Nesting

One spring, several years ago, a robin built her nest on our woodpile on the back porch. I was newly pregnant with my first child (which turned out to be two children) and was taken by the idea that the robin and I were sharing a journey toward motherhood. Her children, of course, hatched within a couple of weeks and fledged after a couple more, while I had months to wait for my babies’ arrival and, thankfully, have much longer than that before they leave home.

Are you looking at me, phoebe?

I’d never seen a bird’s nest and all the accompanying activity up close before, and I became both entranced by the process of nesting and hatching and fledging, and protective of the nest and its contents. Now we have another nest on the back porch, and I’ve taken to peering through the kitchen windows again, watching another nest story unfold. This time it’s a phoebe who has built her nest, atop the back porchlight, a couple feet above where the robin settled in 11 years ago.

While the location is the same, the surrounding environment is quite different now than it was in the robin’s day. The back porch is not the quiet sanctuary it once was, and the light on which mother phoebe has built her nest is smackdab next to the back door.

Kids go careening through that door regularly, on their way to the garage to collect bikes and other playthings. They ride said bikes around the driveway, quite close to the nest. They kick soccer balls and hit tennis balls back and forth nearby. They climb the trees along that edge of the driveway, where the phoebe sometimes, in quiet moments, perches while seeking out bugs to catch.

I can only figure that the phoebe decided on her nesting spot while we were away for a few days back at the end of April. It would have been quiet here then, with no dog and no humans. I imagine the small porch, tucked between house and garage, seemed like a nice place: sheltered from the weather, with a good view of the rest of the yard and plenty of bugs to catch for dinner.

Although we’ve faced the small inconvenience of altering our movements – keeping the door closed and instead accessing the garage through the muddled mudroom, leaving the light off, and trying not to walk too close or too quickly past the nesting area – I’m glad the phoebe picked this spot. It’s rare to have such a close-up and constant view of nature – even if it’s a common songbird and not some more exotic wild species we get to observe.

I watched the nest come together in phases, first the mud foundation, then the moss, carried by beak and packed firmly into the mud. For days the nest was empty, a small mud-and-moss cup waiting for eggs. Then one morning, when I’d given up hope, I glanced out the window to find the phoebe sitting there.

After she left, I tiptoed out and held my phone camera above the nest for a photo – it’s too high for me to see into, so I had to slide the phone along the ceiling to gain a peek inside. Low and behold, two eggs. Within a few days there was a clutch of five, and mother phoebe started spending time sitting there, keeping one wary eye on the lookout.

The eggs – all five of them – hatched a couple weeks ago. I watched as the phoebe – and, now, her mate – carried all sorts of bugs to the chicks, watched hungry beaks gape open and be filled with other, smaller winged things.

The babies – at first ugly and naked – have grown feathers, and their eyes opened this week. Now, when I peer out the window, they seem often to be jostling for space in the nest they’ve outgrown. Now and then, one chick or another will open its wings and stretch. They are getting ready to leave the nest.

I suppose there is some metaphor here, some correlation to raising human children who grow and stretch and find their own proverbial wings. But I’ve just been enjoying the phoebe show without looking for deeper meaning.

I’ve learned a good deal by watching the phoebes through the window these last weeks. Many of the details you can read in bird books or online – that phoebes almost always build nests of mud and moss and often refurbish and reuse those nests, that the female does nearly all the work from nest-building to feeding, that they hunt bugs from various perches and often catch them in the air. But seeing it first-hand allows a different level of learning.

Sometimes when I look out the window, mother phoebe peers back at me, head cocked quizzically, one black beady eye turned my way. Perhaps she is just looking for bugs to catch from her perch there on the overturned patio chair. But I like to think there’s some level of avian trust in that gaze, that amid all the noise and activity of my brood the phoebe knows we’re looking out for her little family as they prepare to fly away from the nest.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the June 23, 2017 issue of the Littleton Record. 

