Outwitting a Robin, Hawk Wars and Birds in Concert

Yesterday

He' s not much afraid of me, that fat red-breasted fellow strutting along the paths in the woods.  He cocks his head and keeps a beady eye on me until I turn my back, and then he promptly flips over every bit of loose moss he can find. I'm not sure if he really thinks there may be a tasty worm under there or if he is just playing a game with me and likes to watch me put it back. After all, he just checked it a few minutes ago, and he knows what's under there.. I'm not much appreciating his sense of humor!

But I'm smart, too. And maybe I can outsmart that feather brained wiseacre. I have an secret weapon. Somewhere, a long time ago, I acquired a box of vintage hairpins, and I am going to pin that moss down!

The pins will just rust away. Ha! Take that, you feathered bandit!

Fade to this morning

Well, there was a lot less moss in the middle of the path and an lot more still fastened down. I missed a few pieces, but of course, Cock Robin didn't and flipped over every one that was loose. By mid afternoon, he had it figured out that he could just shred the moss to pieces and get it out that way. But not all of it! So far, I'm calling it a draw. I've still won some, there is more left pinned down than he has managed to tear up. At least if it's in bits he will just scatter it, and it will take hold where it falls. Then he can't flip it over!  I think I have learned that spring might not be a good time to transplant moss. Next time I'll wait until fall when Mr. Redbreast has flown south for the winter! (I have noticed that it isn't the female of the pair that's doing all the mischief, it's the male. She must be too busy with her housework and raising a family to be out there causing trouble!)

More bird drama, this time in the air. Hawks and crows are having a war! Several times a day a hawk comes screaming over the woods, with crows in hot pursuit. Whatever it is that he has done to offend the crows, they are definitely bent on running him out of town! Today there were a pair of hawks, and a whole murder of crows, circling and diving and chasing above the treetops. I think the hawks are nesting in the woods Out Beyond; tomorrow I will walk out there and see if I can find their tree. I'm not sure what kind of hawk it is, just that's big, so it might be a redtail or Cooper's hawk. They are moving too fast when they fly over for an ID!

I haven't seen anybody home here yet! This might be a crow's nest.

A mockingbird has taken up residence in the oak over the house, at least for his sound stage. When he opened his repertoire with a bob-o-link song, and followed it up with a whip-or-will, I knew him for a bird that has been around. His concert lasts a good 30 minutes, and I don't think he repeats anything, including a few cell phone rings in there. He is a dancer too; with every third song or so he leaps a couple of feet into the air and lands launching yet a new riff. Yesterday a robin in the walnut tree joined him and there were bird duets in stereo! What an awesome concert that was!

I guess I forgive him for the Moss Incident.

"Let us be like a bird for a moment perched

On a frail branch while he sings:

Though he feels it bend, yet he sings his song,

Knowing he has wings"

                   --William Blake

Pink Bloodroot and Nature in Chaos

When you have mossy paths in the woods, you can't rake them to get the leaves off, they have to be taken off by hand. That means you have to get down there and look the little spring flowers right in the eye, and see what they are up to. Which is how I found the pink bloodroot. There it was, right next to the dry creek, this little pink bud. At first I thought oh, a pink anemone, cool! A second look told me my mistake, and I couldn't believe what I was seeing! Last spring, I transplanted a few bloodroots to a new area, and I am pretty sure they were all white, but when I went back to look at the blooms this spring, where the original clump was, lo and behold! There was one with alternating silvery pink petals! Can't wait until tomorrow to see if the little pink bud opens up all pink, or with alternate petals also. The pink color variation is a rare occurance. This is the first time in my life I have ever seen it. 

The pink is a little hard to see, but my camera has decided not to work on macro, so this is all I got!

Four out of the eight petals on this bloodroot flower are silvery pink!

The funny thing was, I had been thinking about chaos, nature, evolution, plant DNA, what drives genetic change, just moments before, and there was the result, right before my eyes. Chaos is something most of us never think about, unless it happens to us, and then we just think of it as something terrible and upsetting.  Actually it is a "new" science, only recently recognized and studied. I don't even pretend to understand the higher mathematics of chaos, but it is a fascinating concept that includes fractals, which I love, and wouldn't be possible to calculate fully with without computers!. I can easily see how chaos drives Nature, or maybe it is Nature that drives chaos, or chaos that drives evolution, that drives Nature....or......the old question of what comes first! 

It involves a linear equation, such as the life of a plant: the seed sprouts, grows, flowers, sets seed, which sprouts and begins a new plant, and so on. Without error, this cycle could go on indefinitely in all the complexity that it takes to grow a plant to reproductive success, amd there would be no diversity.  But there is always an "error", no matter how slight, something unseen or unexpected that will disrupt the cycle. The plant dies from lack of rain, no bee is present to pollinate the flower, a deer eats the plant, a bird eats the seed. This is called a non-linear event, and chaos results. But the result of chaos is not tragic, it just triggers a change, into another linear cycle, until another non-linear event comes along to cause chaos again. A tree grows, year after year, a linear cycle. Then chaos: a storm fells the tree. The end? Only for the tree, the cycle of decay begins, and new life is nurtured with millions of chaotic events before the tree is gone, and even then, the process never stops. The chaos concept involves everything in the universe.  

No action can take place without causing change to something, and in order for change to take place, there has to be a chaotic non-linear event, so matter how infinitesimally small, to cause it. All sorts of things, big and little, can cause chaos that changes the environmment in some way. A big one that comes to mind is Hurricane Katrina. One change that came about because of the chaos caused by that storm affected the bird population of the midwest: immediately after the storm, fish crows began showing up in Missouri. They are a seacoast species, and were apparently either blown north by the hurricane, or escaping from the storm. They apparently liked it here, because they have decided to stay, throwing our native crow population into chaos by competing for food and habitat, thereby changing the ecology of our area.

So what caused the bloodroot to become pink? Some unknown non-linear event in the life of the plant, no doubt, throwing its DNA into chaos and causing a diversion in its genetic makeup. This sort of thing occurs in nature millions of times in a day, resulting in slow evolution of all species, including humans! (need evidence? Look at the changes the enviroment has caused in our physical bodies!) Plant hybridizers have learned to harness and use this type of event, giving us those wonderful new cultivars that we all covet.

Without Chaos, we would have no wonderful diversity of Nature. But without the actions of Nature, we would have no chaos. It is the Circle of Life, the Web of fragile threads to which everything is connected. Whatever happens to the Web effects everything in it. It drives climate change, our health, our daily lives, and the universe as a whole.  Our own actions cause chaos every day. In my woods today, it was me--cleaning up leaves, throwing millions of little microbial creatures' lives out of whack, uncovering plants and exposing them to sun and rain, changing my own environment ever so slightly. But those ever so-slight changes are non-linear events that could, over time, change the ecology of the woods. All gardening and farming efforts, for better or worse, cause chaos and change, as we can plainly see, looking at what has happened to the forests and prairies in the United States and the populations of many indiginous species, both plant and animal. Sometimes one chaotic event can set in motion changes that take many years to become evident; sometimes it happens in less than the blink of an eye.

Pretty deep musings for a day spent in the outdoors, huh. But it really made me aware of the amazing, complex life on this planet that we take for granted every day, and what cause and effect our (my, your) actions have on that life. Our very lives are as a result of Nature, and we depend on her for our lives. Nature is our nurturing Mother. So..... mind your Mother.