Poetry Sunday: February by Margaret Atwood

Winter is winding down where I live, but it seems to be readying one last blast for us. We are expecting some quite cold temperatures this week as February ends.

Margaret Atwood understands February:

   February, month of despair, 

   with a skewered heart in the centre.

And she understands cats and life:

    It’s all about sex and territory, 

   which are what will finish us off 

   in the long run.

Here is Atwood's take on February.

February

by Margaret Atwood

Winter. Time to eat fat

and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,

a black fur sausage with yellow

Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries

to get onto my head. It’s his

way of telling whether or not I’m dead.

If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am

He’ll think of something. He settles

on my chest, breathing his breath

of burped-up meat and musty sofas,

purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,

not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,

declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,

which are what will finish us off

in the long run. Some cat owners around here

should snip a few testicles. If we wise

hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,

or eat our young, like sharks.

But it’s love that does us in. Over and over

again, He shoots, he scores! and famine

crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing

eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits

thirty below, and pollution pours

out of our chimneys to keep us warm.

February, month of despair,

with a skewered heart in the centre.

I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries

with a splash of vinegar.

Cat, enough of your greedy whining

and your small pink bumhole.

Off my face! You’re the life principle,

more or less, so get going

on a little optimism around here.

Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

This week in birds - #390

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

Purple Martin image courtesy of All About Birds website.

The Purple Martins are back. They began arriving back in our area around the end of January. First to arrive are the scouts, adult males like the one in the picture above. The adult males are followed by the adult females and first-year birds. The martins are among the first of our summer residents to return to the area and they are generally among the first to leave. Most of them are gone from here by July 4. In the eastern part of the continent, martins are now entirely dependent on nest boxes erected by humans, a tradition that goes all the way back to early Native Americans. In the west, the birds still sometimes nest in natural cavities.

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In this election year, it is worth noting that a majority of Americans surveyed said that dealing with climate change should be a top priority for the president and Congress. Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed ranked protecting the environment as a leading policy priority. However, this masks a deep partisan divide on the issues with Democrats overwhelmingly citing the issues as important and Republicans much less concerned. 

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Extreme weather made news in widely separated areas of the globe this week. Britain has been battered by two successive big storms that have dumped torrents of rain and have caused flooding, landslides, and misery in many parts of the country. Meanwhile, in Mississippi, heavy rains in the central part of the state have swamped the Ross Barnett Reservoir north of Jackson and the overflow has pushed the Pearl River over its banks, forcing evacuations. 

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Throughout the South, spring is arriving weeks early this year, encouraging plants to wake up and to bloom. This could be a problem since the area is still vulnerable to late frosts for a few more weeks.

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Temperatures are steadily rising around the world, but the trend isn't spread evenly geographically or throughout the seasons. The cold places on Earth are heating up much faster than the warmer spots and the winters are warming up faster than summers. This is creating a cascade of unpredictable impacts in communities throughout the country.

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Restoring the Bobwhite Quail to the Chesapeake Bay area has had an unexpected benefit for the conservation of the bay itself.

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There are areas of the Appalachians that have been devastated by "mountaintop removal" by energy companies trying to get to the minerals underground. Such practices completely destroy the ecosystem of the locale, but scientists are now recommending a way to restore that ecosystem. Essentially, it involves planting trees. Lots of them.

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And speaking of restoration, Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon has given her support to a plan to remove four dams from the Snake River in order to help preserve and increase the salmon runs.

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A five-year study of the impact of reintroducing beavers to the English countryside has concluded that the benefits of such a plan outweigh any problems that might be created. 

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A well-preserved frozen bird carcass that was found in permafrost in Siberia has been determined through DNA testing to be a Horned Lark. The bird is from 46,000 years ago. 

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Africa has long been a thunder and lightning hotspot, but with the planet heating up, the continent is experiencing bigger and more frequent and severe lightning storms, like the one that recently killed four rare mountain gorillas in Uganda. 

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As the assault on clean water regulations continues at the federal level, some states will be hit harder than others by the effects of the removal of the environmental safety net.

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Black-throated Blue Warbler photo by Kyle Horton.

A study of the Black-throated Blue Warbler confirms that the little bird has shifted the timing of its spring and fall migrations over the past fifty years.

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Increasing periods of drought and rising temperatures are decreasing the flow of the Colorado River, a 1,450-mile waterway on which millions of people depend.

