The Succulent Seer: birds

Showing posts with label birds. Show all posts

March 11, 2012

Henhouse update

One of my goals as a blogger is to master the art of the short post. It's very difficult for me since I'm very long-winded. My first foray into the short blog arena was literally 5 minutes ago—to celebrate this blog's 5000th pageview. This post is not exactly short but neither is it one of my characteristic super-long posts.

What I want to say is that my experiment with the nesting chickens worked. In my last post, I described how I put up a removable door to protect the 2 nesting hens from their marauding sisters who don't watch where they step when laying their own eggs (although the other two are laying, they're not "broody," i.e. not interested in sitting on the eggs. I must be a shabby bird biologist because I couldn't tell you off the top of my head what makes a bird broody in the first place). The day after I tied a shield with custom air holes, fabricated out of a scrap piece of corrugated plastic, and affixed to the front of the next box with my crappy knots (no wonder my husband gave me a little guide to knots a few years ago...if only I'd studied it), I was pleasantly surprised to find 1) no more broken eggs up top in the occupied nesting box and 2) a fresh egg laid by one of the unbroody hens in the box below. Success. Since the 2 broody hens are sort of blocked in, even though they hardly ever get off the nest (I've never actually observed them do it—they kind of semi-fast for 2 weeks), I feel obligated to make sure they get out and stretch their legs, eat, drink, and take care of their business at least once a day. So that's a tad bit labor intensive, but if it results in cute little chickies pretty soon, I think it'll be worth it. Crossing my fingers!

My next post will be quite long because it will tell the dramatic story of something that happened here last night—a terrifying night of a huge fire on the property started by a lightning strike. But since we were up all night and are exhausted, it'll have to wait. Hasta pronto.

March 9, 2012

The Real Easter Basket

Two months have passed since I began working part-time at an English school. It's been nice to get out of the house, I enjoy the personal interactions, and I can now breathe a little easier on the economic side of things, but it's had its expected flip-side results as well. I'm quite tired every day, I worry I'm not giving enough undivided attention to my family (some correspondences are suffering), my hip pain has returned, and my amount of free time to dedicate to creative pursuits such as writing, art, and gardening has taken a hit.

But there're also some undeniably wonderful things happening at the same time—the growth of our daughter, the flourishing of our orchard and flock of chickens, even the growth of some friendships and personal strength. I tend to believe as is in nature, also is with people, and vice versa. Even when it seems like I have little extra time for anything, the above things are both a blessing and a natural result of small, diligent, patient efforts toward progress, combined with the wonderfully powerful and cyclic elements of nature.

I'm the kind of person who likes to answer every personal email I receive, but it hasn't always been possible with my new schedule. But one of the side effects of not always being the most responsive, or first to reach out, has been to find out which friendships have perservered despite my low levels of maintenance. It reveals a connection that can stand the test of time.

I never would have guessed that something as simple as, when we built our house, placing a window facing a mesquite tree, would bring so much enjoyment from the center of our home—seeing its vibrant, almost flourescent green leaved branches waving gently in the breeze and filled with songbirds coming to take a drink from a dish of water on the ground below it. It took years of gently inviting wildlife to our yard and runoff from our roof directed to the mesquite's roots for this whole scene to develop.

There's a weedy grass that got out of control in our yard while we were otherwise occupied with parenting duties, and when I finally decided to reclaim my garden and started letting my daughter come outside and explore while we worked, we'd get covered with its sticky seeds. Even the regular feeling of desperation of just walking outside for a few minutes to pick greens or feed the animals, only to spend almost half an hour just picking the spines out of our pantlegs (and weeks afterward trying to eradicate it), managed to turn into a unexpected moment of repose, albeit a month or two later. Just today, my daughter and I were standing in the kitchen after coming in from outside and I noticed she was prostrate on the floor behind me. At first, since she has a frustrating puppy-like characteristic of chewing shoes, I impatiently said, no touch! But when I looked down, I realized she was picking seeds off the bottom of my pantleg and couldn't help but smile. This is a 17-month old, who picks kale leaves and feeds them to our chickens—why had I assumed she was just getting into trouble instead of doing something constructive? I took a deep breath, stooped down, and hugged and thanked her, acknowledging to myself that I'd judged the moment too quickly.

