Birds, In the neighborhood, PSA, Whatever

Little killers free to a good home

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Cat lovers cover your ears.

I used to like cats. Then I decided that I liked birds and other wildlife better.

What really happened is that I had a beautiful fat black cat that got sick and broke my heart when I was a kid.

So I swore off cats for good. I like other people’s cats well enough, but I really don’t like my neighbor’s cats that are allowed free run of the neighborhood.

Some of my favorite people have *mostly* indoor cats that are *let out* each day to do whatever it is that their dear owners think is so necessary to a domestic cat’s nature.

Kill birds and torture small furry innocent woodland creatures and HAVE KITTENS UNDER MY SHED!

Why are these kittens my problem? I don’t own a cat.

Have I mentioned the free catch and release (to the SPCA) program we run here?

😉

This was tonight’s catch. 4 adorable and hissy-scared little killers. We’re trying to catch their mother, but she ran the DH out of the backyard one too many times and he finally said uncle. What a protective mother!

I don’t know the answer. I don’t understand why this behavior is tolerated from cat owners. Jeez… I can’t even walk my dog on a leash in the local park except for under the cover of darkness for fear that I’ll be ticketed by the local police. My town is very serious about protecting our parks from dogs. I once had the police follow me home after walking my dog in the cul-de-sac that leads to the park.

Cats get a free pass. Why is that?

NJ Audubon has collaborated with the American Bird Conservancy in an effort to educate cat lovers to be more responsible cat owners. Cats Indoors has lots of great info, but I’m not so sure that anyone will be so easily convinced as me.

From the field, Small truths

A note of thanks to a client

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Dear D.

You humble me.

From the moment we first met, I’ve wondered at you. I’m not surprised anymore with the strength that you show; I’m astounded with it.

You have such astonishing resources of love and emotional resilience.

You let me see behind that mask of confidence on your face today; you admitted you were afraid and you cried long pent-up tears, but all I saw was your grace.

Today was your first step towards realizing some of your goals and I want to thank you for letting me play my part.

You are an exceptional woman. You can’t see that yet, but I hope one day you’ll have pride enough to match that self-confidence. It’s been hard won. You’ve come this far with almost no support from anyone.

I hope you know I’ve been cheering you on and will continue to. You deserve your very own cheering section, I think. I’m so very happy for you.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

This is the note I would’ve liked to tape onto the plant I brought D. as a housewarming gift today. The silly plant made her cry; I can only imagine what this note might’ve done.

Some people just have so much crap unjustly heaped onto their plates; others of us are so very lucky. I’m grateful that my job reminds me I’m one of the lucky ones and that there’s a lot to be learned from the poor and others that society tends to discount.

On second thought, I may just send it… it might be good for her to hear.

Birds, In the neighborhood, Whatever

A new bird list!

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Circumstances beyond my control (a husband with a mind of his own) have necessitated the start of a new list: birds seen by boat. Not just any boat, either… THE boat… our boat, apparently.

(Men and their toys!)

😉

An osprey scared from its nest just when I thought I finally had the perfect photo opportunity – a nest at eye level, just outside of the river channel. I love all the found stuff osprey include in their nests. Also interesting is the rope ladder up to the nest… I guess somebody bands these guys.

I have no idea what this bird is. I’d thought it was a tern, but its back is reddish. Help anyone?

A tree full of great egrets, waiting out the tide, I guess. I know these pictures are awful, but I was too scared of having to swim to shore to bring the good lens. (The boat is something of a fixer-upper.)

Storm clouds full of gulls… who cares what kind; they’re just gulls!

😉

Conversation following inaugural boat tour of the river:

“So… are you happy with it?”

“Um… I didn’t want a boat.”

“Yeah, but… are you happy with it?”

“Um… it’s a boat.”

(I might get to see some good birds though.)

😉

Books, Remembering, Snapshots, Wanderings

Skywatch Friday

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You have to know how to look at this country. You have to slow down. It isn’t pretty, but it’s beautiful.
–Kent Haruf in West of Last Chance
In the weeks before I went to North Dakota in June, I spoke to a couple people out there and the weather always came up in conversation, mainly the hope for rain to “green things up some.” Green it was, but every so often we’d come across a view like this of a pale ocean of prairie grass laid out to the horizon. More often than not there weren’t any trees to mark the edge of vision, the sky and clouds a kaleidoscope of moods, the play of sunlight on the land the only thing to distinguish one moment from the next.

Visit here for more Skywatch posts.
Pastimes, Whatever

I lifted 325,719 lbs. and all I got was this lousy t-shirt!