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As the EPA finalizes plans to roll back rules that cut the emissions of mercury and other toxins, utility companies are opposing the changes as unnecessary and unreasonable.

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A recently published genetic study of bats in the Philippines indicates that there may be more species of those critters there than was previously believed.

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A scientific model suggests that birds have been migrating for much longer than had been thought. It seems that they were migrating during glaciation periods and that their migrations shifted with climate change. 

Nothing More Dangerous by Allen Eskens: A review

"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

It often seems that we are afflicted with an epidemic of sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity in our public life these days, but Allen Eskens reminds us that this is not a recent development. The ignorance/stupidity movement has deep roots in our society.

He takes us back to 1976, to the little town of Jessup, Missouri and shows us life there through the eyes of fifteen-year-old Boady Sanden. Boady is a freshman in high school and has been enrolled by his mother in St. Ignatius High School, the local private Catholic school. He left behind all of his friends in the public school he had attended and he is an outcast in the new school. He is either ignored or bullied by the St. Ignatius kids.

Boady lives with his widowed mother (his father died in an accident when he was five years old) who works as bookkeeper for a drywall hanging company. They live next door to a mysterious man named Hoke who moved in about ten years before. Even living next door to him for ten years they know little about his history but he is a kind and intelligent man who serves as a kind of surrogate father to Boady, teaching him skills that he needs in life and also gently guiding him on an ethical path.

Boady and his mother and Hoke are all white and the community where they live is rife with racial hatred against black people. Jessup even has its own group of wannabe Ku Klux Klanners called CORPS (Crusaders of Racial Purity and Strength). When an African-American woman named Lida Poe who was the bookkeeper for the area's biggest employer disappears along with about one hundred and eighty thousand dollars of the company's money, the stage is set for conflict and suspicion. Moreover, when the Minneapolis headquarters of the company sends an African-American manager to sort things out at the Jessup factory, the CORPS faction is outraged.

The new manager moves with his family to Jessup and into a newly renovated Victorian house just next door to Boady and Hoke. It turns out that the family consists of parents and a son just Boady's age and, although the two boys get off to a shaky start, they soon bond as friends and become inseparable, sharing adventures in the woods adjacent to their homes. Their relationship had a To Kill a Mockingbird vibe for me with Hoke as a stand-in for Atticus Finch. (We finally learn that Hoke was a defense attorney in his previous life.)

On one of their adventures in the woods, the boys make the gruesome discovery of a body buried under a log. Lida Poe had not left town with embezzled money after all. 

The story then becomes a murder mystery, which the local sheriff, an ambiguous character - is he a good guy or a bad guy? - seems not too eager to investigate. The reasons for that may have something to do with the fact that he is related to some of the CORPS members.

This is essentially a coming of age story with very relatable characters as the protagonists. It is well-written with the plot and the motives for certain characters' actions revealed slowly over time. The plot is constructed in such a way to keep the reader's interest and to keep those pages turning. It was a pleasurable reading experience. I had not read any of Allen Eskens' books before, but the man can write. My only complaint is that the plot did seem a bit derivative, but it tells an important story and reminds us of the truth of that quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars   

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anaparra: A review

In a slum in an unnamed city in India, something terrible is happening. Children are disappearing and the police can't be bothered. After all, the people who live in this slum are the poorest of the poor. They are worthless in the eyes of society, so why should the police exert themselves on their behalf? Frantic parents beseech the police and offer them whatever bribes they can scrape together to try to get them to act. But none of the children are found and others keep disappearing.

Nine-year-old Jai lives in this slum with his older sister and hardworking parents. He is an indifferent student at the local over-crowded public school. His best friends are Pari, a whip-smart girl who loves studying, and Faiz, a Muslim boy who works hard to help his family. (No doubt any resemblance to Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley is purely coincidental. Or maybe not.)

When the first child disappears, it is a boy from Jai's school, a neighbor of his. Jai is addicted to true crime shows on television and he has learned (he thinks) investigation techniques from watching those shows. He decides that since the police are not acting, he will do some "detectiving" on his own. He engages Pari and Faiz in his scheme and they wander around the community searching for clues.

Then another child from their school disappears. And the toll continues to mount.

At first, the lost children are all Hindu, and religious hatred being what it is, Muslims are suspected as the culprits. Eventually, the police do actually arrest a Muslim man on scant (read no) evidence and throw him into jail where he languishes. As more children go missing.

