Rants from the Hollow

The house wrens and the robins have made common cause: against the squirrels.  It happened early Wednesday morning.

After I poured my first cup of coffee, I thought I’d see what the wrens were up to.  They were still around, not dancing quite so vigorously, but picking away at the nest.  A squirrel climbed up on the patio table, just a few feet from the bird house, and pretty quickly caught their attention.  They were both on it, and chased it off the table.  The squirrel climbed up into the pergola, and the wrens were fluttering all around, making a fuss.

After about 30 seconds, the squirrel headed straight towards the robin’s nest, where one of the robins, as usual, was silently and motionlessly roosting.  The other robin wasn’t in site.  The squirrel came right up to the robin, while I watched through the sliding door, and bumped it with his nose.  The robin exploded! it immediately whirled around, and chased the squirrel through the wisteria.  The robin didn’t immediately return to the nest, but instead flew around and around the pergola, yelling for the other robin to get back from wherever it was grubbing for worms. The squirrel headed back for the nest, and practically crawled inside it, apparently hoping for eggs for breakfast.

At this point, not really wanting nature to take its course, I intervened. I opened up the door, and probably didn’t need to make any noise.  Apparently operating under a guilty conscience, the squirrel took off like a shot across the top of the pergola and into  a nearby dogwood tree, followed closely by a robin, a pair of wrens, and some guy in a bathrobe.

Fairfax County isn’t too keen on firearms, but I figure I can get away with a sling shot. You never know when a groundhog might show up.  I don’t know if the squirrel saw what I was packing, or just couldn’t cope with all those feathers in his face, but he disappeared.

I have difficulty believing the squirrel won’t be back. They are clever, tenacious, and seem to feel no pain.  And they have bottomless pits for stomachs. I’ve been surprised to see the robins silently roosting away, and I haven’t found any robins egg blue shell fragments, so I have to assume the babies are OK.  Its been 3 days now, and the robins are still roosting.  The female wren is still decorating, and the male is singing about it. 

My home city managed to make it in the news this week, for being the site of the most recent domestic terrorist incident that didn’t actually happen.  Although all of the apparent anarchists are at least one generation too young to remember when Cleveland could legitimately claim to be the greatest location in the nation,  their original plan was apparently to use Cleveland as a site to topple some highly visible symbol of corporate greatness. You know, like the umm…..well, yeah, you get the picture.

Apparently unsuccessful at locating an accessible yet visible form of corporate hegemony in Ohio, they decided instead on a very attractive high level bridge over the Cuyahoga River. While it isn’t exactly representative of economic corruption, it has become a well-recognized site within the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.  I guess anarchists are just as happy destroying big government and national infrastructure as they are blowing up big businesses.  I wonder what cable news channel 20-something anarchists watch.

Dedicated in 1932, this beautiful concrete arch span bridge is over 1100 feet long, and  It replaced an 1881 metal truss bridge, which after a recent restoration, is still around, and another prominent feature of the national park.  I don’t know if that little girl is still around. If so, she must be around 90.  I wonder what she thinks of all this.

(Image above from the Cleveland Memory Project, copyright Cleveland State University. Michael Schwartz Library. Special Collections.)

Last year, Elizabeth bought I what I thought was a somewhat, how should I say this…over-engineered wren house. She asked me to hang it under the pergola on the back deck. It subsequently attracted some wrenly attention, but I couldn’t confirm that any avians occupants

As it turns out, the female house wren is…how can I put this politely? She’s a high maintenance little bird..  She expects that the male wren will carry loads and loads of heavy sticks to multiple potential nesting sites, all while singing like a canary at the top of his little lungs.  While he warbles away, she’ll inspect the foundations, and if she likes one of them, and she likes him, and if she’s you know, really serious about the whole thing, she’ll approve it. At this point, the male house wren is expected to continue hauling lumber, singing his little tail feathers off, and the female will line the nest with soft things. (For some of you, this might seem like a familiar story at this point).

This year’s nesting drama has been going on for awhile. I’d heard the male’s beautiful of waterfall of song for a couple of days, and noticed Saturday a week ago that he was starting to gather twigs and pull them into the bird house.  Then it seemed to go quiet for awhile. I figured that for a second year in a row, it just wasn’t going to work out for him.

Meanwhile, a pair of robins decided that our particular form of bloom-free Wisteria (Compson’s Fruitless, I believe), made the perfect environment for a nest.  Located only a few feet from my office window, but hidden by the wisteria leaves, a pair of robins very quietly, methodically, and undramatically began building a nest atop a 2×8, only 10 feet away from the wren house. I wasn’t even sure it was a pair of robins, because they both look exactly alike, and make the exact same noise. Which is no noise. 

