Joe Barefoot and the Suet Ball

Much of this blog has been about nature experiences that children can encounter on their own. But there is one place where adults can provide important guidance to youngsters. That's in the area of getting familiar with backyard birds.

Experiencing:

My grandmother, in whose kitchen I seem to have spent half of my young life, had a large spreading double flowered Japanese cherry growing in the yard behind her kitchen. In the spring the tree was a mass of large, drooping light pink flowers, as solid as an umbrella. It engulfed me in a happy feeling of peacefulness just to stand under it and look up into the solid pink canopy. I have never known another tree of any kind to flower so copiously.  Hanging from the center of the canopy of flowers was a bird feeder which "Gram" kept full all year long. But in the spring that tree was an unforgettably beautiful backdrop for the visiting birds. Picking up on "Gram's" interest in birds I soon became familiar with all the common birds in the neighborhood. I would stand at her kitchen window mesmerized by the comings and goings and the intermittent squabbles of her feathered visitors.

Then in fourth grade Joe Barefoot launched me on a lifelong bird feeding venture of my own. Joe Barefoot (Mr. Barefoot in the classroom, Joe Barefoot to the town folk.) was a traveling media person in our small town. This was decades before the word "media" meant more than oils, pastels, etc., so I don't know what his title actually was. He traveled from classroom to classroom in our elementary schools with a movie projector and reels of film that served as magic gateways to the world beyond our limited horizon.This was in the years when television was no more than a novelty for early adopters, so when Mr. Barefoot came to our classroom one could sense the excitement. Nobody was about to take the slightest action that might annoy the teacher and cancel our show. I recall movies about Eskimo and African cultures, agriculture and the geographical wonders of the world. But the real thunderbolt Joe Barefoot threw at me came the day he carried in a mysterious brown paper bag along with his projector. He talked about feeding birds, then opened the bag and pulled out a round ball on a string. It was a suet ball packed with seeds. Next he tilted the bag toward us and showed us the bird feed within, a mixture of sunflower seeds and millet..

In the next breath he announced that he could get these items for us at lower prices than those in the store and that if we wanted to feed the birds he would take orders and make deliveries. I think the seed price was something like pennies a pound.

I rushed home that day and begged my mother to let me order some seed. Now my family didn't have much money and didn't buy anything that wasn't necessary, but on this occasion my mother agreed - provided I paid for half out of the little green money can on my closet shelf. I was elated.

I set about designing a bird feeder. From somewhere I got some one inch boards. My buddy Bruce got a saw, I got a hammer and nails.  We cut boards and pounded together a bird feeder in his garage. By the time the seeds were paid for and delivered my feeder was painted brown with floor paint and  hanging in the little jack pine along our back walkway, right over my little wildflower garden. I can still see it in my minds eye. It was a terrific feeder that lasted for years. Reflecting back I still wonder where I got the  know-how to design and build it.

Soon I had the cardinals, bluejays, juncos, titmice and other local characters coming out of nowhere to hang out at my feeder. My mother relented and started buying the feed, and I was launched on a lifelong habit. I have been hanging bird feeder ever since. During the years that my wife Mary and I were RVing full time I designed a clear plastic feeder to hang on the ladder on the back of our trailer, right up against the one way window. Over the years we saw dozens of bird species a nose length away, birds that were never seen around my original Pennsylvania home. I owe the long departed Joe Barefoot a big thank you.

Now that I'm living in east central Minnesota the number of winter bird species at my feeder is limited. But here is the main cast of characters that show up at the feeder just outside the kitchen patio door.

The Red-Bellied Woodpecker

The red-bellied woodpecker is my favorite winter bird. I don't know why. I just love the sharp color pattern and the exaggerated woodpeckery behavior of this bird. It seems to broadcast an attitude of being in charge of its world. The picture directly above clearly illustrates how a woodpecker uses its tail for a prop.

 

The Hairy Woodpecker

The hairy woodpecker and the similar looking downy woodpecker spend a lot of time at the feeder.

A Visiting Chickadee

Researchers claim the chickadee is America's favorite bird. I don't doubt it. They are so bold and friendly that I've actually had them land on me while sitting quietly in the woods. Besides they're never ending seed transfers from feeder to tree bark are amazing to watch.

