Squirrels at feeder

 I added a PVC pipe to the pole holding the feeder. It does stop the squirrels from climbing. So they jump from the lilacs. It also makes a good support for your foot while you work through the seeds in the bottom tray. The grey phase black squirrel below is giving the PVC a look but it uses the tree access point as well. Basically the feeder is empty and it is cleaning up around the base. Most of our Eastern Grey Squirrels are black as seen in the top photo, but we occasionally get these grey brown squirrels with white bellies, their markings are beautiful. My buddy Doug who lives in south Calgary by Fish Creek Park noticed they have fewer squirrels at the feeders now. He thinks this is because they now have bobcats. With the dogs I would rather have squirrels.

"Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail 

Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; 

Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;"

from Sunday Morning

by Wallace Stevens 

And here we have squirrels.

What cat?

“Time itself is a thing, so it seems to me, that stands solidly like a fence of iron palings with its endless row of years; and we flow past like Gyoll, on our way to a sea from which we shall return only as rain.” 


from The Claw of the Conciliator
by Gene Wolfe

I see trees of green, 

red roses too. 

I see them bloom, 

for me and you. 

And I think to myself,

what a wonderful world. 

I see skies of blue, 

And clouds of white. 

The bright blessed day, 

The dark sacred night. 

And I think to myself, 

What a wonderful world. 

The colors of the rainbow, 

So pretty in the sky. 

Are also on the faces, 

Of people going by, 

I see friends shaking hands. 

Saying, "How do you do?" 

They're really saying, 

"I love you". 

I hear babies cry, 

I watch them grow, 

They'll learn much more, 

Than I'll ever know. 

And I think to myself, 

What a wonderful world. 

Yes, I think to myself, 

What a wonderful world. 

Oh yeah.

“Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, 

We fell them down and turn them into paper,

That we may record our emptiness.” 

Kahlil Gibran

Sand and Foam?

We have been alternating here between the hopeful signs 

of spring and the return of winter. Helen and I have managed

to finish a long delayed project and converted one room in 

the basement into a library for some mysteries, science fiction,

my Darwin/biology books and the bulk of my poetry collection.

two more libraries and a wood working shop to go.

 

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"

from The Summer Day

by Mary Oliver

"I dream an inescapable dream
in which I take away from the country
the bridges and roads, the fences, the strung wires,
ourselves, all we have built and dug and hollowed out,
our flocks and herds, our droves of machines.

     I restore then the wide-branching trees.
I see growing over the land and shading it
the great trunks and crowns of the first forest.
I am aware of the rattling of their branches,
the lichened channels of their bark, the saps
of the ground flowing upward to their darkness.
Like the afterimage of a light that only by not
looking can be seen, I glimpse the country as it was.
All its beings belong wholly to it.  They flourish
in dying as in being born.  It is the life of its deaths."

                                                                              from The Dream
                                                                                    Wendell Berry

As often happens when bad weather and lassitude

combine to keep me in, I fall back on the denizens of 

my backyard feeders for my photographic subjects. 

The Downy woodpecker was a nice change as all to often

I am left with a few native birds and a host of introduced species.

I felt the poetry fragment from Berry and my own poem make

nice bookends for this themecontrast. While I would like to see the 

world of the Plains Grizzly, the vast herds of Bison and Pronghorn 

or even further back the Dire Wolf, Sabretooth and 

Short Faced Bear I am not sure that world would like me.

So sparrows it is.

 

Eye, Fly, Awry in this Landscape of Words,


They say don’t feed the birds, you encourage
dependence, promote non-native species.
who knew, it seemed such a harmless lark.

And what is the result of my two week vacation,
starvation throughout Brentwood stretching to
Dalhousie and Charlewood, or is it more widespread.

They do fly after all and we go through a lot of seed,
will they be dropping in Shanghai and Topeka,
and if not mass starvation, perhaps delinquency.