Towards the end of the week, it was getting noisier.  Not from the robins. No, they had finished their nest, and were very quietly and methodically roosting. No, it was the damn house wrens. The male had definitely attracted a female, and by last Saturday, the two of them had worked themselves into a tizzy, singing, flying, shaking their tail feathers, and waggling their wings in a way that I could not honestly interpret as being anything but extremely suggestive.  Everybody in the neighborhood was subjected to this in your face display.  The sleek velvety catbirds thinking about returning to their mid-yard nesting bush were looking at the wrens out of the corners of their beady little eyes.  The family of crows that fill up the nearby birdbath with chunks of stale bread and nameless animal parts, they remarked on the wrenish display. Even a carolina wren, second only to the house wren in volume/mass, thought it was a bit over the top.

Things seemed to have reached a peak about the time I looked out the sliding door Monday morning during breakfast. The two house wrens were shaking their wings, their tails, they were singing, they were popping in and out of the nest box, and they were chasing each other around the pergola. They both flew down to the ground together, when suddenly, one of the robins, patiently waiting along the top of the pergola to relieve the other robin on roost duty, dropped onto the wrens like a ton of bricks.  Whomp!  Grateful peace descended on the backyard stage as the robins quietly resumed roosting, and the wrens left to lick their wounds. They recovered.

I can still hear the descending musical notes of the male house wren’s spring call from my office. It might be disturbing the unhatched robin babies, but I think it’s a pretty song.  What’s different now is that the female seems to have made her choice.  At breakfast today, I saw her carry in a few token tiny bits of straw, while the male continued to haul in trailer loads of nesting material. This morning, there was some long stringy thing hanging out the hole, and its gone now. I’m assuming its inside.  I think we can soon look forward to the pitter patter of wrenlet feet.

Although England does have some highly-talented avian songsters, during our stay in Europe I missed the nightly spring peeper concerts that we take for granted in the Eastern US.  When we spent our first couple nights in the cabin earlier this month, we were treated to a couple of epic amphibious recitals that really felt like home. Then we had a couple of frosty nights, and at least 2 weeks without rain, which brought the nightly performances to a halt.

Saturday’s half inch of rain was welcomed by both our new grass and our frog population.  The spring peepers were out in force. Although the single loud low “brreeeeeppppp” call hadn’t returned, the several “creek creek creek” callers were back (Leopard frogs?  Kirk and I found a chilly lone leopard frog near the spring during the first week of March.).  It was a night to sit out on the new porch swing and not miss not having TV.

Just before Midnight, Elizabeth noticed a small brown frog clinging to the glass of the downstairs cabin door, and on the theory that where there’s one peep, there’s more, we opened the door and found at least a dozen sitting on the cement pad, sitting on door thresholds, or clinging onto a plastic chair. Several had tiny but smug grins, punctuated by the faint outlines of insect wings.  The little fellow at the top of the page was suckered onto the sliding glass door. An inch long at best, he was one of the bigger ones.

55 Acres of woodland crawls with animals, most of which are nearly invisible during the summer.  Our little half acre pond is full of swimming and wriggling things, but the tight approach path mostly discourages larger water fowl. 

Given that most aquatic birds continue to fly right on by, seeking larger watering holes that aren’t located in deep wooded valleys, I was motivated to grab my binoculars one morning last week when it turned out that a mallard drake was attached to an expanding ring of ripples.  He paddled around on the far side of the pond by himself, and given that ducks tend to be social beasts, I wasn’t surprised when a second one splashed down.  What did surprise me was the crest on the its head. This was no mere mallard. It turned out to be a female wood duck. I haven’t seen a wood duck down here since I was a kid, and I immediately regretted not following through on my plans to turn some of the scrap cedar cabin trim into a wood duck nesting box (punctuate those 4 words as you see fit).

Could this be some sort of illicit liaison, with the amorous  amphibians taking advantage of the relative seclusion of our small body of water to spend some time away from the beady spying eyes of their quacked up families? As it turns out, there is a reason they call mallards dabblers, but in this particular case, the female woodie treated the male with studied indifference, climbing up on shore and poking around while he continued to float placidly in the pond without any apparent sign of arousal.

Geese are much less subtle than the ducks, like Bombay taxicabs, seemingly unable to move without honking.  We frequently hear their calls as they fly overhead to the larger pond next door, but several times last week, a pair of geese dialled in some extra flap and made the steep descent to take a gander at our pond.  One day they spent a good two hours on the far side of the pond, floating around, snacking on God knows what, and standing on top of rocks, honking.  Although they did make one or two follow up visits, the female was eventually heard to say “I want to be closer to my flock, and besides, something smells funny, here.” Not wanting to get his goose cooked, the male agreed that there were other sites that had better exposure, and that was the last I saw of them.

