Nature in Sub-Urbia

Skywatch Friday addendum, 16 April: If I don't cheat and use this as my SWF entry for this week I won't have time for one at all--so here's an update. The evening after I posted what appears below, the moth was still on the screen. But as soon as I switched on the porch light, he fluttered off. I guess I was sort of hoping he was dead, so I could "collect" him--but now I'm just as happy he was just resting for the day. The birds, however, seem to have moved in permanently.

A couple of days ago I was slaving away at the computer, and glanced out the window in front of me to see a gang of Cedar Waxwings frolicking in my birdbath. I say "gang" rather than "flock" because these birds are ruffians. They attack any unwary bush with anything resembling a berry on it, and completely denude it in moments. One day last week, they were busy stripping my pear trees of blossoms. No pears this year.

Right around equinox time they were at the holly, and I can imagine that it's only a matter of time before the pyracantha berries are ripe enough to gobble up.

After their group bathing experience (I only managed to catch three at it, and I had to shoot from inside the house), they gathered to sun themselves in a neighboring tree (see below). As I've mentioned in an earlier post, these birds once used to fly through, eat berries, and leave--after depositing the remainder of their meals on unsuspecting lawn furniture and laundry. Somehow they managed not to poop on the pillowcases drying on the line behind the pecan tree.

Nowadays they seem to treat this place like a cafeteria, especially since the establishment of the Carbon Sink on the southwest corner of the property. There's a lot of privet there, some of it probably contributed by these very birds, as well as the volunteer Chinaberry that grew from seed about six years ago and is now over twenty feet tall. This tree is, of course, thought by many to be a weed, but to me its a link to my Asian childhood, and also to Italy, where I saw it growing as well.

At any rate, when they're through feeding or bathing, they congregate for a nice long squawk, yellow breasts gleaming in the sun. I think I can put up with a bit of bird lime (the color varies with the meal) in exchange for tree ornaments and a concert every now and then. If you'd like to see what they look like in action, YouTube has a whole page of videos.

The latest oddity is the appearance of a Luna moth on the rusty screen door at the entry to the house. Beloved Spouse noticed it last night when he was shutting down the house at bedtime, and I snapped a couple of shots, assuming that the moth would be gone by morning.

But he was still there at sunrise, and so I photographed him from both inside the house and out. I love the shot with the shadow with the grids created by the screen and door muntins, but was especially pleased with the one backlit by the sunrise that opens this post.

I think this is the only time I've seen one of these beauties alive (if, in fact, he is still alive, and didn't just choose to die on my screen door; I didn't poke him for fear that he'd fly away). I knew they were in the neighborhood because I found a wing once when I was cleaning up the garden.

I'm heartened by the continued appearance of evolution's incredibly varied results, because in moments when I think we might be getting stupider and stupider as a species, something might survive our (ahem) lunacy. I guess it's just time to stop reading the op/ed pages of the Daily Poop, and certainly stop watching really bad doomsday movies (we caught the train wreck called Armageddon a couple of nights ago; very messy, stupid science, but a tear-jerker nonetheless).

Every time I drive by a manicured lawn (in the very economical and ecologically correct Vera, who has already rewarded me with four leaves for good driving) I can't help but feel slightly morally superior, knowing that my ratty, 100% organic yard has become a haven for all manner of flora and fauna. The Carbon Sink is now a jungle, full of edible goose grass, which is great in salads and cures all manner of ailments. Last year it was cow parsley, but this year the late winter rains seem to have drowned out some of that, and what the kids used to call "sticky weed" has replaced it.

The Beloved Spouse mowed on Sunday, and although back quarter-acre doesn't exactly look like Augusta National (many of the plants for which various holes on the course are named actually grow in my yard, too), it's rather more civilized now that it's been shorn; at least the clumps of assorted wild grassy stuff are all relatively the same height. I do wonder, when I'm sitting out enjoying it all, whether our lack of a chemical lawn service is going to make it more difficult for my neighbor to sell her manse (asking price is $519K). But I'm thinkin' that the kind of folk who don't like my yard will do one of two things: not buy the house, or put up a fence (saving me the trouble of repairing mine, and giving me something to hang bird feeders on). I live in hope that people will love the house (it looks rather like Morris's Kelmscott Manor), and think having scruffy, farmer-wannabe neighbors with a suburban wildlife sanctuary is a good thing.