Spring Cacophony

Spring is such a raucous season. Unfolding from winter’s relative quiet, spring opens with the musical call of peepers from just-thawed ponds and the varied songs of birds returning, the noise building to an impressive crescendo that ebbs and grows throughout each day.

Last weekend I escaped to the front porch for a few stolen moments of solitary peace. Only they weren’t solitary – or peaceful, really. All around me there was noise and movement. A catbird meow-called from the highbush cranberry in the front yard. The whir of wings revealed a hummingbird was exploring the flowers in the planters on the upstairs porch railing. The piercing screech of a hawk drew my eyes upward, where two raptors spun circles far, far above. They seemed too high to be hunting; just playing on the breeze.  

On short evening rambles with the dog, as most birdsong quiets with the approach of darkness, we hear the beautifully melancholic trilling of the hermit thrush from the woods. The peepers are just warming up then, testing out their voices for another night of singing for love – or at least reproductive prospects. By the time I am in bed, with the windows open to the welcome warmth of the spring night, the singing of these tiny frogs is a boisterous, chiming cacophony, one of the wonders of nature that amazes me no matter how many times I hear it.

The robins lead the chorus that awakens me on spring mornings with their rambling, cheery singing. A varied choir of other birds joins in: the question-and-answer of the red-eyed vireo, the ovenbird’s somewhat screechy “teacher-teacher-teacher,” and the white-throated sparrow singing, “Old Sam Peabody-Peabody-Peabody.” There are song sparrows and goldfinches, phoebes and slate juncos – and the chickadees and nuthatches who’ve stayed with us all year. It seems impossible that one yard contains such a variety of birds – and birdsong – and I’m sure I’ll never learn them all. That kind of noise is nice, anyway, whether or not I know – or see – who’s making it.

Not all the twittering happens from tree branches or the pond, of course. Tom turkeys gobble as they make their way along the paths through the back field. A gang of crows yell their caw-caws at a red fox as he meanders through the yard in the early morning, patrolling the invisible borders of his territory before trotting off to some quieter spot.

Amid all of this noisy nature, we humans contribute to the sounds of spring, too. The drone of lawnmowers returns to yards everywhere. Bicyclists call to each other as they ride past in spandex-clad pairs. The hum of sporadic traffic drifts through open windows. And if there is a baseball game at the school two miles down the road, the cheers drift into our yard, and I pause to silently root for the home team.

Even the appearance of spring, once the season really gets going, is a bit noisy. The grass, finally, turns a bright, lush green. Leaves unfurl on trees. New vegetation pushes through last year’s dieback in the field, and lupine leaves grow higher and fuller, moving toward the plants’ burst of color – coming soon. The apples trees are blooming now, all white and pink, and the buds on the lilacs are opening into a cascade of purple and the sweet scent of almost-summer.

These pastel hues will build toward summer’s audacity of color, when a cacophony of blooms bursts forth from the gardens and fields. By then, the peepers will have quieted and the birdsong will have started its slow fade, as birds move from attracting mates and establishing territories to hatching and feeding broods of chicks. (Who has time to sing when the kids are demanding food all day long?)

But now, in these days of approaching summer, when winter has really and truly faded into a cold and provisional memory, the sounds of spring rouse me from sleep in the welcome brightness of early morning. All the noise and color draw me into this season, growing from the last, rolling into the next. 

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the May 27, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.

Indecisive March

March is such an indecisive month. I think whoever coined the phrase, “If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a minute,” must have done so in March. What other month can bring near-summer temperatures, mid-winter snow squalls, rain storms, thunder claps, and sunny blue skies all in one week?

Snow crocus

Even after such a weird-weather winter, this month has been intensely unpredictable.

The crocuses bloomed last week, the earliest I can remember them opening to the warming sun. And our first robins of the year flew into the yard weeks before their normal arrival date. We’ve had more birds at the feeder than ever before: chickadees and blue jays, nuthatches and woodpeckers, goldfinches and purple finches.

