Toad in the Hole

The Complexities of Chow

The other day, Joe and I took a stroll in Hayward Regional Shoreline park. I had an ulterior motive—wanted a look at the plantings in an apartment complex near there, as I was doing a consult with people rehabbing it—and it was also the one place we thought of where we could go on this first sunny weekend in forever that wouldn’t be mobbed and muddy. The backyard has my lifetime dose of mud; don’t need more.

Well, it’s Spring there too. The barnswallows are back, zipping and chattering around the visitors’ center building. The avocets have their pale-bricky head coloring; the ruddy drakes are getting ruddy and their bills are turning that improbable pale blue, all at wildly various rates. Some black-bellied plovers have black bellies. There were gaggles of least sandpipers nearly invisible in the mud and pickleweed; curlews and godwits hunting in loose pairs and foursomes.

Right at the start of the trail along the dikes, a great egret was highstepping, hunting in the mix of grasses, scrub, and pickleweed on the opposite bank. Ignored us completely. Looked here, looked there, and then Zap! Flash of snaky neck and big sharp bill into the tangle.

Came up with a song sparrow struggling, held by one wing and a bit of body in the big scissor bill. The egret juggled the sparrow a bit, got it aligned headfirst; little smudgy pinfeathers and blood started staining the bill’s sides. A few more shakes and more positioning, and the egret gulped the sparrow—clearly still alive and struggling—down whole. We could see its progress down the long throat. It was clearly not as easy as swallowing a slick fish, but down it went.

Then the egret walked down to the channel, washed the blood and feathers off its bill, and gulped down water as a chaser; we could see the throat moving for that too. Apparently egrets, like pigeons, can swallow water with their heads down.

Immediately it strode back up the bank to resume its hunt.

There were song sparrows and savanna sparrows and marsh wrens singing in their places all along the trail; I suppose the pickings were easy, though this one had been grabbed from some hiding place, not the top of a bush or grass stem.

We’ve seen birds swallowing —or trying to swallow—some unlikely things over the years. A gull in Golden Gate Park, with one arm of a largish red starfisn in its mouth and the other four arms spread out in front of it, walking around looking rather perplexed. I suppose the star’s little sucker feet had hold of the gull’s tongue, because when we backtracked a couple of hours later, there they were still in exactly the same fix. I do have to wonder how that turned out.

A great blue heron at Arrowhead Marsh grabbed a mouse from the marshgrass twenty feet from us. We turned to see it because we heard the frantic skritching of the mouse’s feet on the heron’s bill. The mouse kept struggling furiously, squeaking, scratching, and the heron turned, walked to the water, and held the mouse under till it stopped, then swallowed it. That made us rethink just which “behaviors” are hardwired—it certainly wouldn’t have worked to drown what I think of as a heron’s usual prey, fish.

Last month we were down at the Berkeley Marina, looking for some white-fronted geese in puddle-ponds where marsh restoration has been started. At the far edge of the pond with the geese was a GBH, with a very large dead rat. I mean, this puppy was well-fed—about the size of a good hefty possum at least. The GBH had the rat in its bill and was having a problem with the next step. It kept dunking the rat vigorously in the water—not holding it under, just sloshing it around—and repositioning it, but it was clearly just too large. But the heron wouldn’t give up, and who can blame it: “If I get this thing down I wont have to hunt for days!” We watched for a good 20 to 30 minutes before we gave up.

Owning a snake has raised my consciousness about this problem, the one of having to swallow your dinner in one piece. It’s amazing to watch, even in a critter who has distensible jaws. Shep’s jaws separate two ways: at the jaw hinge, and in the middle of the bottom jaw. Right now, he’s not swallowing anything because, evidently, it’s the season for a young adult male ball python to get all lovelorn and pace around for hours, looking for a snaky date. I never particularly wanted to parent an adolescent, and look what I went and did.

I fed Emma’s baby hognose snake once, and the silly thing grabbed the thawed pinky sideways and refused to let go or reposition it. She swallowed the thing still aimed laterally—what a face! You know that photo of a dog with three tennis balls in its mouth? Like that.

At the Marina, earlier that month, we watched a raven eat a pocket gopher. Raven perched on top of a sign and wedged the gopher into the open top of the post, then tore bits off. Egrets and herons certainly have cutlery analogous to a raven’s, but I guess they can’t or won’t use it the same way. And there, I guess, is the hardwired part.

Or so I’ll suppose until I see a heron working on its meal like a Benihana table chef.

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Frog Shoes?

Open Toad, of course.

Time to come out of hibernation; we’ve had oh four days in a row with sun in ‘em.