The White Breasted Nuthatch

The white breasted nut hatch as well as the chickadees provide endless entertainment as they hold a sunflower seed under one foot and peck it open- a crafty maneuver. The nuthatch is not as accommodating as the chickadee and will often drive other birds away until it decides to leave.

Dark Eyed Juncos

Life wouldn't be the same in snow country without the dark-eyed juncos. These sparrows are one of our most numerous winter residents according to our annual Christmas Bird Count. In summer ours move north but they always return just before the winter snows.

Knowing:

By observation I've learned that the term "pecking order" really means something in the woodpecker family. Pecking order is determined by species size and is, in decreasing rank: pileated, red-bellied, hairy, and downy. If a woodpecker is on the feeder and a higher ranking one shows up, it leaves almost immediately. It usually goes to a nearby perch and politely waits til the bigger guy takes off. On the other hand, if a higher ranking woodpecker is already on the feeder a new arrival will find a perching place to wait, or else leave the area. It's fun watching these birds pull rank on each other all day long. In the long run everyone gets fed.

Like many who feed the birds I've always had a warm feeling inside as I've thought about helping them survive. I recently learned that birds don't need to be fed in the winter. Nature has equipped them for survival even in our near arctic winters. But if you do feed them they'll repay you with hours of enjoyable watching.

Cold Snake, Warm Pocket

Somewhere along the way to adulthood we learn about cold-blooded animals, those that cannot produce and conserve enough heat to stabilize their body temperature. Most of us get this as a piece of abstract knowledge. Here’s how I learned about it first hand.

Experiencing

It was a late September day. A clear blue sky formed a beautiful canopy over a chilly morning as I set out for French Creek to see what was happening. I elected to take the short cut across the grassy field next to the cement mixing plant even though I risked getting wet in the dewy grass. But this would be just one more time I wouldn’t mind getting my shoes wet until I got home and faced an irate mother.

As I entered the field I found the ankle-high wild grass, now reduced to autumnal brown, wasn’t wet at all. It was covered with white frost and it made a pleasant crackley crunchy sound as I stepped on it. I walked for a ways then turned back to see how far I’d come. The morning sun shining toward me at a low angle gave the whole field an interesting glow of brown frosted with white. And there were my footprints, each one a dark patch in the grass, irrefutable evidence that I had passed through and destroyed the pristine view that had existed just minutes before.

Continuing on my way, scanning the ground ahead, I saw a garter snake stretched out in the grass. I expected it to take off as I got closer but it did not move even a little bit. I was now beyond the reflexive “kill all snakes” attitude of my Froggy Pond days and was curious as to why this dead snake was here in the open. I walked over and gently pushed it with my toe. It didn’t move. I bent down and picked it up. It felt cold and it was very stiff. I figured it had frozen to death.

For some unknown reason I decided to take the snake with me, perhaps for close up examination later. I folded it up and put it in my pants pocket.

Before I reached the far side of the field, which was about a hundred yards, I felt movement in my pocket. The snake wasn’t dead as I had assumed. Though I was no longer into killing snakes, having a live one in my pocket was a little scary. I carefully reached in and brought out the snake. In human terms I would describe it as groggy, maybe hungover; moving, but very slowly.

So the snake had just been cold, not dead. I found a small bare patch of ground and put the snake down where the sun would shine directly on it. Then I squatted down and waited. It wasn’t very long before the snake, still moving very slowly, wiggled off to enjoy the rapidly warming day.

Knowing

Today I know that nature provides a wide array of survival mechanisms for both plants and animals that face cold-weather during part of the year. Some warm-blooded mammals eat heavily, put on fat, and hibernate for the winter. These sleeping mammals always maintain a body temperature high enough to keep their metabolic processes running.