I’m loath to bring the feeder in with so much color and activity there, but I’m sure by now the bears are about, and I’d rather keep them out of the sandbox, which is next to the bird feeder. My kids rediscovered that sandbox last week. It’s been there all winter with hardly a skim of ice, but suddenly, with warmer weather, it was the new hot spot.

Maybe the sandbox is just better in shorts and t-shirts. And that’s what the kids were wearing, casting off their more practical mid-March outfits and digging into the summer clothes as soon as they’d walked in the door from school and dropped their backpacks.

My littlest one even asked for bug spray. I’m not sure if the bugs were actually in the sandbox with her or the request was just an innate response to wearing shorts. Regardless, the kids spent hours in the sand, making some combination of mud-sand whoopee pies and cookies and cakes, digging tunnels, getting thoroughly, happily dirty. It’s the most peacefully the three of them have played – I don’t know, maybe ever. As soon as dinner was in their bellies, back out they went until the dark crept in, later now that we’ve changed the clocks.

The next day dawned sunny and warmish, moved to a sky clustered with thunderheads, and ended with cold and wet. And then it snowed. Back out came the extra layers for skiing over the weekend, the neck warmers and thick fleece shirts. Flip-flops, still covered in sand, were chucked once more into the depths of the closet and replaced again by snow boots.

Yes, we are in that familiar March place, where we might ski or bike or walk along the beach at Echo Lake. Maybe all three in one day. The extended forecast calls for a continued mixed bag of sunshine, rain, snow, warmth and chilliness, sometimes all in the same day.

So, I’ll hold off washing up and packing away the winter gear for a while longer, at least until mid-April. March is such an indecisive month. You never know what’s coming next, and it’s best to be prepared – for a little bit of everything.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the March 25, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.

Magical Music

The frogs are back, and with them the song of spring.

Tuesday I drove home at dusk, dodging small amphibians as they leaped across the darkening road. I slowed and rolled the windows of the car down, craning to hear the happy, birdlike sound of the spring peepers and the quack of wood frogs that sing from ponds and vernal pools as winter melts away to spring. Alas, I heard not a peep, despite the hordes of migrating hoppers in the road.

Looking for spring peepers.

But the next afternoon my six-year-old son came running down the driveway from an excursion with his sisters and grandparents to the little pond across the road. “Mama, the peepers are back!” he declared. In a rush he explained all the frogs they’d seen at the pond and how he’d almost caught one. Then he grabbed his scooping net and headed back toward the water.

Turns out those were wood frogs, not peepers, but that did nothing to lessen the excitement for any of us. We returned the following day to sit quietly at the edge of the little pond until the raspy quacks of the black-masked frogs sounded back and forth across the water.

Last night as the light faded, I stepped onto the porch and listened. At first I heard only the singsong trill of the hermit thrush from the woods at the edge of the yard. And then from a further distance came a peep here, and another one. It’s not the full-blown chorus that will come a week or two from now, but it’s a start.

The peepers’ song is one in a string of welcome signs of spring. We spotted our first robin on Easter morning as we headed to the mountain for our last day of skiing. Soon, we were seeing flocks of the red-breasted birds hopping around yards and fields everywhere. The first crocuses bloomed purple and yellow and white among an otherwise brown garden Monday morning as the sun warmed the day, and the daffodils are ready to follow. We’ve heard that the bears are awake and roaming around looking for food. And now the peepers have started their song.

The chirping song of one spring peeper sounds like an overly confident spring chick, a hearty “peep” (thus the common name of these frogs). But as the small amphibians, barely larger than a quarter, gather by the hundreds in springtime, their voices merge to create a sound as big as the night sky, like the tinkling of elfin chimes echoing through the forest. 

The peepers’ warm up – a brief, solitary tune here, a high-pitched chirp there – crescendos into a lively chorus after dusk on the warmest mid-spring evenings, rising and falling, encompassing the gathering darkness. The peepers sing to us through dinner and well into the night, where their song becomes a happy lullaby.

