not much interested in me, unlike the other birds, in an intellectual way; they just like to make sure I keep to my place, and mind my own business. Mostly they're concerned, at the moment, with epic territorial battles related to nesting spots. Their tinkling screams of defiance and rage ring out all day long, as do their triumphal ballads when interlopers have been properly driven away. They're always alert, always busy, and seemingly always furious. Theirs is an intense existence.
The last bird – in fact, the last animal – I'm going to introduce you to today is Ziggy (the "Stardust" is implied). When that juniper grove was slashed out last year, an entire large murmuring of starlings was displaced. My evening serenade of hundreds of harmonizing singers was gone. The ground wasn't littered with dead birds or anything, they were able to find places in other murmurings I guess because mostly, for a while, they just disappeared. However, around a month ago Ziggy appeared.
He's a curious bird, and a bold one; I have nothing he wants to eat so I can't tempt him, but it still only took a few days before he stopped flying away if I walked into the garden. He'll keep singing from one tree or another, keeping an eye on me, watching the skies. European starlings are very interactive birds, interested in everything and everybody, and very curious about people and other animals. Not to anthropomorphize, but they also seem to be a bit vain: if you stare at one long enough, and you aren't making it nervous, it will start showing off and making eye contact. Starlings do look like they're covered in stars, and what a lot of people don't know is that during the singing process they're also putting on a light show. The way they move those
feathers around, especially the throat feathers, lifts a variety of iridescent and reflective surfaces and those amazing white spots, which are actually tiny V's, into a spectacular visual performance. Ziggy likes it here, probably he was born in the lamented juniper, and now he's brought friends. Three gardens down is a small patch of only a couple of juniper trees, and apparently starlings really like juniper. Ziggy seems to be starting his own little murmuring there and I'm very glad he's chosen my turf to do much of his day-to-day business in. He is an eloquent singer, and since he moved in, his song has picked up, among other things: the typical calls of the jackdaw I named Chatterbox, the cries of the buzzard pair who have been hanging around, some elements of blackbirds' songs, a magpie's clatter, the sparrows' alarm call, and my washing machine telling me my clothes are clean (luckily too faintly to trick me).
Well folks, that's about what I've got today; enjoy these closing pictures and I hope to get back to you again a lot sooner this time, possibly about dogs because I met the best dog ever today, but who knows? Stay well, stay safe, and get some rest.
Add comment
Comments