The Purple Line of the book's title is the railway that runs through the slum. Jai steals some money from his mother and he and Faiz go on a rail trip with the excuse of looking for clues. But they find no trace of any of those who have gone missing.

There seems to be no pattern to the disappearances. The children range in age from five to sixteen and are both boys and girls. What could be the purpose of their vanishing? Could it be, as Faiz suspects and Jai wants to believe, a djinn who is playing tricks?

This is an incredibly troubling story to read because it is based on fact. As the author explains in her note, some 180 children disappear without a trace in India each year. A former journalist in that country, she had reported on the disappearances and had attempted twenty-eight years before to write this novel but it just never came together. In the intervening years, she wrote other books, but this one continued to niggle at her memory and conscience until finally, she was able to complete it. She did so brilliantly in my opinion. 

Her most brilliant stroke was in making the nine-year-old Jai and his friends her main focus. Seeing the disappearances through the eyes of these children gives them added poignancy and lets us see just how confusing the world can be to such children.

In addition to the crimes against children, the writer also brings home to us, if we needed to be reminded, the powerlessness of women and of the lowest class in India. And in one particular chapter, she gives us a glimpse of another horror that is too often visited on the women and girls of India: that of brutal gang rape. She makes clear to us the terror that girls and women feel if they must be out on the streets alone, particularly at night, but even in broad daylight. As I said, this is a very disturbing read.

The writer did an excellent job of description in setting the scene of events. I felt myself there in that slum and living as the slum-dwellers live, and my overwhelming reaction was disgust with the filth, the ever-present choking smog, the lack of privacy. And also empathy for these people who are, after all, my brothers and sisters who have no choice but to live like this. I also felt white-hot anger at the uncaring bureaucracy, particularly the police who are unworthy of that name. But also, there is admiration for the strength of the people, their sense of community as they try to help and support each other, their resilience in the face of tragedy. The children, especially, are undaunted and confront their world with humor and swagger and a conviction that they are important and that things will turn out all right. In other words, they are like children everywhere. 

I think Anaparra's twenty-eight-year wait was worth it. She has delivered a gem.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Poetry Sunday: Winter: Tonight: Sunset by David Budbill

Winter sunsets can be particularly colorful and impressive and they can remind us of how lucky we are to be here, to be alive at just this moment and to be able to enjoy a sunset. David Budbill celebrates such a moment in this poem.

Winter: Tonight: Sunset

by David Budbill

Tonight at sunset walking on the snowy road,
my shoes crunching on the frozen gravel, first

through the woods, then out into the open fields
past a couple of trailers and some pickup trucks, I stop

and look at the sky. Suddenly: orange, red, pink, blue,
green, purple, yellow, gray, all at once and everywhere.

I pause in this moment at the beginning of my old age
and I say a prayer of gratitude for getting to this evening

a prayer for being here, today, now, alive
in this life, in this evening, under this sky.

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day - February 2020

Spring may not have quite sprung in my zone 9a garden outside of Houston but it is definitely peeking over the windowsill and bringing with it quite a few blooms. 

 This is the antique rose 'Old Blush'.

 And the 'Peggy Martin' rose.

The daffodil Narcissus tazetta. 

 Leucojum aestivum.

 The cyclamen have been blooming all winter.

 As have the violas, aka Johnny-Jump-Ups.

And the pansies.

 My waxed amaryllis plants finally bloomed after three months. I don't think I'll be purchasing any more of these. I prefer potted varieties.

The Carolina jessamine, Gelsemium sempervirens, has bloomed gloriously all month.

 Turk's cap, Malvaviscus arboreus, is an ever-bloomer.

Plectranthus 'Mona Lavender'.

Purple oxalis, Oxalis triangularis. 

Loropetalum chinense. 

 Solanum luxum, ornamental potato vine.

 I recently bought this 'Bright' hibiscus at one of the big box stores. I planted it.

 And a couple of days later I checked on it and this is what I saw. Yes, there were actually two separate plants in the pot. Two for the price of one.

 Dianthus.

 And more dianthus.

 Snapdragons, Antirrhinum majus.

Lonicera sempervirens, coral honeysuckle 'Major Wheeler'.

As in most recent winters, we have a female Rufous Hummingbird making itself at home in our yard. She is very grateful for all the blooms, especially the honeysuckle and also for the feeder filled with sugar water that supplements her diet. 

