May 19: Offshore breeze

On the island

blown by the wind--

leaf or a hummingbird?

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August 24: Still summer

The nip of fall may be creeping into the morning air, and the song of the crickets may be slowing down to a more languorous, late summer pitch, but summer still holds sway. On this blue sky morning I'm still wearing tank top and flip flops, wishing I could be outside at play rather than at work--because we all know this won't last.

Still fresh blueberries
on my cereal, still
hummingbirds in the bee balm.

August 14: Party sunset

I love the kind of party when, as the sun is setting over a distant hazy ridge, just a burning hot pink sliver above the horizon, everyone there rushes over excitedly to watch it sink. And meanwhile dozens of hummingbirds buzz around us, getting in those last sips of nectar before bedtime. Everyone leaves happy.

End of the party--
buzz of voices at sunset,
buzzing hummingbirds.

August 13: Summer afternoon

I'm standing on the edge of lawn and field looking up at the green slopes of Ragged Mountain. At the lawn's edge, blooming gladioli stand at glorious attention, and faces of tiger lilies peer through greenery. Hummingbirds chatter and buzz around the flower beds. Goldfinches rise and dip over the fields, singing non-stop, swarming the seed feeders. Overhead, birch trees against a blue sky. Butterflies flit in little circles around me, and in the distance, a family of bluebirds gathers on a branch. Tomorrow night we're having a party here, and at this moment, I can't imagine a more perfect place to be.

Butterflies, bluebirds,
birdsong--is this a set for
a Disney movie?

May 28: Treefrog

We returned home from Monhegan this afternoon to be taunted by our backyard birds. After looking for three days for a black-and-white warbler out on the island, the first bird we heard upon pulling into our driveway was a black-and-white warbler, singing loudly right there. Then, as I was checking out how the flowers had progressed since we left on Saturday (lilacs in bloom! columbine in bloom! rhodos starting to bloom!), I was strafed by a hummingbird. We saw zero hummingbirds on Monhegan, despite the island being loaded with both flowers and nectar feeders--so this was a nice welcome home.

One odd thing, however, was hearing the trill of a gray treefrog coming from somewhere up the street. There are no wetlands in our neighborhood, other than the river on the downhill side of the house. This solo frog was calling plaintively in the vicinity of our neighbor's garden. I've been hearing him off and on for the past couple of weeks, but was surprised he was still around in what seems to be a completely random spot and still making noise. Guess he'll keep at it till he gets lucky.

Good luck, little frog--
you're not near water or mates,
but your song's pretty.

May 13: Wildflowers

Because I only carry a pocket-sized point-and-shoot camera, when I'm hiking around I don't take many photographs of birds. Even with a 16x digital zoom, it doesn't have the capacity for a good bird shot. Most of the ones I try are of the "that dark blob there is the bird!" variety. But even when I'm birding, I'm not always looking up in the branches or in the sky. This time of year, especially, I try to also notice what flowers have returned along with our spring birds. Some I've known since childhood, their familiar presence on the forest floor linking me in memory to years of tromping around these local woods: Canada mayflower, trilliums red, white, and painted, hepatica, trailing arbutus, bloodroot, moccasin flower (lady's slipper), bellwort or wild oats, trout lily, rhodora, violets, clintonia... Not all of these are blooming yet, but I'm happy to find even the bright new leaves themselves poking up through the forest duff, knowing flowers will soon follow.

I've realized that a photo is a great tool for recording a plant species I'm not familiar with, to look up later in my wildflower guide. Yesterday, I learned that I'd come across wild ginseng and golden Alexander. Today, wood anemone. Part of my wanting to know and remember the names of all these flowers is the simple desire for knowledge. Knowledge equals power, after all. But there's more to it than that: to know what lives in a place is essential to truly coming to know that place. It's like living in a neighborhood. If you don't know your neighbors, you'll never feel a real attachment to the place, no matter how long you live there. This is my home. I know my neighbors; I know the woman who owns the corner grocery. But when I'm in the nearby woods, I also feel at home there. Here are the little green flags of Canada mayflower among the hemlocks; here is the rhodora in that same wet patch of the field; and here's the hummingbird come to feed.

The hummingbird too

knows wildflowers, rejoices

in their re-blooming.

Wild Ginseng

Golden Alexander

Rhodora

Wood Anemone

May 6: Bee

Ah, my favorite Sunday activity: sitting on my back porch in the afternoon sun, lulled by the constant rush of the river, while I read a book. Caught up in a good mystery, I still find myself distracted by a cacophony of goldfinches chattering in the neighbor's trees and the high-pitched song of the season's first hummingbird zipping around the neighbor's azalea. All this was after I heard my 94-year-old neighbor yelling for help and rushed over to give her a hand so she could get up her front step. She'd been enjoying a glass of wine on her patio alongside the river, and when she got up to go inside, found her joints too stiff to move her legs properly. We all have our ways of enjoying sun after days of rain and chill.

Made lazy by sun,
I let a bee rest awhile
on my open book.

