Pigeon rescue
I saved the life of a pigeon today. I hate pigeons! They’re feathered rats! All right, this was a wood pigeon, but they’re a plague too, like locusts or frogs or boils or your drinking water turning to blood! And they eat the growing tips off your garden plants! Wretched wood pigeons are why I have to net my little magnolia, and I didn’t catch on soon enough and I think it’s going to grow up strange! Pigeons! Bah!
It’s raining. It’s been raining steadily and hard a l l d a y l o n g. That’s ALL day. That is, among other things, four sprints with hellhounds. My raincoat isn’t much more waterproof than fine hellhound fur and I get very cranky not being able to see through my glasses, not to mention the greater risk this puts all other pedestrians at of sudden hellhound assaults,* and half an hour at a time is about our limit. Usually even downpours have pauses in which you can, if you’re paying attention, get hellhounds hurtled during. Not today. I’ve been through three pairs of jeans and three pairs of All Stars**, and it would be four except I get tired of changing clothes and the last time I just sat over the electric fire and steamed. It’s also cold enough to want to fish your electric fire out from under the sofa and turn it on. Hellhounds have been through about six large towels and, for hellhounds, are a bit grumpy. But they get over it quickly: a good riot around Peter’s sitting room–where there’s almost enough room for rioting, unlike at the cottage–scuffling up all the carpets and knocking the sofa sideways, will cheer them up again.
The one good thing about walking around town in filthy weather–and I find walking around town pretty boring generally, although I do a lot of it–is that the number of vicious-off-lead-uncontrolled-dog-equipped morons is much lower than in fine weather. A sort of tarnished-plate lining to a very wet cloud. But the storm drains are starting to back up so there are more and more new, stampeding rivers to find your way around, and I swear even the tarmac is beginning to dissolve into mud.
The usual river is running very high and where there’s a sort of mini Ponte Vecchio I imagine the people are listening to the water scrabbling at their floors. We haven’t been up to the stretch of footpath that goes past the tree farm because I’m reasonably sure it’s impassable, and besides, there are travellers camped out that way and they have a Very Scary Very Large Bull Mastiff patrolling the perimeter.*** But this morning as we were approaching the bend in the river where we would turn back toward downtown and home and dry again, as we were rapidly reaching saturation point, I saw something strangely fluffy floating in the river.
I’m right in thinking that non-water-birds’ feathers can get waterlogged and the bird drown, aren’t I? Even if I didn’t have a vague back-of-mind memory to this effect, this bird was floating way too low: you just look at it and think ‘it’s going to go under in a minute’. I stopped† to consider the situation, and so saw this bird sort of half-paddle and half-flounce its way to the edge, which is probably less than two inches above the water surface right now, but they’re a vertical not quite two inches, because the public footpath along the river at this point is reinforced by palings, if you call them palings when all but the top less than two inches of them are underwater. And it couldn’t climb out. It tried and fell back into the water again.
So I went back a little way and wrapped hellhound leads around a lamppost and looked for something to use as a scoop. I’m willing to risk getting bitten or clawed–at least by something as small as a pigeon–but I don’t particularly want river water in any open wounds.†† Some thoughtful litterer had left a large Styrofoam container just off the path, the sort of thing you carry your curry takeaway in. The rain had washed it out nicely. So I took it back to the bird which I had, yes, already identified as a pigeon and was grinding my teeth as I knelt down beside it. But you can’t just let something drown. Ugh. I could guess how exhausted it was by the fact that it made no effort whatsoever to elude either me or the jaws of the Styrofoam. I ended up using my hands anyway as even a pigeon (at least a waterlogged pigeon) is rather heavier than your average serving of takeaway curry. Feathers are so soft. You know this anyway from feather pillows, but it’s a lot different somehow when a live wing is sweeping across the back of your hand.†††
I got it out, and it staggered across the path and collapsed. I wondered if I should meddle with it any further, and decided not.‡ It wasn’t going to be a big day for footpath usage, there didn’t look to be anything particular wrong with it besides sogginess, and it had tucked itself under some overhanging shrubbery where it might conceivably dry out. I went back for hellhounds‡‡ and the pigeon and I exchanged long looks as we courbetted past. It wasn’t there in the afternoon when we went past the same spot again, nor was there any little explosion of feathers suggesting the interference of a passing cat or dog or fox. I want of course to believe it dried out and flew away. But if it comes after my magnolia next year I’m going to have pigeon pie for supper.