I’m enjoying how vices becone virtues. The damned old banksia rose is all clambering up and into the (second-story) kitchen window again, and yet another year has gone by that I didn’t cut it back and wash the filthy window. It’s a big window, over the sink, and the curtains need replacing too. But there are blooms on the rose already, and I almost don’t have the heart to whack it when it’s blooming where I can see it from the house. I get little enough pleasure out of the garden at eye level; let the second-story flowers bloom at least.

The decision was sealed the other day. We were eating breakfast in the dining room, and heard an odd, off-beat tapping. First thought: the mice were back. It wasn’t the feeder rat at the water bottle; it wasn’t the turtles knocking around in their pen; it certainly wasn’t the snake; it was coming from the kitchen.

I tippytoed out there, and no, the tapping wasn’t from under the sink where the mice had been before Joe stuffed the hole around the pipe with steel wool. Higher. Also, not on the sink cabinet’s plywood: sharper.

It was coming from the window. A bushtit was hunting bugs in the rosevine, and now and then going after bugs in the cobwebby schmutz at the edge of the window. TAP tap tap. Very businesslike for a little gray bird… Wait, one bushtit? It must be breeding season. Spring. The rest of the time they run around in fluid little flocks, peeting to each other for contact and tracking, noshing on those little bugs that hide so well in the garden plants.

I have a fond hope that they might even nest in the rosevine. A bushtit’s nest looks like a disreputable old ravelly gray wool sock, with a hole near the top. OK, that hope is fond in the old sense, foolish, but I have more remote hopes socked away in the fantasy attic. It’d be fun to watch.

And if I’d kept the windows clean and planted that rose somewhere it belonged—instead of forgetting the gallon can in the space by the driveway long enough for the plant to root right through it—we wouldn’t be able to watch, from two feet away, little birds forage and pause for a friendly rap on the window.

Match that, Martha.

I was talking about bushtits and wrentits and titmice, um titmouses? the other day and Geoffrey Coffey asked why so many birds were named after tits. I answered and he put it on
his blog which is a pleasant compliment too.

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Contrapuntal Cat Story

...or Matt the Cat Saves the Day:

Yesterday I was drinking my second cup of coffee (therefore not quite alert and oriented) and heard an odd rattle from the aquarium. I assumed it was one of the dojo loaches making one of those frantic surface dashes they make now and then and bumping the filter intake tube or something. But when I let Matt the Cat in for his breakfast*, he went to the back of the aquarium cabinet immediately, climbing through the dracaena on the floor to get there, and more or less pointed.

I moved the plant and scatted the cat and sure enough, there was a dojo loach wiggling on the floor. I grabbed it and returned it to the tank, and as there has been no pitiful corpse floating on the surface since, I assume the fish survived. If Matt hadn’t pointed it, I’m sure it would have desiccated or maybe bloated and raised a fearsome stink behind the cabinet.

Matt pointed a rat for us once—an escaped snake dinner who had actually tumbled his little rat carry-cage off the sideboard and sprung the lid—and Joe managed to catch it, on the third point. The first two spots the rat had been pointed were up on the livingroom curtain rod and under the coffeetable, neither reachable in time. I’m finding this tendency a bit odd, if certainly convenient: he doesn’t pounce; he points, practically like a bird-dog.

Well, for this one he gets tolerated a little longer.

*Actually, it might have been his second breakfast or elevenses, for all we know. I’d bet someone else is feeding him, as he’s bigger than what he eats here would account for and he’s entirely too charming in his dignified way.

Matt has moved in on us, basically, causing me to compromise both my principles and my health—I’m allergic to him, of course. So he can’t be an indoor cat. He does wear a noisy bell, to which he acquiesced grudgingly. He’s allowed on Joe’s lap, one chair, and of course the doormat, the floormat, the bathmat, whatever mat’s handy: his favorite places to be, which is how he earned his name.

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Abbott’s Lagoon, Point Reyes

Wednesday, Joe and I jaunted over to Abbott’s Lagoon, mostly because Stallcup had reported three black skimmers hanging out with the Caspian tern flock there. This is as far north as we’ve seen them so far, as they progress into new territory, moving up from Baja. They’re one of my favorite birds, even when I don’t get to see them feed with that graceful barely-touching plow motion over the water. (They like dawn and dusk for that, mostly. I’m rarely that ambitious myself.)

We saw at least two of them: one resting with terns, another chasing one—which I thought odd; I’ve never heard that they did that, and they certainly don’t look adapted for highway robbery. The terns themselves were a hoot. There were lots of them—I forgot to count, but a couple hundred scattered over the beach on the west side of the lagoon, and chasing around in the air in half-dozens and tens, playing Catch-the-guy-with-the-fish, skritching loudly, “GimMEthat! GimMEthat!” Some youngsters were still begging successfully, waddling forward when a parent landed, focusing intently with brilliant-orange gapes wide open—you’d think they’d trip over their own lower bills.

