Tag: hummingbirds

Hummmmmmmm …

jono55

At least one of our hummingbird families has moved on to new opportunities. But there are still four birds visiting the feeders regularly. I will miss them when they all leave, as I do each year. I have never tired of watching the way they hover and dart, their endless squabbling with one another, and the swooping zoom-bys as they fly in for a visit. Tiny, tiny creatures. Beautiful.

An addition has been made to our outdoor neighborhood zoo. Yesterday morning, in broad daylight, a red fox trotted across our driveway and up the street. Really a handsome animal who didn’t seem too concerned about its exposure. As opposed to the case of coyotes, owls, large hawks, and eagles, our local pets aren’t much threatened by the foxes.

Red foxes only average about 15 pounds under all that fur and this is only a hair bigger than a household cat or one of those whateverdoodle dogs. I may not be lucky enough to see the fox again, but I like the feeling of knowing it’s out there.

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We’ve finally had a little rain here in the valley, something September promises and usually delivers. By the end of the month snow should appear on the tops of the San Juan mountains to the south of us. Last Saturday I had the pleasure of talking with a new neighbor, a woman who had lived for forty years in Gunnison CO, which is just an hour east of Montrose. She moved here because of grandchildren, who are a common attractant, particularly for senior women.

When Robin and I were scouting locations prior to moving here, Gunnison was one of the towns we looked at. Our impressions were initially positive, although it is a smaller village than this one, until someone told us that it is the coldest spot in Colorado in mid-winter.

Hearing that, we cancelled any plans for a Gunnison move. Coldest spot … no, thank you, not after freezing our patooties off in the Midwest all of our lives. The moderate climate here in Paradise looked much better to us eleven years ago and we haven’t been disappointed.

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Lightning flashing, wind gusting, thunder rolling – all of these came down on us Wednesday night after dark. Some little rain, but mostly that sound and light show.

On one of my trips into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of northern Minnesota, my companion and I had camped on a small island. We hadn’t traveled very far from the put-in, which was only a few miles and a single portage away, but no matter. Covering large distances was never our goal. We were not voyageurs, after all.

But a storm rolled in after dark that was to continue all night and into the next day, lasting nearly twelve hours. Sooo much lightning … sooo much rain … sooo much wind. All night the elements battered our small tent. The lightning was spectacular and nearly continuous. Sleep was impossible with all the noise, and we played every mind game we could think of lying there in the dark. When our bladders had expanded to our breastbones we were forced to leave the shelter and stand in the torrential rain while we felt like electrical targets all the while.

When the storm was over, all of our gear was wet and we were wetter. We decided to return to the world and get a cabin for the next night to allow our stuff to dry out (did I not mention that we were not voyageurs?). At that point we learned that eleven inches of rain had fallen during the downpour. Which had proven several inches too many for our poor tent, which simply hadn’t been up to the task of keeping the water on the outside.

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Lightning Crashes, by LIVE

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J.J. Cale emigrated from Earth in 2013 and is not expected to return any time soon. This is a guy who never hit a bad note, never recorded a song sloppily. Each tune had a beginning and an end, with tight musicianship in between.

On the album Okie he covered this old gospel song from 1925.

Precious Memories, by J.J. Cale

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There was another political assassination in our beleaguered country this past week, and we are still in the phase where small-hearted people are trying to use the man’s death to score points for their personal agendas. This will go on for another week or two, and then we will move on to the next outrage.

We have a rather a toxic mess of pottage stewing in the US right now, with what passes for leadership pouring gasoline on any fire they can find. Forget about being rational, forget about introspection. Finger-pointing and counter-finger-pointing are the orders of the day.

I am sick of it. The whole episode, from the shooting to the present nauseating debacle of mutual blaming, reveals humans at their worst. Only one thing is certain. When a country has nearly two guns per adult circulating among its civilians, we will continue to see these deaths. I am an old dude who had his first chance to vote in a national election and was lucky enough to be able to choose John F. Kennedy. Three years later an unstable citizen with a rifle took Kennedy’s life. That left a scar on my young psyche that has never had the chance to completely heal, because there has never been a shortage of fresh killings to deal with.

