Angry Birds

I thought her stupid birds were gone…what? 

Yes, our robins have been gone for a couple of weeks now, but other avian  neighbors remain on the other side of the house – mockingbirds who have nested in a vine-like plant on my carport.   (Hyacinth? Maybe. I don’t know.)

I knew they were there, but it’s only been in the past couple of days that I’ve taken time to actually watch the action.  The babies are pretty big now – you can see them peaking out at times.  They’re very loud when they’re being fed. I suspect they’re about ready to fly.

I ventured up on a ladder today to snap a portrait.

Angry Bird

The photography session wasn’t as leisurely as the others, as you might imagine.  Mockingbirds are mean and aggressive suckers – the geese of the songbird world. A couple of weeks ago, I watched this mockingbird pair chase a squirrel who’d ventured too close to the nest across through trees across three yards.

Nothing happened to me today, but to be sure, the minute one of the parents was aware that I was near the nest, it perched on the powerline above my head, squawking.  I didn’t give it time to do more. I can respect that protective parenting.  I do.

Helicopter Parent

Mary in May

Two notes:

Mary and the Christian Life is available as a free-ebook. You can find more information about that book, and download links, here. 

Praying the Rosary: With the Joyful, Luminous, Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries was published in 2005. More information about it is here. 

Monday

You did not choose me: no, I chose you; and I commissioned you to go out and to bear fruit, fruit that will last…

 -Gospel, 5/14, St. Matthias, Apostle.

5/14, about 9 am. Railroad Park, Birmingham

7 Quick Takes: Put a Bird On It Edition

As you know, we recently hosted a Robin family on the ledge of a window of my room. They’ve been gone a couple of weeks now, but we still think and talk about them.  That first day after they all left was very quiet and just a bit sad.  They were separated from us by many degrees of species-dom and by a window, but there watching them was more like looking in a mirror than through glass.

— 1 —

Surprising, beautiful new life. 

The eggs weren’t laid on Easter, but it was on Easter that our neighbor pointed out, “We think you have a bird’s nest on your window!” – and so, it was the day on which we discovered these gorgeous, perfect eggs – Easter eggs.

— 2 —

Helpless and dependent.

And ugly.

Sorry. They were.  Not a judgment!

But, my goodness. That yellowish skin, rubberband necks and pretty scary eyes that dominated their little heads?

 

Songbird babies are altricial  – that is, they are hatched completely helpless, in contrast to precocial (rooted in a word meaning “precocious”) birds who are hatched more matured and able to walk and obtain their own food, once it’s shown to them.

 See! You learned something!

Speaking of which…

— 3 —

4 days after the first two hatched.

Why?

As you can imagine, this was an amazing learning experience.  We watched, we observed, we wondered, we asked, and we learned.  The best life science class ever.

Why do the babies stay in the nest? How do they know? How do their feathers grow? When will they open their eyes? What do they eat? Will another animal come eat them? 

— 4 —

5 days old

Change

Five days after the first two hatched, the change is amazing to see.  They’ve not just grown bigger, but are transforming.  What most fascinated me were the development of the wings – compare these with the little stubs they begin with – and the feathers.  It all happened so quickly, you can see why they must eat all the time..it almost looks painful.  It put in mind of horror movies where someone suffers strange attributes popping out all over his body.

7 days old

— 5 —

Feed me.

This photo says it all – all about parenting, don’t you think? Cross-species, at any age?

The parents were just as interesting to watch as the babies.  Both mother and father brought food, which was primarily worms and berries.  Joseph said he saw a bee being fed to them once.  If they were coming with food and saw one of us at the window, they wouldn’t land, but rather fly quickly away to a nearby branch.  They didn’t get too upset (in contrast to the mockingbirds at the front of the house, who regularly and violently chase after squirrels who venture too close to what I presume is a nest somewhere in a cluster of vines), but simply sat on that branch, waiting and chirping.  It seemed to me as if the adults definitely communicated vocally with each other when this happened, as if one was asking, “All clear?” and the other responding, “Not yet!”

(In order to get close-ups while they were feeding, what I did was to just set up a stepladder in front of the window. That way there was a standing structure there all the time which they could get accustomed to seeing as just part of the landscape.  If I saw that it was feeding time, I’d just stand on the ladder with my camera pointed down, and wait, never for very long.)

One of my readers reflected that this might be what we look like to God – always hungry, needy, begging.

— 6 —

12 days old

Trust your instincts

One of the most astonishing aspects of observing natural life, to be sure.  Such a mystery, this thing called instinct.

The instinct that tells them to crane their skinny elastic necks and open those beaks when they feel a jolt on the edge of the nest.  That tells them to stay put in that same nest, even as they crowd each other, must lie atop of each other and are slowly gaining the ability to move on their own. Still – they stay put.  All day, every day, they sit in the nest, little growing balls of fluff, waiting. As their eyes opened and they grew more aware, they began to watch for the parents, and follow their movements in the trees and on the ground.

But still, they remained. They knew it was not yet time to go.

(Except for the one that I’m thinking got blown out of the nest one blustery night a couple of days before this picture was taken…)

— 7 —

13 days after hatching, ready to fly away.

You’re ready. Go.

But then one day, like clockwork – or instinct – it is time to go.

I had worried about the baby birds before this day, because even though they waited with great patience most of the time, I could see their restlessness and watch them stretch and flap their wings.  I could see an accident happening, and that they weren’t quite ready to make it.