At this point in this blog entry, I was going to start rhapsodizing about raptors and the beauty of blackbirds, but a pair of geese has just now landed in the back of the pond and is noisily advertising its presence. While I can’t verify that it’s the same pair that was here last week, they are in the same spot as shown six days ago in the photo above, directly across from my office window on some mossy rocks on the east bank of the pond.  They’ve done a bit of grazing, both below the water and on land, but mostly, they are just standing on rocks, honking, which seems rather purposeless.  I suppose they would think the same of me, if they could see me sitting at my laptop.

A flock of Canada geese is annoying, but a pair is charming, and its nice to think that we might see them on a regular basis. As long as they don’t bring all their friends.  A nesting pair might be fun, although geese get aggressively territorial when they have young. Our pond doesn’t seem like the sort of open wetlands that they prefer. The design and care means that it isn’t surrounded by water plants, so I don’t think it has any suitable nesting material.  The Killbuck bottoms south of Millersburg are dotted with dozens of large mounds of vegetation, most of which are punctuated with a standing goose this week.  Maybe this pair is just using our pond as a quiet place to get away from the flock.  Butts up!

After a busy 5-truck day last week,  involving plumbing and an amazing amount of window hardware, our Amish carpentry crew pulled the plastic coverings off the windows, and we had our first night’s sleep in the cabin.  We are still waiting on some plumbing fixtures and shower doors, but at least we’ve got a working trio of toilet, sink, and shower in the downstairs bathroom. After a noisy startup, our old washer and dryer have settled into their new Ohio home and have been busy cleaning tractor mud from my one pair of work jeans. Other than a balky dishwasher, another transplant from Virginia, the kitchen is operational.

Elizabeth has done an amazing amount of cleaning, unpacking, and nesting.  Days of sweeping, vacuuming and scrubbing, including hiring a pair of women with mops for a day, and putting my mom to work on a couple shower stalls, has mostly removed the thin, and sometimes thick, veneer of construction dust, mounds of glop, and piles of wire trimming.   One week ago, it was an empty building, full of cardboard boxes and dirt. Now it feels like a home.

A new place requires a huge amount of screwing. I mounted a couple of poplar 1x3s to the utility room wall (without breaking any cement screws this time), and after trimming it to size, attached a pegboard.  Then I hung up a paper towel holder in one of the relatively few gypsum walls.  There still seems to be an infinite queue of towel racks, toilet paper rolls, mirrors, lights, and electrical plates that needs to be hung, so I’ve got lots of drilling and screwing to look forward to. At least the plates already have holes.

A couple years ago, we developed a taste for metal switch plates.  We like being well-wired, and lots of walls have 2 or even 3 outlets on them.  Even before finishing all the outlets in the basement level of the cabin, our Amish electrician had bought out all the white metal outlet plates in a 3-county area.  A quick count shows that when the a shipment of plates arrive, I’ve got over 2 dozen to screw in. The electrician already hung the ceiling fans and most of the lights, so I’m not on the hook for that (Electrician: “Do you know how many light switches there are in this house?” Elizabeth: “60?”  Electrician: “65.” Elizabeth: “Is that a lot?” Electrician: “Yup.”)

Elizabeth found a swing in Coshocton that matched the color of our porch, so she sent me down on Saturday to see if it would fit in the back of the Subaru. It came with a chain, which solved one problem,  but not with something to hang the chain from.  After I managed to squeeze the swing into the back of the wagon, I went to the lumberyard in Coshocton to see what they recommended.  They talked me into a pair of screw eyes and a pair of springs.  I wasn’t sure if comfort dictated suspension, but he seemed to think the springs would be the perfect interface between the eyes and the chain. (“Do you have something for those eyes to screw into?” “They are going into a 6×6 beam.”  “That’ll do.”)

Dad and I decided to start with one screw eye to see how it went.  So I climbed up on a step ladder, drilled a hole, screwed the eye in using a screwdriver as a lever. Then I climbed down the ladder and we stared at it. And then we stared at the puzzle represented by the spring unit.  As it turned out, the suspension mechanism did interface nicely with the chain, although it meant pulling the chain thru the center of the coil spring, hooking a metal loop through it, and then pulling the loop and chain back through the spring.  As far as the other end of the suspension unit went, there was no way the entire cabin was going to pull through it.  There was no way the screw eye was going to pull through it. The solution turned out to be a pair of S hooks between the eyes and the springs, but the hardware store hadn’t sold me any of those. Dad found a pair in the barn, and now we’re hanging easy.