How are things in your garden as winter winds down, or as summer winds down if you are in the southern hemisphere? The changing of the seasons is always an interesting time for gardeners. In my own garden, I'm finishing up with pruning and winter cleanup, moving several of my plants to areas where I think they will be happier, and adding some new plants to the garden. It's good to be out and about and getting my hands dirty again.

Happy gardening and happy Bloom Day to all, especially to our host, Carol of May Dreams Gardens.

This week in birds - #389

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

A windblown American Goldfinch visits a crape myrtle still bearing its seeds. Goldfinches and other members of the finch family love these seeds and spend a lot of time in winter munching on them and later spreading the seeds around the yard. In recent winters, our backyards have been alive with goldfinches and sometimes their cousins, Pine Siskins. Not so much this year. I have only seen very small flocks of the birds in my yard. The same goes for Cedar Waxwings. Instead of flocks in the hundreds that we've had in past years, there are flocks in the tens this year. Is the warming climate encouraging them to stay farther north in winter?

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This is the weekend of the Great Backyard Bird Count when birders report the location, species, and numbers of the birds that they observe. It's a way for citizen scientists to participate in helping scientists to track where the birds are in mid-winter. It's fun and free and here's how you can participate. 

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officially announced that January 2020 was the hottest January on record with a global temperature averaging 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th-century average. NOAA's records go back for 141 years.

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And in Antarctica where the record for one day's hottest temperature (65 degrees F) was set just last week, that record has now been broken with a temperature of 69.3 degrees F on February 9. 

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A hotter Antarctica is bad news for many of the penguins that live there, including the continent's most numerous species, Chinstraps. Scientists say that Chinstrap Penguins nesting on Elephant Island number less than half as many birds as were there fifty years ago. They believe that climate change is a big factor in the decline. 

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Wolf OR-54 image by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Sad news regarding the female gray wolf originally from Oregon that had traversed some 8,700 miles in northern California and Oregon in the last two years looking for a mate. Conservationists searching for her after her tracking device went silent have located her carcass. The circumstances of her death are being investigated.

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And even more sad news about an endangered species: Four mountain gorillas have been killed, apparently by a lightning strike, in Mgahinga National Park in southwest Uganda, according to conservationists.

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Elsewhere in Africa, the bad news is locusts. Unseasonable rain linked to a climate-change-driven event in the Indian Ocean has created perfect conditions for the swarms of locusts and they are invading Ethiopia and Kenya by the billions. 

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A new study by University of Miami researchers confirms that the toxic reach of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico extended much farther than has previously been acknowledged. I don't think that will be a surprise to anyone who lives near the Gulf Coast.

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This is an image of a hummingbird called the Blue-bearded Helmetcrest. The population of the species is vanishingly small. It lives in the northernmost mountain range in Colombia, which it shares with the indigenous Kogi tribe that has called the area home for centuries. Both the people and the bird are imperiled. 

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Some of the world's most endangered mammals live on the island of Madagascar. They are lemurs and the main danger to their continued survival is loss of habitat. One species in particular, the ruffed lemur, seems to be especially affected by human activities that are degrading the habitat.

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Big discoveries by the fossil hunters: (1) A tyrannosaur that is older than T. Rex and other famous members of the family was found in Canada. The bones were actually found some time ago and sat in a drawer in a museum until they were recognized for what they are. The bones are 79.5 million years old. (2) And then there is the recent find of the fossils of car-sized turtles that once roamed in what is now Venezuela and Colombia.

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A Yemeni birder and wildlife photographer who had lived in New York for twenty-two years and had faithfully reported to yearly check-ins with immigration officials was summarily deported on January 28 without allowing him to contact his family or his lawyer. He went to the scheduled check-in and was not allowed to return home or to contact anyone.

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Grizzly bear deaths have increased dramatically in the millions of acres in and around Glacier National Park. Trains, cars, and poaching have all contributed to the fatalities raising concerns about the future of the grizzly population in the area. 

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In addition to all the other devastation caused by Hurricane Dorian to the Bahamas, a significant amount of damage was done to the coral reefs in the area.

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Voters are saying that climate change is one of their major issues this year. The Climate Leadership Council hopes to use that expressed concern to prod politicians to institute a carbon tax. Carbon dioxide emissions comprise most of the greenhouse gases that are warming the Earth and these economists, politicians, and corporate executives believe they can get agreement from all sides to address the problem in this way. To which I can only say, good luck with that.