Looking for sanity in a society that so often seems insane is my first order of business. The path couldn’t be clearer. Non-violence is the only road worth following, the only way that offers the opportunity for meaningful change. We are not a highest-order species, but we are all that we’ve got to work with right now. Robin and I are contributing our time and treasure to political groups that are clear in their dedication to non-violence as a first principle. Anything else is madness.

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First snow, San Juan mountains, September 13, 2025. Now where did I put that long underwear, anyway?

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Beaten

jono55

Those among you who are wholesome adults and children and have no interest in the sordid business that rock and roll has occasionally been can just skip this section. I am dedicating it to a tune that is either one of the most or least offensive songs in the entire genre, and that is the Kingsmen’s rendition of Louie, Louie. It was prompted by a recent article in the New Yorker entitled: Is This The Dirtiest Song of the Sixties?

Just to start things off, here is the original, by Richard Berry

Louie, Louie, by Richard Berry

And here is the version that actually had the FBI up nights trying to decipher the lyrics.

Louie, Louie, by the Kingsmen

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of cover versions out there, making Louie, Louie one of the more durable arrows in the rock quiver. Sooooo … what’s your verdict? Read the article. It’s amusing but you won’t learn a thing that helps to clarify the issue.

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Here is a perfect point/counterpoint. Our president and his gang of thugs are rounding up latinos and latinas as fast as they can and sending them illegally to prison camps where they live under deplorable conditions. But what’s this? A group from Mexico (the land of rapists and drug lords according to Cluck), came northwards across the border to help Texas in rescue and recovery operations immediately after the Guadalupe River catastrophe.

Cluck and his newly created League of Incompetent Bastards would have trouble understanding something like this. It is the sort of unselfish and courageous thing that people do for other people when disaster strikes. Borders, languages, and politics are set aside as humans respond to tragedies. There are days when I despair of our species for many reasons, but stories like this … maybe we will make it after all.

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In an idle moment I spent some time searching for a photo of my old elementary school online and was at long last successful. I did find that Warrington Elementary ceased to be a school in 1966, and was reborn as an apartment building.

Our family home at the time I attended Warrington was on Second Avenue south and everybody on that street was white. Two blocks away, on Fourth Street, that color pattern was reversed. We all went to Warrington, however, and I have no recollection at all of any black/white tensions in the school, no sorting out according to color on the playground. I only had one playground fight in all those years and that was with the biggest girl in the fifth grade who trounced me, on the spot indicated by the arrow. I do not recall what my offense was, but her remedy was a doozy.

I do recall an African-American boy who was the best singer in the entire school, and his name was Plouis Moore. At an assembly one day he sang Danny Boy in the finest Irish tenor voice imaginable. Even a clot like myself could recognize his talent. Because of that one day, that one song, his is the only name that I remember from all those years in that school.

Except for Marjorie Heath, of course, my unspoken and thus unrequited love of the fourth and fifth grade. She never knew it but I would have been her slave and would have done anything she asked.

I have only a few memories of elementary school, but one that is still vivid involves adhesives. In many of the projects that we were assigned in class there was quite a bit of gluing of one piece of paper to another. This was done with the aid of a giant jar of white library paste. By the time we had finished any of those projects, I had been licking that paste from my fingers for at least an hour, just to keep them usable.

Over the years I developed a strange liking for the stuff. Fortunately for my health, in the junior high years the paste pot was no longer on the scene. Lord knows whether I would have made it out of seventh grade if that weren’t true, but instead might have been found under my desk, white paste smeared around my mouth and on my hands, moribund.

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Came across this photo of a gravestone in Goldfield, Nevada. Whew! Narrow escape for me.

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We are presently beset by hummingbirds, who are here in such numbers that they empty the feeders in 36 hours. At times there are up to six birds at the two stations. If one is to be beset by anything this is a good kind

I have identified two species, the Rufous (at left) and the Black-chinned. All day long they drink and squabble among themselves, and their day begins well before sunup.

It would appear that I need to shop for more feeders. Just having the two isn’t handling the traffic.

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Bullet the Blue Sky (Jacknife Lee Remix), by U2

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The Birds

jono55

The hummingbirds are back at the feeders! I’ve been putting fresh sugar/water out there for the past three weeks or so, watching every day, and Sunday afternoon the first black-chinned traveler showed up.

You can clearly see a purple bib in this pic (not mine) below the black chin.