Unusual in that we had both white and brown pelicans on that same beach in good numbers, and Heermann’s gulls among the outnumbered (for a change) gulls hanging around. Also, the year’s first phalaropes for us, red-neckeds. A few marbled godwits, willets. The coastal migration is on, folks.

And there was this one bird. A smallish calidrid shorebird, associating with a couple others, but with a rufous wash over its head and neck that they didn’t have. “Um, look at this one,” said Joe, and turned the scope over to me.

So. Not much bigger than the least and the western sandpipers with it, but a bit huskier in build—not longer; smaller than the nearest phalarope and the snowy plover that showed up after a few minutes. Black legs, smallish bill, folded wings extending very little or not at all past the tail, that reddish wash like a very short bib just a little way down the breast, clean underneath; indistinct white-over-dark eyelines; no snipe-stripes on the back, no more-rufous scapulars… I could spend two more grafs describing it, but anyway from both size/proportions (especially length) and behavior—it was feeding in the water and wettest mud along with the least and western, never even ventured up into the higher gravel or grass—it was not the Baird’s that we’d first thought it was, until that little Waitaminnit went off in Joe’s head. It seems to have been a red-necked stint. Not only a lifer, but a great honkin rarity, though certainly not the first reported on this coast.

We spent the next two days poring over photos and paintings in books and magazines and on the Web. (Anyone who’s been to our place and wondered why the hell we have such great drifts and piles and shelves and heaps of books and periodicals: this is why. Sometimes you really have to work for your goodies, and you never know what you’ll need.) The more pix I see, the more it looks like red-necked stint, particularly after reading that the adults of this species migrate first, which isn’t true of a lot of shorebirds. What we saw looked like a plumage in transition from adult-breeding to “winter.”

Woo hoo.

We also made a side trip to Limantour—that road, from Drake to Limantour Estero, has to be one of the prettiest drives in California—and saw more phalaropes.

When phalaropes are feeding, they swim in tight little circles, stirring up li’l bugs and water inhabitants to snatch up. That must be hardwired indeed: I watched one walking on the sand… in tight little circles, looking at the ground for bugs.

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Hunting for Bear

On one of those whims that we’ve vowed to honor since Joe retired, we drove up to the Sierra foothills towns of Jackson and Ione Wednesday. The objective was a copy of Mr. Bear Squash-You-All-Flat, copyright 1950 by Morrell Gipson.

Got it, too. Bookfever has a stall in one of those collective antique stores in Jackson, and as they’d advertised at least two copies of the book on their site, I figured a smart marketer would have one there. Evidently the main physical location is a house on a dirt road off a side road off a highway between Ione and Jackson; there’s a flock of wild turkeys visible in the Web site photo. As visits are by appointment, I’m lucky to have found my quarry in Jackson.

Mr. Bear Squash-You-All-Flat is one of those childhood dents I was amused to find I share with Gary Larson. The Little Wonder Book copy I has as a kid in the ‘50s is long gone, pulped or atomized in the general household maelstrom generated by six kids, some of them fairly destructive. (I still hold a grudge about my Farfel dog, with his moveable mandible. I have no one but myself to blame for the awful demise of Amosandra(tm), though; she was rubber, and sitting on my desk in the sunshine eventually caused her to collapse in a truly grotesque manner. I’ve never seen another like her, oddly. I’m afraid to Google for her, as then I’d find one and it would cost an arm and a leg and, oh, you know.)

We used to play I’m Mr. Bear Squash-You-All-FLAT!! sometimes, a game that involved sitting on each other the way Mr. Bear does on the teeny forest homes of the teeny forest critters in the book. I kind of had an advantage there, though my first younger brother was nearly as big as I was, so it wasn’t much of an advantage. No bones were ever broken. Hey, kids were easily entertained back then. I guess.

I’ll leave the Surprise Ending as a surprise except to mention that it involves technology, in a recycled way.

We’re finding that the hardest part of getting out of the Bay Area for these trips—Pescadero, Sonoma, the foothills, Lassen—is getting out of the Bay Area. I-80’s a mess no matter when we use it, and 205-580 through Stockton and Livermore was no better. I could froth on for paragraphs about the sprawl outside Tracy and Stockton and Livermore, but some other time. Dang but it’s hard to see perfectly good habitat, including the residences of birds and beasts and plants I’ve known personally (with their families) over the years, give way to rank upon rank of stucco clones built to the lot lines.

Nina Paley has a point.

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