Tiny Little Voices Going Beep Beep Beep

Whenever I hear it,  nyank nyank nyank, my world lights up just a little bit more, because I know there are nuthatches around. I adore nuthatches. If it weren't for all the other cute birds, they'd have the cute franchise sewn up. Red-breasted nuthatches aren't at all uncommon but it wasn't until a couple years ago that I saw or heard them with any regularity at my house. That first year I heard lots of them. We even hosted a couple in our birdhouse, when they aced out our chickadees Marge and Studley Windowson, who were still measuring for the piano when the nuthatches bombed in with first-and-last and the security deposit. It didn't work out well for the nuthatches, though. Their tenancy turned out to be a complete disaster and the Missus wasn't even speaking to her mate when she flew off for the last time. This year I haven't seen any nuthatches at all, here. I've assumed the whole place brings up bad memories for them, and I'm sad about that.

Interesting fact: Dave can't hear nuthatches. Whenever we're walking and I point them out, he looks baffled. Even when I imitate them and point in their direction he can't hear them, or me. Apparently they beep in a very narrow frequency range and he doesn't have the bandwidth for it. My voice is in the same range. A lot of the time he can't hear me either. Apparently.

On the other hand, I can't hear the dog that drives him nuts. Our neighbor has a dog that she lets out into the back yard to deliver updates to the neighborhood. Everything the dog has to say he says in the first five seconds, but he's real thorough, in case anyone passing through a half-hour later has missed the first bulletin. It's not really that I can't hear him as much as I tune him out. He has a low voice, like Dave, whom I also don't always hear. Apparently. Probably I don't hear the dog because I get a lot of sleep and I'm thinking about other things.

I'm sure this annoys Dave though. It's pretty annoying when something is driving you nuts but your partner is all "what-ever" and smiling like the freaking Buddha. It makes you feel small and petty. I'm not sure why the Buddha didn't get his ass handed to him more often than he did.

Some of the time the dog is barking, I'm thinking about something I'm writing, or want to write. Sometimes there's almost nothing going on in my head. Sometimes I'm thinking about how I feel pretty good, which means I might have ovarian cancer, which often presents with no symptoms. Sometimes I'm just thinking about how nice and quiet it is.

"Haven't heard the dog barking in a while," I might say, at the risk of irritating Dave, if in fact the dog had been barking up a storm and I hadn't noticed.

Dave's head pops up, ready to refute, and then his face relaxes. "I don't hear anything," he marvels.

Yay! The nuthatches must be back!

Chickadees: If You Have To Ask, You Can't Afford It

Female

Big news in Portland real estate, where rental vacancies are at an all-time low, and landlords can comfortably soak their tenants without compromising their ethics at all, assuming they're assholes. So it should have been no surprise that the nesting box, the one right outside my writing room window that has been occupied every spring by Marge and Studley Windowson, our chickadees, has fallen victim to the hot market. A pair of nuthatches sensed an opportunity and snapped it up before Marge and Studley ever got their tiny little identical butts in gear. There's nothing we can do about it. We're hoping the Windowsons have been able to locate something affordable on the edge of town.

Meanwhile the nuthatches seemed to be dinking around about actually moving in. I decided to hang up some nesting material right nearby. My cat Tater helpfully refused to shed a single strand of fur. I went next door and borrowed a cup of Golden Retriever. Birds loved it, except for the nuthatches.

Holding single strand of golden retriever

I read up. The box was the right size, but nuthatches "rarely" use them. Well, poo. Had they just been toying with us, and holding up the paperwork on the house just long enough that Marge and Studley had to give up? Would we have an empty box through the nesting season?

Finally they began to move in some fluff. It looks like a going concern now, plus we have the benefit of feeling special, since they so rarely go for nesting boxes. I'm looking forward to watching this, not least because I can tell these guys apart. I don't know if I'm looking at this one, or the other one, but I'm pretty sure they're not the same.

Which just goes to show how extremely bad I am at really noticing things. I spend a lot of time noticing, but not to the point where I could give you any particulars.

Male, primping

Example. This week Dave and I went on a hike. A few hours in, an old man came by us going the  other direction and we all said Hi. One minute later another old man came by and asked us if we'd seen a woman just ahead of him on the trail. I hesitated. I didn't want to say an old man had just passed by, in case that was the woman he was talking about. Seemed rude. He clarified that "she is wearing a pink jacket." Now. I should have remembered if the old man was wearing a pink jacket, shouldn't I? But at that point I couldn't swear that the person we just saw was a man or a woman or was wearing pink or not.

Birds, same way. I'm pretty sure our nuthatches are different, but if you asked me, I'd say one looked sort of diffident, and the other one sort of saucy. These are not field marks. Find three field marks, I can hear my friend Bill say, so let's see: one of them is diffident and pensive with a thousand-mile stare. The other one is saucy, restless, and prone to hyperbole.

I looked them up. According to the guides, the male has a black crown and tends to be somewhat darker in the breast, and the female has a dark gray crown. Well, sure. When you put it that way. I can see it now.

But if one of them had a pink jacket on, I can't recall.

Here's a bonus video of the nuthatches protecting their territory. Hold onto your heart; and yes, I promise the nuthatch is okay in the end!