Category Archives: Whatever

Birds, In the neighborhood, Snapshots, Whatever

Useless bird photography tips

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Tip #1: If you find yourself lacking in either good equipment, skill or interesting and flamboyant birds to photograph, it always helps to take pics of birds in places one isn’t used to seeing them. This will make up for your lack of skill, somewhat. Maybe. Probably not.

Example #1: Robins belong on grassy lawns or in muddy nests, not sandy beaches. The odd habitat distracts the viewer from the less than stellar exposure and the soft focus from your long lens that is sooo darn slow.

Example #2: Eastern towhees should be skulking on the ground in leaf-strewn forests or scratching around beneath blooming beach plum bushes or in poison ivy tangles. They are almost never seen perched in trees. This from-below view is interesting for its novelty and may keep the viewer from noticing the poor composition and soft focus of your photo.

Coming soon: Tips for taking pics of any bird that sits still long enough!

In the neighborhood, Snapshots, Whatever, Wildflowers

Position available

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Wildflower Enthusiast:
There is a temporary need for a part-time wildflower instructor willing to traipse around in the woods and point out and identify pretty flowers. Availability primarily on weekends and late afternoons during the Spring season. May also be needed for summer day trips to the NJ Pine Barrens.

Must be able to discern weeds from wildflowers and recognize garden escapees. Infinite patience with the beginner is desirable. Resistance to poison ivy helpful. Must not be deterred by wet feet, muddy knees or mosquitos. Love of rock-eating black labs might prove useful, as would a good sense of humor.

There is no salary; good company is the only thing on offer. Possibility of barter is negotiable. To trade: above-average knowledge of birdsong, organic homemade rabbit fertilizer (by the ton), best local pizza, free-range mixed baby koi/goldfish, familiarity with essential inferior poetry.

To apply, simply state the name of the flower pictured herewith. Serious inquiries only, please.

Remembering, Small truths, Whatever

Scents and memories

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My mother had one of those mirrored trays with crystal perfume bottles that she kept on her dresser… very shiny and fancy and exactly the type of thing we kids were never supposed to touch. After she passed away my dad tried giving it to me, to put on my little girl’s dresser, and I remember throwing a crying fit because I was so afraid to have it for myself. Imagine if I ever dropped one of those gorgeous bottles of perfume!

Eventually I convinced myself to take it from my mom’s dresser and put it in my own room. It never quite fit with the pink canopy bed and I still haven’t gotten over the ambivalence I felt about that damn perfume tray. It’s probably in storage somewhere or up in the attic. I don’t dare throw it away, but I don’t want to have to look at it everyday, either. Silly how an object can be tied up with so much emotional baggage more than 25 years later. I guess maybe I feel like I still haven’t grown up enough to use anything so… elegant, so classy, so like my mom.

Part of my ambivalence might also be associated with the particular perfume my mom liked. I don’t necessarily remember her wearing it – I can’t remember the sound of her voice, never mind what she smelled like – but I do remember the scent in those bottles.. Chanel No. 5. Overbearing, flowery, full of vanilla … ick. The perfume itself had probably gone over years before and that made it even more awful-smelling and heady.

I’ve never been one for perfume anyway (any wonder why?!) but many years ago I was given the tiniest bottle of the most perfect scent – bergamot and jonquil, jasmine and mandarin… in an understated black rectangular bottle. Perfect. That little bottle went quickly and I spent years trying to find more of it. Turns out it was discontinued. It reappeared a couple years ago at a ridiculous price and I’d refused to buy it. Until today. Today I spoiled myself and bought the big bottle.

I don’t do it often, but it feels nice to be spoiled once in a while! And having that scent on my wrist again makes me smile and feel happy. Happy except that it reminded me of my mom’s perfume tray collecting dust somewhere.

😉

So… any favorite perfumes out there? Any that you love to hate? I’m hoping none of you are big Chanel No. 5 fans.

Please note: Someday this will return to something resembling a nature blog. I feel like I’ve been “off-topic” a lot lately!

Garden, Snapshots, Whatever

Spring in my garden

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The season of yellow is quickly giving over to the season of blues, pinks and whites. The neighbors are welcome to their garish forsythia; I’d rather wait for these in my garden:

Virginia Bluebells

Serviceberry

Meadow Sage

Quince (slightly garish, yes, but gorgeous anyway!)

So… what’s blooming your way this weekend? Still stuck with all that yellow?

😉

Whatever

Poem in your Pocket Day

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A favorite from Ted Kooser:

The Bluet

Of all the flowers, the bluet has
the sweetest name, two syllables
that form on the lips, then fall
with a tiny, raindrop splash
into a suddenly bluer morning.

I offer you mornings like that,
fragrant tiny blue blossoms–
each with four petals, each with a star
at its heart. I would give you whole fields
of wild perfume if only

you could be mine, if you were not–
like the foolish bluet (also called
Innocence) – always holding your face
to the fickle, careless, fly by kiss
of the Clouded Sulphur Butterfly.

