Grace And Grief

Strange times indeed. They're marked by uncertainty, most of all, followed by a stouter appreciation of how uncertain life has been all along. What next? we ask ourselves, as we might well have asked before, if we hadn't had so much busyness to distract us. We want a dog's life. Specifically, we want to wag and bark and roll in shit without any sense of our mortality. Meanwhile, life keeps sending us bolts of grace and grief, all in the same fabric.

At the same time I've been holding my breath waiting for a friend to recover from COVID-19, I've felt nothing but honored that, purely by chance, I have a front row seat to the creation of a new batch of bushtits. Front row, hell--I'm sitting on the stage! Right in front of us we've watched over the past month as Chip and Mitzi Vinebustle have painstakingly fashioned their nest-sock out of spiderweb and moss and hustle. It was finally finished about a week ago. The flurry of activity had stopped. I thought the Vinebustles were out grocery-shopping and I got curious about their sock, so I leaned over the railing--it's only a foot away--and brought my eye next to the entry hole at the top, and Mitzi up and blasted out of there right now. Sorry! I won't do it again! Oh dear. Poor little button. I backed way off, of course. I'm thinking eggs have happened.

We know what comes next, and look forward to the day, coming up soon, when the nestlings hatch and the rest of the family is invited back and the whole sock fills up with bushtits. A jollier thing cannot be imagined.

But I'll have to keep imagining it. Because sometime in the afternoon of April 29th, something really bad happened. There is a paw-sized gash in the side of the nest sock and the bottom is ripped out. Two light brown feathers are stuck to the moss and tremble in the breeze.

It had occurred to me that the nest might be in range of a cat on our railing, and I'd had the notion to jumble chicken wire on the railing if I saw a cat stalking the Vinebustles, but I hadn't done it. The neighbor's cat noticed the peeping from the song sparrow nest under a shrub last year and dispatched them before I'd found something to fence it out. I don't know why I wasn't proactive this time around.

I have two neighbors with outdoor cats that like my garden a whole lot. It's no wonder. Everything I do there is with my birds in mind. I plant what they like, I don't clean up the things gone to seed until spring, I don't rake leaves, I maintain feeders and a nest box. My neighbors would like their cats to not kill my birds. They think--well, most that can be said is they think it's a "shame." They also think that's just a cat's nature, which is true, and they also think it's very important for their cats to be able to entertain themselves by expressing that nature. Maybe they also think it's handier for them to poop in my tomato bed rather than a litter box. I can't say.

In any case they do not want to upset me, but after all, there are lots of birds, aren't there? Cats have been around forever, and there's no shortage of birds. Right? In fact domestic cats have not been around forever, not on this continent, and birds have not evolved with them, and there is most definitely a shortage of birds. Particularly in this yard. But my neighbors have heard all that, and shrugged.

And so I want to leave any of you who still allow your cats to roam to consider at least one thing about your neighbors. Just because birds are of minor importance to you, you have no right to assume the same of me. You have no right to assume my feelings are silly or overblown. Your nonchalance about your cat has devastated me. Has stolen my sleep. And there's still a chickadee in this yard that has single-footedly kept both Dave and me emotionally afloat in the darkest of days. Don't tell me it's just a bird. You're not the authority on whom I love. It's not your territory: you have no right. You have no idea.

Chip And Mitzi Put In An Offer

Mitzi

Well, we certainly did not want to discourage Chip and Mitzi Vinebustle, the bushtits, from building a nest right spang in front of our noses. And we'd only get the one shot. In spite of the fact that it takes a month or more to knit a bushtit nest, they don't reuse them the next year, but choose a different location. The amazing thing is they totally could reuse them. The suckers are sturdy. I'm always seeing bushtit nests from previous years. They look like fluff with intention, but they make it right through the winter, and as you may recall, this is tornado country.

Not really. But it's tornado neighborhood. We had a genuine petite tornado a couple blocks away last year and it took some trees down but I'm betting the bushtit nests made it through. What makes them so durable?

The main ingredient is spider web, a.k.a. God's Own Spandex. Chip and Mitzi are in there tugging on the webbing and pulling it every which direction. Usually these nests dangle from tree branches, which means the construction crew has to hang onto the nest with their feets while they're working on it, but Chip is totally using scaffolding. We have the smartest birds! The wisteria is jangling with old beans on strings and they're hanging their nest right in amongst them.

Mitzi up top with construction-grade fluff

That was job one, for us. The beans are left over from last year's pendulous flowers and some warm evening in March they all detonate. They can take your eye out. You can hear them blow up from a block away. Unfortunately not every one has gone off yet this year. There were still three unpopped beans hanging within a foot of the Vinebustles' nest, so we clipped them off. The explosion would be sure to discourage any prospective fuzzy homeowner and that's if it doesn't blast them into the street.

