GUESS WHAT'S COMING TO MY HOUSE?

One of the draws of moving into this apartment complex back in April of 2005 was the wide expanse of lawn, the abundance of trees, and the rural feel of the location. We had come from living in a three-story building in a senior development, where the building itself was the draw. The limitations of this was that when our littlest grandchildren came to visit we had to go to a park to let them run and have fun, because there were no grounds around our apartments for them to play in. So this second senior complex seemed to be much better for us.

Sometime around November of that first year, we awoke one morning to find a contingent of cattle egrets, probably 12 in number, wandering across our lawn, looking for grubs and other egret delicacies. It was a real shock to see them. They are large birds! We had no cattle, of course, but our apartments are not too many miles away from some dairies and we figured that's probably where these egrets belonged. We loved to watch them. They marched around the entire complex for the next few months -- we'd see them at the south end sometimes, other times up near the management office. They were not unduly skittish, but also I think most of the residents so enjoyed watching them that they didn't bother the birds by getting too close.

I asked my next door neighbor if this was a yearly happening. He replied that he'd lived there eight years and had never, ever seen an egret before. And they have never come back either.

But what has arrived this year is a multitude of toadstools.


They were not there when we went to bed one night. The next morning we had a large fairy ring, I think these are called. The toadstools practically grew in size as we watched them. They were huge. In our five years of living here we never have seen a toadstool in our grass. I have no idea whether or not their appearance has anything to do with the fact that because of California's water shortage our management has almost stopped watering the lawn, as well as stopped fertilizing it, since they really didn't want it to grow. But we certainly were surprised at our new decorations.

And finally this year we've been blessed (or cursed) with our first gopher. We knew they were around, but they had kept themselves pretty much confined to the golf course. Just two weeks ago I saw the pest control service out on the 4th hole probing a gopher hole with a long metal tube, undoubtedly spraying down the hole hoping to kill that gopher.

I'm not crazy about gophers per se because one year in Loma Linda they ate all the roots of my 6 tomato plants, leaving the plants standing upright inside the cage but deader than a doornail!


Our gopher is traveling from east to west. Each morning we get up and there is a new pile of dirt a few feet west of where it was the day before. We can see where he's been and where he is going. His latest dig last night was through a tree root. His little sharp teeth shredded that root, and there are lots of root trimmings on top the pile of dirt from last night's work. Our lawn, such as it is now, gets mowed on Wednesdays. The piles get squashed but on Thursday mornings we can see that he's back at it.

I am such a softy for little animals that as far as I am concerned, he can munch away with impunity. I will not call management and tattle on him; I can't guarantee that my neighbors won't. He's pretty far from where our flowers are, so until he starts going after them, I'll not bother him.

And anyway, with a face like this who would want to kill him?

A TOAST TO THE BIRDS

I like birds. If I didn’t have a cat I would have a bird, a roller canary to be specific, one that sings his little heart out over nothing at all, just because he can. When we lived in a house, I had a canary and three cats. In good weather I put the canary cage outside under the patio and he did his singing there. At night and in the colder weather his cage stayed in the spare bedroom I used as an office. I suspended it on a swag lamp chain where the cats couldn’t get to it. The bird sang there too. I loved hearing him.

In our little apartment now there is not room for both a cat and a canary. My intention was to get myself a canary when our last cat died, but by the time Tigs was gone, Squeaky had already become a member of the family. Since she is likely to outlive me, a canary just is not in the cards for me. Perhaps that is why I am so solicitous of the outside birds.

In our front yard, visible to us through sliding glass doors, we put out suet blocks, seed bells, millet sprays, hummingbird “juice” and even water for a drink or a dip. But even with all those goodies, I am a tinch disappointed in the limited variety of birds that come to feed. Of course we get hummers and various sparrows and pretty little house finches. We have a lone resident phoebe but since phoebes eat bugs, he pretty much stays out on the rooftop out of sight waiting for gnats to fly by. Once in a blue moon we will get a female oriole come for a taste of the hummingbird juice, but obviously it isn’t her favorite place to eat.

For the last three years we have had a pair of black-headed Grosbeaks come in the spring. Usually they show up the third week of April and stay until their baby is able to come to feed at the seed bell. We usually get a couple of peeks at him and then they head out for their next stop. This year the pair were here for about two weeks and then disappeared. It was very disappointing, as these are the only colorful birds we get. In the winter the cute white-crowned sparrows mingle in with the regular sparrows, but in spring they head north for the bay area. So our bird population, insofar as what we can see from our front yard, is very small. We don’t even get mockingbirds!


To be honest with you, I have only told you about the birds that I like. This year we have had starlings, which are exceptionally uninteresting birds. We have lots of crows, who are only good for making a racket as far as I am concerned. And then we get a hawk once in a while. When I see it sitting in the big tree out in front, I run out like a crazy woman and try to shoo it away, flapping my arms and saying, “Not MY birds!” The hawk is pretty good about minding me.

In January of our second year here our complex was visited by a flock of about 12 or 14 cattle egrets. These egrets aren’t very pretty but they were fun to watch. They would slowly walk across the lawns in search of interesting tidbits. We could even sit on the porch and watch them nibble by; our presence didn’t disturb them much. I don’t know where they went at night. Maybe to find some cattle. During the day if the flock wasn’t in front of our house, we could count on them being on down the road a bit on someone else’s lawn. By May they were finished with us and moved on. They have never come back.


It’s fun to watch birds. Right now the sparrow babies are just about big enough to be on their own. Sometimes the way they carry on, fluttering their wings and opening their mouths while they hunker down into a soft ball on the ground trying to get their parents’ attention, you’d think that they are still quite dependent. But if food doesn’t come quickly, they shrug their shoulders and set out to find their own seeds, of which there are plenty around.

The down side of all this bird business is that we tend to track a lot of seed hulls into our house. But that is a small price to pay for the enjoyment it gives us to watch all the critters big and small who know they can depend on the Title family for their next meal.