WHOOPS!

There are some friends and family members who claim that I am accident-prone. I have two explanations for this.

First, some adverse events are due to bad luck. For example, my two sisters and I were standing side-by-side on my dad’s farm. All the buildings and equipment had long-since disintegrated, and the weeds were up to our knees. Suddenly, without any of us moving a muscle, a piece of strap iron sproinged up out of the grass and sliced my calf. It did not touch my sisters. I was selected for this honor by the universe. It was not an accident.

Second––and this is my primary assertion––people who move around more, who do more things, will have more encounters in life; they’ll have more good experiences and more disasters. Someone who stays home and sits in a recliner is not likely to fall victim to that invisible, incredibly slippery algae that grows on concrete surfaces. She would not have had the opportunity to step back onto such algae-covered concrete and rip 30 feet down into  Lake Michigan in downtown Chicago right before a family wedding.

And I don’t think it’s much different when it happens at the Coralville Reservoir; same algae, same result, except I sat down hard in the water on a really sharp fossil.

I moved out to the country for a reason: adventure! I climb trees, I jump fences, I exhume cows. It's no surprise that things will happen. The accident in our front yard falls squarely in that category: if I weren’t an active person. . . . . . .

It was freezing cold, the snow was a foot deep, and the wind was blowing birds by the window in a direction they were not facing. Poor little fellows. There was no way I was going to leave those feeders empty.

I put on all of my winter clothing and dragged a 5-gallon bucket of bird feed to the feeding center. I could hardly find the bird feeders, because driving snow was pelting my eyeballs. I squeezed them shut leaving just a tiny peephole.

The  biggest feeder is filled by folding its entire roof back. Very easy design. I’d be done in no time. Already frozen, I decided to put all seeds in that feeder and run for the house. I lifted the huge bucket way over my head and opened my eyes just long enough to aim.

At that moment, a gust of wind hit me from behind, my feet left the icy ground and became airborne, and I landed on my back.

That was not the accident; that was just an incident. The accident part came next.

The 5-gallon bucket tipped over and emptied itself all over me. More like into me. Both ears were packed with birdseed. There were seeds under my eyelids. Some of it would have to be flossed out-if I lived through the choking; my mouth was also full. While none of those results were fun, they were nothing compared to having bird food up both nostrils clear to my sinuses.

I sneezed out mustard seeds, I hocked up millet, I picked niger seeds from my tear ducts. The other 4-gallons of seed went down inside the front of my shirt.

Someone who never goes out in inclement weather to feed the birds would not have such an accident. And they would not have birds either.

Just remember, it's not the number of accidents that counts. It’s the ratio of accidents to adventures that counts!

:::::::::::::::W:O:O:D:P:E:C:K:E:R:S::::::::::::::

The beautiful redheaded woodpecker

Before I moved into Woodpeckerville, I figured woodpeckers

speared their food. Why else would you keep ramming your beaky lips into a tree if you don’t get food, right? Turns out they have an especially long and clever tongue. A couple of inches long. After drilling a hole, they stick in the tongue and wrap it around their prey. They can get a pretty good grip because they have very sticky spit and the tongue is covered with bristles. (See? One more thing to be grateful for––no bristles on your tongue.)

What are they extracting from the trees? Insects and grubs for the most part.  If you savor escargot,  you'd probably be able to eat grubs. The rest of us will count our blessings that we don't have to crunch down on one of those things. That impressive woodpecker tongue is also useful for drinking; we often have woodpeckers drinking from our hummingbird feeders. They love fruit and nuts as well, but nothing so much as a snifter of tree sap after dinner.

Some woodpeckers drill to forage for food, others are seeking nesting sites. Depending on the type of bird, you can find small holes, huge holes, or a series of tiny holes around the tree. To get a good grip for drilling, woodpeckers have a strong, stiff tail to brace themselves against the tree. Otherwise, the recoil would be terrific, and there would be woodpeckers shooting off of trees throughout the forest. You would think the tree might be the worse for wear, but it actually benefits from having pests removed.

When I watch a woodpecker head hammer repeatedly on a tree trunk, I always wonder why they don’t suffer from Shaken Woodpecker Syndrome. They are exerting significant force, and may achieve in the neighborhood of 15-16 whacks a second. If they peck on your roof and you are inside the house, it’s louder than a drum rim-shot. Thank heavens we have plenty of trees to distract them. In fact these birds' heads are designed to take a beating. Nature has made the brain-to-skull ratio a little different than ours.

Woodpecker brain has
more room for error

Our brain is close to the skull

Unfortunately, in order to leave more space between the brain and the skull, the brain must be small. Maybe if the brain were a little bigger, the woodpecker could think of an easier way to get its dinner.

Red bellied woodpecker
(Don't ask me-I didn't name it)

If you have done any wood chopping, you know what happens if you don’t wear your safety goggles. Woodpeckers wearing goggles––what a wonderful thought! But instead, to keep out the flying sawdust, they go with special third eyelids to protect the eyes and feathers to cover their nostril slits.

Once those cavities are drilled out for nests, woodpeckers must defend the home front. Animals without built-in jackhammers are thrilled to find such housing and try to become squatters.

There are a couple of hundred kinds of woodpeckers ranging from smaller than your hand to over 20 inches. In addition to the redhead and the red-bellied, these are the ones that amuse us all year round.

The downy–

or is it a hairy-

or is it a ladderback? Nah, it's a downy.

Yellow-bellied sapsucker

Flicker feasting on hackberries

Eastern flicker

Flicker flaunting it outside our upstairs window

The astounding pileated seen at a great distance
Woody Woodpecker lives!

To watch the pileated woodpecker mating ritual:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWznm2HA1hc


To hear the pileated mating call:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxXkG4mqeWQ&feature=related

To compare downy-hairy-ladderback w'peckers:

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/pfw/AboutBirdsandFeeding/woodpeckerIDtable.htm

                                                                                           


SHAPES 

The woods, the meadows, the pond, the sky

The plants, the animals, the earth itself

The microscopic world and the big view

         Winter, summer, spring, autumn

                  Night, day, dawn, dusk

You cannot escape it––the countryside is a cornucopia of shapes. It’s very appealing to those of us who loved geometry.

Some shapes are interesting in their predictability. They are symmetrical or repetitive or mirror images. 




Other shapes are beautiful in their unpredictability, their irregularity.

Whenever I walk, snapshots of shapes jump out at me. Sometimes they're part of nature’s structure. Other times it seems as though the plants and animals are posing in an incidental shape, one that may dissolve the instant you notice it.

Those Structural Shapes––––

Jack-in-the-pulpit

Dragonfly wing

Ice crystals along a corn leaf

And Those Incidental Shapes–––

Blowing grass draws an arc in the snow

When the world makes no sense, take a better look. 




Truth is, it’s in pretty good shape.