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The black-chinned hummingbird (Archilochus alexandri) has a pretty distinct migration pattern:

Spring Migration (northward): They leave their wintering grounds in western Mexico (especially along the Pacific coast and parts of central Mexico) around February to March. They move north through the southwestern U.S. and reach their breeding grounds by late March to early May.

Breeding Range (summer): They breed mainly in the western United States — places like Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, California, and into southern British Columbia.

Fall Migration (southward): By late August through September, they start moving south again toward Mexico for the winter.

Wintering Grounds: Mostly western and central Mexico, but some may overwinter in southern Texas along the Gulf Coast.

AI generated text in response to the query: Describe the migration pattern of the black-throated hummingbird.

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Transcendental Blues, by Steve Earle

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It was well known that director Alfred Hitchcock had a thing about casting blonde women as heroines in his films. The quintet at left is (clockwise) June Howard-Tripp, Janet Leigh, Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren, and Eva Marie Saint. There were others.

As far as Hitchcock was concerned, blonde was all there was to say about female beauty.

This obsession led him to cast Hedren in The Birds. Now I’ve seen this movie a couple of times, and although I have absolutely no credentials as a critic, It appears to me that Ms. Hedren could not act her way out of a paper bag, whatever other sterling qualities she might have had.

The Birds, for younger readers, was a film where the ornithologic fauna of a small seaside town turned on the humans, pecking them in all sorts of horrible ways (the eyes … why did they go for the eyes?). While being pursued by murderous titmice wouldn’t be too scary, when the bird in question is the size of a big seagull or raven, the grim possibilities were more obvious.

Here Hedren is shown expressing abject terror, which is almost the same look as she had in the photo above where she was smoking a cigarette in a diner. Although there is an errant lock of hair in the attack photo she reveals not a wrinkle or a squint in either one.

But back in 1963 when the movie came out, one could easily overlook her limitations and allow oneself to actually ponder what it would be like if terror came fluttering from the skies to seek you out. Yes, even hummingbirds. Those little beaks are ever so pointy.

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Who You Are, by Pearl Jam

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We have a family of garter snakes that lives under the concrete platform outside our front door. Even though I know that they’re there, occasionally I am still startled when a nearly three-foot long member of the family comes undulating by me a few inches below my feet. Neighbors have told me that I could just fill the small hole that is the entrance to their burrow and it would be goodbye snakes.

Problem is that there is no way for me to know if any members of that family are at home should I decide to mix up a little concrete and pour it in. And trapping any of them in there would be completely unacceptable.

If there is a creature in this universe that offers less harm to me than the garter snake I don’t know what it would be.

It’s quite the other way around, actually. The small patch of grass that is our front lawn is one place that the snakes hunt for food. Unfortunately I learned this by accidentally killing one with the lawn mower, as it was invisible in the grass in front of me. Now when I mow the area I move as slowly as the machine will go, watching carefully for blades of grass that start waving suspiciously.

At one point in my kid-ship our family lived on an acre of land a couple of miles out of town. Next to our home was a grass-covered vacant lot. Our dog at the time was named Sandy. He was a very goodhearted dog of uncertain parentage that my father had taken in. Sandy loved to wander in that tall grass next door, and every once in a while would come up with a garter snake in his mouth that he would carefully bring unharmed to our lawn, where he released it. Catch and release, like a trout fisherman.

One day as I was up to no good at all reading Mad magazines, I heard my mother scream from somewhere outside the house. The horror registered in that outcry brought the entire family to the scene, where we found Mom with a full laundry basket in her hands, standing under the clotheslines, and surrounded by at least fifteen snakes that we could count. Sandy had been busy.

Bravely I waded in to her rescue, clearing away all reptiles from her path back to safety. I don’t remember her ever thanking me for that good deed, perhaps she took umbrage because I was laughing so hard.

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People have been trying to write rock’s obituary ever since its birth. Already in 1957 the group Danny and the Juniors felt that they had to offer up the defensive tune Rock And Roll Is Here To Stay. Gaslighting critics clamp themselves like barnacles on to the shiny next thing and off they go, leaving the supposed corpse of the genre behind. And yet here we are, new bands continuously arising. Some we become aware of, others just as worthy, perhaps, never get out of the bar scene. But rock obviously means something to its audience. It is music that resonates.

