Wordless Wednesday: What We've Been Seeing

Red-breasted Sapsucker

Western Bluebirds

Yellow-rumped Warblers

Pileated Woodpecker

Mountain Chickadee (at the nestbox!)

We're expecting our first real winter storm of the season. We think we're ready for 6 to 10 inches of snow. Wheeee!

The Status of Things

I guess we really meant it when we said we wouldn't update this blog until there was something to report. There's almost something, so what the heck, here's what we've been up to in the nearly two weeks we've been silent.

At 10:00 am this Monday morning we are meeting a surveyor at a piece of property we are in the process of buying. There is one last bit of boundary detail that we want hammered out before we affix our very important initials and signatures on a thousand pieces of paper that will finally make this 4.7 acre piece of land and lovely house our home. We made a ridiculous full-price offer on this place, and realized later that it was a little like proposing marriage after a single riotous speed date. But we've gone back and continued to fall in love with all the very good and beautiful things about the property and house. It's really surprising to us that we have no regrets about our impulsive affaires du coeur. Sometimes things just happen that way. It's very much like the beginning of our own marriage! So we proceeded.

Still that's all we're going to say about it at the moment. Things have a way of falling apart or blowing up or disintegrating even with the very best intentions. So, just wanted to say hello, we're still here on earth watching the birds, jack rabbits, and deer. All is well.

Above photo is of a Pileated Woodpecker we heard and then spotted on the property. A very good omen we thought. We're not even going to mention the heron we saw in the pond... Ooops!

What The Pileateds Did on Valentine's Day

It's interesting that Roger and I don't celebrate Valentine's Day in the traditional sense. My parents always did. They exchanged cards and remembered each other in those kind ways that romantics sometimes do. Even from his deathbed, my father had one visiting child (my older brother) buy a card in January and hide it in a drawer for a month, and had another visiting child (me) fill it out for him to give to my mother on his last Valentine's Day. It was that important. He died one month to the day later. Yet here it is Valentine's Day, and Roger and I don't buy any cards, gifts, candies, or flowers. We spend 24 hours a day together. That's literal. Our affections are expressed in the little surprises we do for each other every day of the week. It's true. One of us sneaks off in the morning while the other is immersed in political readings or Facebook, and makes the bed. Or, Roger will whip up a breakfast frittata. Or, I'll make a fresh batch of maple almond granola. In the evening, every dinner is a celebration. We open a bottle of wine. We hold hands before we eat and thank each other for the meal and the day. When one of us is doing the dishes, the other turns down the bed. It's a daily dance of love we do. Seriously what more could we do on Valentine's Day that we aren't already doing everyday for each other?
We go for a hike. On this Valentine's Day the sun was shining in a sierra blue sky. We headed out in the mid morning, feeling the warmth of temps already in the high 50s on our winter pale skin. We walk a brisk four-mile round trip. All the people on the trail are just as happy as we are to have this beautiful day. Everyone greets each other with a generous "good morning" and a "wow, what a beautiful day..." and walks on. Dogs splashed in the irrigation ditch, and children fished for brown trout. It's that kind of day. Easy.
Off in the distance a pileated woodpecker calls. Then again. We walk on, feeling lucky to be heading in the direction of the sound. We stop and listen. The call is so close, we know the bird is as near as can be. There in a very tall, old snag we see a flash of a red head on a black body. He calls and cranes his neck to find his mate. He calls again. She arrives. The trail is instantly restored to its natural quiet with the two of them together at last on the tree. And for a moment, we think they must be celebrating Valentine's Day.

48 Degrees 03' North; 122 Degrees 47' West

We just made it through the toughest winter we've ever had here. Okay, it was only our third winter, so we don't have much comparative evidence, but we heard from old timers that the winter was particularly grim and bleak. It drove me a little crazy. It's not just my psyche that cowered in the gloom, but my brown skin simply needed more sunlight to derive any benefit from the uv spectrum. There's a reason why paler skinned people could adapt to northern climes, and why Inuit make it through the dark season by living on fish. It all works out so well in a Darwinian sense. So what is a nice, non-fish-eating, semitic daughter of the desert doing in a place like this?
It's the modern world. We thought we could live anywhere. Who thinks about their skin pigment and latitude lines when considering where to retire? Certainly not us. We came for the natural beauty, the wildlife, the quiet. We came to be in a place where we could look down the beach and see a river otter scolding a gull. (Sorry for not having the gull in the shot, but this was taken at 48X digital zoom. You need to click on it to see how close the otter was to shore.) I wasn't even sure what I was seeing. I actually thought it was a stand-off between the gull and another larger shorebird! Maybe they were arguing over who could get the food here at this very spot.
But that otter spotted us before he could make his point, took off, and then watched us from the water with a rather toothy grin.
We came to be in a place where we could just turn our gaze from the water and look up into the trees to see eagles or a pileated woodpecker madly pecking, bark flying in all directions. We hushed and walked quietly, but this bird was not fazed by our presence one bit. He let us get very, very close. (Click on this for a redheaded treat.)
We came for all of this magnificence. We were the only people on the beach for miles. We came for that solitude too.

So, how do we survive the dark winter next? We've been doing research on the full spectrum lights to see if they stimulate the production of Vitamin D. So far, we haven't found anything conclusive. Does anyone out there know about full spectrum lights and Vitamin D?
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Don't forget to submit your Good Planets photos to Vicki at A Mark on the Wall. Send your pics that depict the beauty of our planet to vbennett at umich dot edu.