Snakes cannot maintain a minimum body temperature in cold weather and this makes a world of difference in how they cope with northern winters. The snake’s equivalent of hibernation is a process called brumation.  In brumation the snake’s metabolic processes slow down as the temperature goes down. At the height of winter a snake’s metabolic rate may be close to zero. This means there is no digestive process going on: any food in a snake’s gut will not be digested but will decay over the winter, probably with fatal consequences. Hence unlike mammals that eat more and more to build up a supply of fat as the weather gets colder, snakes eat less and less as fall comes on. As the snake’s metabolism slows down it has a decreasing ability to move. Garter snakes find a place to hide during this vulnerable period of immobility; it can be an animal burrow, a cave, a sheltered space under an outbuilding or a hollow under some big rocks. Typically many garter snakes will find the same sheltering place in a process called denning, which may include a dozen, a hundred or even thousnads of individuals depending on the surrounding habitat. It is said that it is an amazing sight to see garter snakes emerging enmasse from a large den as they all regain their mobility at the same time. It’s something I hope to witness some day.

photo by EcoSnake on Flickr

Garter Snakes Emerging from a Den

My garter snake was probably in a temporary state of immobility because its temperature, and hence its metabolism, was lowered by the frost. I imagine the snake waking up in my pants pocket that morning was no less surprised than I was.

Bone Dog

Here's another reminder that the natural world isn't always pleasant to the adult mind but that kids left to pursue their natural curiosity aren't constrained to dealing with just the pleasantries. As an illustration I'm rolling out another memory of a situation from my childhood just as it happened. If you're finding this post really bothers you, please skip it.

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The Experiencing:

One day on my way home from checking out Froggy Pond I turned off into one of the grassy fields that was just slightly higher than the railroad tracks. I had no real reason for turning off except curiosity. But come to think of it, that was about as fine a reason as one could have for walking into a field of autumnal brown better-than-knee-high grasses full of whirring brown and yellow flying grasshoppers. At the top of the three-foot incline I surveyed the unexplored land. It was pretty flat. About twenty feet away a small wild cherry tree caught my attention. Not because it was there, but because it had an old piece of cotton clothesline hanging down from a point about three feet up the trunk. I figured some other kid must have discovered this field before me and had built something there, something that needed checking out.

I loped over to the tree and looked down to where the rope trailed away into the grass. There was a skeleton lying in the grass. I bent down to have a closer look. It was the skeleton of a dog: clean and white, which I now know means it was probably at least a few months old. The rope was fairly well deteriorated too, but I could still see the loop that had at one time been around the dogs neck.

In a matter of seconds I was overwhelmed by the questions running through my mind and some very bad feelings that went with them. How did this dog get here? How long ago? Did somebody tie it to this tree and leave it to die? I couldn't image anyone doing that. Yet the rope was definitely tied around the tree. It couldn't have been accidentally snagged behind a running dog, which I wanted to believe in preference to thinking of this as a deliberate act. Could somebody have tied the dog here, gone away for a while, and then forgot about it? No matter how I tried I couldn't find a reasonable explanation. My mind was unwillingly captivated by a picture of this dog patiently standing and uselessly barking and barking for someone to come.

The mind looks for escape hatches in the midst of true horror. In the midst of my bewilderment I found an escape of last resort. I recalled a black lab my maternal grandfather used to have. It was at a time when I was so small I didn't have more than a general memory of it. As I got old enough to understand things I asked my mother why my grandfather didn't have the dog anymore. She told me he had bought it for hunting and when the dog turned out to be useless for hunting he took it out and shot it. At the time that haunted me as a very sad death of a good dog that could have been fun to have around for a long time.

But now as I stood looking down at bone dog this same recollection gave me the escape I sought from my confused frustration. Somebody had tied this dog to the tree and shot it. Perhaps it was sickly, dying anyway, and the owner didn't know what else to do. In any case it died quickly. That must have been what happened. That was bad to think about, but not as bad as picturing a slow lingering death.

Now I wanted to know more about bone dog so I squatted down in the grass to examine the remains. From the size, the shape of the skull and the remnants of hair still visible in the grass I knew bone dog had been a collie. I looked for any evidence that bone dog had been shot, but I didn't see any obvious bullet damage in the skull. Then I figured that bone dog could have been killed with a shotgun blast which might not leave visible damage in the skeleton. After all when my father brought home rabbits and pheasants from his hunting trips they had only a few tiny pellets in them.

I had never dealt with a skeleton before so I spent time just looking at how bone dog had been put together: backbone, ribs, leg bones all were just about where they should be. In fact looking back now I'm surprised that the skeleton was intact. Apparently no predators or scavengers had pulled bone dog apart.

My final act was to pick up the skull and look at bone dog face-to-face. I wiggled a canine tooth and it came out easily. Then I could see how it had been set into the jawbone. Finally I laid the skull and tooth back where I had found them and took my leave of bone dog. For some reason I have never recounted this episode to anyone until today, even though it has popped up to the level of consciousness at various times in my life.

