are increasing.
The pond is now clear, clear to the bottom. All our fishes are happy. I can’t feed them yet.
I’m doing the final edit on the NEXT Foreigner book before writing the ending.
The house is a mess. But we are bringing order out of that chaos. Slowly. While working on the garden and two books.
Morning, and I hear birds singing…we don’t have the more colorful prairie birds this deep in the city, but I have my silly sparrows, and they’re back in the quince bush outside my window, in mating frenzy. They like our pond—they’re the cleanest birds in north Spokane; and they’re not afraid of the cats—who watch through the window. I miss our rosy house finches, but not the apartment where they visited.
So I’ll take my rowdy little browncoats, and enjoy them at very close range—only 3 feet from my chair. They’re not afraid of me, either. And they’re back every year.
The quince is about to bloom: it’ll be pink when it gets the blooms going—monster bush, high as the eaves.
This morning I watched the ISS cross our skies just before sunrise and have been enjoying the serenades of the hundreds of birds that seem to find our neighborhood irresistible. We have actual trees rather than just cactus so the songbirds are nesting. We have some palm trees as well that we have not trimmed back because the palm fronds offer shelter and shade and serve as a windbreak (we get a lot of strong winds all year round). We also get quail and roadrunners although they are not nearly as tuneful… In the evenings we get owls courting and also the pipistrelle bats, so there must be something attractive about our yard. Between daytime serenades from the little songbirds, and the nighttime lullaby of nightingales, owls and coyotes we have a very musical home where it is a pleasure to sleep almost year round with windows open.
I have sparrows and house finches (according to “Whatbird.com”) at the feeder, plus cardinals, mourning doves, and the damned starlings. I believe I’ve also seen chickadees during the winter at the suet patty, and on the feeder, too.
The feeder is right out in front of the living room window and the cats can sit on the back of the couch (or the end table) and watch the birds feeding. I call it “Kitty TV”.
Ah yes, Bird Television, fascinating to all the felines.
We have mynah birds who travel in gangs; 4 or 5 of them will perch in the plumeria and yell rude things at the cats. Their alarm call actually sounds like they are screeching “CAAAT! CAAAAAT!!!” Sometimes I set off their alarm, and I inform them that, no, I have 2 legs, not 4. We have sparrows, zebra and rock doves, finches who look like they have been dunked in cherry, orange, or lemon syrup; little green mejiros with a peppermint Lifesaver ring around their eyes; cardinals, both Kentucky and other; and francolins, dull brown-gray birds who work themselves up into a frenzy of calling. Francolins are squab-sized and are game birds elsewhere, but they are relatively tame and dumb here.
Well, it’s the first week of April, so I have to operate on short sleep because SOMEONE’S BOOK is keeping me up until 2 AM. 🙂
Oh peacemaker! You stay true. I love it. It is so difficult not to fawn.
The new Bren book is always treated as the first sign of spring here. Just wish there was one for Fall (as you say) as well 🙂
And Bren looks like Inheritor,imho. That is what he looks like. But maybe he must have the queue.
Spring! Oh how great! Such a hard flipping winter!
My daffodils and crocus are poking out. At Mama’s house, all the summer flowers are out. It was 80F there yesterday.
Does your quince fruit? Quince are wonderful to eat, but hard to come by.
Ornamental -aka Japanese quinces are a completely different beast from the tree Quince. They do have an edible (if cooked) fruit, but it is really bland -not worth the effort. Tree Quinces on the other hand are wonderful – great to mince one into the apples for a pie. And the jelly is pure ambrosia.
I like the imagery of “rowdy little browncoats”—and of course, they do “keep flying.”
Can’t take the sky from me.
And yes, their coat is kind of a brownish color.
😀 Thanks, CJ, J.C., and company. — I’d never really considered sparrows as “rowdy little browncoats,” but now I have a whole new appreciation for them.
(One of my favorite quotes from Firefly involves the line about the cows, who “forgot” they were cows on the ship, and then they saw the sky and remembered. The whole discussion around that, very poetic and meaningful.)
(But then, the subtle bit about the cans being unlabeled, and thus people being unlabeled, is also a favorite bit.)
Aw heck, I just love Firefly.
🙂 totally the right personality!
offtopic, but I thought y’all might find this interesting
http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2014/04/did-europeans-get-fat-neandertals
Really interesting. From not our cousins, not remotely, to really interesting; I’m a percentage Neandertal, and a wee bit Denisovan, which is a new group they’re trying to figure—If you’re African, the north of Africa has a smattering of Neanderthal from the Eastern Med; and if you’re Asian, you may have some other early human adjuncts: Denisovan, maybe, but less likely Neanderthal unless you had people hiking up and down the early trade routes.
