My Robin Friend

Last year, I was visited by a robin and wrote the below, meaning to post it once I had a picture of him. I kept trying and trying, but failed.

*****

Last week, a little juvenile robin flew into my office. He (putatively) has been visiting me for a few weeks now, getting slowly braver, and braver. He used to perch just outside my office window ledge peering in at this strange, large black clad creature. I would freeze to watch him, making only the tiniest of moves so as not startle him.

One day, Master Robin flew into my office, around my room and landed on my Green Legislation Book, which is no more than an arm’s reach away (always have to have quick access to legislation). I did not turn my head to look at him, but merely darted my eyes across. He tipped his head to the side to look at me. Then he tipped his head back the other way. He has such startlingly black eyes. He looked unimpressed with my set-up and flew back outside again.

I adore robins, with their jaunty red breast. I know my visiter is juvenile because his coat is speckled and his red breast is still only orange, and a bit browny speckled too. I love robins in winter – they are a flash of red when everything else is dull. (The Nanny of the wintry bird world?) They also seem sociable – although really they are aggressively territorial – because they dart in front of you as you near their home.

When we first moved here, robins would land on the path in front of me as I walked to work, marking the closest point at which I am allowed to approach their nest. They would flit away again as I approached twittering a high pitched warning. Little did they know that I just find it more delightful that they chatter at me. I’d follow them, if I could, but I am neither small enough, nor fast enough. And I’m usually running late for work.

In the tree outside my office – which has regained branches and leaves since its decapitation in early spring – are many tits (mostly blue, but the occassional long-tailed and bearded also visit). They are shyer birds and fly away at the tiniest of moves from me. I’ve seen the occasional green finch and once, a bullfinch. There are also pigeons, which are less interesting, and magpies, which are frightening. Mr Squirrel has not returned, however. He has probably set up a permanent home elsewhere.

*****

Yesterday, Master Robin returned. I am quite sure he is one and the same. He hopped through my open window in the same manner and flew ’round once proprietorially before flying out again. He landed right where I used to put out bird seeds for him and the tits, which I removed because it had started to attract magpies and pigeons. From the window ledged he chirruped at me and I imagined him saying, “Oy! Where’s my feed? What good are you?” I feel elated and berated at the same time. I will bring in bird seed again.

He is all grown up now. No longer is his breast orange and his coat speckly brown. Indeed, he has a proud red chest and his speckles have all disappeared. I hope that I will see him bring home a mate and set up a nest and welcome young robins into the world. I doubt I will catch photos of any of this, should it happen.

For your delectation, here is my favourite Robin photo from 2009. Oh, it makes my jaw hurt from grinning.

I am, however, a little worried. Robins are harbingers of autumn. Please, it is not autumn already. It is still summer. I love autumn and winter, but I’m not ready. Oh, please.

Baby Animals are the Shiz

Another photo post for y’all.  It’s been hectic in my world and my brain is mostly mush.

Some goslings out for a walk in York. They look like hooligans.

I love how the foremost gosling has his/her tongue hanging out.  If they wore trousers, it would be ill fitting tracky-dacks (tracksuit pants / sweat pants) and I do not doubt they would have their hands down the front.  Why do young men do that?

A pair of lambs nestling in a hole, somewhere in the Lake District near Wndermere (vagueness is not me being coy; I honestly don't really know.)

A friend, with whom I was hanging out and squealing about lambs in the Lake District, commented that she thinks women who have reached child-bearing age become more susceptible to the cuteness of baby animals.  I don’t quite agree with her.  For myself, I am still ambivalent about whether I will have children (and I guess I might need to make that decision soon-ish).  I have moved poles away from the position I took when I was eight, and held onto through my 20s, that I would never have children.  However, I am much happier and more comfortable now to wallow in all things cute, when I was very reluctant to do so as a teenager.  I got branded ‘cute’ a lot and it’s only the last few years that I’m prepared not to get offended if you call me cute.  On occassion, I’ve even been known to be flattered by it.   The change has to do with getting comfortable in my skin and my person, rather than impulses dictacted by biology.  Although, I guess if it was biology being the boss, I would not necessarily know it.

A not very good photo of baby pygmy hippo and mama, Marwell Zoo. He was so cute, he made me cry. No, really.

Hippos are dangerous animals. A workmate keeps telling me this as if it will somehow lead me to adore them less.   Hippos crack me up.  I love that they are vegetarians and yet kill more people in Africa than lions.  Okay, well, I don’t love that they have killed people but just the incongruity of the fact of their preferred diet contrasted with the threat they pose to visitors in their terrtory.  They own the river.

Pygmy hippos, however, are endangered.  They only survive now, in zoos.  They wiggle their ears.  It is the most adorably absurd thing on a creature so ungainly.

