It’s not summer yet, but that doesn’t mean I can’t crank out my little bit of bullshit on the patio instead of in the office. I mean, it’s 64°, just past 8 a.m., and there are a lot more hummingbirds out here than there are in there.
Birds of another sort abound elsewhere. Buzzards, mostly. The Benighted States have been at the polls again, hoping to find a few that shit gold instead of what we’re wading through at the moment.
It might help if we focused on finding a species that isn’t focused on eating our entrails.
A robin, maybe. One’s busily plucking bugs from the back yard as I type. Good, useful work, that. Many insects infest the American lawn; many, many of them. A hungry robin might be just the ticket.
Aw, hell, who am I kidding here? We don’t need a robin. We need a Batman.*
* Or a Batwoman, Batperson, someone who identifies as a bat, is transitioning to a bat, I don’t give a shit. As long as s/he/they kick ass.
We’re generally light on mothers around here come the second Sunday in May. Herself isn’t one, and neither is Miss Mia Sopaipilla.
But for this Mother’s Day we have a robin sitting on a clutch of eggs in a fine, strong nest built in the Chinese pistache outside the dining room.
Two feeders, no waiting.
We’ve had doves cobble together some half-assed homes under the front overhang that mostly turn into fly-thru eateries for the neighborhood raptors. Hummingbirds tuck their teensy little bide-a-wees into the pines out front. And a variety of little cheepers have grown up in a dead limb of the backyard maple, holed at top and bottom by a ladder-backed woodpecker. A tree dude accidentally sawed it off while pruning the maple a while back, but he reinstalled it and it’s been home to at least one more family since then, so, winning, etc.
None of these little mothers ever pays any rent, but we don’t care. We even provide free feeds at our BB&B (Bird Bed & Breakfast). From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, as the fella says.
The hummingbird feeders are going back in the closet for now.
The quail are laying low. The hummingbirds have flown south. Yet one bird remains, flying more or less daily at the elaborate altars to fascism that The Duck! City MAGgots construct in their front yards.
I prefer the actual birds to the gnarly old featherless talon I flip to the yard signs, banners, and flags of the FreeDummies as I bicycle past their fauxdobe compounds in the foothills. Simultaneously a departure from and a riff on the traditional Halloween decor from China via Walmart, I suppose — but I like my goblins a little less, y’know, real. Y’know?
Now and then it seems I’ve pedaled into some hideous Mike Judge-Tim Burton reboot of “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.”
Linus, who considers himself an intellectual but gets his news and analysis from Facebook and NextDoor, pesters Pendleton about adding a Kevlar “Security Blanket” to its line. He wants one for his annual Halloween stint in the pumpkin patch, just in case another assassin decides to have a go at the Great Pumpkin, assuming he actually shows up.
Charlie Brown is an “independent” (unless you count Social Security and Medicare). It’s a convenient political fiction that means he hasn’t got the stones to put a “Pumpkin 2024” sign in his yard for fear of offending the Little Red-Haired Girl, who has long since married someone with a job and a future.
Not so Schroeder, the lone clone of an unrepentant Nazi who fled Germany as the Allies closed in; he plays “The Horst Wessel Song” on a toy piano while gazing soulfully at a framed, life-size, autographed photo of the Great Pumpkin cheating at squash.
Lucy is now a brittle bottle blonde who’s “had some work done” to keep her job as a screeching harridan for Fox News. These days she kicks balls rather than snatching them away from Charlie Brown.
Peppermint Patty (field-hockey coach) and Marcie (librarian) share a one-bedroom apartment with a dozen or so rescue cats and not nearly enough ventilation. But plenty of joy.
Pig-Pen is actually Steve Bannon (because of course he is). He had planned a live podcast from the big Halloween party until the FCI Danbury warden refused to honor his “Get Out of Jail Free” card from the Goldman Sachs’ edition of “Monopoly,” in which all properties are Park Place and only poor people go to jail.
And Snoopy is an undercover K-9 informing on all of them to the FBI.
Hot times in the old town, as the fella says. Yesterday’s high of 100° set a record for June 7. Normal is 89°.
But what’s normal these days?