* * *
* What I don’t understand is how they choose. They’ll walk pleasantly past six people on a loose lead . . . and the seventh they’ll be all over, or they will be if my thumb hasn’t hit the brake fast enough. It has nothing visible to do with the person; they’re just as likely to go for someone scowling fiercely in a wildlife-should-not-be-allowed-on-public-ways way as for someone who is going all weak in the knees about how beautiful they are. One of the drawbacks of their harnesses^ is that the straps sit so much farther back on their shoulders that their necks are entirely untrammelled and slender graceful hellhound necks become remarkably long and flexy when you’re passing someone interesting on a narrow pavement.
^ Darkness once managed to yank out of his collar too so I think his escapetry has more to do with his duck and dive technique than with the tackle he’s snaking out of.
** And I can fit only two pairs of jeans and two pairs of All Stars on the Aga rail at a time.
*** Sometimes I get along very well with travellers: we like each other’s sighthounds. I like bull mastiffs too, but I don’t want to mess with one. Or, more to the point, have it mess with me.
† The veins popping out on my arms as I hung onto frustrated hellhounds. Oh, Mom, we never have any fun!
†† I’ve also just had it drummed into me, somewhere along the line, that you do not use bare human hands on wildlife, even aside from the possibility it might hurt you. I don’t know where the order came from. But I’ve been attempting to rescue unlucky or misguided critters as long as I remember, so maybe it came from some basic guide to the help and succour of local fauna current forty years ago.
††† Lice! Fleas! Unknown Dreadful Avian Parasites!
‡ The same drumming declares Thou Shalt Meddle as Little as Possible.
‡‡ Did I tell you about not quite catching the lamb a few months ago? It had got on the wrong side of the fence, and it and its mum were having separation hysterics. I tied the hellhounds to one end of the fenceline and then crept past the lamb, thinking that it would prefer me to the hellhounds. I did finally manage to grab it, but you’re always afraid of hurting what you’re theoretically helping, lambs, like most baby things that grow fast, have extraordinary amounts of loose skin, and it managed to writhe away from me again. Whereupon I stomped off muttering to tell the local farmer. If I’d just caught the thing it would have taken a lot less time.
Owls
Today’s critter link is:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/13/wildlife
Which is A beginner’s guide to beating off these vicious predators, and I’m not sure what the point is–are we in silly season already?–why these particular vicious predators out of all the ones available, and why is the Guardian publishing the article? The advice is also pretty obvious, at least to those of us who are critter-obsessed and afraid of everything and dedicated to gratuitous and extreme what-if storylines* and have therefore read The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook several times: go for the eyes (sharks and alligators), look bigger and more threatening than they are (cougars and pumas), forget it you’re dead (bears). But I love the Killer Turkeys. In Boston! Boston has an invasion of large aggressive wild turkeys! With teeth and tats and a bad attitude! They’re threatening joggers!*** Oh, ow, don’t make me laugh like that.† And you should use a broom or umbrella to fight them off!†† Have at thee, thou scoundrel Meleagris!†††
But this is my lead-in to my owl story. Stories. I never told you the first one and now it has a sequel.