It's possible that bushtits have enough equanimity to shrug off exploding wisteria beans, though. They don't mind us too much. And they're not real fussy. The Literature states that the location of the nest in a given tree "tends to be from 3 feet to 100 feet" off the ground. Tends? That's like saying your average American tends to live somewhere between sea and shining sea.

The Literature also says that the tits incorporate feathers, fur, and downy plant matter to camouflage the outside of the nest. That way nobody will notice a foot-long fuzzy sock with a bustle of bushtits flying in and out of it all day long. Because once Chip and Mitzi invite the whole family back in, there are going to be lots of bushtits, and they never stop talking, either. It'll be as quiet as a preteen slumber party. Everyone wants a turn. Let ME sit the eggs! No, let ME! MOM! It's MY turn! Pip pip pip! No fair! SCOOT OVER!

Chip on his scaffolding

Camouflage? Please. They might as well go for a snappy argyle.

The extra helper tits are referred to (in The Literature) as "supernumeraries," and yes, that is the same term used for extra nipples on people. It's a little dismissive. The implication is that you really don't need all those bushtits. They're superfluous. But bushtits never find each other superfluous. They all find each other equally swell and they're all super excited about making new ones.

So among the things I'm looking forward to here is the arrival of the Louis Tiffany drapes Mitzi has on order, and the day the sock will bulge and bop with essential birds, cozying up in the feather lining. There won't be a kid jiggling his bag of marbles who will be any happier than me.

I Feel Flitty, Oh So Flitty

If you see a really cute little bird about the size of a tailed ping pong ball and you decide it's a bushtit, you're probably wrong. Bushtits don't come in ones. You see a solitary bushtit and you've just seen the saddest thing on the planet, this close to dying of lonesomeness.

We've got a neighbor like that too. He likes to sit on his front stoop and his buddies show up and after a while they're a wee bit likkered up and then they're jabbering all over each other, happy as clams at high tide. It doesn't seem like they could possibly be listening to each other, but they probably are, and it's exactly the same with the bushtits. You might get thirty of them in a bunch and they even go to the bathroom together. Of course, birds are going to the bathroom all the time.

So if you do have a genuine bushtit, you've got a raft of them all going off at once, and the only exception is right about now, during mating season. That's the only time they pair off. I don't know how the female chooses a mate but I don't think she can go wrong. If there's something she likes about one male bushtit, it's likely to be equally right with all of them.

Photo By Mary Jansen

I particularly like bushtits because unlike some people I could mention (I'm looking at you, Marge and Studley Windowson), it's real easy to tell the boys from the girls. The boys have sexy brown eyes and the girls have haunting yellow eyes. They're always being described as "drab" but that's only because brownish doesn't strike a lot of people as a color. Even when it's soft mouse gray and chocolate Necco candy brown.

Anyway, the bushtits, in a burst of springtime inspiration and hormones that they would otherwise not know what to do with, do pair off for just as long as it takes to get a nice nest started. It's a woven sock, maybe a foot long. There's a hole in the top of the sock for entry and then a little passageway to the bouncy bottom part. The suckers are so well constructed, using lichens and grasses and fur and spider silk for the Spandex effect, that they are still intact the following spring and even the one after that, but nobody uses it again. They start over. Everybody likes a good project. And there's always lots of help. That's unusual among birds.

Photo By Mary Jansen

The female does most of the work on the bottom part where the eggs will go, and probably turns the heel, and the male works on the rest. They might spend a month at it, but as you can probably guess, that's a long time for bushtits to go without the whole gang, so at some point all the unmarried members of the flock show up and pitch in. Is there anything cheerfuler than a sock full of bushtits? Nobody knows who's who for a while, but eventually the eggs drop out of one of them, and she and her mate both sit them, and meanwhile the hangers-on are all in there too. They should have knitted panty hose.

Two of these photos are courtesy of fellow Portlander Mary Jansen, a Friend Of Pootie and spectacular artist.

Get Your Gladys On

There's singing.

These are tough days, and it's not good to spend too much time in your own head. It's loud and cranky in there, and your internal political oratory is only slicing minutes off your life, to no obvious benefit. The best way to get out of your own head is to spend time in someone else's. It's springtime, and it's time to get your Gladys Kravitz on.

Your kids all know who Gladys Kravitz is. There's plenty of Legacy Television to watch instead of playing outside; but for you old folks out there who can't quite come up with names anymore, Gladys Kravitz is the nosy neighbor who was always spying on the Stephens family in Bewitched. She probably had a good idea about Darrin's sexual orientation before it came out in the general press.

