It's Raining, It's Pouring

It’s raining again this morning, and a red-winged blackbird has landed on our bird feeder. Pleased by his good luck, he sends out a high-pitched whistle for his people to join him. They’ve come a long way for this. Because of her years of cycling past marshes in the spring of the year, however, this is Alison’s least favorite bird. I don’t know where she learned the words she uses to describe them, but it makes me wonder. I will not repeat them here. It is nonetheless true that these bold, heavy birds have come close to knocking her off Angelique on more than one occasion as she pedaled past their nests in the cattails.
This week is spring break here for everyone except Alison (and a few others who keep the university operating while the students—our bread and butter—are in Cancun). I’m working at home, catching up on various things (a promised book review, the Audubon edition, preparation for my fall seminar in Audubon), and I’m fully aware of how lucky I am to be able to stay put and observe this break in the weather that will bring us frog and toad calls any day now. This is the true “spring break.”
Last year we learned to identify the evening call of the gray treefrog, which I will not imitate here except to say that it is a contemplative and almost cheerful “chrrrr” that we take as a sound of home. At sunset, two or three of them, spaced some hundred yards apart from one another, set up a rhythmic round of talk, not so much to report the news as just to say “I’m here. You?” The woodcocks arrive shortly after and add their evening calls of “Zeet,” which I do imitate from our porch. I can’t get Alison to try it, she’s so reserved, you know. A woodcock in this valley in the spring is as happy as a pig in—well, the flood-softened ground is just the place for the long, straight beak of the “timberdoodle” (as our neighbor Jeff calls them) to probe for worms.
Speaking of the Flood, our neighbor Noah, who applied “mud” to the new drywall downstairs yesterday, has built his family farm and home atop a hill a mile and a half from here, well above the required 15 cubits above the river.
I have to apologize for the earlier long list of bird species. I had intended for it to show up in some side panel, not on the main page. Anyway, I was just bragging, and should be ashamed.