I know my dad’s deepest discernible roots lie in the Caucasus near Sochi, further than 5000 years ago. And my mum’s pop up in what is now Turkey, Greece, Southern Italy, and the southern Alps. Jane’s mum’s side was more toward France and Spain—one of that group that entered Europe, and then got caught by a resurgence of the ice: there’s some missing strands in that skein, apparently: they went into the area, but did not resurface. All our lines had ample time to pick up different folk along the way.
Got any of Edward III’s kids back there? I do. His wife was, Philipa of Hainault. Her MtDNA-line GGGM was “Elizabeth the Cuman”, Queen Consort of Stephen V of Hungary, “probably” the daughter of Kuthen, Khan of the Cumans. (paul: Dynastic marriage? Sensible attribution.) Here’s the fun part: The Cumans originally lived east of the large bend of the Yellow River in China. Maybe that’s why I’ve always liked the Polovetsian Dances from Borodin’s opera Prince Igor, perhaps better know as the tune for “Stranger in Paradise” from the Broadway Show “Kismet”.
ah, then you would also be very interested in this book – The Horse, the Wheel, and Language – how bronze age riders from the eurasian steppes shaped the modern world http://www.amazon.co.uk/Horse-Wheel-Language-Bronze-Age-Eurasian-ebook/dp/B003TSEL1Y/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1396593224&sr=8-1&keywords=the+horse+the+wheel+and+language it’s a heavy read – I ordered it from the library – and goes into enormous detail, especially on the archaeology side, but basically if you are interested in the change from hunter-gathering and basic neolithic farming on the fringes of the steppes around the black sea, to nomadic wagon dwellers on the steppes, the domestication of the horse, and how the indo european languages came to be so dominant … it’s worth ploughing through!
I just saw two copies of Peacemaker HB on the shelf at Powell’s (Technical) Books in Beaverton. 😉
We have sparrows and doves, and there are hummingbirds around – I hear them. There are mockingbirds on the block, and crows, and black phoebes. I’ve seen Cooper’s hawks occasionally, but they’re usually in trees and not very visible. Bushtits are around, but they’re more heard than seen. (Little tiny grey-brown birds that travel in twittering flocks, picking bugs off twigs and leaves. You won’t get one, you’ll get six or twelve or forty.)
Ah, yes, the “LBJ’s” – Little Brown Jobs. 😀 They are everywhere, but nothing beats the total frenzy of the returning robins. First you see (or hear) one, or two; then suddenly they’re everywhere, chirping their brains out non-stop, fighting and fussing over territory (I saw two of them trying to duke it out with a pair of grackles the other day), and generally being loud and goofy. I love ’em 😀 Although they never do shut up for most of the breeding season – they pretty much vocalize 24/7.
Finally finished working for the day and came upstairs. Couldn’t resist a quick peek here to see what’s going on. I saw 2 purple flowers in my bulb bed yesterday or today when I was walking back to the house from the mail box, but didn’t take the time to walk over there to see what is blooming. Sigh. I’m really looking forward to April 15th this year…
Now a quick check of the bargain ebooks for the day, then I’m off to bed to finish Peacemaker – only 75 pages to go. Post tax season, I’ll do a reread of the entire series, but I was too anxious to read the new one to wait until I could manage to reread all the others.
Sumer is icumen in
Svmer is icumen in
Lhude sing cuccu
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med and springþ þe wde nu
Sing cuccu
Awe bleteþ after lomb
lhouþ after calue cu
Bulluc sterteþ
bucke uerteþ murie sing cuccu
Cuccu cuccu Wel singes þu cuccu ne swik þu nauer nu
Sing cuccu nu
Sing cuccu
Pes
Sing cuccu nu
Sing cuccu
With apologies to Ezra Pound, right, BCS? LOL.
Over on the west-side, it’s been warm enough for koi/goldfish feedings most days since early March. I tend to moniter the water temperature closely….and feed just once before noon. A couple days water temp has gotten up into the low 50’s but I’m sticking with wheat-germ food.
I’ll be on the hunt for more nicely-colored shubunkins this spring. I think I’ve got all the same sex (sigh).
You remember how the birds in the Peanuts comic strip (like Woodstock) never had actual dialog in their speech balloons, just a series of exclamation marks? First time I saw that, I knew right away, those birds may have been yellow, but they were really sparrows. That, to me, is exactly how sparrows talk. A speech balloon full of exclamation points. We used to have all kinds of sparrows here, but now you hardly see them. Mostly big birds like mockingbirds, jays, doves and grackles. Used to hardly see grackles here. Now they’re everywhere.