QUAIL MUTTERINGS #7. Slow Meanderings – April 29, 2011

Having the stomach flue blows, both literally and figuratively. I won’t go into the literal details since we all know them so well. But because of these aspects we also don’t feel up to doing anything – routine or fun, and that is a bummer too. I spent all day yesterday inside or on the porch moving from bed, to couch, to recliner, to adirondak chair… In spite of the turmoil going on inside my body the natural world outside went on as usual.

Plopping down in the chair today on the east side of the porch the morning sun warmed my feet and legs while the roof overhang shaded my face and upper body. I looked out to a rock by the mulberry tree where there sits the top bowl section of a cement bird bath. I’d scavenged it after the Cedar Fire and it now functions as a small watering hole for the critters. A large quail, with a darkened head, stood on the rock beside it. He looked so serene there. He’d come yesterday as well.

After my friend disappeared behind the rock my eyes glazed over until movement in the nearer vicinity re-focused them. Lizards. On the old Torrey Pine tree stump, what’s left of it after the fire, a large bluish-black alligator lizard lay sprawled, soaking the sun’s warmth into its core. It must feel so good to him. Then a smaller grey lizard scrambled up from below and stopped near the top to do his morning push-ups. A tiny little one ran along the rock wall to meet up with another before disappearing into the periwinkle.

The cacophony of bird songs here, in my opinion, is unrivaled anywhere. The canyon seems to be their haven of refuge. Their voices fill the air from before dawn until nightfall, at which time the porwil and owls take over, and of course the frogs. I love listening to them all. The canyon wrens with their descending calls, the muted mutterings and fervent blasts of the quail, the hawks, ravens, and everybody else. It’s music to my ears.

Earlier this week friends of mine, Dorothy Mushet and her daughter, Cindy, and her two boys, came to visit. Dorothy had come to see the canyon with her own eyes instead of relying solely on photographs. We’re collaborating on a children’s book about my mom’s experience raising a family of orphaned baby squirrels with the assistance of my daughter, Kali, when she was about ten-years-old. I’ve written the text and Dorothy is painting the watercolor images. She is a wildlife and children’s artist. Her gallery is the Banner Queen Ranch Trading Post, and she lives in Julian.

Walking up the trail with camera in hand she’s surprised how lush and green everything is here.

“I think I’ll need to add more oak trees to the illustrations and make them a darker green,” she says. “Also more quail. There sure are a lot of them here.”

The boys are excited by all the huge boulders and climb one of them, sliding on their rear ends down the long, sloped side. They’re also intrigued by the four burnt Model-A carcasses slumping in the canyon.

Coming into the house Dorothy sits on the couch and opens her sketch pad.

Cindy says, “On the drive down here she said you might fire her after seeing what she’s done.”

I look down at the pages as she turns them explaining her presentation on each one and fight back tears.

“Yeah, right. Fire you? Maybe I should be fired. These are absolutely beautiful. They’re perfect,” I say.

“So I’m on the right track?” she asks.

“Yes. Most definitely. These are fabulous.”

I feel grateful for choosing her for the illustrations. I felt from the get-go of starting to write this book that she was the one. When I’d called to ask her about it she confessed that my mom had asked her to paint two pictures: one of a ground squirrel and the other a wolf. She hadn’t gotten to them before my mom’s passing and had felt a little guilty. Perhaps this was meant to be, a collaborative effort for all our sakes. Personal things had transpired for both Dorothy and me making it clear to us we were on the right path. Hokey or not as all this may sound, sometimes it’s what gets the job done.

QUAIL MUTTERINGS #6. A Special Hawk – April 3, 2011

            Our three Nubian baby goats are a year old now. Lily is so named for her long, beautiful white ears which hang down framing her cute little brown face. Lap Goat is a solid brown doe, with black highlights, who would constantly climb into my lap whenever I’d sit down in their pen. And Buddy is the dark brown little runt who’s lucky to be alive. He’s positively adorable. He somehow injured his frail little back, early on, and I had to give him injections of Prednisone after visiting the veterinarian. We almost lost him, but those shots everyday, then every other day, and then twice a week and so on, saved him. Of course, we’d have to spend the most time and money on the one we weren’t even planning to keep.

