Plastic Bag in a Squirrel's Nest

March 16, 2010.  Tuesday.

Situation:  I have work to do in the late morning and early afternoon, get home around 2:30.  As I get out of the car, I see something flapping from a squirrel’s nest in a tree by the walled garden.  As I look closer, I realize it’s a piece of plastic bag – probably used by the squirrel for similar reasons we used the whole bag in the first place.  The Boy is home and says he plans to make supper.  Moi is out working most of the day, so I decide to do the dishes.  As I’m looking out the kitchen windows, I see that some day lilies around the summer house have sprouted and I see two bluejays frolicking in the front yard.  When I finish the dishes, about 3, I decide to take Mway for a walk.  It’s a warm day today, so I decide not to wear any jacket, just my walking clothes, and my boots, my gardening gloves, and orange wool cap (I decide against the helmet because I don’t want a brim impeding any view of birds I might have).  Mway has closed the door on herself in her room, so I have to open it to let her out.

State of the Path:  I hear starlings in the big spruce tree as soon as I get outside.  Mway first goes by the summer house then comes back to squat by the swimming pool.  I have my eyes out looking for the chickens and don’t see them anywhere, but as I’m walking down the sidewalk I hear roosters crowing somewhere up by the driveway.  Mway runs over by the chicken coop, but of course she doesn’t find any chickens, and she follows me into the walled garden.  In the big tree by the outbuilding, I scare up a bunch of redwing blackbirds that I then end up chasing among the trees through the old orchard to the back hedgerow.   I see a couple brown pigeon-headed-like birds fly from the garden into the old orchard – are these mourning doves?  In the old orchard, the water that was running through there before has dried up, but the ground gets wet again as I double back to the main path, and there is still water sitting in the gulleys down through the maples by the wigwams.  As I’m coming up to the pin oaks just before the creek, I hear spring peepers – the first time this year I hear them on a walk.  But as soon as I step up to the creek, they fall silent.  As I’m walking along the creek, I notice there are still ponds in bug land, and one that I hadn’t noticed before in front of the wooden barrier the Boy once used for playing paintball.   There is still water trickling through the drainage ditch from bug land.  I don’t take the side path by the skating pond, again because the sides of the feed channel look too slippery and there is a lot of water sitting in the channel.  It looks like some plant there in the water – a catty-nine-tails? – is getting ready to spring back to life.  Above the break in the ridge around bug land, the path is still very wet, and because shrubs and sumac trees hem in the path here, this is where I inevitably get water in my boots.

State of the Creek:  The creek is a little lower today, some areas resuming a rusty brown color.  At the log jam, there is foam and scum gathered in front of the big log, and in the pool behind it, I see one water strider.  I see a couple more striders in a pool farther down the creek.

The Fetch:  Mway meets me at the clearing.  As I’m walking toward the end of it to take my position for tossing the stick, she strides along, looking up at me and smiling, hopping and spinning around eagerly.  Then one fetch – that’s it, and deliberately avoiding my look she starts running down the path through the briars back toward the walled garden and finally to the back yard.  When I catch up to her in the back yard, she’s standing in the midst of chickens, without the stick in her mouth, looking up at me.  I keep walking toward the porch, Mway following me, chickens milling around.  I see the stick by the pool and tell Mway to pick it up.   She grabs it in her mouth, and follows me up on the porch with it, then drops it and stands at the door, waiting to be let in.  As I’m tossing the stick on the bench, I see a hen on the porch pecking at a bag of feed that Moi had taken out of the coop because rats were getting in it.  Yesterday, there was a broken flower pot on the porch.  I didn’t see any chickens on the porch yesterday, but I did see some chicken droppings, and my guess is that the chickens had knocked the flower pot over.