Sense of Adventure

Aren’t hummingbird shadows on the ground a hoot? At first you think they come from something just floating in the air, like the cottonwood cotton that’s starting to drift like snow in the Valley now and give my allergic friends the fits. Then you realize they don’t just drift with the wind, but pause and dart.

I saw that happening as Emma and I were walking on the ditch east of the RGNC this afternoon. I never did see that particular hummingbird. Saw plenty more.

So, how did that story get started that hummingbirds never, and possibly can’t, stop and perch? Somebody mentioned that to me in the last month or so, and I thought about it right off the bat today, as we walked through the leafy tree corridor to the ditch entrance. A hummingbird lit on a branch right over the trail, although it didn’t linger long.

On the surface the belief makes sense: clearly the little bastards have to move around a lot in order to eat vast amounts to keep their furious little metabolisms blazing. And if you spend any time actually watching them, you see fairly quickly that, regardless, it ain’t true. You see them take time outs all the time: on feeders, on tree limbs, on bushes, on wires.

I guess this once again shows we tend not to see what we don’t expect to.

Also, driving the short block from Candy to Veranda to park, I saw a big white bird flying over the RGNC fields. It looked too big and not quite right to be a white pigeon - rock dove - such as you see flying around here a fair amount. I thought maybe it might be a cattle egret, which I have seen in that area, albeit it seems a bit late in the season. It went away to the north.

As we walked north along the ditch it (I’m presuming it was the same big, white bird, since we don’t get them here all that often) flew back over heading south. This time I thought fairly sure it was a gull. It was almost entirely white, with maybe a bit of black at tail and wing tips. This was surprising: we get gulls here, which most people don’t know, so that it startles hell out of ‘em when they do happen to spot the birds. Or make people think they’re crazy, as several have remarked to me.

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So today I decided, no more excuses, and went forth into the back yard to plant my honeysuckle.

It’s supposed to get really windy later. That struck me as not ideal for planting a tender transplant. Then again, it’s gonna have to get used to our wind soon or late. Also I’ve been putting it off already for, well, a year.

First I dug a hole by the wall to embed the fan-shaped wood trellis I bought from Mundo Wally for the purpose. There proved to be a sort of lip of foundation at the base of the cement-block north wall which served nicely to prop the base against. A small chunk of busted-up cement from something or other I’ve had to demolish since moving in helped wedge it in place from the other side.

At this point, as usual, Emma took my presence in the yard as meaning I wanted nothing more than to play with her. So nothing would answer but that I had to roam around the yard holding my arms out before me like Calvin playing Frankenstein’s Monster and making zombie noises. Which is how one plays the Puppy Monster. Emma happily raced around fleeing the Puppy Monster until she got tired and went to lie down in the shade. Fortunately it wasn’t too hot out there yet.

A few years ago I tried planting honeysuckle and it just flat died. This amazed all the people at local nurseries I asked about it, who unanimously said that honeysuckle’s so robust that if it didn’t have purty flowers it would be roundly hated as a weed. I did a little more research this time.

Hope it helps. Fingers crossed.

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Been a busy day. Got a lot of writing done, and also made good progress in the yard. I’m finally about ready to plant the honeysuckle clipping I’ve been nurturing in a pot on the kitchen counter for the last year and a half. Soon after that I’ll be planting native grasses front and back. Yay!

Also, I finally got the necessary preparations made to learn at last whether I’ve indeed achieved compost. However I was too beat tonight to filter the stuff and find out. Tomorrow…

Poor Emma has somehow got a slice in one of her pads. Poor tyke. I gave her a quarter aspirin to relieve the pain. She’ll have to heal a few days before I take her out walking again.

Click here to read the reason behind the season - what makes Cinco de Mayo so damned special. I was going to watch the largely unknown 1970 Clint Eastwood/Shirley MacLaine (!) oater Two Mules for Sister Sara (the only movie I know of set during the Franco-Mexican War) in honor of the great day. But I’m too racked-up for that too. Maybe tomorrow for that as well.