The Knowing.

Probably the most powerful lesson from my encounter with bone dog was that human nature could be unfeeling. The idea of leaving a dog to die was untenable. But even if bone dog had been shot in some merciful way he/she at the very least deserved a respectful burial.

At the material level I learned something about how animal skeletons are put together. At the time it was just interesting information to a curious, exploring kid. Sixty years later I see that it was an early indication of my lifelong interest in biology. And had I been taught to stay away from such things as bone dog I would have missed out on an important learning experience along the path to my later professional life.
And I still say “I’m sorry for whatever happened to you bone dog and sorry that I never knew your name. But I thank you for the lessons.”

Apples, Wasps, and Nascent Love

You may recall that early on in this blog I stated that human nature is certainly a part of the natural world though we seldom think of it that way. Here's an example of what I meant by that comment. First the "Knowing" part.

Nature seems to have decreed that boys and girls grow up seeing the world through different filters and reacting to it in different ways. That's not surprising since biologically the genders have significant differences as well as similarities. In fact in many species the male and female live out their lives quite separately, only getting together to mate. The need to reproduce in humans typically brings couples together for mating and then an extended time of child rearing. So the little boys who don't like little girls and the little girls who stay aloof from little boys have to merge their worlds at some point so they can live together and ensure the next generation. Nature takes care of this melding very nicely in our prepubescent years. Our first moves toward the opposite gender are asexual and arise from some shared activity.

And now the "Experiencing" part.

With me it happened in the summer between fourth and fifth grade when a new family moved into one of the large old brick houses up the street. Since we shared our town with a large army hospital the arrival and departure of families was a common happening. The Bishop family had two initial attractions that drew me right in: they weretwo beautiful boxers that my dog-loving side couldn't resist. Getting acquainted with the dogs meant getting acquainted with the two sisters who were always out in the yard at the same time. Mediated by a love of dogs my relationship with Sandra Bishop and her younger sister soon developed into a genuine playworld friendship.

I can't recall what all we did through those days of late summer. I just recall that Sandra was an outdoor type girl who wasn't about make-believe tea parties in the living room. And as the summer went on I realized that she was very pretty. Now the Bishops had two hugh old apple trees out beyond the kitchen. No one tended them, yet they managed to put out a good crop of sweet gnarly apples. Now one of my greatest talents as a boy was tree climbing. I had proudly conquered just about every decent sized tree for a half mile around. The branches of big apple trees are arrayed for easy climbing. The Bishop's apple tree was not a challenge to me at all so I couldn't resist the temptation to get an apple right from the tree. But how surprising and exhilerating it was the first time I went up it to find Sandra climbing right beside me. This was the first of numerous expeditions. As I demonstrated my lack of fear, and she matched it, we soon got into the habit of going as far out on a limb as we dared, picking an apple, then chomping away in our shadey bower, talking about who knows what.

photo by donsutherland on Flickr

Apples, A Member of the Rose Family

Now I was still a boy and into the type of teasing that little boys dish out to little girls in lieu of knowing how else to show they are beginning to care. In our case it came when we noticed dozens of unusual large wasps hovering just over the grass every warm sunny day. These were not the common paper wasps that built nests under our eaves. These wasps were larger and more colorful.

Periodically one of these wasps would descend into the lawn where it would move awkwardly through its grassy thicket. We would bend down close to see what it was doing. Then I got a great idea, one of those challenges that only a male brain would contrive. With a quick motion I grasped a wasp with thumb and forefinger on each side of the abdomen, much like holding a pencil. I held it up so we could examine it closely. We could see the little stinger going in and out vainly trying to find a target. Then the next idea struck. I pointed the stinger toward Sandra and told her she'd better run. She did, in that knowing way that said she understood the game. If there had been real fear she would have run into the house instead of running circles around the lawn pleading with me to stop. Later I showed her how to safely catch a wasp, and to my delight she was a perfect student. Now she had a weapon as good as mine and the running in circles ceased in favor of a logical truce between friends.

