While Sitting Very Still

There are advantages to working so hard I'm temporarily too tired to move. 

A few days ago I was weeding the blueberry patch, getting it ready for more planting, but reached my limit and just sat for about 10 minutes. Part of that was looking at the job done and job yet to be done, planning methods, and prioritizing. Some of it was just taking in the morning. 

Movement caught my attention. It was on the ground, not in the cherry trees. The birds are too smart and wary. If only they knew how dangerous I wasn't at that moment. Into full view popped a little chipmunk. While I marveled at how healthy it looked - why not, in our yard? - and what a lovely rich brown its back was, it approached, stopped, moved, stopped, looked up overhead, stopped, washed its paws, and dashed under the cherry trees, lost to view in the tall weeds.  I've seen one off and on in our yard since we moved in. We've had them in our attic, seen a pair cavorting in the back woodpile, watched them running and leaping through the endless canopy across the back end of the yard, from hazelnuts to oak to blue spruce to oak to.... Well, you get the idea. We don't get squirrels, one of Paul's regrets when we first moved in, but I find these much  more charming. They certainly are well fed here.

On another morning, while the back concrete steps were still out of the sun, I just sat, musing. It started as identifying burdock plants around the yard starting to form seeds, pushing that to a higher priority on the to-do list, then noting the grape arbor, bare two weeks ago, is now densely leafed out, finally dropping my gaze to the pot of Little Grapette daylilies budding near my feet. The largest two buds are starting to purple, so blooms are anticipated soon. The other new ones, Nosferatu, haven't begun to shoot up flower stalks so I wonder if they will at all this year now after being cut apart and planted in their new homes.

Then the song caught my attention.

I realized I'd been hearing it for a while. Seeking its origin, I spied a small brown bird on a branch tip back in the central yard. I watched it flit around the yard, figuring it might be trying to attract a mate, even late as it is in the breeding season. It would call several times, relocate, repeat, relocate, repeat. It once came within about 12 feet but that was it's briefest perch. One time it landed on a pole holding one of the bird house boxes we put out over by what used to be the raspberry patch. They were last year's replacements for rotting birdhouses put up nearly 30 years ago. Over the life of the old boxes they housed tree swallows, bluebirds, and wrens. There might have been others. With three boxes up, only one each year was occupied. The birds which nested made short work of plugging the openings in the other nearby boxes to prevent competing families from setting up house. Each fall, or at least by the next spring, we needed to open them and pull out the twigs. 

Last month I had noticed one of the new houses, located under a defunct platform bird feeder by the grape arbor, had a bird visit it briefly, poking a twig inside. The hole was pretty well blocked. But where was the family nesting instead? This day the singing bird was on top of this house as one of its calling spots.  Just another convenient stop, I supposed. About that time it got an answer, fainter, shorter, not responding to all the calls, but it made me peg the first bird as a him, and the replies as belonging to a her. The whole "concert" lasted perhaps two minutes, when suddenly the second bird perched on top of the plugged house. It then dropped down to the plugged opening, moved up under the overhanging roof, and disappeared. 

There was a small gap there, perhaps 1/2" high, the width of the house, designed to let hot air out. It never occurred to me that it would also let bird parents slip in and out of a house to raise their babies where nobody and nothing could expect the family to be, much less be likely to follow. In a brief moment the female popped out again and flew off. I really did restrain myself from going over and seeing if I could open it up and see the nest. I did buy those houses last year for a reason. I can now sit on the steps and watch what's going on over there though. More or less.

I'm thinking wrens. I'll have to go google their song, see if it matches.  (Note: I'm back from checking. With the series of chirps ending in a loud trill, I'm saying it is.)

We used to have them a lot. I moved a small house designed for them into the front yard's sugar maple many years ago, and it got a few years of their attention. Then it just sat, until a couple years ago it just fell in pieces to the ground. But long before the fall there was another chapter to its history. That was so long ago I hadn't yet switched to digital photography, but I got a 35mm photo of a green tree frog who'd taken over the door of the house to look out over the world from. A couple days later the frog disappeared as well. I expect last year's collection of tree frogs collecting each evening on our lit picture window, awaiting dinners of the bugs likewise attracted, include its descendants.