Count Squirrel Nests

November 6, 2010.  Saturday.

Situation:   Early this morning Moi mentions going down the lane to check the mail, and she’s still thinking about the kitten, worried that she might find it dead.  “I feel real bad,” she says, “I feel guilty.  But if it had rabies and I even get saliva on me…”  Both of us work tonight, but at separate places; and I work late, 9 – 12 pm.  Eventually Moi goes down to get the mail, and she tells me that the kitten is no longer where it was.  “Maybe it got over whatever was making it sick.  Or maybe one of our neighbors saw it and picked it up,” she speculates.  Moi shows me how Woody likes to fetch a little cloth mouse.  “Maybe he’ll someday go on walks with Mway.”  Mway looks on, nervous, pacing, eventually even barking.  She even pounces one time as Woody runs after the mouse, and Woody has to sneak behind a chair to bring the mouse back to Moi.  Everyone takes a nap from 2 to 3:45.  It’s now a little before 4, and I’m ready to take Mway for her walk.

State of the Path:  With the leaves off the trees, squirrel nests are easy to see, and, after first seeing one in the tree next to the outbuilding, I decide to count them.  I see three more in a tree beside the walled garden (although a couple of them look bedgraggled and may be old), a big one in a tree in the hedgerow close to the house (our willow, which I see when I look up that way, planted a little inappropriately in a rise of ground near the corn crib, is about the only tree that still bears green leaves), and another old bedgraggled one in a tree at the beginning of the old orchard – I don’t see anymore until I come up toward the clearing: none in the oaks by the creek, which suggests to me that squirrels prefer black walnuts, and I wonder what they do in a season like this one when the trees have not borne any walnuts, and I try to remember when was the last time I saw a squirrel -- I don’t know.  I scare a female cardinal out of a honeysuckle before the wigwams.  I watch my shadow passing over the brown grass of bug land.  In the the sky are thick bands of dark clouds, a swatch of blue, and a thick band of white clouds that slowly grows darker over the course of the walk.  Down by the creek, I spot – and, yes, I definitely can tell what it is – a black-capped chickadee in the bare mutiflora branches surrounding an oak tree.  I can’t remember when I’ve had such a good view of a bird.  It flies across the creek and lands on a honeysuckle.  I hear it make some buzzing noises – at least I think the noises are coming from it – and then I hear what I’ve always called its be-bop call (what Audubon describes as a “whistled fee-bee, the second note lower and often doubled).  Then after I walk the plank, I see about five more black-capped chickadees in another bare multiflora surrounding another tree.  They flit from branch to branch, nibbling at something, but I don’t see any berries on this particular mutliflora.  Then one of the birds suddenly seems to have yellow markings on it, and it looks like some other kind of chickadee (of course, I find nothing like it in Audubon – maybe my eyes were playing tricks on me).  In the break in the ridge, Mway suddenly stops, a paw raised – and I think maybe she’s sensed a raccoon or something, but soon she continues on.  I take the path up toward the summer house, and here I count more squirrel nests, the big one in the tree near our property line, and three in the trees around the summer house.

State of the Creek:  My shadow walks on top the quietly moving water, but today, instead of jumping onto the honeysuckle, it seems to slip behind it.

The Fetch:  I toss toward the “chokeberry” and the honeysuckle.  On about the fifth toss, the stick slips from my grasp, makes a slice deep into the goldenrod.  But Mway pinpoints where it landed -- it seems solely by hearing -- and after already having run toward the honeysuckle, changes direction and makes a beeline into the weeds.  I don’t like how Mway is tearing up the grass in the middle of the clearing, so I stand off a little more into the newly trampled goldenrod.  We go to level 2, and again I keep saying “put it down” until Mway, standing in front of me with the stick without dropping it, has decided for herself that she’s had enough.