Images: all taken with the Nikon D80, with minimal adjustments in PhotoShop.

Skywatch Friday: 13 Ways of Looking at Spring Skies

Wallace Stevens's iconic poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" was one of the first texts I studied in a graduate course on translation. The concept that understanding involves multiple perspectives wasn't all that new to me, but this poem drew me to Stevens and his other works, and has frequently prompted visual "thought experiments" that involve looking at familiar things in different ways.

Since many of the photos I take are of my little half-acre in north Texas, I'm frequently inspired to shoot the same object(s) over and over again, at different moments throughout the year. Now, midway through a rainy spring, and before the premature summer weather sets in, I thought it would be a good time to visit and revisit some of this year's subjects.

The opening photo is one I took just after I started posting on Skywatch Friday, and just as the trees in front of the house started budding. The one that follows is of a gloomier moment, as storm clouds began to gather in a spot nearby, about two weeks later:

Just before the official entrance of Spring (phenologically, it arrives early in Texas), I accidentally caught a flock of Cedar Waxwings on film, although I didn't realize what they were until I was choosing photos for this post. I wasn't sure even when I enlarged the image, because their little cockades didn't show up; but the tails and the yellow-grey vests give them away:

And here's a closeup:

Today, as soon as the sun arrived (after several soggy, cloudy, dismal days) I went out a'shootin' and to my surprise, there they were again, this time filching the mulberries that grow next to my front door (the mulberry overlaps with the enormous pecan that grows in the southeast part of the property):

And a closer view:

Concurrent with the first Waxwing photo, I snapped a pleasant surprise--a volunteer redbud that had settled in long enough to be bud (although the buds are really pink), and not far away from that the wisteria had also started to bloom,

to be followed in another ten days by voluptuous, frowsy vines all over the fence, perfuming the entire yard:

Some of the flora aren't quite as dramatic, but still contribute to the suggestion of heavy vegetation to come, such as my well-loved Bur Oak. Its acorns are majestic, as big as hens' eggs, and its rough bark forms a nice backdrop to its large crenelated leaves--here only just budding out, dripping catkins:

Most of the photographs featured so far have shamelessly used the sky as a backdrop; but in these last three, it provides most of the content. The first is of a fairly typical evening in March, just as baby leaves have started to obscure the sky. The skeletal branches of winter have been replaced by fuzz, and clouds move in on a regular basis, but in this shot there's still a bit of blue in the corner, and darkness hasn't quite won out. Within a month there would be little sky at all to see through the canopy.

The second was taken as I was getting ready to enter the hospital, knowing that this month (April) would end my quest to capture all the full moons of the year. As it turned out, on the night of the Full Pink Moon I was still in ICU, and it was the proverbial dark and stormy night (I remember the rain beating against the big windows in my room), so I wouldn't have caught it anyway. Still, this shot of the waxing gibbous moon (although a little fuzzy; I didn't even think to get out the telephoto lens) got fairly close to the proper date.

April showers were in full force for most of the month, and on the 28th I awoke to a mist-drenched back yard. The sky had fallen into my garden, and we got a bit of a respite from the rain.

As much as I complain about being exiled from the land of my birth, there are many things to love about what's left of the prairie. My little carbon sink and my accidental garden remind me that it wouldn't take too long for signs of human habitation to disappear, at least on this small piece of land. I'm trying to strike a balance between too much "civilization" and too little, and I'm frequently rewarded by the variety and density of nature, and the role the sky plays in bringing it to my attention.

Happy Skywatch Friday, People--and many thanks to the crew that put this meme together and keeps it thriving.

All photos taken with a Nikon D80, using either Nikkor 18-135 mm or Sigma DL Macro Super 70-300 mm lenses.