for some, the urge for going is growing? #phenology

We thought the hummingbirds might have departed, not for warmer, but for Southern climes. It's mid-80s headed toward 90 today. At least one hummer is still hanging around. She (most likely) just made a pass at the nectar feeder. We're pleased to still have her company. With high temperatures dropping into the sixty's this coming week, and thunderstorms in most daily forecasts, we won't be surprised to see her and any children go.

female ruby-throated hummingbird at feeder

Photo by J. Harrington

As near as we can tell, we have but one cottontail rabbit living here. S/he spent much of the Summer hunkered under the brush pile, until we finally got around to torching that pile. Losing a home must not have been too traumatic. Yesterday, we noticed the rabbit laying stretched out under the front feeder, nibbling the tops off sunflower plants that had germinated from seeds dropped by the birds.

Counting Birds

As a child, fresh out of the hospital 
with tape covering the left side
of my face, I began to count birds.
At age fifty the sum total is precise and astonishing, my only secret. 
Some men count women or cars
they've owned, their shirts --
long sleeved and short sleeved --
or shoes, but I have my birds,
excluding, of course, the extraordinary 
days: the twenty-one thousand
snow geese and sandhill cranes at 
Bosque del Apache, the sky blinded
by great frigate birds in the Pacific
off Anconcito, Ecuador; the twenty-one 
thousand pink flamingos an Ngorongoro Crater
in Tanzania; the vast flocks of sea birds
on the Seri coast of the Sea of Cortez
down in Sonora that left at nightfall, 
then reappearing, resuming 
their exact positions at dawn;
the one thousand cliff swallows nesting in he sand cliffs of Pyramid Point,
their small round burrows like eyes, 
really the souls of the Anasazi who flew 
here a thousand years ago
to wait the coming of the Manitou.

And then there were the usual, almost deadly
birds of the soul -- the crow with silver 
harness I rode one night as if she 
were a black, feathered angel.
the birds I became to escape unfortunate 
circumstances -- how the skin ached
as the feathers shot out toward the light;
the thousand birds the dogs helped 
me shoot to become a bird (grouse, woodcock,
duck, dove, snipe, pheasant, prairie chicken, etc.).

On my deathbed I'll write this secret 
number on a slip of paper and pass
it to my wife and two daughters.
It will be a hot evening in June
and they might be glancing out the window
at the thunderstorm's approach from the west.
Looking past their eyes and a dead fly
on the window screen I'll wonder
if there's a bird waiting for me in the onrushing clouds.
O birds, I'll sing to myself, you've carried
me along on this bloody voyage,
carry me now into that cloud 
into the marvel of this final night.

James Harrison (1990) - The Theory and Practice of Rivers and New Poems

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