A bit of an experiment today - take that as yesterday, Friday, May 2^nd, the day before this nominally posts.

As I mentioned in our last thrilling episode (and, yes, I’m easily thrilled) I’ve got both Dragon NaturallySpeaking and my DVR up and running. So today when I took Emma Dog for a walk down by the Nature Center, I decided to try my hand at an audio diary. I keep a journal of our walks anyway, and it’s struck me several times just how convenient it’d be to be able to record interesting events, sights, impressions, and suchlike, just by speaking. I do carry my beloved Pilot T/X religiously, but writing into it’s … not so efficient. Especially since Graffiti 2, their writing interface software, basically sucks. Although in truth I’ve never been terribly accurate at writing on my PDA.

But talking, obviously, is pretty easy.

Also, of course, it’s my intent to dictate my fiction on the go, implementing what I’ve long thought of as my “Man in Motion” concept. So I reckoned this’d be a prime opportunity to test several things at once.

What follows, therefore, is my transcript of the day’s session. It runs 1006 words. It’s proofread, but not edited - I’m proud I only said “um” once. It’s as close to word-by-word as I could make it.

Feel free to skip this one. If not - here goes:

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… but Hell no.

Usually Emma Dog goes outside when I get out of bed and stays out all day (for some reason she won’t stay out if I’m not up, at least in the daytime.) She does her business, gets fed, explores, lies in the sun, all those outdoorsy dog activities. Today she started whimpering to get in after maybe half an hour. So I let her inside.

A few minutes ago, a little after 1:30 PM here in the Mountain West, Emma got up off her fleece on the couch and went to the back door. Which I’ve got propped open for ventilation. At the screen she stopped and stared out a few moments. It’s a standard way she petitions to go outside.

Then she turned, went back to her couch, and curled back up to go to sleep.

The reason’s not hard to divine: today really blows. Literally.

It’s our second day running of nasty wind. Today it hasn’t got up to really scary winds, which we attained around 5 PM yesterday. But its bad enough.

Today’s redeeming feature is that it’s a cool wind. It’s actually effectively aerating my house, which for some reason has the ventilation characteristics of a sealed bank vault even with all windows and doors wide open. I don’t even have the ceiling fan on in the living room, where I sit on the (other) couch - yes, it’s got an Emma Fleece too - writing this with the Cubs-Brewers game on in the background. (Oh, good. The Brew Crew just tied it on a home run.) Yesterday it just blew hot air everywhere. It was the very sort of day which makes me much prefer Fall to Spring. They’re my two favorite seasons; Fall mostly omits the killer winds.

Another annoyance is that there’s nothing I want to do in my yard right now that the wind won’t render impossible. Or at least make prohibitively unpleasant.

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I just got back from taking Emma on a walk on the ditch that leads along the eastern side of the RGNC wildfowl preserve. It was a beautiful Spring midday, mostly clear; the sun was hot and the breeze cool, a combination I really enjoy. Too bad we don’t get it too often.

As we were heading back to the car along the southern fence of the RGNC fields I saw a couple of ring-necked pheasant cocks (okay, get the giggles out of the way. It’s what they’re called. Deal.) Albuquerque’s North Valley down by the Río Grande is infested with pheasants. The males strut around, looking absurdly gorgeous with their shiny green heads, red-circled eyes, golden breasts, and long-feathered tails. And of course what they’re doing is trying to attract babes.

So these two cock pheasants came running toward the fence through green ground cover that was maybe chest-high on them, four or five inches on average. It looked as though they were racing. Their courses converged until they came within about eight feet of the fence, when they stopped ten feet apart. Then they turned around and walked back out into the field, again angling toward each other, until they were walking side by side.

Then they stopped and turned toward each other. They started doing this bobbing routine, one ducking low while the other rose up, like pistons in a two-stroke engine. It looked suspiciously like a courtship dance; I was wondering if we were going to see some serious gay pheasant action here. Right out in front of God and everybody. Think about the children! (Imagine that as said by Bill Clinton in his customary Berkshire hog-as-televangelist squealing grunt.)

