Today though, I've stayed close to home, stalking the wildlife of our backyard. Incredibly, our efforts at plant resuscitation have paid off, and not even the howling serenade of the miserable dobermans who linger on in their tiny shit patch of a yard, thoroughly abandoned by the exiled son of our neighbor, has discouraged the birds, butterflies, and homeless kittens from settling in our yard. It's a veritable toilet paper commercial out here.
This lovely guy is a Great Kiskadee from Northern Mexico, and the first time my husband and I saw one, we were in the car and nearly rammed someone's parked motorhome chasing brilliant flashes of yellow down the street. The not very flattering description in my nerd guide calls him a "big-headed flycatcher, sometimes feeding on small fish." Further killing the romance of his presence, I can only assume he loves it here because of the clouds of flies attracted to the nearby stockpile of doberman poop.
We're also blessed with random flowering vine-things that do their valiant best to class up the chain link fence. There are even some growing on the tractor and the 1950's dump truck parked in one corner of the backyard, but when we moved in, I promised a friend that the first picture of the broken down vehicles in our yard would have me on top of them, drunk and covered in Christmas lights. (I'm working on it, Lily.)
Possibly the coolest thing, though, is this wacky tree that grows right outside the kitchen window called a bottle brush tree. About two weeks ago, it let loose with a profusion of bizarre fuzzy red blossoms that smelled oddly like cake batter. The only way I know how to describe the blossoms is to compare them to severed muppet fingers, like if Elmo was tortured by violent extremists-- and the hummingbirds go nuts for it.
One night last week, my husband and I stood in awe on top of the picnic table on the back patio while at least two dozen hummingbirds zipped around in the canopy of this tree chirping at each other. We tried to get a few pictures, but it's understandable difficult capturing nature's tiniest crackheads on film. Nevertheless, we were able to pick out at least four different species, and again the nerd guide came in handy-- we've spotted the Buff-bellied, the Black-chinned, the Ruby-throated, and the impossibly tiny Anna's Hummingbird. Another priceless unflattering description pegs these speicies as "casual vagrants."
Unfortunately, a freak hail storm blew through last week and ripped off all the bottle brush blossoms and plastered them all over our house. (It also dinged up one of our cars and stranded Abby and I on the other side of town, where we had been enjoying a nice blazing hot afternoon stroll. Yet another interesting fact about the tiny town is that storm sewers apparently seemed like an extravagant extra, hence flood time in a strong storm is a short three minutes. The streets are just heavily cambered to channel water into the intersections, so at the end of every block, Abby happily waded and I angrily sloshed calf-deep in nastiness.)
Since the storm, we've tried to make it up to the hummingbirds by putting up feeders, and they seem amenable to the arrangement, except when we try again to get pictures. Their faces are tinier than the surface area of a dime, but I swear I can see an almost sarcastic look of shock when I try to slowly bring up the camera to capture a blurred shot of their retreat.
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