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It’s a slow day here in blogland, so I’ll use the excuse to toot my own horn a bit. Indulge me.

😉

I’ve been going to the Y for months now and have actually (gack!) learned to enjoy exercising. I love the Y. I’d thought of joining a gym in the past, but could never get past the idea of all that spandex and lycra and all those muscleheads and really skinny blondes. Not my sort of scene. Not to mention what you have to pay to a gym for the torture of lifting weights or taking a spinning class or whatever.

I looked into the local Y (mostly for yoga classes) and found that they offered a really great discount for volunteer firemen and their families. Bingo! $31 a month and I have use of the whole place and the pools and the hot tub and whatever classes I like whenever I can manage to drag myself there.

I was really, really good about going for months: 4 or 5 times a week plus two evening yoga classes. Then the weather got nice and I found other things to do. I’m the sort of person that has to be regimented about this type of thing; any slacking off, even just a little bit, leads to a total collapse of my commitment. That’s pretty much what happened for most of June and July. I was lucky to get there twice a week.

But the Y is smart. If you’ll allow it, they’ll send you congratulatory emails when you’re making progress or nastygrams when you’re slacking off. I’d been getting these nice emails telling me that I’d lifted the equivalent of 5 African Elephants in the past month and burned enough calories to eat 3 ice-cream sundaes. Then I got a couple of those nastygrams that intimated that I’d not been trying very hard and that left me feeling like a lazy bum. So I started going again, every day, and now I’m feeling really great about being committed to it again. Plus, physically, I feel so much better! There were those days, in my first week back, that every muscle in me ached, but that only lasts so long.

That sort of inclusiveness, regardless of your level of fitness or commitment, is part of what I love so much about the place. There’s senior citizens there and a musclehead or two, plus that awful grunting guy I’d mentioned before, and ordinary people like me just trying to be healthier, one stomach crunch at a time. Plus, they send nice emails when you’re trying hard, with animated balloons and stuff. Today I’d finally lifted enough weights and spent enough hours there to earn a t-shirt as an incentive to keep going. A silly thing, really, but you shouldn’t lift the equivalent of 38 elephants without someone noticing.

(Plus I’ve finally got muscles enough to open my own pickle jars!)

😉

Image from National Geographic

Bunnies

How to bliss-out a bunny

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I had planned a photo session this afternoon with Freckles the bunny so I could do a post about her turning 7 years old this month, but in the midst of trimming her nails and brushing her coat out, this happened and these photos are way cuter than any I took in the back yard.

Freckles has always been a very laid-back bunny and at 7 she is even more so. Nothing bothers her, nothing freaks her out and that probably explains why she’s always been so healthy. (Knock wood!) Bunnies are prone to stress, of course, and that stress leads to all sorts of health problems.

Anyway… trimming her nails is easy; I just roll her into an almost ball on my lap, facing away from me, and trim away.

After the nail trimming was done, I turned her around in my lap to face me and worked the magic of the bunny whisperer. This mostly consists of rubbing the fur on her belly.

As she relaxes, I gently run my hand over her face and draw her ears behind her. This really, really relaxes her and I don’t have to hold her at all.

Her front paws go up in the air with her back legs in a perfect imitation of a dead bunny. She’ll stay like this forever too, so long as I stroke her face every now and again.

Freckles also likes to sleep this way sometimes, causing untold numbers of near heart-attacks in those not familiar with the *dead-lop-flop*.

Rabbit experts will tell you that there is no magic in this gentling of a bunny. We call it *trancing* and it’s probably based on an instinctual response to being grabbed by a predator. Some people use this trick to trim nails or give meds, but I don’t trust it enough because the bunny can wake up in a flash and twist off your lap and hurt itself. Freckles is the only bunny here I’m able to trance, even though I never need to.

What about your buns? Can you hypnotize them – do you need to?

Birds, In the neighborhood, Snapshots, Whatever

Pausing (tern)

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Most of the weekend was spent within view of the ocean, on various benches along the boardwalk. That’s a pretty nice way to watch the world go by, I think.

Anyway… I noticed that some of the Laughing Gulls seem to be pulling back their summertime black hoods in favor of a more undistinguished (or is it indistinguishable?) look. The terns still look the same, though I could imagine this one suddenly remembering an appointment someplace to the south.

There were small flocks of peeps feeding back of the jetty and flying, fragile bits of silver and pale russet, among the beachgoers. Telling one from another is impossible, because even among the normally *easy peeps* like sanderling and semi-palms, no two in a dozen look the same at this time of year. They’re all a scraggly mix of winter gray and spring red. Shorebirds just escape my abilities!

Just me rambling about birds, books, bunnies, or whatever!