At the Front Door, Spring

A swell way to begin one’s day is to have a peenting woodcock on the front lawn at 5 a.m. Peenting is the sound made by the displaying woodcock, a.k.a. timberdoodle. It actually sounds more like an electrical beep, loudly repeated half a dozen times and followed by a soft twittering produced by feathers in free-fall. Too dark to see anything as I stood on the front porch barefoot in the chilly dawn, so I just listened. The woodcock display has been something of a holy grail for me. I’ve been asking around for directions to possible places to watch (wet meadows after sundown) but until this morning peenting woodcocks might as well have been ivory-billed woodpeckers.
Here at the Harvard Forest, life in Benson House has many nice gifts from nature. The stream behind us is called Nelson’s Brook and has abated somewhat from the snow melt cascade it was just a week ago, but it still offers pleasing compositions for the pencil and brush. It creates a lovely rushing sound attractive to birds looking for a drink or a bath. Right outside the front door I have seen pine, palm and prairie warblers; a pair of eastern phoebes are building a mossy nest in the porch eaves; yellow-bellied sapsuckers are tapping the sugar maples right around the house. Just this morning I saw my first blue-headed vireos, a courting pair; then a wild turkey wandered up to the porch looking for birdseed. And then there was that excellent peenting woodcock. Life just gets better and better.

Sugar Maple, Swift River Reservation, Petersham

Glacial Boulders, Swift River Reservation, Petersham

Last week the premier artist Barry Van Dusen and I hiked and sketched the Swift River Reservation just south of Petersham, a delightful excursion for a sunny afternoon. The trees are still free of foliage, but down on the sunlit forest floor we found a wee tiny blooming flower, Hepatica nobilis, emerging and flowering before the spreading canopy can throw it down into the deep dark well of summer shade. While a grand twisted sugar maple attracted my eye, Barry got down practically on his hands and knees to paint the hepatica. I tried to capture the whole gargantuan specimen on my biggest sheet of paper and and he was quietly drawing and painting the little hepatica, making the most perfect work of watercolor beauty in miniature. I polished off the maple and moved on to a great heap of huge granite boulders, a colossal monument to the great retreating glaciers. Barry stayed small. And perfectly awesome.

Barry Van Dusen gets down.

Barry lives nearby in Princeton, Massachusetts, and knows these roads and pathways like a favorite book. He’s a terrific field and bird artist, a fly fisherman, and an all-around naturalist and fun person. He’s as great a birding companion as a sketching one. While we sat in the forest we drew and listened to a winter wren’s vocal cascade in the ravine, an evening grosbeak’s flyover call, a raven’s croak.  Sounds of spring, just like this morning’s woodcock peent. Just the beginning of the season of spring, that first little stirring before it all breaks loose and turns into summer.

Keeping My Balance

I want to say thank you to everyone who wrote with such kind, warm words about Cody. To those who shared their own stories of losing their most treasured canine companion, my heartfelt gratitude and sympathy goes out to you.

The sea is a powerful restorative, and the sea in winter is bleak and beautiful all at once. With my good friend Cindy, we shivered and walked and drew and photographed, looked at river otter tracks in the sand, watched eiders ride the chop and harriers chase red-tails. There were a couple of near-rarities: a northern shrike (a life bird for me) and a Eurasian wigeon. We stayed at the cozy 1705-built Charlotte Inn in Edgartown (thank you Gery!), we had pots of hot tea fireside in a small pub. We explored the old cemetary (and spent a few moments contemplating John Belushi’s final resting place), we dined (fresh oysters for me, of course) while an Irish music trio played wondrous tunes and rowdy patrons clapped and threw peanut shells on the floor.

Drawing is another restorative. Nothing takes you outside of yourself and reconnects you with the world so well. It’s intimate, meditative, fascinating. Clear your mind if you want to do it well. Draw anything and everything. Make it your own.

A common eider chugs forward in an outer Chappaquiddick seachannel like a passenger ferry loaded up with cement trucks.

We watched this pair of breeding-plumaged Long-tailed ducks working a rip current just past the breakers nearest the shore where we sat in the sand. Like a conveyor belt that carried them backward as they dove and surfaced, when they reached the back end of the ride they would fly forward to begin again. Over and over, they flew forward and were pulled backwards, diving and feeding on whatever else was caught in the current. The male duck’s central tail feathers are long soft streamers rather than stiff spikes like those of the pintail duck.

This northern shrike made an appearance in the red cedars of Lobsterville, where unsuspecting song sparrows actually flew in to join it (probably thinking it was a fat mockingbird) and nearly got nabbed. The shrike, a.k.a. butcherbird, is a predatory songbird (!!) and famously impales its prey on thorns and barbed wire fences. I’ve never heard its song but Cindy says it’s quite beautiful. Imagine that.

Warming up by the fire with hot tea and laughter.

The cliffs below the lighthouse were assorted colors of clay, an artist’s palette of warm and cool.

a moment of peace and solitude, beauty and otter tracks.

When Bloggers Collide

Two Birds of a Feather

Just chillin’ with my homey over here at the Rancho Motmot; TR came by for some liquid beetle juice. Nothing like cochineal on the rocks with a twist and a lifer black-and-white warbler to get your mojo going.

TR: “Motmot serves the best beetle juice in town and a wicked platter of wild birds and Zick dough“

M: “Don’t forget the fresh mozzarella- I slaved nearly half an hour over that!”

TR: “Didn’t know you could get fresh mozzarella in Oklahoma- you’re about to embark on a third career- they’re going to be lining up to get their gums around this stuff”

M: “What exactly are you saying about Oklahoma dentistry, pal?”

TR: “My dentist is still in New Mexico”