Mother Love

The black phoebe pair in our garden has successfully fledged their first batch of nestlings. (This picture is of the fledging a couple of years ago; we missed this year's as we were at work).

Every year, the phoebes come back to our garden, clean out the old nest under the eaves, and lay their eggs. We saw three babies this year, which is typical. A few days ago the young 'uns were standing on the edge of the nest practicing flapping their wings, as their busy parents took turns bringing them them a non-stop supply of bugs, some of which were alarmingly large and leggy. At night, mom tucked herself at the edge of the nest to keep her growing nestlings warm.

Now they have flown. I'm sure they are as demanding and selfish as fledglings everywhere. But their parents did a fine job,and I hope the babies will remember those lessons when they come to build their own nests in years to come.

Happy Mother's Day!

The Flowers that Bloom in the Spring

I've told you before about the Anza-Borrego Desert. It's a place BP and I love (we spent part of our honeymoon there), treasuring its beauty and the myriad forms of life that figure out how to survive there.

Generally, California is only green for the month of March. Somehow, the green color softens the hills. This has been a wet winter for Southern California (San Diego is lucky to see 5 inches of rain a year). And, the storms have been spread out, meaning the rain that made it out to the desert did not fall all at once, but more dispersed. This has made it an excellent year for wildflowers, and I'm sure the calls to the Anza Borrego Wildflower Hotline have been legion. (This is the Southern Californian equivalent to New England Leaf-Peepers.)

So, along with everyone else in San Diego, we headed to Borrego this weekend, taking our trusty Honda along rough dirt roads and fishtailing through sandy washes. We were certainly rewarded, with veritable carpets of flowers, scumbled as if by a painter's hand in patches on the desert floor. Even in the stark badlands, a few brave blooms could be found.

There were Arizona lupine, and sand verbena; brown-throated primrose, and desert dandelions. There were odd lilies and tiny magenta flowers wedged into the cracks of rocks. Even the tar-smelling creosote boasted small yellow flowers. And the great spindle ocotillo with red flowers at the tips of their branches, like candles. Insects and birds are busy, and we saw an enormous (ca. 4") caterpillar urgently eating its way through one bush.

Many flowers are still to come including indigo bush, desert lavendar, and cacti like the various cholla. It's early yet and with the passing weeks the bloom will move up the mountain, until the hills have a final surge of color, then return to their drab golden brown for the next 10 months.


Update: This is for Margaret. This caterpillar is about 4.5" long--you could hear him chomping. His tail has spikes. I bet he makes a fearsome moth. Click on this (or any pictures) for a bigger view.

Everything has a cost: lessons from a jacaranda

Nothing comes free, does it? It's early May, and the jacarandas are in bloom in the really old neighborhoods of southern California's cities like San Diego and Los Angeles. These imported trees have an intense purple color that almost glows in the dark and provides a needed dash of beauty in the tired old city streets. One of my most vivid mental pictures is driving down LA's lower Broadway early on a spring evening a few years ago, south of downtown, where the dull industrial buildings and red brick seemed as though they were illuminated by the glow of the jacarandas.

Despite their beauty, the trees aren't planted in new developments. They are very messy, dropping petals and sticky goo all over the street. You need a maintenance team to fight back. In earlier days, people thought it was worth it, but not any more.

It's rather sad, I think. We're such a hurry-up society, unwilling to make the investment or pay the cost. We want it all just so, colored within the arbitrary lines that we set. And whether its children or colleagues or congregations, we are unwilling to make space for the messy yet wonderful variation that oozes outside the lines and gives our lives color and variety. But I am an advocate for breaking outside the lines. I'm going to celebrate the jacarandas.

Picture from here

Signs of Spring, new birth, and hope

Here in Southern California, it is definitely well into spring. My pea plants are flowering and we are already starting to harvest radishes, and it is sunny and warm. (It stops raining here in March.)

A few years ago, the phoebes built a mud nest under the eaves of our house and now every year they come back to raise a couple of broods of babies in it. Phoebes are black and white flycatchers, very common in the suburbs here. They are devoted parents and during the day there is a regular cycle of each parent bringing large and delectable bugs to the peeping babies. The first brood of 2009 is being fed right now. I can occasionally see a bill or a tail of a baby over the edge of the nest. At night, one of the parents wedges itself on the top of the nest to keep them warm. There are at least 2 or 3 fledglings in the nest.

