Strawberries and Robins and the Bertrand Debaucle

The strawberry patch that for the last six years has served only Robins (which may be why I have a Robin Settlement, one nest per rafter, under my deck above the garage) somehow this year is not rife with half-eaten berries.

The Robin has mysteriously left them to me.

She raised her young here, so you would think there would be no strawberries for me at all. It may be due to the one day a nearly-grown, but still with belly fuzz (adult feathers growing in), robin sat on the rafter with his beak pointed straight up. All day. Seriously, every time I passed by, his head was thrown back, beak up. Waiting for Mother and the Worm.

I became troubled because I was outside all day and never once did I see the Mother Robin, who I know by name (which is to say, "Robin") because I have often passed under her nest, and we came to the point where she did Not fly off the nest unless I opened the side door of the garden closet. Then she would lunge, hoping to Alarm me by the wind of her wings in my hair. Hoping to teach me a Lesson about not opening the side door of the garden closet when she is incubating her Eggs.

But that day there was no Mother Robin with her wind in my hair, just Bertrand, the young fledgling (if he was that yet). I knew him from the days when his spikey hatchling head peeked over the edge of the nest and looked at me without fear. Or was that without interest. I did not, after all, have a worm for him or a proper beak to stuff it into his own. There he waited and waited for Mother Robin, and unless she was being very stealth about it, sneaking in and out whenever I was around the corner, she was gone.

I know it is none of my business. Now that no Robins have been eating my strawberries. At the time it seemed like a good idea. I was digging in my garden finding SO many worms that Bertrand would consider delicious, and what if Harm had befallen Mother Robin and Bertrand would cut off all of the circulation to his bird brain by keeping his head thrown back for another 12 hours and fall off the beam to his peril?

I knew better than to give him a human-scented worm. I used garden gloves and I masterminded how to convey a squirmy worm onto the beam beside Bertrand with a Hoe Handle. This is where all of the nonsense began.

Bertrand stood next to his nest with his head back and beak pointing toward heaven, still. Or, toward the floor of the deck, in fact just an inch or so from it. I don't know how Mother Robin was going to stuff a worm in anyway with no clearance above the youngster's beak. Bertrand had grown so tall. He did not fear me or even notice me as I approached with a fat worm on the end of a hoe handle. He had been hearing my voice his whole life now, I decided. My calming words to Mother Robin as I would approach so I didn't startle her (or she me), as well as our own exchanges when he peeked above the edge of the well-woven nest and once when I took a photo of him.

Had the worm complied and fallen off the hoe handle properly, everything would have been fine. No harm done (except perhaps to Worm). But no.

Worm kept crawling and recrawling around the end of the hoe and would not fall. Perhaps he sensed he was at a high altitude. Maybe worms know those things. That he was not to drop an inch into soft brown earth but onto hard brown wood to be eaten up by Young Bertrand. Perhaps his worm instincts told him to squirm away from the Smell of a Worm-Eater. These are the secrets between God and worms, which only they know. All I know is that the worm did not comply and my trying to lap the worm off the handle and onto the beam involved too many movements and I somehow changed in Bertrand's mind from friend (or harmless large creature) to foe.

Just like his forebear, Bertrand sprung from the nest and sent the wind of his wings through the top puffs of my hair that humidity had risen above its natural level. (Frizz, I am saying.) Unfortunately Bertrand did not know Where to fly. For all I know it is the first time he flew. And instead of flying Out into the world, he flew In to the garage. He flew directly in one swoop from nest to the dog crate stacked with extra shingles and a spark plug wrench and awl (with which to turn the spark plug wrench). As though it was his back-up plan. In case of emergencies, fly to the shingle with the shiny metal wrench. There he sat for an extremely long time regardless of my comings and goings into the garage. I saw Mother Robin then, flying toward the nest, then swooping away. Then in a tree watching me, watching the nest where Bertrand no longer waited.

He is in the garage, I wished I could explain. I had made a terrible mess of things. She didn't know where he was. He didn't know where to go.

This was my fault and soon it would be dusk and I would want to close the garage door and Bertrand was still waiting to grow up. Waiting for further instructions. Waiting for worms. And Waiting for his chest feathers to grow in.

He was no longer expecting a worm, his beak pointed only forward now, just looking straight ahead, like a child taught to Say Nothing until Mother Arrives.

I was filled with regret for throwing the balance of nature askance. I had to urge Bertrand out. I brought the dreaded hoe handle close to the crate and he did not flinch. Oh really, I thought, you must have some instinctual fear of my kind. I inched it nearer to him and Then he flew. He sailed out of the garage, under his long-time home on the beam, out above the driveway and into the real world across the yard and on to parts unknown. Mother Robin was gone by then, to my knowledge. Or maybe they met up, mid air. Maybe they decided to build another nest elsewhere because of my worm-on-hoe-handle shenanigans.