The baby pygmy hippo would disappear under the water and then emerge ever so slowly, eyes first, then ears which he would vigorously wiggle (presumably to shake the water out of them?).  Sometimes he would duck back under the water when he saw all the people ogling him and sometimes he would emerge fully.  My partner reports that I shoved some kids out of the way to get closer to the edge of the viewing platform.  This is possible.

Gardening with the Seasons (Part II)

or: How (& why) I planted bulbs (I’ll try not to digress this time)

Gardening in the northern hemisphere, with seasons is completely unlike gardening in tropical Brisbane. (Such riveting news, I thought I should repeat it).

In Brissie, I just planted whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. And watered. Just like my dad told me to.

Like my dad, I did other things too, which I, like him, seem less inclined to tell people about: preparing the soil, digging in compost, turning the soil over, etc. I did not really do much of that. My partner did the bulk of it, when I decided it was time to do it. He’d watch me struggling with the spade, digging ineffectual holes and then take over.

It just took me longer to dig holes. In the far-away time before my partner, I dug my own holes. I would strike at the earth with the spade a few times experimentally. Then plunge the spade in. Then again. Then, with spade left in, wiggle it about a bit. Then plunge again. Then sit down for a rest. Then go get a drink. Then return to try again. It took me a while to dig a hole, but I always succeeded. I’m persistent.

Oh dear, I’m digressing again.

After we moved from the Little Flat to the Little House, I was most excited about the idea of having a garden again. I dug a hole (I did this myself, while my partner was away. It took three times as long as it would have done if he was present as he would have taken the spade away from me after my first few experimental strikes at the clay-y patch of earth I had decided would be our veggie patch). Into the hole, I buried the Bokashi contents from our flat. I mixed it all in and left it alone.

A few weeks later, we bought seeds of things we wanted to plant: beans, spinach, lettuce, silverbeet; and some flowers: nasturtiums, poppies, foxglove, honeysuckle, passionflower, jasmine.

A few weeks later again, we had some time to actually plant. On reading the labels of the seeds we’d bought, I realised we’d missed our window of opportunity for planting most of the flowers. The poppies and foxgloves should have gone in shortly after we bought them (should have realised this from the fact that I was now seeing foxgloves and poppies in the woodlands and other people’s gardens … probably therefore past their sowing time). We planted everything else, plus some of the basil that was outgrowing its pot.

That’s just not how it works in Brisbane. Stuff grows year round. You can plant it year round. And if you can’t, then it’s only because it’s too hot. Don’t plant in December, January or February. In those months, you won’t know if the sun will wither your plant to a burnt crisp of its former self, or if a torrential downpour will relocate your seedling or seeds, somewhere else, entirely out of your control. Or both. On the same day.

In England, the slugs got almost everything. They destroyed the basil in one night. Seedlings would disappear as soon as they emerged from the earth. We tried everything organic: eggshells, coffee grinds, hair. The only thing that worked was a plastic pot (formerly containing yoghurt) half buried in the ground, half filled with beer. The slugs would go for it, instead of the emergent seedlings. But, by then, we only had a very few seeds left. All that grew was a lone stand of silverbeet. It was much too late in the year to plant any more seeds.

Flower-wise, most things grew fine. The slugs did not like nasturtiums one bit, so we planted more of them round the edge of our veggie patch as a barrier. They make our garden look productive, rather than bare. But it is bare. It is bare of vegetables. We were demoralised. So demoralised, we even forgot to eat the silverbeet, so it is now unpalatably bitter.

Quite a few weeks ago, I was flipping through the weekend paper and read about planting bulbs. I adore the bright flowers that pop up at the end of winter, heralding spring. I bear much affection for them, as they first greeted me in this new land. It was so exciting to see white and purple crocuses, daffodils and snowdrops, growing like weeds. They symbolise England for me. They are so very different to what you can get in Brisbane: delicate blooms, thriving on cold, redolent of the changing of the seasons. And they epitomise English gardening: you have to sow them many months before anything happens. You have to PLAN.

So, I sent off for some bulbs: 100 crocuses, 70 daffodils, 50 tulips. I have grand visions of my front garden being a field of English flowers, in miniature: in February, crocuses; March, daffodils; April, tulips; and then, it will be time to plant foxgloves and poppies, ready to bloom for summer.

We planted the bulbs last weekend. My partner lifted the grass / lawn (an aggravating operation that the word ‘lift’ belies); I mixed potting mix with the soil and placed the bulbs in their randomly appointed spots; we finished by walking over the lawn, stomping the grass back into place.

Now, we wait.

Autumn Leaves

English summers are much like Brisbane winters: the sun is bright, the skies are crisp blue and the temperature is mild (in the mid teens Celsius; I haven’t a clue Fahrenheit). And both are short-lived. I do love Brisbane winters.