When the kid goats were about a month old our friends, Mark and Helen, came over to see them. When we headed over to the animals we noticed a very large bird perched in a tree up on our south mountain. That thing was huge and not colored like a raven, buzzard or hawk so we thought it might be an eagle. Mark went to his car to get his monocular so we could study it up close. The device is small and he keeps it handy for such occasions.

This avian was massive. Its whole breast area was white which was probably why we noticed it in the first place, sitting way up on top of an oak tree. We passed the monocular around quickly so that we each would get a chance to see it, but we needn’t have worried. It stayed there a long time. We even stopped looking after a while to play with the baby goats. When someone looked up again, it was gone. Kent researched it later and decided that it was a Ferruginous hawk. They’re much bigger than other hawks, have the white breast, like to perch up high in the tops of trees, and stay there a while looking out over their domain. It met all these criteria so I guess that’s what it was and they do live in this area.

In December, the day of the Dance Centre’s Ramona performance of The Nutcracker, I saw it again. It was a nice sunny, warm day and I took my lunch out on the porch to enjoy some time outside. The last few weeks had been hectic directing rehearsals and getting costumes and props ready for the concerts. I was about to take a bite of my feta and sorrel quesadilla when I noticed the large bird on top of an oak tree on the north ridge. I went inside to fetch my binoculars. It was the highlight of my day – sharing time and space with that beautiful, majestic creature. And once again, he stayed a while. For the whole time I ate my lunch.

The Nutcracker performances went well that season. Everyone seemed to enjoy participating and/or spectating. We also performed the ballet in Julian. That day was much warmer than when we had taken the troupe up there two years before and the cold wind whipped ice and sleet through town.

A couple months ago, during my morning run, I glanced up the north hill and saw that Ferruginous hawk again. I stopped for a minute to admire him. This time his oak perch was at the Tree Cave on the south slope of the north mountain. We call it the Tree Cave simply because there is a large live oak growing up through the center of the cave. When you walk through the natural shelter you sink to your knees in loose leaves. At least I did as a kid, back when I spent more time in there. Anyway, my large hawk friend stayed put during most of my laps so I got to see him several times.

There are a string of seven caves on that mountainside, not counting the Tree Cave. I discovered them one day as a kid when I was hiking around. They start with the Bat Cave. Yes, so named because bats live in there. From that cave you climb upward heading northeast, sometimes crawling through small openings between rocks or bushwhacking through the dense buckwheat, sumac, lilac and chemise which make up our Ramona chaparral.

As a teenager, I found a cave up above the Saddle which was stacked full of clay. The local Indians must have wanted to store some of the precious red mud out of the weather. The clay pit is nearby. It is rimmed with large quartz rocks and is a very special place. The area is littered with pottery shards. My mom had worked some of this clay, carefully preparing it by sifting and rinsing. She sculpted a woman’s bust from this rustic, red powder and fired it at cone ten, which is stoneware. Not all clay can be fired that hot and be preserved this well. Mom gave her work of art to my dad as a gift, a long time ago. Years later, she used the foundry at Palomar College to pour bronze replicas of her sculpture. I now have the original clay bust. Dad had given it to me after Mom’s passing and I’ll cherish it always.

QUAIL MUTTERINGS #5. Squirrel Paradox – April 2, 2011

My mom was a total do-it-yourselfer, back to the land kind of person. She knew how to build anything and her can-do attitude served her well, saving her quite a bit of money in the long run. For projects around the farm, which most people would hire a plumber or a handyman, she’d just take the task on herself, usually doing the job better than they would have. She was thorough and conscientious, always.

About twelve years ago, when all three of my children were still young and living at home, my mom accidentally disturbed a nest of baby ground squirrels. In order to soften the dirt for digging she first poked the ground with a metal rod attached to a hose which squirted pressurized water out the bottom. When she and my daughter, Kali, began digging she turned up a shovel full of dirt with three wriggling baby squirrels. They were so young that they didn’t even have their eyes open yet and their skin was translucent. Kali helped her grandmother, Gramaset, carefully brush the dirt off each one of them before taking the newborns inside. Gramaset found an old shoe box and some rags and created a makeshift nest for them next to the warm wood burning stove. One of the wee ones had a broken tail, kinked near the end, where the shovel had most likely nicked it.