August 20: Things Invisible to See

While I was reading in the back yard late this afternoon, a hummingbird was chattering perpetually overhead. It seemed to be buzzing between our yard and our neighbor's (which is full of enticing flowers right now), pausing occasionally in a spruce tree that hangs over the fence between us. I don't know if it was nesting in the spruce--I've found hummingbird nests in spruces before and admired the added protection of all those prickly needles--or perhaps sipping spruce sap, but the tree seemed to be its primary focus. Its high-pitched calls were not aggressive or territorial, though the bird can be both, but more conversational. A "here I am, hanging out near my favorite tree" kind of sound.

Meanwhile, I could also smell a delightful fragrance on the breeze, the scent of some unknown flower wafting my way. If I closed my eyes in my lawn chair, the redolent air combined with the birdsong around me (mostly the hummingbird), and I could almost imagine I was somewhere semi-tropical.

Shortly thereafter I learned that an old friend and his family had recently been in a very bad car accident. Apparently among his serious injuries, his heart was literally crushed. (He's a writer, and I know that when he recovers, he's going to use that image as a metaphor somehow.) This all seems like a non sequitur, but as my mind shifted from enjoyment of the hummingbird's song to coming inside to write about it and then learning about my friend's accident, this silly haiku project--my attempt at trying to pay attention to these little moments that make up our life, these fragments of beauty, joy, and poetry--seemed somehow more important than ever to me. We never know when they might all be taken away, or when we might be forced to shift our perspective on what even constitutes beauty and joy for us.

Rather than reducing them to trivialities, I think such mindful moments can help root us in the present and give value to our existence, and by extension, the existence of all life: hummingbirds, aromatic flowers, the fragile physical existence of humanity... One moment I was listening to a hummingbird and pretending I was in the Caribbean; the next, my thoughts were entirely with my friend and his family. And yet the two moments are united, just as when we think about where we were when we heard sad news, some unimportant detail always surfaces and becomes a part of that whole experience. (When you think of where you were when you heard about the planes hitting the World Trade Center, for example, what random details surface in your memory?)

As the world suffers,
in this moment I focus
on hearing a bird.

July 28: End of Day

As I type this, a cardinal is vigorously whistling, "TEW too TEW too TEW too" outside the kitchen window, coming by for his end of the day feeder visit. Out the other kitchen window, the female hummingbird samples the bee balm blossoms, as we've watched her do for the past several nights as we've sat at the table eating dinner. She'll dip into a red flower or two, withdraw, then turn and hover right in front of the window, looking in at us. I don't know if she sees her reflection, finds us fascinating, wants us to find her fascinating (which we do, of course), or what.

The sinking sun, in a slightly different place than it was this time of night a month ago, or even a week ago, shines through a tapestry of green onto the river. The river itself is a mere thread of murmuring water at this point in summer, but there's enough water there to cast a glare where the sunlight hits it. That patch of light seems like an ephemeral fragment of summer, caught shining for just a few blessed moments, flashing like a signal mirror an urgent message about time and the river flowing...

River catches light
but can't hold it, keeps flowing.
Sun goes on setting.

August 26: Hypnotic Hummingbird

As I stood on the outside deck of a friend's mountainside home today, hummingbirds swarmed and screeched below me. Ten or more of these feisty little birds zipped around the feeders, chasing each other, perching nearby, feeding on the sugar water, and otherwise buzzing in and out of sight within the leaves of the surrounding oak trees. I haven't seen this many in one place in a long time. My friend says they have to refill their four feeders every two days now. Activity around the feeders has picked up in the past couple of weeks, and he and his wife think the birds must be fattening up to get ready for migration. We all marveled over how amazing it is that such little creatures can travel so far--although if you watch them in action, they certainly don't seem fragile in any way other than size. They can hold their own.

A chipping sparrow flew onto a branch below me. As I watched, a hummingbird hovered in front of it and dipped back and forth, tracing an arc in the air like a pendulum, over and over. I've seen hummingbirds perform territorial displays like that with each other, especially species out west, but I don't recall seeing one pull that on a bird of another species altogether. Perhaps it was simply checking out the sparrow, but it seemed more deliberate than that--like the hummer was trying to make a point with its ritualistic repetition. It swung in front of the sparrow a dozen times or more, but the larger bird didn't even seem to notice, and it certainly wasn't scared away by the hummingbird's display. Perhaps, as I was, it was simply fascinated.

Swinging a green gem,
your body, you hypnotize
a watching sparrow.

August 16: Hummingbirds

When my friend Diane calls me at an odd time at work, I know she's seen a cool bird in her yard. This afternoon was no exception. "I've got a rusty red hummingbird with a red throat here," she said. I was at her house in minutes.

Rufous Hummingbird, male; Rockport, Maine

And there he was, a male rufous hummingbird in all his shining red glory. He spent most of the hour I was there perched in a tree, where he stood out like an autumn leaf. He perched in full view with an eye on her hummingbird feeder. I only saw him approach it to feed once, when I took the above photo. But whenever a ruby-throated hummingbird, the native species you'd normally expect to see here, tried to feed, he would swoop down and chase it away. He was slightly bigger and puffier than the natives, which apparently made him somewhat of a bully.