In a few days, it will be autumn here. I am looking forward to autumn, having never experienced it before. My sisters’ favourite poem/song when we were younger was ‘mu thu la bay’ (In Autumn, the Leaves Blow). It is an epic poem about a young, beautiful girl who falls in love with her tutor. He has to leave her in the autumn. Like all good Viet poems, he goes off to war and dies. He never comes back for her, and in autumn, with the leaves falling off trees and blowing around her, she remembers him. Autumn is a poignant and nostalgic season.

Intellectually, I understand this and I recognise the symbolism. Viscerally, emotionally, the images of autumn do not evoke much response in me.

In my formative years, I read the autobiography of Jill Ker Conway (The Road to Coorain and True North). I mentioned it in a book meme. I loved how the landscape and environment grounded and influenced Jill Ker Conway’s life and writing. I also interrelate with my environment; I have always personalised my living and working space, and find my moods affected by weather.

My lack of understanding of the English landscape, flowers and plants somewhat disorientates me, and at the same time reminds me that I have to learn, rather than refer to innate knowledge. I am eternally curious about berries and fruits and plants. When we walk in the countryside, I pick and squish and smell and peer. My partner continues on ahead and I chase him every few metres: I linger as something catches my eye, then I run to catch up. I was so happy to find acorns, in their cups, at the height of summer. I had never before seen an actual acorn – the symbol of old England is the gnarled and majestic oak – and the acorn speaks of mysterious connections. I am finding my place in this landscape of soft grass, nettle and acorns.

From early childhood, I wondered how my father related to the Australian environment and the ways in which it was different to Viet Nam. Of all my father’s children, I have the vaguest memory of him as a vibrant man. For more than half my life, my father has been ill. But I can call to mind images of my father striding along a beach, or casting out a net and hauling it in with regular, assured movements, or the graceful swing of his arm as he cuts up fish, or the way his huge hands cup fluffy baby chicks, the same hands that will wring their necks in a few months’ time. It was wonderful to see my father in Viet Nam, in land that he knew innately. He rested, elbow on the prow of our long tail speed boat, and he looked out at the Mekong. He looked like that land owned him, and he knew its ways. He squinted at the sky and said: It won’t rain tomorrow and everyone – local Viet and Viet Kieu alike – believed him. And he was right. I can’t describe how much Ba belonged to the Delta area, how he seemed to stand more erect and the pride of the land swelled around him. He shrunk again in Sai Gon, and then back home in Brisbane. But I got a meagre glimpse of who my father was before he came to Australia and I knew that the landscape infects my father, too.

*****

The leaves outside my office window are turning yellow and dropping off. I watch them curiously, and a little nervously because I want them to turn yellow, and then red, and then brown, and then (and only then) may they drop off. They don’t mean much to me, these autumn leaves. But I am in a phase of transition now and I wonder if I will attach to autumn the fluttering emotions that currently affects how my identity is swilling into formation here.

The Art of Stalking

I spent last weekend with my new (to me) digital camera, Annie Dillard’s Pilgram at Tinker Creek and a dilettante attitude under a gorgeous Moreton bay or Port Jackson fig at Orleigh Park, West End. I read and photographed, lazed and wondered. I promise to spend more days like that, rather than like this.

I had been reading Annie Dillard’s treatise on how she discovered the art of stalking a musk rat. I followed her advice in a loose way – or at least was inspired by it (at p 184):

In summer, I stalk. Summer leaves obscure, heat dazzles, and creatures hide from the red-eyed sun, and me. I have to seek things out. The creatures I seek have several sense and free will; it becomes apparent that they do not wish to be seen.

Annie Dillard speaks of losing herself in the stalking (at p 198 – 199):

[The muskrat] never knew I was there. I never knew I was there, either. … My own self-awareness has disappeared. … I wonder if we do not waste our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves.

And so I tried to stalk a willy wagtail. There were other people at the park: a couple on another bench under another fig, a sole young man with his swag and a group of people having a picnic. All were absorbed in their own business but I could not evade my awareness of my slow and occassional halting to follow the willy wagtail with a camera. I’d stop where I thought I was just close enough and then cast a look about me to see who had been watching my creep towards the creature. I felt as an exhibit in Monty Python’s Silly Walk museum. Invariably the casting about would lead to the willy wagtail flying to another perch and wagging its tail in a taunting, happy way.

This picture was taken while lying on a park bench engrossed in my reading of Annie Dillard’s wondrous book. The willy wagtail flew to within inches of my nose and then landed on the grass, wagging a few teasing times. I extracted the camera from its case, pointed and shot.

If you have a interest in the world around you, read Annie Dillard. She sparks and amuses and her writing is nothing short of meditiatively incandescent. I feel as a child – renewed and wondering – when reading her work.