The mule deer are slow-walking their rounds from rose bush to birdbath, lingering at feeders provided by some well-intentioned animal lovers up the road a ways. Wandering from this handout to that, the deer startle motorists in blind corners and make high-speed descents on the old two-wheeler a little more thrilling.
Seven of them were working our cul-de-sac last night, no doubt with designs on the neighbors’ new peach tree, which is enclosed in the sort of stout wire cage that should be restricting the movements of Alex Jones and Rudy the Mook, preferably in some public place so passersby can poke them with sharp sticks. Jones and the Mook, not the peach tree or deer.
Over at Desert Oracle Radio Ken Layne has his own musings on heat and wildlife as he settles in for another sweaty shift dishing up his Joshua Tree jive.
The days are long and hot and hazy. Another summer to endure. … It just eats at your nerves, this kind of weather, and what’s worse is you know that the hot weather is another month or two away. What’s bearable when you’re alone under a cottonwood in the breeze is absolute torment when you’re trying to get yourself from point A to point B and see ugliness all around. Dead eyes behind the cracked windshields of erratically piloted vehicles; the never-ending trash piles; empty strip malls of crumbling stucco and blank plastic signs. Long stretches of highway with nothing but human-built desolation. The ragweed’s coming up too. Best to stay on the property in the company of the creatures who survive this aesthetic apocalypse.
Layne provides a bit of heat relief for his neighbors. Young rock squirrels have taken to hanging around the water bowl he leaves out for the birds, one of them trying and failing to surf the ice cubes he includes from time to time. A cottontail dozes on the doormat. The bobcat, coyotes, and mountain lions he leaves to fend for themselves.
He has mule deer, too, hugging whatever shade they can find, under a willow or juniper. Doesn’t mention any peach trees or rose bushes.
Should we be feeding and watering these critters? Well … what we call “our” property was theirs first, after all. Is it unreasonable to ask that we contribute a little something to the common good?
This seems to be Layne’s thinking. And ours, too. We maintain two bird feeders and three hummingbird feeders, and don’t holler copper on the deer ambling through the yard. Noblesse oblige? Share and share alike? From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs? Here’s the Desert Oracle again:
Now these rock squirrels are desert squirrels, squirrels of the Southwest. They don’t even need water, beyond what they get from the various seeds, grasses, fruits and bugs that they eat. But these young squirrels, they are fools for cold water. They just hang around that bowl for half the day. And now I cannot replace that bowl with a proper birdbath even if I wanted to, because what will the squirrels and the bunnies do?
Hm. The weather seems less than ideal for the old bikey ridey this morning. The weather widget says we’ve gotten 0.15 inch since I oozed out of bed two hours ago, it’s still bucketing down, and I am no Laura Killingbeck. I prefer my velo-adventures sunny-side up with some toasty 65°-degree-plus temps if I can get ’em. Just ’cause I have mudguards doesn’t mean I wanna use ’em.
We Duck! Citizens enjoyed a high of 81° yesterday, well short of the record — 92° in 2022 — with zero precip’. In fact, the National Weather Service reports that we have had but a trace of moisture so far in May, and just 0.33 inch in April, a mere dribble compared to the usual half-inch.
Up to 0.24 inch since I started typing this post. Woof. We could corral those missing April showers today.
Anyone who has forgotten/is unaware how important water is to us here in the upper reaches of the Chihuahuan Desert, where the yappy purse dogs roam free, can become wise following the online musings of water wizard John Fleck. Buy him a coffee if you can spare the funds; I attended one water-board meeting in the Seventies, as a cub reporter fueled by vile percolator joe, and I can assure you John needs all the proper java he can get.
In other news, our man Charles Pelkey is working the early shift in Laramie as local host of NPR’s “Morning Edition,” and anyone who misses the glory days of Live Update Guy can catch his act on the Innertubes at Wyoming Public Media. That other fella he used to work with at LUG remains unemployable in print, broadcast, and online.
I do serve at least one small purpose, however. After my own cup of coffee I scattered some bird seed around under the patio cover so the tweeties could enjoy a snack out of the wet. Queuing up at the feeders today must feel like being a hobo outside a Seattle soup kitchen.
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