The whole of bird society breaking down, begging,
sexual license, belling cats, downing power lines
pushing each other into the air intakes of jets.

Or could it be positive, native species returning
Bluebirds, Martins sundry Warblers all jostling
wildly for the vacant nesting boxes and bird baths.

Maybe we should think big, Passenger Pigeons,
Carolina Parakeets, Labrador Ducks, who knows
what these misplaced Weaver Birds were up to.
 
Maybe we will see the great brown spurts of Bison
moving out of the river valleys with their attendant
packs of Grey Wolves and lumbering Plains Grizzlies.

And if I stop feeding the sleek Black Squirrels
that hang like misshapen fruit from my feeders,
what can I get for that?

                                                     Guy

"Now the long freight of autumn goes smoking out of the land.

My possibles are all packed up, but still I do not leave.

I am happy enough here, where Dakota drifts wild in the universe,

Where the prairie is starting to shake in the surf of the winter dark."

                         from Beyond the Red River

                                      Thomas McGrath

We have had a cold week,  for much of the time the 

temperature was in the high minus 20 Celsius range 

with a wind chill some 10 degrees colder. As bit warmer 

today, but for most of the week the view out the window

showed puffed up birds and frost wrapped trees. I did put

up some Christmas lights today. The show must go on.

 "Thus having prepared their buds

against a sure winter

the wise trees

stand sleeping in the cold."

                  from Winter Trees

                              William Carlos Williams

You are here, alive in this place,

touching with sight

things that are smoke tomorrow

from Alive in the World

John Haines

I could not capture the motion but all day the vent on 

the neighbors garage has spun round beneath its little

cap of snow.

Two days of snow and the feeders and heated  bird bath

have been the centre of attention in a cold and windy world.

And for me this is always a welcome site seeing that they

are here and things are, in this moment as they should be.

So the song is becoming as the world

becomes, and it can never leave us;

 because we are the notice in its passages,

from Song of the Ocean of the World Becoming

Pattiann Rogers

"Memories from age three or age five put on the costumes of dreams.

Things were happening then just exactly the way they happen now,

 but those things seem to be rich with inner life and happy 

discovery, and a fuzzy sense of the world."

 from Love and Irony: 

Postcards from a Child of the New 

York School

Katherine Koch

A few weeks ago the aphids were 
flying everywhere I noticed that they were 
particularly thick on my Red Leaf Rose, 
but help was nearby, the House Sparrows
 flocked to the rose alternating between the 
bird feeder and grabbing mouthfuls of aphids.
This allowed me to enjoy their antics and 
quiet beauty.

This also encouraged a bit of research on aphids. 
Spring aphids are parthenogenetic, the population 
hatching from eggs is comprised entirely of females
who then switch to vivipary or live birth without males.
Towards the end of summer they produce a winged 
population consisting of both males and females which
allows them to spread to new host plants.

The Prairie Gardener Book of Bugs
Nora Bryan & Ruth Staal

One thing that I noticed while watching the sparrows was

this Grey Squirrel, it came directly down the Amur Cherry 

ran thru the area under the feeders where the squirrels normally

feed grabbed a piece of gravel, bit it and ran away with it.

A week of so later it did the same thing.

I still have a fuzzy sense of the world.

"I watch 

the lamplight's clear pool 

on the ancient pinewood planks 

fall through cracks and knotholes 

onto the lives of mice as starlight 

filters through the window 

and falls on me."

from How I Understand Eternity

Brian Swann

"He has fled like electricity down the telegraph wires into

prairies of distance where the single bird sits

small and black against the saffron sky,

and is itself"

 

from He Has Fled

            

Robert Penn Warren

 

 

 

 

" We must learn to live in the world."

 

from Loss, of Perhaps Love,

in Our World of Contingency

 

Robert Penn Warren

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"All things lean to you, and some are

Trying to tell you something, though of some

The heart is too full for speech"

 

from Trying to Tell You Something

 

Robert Penn Warren