John James Audubon

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John James Audubon

April 26, 1785-January 27, 1851

Birds. How exasperating they are! Even when I lift my camera to shoot them through the window, they scatter. Light, vulnerable and deft, they hide in the branches until the frightening woman with the black box vanishes. They must think my camera shoots bullets instead of photographs.

I told you about my single attempt to photograph birds in the meadow in winter. None appeared though I sat for an hour and a half and froze my tush, never to embark out again this season.

Not so Mr. Audubon. From the time he was a baby he felt an intimacy with birds bordering on frenzy. He spent most of his life chronicling them, often in harrowing conditions. (See field notes from his journals, below.)

The portrait, above (now where Sasha and Malia can see it daily on the west wall of the Red Room in the White House), of Audubon by John Syme shows him as he must have looked in the years 1820-1824 when he explored Mississippi, Alabama and Florida in the start of his attempt to paint all the birds of North America. One of the treasured books I inherited from my parents is Audubon's Birds of America, the greatest picture book of all time. It has 435 watercolor plates of birds painted by John, well my edition has photographs of the plates. In all, the field work and paintings took 14 years to complete for the book. Yes, the gun there means he shot birds in order to draw them. At the time of the painting of this portrait in Edinburgh by the Scottish Syme, Audubon was in the British Isles looking for a publisher for the book.

mourning doves

He intended to include paintings of eggs in his book, but they didn't make it into the final copy. (In my 1966 edition, Marshall B. Davidson included Audubon's eggs in his Introduction.) Eggs are more docile subjects, no need to shoot them. But at first glance at his drawings at the right I thought the pen scratches under them were feet!

The book has 435 hand-colored prints of over 700 North American bird species. He tried unsuccessfully to get it published in the U.S. Eventually in England it cost more than $100,000 at the time to print (over $2 million in today's money). Copper plates had to be carved, and the original edition was hand tinted and printed with the aquatint process.

cardinals

It seemed to us as if we were approaching the end of the world. The country was perfectly flat, and, so far as we could survey it, presented the same wild and scraggy aspect. . . We now and then passed through muddy pools, which reached the saddle-girths of our horses.

- from Audubon and His Journals, chapter "Spring Garden"

scrub (or Florida jay), Stellar's jay, yellow-billed magpie, Clark's nutcracker

In the morning when I arose, the country was still covered in thick fogs, so that although I could hear the plain notes of birds on shore, not an object could I see beyond the bowsprit, and the air was as close and sultry as the previous evening.

- from the chapter St. John's River, Audubon and His Journals

purple finches

The National Audubon Society was of course named after John James Audubon.

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the hard boiled egg

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It's poetry week. Every three weeks or so several of us meet with our poetry professor from college days for conversation, poetry work, and dinner, which our former professor - now mentor and friend - prepares and serves with grace. It's a pretty cool deal. Two women skype in from Boston and one from Tennessee. I'm still working on a draft of a poem for tomorrow. Meanwhile, below is one from 2005 BC ('Before Chickens' on the farm). In this case, the egg came first.

I find that some people are tormented if you ask them to read a poem. "Is it long?" they whine ask. If you're one of them, stop here, consider this a very short post, and maybe imagine what is in the drawer, above. If you're not one of them, or if you're willing not to be, read on. I think poems should open a little drawer in your head, or at least make you want to know what's in the drawer.

In the stanza about conversations, this was BB (Before Blogging). PB (Post Blogging), it's even more true, thanks to you.

The Hard Boiled Egg

As I peel my egg,

shell adheres

to the clear membrane

in chunks, like ice floes

on the surface of water.

Before I bite

the end, cool and round,

I know the felt-like yolk

will mix with the metallic white,

an aggregate flowing with

grains of pepper and salt

on the riverbed of my tongue.

Every day is a completeness

like this. Conversations

like embryos fresh

and awake for surprise.

Nakedness under a shell.

Nourishment begun

at my mother’s white table cloth

that spreads to the snow

fields around this farm peppered

with thistle crowns and bare

branches emerging from

under the mask of white

that curves around the world.

~

Ruth M., December 2005

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6 weeks old

While Decembery tempests blasted Nature outside the barn, inside the coop a Partridge Cochin hen insisted at eight months that she was ready for motherhood. She kept stomping her foot at Don whenever he would pick her up and set her down off the eggs she'd find and set on. "Ok ok," he finally relented and swooped Broody and her adoptees up and nestled them into the brooding box. With the wind banging bare lilac branches against the window, she sat there steadfast under the warm lights on those eggs, and on the 20th day seven of them hatched. They survived and grew and grew. These are the first hatch from eggs laid by our own Green Barn hens in their first year of life.

This week the chicks are six weeks old. For all we know, there are seven mothers of the seven chicks, and Broody the brooder may not even be one of them. We do know Khan is the proud papa.

