After the Almanac --- 7.10.26

Continuing notes from the natural world. Also, a washing machine repair man appears.

First, a note to my readers: I love hearing from you.  Without you, I'd just be writing to myself. 

As I said last week, the great shuffling of birds and animals has settled into routine, but now the phoebe nest is a beehive (well, a phoebe nest) of activity. Every time we open the back door, the little heads pop up in alarm, then pop down again. Lots of feeding by the parent birds.

There are four babies: Big Bossy, who is twice the size of the smallest ones, Junior, who is one step smaller than Big Bossy, and Little Scrawny One and Little Scrawny Two. The Little Scrawnies’ necks are pencil thin. Big Bossy sits on the edge of the nest looking out, as if readying to take off. Little Scrawnies huddle down in the nest looking terrified. 

As I watched today, Junior elbowed (winged?) Big Bossy out of the way to claim the nest edge, just in time for afternoon snack delivered by a parent. Thank the scrawniest Little Scrawny got the next snack. Big Bossy clearly needs to slow down the weight gain, and everyone else needs to speed up. 

How do the parents handle it if one baby is ready to fledge first? We’ve always seen them fledge on the same day, pretty much all the same size. It’s all the parents can do to shepherd the group out of the nest and over to a branch and teach them all the bird stuff, plus watch over them to make sure they don’t get plucked up by a threatening raptor.

Last year, they fledged on July 6th, and it’s already July 10th and only Big Bossy is anywhere near ready to take off. 

Thinking about the phoebes, I found that Audubon.com has a remarkable migration map with dots representing birds, tracking their annual migrations. The phoebe isn’t a species with a particularly long migration; the farthest north is upper Canada, the farthest south is southern Mexico, but most of the dots sweep over the U.S.A. By contrast, our other visitor here, the Baltimore Oriole, goes as far south as Panama. 

And the flammulated owl goes from the Sierra Madre de Sur up to the Cascades and Rocky Mountains.

 

I just put that one here because I’d never heard of the Flammulated Owl, and that name is irresistible. According to Audubon, it was considered rare until recently, when scientists realized they’d been overlooking it, due to its excellent camouflage. It could also have been overlooked as it is tiny, under 6 inches high, weighing 2 ounces---the equivalent of a quarter cup of water. Not even a full cup. A quarter cup of water, and it can migrate from southern Mexico to northern Washington, even southern Canada. 

The global population of phoebes, Audubon estimates, is 35 million. Flammulated owl? 12,000. Looking at photos online, I see a great variation in color in the flammulated owl, likely due to the excellent camouflage ability.

Here, this week, there’s suddenly a lot of social action with our fellow humans. It took a long time to locate a washing machine repair man; apparently they are not a native species in our area, or maybe they are abundant but well camouflaged, though usually not tiny.

The washing machine repair man came at last, not to repair the machine but to examine it and tell us it needs a new belt, maybe a drum as well, in which case it won’t be worth fixing, but we have to wait, as one does for any medical diagnosis and procedure. 
And now the insurance man has stopped by to make sure we’re taking care of everything here; it’s unlikely he will ask about the phoebes. 

All this takes me from the intimacies of the wild world.
But this morning, on the step to my studio, a friendly little chipmunk waited, then ducked beneath what’s left of the step, which has decomposed into a pile of boards, and can’t really be called a step. But finding a person to build a new step is as easy as finding a washing machine repair man.

A couple of blue birds have, this week, crashed into my studio window as I sit writing (or, really, not writing). I keep the shade down now.