Strawberries the robins left for me this year (plus blackcaps)

I have seen Robins in the yard, but I don't know if it is Mother Robin or if it is Bertrand, fully feathered in his belly, now, or other stranger Robins who have come simply for the Worms. I have a lot of worms and my lawn is pure nature, no chemicals to make robins walk funny or lay square eggs. So I think robins will stay, but no one has come back to the nest.

Let it be known that once a worm is dangled from a hoe handle, the robins suspect trickery and may make their home elsewhere.

Sigh. I should not have messed with nature. Though I do seem to have all of the strawberries in the patch to myself this year, in spite of other robins in the yard... Maybe Mother Robin was a particular berry fiend and the other Robins eat in moderation. Secrets, again, that only God and Robins know.

Planting Grass as a Non-Professional

A lot of rain has fallen today, watering the patches and splotches of grass seed I flung out in the last few days and sprinkled over with straw. A professional grass planter once told me that birds will eat up the seed if you don't cover it with a 3-deep layer of straw. Three stalks deep. He said this is deep enough to deter the short beak of a bird. This is a terrible situation for a non-professional. In no circumstance can the straw covering your grass seed (already under surveillance by a Robin as you were flinging it out to start with) be 3-strands-deep. It is 1 deep or 24 deep or 7 deep, for the most part. So you leave your sense of precision in the house and shake out swatches of straw over seed as thin as you can and think no more about it.

Today is the only day of rain forecast for this week. I would so much rather have God water the grass seed than me, so I went to Menards. I bought up seed for shade and seed for sun (and cocoa bean mulch for the hasta bed and for the row of barberry bushes out front). The rain mounted to nearly torrential just as I left the store and the good natured worker in a yellow slicker came out to loft mulch bags into my trunk and back seat. (I have heard tell that they will not carry out purchases for male customers. My source confessed that he sometimes has his wife pick up things at Menards for this reason...to get a little help, after all.) The yellow-slickered man was happy to help, as I was to be helped. He said he spends most of the day muddy anyhow.

Once home, I saw the rain gutter over the porch was overflowing, so I was distracted from grass seed. I took an old wooden chair from the porch, which sunk into the earth 4 inches with two legs and 8 inches with the others as I put my new Wisconsin weight upon it. So I teetered and flailed and steadied myself with the gutter every time I moved the chair further down the line. It's good I didn't pull it off in the process. I have done this bare handed before and the decomposing leaves are some kind of caustic matter for the skin, so I thought I was clever to put on rubber gloves this time. I cleared the length of gutter along the back porch, which is all I could reach. Rain poured into the rubber gloves but I expected that and was not daunted. It pooled there until I reached up for more leaves, at which time the gloves were like a spout pouring water Into the sleeves of my raincoat, like tunnels to my armpits and beyond. Ah well. Now I was soaked inside the coat and out, I might as well stand in the rain and seed the rest of the lawn. I had been debating waiting til it let up...

For an hour I wandered the lawn, flinging grass seed over bare patches, bringing a pitchfork with a helping of straw, and shaking it over the new seed, aspiring to the 3-deep standard, until I was out of straw and interest both. If you can imagine being wetter than when gutters of rain pour down your armpits, I was that.

I walked in the kitchen door and peeled off my raincoat only to realize as much grass seed had stuck to the wet of my coat as perhaps lay out in the yard. It was like a strange work of art, rife with meaning just beyond my grasp, and it sprinkled across the kitchen floor. An artful mess.

Elias and the Gute found it interesting until they realized it was not tasty. They were in a desperate state. I had forgotten about the lamb meat cooking in the oven when I went to Menards. It is ground lamb with garlic and onions and marjoram and rosemary cooked slow at a low temp in a loaf and then weighted down while it cools to drain the fat and juices so it is oddly dense and then sliced thin for gyros. It's understandable that with two hours of slow-cooking lamb, Eli and Guthrie were hopeful concerning supper. We ate (them kibble, me lamb) and just when I thought the rain was letting up, it came down in torrents again tamping down the tufts of straw making all of my handiwork in the yard look more intentional.

It was not the dreary cold 56 degree day in May that it started out to be. In the end, with patches of straw across the yard lit in the setting sun, I felt like I'd had an adventure. And now a bath of Epsom salts and a little fragrant oil will make everything right... Acclimating, still, in Wisconsin.