For reasons other than his obvious beauty, seeing this hummingbird is a big deal. Look in a bird book and you'll see that rufous hummingbirds live far west of the Mississippi. The only other ones I've seen have been in the Rocky Mountains. But occasionally one will go astray during migration and show up in New England. I've never heard of one being seen around here, though, and I've certainly never been so fortunate as to see one in Maine. 

While we were watching (and trying to photograph) the rufous hummingbird and the comings-and-goings of the resident ruby-throats, our attention was drawn to movement in a potted jasmine plant on Diane's porch. At first we thought it might be another hummingbird, but we quickly realized that it was an insect. A hummingbird moth, to be specific--a very cool moth that looks just like a hummingbird. I think I've only seen one or two of these before, so it was almost exciting a sighting as the  errant rufous hummingbird.

Hummingbird Moth

This afternoon's sightings reminded me--you should always keep your eyes open on what's buzzing around your back yard!

Hummingbird--so small
your body, so fierce your heart.
May you burn brightly. 

August 5: Birding After Dark

As I carried our supper dishes to the sink tonight, I was surprised to notice a hummingbird visiting the bee balm outside the kitchen window. Dusk had fallen, and it seemed way past that bird's bedtime. Perhaps visiting our garden was like "last call," a final pit stop before roosting for the night. The bird had to be a neighborhood regular that had fed at these flowers before, because in the half-dark, it obviously wasn't the red of the petals that had attracted him.

Even later I was surprised to hear the distinct "pip" call note of the cardinal, making his evening rounds. As my husband pointed out, he's still showing up at around the same time at day's end, but it's getting darker earlier so it seems like he's here later. If that makes sense. In any case, when he made his last visit to the window feeder tonight, I could barely see him. If he weren't so loud, announcing his arrival with such advance fanfare from across the street, we'd never have noticed him on the shadowed feeder.

His voice precedes him.
Cardinal's last visit at dusk--
dark bird, red hot song.

June 26: Backyard Birds

After mowing the lawn today, I did something unusual for me. I sat on the back step in the sun and... well, that's it. I just sat on the back step. For about ten minutes I did nothing but just sit there and live in the moment. My cat, who is strictly an indoor cat occasionally allowed supervised visits onto the porch, came over and, instead of trying to make her usual escape attempt, curled up in my lap. Apparently she wanted to live in the moment too. She purred and dozed, while I looked around and thought about how much I love my back yard.

Back yard, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love the ever-present rushing music of the river that passes over your feet. I love the canopy of oak, beech, ash, and maple leaves that surround you, leaving just the right-sized opening for sky and sunlight. I love the frilly fans of ferns that border your edges and the tall goldenrod along the porch steps. I love your view of my neighbor's orange day lilies. I love how you keep my flowers healthy, even the wild ones. And I love how the combination of water and tree cover brings birds into your sheltered embrace.

If you don't go looking for birds, sometimes they have a way of finding you. While I sat there enjoying my yard in all its early summer greenery, I heard the following:
cardinal whistling up a storm in the neighbor's yard
squalling group of crows upriver
broad-winged hawk high overhead
pileated woodpecker cackling somewhere downriver
loon calling in flight
warbling vireo moving through the trees above the river
several robins singing throughout the neighborhood
song sparrow across the street
hummingbird squealing through the yard, hopefully on its way to my bee balm

I've found fewer birds than that while out actually looking for them! And my cat was oblivious to it all.

Sometimes sitting still
turns out to be the best way
to hear birds, here, now.

June 23: Bee Balm

This summer the bee balm has become King of the Garden. A self-propagating perennial, each year it pops up in different places and in varying density. This year, however, it's outdone itself. Usually the tallest stalks are just visible at kitchen windowsill level. Today I noticed that the tallest plant is gaining on the top of the window, and its red buds haven't even fully opened yet. It's sort of like an out of control, seven-foot tall adolescent boy. And there aren't just a few plants scattered here and there--there are dozens. This is one patch of happy, dominating flowers.

The bee balm was given to us as a house-warming gift five years ago, and I was thrilled to receive it because I know it's a favorite of hummingbirds. My grandmother always had a patch, along with a yearly mass of nasturtiums, half a dozen hanging fuchsias, and about as many hummingbird feeders. Dozens of ruby-throated hummingbirds screamed around my grandparents' house all day long. Things are a bit less dramatic at our house. When the bright red bee balm blooms, I occasionally watch one hummer at a time visit the flowers while I'm eating at the kitchen table. A small excitement, but one I look forward to nonetheless, especially that moment when the male hovers in front of the window, flashing his ruby-colored gorget. (That's his throat, lest you think I'm being obscene.)

With this year's plants stretching more than halfway up the window, we should have a pretty good view when the hummers arrive at our one good nectar station. I've heard them buzzing around the neighborhood, but the only other flower blooming that might have attracted them thus far is a lobelia that's not visible from inside the house. So we have high hopes for our super-tall, super tempting, majestic bee balm.

Allure of ruby
flower draws the ruby-throat,
living gem itself.