What they're eating these days

There are always new things to learn about animals' food preferences, it seems.  Not until this week did I know that juncos will go for suet but can't hang onto suet cages.  The suet cake I put on the tray feeder drew its share of slate-gray-and-white visitors for a few days--until the starlings discovered it, wrestled the cake to the ground, attacked it in hordes, and pooped on it for good measure. While I am as fond of the plays of Shakespeare as the next English teacher, bringing every bird mentioned by the Bard to North America was a really stupid idea.

Wrens are visiting the tray feeder (when it's not overwhelmed by starlings), and while I would have expected the little insectivores to go for the high-protein sunflower seeds, ours seem to prefer the cracked corn.  Speaking of corn, the squirrel feeder hasn't seen much action this winter; our two enormous oaks have dropped so many acorns that the squirrels haven't been able to bury them all but are still feasting.  We also have deer regularly browsing the acorn piles, allowing for some beautiful moonlight wildlife-watching.

I am probably violating some unwritten law of birdfeeding, but cat food can be a bird attractant.  Ending up with a bag of something rejected by our finicky felines, I moistened some of the offending kibble and put a pan of it on a pile of blocks.  Thus far, it's been a big hit with the blue jays (and keeps them off the tray feeder so that the smaller birds can have a chance there).

And on the subject of finicky felines: the one-eyed, fourteen-year-old cat that we inherited last fall has begun climbing onto my lap and attempting the theft of breakfast breads.  Cinnamon raisin bagels as cat food?  Sounds pretty weird to me.

Call of the Wild

Why is it that we take such pleasure in getting close to wild things? Think of all the people who keep what to me are totally inappropriate pets--ocelots, wolves, even parrots.  These are animals meant to live in the woods, not in suburbia, but numbers of our fellow humans want to be close to these not-yet-domesticated creatures. (Of course, I put up bird feeders to get to see little wild things up close.)  A (probably dreadful) film that I still remember from my childhood was the obscure Mara of the Wilderness, about a girl raised by wolves, which seemed like a pretty cool idea when I was eight. These days, I'm too fond of indoor plumbing and central heat to want to spend my time running with a wolf pack in the northern Rockies (if that's where the film took place--I saw it a LONG time ago), but how many of us read and at least briefly fantasized about being Women Who Run With the Wolves?

How many stories/poems/songs have to do with the lure of the "bad boy", the untamed male? Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, "Leader of the Pack"?  Our current vampire fascination has something of the same feel to me--how many young women fantasize being the woman who can join with the male who could prove at any moment to be dangerous and drain her life's blood?  Pretty strange, when you think about it.

But I must confess a current related satisfaction.  Several years ago we adopted a feral kitten born in our back yard, and feral Feraldine has remained even though she has lived in our house since late 2007.  She sleeps in a basket in front of a heat vent, uses the litter box, and eats in the kitchen (preferably when we are in another room), but little Feraldine, the "blue streak," has retained a fear of humans.  The last few mornings, though, she has materialized in bed, doing the "feed the cat dance" on top of Mommy.  She has even allowed her head and back to be scratched, arching her back, purring, and curling her tail into a perfect question mark.  (Of course, she still dashes away as soon as human verticality seems likely.) I don't like to seem unappreciative of our four thoroughly domesticated felines, but Feraldine's purr is one of the happiest sounds I've heard in a long time.

A perfect winter day

No nature writing today, just the chronicling of a peaceful and perfect day.

An overnight snow made driving to our new student orientation event at 7:15 this morning a bit challenging, but I love fresh snow; the unbroken whiteness transforms everything.  After my part of the campus event ended, it was off to pick up a friend to visit the farmers market, where I scored an enormous box of the season's last Gold Rush apples, enough for a winter's worth of fresh eating and crisps.  Speaking of eating, our potluck brunch was probably nutritionally unbalanced, leaning heavily toward carbs and caffeine, but homemade breads and laughter are indeed food for the spirit.

The afternoon brought a visit to the library and a large stack of books that followed me home, followed by an exercise bike session in front of a history DVD from PBS.  The day is ending with a glass of wine and some time with Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell's gentle series of sketches of small-town English life in the 1850's. The women in her stories are generally short of cash, resourceful, often silly, courageous, and attentive to each other's needs.  They're a lot like the women I know.