About a week ago hellhounds and I were toiling up a familiar hill on a favourite (except for the hill angle) walk when my companions, who have much better rear end torque than I do, took off, in a manner any dog owner knows to find ominous. I usually mash the brakes on first and ask questions later, as on this occasion, not for their sake–they’re both in harnesses now, so no neck damage, and the force is spread over their chests and shoulders–but for mine. If they hit the end of their extending leads at full sprint, I’ll go over, not to mention the tendonitis. That day it was fortunate for the object of their affections as well, which was a baby tawny owl. It has to have been a tawny because it had black eyes; but it was small for a tawny, and had that rumpled look of the newly fledged‡. It was also just sitting there looking at us. My prior, if limited, experience with fledglings is that they hop away. Certainly my robins did. This one just wasn’t bothered, despite the hot breath and adjacent straining of hellhounds (and the hot breath and the straining of the detaining party). So we stared at each other for a minute or two and then hellhounds and I went on our way, not without backward glances. Mine were on the lines of ‘I wonder if there’s any chance he’ll still be alive tomorrow morning?’ We went past the same spot today and there were no feathers (I’m glad to report) but I realise this doesn’t mean anything except that there were no feathers.
Then the night before last we were going back to the cottage late even for me (don’t ask). And as I pulled out on the main road from the long driveway to the big house and its mews, there was an enormous great lump in the road which I took to be a knot or gnarl of wood which would wreak havoc on anyone who ran over it, so I stopped to move it out of the way.
It wasn’t a lump of wood, of course. It was a lump of owl. And it just sat there and gravely watched me coming. Again it was a tawny, again it was small for a tawny, and shaggy, and I assume it was another fledgling; it didn’t seem hurt, but it couldn’t fly for more than a brief glide. And it wasn’t very interested even in doing that. You feel extremely ridiculous waving your hands and dancing up and down at something about a foot high which is not impressed. I eventually got behind it and used my feet to try and hustle it along, and it would hop and glide and settle down again, and hope I’d now go away.. It liked the middle of the road, and it didn’t see what my problem was. Eventually I pulled the sleeves of my sweatshirt‡‡ down over my hands and picked it up. Oh, and about time too, you could see it thinking. The bus has finally arrived. It did eventually try spreading its wings again so I let it glide another few feet and settle, but by picking it up I’d at least changed its direction and got the little mouselover off the road. And I wonder if there’s any chance he survived the night either. Some baby tawny owls must live to grow up. But you proper Englishers out there, are tawny owl chicks known to be dementedly tame? Or am I under a spell that says Friend to tawny owls?‡‡‡
* * *
* Yes, but what if there was this amazing meteor shower while you were in hospital having your eyes operated on, and the day that the bandages were supposed to come off nobody came to do it, and so you did it yourself and found out that everybody else in the world (nearly) had gone blind, because of something about the meteors, and furthermore there are all these giant carnivorous plants rampaging around stinging to death all the blind people? I mean, just, what if . . . ?
** And very interesting it is too. I also recommend the SAS Survival Handbook.
*** I used to run, okay? I never jogged. For one thing I did it in cotton. Faded. Baggy. I bought good shoes though, from the Mystic Geometry Man.
† And if anybody from Boston who has been threatened by a turkey is reading this, I apologise. We have demon swans here, and I’m afraid of them. But after sharks, alligators, and bears, I’m having trouble relating to predatory turkeys.
†† Which sounds like running with scissors to me. Your first-grade teacher would give you a black mark. And an extra one for making up taradiddles about turkeys.
††† It’s almost as good as triffids.
‡ See robin photo, especially now that Blogmom has fixed it.
‡‡ Weather report: last three days and two nights it’s got near or over eighty during the days and then plunged to the low mid fifties at night. Which is undeniably a huge improvement on the not getting below eighty at night either pattern we’d been on, mercifully briefly, previously. But I don’t know why we don’t all have pneumonia.
‡‡‡ And if the latter, what does that make the hellhounds?
Robin in the greenhouse
Yes, I do have a greenhouse and I am frequently in it* but in this case I don’t mean me, I mean a robin. I have a small feathered kind of robin sitting on a nest in my greenhouse. Or I do if she forgives me for disturbing her, which is, of course, how I found out she was there.