The living things in our garden have been in a relative state of neglect, with the exception of our flock of chickens. They didn't lay a single egg for almost 4 months this past winter, and we were starting to wonder if our efforts to keep them fed and safe were in vain. Our older chickens almost got passed over for new chicks to replace them. But then miraculously, almost a month ago, they began laying again, and right now, not one but two of them are sitting on eggs in the nest, in the hopes that they will become first time moms to some fuzzy little chicks in less than a couple weeks. In checking up on them last night I observed that one of the 7 eggs they'd laid and were brooding was crushed and smeared over the others. I couldn't figure out if it was them or the other chickens coming in and stepping on them. So I decided to try and experiment with a swinging door so they could get out and eat and drink water once or twice a day but that would block the other two hens from coming in, who'd have to lay their eggs in a lower nest box. As I was snipping and collecting grass from around the yard, and placing it in the coop, rearranging the eggs carefully, I couldn't help but think of an Easter basket. Then I thought, duh, these *were* the original Easter egg hunts! Even though I probably won't have time or money to do up a fancy colorful gift basket like the kind we used to get as kids, we'll have the satisfaction of having the real thing.

Not to be trite, but cliches describe these situations well—finding the silver lining of every cloud, or asking yourself what you can learn from a situation. My own personal list goes on, but I hope I've made my point. In these particular moments, I made a mental note that sometimes even the most disdainful situations can have surprisingly sweet results—especially if you take the time to look for them.

July 15, 2011

Summer Fruits

My first trip to the States with my daughter is coming to an end soon. Although there's lots I could tell about it, such as how it feels to see her respond to family, how it feels to travel without my husband, what it feels like to go through reverse culture shock every year when I come back in contact with the U.S., I was most compelled to write about an experience I had yesterday morning. I think it's because it embodies a lot of what has meaning for me, being from Upstate New York, and what I've taken away from it even when I'm far—

I went to visit my grandmother's house next door. There is a small forest between hers and my parents' houses, where songbirds call every morning. I pushed the umbrella stroller up the driveway, across the front yard, and into her backyard, under the huge maple tree and bumping over its roots, to the raspberry patch in the backyard. When I was a kid I used to help pick quarts which we'd either eat as a family or they'd sell in a roadside stand or trade with the uncle across the street for tomatoes. Now, as I approached with the baby cooing, they were overgrown with grass and sprawling every which way. My grandfather, who was probably responsible for pruning the canes, has long since passed, and my grandma is frail at 89. In any case, I was delighted to see a few red ones peeking out, so I picked several and then went into the house. My cousin, who lives with my grandma, came out to hold the baby while I filled a quart basket quickly, stepping through the thorny branches and lifting them up and to the side to expose ripe fruits without a scratch as only one who's done it for years can do.

Soon, my grandma was dressed and had come out with her cane and another quart basket. Although she wanted to pick some herself, I worriedly observed her as she wobbled by the bushes. "Oh my God," she exclaimed when she saw how overgrown the patch had become. "There's still a lot of good ones in here," I said, and I worked quickly to fill another half quart after she passed me a few handfuls. But when I saw she'd crushed a red berry on her Keds and was having trouble backing up, I recommended we head back in for the heat and that my skin was getting itchy from the grass—I didn't want her to take a tumble in the brambles. So we headed back in, and I plotted my raspberry mousse pie while explaining to my grandma why I'd be holding off on letting the baby try berries until she was a year old. She couldn't quite understand the gist and I found myself wondering what the wisdom of following the recommendations to a T were anyways.