Schooldays came and then winter. Sandra was in a different classroom, there were no more apples to be picked, and I walked to school and she apparently didn't, so our closeness faded into a lull to match the season. Then came the day that a neighbor announced that Sandra's father had been transferred again and that they were gone in that mysterious way of military families. There were no goodbyes, only a crushing disbelief that the friendship I had automatically imagined stretching into my future was not to be. Much later there were memories. To this day, as much as I have looked, I have never again seen wasps like those of my apple tree summer. Nor have I ever tried to catch wasps that way again, although I know I could. My sole connection with those sweet apple summer days is that I have a wonderful loving daughter named Sandra, just a bit tomboyish, a lover of dogs and animals in general, and determined to be outdoors whenever she can.

Froggy Pond Part 3

I am flagging my final memory of Froggy Pond with a reminder that nature is not always pretty, nice, neat or cute. It is what it is - raw biology, relentless geological change, and elements of climate and weather that pay no heed to our human frailties. Children allowed to explore the realm of biology uninhibited by adult concepts of “scarey“ or “not nice“, are interested in just about everything. Gooey, stinky, mushed, dead, bloody, and a host of other “not nice” adult signal words have no place in the mind of an intrepid young explorer. Learning by exploration will concretely define these words in due time. It is with this in mind that I introduce the following section by warning those who have never experienced more than the pleasant intersection of nature with human nature that they may find it disturbing.

 Froggy Pond was a mecca for garter snakes. I'm sure they came there for the fresh water and a feast of tadpoles. One side of the little hole we called Froggy Pond was composed of intertwined roots of overhanging shrubs. Every few minutes a garter snake, sometimes two, would come up out of the roots at the edge of the little spring hole and freeze for a few moments in a shape something like a question mark. In an instant they would disappear back down into the tangle of roots.

CaptPiper photo on Flickr

Eastern Garter Snake

Like everyone else in our world Bruce and I knew that snakes were bad critters and that the only good snake was a dead snake. Top that off with the boyish challenge of "getting" one of these fast moving creatures and you have the essence of this story. We were not about to try catching a live snake by hand so we scrounged around for ammunition. Garter snakes were pelted with sticks, stones, and chunks of black railroad cinder. We temporarily distracted them, so that we had to wait longer between their reappearances, but for the most part they just ignored us and went about their business as usual. Finally Bruce, always the more adventurous and daring of our duo, got a decent size stick, crept round behind the spring hole and dealt a mortal blow to the next snake that popped up. Bruce collected the snake and brought it over by the tracks. We solemnly examined it from end to end, noting the stripes, the little eyes, and the mouth. Had we though to open the mouth and look at the almost invisible row of very tiny pin-like teeth we would have realized this snake couldn’t do any harm. But that was a lesson for another day. At the moment we were filled with the idea that we had done a good thing, and we were trying to convince ourselves that we really had accomplished it. I proudly held the dead snake by the tail as we walked home through the hot summer afternoon. Bruce dropped off at his house and I continued on alone. A block from home I passed the house of my other best friend Lew. His visiting aunt was sweeping off the little portico by the side door. “You should see what I have” I called out to her. I‘m sure there must have been a tone of pride in my voice. “What is it?” she asked as she put down the broom and descended three steps. I held the snake up as she approached. “Ewwww! A snake!” So exclaiming, she bypassed the steps, ran up the grassy bank, entered the house and slammed the door. I was completely baffled by her reaction. After all the snake was dead.

When I got home I showed my mother the snake. She didn’t like snakes but at least she had encountered them in her life time and wasn’t afraid of a dead one. She simply told me I’d have to bury it. I folded the snake and for some unknown reason wrapped it in cloth. Then I dug a hole six inches deep in the place where we dumped the coal ashes from our furnace. It was easy digging. After dropping in the snake and refilling the hole I placed a brick as a marker. I carried on my normal life with my friends for about two weeks. Then one day, out of the blue as they say, I wanted to know what was going on with the snake. I got my mother’s trowel, removed the brick, and began the exhumation. I carefully unrolled the cloth with no particular expectation as to what I would find. The snake had changed. It was green. I rolled it back up in the cloth reburied it and never dug it up again. Now I had some idea of what happens to dead things when they are buried. All knowledge can be rated on two scales: interest and importance. The knowledge I gained from this venture was certainly interesting to me but I’m not sure how it rates in importance. I’ve never had a specific need for it, yet in the long run it became part of my understanding of the natural processes of life, death, and recycling in nature.