But then this day came – and they were.  As I wrote at the time, it took about 45 minutes.  One ventured to the edge of the nest, teetered a bit, then tumbled/flew to the ground.  Then the next, and finally, only this sibling was left. He remained in the nest alone for about ten minutes. He chirped, sat in the nest, popped up to the edge, then back down, then finally up – and down.

I could see them all for much of the rest of the day in the back yard, following one of their parents around, pecking at the ground.  I try to avoid anthropomorphizing the whole thing, but I swear, down there, those little ones really did seem…excited.

As if this is what they had been waiting for, as if this freedom to go, to be, to…fly – was what all the preparation, the resting, the growing, the endless eating, the watching and waiting had been all about.

Which, of course, it was.

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

Or, this week, Betty Beguiles.

Participation

**Read the caveat at the end, first. Please.*

I ran across the following in my parents’ stash. Two books. Music books.

(If you click on the image, it will provide a larger, clearer, version.)

They belonged to Eva Langlois Desjardins, my great-aunt, who raised my mother.  She and her husband, Louis Desjardins, a dentist, had no children of their own, but took in my mother, her brother, and their mother, Marie Langlois Bergeron, when my mother’s father, Joseph, died in a car accident when my mother was six years old. Not too long after that my grandmother had some sort of breakdown, and moved to a rest home in Lewiston, where she lived for the next forty years or so.  So my mother always thought of Eva and Louis in parental terms. Anyway.

The lived in a small town in southern Maine.

Eva was one of the parish organists.  Louis played the violin and sang baritone.

Eva, like all of that generation preceding my mother, was born in Quebec of a middle class family.  She was educated through high school – a convent school, I believe. Not boarding, but run by a religious order of some sort.  So, that’s what she had, along with music lessons, I presume: a high school education.

She was the organist, as I said, in the parish in that small town.  A Francophone parish, where my mother attended the parish school.  The parish which we attended, decades later,  on Sundays during our annual month-long visits.

Of course by the time I got there, and was sentient – the late 60′s and 70′s – things had changed.

I actually remember those Masses pretty vividly.  They made a big impact on me, and the impact was all about the music. I’ve never forgotten that music accompanying those Masses in the mid-70′s.

A tape recording of Glory and Praise piped through the loudspeakers.

And not a soul singing along.

I’ve talked to a lot of people who lived through and had awareness of the changes brought by the Council.  Some were heartbroken – I remember in particular one man who had converted right before Vatican II and expressed feeling as if he had been lied to and betrayed when the changes hit.  Others were elated and welcomed the changes that came.  Another older friend has expressed to me his experience of finding the religious experiences of his pre-Vatican II childhood and young adulthood dry and lifeless, and the vernacular liturgy and other changes bringing a good kind of transformation – a deep connection to Christ and the Church, which he had not felt before.

As I say below, this post isn’t about rehashing all of that.

It’s just about these artifacts and memories. About a woman with a high school education and her well-worn and marked-up book of chant technique in Latin and French. It’s about a bit of an exercise in imaginative memory, as I wonder what Eva and Louis thought about  as they sat there in the pews of their parish , having been told that times were changing now and their services were no longer needed,  the strains of a tinny recording of Lord of Glory wafting through a silent church.

---

I’ve mentioned before that one of the reasons I don’t blog on heavy, contentious issues anymore is because I don’t have a sane, adult supportive companion at home who would help regroup and recalibrate after the crazy intensity of online discussions.  But secondly, there comes a point at which you do tire of participating in the discussions, because they tend to be so predictable.  Nothing wrong with predictability, really – it just points to the persistence of the issues – but it does get wearisome.  Especially if a new reader pops in and is all “Hey! I noticed that you don’t mention THIS! Why don’t you see THIS POINT! “….which happens to be a point you and readers made and hashed over in your previous 87 blog posts on the subject over almost twelve years of online life.  

So it is with this subject – the Second Vatican Council.  You get my point.

Book updates

A few updates on news and views related to books:

Wish You Were Here:

• A lovely, heartfelt blog post from Jen Ambrose
• Mary DeTurris Poust reviews it in Catholic New York.
• The May issue of Catholic Digest has an excerpt. 
• My college friend, who is also a librarian, wrote about it here. 
• Sarah Reinhard, blogger and author, most recently of Catholic Family Fun has posted a  review on Amazon. 
• I continue to hear from readers who have experienced loss and found the book to resonate with their own experiences and to be helpful.  I am always so glad to hear this. It’s why I wrote it.
• As far as I can tell, not too many brick and mortar bookstores are carrying it, unfortunately.  I am not sure why, but I’m pretty sanguine about it.  Whoever needs to read it, will find it.  I was cheered, though – I admit – to hear from someone who saw it on a table in a bookstore in FCO – Rome’s primary airport – and another friend who saw it in the Pauline Media bookstore near St. Peter’s Square.  So it’s somewhere!

Friendship With Jesus

Artist and illustrator Ann Englehart just returned from two weeks in Italy – having a fabulous time and, in the process, doing a bit of visual research for two more children’s book ideas we are kicking around.  While there, she had two media encounters, with Vatican Radio and Rome Reports..

• …which I linked in this previous post
• Last weekend, Zenit posted an interview with Ann, as well. 

Welcome!

(Contrast tweaking of scanned image helped along by PicMonkey..since Picnik has been swallowed by the Google Borg.)