Last year, we were astonished when the nest (about the size of a regular sized teacup) erupted forth with 4 babies! We had the privilege of watching first flight from the nest down to our table where they stayed while the parents continued to feed them. That's what the picture is; notice the baby has its mouth open to be fed! At night, mom and dad herded the babies back up to the nest where they oozed over the edges, being far too big to fit. Each day they flew a little further around the garden, but on the 4th day, they finally flew away.

With all the baby phoebes we have hatched over the years, we have to wonder if we have populated this entire neighborhood with these industrious, unassuming birds. It's sadder to think that some of our babies may not have survived the winter, gentle as it is in southern California. So I'm not thinking about that, but instead wondering how many new birds are behind the peeps that I can hear, and how they manage to eat those enormous bugs that mom and dad bring them, and whether BP and I will be lucky enough see that first hopeful, clumsy flight when they finally emerge from the nest.

The season of triumph and defeat

It's spring, and it's admissions and graduation season. On my university campus, faculty and students are hunkered down for the remaining weeks till the end of term and finals, while the university is just beginning the long "fix-it-up" period prior to commencement (new plantings, painting, etc).

Meanwhile, high school students are waiting for the envelopes from universities and colleges. The media tells us stories about hyper-articulate kids who get admitted everywhere they try. As a step-parent to teenagers, I know the media darlings are abnormal pseudo-children who were probably reading German philosophy in the original at age 12, and certainly didn't spend puberty trying to grow up like most kids do.

In our household, the joys of college acceptance have been undercut by the pains of rejection. Our young scholar, who really got it together this year academically, was a little too late-blooming for his preferred campuses, and there is a lot of disappointment chez IT. If only his beanstalk-like spurt into adulthood had happened a year or two earlier! I know he'll do fine, and learning to deal with setbacks is part of growing up, but it's still painful to see your kid lose that first dream. Even though we know he'll join the ranks of still-spotty freshmen somewhere, and begin to climb the ladder anew.

My undergraduate students are in the same boat, waiting for letters from graduate and medical schools, or facing a decision deadline. There are the triumphant ones who have choices between desirable programs, and whose only problem is making the decision. They have expansive body language, and loud and cheerful voices before class. For them, commencement will be a joyous culmination of their triumph, surrounded by doting parents and draped in ribbons and academic "bling". Then there are the quiet ones, who have about them an injured stillness, because they were not admitted by their schools of choice. For them, commencement day will be bitter-sweet, and the equally well-deserved and hard-won honors and ribbons will feel hollow. As with my stepson, I want to sweep them up and comfort them and tell them none of it matters and they will do fine, but their fragile young-adult dignity won't allow it.

And we, the faculty, soon to pull our regalia out of its year-long slumber and shake off the dust, we will see yet another year end. The students look just as young, but we faculty are greying and more lined, as though we are the painting to the students' Dorian Grey. The yin and yang of academic life, the same patterns played out every year, as we launch our newest fledglings in their season of triumph and defeat.

Desert blooms

The deserts of California may look bleak and dead to the casual visitor. But to afficionados, the subtlety of color and texture and aroma hint at the life under the khaki.

Depending on how wet the year has been (and it generally isn't very), there is a brief spring bloom of wild flowers in the desert. First, tiny ground-hugging flowers carpet the desert floor, in succession of white and pink and yellow. A little later, the brilliant cactus flowers appear, like garish neon lights from all-night diners, luring in traveling birds and insects for a meal. None of it lasts very long, so the desert parks have "wildflower hotlines" not unlike the leaf-peepers of a New England Autumn. This picture from 2008 shows the long, spindly ocotillo, the fuzzy looking cholla, and the beavertail cactus with its vivid pink flowers. That silvery branch in the front right looks like a piece of smoke tree.

Usually BP and I try to get out to the desert during wildflower season, to admire how the brief period of color illuminates the normally stark landscape. But this has been a brutally busy year for us and we have had no chance to get away. Now, the season is over, and we missed it, and are worn out to boot. Oh well. Maybe next year.