There's tail-fanning.

But don't waste your Gladys on the neighbors. Snoop on the birds instead.  They're randy as the dickens right now. The males are spiffed to the nines and singing their hearts out. They're hoping the same lines that worked last year will work this year too, and they probably will. The females are completely on board, but they're playing it coy, hoping to get a few dinners out of the deal. You can see all of this easily enough if you just look. Love is in the air, and new birds are in the pipeline.

Our chickadees, Marge and Studley Windowson, are back this spring looking into the rental box outside my window. I just saw a pair of ruby-crowned kinglets nearby and got all excited that they'd be interested, even though it turns out they don't use boxes, but they didn't stand a chance anyway. Studley ran their asses right off, or maybe it was Marge. There's nothing our chickadees like better than picking on something smaller than them, like bushtits or kinglets. It makes them all puffy in the chest. They leave hummingbirds alone because they're too mean and pointy to take on.

We need new birds. There aren't near as many as there ought to be, since we persist in poisoning our gardens and ripping out stuff they like to eat and sending out death squads of darling killer cats and putting in windows that look like sky. In spite of all this there are birds. And right about now, they're all working real hard to make even more birds, and they'll let you watch.

There's THIS.

They won't necessarily show you their nests. That's a secret. You'll have to get lucky, by following a bird with nesting materials. Crows are easy. They're flat-out carrying lumber.  But I'm still hoping to score a bushtit nest this year. Bushtits are very plural. If you've seen one, you've seen twenty. They make a brief show of pairing off this time of year and starting in on their nests, but invariably they say what the hell and invite the whole crew in once they're done knitting it. It's a sock. A big stretchy bouncy sock with bedrooms all full of fuzzy little tits.  That'll get you out of your head, or you ain't right.

Don't worry about how you look. Yes, you're staring into the sky, and your mouth has gone slack, and there might be a little drool, and you look like one of those people waiting for the Rapture. But you're nothing like them. They suffer from more certainty, and less reward.

[...and then there's THIS. I'm going out on a limb with my little friend here and calling her an American goldfinch, and I don't know what the heck she's doing, but she totally let me watch. Ah, spring.]

Cascara 2.0

It's a cascara tree. No human planted it. It was a gift from a bird who gave a shit, but not about property lines. When Dave put up a fence between our house and the next, he put it up as close to the tree as he could. Even with that, later, we realized we'd stolen some two feet from the neighbor's yard to accommodate the tree. So we had to buy the neighbor's house.

Cascaras are native here, which is good. That means birds will like it, and insects will live in it, which means the birds will like it even more. I didn't think it was that attractive, at first. Kind of dull. But that was before I started writing, and before we designated the room closest to the tree as a writing room, and before I had a chance to appreciate the birds that appreciated the tree. Now I do. I count on them. The tree is up past the second story and that means its branches are right outside my writing-room window. It shouldn't have gotten much taller than that, but it did, because it's in shadow and yearned for the sun I suppose, and we had to whack off the topmost branches because they shaded our solar panels.

That was a few years ago. The tree hasn't done well since. It could be the coppicing, but it's old for a cascara, and maybe it was doomed already. Most of it is flat-out dead. It's a weird tree. New parts keep springing out of the old so that there are viable branches going vertically out of the dead stuff. It looks like a huge, unruly menorah. I don't know how long it hopes to keep this up, but already the leafy shade our birdhouse birds might be relying on is gone. There are just a few cowlicks of leaves left.

So what you ordinarily do when a tree is dying on your little city lot is you take it down and replace it. That's understood. You tell all the shrubs that it just went to live in the country, but that's not what really happens.

I dithered about it. I need that tree. My window is on the second floor. You can't just swap a big tree out that fast. If I didn't have my birds to look at, I'd just be staring at a blank computer screen, and that tends to panic writers.

Then my birds caught wind of the plans and started piping up. They pecked at the dead parts and pulled out little grubby snacks. They grabbed seeds from the feeder and stashed them in the flaky bark. They loved it. TERRIFIC, said the chickadees. Yeah? Okay.

The bushtits lined up on a branch together. SOME TWIG, they spelled out.

Hey. I know this story. This is the story where you think everything's going great and then you lose your very best spider, and it's horribly sad. I was morose for days.

Then I was weeding a patch beneath the unruly menorah tree and saw them. Remember? That's not the end of the story after all! There, in an empty pot at the base of the cascara, were two friendly little cascara seedlings, six inches tall. I can plant them next to the dying tree and maybe they'll grow up right alongside! They said they're willing to give it a go.