The male frogs – peepers, wood frogs, and others – warble for the females, drawing them in with beautiful music. At the height of their mating season, the peepers seem to call from all sides – the pond across the road, the deep drainage ditch in the side field, the swampy marsh around the corner.

The frogs begin their spring song as the first flowers open, before the leaves pop to turn the landscape from dull brown to cheerful green. They sing us from the end of winter into the beginning of summer, their music carrying us through late snow showers and chilly rains into the warmth and color and brightness, when the local tarns that swelled in spring evaporate into the heat of summer.

By the time the music fades, we are close to the solstice and have become, perhaps, too busy to notice. No longer waiting for the arrival of spring, we’ve moved onto other things – long summer days and dips into cool rivers, cookouts and gardening, hikes through forests dense with rich green foliage.

But in these days when spring is taking hold, when frost still whitens the grass some mornings and the trees are mostly bare, we wait each evening for the peepers, listening for their magical music, welcoming this cheerfully tenacious song of spring.

For more information about spring peepers, I recommend an article by ecologist Michael J. Caduto, from Northern Woodlands magazine: Spring Peepers, Winter Sleepers.

To learn more about wood frogs, I recommend this page from NH Public Television.

Earth Day and the promise of spring

It was probably not an act of genius that inspired the organizers of the first Earth Day in 1970 to choose April as the time to celebrate the planet and lobby for its environmental protection. It is easy to love the Earth in spring: cheery birdsong fills the air as flocks of robins hop after worms in the greening grass, early blooms emerge, leaf buds swell and open, and fiddleheads unfurl from the damp ground, reaching for the strengthening sun.

Spring offers a sense of hope. It is a time – for people and nature – to brush off the dust and dullness of winter and start anew.

Earth Day began as a grassroots environmental demonstration that led to the passing of the Clean Air and Clean Water acts. Now, 42 years later, April 22 is both a celebration of steps made to protect the environment and a reminder that – in an era of over-packaged, over-processed consumerism – there is still much to be done.

I have read two articles this week about the importance of outdoor experiences. One indicated that children who play in the dirt develop stronger immune systems. The other revealed that kids who are involved in nature-based activities at a very young age adopt “pro-environmental behavior” as adults.

Earth day is celebrated by groups ranging from preschools to large environmental organizations. Its message varies from enjoying and exploring nature to reducing pollution and enacting energy efficiency in buildings, vehicles, and businesses. At its root, Earth Day is a reminder that maintaining and protecting natural resources – air, water, wild spaces to explore – is essential not only to human life, but our psyche as well.

What better time to appreciate that connection than spring, when we rush outside to savor the sweet air and sunshine?

Many local communities and organizations coordinate roadside clean-ups this time of year, as melting snow banks reveal a winter’s worth of litter. Businesses offer sales on eco-friendly items. The state Fish and Game Department and Department of Environmental Services team up to host their annual Discover WILD New Hampshire Day, featuring everything from wild animals to hybrid cars.

As a child of the ‘70s, I vaguely remember school discussions about saving the rainforest, and Woodsy Owl telling me to, “Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute!” during Saturday morning cartoons. What made a more lasting impression, however, were days spent outside digging in garden dirt and playing in the sandbox, climbing mountains and swimming in clear, cool rivers, exploring the natural places just beyond the backyard and traveling to National Parks across the country with my family.

As a kid, I ran home from school on early spring days, looking for the first crocus in my mother’s garden. Seeing the earliest tiny, purple blossom of springtime was magical and joyful. Now I have children of my own, who love the greenness of summer, the crisp air and kaleidoscopic color of fall, the enchanting snow of winter, and the fresh blooms of spring.

I’m not sure which of us – the children or I – was more excited this spring to spot the first brave crocus poking through the dirt. We all ran to it and crouched down for a closer look. Then we smiled and turned our faces to the sun, stretching toward its warmth and reaching for the promise of spring.

For the Record-Littleton, April 13, 2012