Two years ago I was (sh)out(ing) in the greenhouse and had been out there for a while, or in and out, losing things, tripping over things, looking for things, which is how it goes, and then I did the wrong thing and there was a sudden blast of wings and a small feathery cannonball straight past my ear. WHOOPS. So I climbed up on the little brick wall that makes the plunge bed** and peered down on the shelf above it: and saw a small pile of rubbish behind various bits of anti-slug kit that don’t work but I keep thinking I’m probably doing it wrong and I’ll try again some day, utterly in keeping with its surroundings although made up of a slightly higher percentage of leaves and moss and a lower percentage of cardboard plant labels and bits of string than usual.*** Robin’s nest. She was just outside in the apple tree†, giving me the hard eye. But she came back, and she sat.
Over the ensuing†† weeks I furtively managed to block her off a little more effectively, although I still spent all my time in the greenhouse all hunched over and of course everything I now wanted was on that shelf. Even so I managed to miss the big event: I didn’t realise anything had happened till I figured out there were two robins doing an awful lot of flying in and out of my greenhouse. I want to believe this is not utterly pathetic: That time of year you’ve always got lots of birds yelling in your ear, and when I was in or near the greenhouse I was all bent over and didn’t see anything above knee level. By the time I had slithered cautiously up on the plunge bed wall again, as far away from the nest as the greenhouse dimensions would let me, the babies already had a few feathers and were getting pretty crowded in there behind the bricks, the slug traps, and the Revolutionary New Way to Tie Up Your Plants Without String or Wire,††† which last was at least contained in a box perfectly shaped for walling off robins’ nests.
At this point I became a fixture at the pet shop, buying mealworms. I’d never been godparent to robins before, it was Penelope who told me what to do. Mealworms are creepy, but I still felt a little like the villagers staking out the princess for the dragon: they haven’t got a chance. You put them in anything with a bit of a lip on it, a plant saucer, a jar lid, so they can’t wiggle off in their vague way, and then you step back and the robin barrels in like a heat-seeking missile and . . . you put out more mealworms. By this time mum had moved on and dad was left holding down the nest on his own and looking a little frantic. I bet robins really like winter, when they have time to hang around doing cute-overload things like perching on people’s spade handles.
I think it’s a terrible system that as soon as the babies are more or less fledged the first thing they do is hop to the edge of the nest, plane down to ground level . . . and stay there, because they can’t fly yet. Yo, all you neighbourhood predators! Dinner! Again I missed the show‡ and didn’t realise they were gone till I found just the legs of one of them on the greenhouse floor. Trauma.‡‡ I looked in the nest and they were all gone and I immediately assumed the worst . . . till I found one hiding among the plastic pots. I actually caught him (wearing my garden gloves) and put him back in the nest, but he promptly jumped off the edge again, so I gave up.‡‡‡
I don’t know how many of this brood made it, or if any of them did. But I’m pretty sure at least three survived a while after they divebombed out of the nest, by dad’s antics and the rustling in the shrubbery with attendant small round bouncing shadows on long skinny legs. Most things that hop like birds emerge and fly away, and these didn’t.
Last year I was stupid. I put in a pretty, ornamental wrought iron pole to hang a hanging basket from–that’s what it’s for, okay? I bought it at the garden centre and it says Hanging Basket Pole. And I got it home and hung a basket from it and it promptly bowed low down to the ground, like the cherry tree in the carol. Arrrrrgh. I need a pole there because I have a little climbing rose that wants something to climb, and the hanging basket was going to provide a focal point in a garden that’s too small to have focal points so you have to get creative, and with the rose and everything it was all going to look really cute. Feh. So I bought one of those spinning wind-dancer things with a crystal in its middle to hang from my pretty, useless pole, and in the first place it looked sort of doolally and in the second place it served as a bird scarer, although it took me a while to figure this out. Duh. I thought everyone was avoiding me because of the hellhounds. So I took the bird scarer, I mean the wind dancer, down, and suddenly I had birds in my garden again. But it was too late for robins’ nests.