More likely it was some kind of rivalry dance. As I watched this Emma and I started walking again. Before we’d gone more than a few steps this hen pheasant comes booming out of the low brush right by the fence. She flew off at an angle past the fancy-dancing males and out into the field. The nearer male turned right round and went running off in her direction, chuckling to himself in triumph. The other emitted a loud clack of dismay. “Dammit!”

Or actually, just a pair of muskrats. They didn’t get up to anything … untoward during the short time I had them in view.

After writing some more on the new Rogue Angel yarn, I gathered up Emma Dog and took her off to the Nature Center for an afternoon walk. It’s a perfect Albuquerque Spring day: warm, clear, calm; the trees are getting green and the fruit trees and the lilacs fragrantly in bloom. A marked improvement over the gale we walked through a couple of days ago, and the Arctic day that followed it.

From the levee bike path I saw some big, soft-shelled spiny turtles sunning themselves down on the ditchbank. A guy cruised by us on a nifty recumbent tadpole trike, lower-slung and probably more expensive than my TriCruiser. Sometime this week I need to get my tricycle to a bike shop for an overhaul so I can start riding it before it gets brutally hot and I’ll snivel too much.

Not a lot of birdage about, though some of interest. Our usual Piper Cherokee-sized Canada geese kept flying low overhead, honking stertorously. As we walked north up the dirt path along the east side of the clear ditch, which is very pleasantly shaded by trees and brush, a bitty grey wren-like thing flew over with a whir that seemed to be a call, rather than the sound of its wings. It gave a little cheep as it lit in a tree to our left. Naturally it went promptly around the other side of a big branch where I couldn’t see. It seemed to have a very curved beak, almost like a thrasher. But they’re way bigger than this bird, which was so tiny I first thought it was a cicada - although we’re at the wrong end of the season to see them. It may’ve been a Canyon Wren.

There’s a notch in the ditchbank that leads right down from the trail to the water, perhaprs halfway between the footbridge that leads back to the east side and Montaño, where it’s convenient for Emma to go wade in the water and drink. As we approached it I heard a big woodpecker thudding away off in the bosque proper, across the ditch and the bike path.

And then when we got to the notch, right there swimming south and not eight feet from the bank I saw a muskrat. A beat later I saw a second toward the other side of the ditch. They both dove pretty promptly; one surfaced briefly under some brush overhanging the far side. I bet they have a burrow under there.

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When Emma and I went on our walk today, on the bike path and trails down along the clear ditch by the RGNC, it was a lovely afternoon. The breeze was cold, but it’s mostly a sheltered walk. Only walking west down the path from Candelaria did the wind-tunnel effect make it really bitter.

As we crossed the wooden footbridge across the ditch from the Nature Center gate a young mother with two kids by the far landing stepped aside to let us pass. A wise idea, as it turned out.

Her older kid, a little boy of maybe five or six, came tottering forward as we reached that end, blithely ignoring his mom’s repeated commands to stop. And then he did stop, and his eyes got real wide.

“There’s a big dog!” he announced breathlessly.

Yeah, kid. No diddly. Listen to your mama next time, won’t you?

Actually I don’t think Emma would ever remotely hurt a child. She got along well with the kids at the home she lived at for a year. It was the other dogs she had a problem with. Still, I prefer to avoid putting such things to the test unnecessarily.

There’s no question that, at almost 100 pounds, burly and black with a shoebox head, Emma looks formidable. Okay, she is formidable. Most people just assume she’s a he. A lot of people admire her, some with visible trepidation.

They should hear me coo at her as my baby girl…

It seems the cranes have finally flown away. I didn’t see any in the field along Veranda, east of the RGNC. It’s sad, of course, in a way. But if they don’t go away, where’s the poignancy when they return?

That’s not altogether true. The Canada geese don’t all leave. A goodly population sticks around and produces broods of deceptively cute babies. (Deceptive, in that their parents are huge and scary.) But when I hear the wild geese flying back as the autumn air turns crisp, it always stirs me at a very deep level.