Kali ran home and excitedly explained to me what had happened and said, “We need some goat milk for the babies.”

I poured a little into a small glass jar and we quickly walked the quarter mile up the dirt road to my mom’s place. She’d found an eye-dropper to feed them from and some baby cereal to mix with the goat milk. Mom was very talented with animal husbandry. She currently was taking care of four geriatric horses which kept her from leaving the property for any extended period of time. When I was a kid we had a goat that we staked up on the mountain to clear brush. One day a dog came through and severely mauled it. It had left it for dead with a huge, gaping hole in its side where the innards were spilling out. That night, in the dark, my mom and dad carried the goat from the mountainside to the house on a homemade stretcher, with my sister and me holding flashlights for them. Mom stayed up all night carefully stitching that goat back together saving her life.

Now with the baby squirrels, she got up four times a night, just like a mother with a newborn baby would do, and fed them from the eye-dropper and made sure they were warm enough. Kali went up each day to help. They named the one with the kinked tail, Broken Tail. He became the tamest of the bunch. When the younguns got old enough to start getting around on their own they moved from the shoe box to a small cage and began eating dry cat food. From this they graduated to a larger cage outside where they could see other wildlife.

By mid summer, Gramaset and Kali had built an even bigger pen on the ground so that when their little friends were ready they could dig out and be on their own. One day, when Kali was carrying the pie tin with cat food out to them, she noticed that Broken Tail was gone. She was relieved to see him running back to the cage and ducking through the tunnel he’d made. They were all very tame by now and Kali had to be careful not to feed them by hand and get her fingers bitten.

There came a time when the young family dug out for good. Although they still hung around the area and were much tamer than the wild squirrels. In fact, one of them was a little too tame for my taste. In the mornings I’d run loops up to Mom’s end of the canyon. Sometimes, one of those little buggers would stand guard up on a boulder and wait for me. When I’d pass by he’d run out at me threateningly. I yelled and waved my arms at him menacingly, but he kept doing it. It was a game to him. Finally, I threatened him with a shovel and then he quit doing it. But it took me a while to stop looking for him, worried that the little demon would run out and bite me.

Since the Cedar Fire there seems to be an over abundance of squirrels here in the canyon. We’ve had to completely fence in the garden areas, including under the ground as well as the roof. Otherwise we’d have no harvest left for ourselves, thanks to Mom’s little friends. I borrowed a squirrel trap, one that can catch up to a dozen at a time. But I couldn’t bring myself to use it. For some reason, unclear to me, I’m not supposed to hurt them. I’ve gone out and sat on the rocks behind the house and set my intentions on making deals with the enemy such as, “If you leave my garden alone I’ll let you live.” Ha. The neighbors shoot them so they all come here to live.

The squirrels started coming to me. Most of these encounters take place when I’m standing at my bedroom window looking out at the ledge above the brick wall and the rocks behind the house, literally a yard away. One time, a squirrel was there looking at me. It vomited and then laid down on the wall for a two hour nap. Another time, one looked in at me, dug a hole, relieved itself, covered it back up and walked away. Last spring, a mother squirrel raised her new family on those rocks below the cistern encouraging the babies to come visit me. They were quite entertaining. Other times, they have come and stood on their hind legs and gawked in at me as if trying to tell me something. “What? I don’t understand!” I guess I’m too dense to comprehend their message.

I’m now working on a children’s book about the squirrels. I wrote the text and gathered some pictures of my mom and Kali to give to the wildlife artist who’s doing the illustrations for it. She wanted some photos of ground squirrels too. I went outside with my little 35 mm camera and noticed one of my small friends up the hill. I explained to him that this was for The Squirrel Book and asked if he would cooperate. I swear, that little bugger let me follow him around and he kept posing for me: standing up on his back legs on a stump, eating a blade of grass, scratching himself on a rock… Go figure.