Before my grandmother had come out, I'd asked my cousin if he wasn't too agriculturally inclined. "Why do you ask," he said. "Oh, I don't know," I replied, "I guess it just strikes me as a little sad that his raspberry patch is going to pot." I was thinking of the days when the garden was well-tended, even to the times I've been told about when my grandmother's own mother had a flourshing production farm that brought the family close to self-sufficiency during Depression and war times. It seems as if with the passing of every generation, a little more of the old ways are lost. And so, in an effort to reverse this trend, like others who are interested in local agriculture and restoration, I'm trying to establish our own sustainable garden down in the semidesert where we live. It's a combination of organic gardening and native plant conservation. It means growing fruit and pine trees on recycled greywater lines alongside kale, carrots, and squash in raised beds, near the mesquites, nopales, and agaves that shore up the hillside and the chilitos and garambullos, cacti who give us our own wild southern summer fruits.

Even so, there's something unnerving about being the first in four or five generations of the maternal line to break ground in an unfamiliar land. I've been trying to put my finger on what's the essence of what I'll miss when I go, and the closest I can come to is the familiarity of the verdant tree cover around my parents' house, the black-capped chickadee and cardinal songs issuing from the leaves, the easy laughter of us hanging out on the family room floor watching the baby play with her new American toys. But I must "bloom where I'm planted," as my mom names the dictum that I'm trying to follow. As nurserymen know, it's not so easy for roots to overcome transplant shock, especially when the seedling is put in a climate entirely different than the one it's adapted to. But part of evolution is playing with the hand life deals you, leading to survival of the species over time.

And so I was comforted to hear my grandmother say something that surprised me when she observed the raspberry patch in 'ruins'. "Forever wild," she declared. My cousin said it was in reference to an Audubon campaign he'd told her about, one that promotes the reclaiming of native habitat in backyards. I had to admit, the thought of the raspberries going feral under the sumac and providing sustenance to the local wildlife, the whole of which would eventually give way to more maple forest—after all, the ferns and wild strawberries are already moving in—was just as sweet as the thought of human hands picking and enjoying the ruby red fruits. It helps me not think of the alternative, what's already happened in most of the neighborhood and what's happening again down where I live—the wholesale development of open space. It pains me that I don't have much control over the destiny of my old backyard haunts, that I care for so much, but must be so far from. But if my grandma, who's spent her entire life tending cultivated patches, could be OK with releasing the raspberry patch into the hands of nature and the unknown future, so can I.

June 3, 2011

Change of Scenery

Why did the roadrunner cross the road? To get to the birdbath, of course. Like Wily Coyote, my nose was shocked out of a book (a journal from 2003) by a roadrunner recently. No, it didn't come up and rub noses with me, but rather, Margo said, the roadrunner was in our yard. I was shocked because it's been a loooong time since there's been one in our yard. When we first built the house, he/she quickly found the "birdbath" I'd stashed at the base of a mesquite tree; the bottom cutoff third of a 5 gallon bucket filled with some rocks and water. The roadrunner, to my delight, wasn't the only regular fixture at the watering hole, although most of the birds didn't really settle in and ramp up their presence until construction was over a year later.

Unfortunately, one of the local customs here is to wall off entire properties with brick walls. Although I expressed that I wasn't too keen on that idea for our house (I don't like fences and borders in general—ask me why later) since we live on a shared ranch with several other in-laws, I was kind of outnumbered. Now, four years later, ground-bound animals like the roadrunner and snakes aren't as likely visitors anymore. So I was pleasantly surprised when Margo reported he'd found his way to our yard, and again when I saw him tooling around in the vacant lot behind our house from our bathroom window the other day. Miracle or not that he's still hanging around, I can't help but wonder just how long he/she'll be able to hang around the neighborhood. It's not that I'm particularly cynical, but I've got firsthand testimony about just how much things have changed here, in a fairly short period of time.