This year I angled a small cardboard box half-out on the greenhouse shelf and put a half brick in the open end to hold it steady and waited hopefully. Nothing happened. Robins start nesting in March. I’ve seen mine around–I can only tell male from female when I see them together, and when they’re not raising babies they’re solitarily territorial, so I don’t know who I’m seeing–but no nest. So that greenhouse shelf started silting up again around the box because there’s no reason not to let it and besides I need the space and furthermore why do I want robins nesting in my greenhouse? It’s a nuisance having to do everything all bent over–and if you go to the other side of the garden to give yourself a break, in the first place everything you want is still back in or around the greenhouse and in the second place mum or dad will promptly be screaming at you that you’re occupying the space they were about to investigate and what about some more mealworms then? And it’s not only in the greenhouse you have to duck, it’s that whole side of the garden because, as I keep saying, it’s a very small garden, and the flight path for incoming deliveries takes all of it. It eases off a little when it’s just dad–also dad gets very used to you: I was tempted to hold out a plate of mealworms and see if he’d come and take them still attached to me, the way you can hold out a jar of peanut butter in the winter in Maine and be covered in chickadees in a minute or two–but you’re still in a modest state of permanent alert for a couple of months or so. Including not wanting to tread on any of the small bouncy shadows who also get rather too used to you.
So I don’t want robins in my greenhouse! Forget it! No! –And about a week ago, idly looking in the empty box I noticed it contained A PILE OF RUBBISH! You do get some very odd little wind spouts in a small walled garden at the top of a hill, but I kind of doubted this was wind-spout work. I did worry it might be a mouse nest–I have mice, gods know, which is the other reason I didn’t have enough tulips this year–but mice aren’t known for nesting in open-ended boxes on high shelves although I’m sure they could.
But I haven’t seen anyone in the box. Till today. When I’d been going in and out of the greenhouse as normal, giving only the most cursory glance at the box and its contents, till I did the wrong thing again–in this case reaching for the canister of slug pellets§ that had crept back up on that shelf–and I had the feathered cannonball past my ear again. I should have cleared the damn shelf off the minute I saw the nest: I’m now denied my last seed trays, my spare hand tools and several other crucial items for the next couple of months. Or anyway I hope I am.
Pleeeeeeease come back and sit on your nest.
Lighting candle. . . .
* * *
* Shouting is probably philosophically optional, but practically speaking it’s required.^ It’s a very small greenhouse with a lot of stuff in it. The stuff is not necessarily very deftly piled.
^Furthermore it keeps the neighbours amused.
** And which may, I hope, some day even be a plunge bed again.^
^Plunge bed: a small walled area full of sand, and you plunge plants in pots into the sand. This keeps them cooler in summer, including that they don’t need watering as often, and helps protect them from frost in the winter. If, of course, your plunge bed is not already full of terra cotta pots (the plastic ones are on the other side), the Styrofoam six- and eight-packs that plug plants are sold in, which I break up and use for pot drainage, bags of various kinds of compost and fertilizer, etc.
*** I do feel there’s a certain cross-species similarity of approach to housekeeping going on here.
† Sic. It’s a small tree, and semi-espaliered.
†† I-forget-how-many-although-I-looked-it-up-at-the-time-and-the-everything-about-British-birds-site-isn’t-responding-and-my-bird-book-doesn’t-say-and-it’s-amazing-how-dependent-you-get-on-the-internet-I’m-not-sure-I-approve
††† Yes, I’m a sucker. The problem is that every third or tenth or forty-seventh revolution in living/gardening is one, and if you didn’t hopefully try all the duds you’d've missed it.
‡ Okay, I take it back. I am pathetic.
‡‡ I know, I know. But I can do without nature red in tooth and claw.
‡‡‡ Some wildlife rehabilitator is going to tell me you mustn’t handle baby things because then their parents abandon them. I was freaked out by the legs, and I was wearing my gloves, which would have smelt of me but also of the garden. And I know it didn’t happen in this case because I saw him kamikaze off the edge again, and saw dad fly down after him and poke a mealworm down his throat. Dad was probably saying to himself, why didn’t she do something useful while she had hold of him, like feed him? Silly woman. Never mind. She’s good about mealworms, and nobody’s perfect.