Here you see two shots of the same six-week-old chick on the occasion we invited her/him/it into the house for a photo op. We won't discover its sex until certain leg and head features develop. Don't ask me what those features are, I'm just la-di-da-ing like Lisa here on Green Acres. Don is the expoit (read farmer, farmhand and farmer's wife). The highlights of these gorgeous days-old feathers look quite different under the lamplight shining on the ottoman, compared to the natural light from the window.

Look, all this from an egg.

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1996 Oscar: one scene in The English Patient

I watch few movies now, and I can't for the life of me list the nominees for Sunday night's Oscars show the way I once did, let alone say I've seen them all. I know there's Pitt and Winslet, a Slumdog and a Wrestler.

So I'll do what aging people do when they start losing touch with the changes around them: I'll reminisce. About a 1996 film about WWII, too famous and parodied for you to be ignorant of it. But even so, it gets me thinking about how sorry we all are for this fractured world, and sorry for ourselves too.

So, in the movie, there is brutal war among the world's powerful governments trying to shape boundaries and mindsets in the decades to come. Human beings and Nature together have grown soft and muddy with grief, hatred and killing.

For Hana war is not just a story in the news. She has watched her best friend explode in a jeep that hit a mine. Then in the hospital tent under mortar attack she has discovered that her lover, an officer in another regiment, has been killed. As a war nurse, her ears are deafened with bomb blasts and agonized whimpers of broken men. She holds their torn flesh and bones like crushed fruit.

So when Kip the mine sweeper carries her on his scooter into town for an escape and a surprise, Hana's whole body lights up with childish anticipation. They enter an empty church where frescoed murals adorn the walls up high. Too high, and invisible in an unlighted church. Kip harnesses her on a hanging rope with himself as counter-weight on the other end, hands her a flare after lighting it, and hoists her to the level of the paintings. He operates the rope deftly as if he has practiced this every night for a week, causing her to sway gently in a hanging dance that he controls so she can examine the painted faces up close while she twists and dangles.

Kip knew Hana could not extricate herself from the plodding pain engulfing her, just as he himself had struggled to block out the strain of his mine sweeping job. As love surprised them, he shared a secret window of art and joy with her. I appreciate the grace of the scene for showing two people crushed with war fatigue determined to absorb available beauty, for each others sake as much as for their own.

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Everything but the . . .

It is where she has filled the cool cavities of 18-pound Thanksgiving turkeys with stuffing in her fists. It is where she bathed her babies, their soapy skin so slick she was terrified they'd slip and gouge their heads on the faucet, yet they cooed at her unafraid, blinking and sputtering when she rinsed their heads with cups of clear warm water. Cabbage heads and cauliflower heads were washed here too, and fingers of carrot scrubbed with a stiff white brush. Teapots and soup pots filled. Flower stems clipped before layering them and their velvety heads in water-filled vessels. Here in soapy water she broke her favorite glass rotating her hand inside, and she watched the perfectly sliced V between her knuckles blossom and point at her heart candy apple red, then blood red, then wick into the fine rivulets of her skin. With a turn of the faucet handle, cold water instantly streamed to cleanse the cut, as it had streamed, washed, rinsed, and filled dozens of times a day, every day, for decades.

Indoor plumbing has brought water into this farmhouse kitchen for 80 years. She is one of only two thirds of the world's women who can turn a faucet and receive a rush of water right into sinks in their homes. The rest are lucky if they can gather clean water from a pump a mile away and carry it in red plastic jugs on their heads back home, spending hours a day on just this simple collection. Some only pray for adequate access to clean water. Some = over a billion.

You can read about global water issues at the Global Issues site, like how because of CocaCola's production that depleted water resources in Plachimada, India, local farmers had to dig 450 feet and still couldn't access water.

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Come out for a walk

One of the last of winter. We've been sitting here at our computers long enough.

Lean your head down under the apple tree, I don't want us to knock the pretty snow off. Oh, and I don't want you to bump your head either. Follow me toward the sun.

Oh, is that a deer? Or a giraffe? I think he might let us ride him through the woods.

Now we're in the meadow, which we call the Queens Bowl. Queen Anne's lace is wearing Winter Queen's lace. Oh, that's ok, you don't have to curtsy, I am only bowing to take their photograph.

Oh look, Rose's hips are wearing lace too. That sounds a bit racy, don't you think?

These dangling seeds look out of sorts, I'd say. But my hands are getting cold, so I am out of sorts too.

Let's head back.

Hi there, Bishop. That spot in the sun looks inviting.

Good idea, let's go in and stretch out by the fire after our workout.

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inches & finches: another layer of winter . . .

. . . four white inches and counting. The birds that had been away scouting easy food on the land for 10 days are back and gorging at the feeders. I counted 30 finches at this one maple tree alone. There weren't any perches left for this amazing hanging goldfishfinch. A split second later he was clutching the tree bark waiting his turn. I get the feeling the other finches are looking at him like "wow, how do you do that?" I know I was.

These three - American tree sparrow, goldfinch and downy woodpecker - managed to share the tower. How's that for Love Day behavior?

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