Bluet image from Hilton Pond

Birds, Whatever

First looks

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Patrick invited us to share a bit about the first pair of binoculars that we used for birding. Unlike Patrick, I came to birding kinda late in life, when I was in my mid-twenties, and bought a pair of Kowa’s at the nature center where I would end up volunteering a few weeks later.

They were cheap and pretty awful, but nothing as bad as what I see some people trying to learn birds with. I used them for a couple years until I was able to appreciate the difference between a $100 pair of binoculars and a $1000 pair of binoculars. I saved up for the Zeiss 7X42’s I use now and still keep those old Kowa’s on the counter to grab when I see something interesting out the kitchen window. They’re always dusty, but I still see nice birds with them once in a while.

Now I’m trying to remember what my first bird was with the new Zeiss’… I think it may have been a prothonotary on the first day of the spring weekend in Cape May in 98 or 99.

Small truths, Whatever

In which I foresee the future and rant some

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Today was a beautiful day, so beautiful and warm for the first time that it was hard to stay inside at work for so many hours.

Spring fever got the best of me this evening and I skipped the gym (again!) and wandered around the garden instead to encourage the bluebells and bleeding hearts in their progress towards blooming. I checked in with the fish in their temporary home until the pond is cleaned (soon!) and tried to find a frog or two hidden amongst the muck at the bottom. Once it started to get dark, I walked the farm fields in back hoping for woodcock. No luck; it’s too late and I missed my chance for the year. I knew it was all wrong when I heard only robins caroling and no white-throated sparrows. Usually, I know to expect the peenting to begin once the white-throats have quieted down for the night. The robins are singing at dusk and the woodcock have moved on.

In short, it was another of those days that left with me nothing much to blog about. Around 9 pm I finally got to open the mail and found my topic for the day: my impending poverty.

😉

My birthday’s coming up in a couple months and as you working people know, Social Security sends out an estimated benefits statement each year. Mostly I don’t pay much mind to it because the idea of retirement is so far off for me now that it feels like a waste of time to even contemplate it. But I spent some time looking at those numbers tonight and am sort of sorry I did.

The bad news is that if I continue to work two jobs until I’m 62 (another 25 years or so) I’ll have earned enough to qualify myself for a whopping $576 in monthly benefits. $576 a month is way below the federal poverty level, you know.

Worse is that if I continue to work two jobs for another 30 years, I’ll still qualify for benefits that keep me below the federal poverty level, but which are too high to entitle me to food stamps or any other sort of government assistance.

Worse still is that if I continue to work two jobs for another 33 years (until I’m 70 for christsakes!) I’ll barely qualify for enough to keep me out of the poorhouse.

Does anyone else find this terribly depressing?

Can anyone wonder why I try to be so kind to my poor downtrodden clients? I’ll be one of them someday!

😉

Granted, I’ve not made lucrative career choices and don’t believe it’s up to the government to support me in my old age, but jeez! Where’s the motivation to go to work on a sunny spring day?

The truth of the matter is that I can also expect a pension as a public employee, assuming the other taxpayers in my fine state don’t whittle that away to nothing by the time I’m old and gray. ‘Taxpayers’ seem to think that we public employees, your teachers and public health nurses and garbage men, and even us dopey social workers, have too many perks and earn too much and shouldn’t also earn a nice pension for our old age. The truth is in those numbers though… I earn so little as a public employee that, were it not for that anticipated pension, I’d be going to work everyday for the rest of eternity only to set myself up to be poor in the future.

I’m thinking of leaving it all behind… running off to join the circus or finding a band that needs a groupie or setting up a lemonade stand on some deserted beach in the Bahamas; anything to avoid the seeming drudgery of working everyday for nothing.

Maybe I should just find a really good financial advisor instead.

Birds, In the neighborhood, Pastimes, Whatever

Overheard at the bird observatory

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An egg story to rival Delia’s:

“Hello? Is this the Audubon?”

You can assume this means trouble at 10 am on a Sunday morning.

“We had a bunch of dead trees cut down in our yard…”

Uh oh. Why don’t people know enough to do this in the Fall?

“and my husband was cleaning up the stump grindings and found this egg…”

Oh dear.

“buried about four inches down in the dirt.”

Huh?

“It’s huge! And I know it’s an owl egg because my neighbor is one of those people that’s into all that nature stuff and she looked it up on the Internet and she says that owls burrow down, you know, to make their nests and…”

The bird observatory is located in NJ. The person was calling from NJ.

“and the egg must weigh at least a pound and I think it’s still alive so I put it in a basket..”

Wasn’t Easter a couple weeks ago already?

“and filled the basket up with dirt and buried the egg again and it’s been out on my deck for the last couple days..”

In the sun, I hope.

“and I’m not sure what I should do because I think it’s alive and it’s so heavy and could I bring it to you and you’ll tell me what it is and maybe take care of it or whatever?”

Sure… bring it on over. We’ll sit on it and hatch it for you.

————————————————————————————————–

How do you think I handled this particular phone call? With patience? Did I cackle in this woman’s ear or take the rare opportunity to educate?

No. I asked her if she was certain it wasn’t just a really big rock.

Or a dinosaur egg, maybe.