Within that genre there are jam bands. Goose is the latest to come to my attention, and when I played that first cut on Apple Music there was an instant connection made. I looked through their albums and Perfecto! They have an album called “Live At The Capitol Theater,” which contains 53 songs. Who would have the nerve to do such a thing but a jam band? And a concert film on YouTube that is three hours long? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQSavJ-sULs . What can I say?

Give It Time, by Goose

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A day brightener … sorta …

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Be Cool, Fool

jono55

Well, it’s all over now. Might as well start shopping for a good Oval Office chair for Kamala Harris, because she’ll be needing it in January. How can I be so confident? Because Taylor Swift has spoken.

We’ve never before thought of her as a Queen-maker, but here we are. The speakers of my television set had barely stopped reverberating from the Harris/Cluck debate when Swift posted her endorsement of Harris on Instagram. Now surely it will be only days before the Cluck campaign implodes altogether, and we can be rid of His Imperial Orangeness for a while.

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Take Five, by Dave Brubeck

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Our skies are not showing their own particular signs of Fall. The hummingbirds are still fussing at one another at our feeders and there have been no big overflights by Canada geese or the sandhill cranes. Quiet up there so far.

We’ve really come to appreciate those hummingbirds close up. If you are sitting outside at the table, which is about six feet from the feeders, every so often one of the birds will come right over to you, hover for a second or two, then buzz off. Like they are curious and want a closer look. Sometimes they actually come uncomfortably close to your face, and those pointy little beaks now look like potential threats.

Nearly all of the birds we see here at our home are the black-chinned variety, with a rufous hummingbird sighted occasionally. You can see by the graphic that the black chins are not among the birds who make those unbelievable migratory journeys. When ours take off they might end up in southern Mexico, but that’s about it.

Actually, that’s a pretty awesome trip for a few grams of bird, now that I think more about it.

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Black-chinned hummingbirds, male and female >

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Poinciana, by Ahmad Jamal

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There was a time in the past when I was really starting to get knowledgeable about folk music and just beginning to learn about jazz, when rock came along and while it didn’t kill them off altogether, they couldn’t compete either in the marketplace or in my highly suggestible mind.

Occasionally today I will encounter an article about jazz which provokes that old interest, but usually damps it down at the same time. So many of those writers choose to discuss the intricate mechanics of the music itself, while I, a non-musician, have little appreciation for meter or key or phrasing or any of the ways that the cognoscenti can look at a composition. I am yet one more case of “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.”

But and however. Over a lifetime I have accumulated some favorites from that genre, and the tiniest bit of lore. I’ve sprinkled a few of them into this post. Dave Brubeck’s big hit was Take Five, a song that was huge in colleges in 1959. There was a bar and grill called the Big Ten just off campus at the University of Minnesota that had a jukebox with a decent set of speakers and it seemed that I never had a beer there without that song playing in the background.

The other selections are by Ahmad Jamal, Cannonball Adderley, the Johnny Smith Quintet, and Melody Gardot. All hold high places in the regard of this codger who, admittedly, doesn’t know much about music.

[An anecdote. When I was a senior in high school, there was a member of the junior class who played jazz piano well enough to sit in with musicians in local clubs. He did this even though he wasn’t nearly old enough to legally drink. It was rumored, but never proven, that he indulged in (gasp, wheeze, recoil in horror) marijuana.]

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Mercy, Mercy, Mercy by the Cannonball Adderley Quintet

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Who Will Comfort Me, by Melody Gardot

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Moonlight In Vermont, by the Johnny Smith Quintet

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Ahhh, the Pope recently commented on the US elections. He says that the best we can do is to select “the lesser of two evils,” and must be guided by our consciences when we vote. Whatta guy, to take time out from his busy schedule to comment on our politics. I am reminded, though, of the oft-quoted Bible verse, which might apply here:

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?  How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?  You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

New International Version of the Bible; Matthew 7, 3-5

I think that the Pope and the church he represents have had a serious plank problem for decades now and which never gets resolved because of ecclesiastical chicanery and stonewalling. I would suggest that he allow us to work out our messy political processes on our own, and devote a lot more time to cleaning up the Augean situation in his own house.

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