Repeatment?

Is the winter of 2010-2011 going to be a repeat of last winter? Given that we have had snow on the ground for a solid week with more predicted (including the possibility of a VERY white Christmas), this scenario seems likely. I'm not sure that I'm going to approve. (Not that Mother Nature cares.) 

Winter visitors (again)

      Wasn't it just winter?  It's here again?  Although mid-December seems WAY too soon for all the snow we've been getting, this kind of weather does bring its compensations.

• You can see who's been where. 

      Most noticeable, of course, are the hoofprints.  Not Donner and Blitzen, but the infamous North Parkersburg Deer Herd, several of whose members came very close to taking on a line of cars last night on Fairview Avenue. Fortunately, the lead cars in both lanes (one of which was mine) were able to stop, deer ran off in various directions, and we all went on our merry way. But the most casual glance out any window reveals lines of hoofprints criss-crossing the yard--

heading straight up the hill from Roseland Avenue, continuing up the side yard in the general direction of Hamilton Middle School, making random curves leading nowhere in particular, and concentrating near all the bird feeders looking for leftover seed.  It is obvious that these deer are fearless: one print was six inches from the patio door, and not even the barking of Lucy the Loud Labrador keeps them from the feeders near the neighbor's fence.  We're wondering if the deer have already exhausted the massive crop of acorns dumped on the back yard, or if they're simply saving them for later. 

      More welcome than the hoofprints are all the bird tracks.  I can't tell the difference between the toeprints of a finch and a sparrow, but we definitely have lots of little feathered somebodies looking for food in all kinds of places. New spots for birdfeeders, perhaps?

• Winter visitors return.  The winter flocks of juncos are present in abundance, and the wrens are visiting the feeders that they mostly ignore in warmer weather.  

• Light on snow.  Does anyone else love the way that night is never really dark when the ground is covered with snow?

A sad history

This weekend, breaks taken from grading research projects were generally spent on the exercise bike, watching bits and pieces of the PBS documentary on West Virginia history.  Though I've worked in the state for more than twenty years now, I've never really known its history. Watching the program, my adopted state struck me as a tragic place from its beginning.

Allen Eckert spoke of the neutrality of the area south and east of the Ohio River in the days before European settlement.  None of the indigenous tribes had permanent settlements here but used the land as a neutral hunting ground.  In Eckert's words: "when they were in this hunting ground it was a neutral ground. It was where they could co-mingle, where they could meet, they could talk, and nobody would kill each other." Of course, all that changed when colonists and rapid economic development (18th-century style) arrived, resulting in the Indian wars and the slaughter of numbers of people on all sides.  After the Civil War, when West Virginia was created as part of the Union, former slaves were persecuted for seeking education and their white teachers threatened.  One woman from Maine kept an axe and a gun by her bed to "sell my life as dearly as I may." Only five years after statehood, former Confederates were in control, with control by railroads and industry soon after that.

It had always seemed to me that West Virginia has been basically a colony of the wealthier areas of the United States, a place used for its natural resources but otherwise ignored.  The documentary confirmed that idea, but the real tragedy is that so few people here seem to resist their colonization by the coal and chemical companies.   When the Upper Big Branch mine disaster occurred, leading to calls for Massey Coal's prosecution, one of my students commented on Facebook that the disaster was largely the miners' fault and that the company shouldn't be blamed.  Visiting the southern counties last spring, I met people who worked in mountaintop removal mining and insisted that West Virginia "needed" to sell all its minable coal, since more than half of its mountains would remain.  The brother of a county extension agent sang the praises of the (not even ironically named) "King Coal Highway" being built with company funds on some of the newly-flat land.  I resisted the urge to ask who the peasants were if coal is still king.

Of course it is true that the southern counties are still poor, and coal is still the only game in many towns, but seeing people embracing coal and blaming those who want to break its grip on the state was an unsettling experience.  I wonder if West Virginia will ever cease to be a "dark and bloody ground."

The first snow days

The juncos returned to the feeders with the first snowfall this year.  Usually, I see them on the ground, but this week they were at living room eye-level, using the platform feeder a good six feet off  the ground. This is a good thing, as the snow also revealed lots of footprints of neighbor cats.