The other day we were running our weekly errands down in the commercial district with the baby. It was one of those particularly hot May days (May's the hottest month here til' the cold, high elevation rains arrive in the summer), the temperature needle pushing 100. Weekly shopping is always like an endurance event, mainly because we're so cheap and choosy that we need to go to like 4 different stores to get everything we need at the lowest possible price. El "Tepe" (the local marketplace), Comercial Mexicana (the Mexican version of P&C), Organica or La Bodeguita (the only 2 organic produce shops I've found so far on the north side of town—though I've heard more are popping up downtown, it's a pain to get in and out), and Costco (oh yeah). We were almost done, and the baby had fallen asleep in her carseat, but I'd forgotten a drink and a snack, and as those of you who've breastfed know, if a nursing mother gets hungry, watch out.

I hate being in this kind of position—I'm more a slow food than a fast food person, as my last friend who visited (Cristin) pointed out—I'd rather get low blood sugar and wait to get home and make a meal at home than go stand in a line to satisfy my craving and waste my precious greenbacks. But by this time, I was already pushing cranky with one more shopping stop to go, and the line was way too long for a salad at Costco, so I did something I am ashamed to admit on the Internet (especially if my family reads this—ha, you guys can lambaste me later), I WENT TO THE MCDONALDS DRIVE-THROUGH.

Margo was driving, I was between him and the baby in the Toyota. Pulling up to the order mike, he was like, so, what do I do? I told him what to say: Two sundaes. Chocolate. With peanuts. He repeated after me. We pulled up to the window to pay. He turned to me and said, I can't believe people do this. What do you mean, I said. This is so lazy, he sputtered. Is this your first time, I asked, stunned. Well, yeah, why would I ever come here, he answered. I sat chewing this over. Although it was only my 4th time in 4 and a half years at a McDonalds (2 other times were for sundaes, by myself, and once was for an ice tea with my parents in North Carolina), I couldn't help but feel sad that I'd somehow tainted Margo by bringing him to a McDonald's drive through. Sitting there eating our sundaes, though, I felt a bit better. He was liking his too. See, it's not that bad, if you go just once in a while, I said, trying to assuage my guilt. He sat pensive, we were sitting in the parking lot under a mesquite. The rushing traffic of the Bernardo Quintana boulevard was directly to our right, and the gigantic Costco parking lot stretched out like a couple football fields before us.

He started talking about how this parking lot used to be a huge field filled with pirul and mesquite trees and how he used to bring the cows here to pasture. When he tells me other things about those days, I marvel at how much things have changed in the last 30 years. It's not unlike how many tracts of land up in the U.S. get turned into suburban sprawl in 5 years flat, but it seems even more accelerated on the outskirts of town here these days. Some consider it encroachment from Mexico City, but it probably has a lot to do with a lot of families like Margo's generation, who had 10+ kid families. Looking at the baby to my right, I couldn't help but wonder, how much will things change in the next thirty?

Back at our house, they recently finished the first building in the zone directly behind our home. It's a construction supplies warehouse, and it's somewhere in the realm of 70' long and 50' high, uphill of us at an elevation approximately that of our second floor. The entire enormous rear wall is painted white and emblazoned with the message "Cemento Tolteca Extra, Reduce Grietas Hasta un 50%" in red, blue, and green. When you pull into the ranch property, now before you see anything else, you see the sign "Grupo Santa Andrea" first thing framed against the bright blue sky. My father-in-law laughed when I told him I wasn't too hot on the new billboard in our backyard. He said he used to see the mountains and the planes landing at the nearby airport from the bed inside the house when he woke up in the morning, but now he sees his other son's house. Change can often be a good thing, but sometimes it just depends on your perspective. For those of us who haven't been around as long as Don Lupe, or haven't paid much attention to our surroundings, we might not notice all the changes in scenery but they are happening with every breath.

January 3, 2011

Selected Blog Archives from 2006-2010 (Yahoo)

These posts encompass the time from when I first moved to Mexico with my husband Margarito, to our first winter with our daughter. Together, they cover a lot of territory!

2006