Oy Vey . . .

Let me not spend March indoors again.  Carolina chickadees are already well into tending a nest in last year's bluebird house and I almost missed it for housecleaning! Oy vey! I don't know what got into me—some sort of manic preoccupation with organizing every room coupled with the ruthless throwing out of things. Let it not be an omen that something alarming is about to happen for which I need to have my house in order.  More likely, it's that things had come to such a state of neglect, something had to be done for the tranquility of my soul :-).  Even more likely, and as my psychology professor friend Steve believes, it was that I am on the verge of finishing my manuscript, a prospect so frightening I must take drastic measures to prevent it—measures as drastic as organizing my office, cleaning the basement and re-alphabetizing all the books in the house. For real. I did all of those things, but I swear I want to finish my book. Can't imagine why I would so sabotage myself. Steve says it happens all the time. Proving him wrong is enough motivation to goad me into finishing—as soon as I clean off my desk.  That's a project worth two days of prevention.

Whatever, I was vaguely aware of the possibility of chickadees in the birdhouse, because about two weeks ago, my grandchildren and I saw two of them entering and leaving repeatedly with bits of moss in their beaks.  Oh the magic of witnessing such an event with young children—the whispering, the stillness, the rapt attention. When we were sure both chickadees had flown away, we opened and peeked inside the house, thrilling at the freshly built-up layers of pine straw and soft green moss we found there. But I feared we had chased them off because I didn't see them again until today, though I had only glanced briefly on my daily passes to and from the compost heap.

To be truthful I haven't been longsitting outside recently, in favor of watching this year's Spring through window of house and car.  The beauty of spring bloom in Atlanta is so extreme it appears extravagant even through glass, until you sit outside and recognize you've only perceived a fraction of its intensity. Yesterday I sat out for two hours, unable to tear myself from the directness of the sensations. One can do nothing but gasp in astonishment at the cherry petals falling like snow on every warm breeze, the fluffy azalea color at every turn impossible to comprehend, the lacy white dogwood blossoms sprinkled across yards and woods, the inchworms and strands of oak pollen floating by on invisible filaments of silk, the occasional glints of sunlight traveling along the filaments, the aggressive territorial birdsong mingled with flirtatious chase and flutter of mating season, the rattle of woodpecker on the gutter, the cack-cack-cack-cack of nuthatch, the boastful variety of cardinal calls, and the pleasure of all pleasures—chickadees in and out of the copper-roofed bird house.

I think she's egg-sitting and he's tending her. As yet I hear no tiny chirps, but soon. Today begins Nestwatch 2012, this year of Carolina chickadees.  May they see me through the finishing of the fabled "manuscript."  dkm

Madam Chickadee protecting her eggs from the respectful but unskilled photographer.  Click once on the photo to enlarge and see her pretty white cheeks. 

Bluebirds in the House

It's the height of spring in Atlanta.  Every day is flooded with extraordinary beauty about which to write.   From the early Yoshino cherry blossoms falling like snow on every warm breeze, through the daffodils and grape hyacinths, the magniflora camellias, the yellow carolina jasmine and the intoxicating starburst blooms of the evergreen clematis, to the extravagant bursting forth of the pink and white azaleas and flowering dogwoods the city over.  It's an intimidating state of affairs for an amateur nature writer.

That's not even to mention the ubiquitous mating behavior of every species of returning bird.  And the birdsong, my god, the birdsong.  The most joyful of all, for me, is that bluebirds are nesting again in the copper-roofed house.  I've taken up sentinel duty to prevent the tiny rapacious house wrens from chasing them off this year, as they have done the past two years. The wrens have not yet returned, but when they do, I'm ready for them.

The trouble with trying to capture this flood of spectacular beauty in print, aside from keeping me from writing for three weeks, is that it tends to make it sound ordinary.  There is positively nothing ordinary about spring in Atlanta.  The irony is that I'm more driven to write about the slow and the common.  An everyday kind of slow observation has the effect,  for me, of turning the ordinary into the extraordinary---like giving the voiceless a voice.  I'll just have to trust that the spring burst of Atlanta can speak for itself.

In the meantime, here's a shot of madam bluebird, speaking for herself in the azalea thicket.  Click once on the photo to see her and the azaleas more closely.  dkm