§ Organic. Although I do kind of wonder how organic they really are, and while they’re Safe for Children and Pets I don’t want the hellhounds eating them.
More wildlife
Yep. I’m there. I’m so tired I bailed on bell practise tonight: this is the once a month practise at the next village over, where hearing the bells going again was going to rouse some local talent. Over a year after the monthly practises began, as supported by people like Niall and yours truly, we have exactly as many locals as we did when we started up: one. The nice lady who has the key, and lets us in. I go unless I’m dead, but the district practise was being held there tonight—there’s a district practise once a month, each at a different tower, and the idea is that it’ll both pull a few really good ringers, so the local band can try stuff it usually can’t, and it’s also a good excuse for the hoi polloi to visit a strange tower under cover of numbers—and I drove over hoping that the place would be heaving, so I could turn tail and crawl home. It was not only heaving, but included two of the really good Scariest Ringers** we have, and I would so not be missed.
I wanted to link you to the Guardian’s terrific photo, a few days ago, of the Whitechapel bell foundry but I can’t find it on line. I’ve just done one of my rapidly-becoming-notorious-time-engulfing-searches . . . you’d think I’d be getting better at it . . . and I can’t find it. Anyone cleverer than me—the Guardian [newspaper] has a photo series called Eyewitness. It has some amazing images. This is one of them. I suppose it could be a copyright issue, but why isn’t there a little listing, for the pathetically obstinate, saying, we can’t run this photo for copyright reasons so stop wasting your time looking?
But here are a few others. Forgive me for the school-project one but I thought it was kind of interesting, and a pretty good summary of the basics. I’ve probably learnt most of my English history out of cramming texts for taking O-levels and A-levels*** for example. Very useful if you like reading obscure biographies and/or folk histories that are so recondite that their authors assume you already know the bigger picture or you wouldn’t know to want to be crouched over here in a corner with their book and your magnifying glass.†
http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/0_my_p_workers/0_my_photos_workers_whitechapel_bell_foundry_1hh07.jpg
http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/04_02/bellsDM1004_800×545.jpg
http://www.projectexplorer.org/ms/se/keywords/whitechapel.php
http://chuck.smugmug.com/gallery/1503802_3qGhY/1/72129948_XomNH#72129948_XomNH
Now about those cats in boxes. There were a lot of reactions to my outburst about the Schrodinger increased sample size:
They’re cats. Cats sit in boxes. It’s not a case of getting them to do it; usually it’s the other thing, pleading with them not to. I have been sorting out my tax receipts. Six boxes, all lined up. The fun two cats can have, bouncing from box to box, curling up on piles of receipts, digging madly to send all the receipts into all the other boxes…
Easy. Put the boxes on the floor, put something snuggly in them, and then firmly tell the cats to stay out of those boxes. My cats regularly cram themselves into cardboard boxes far smaller than their actual bodies, so they look like little furry muffins poofing out at the top.
The Schrodinger picture actually originally appeared on Cute Overload. You can see the entry here:
And someone yelled, Shrodinger! And ran for his/her camera. Ahhhhh. Of course. Duh. I’d assumed that someone had this bright idea first, and set it up to photograph. Not that they’d seized a brilliant opportunity. Thus we see demonstrated that even fantasy authors get all dull and literal-minded at the wrong moments.
*Please don’t destroy my illusions^ of an elite, literate community by telling me that someone out there doesn’t know Calvin and Hobbes.
^ I just typed ‘elusions’. Hmmmm.
** These are the nice variety of Scary Ringer however as opposed to the pigbutt variety. Or I might have felt compelled to stay and demonstrate solidarity.
*** Which are or were national tests you took over here sometime between 14 and 16 years old on specific subjects. How many of ’em you pass counts in stuff like university applications. They’re also just nonsense snob stuff, unfortunately, as tests so often are. If you get a lot of them then you’re a Better Person. Bite me.
† A situation perhaps not wholly unlike writing piano music when you can barely play with both hands at the same time.