Two Jays and a Friendship

May 12, 2011

I spot the jay fearlessly entering my yard, land perfectly on my fake-redwood fence and listen to it chatter.

“Hello, Mr. Jay,” I say encouraging his visits, excited that a beauty, such as this royal blue flapper, chose our garden to plop down for a breather, even if for a short time.

I don’t know if my amiable welcome brought him back, but the jay returns now as soon as I walk out in the backyard, whirling by me and again landing on the fence, then the pine tree and finally swooping by as though he too wants to say hi to my waves and smiles.

“Whaa --hack…whahack…whack,” he seems to say with a screech. “Whaaaaaaack…. Whaaack.”

Days go by and I happily go out to garden in the warm sun with my two dogs, just to see if the jay will return. He does, time and time again, but because he has no crest like the mountain jays I’ve witnessed, I begin to wonder what type of bird blesses us with his presence.

Finally, I settle on the stunning Western Scrub-Jay and discover jays in general have a complicated family life, mating system and that females have the carbon-copy plumage of males! This is a rarity in the world of feathers, where the males seem to get the handsome, colorful tints and hues while the females land more drab shades – at least to us.

Later, I learn on a crisp, cool morning with mist threading its way through the yard  that I’m not seeing one jay but two as they land on my rooftop and raucously squawk at me, their azure blue silhouettes cocking from side to side. They are telling me they are making this their home: a nest.

One of the jays flies down from the rooftop and settles on my porch railing, peering at me and screeching: “Whaaaaaaaaaaackahacka….Whacka!”

I can’t believe it when he – or she – lands on our porch railing where our big cat, Buddy, lies curled up just a few feet away. Buddy is aggressive, to say the least, and the main reason we have so many tailless lizards in our yard.

Buddy appears not to care, and neither does the jay. It might not be the jays that need to worry – it might be the cat.  Jays and their relations, like crows, will mob creatures that try to attack them – or their nests.

I can’t help but worry about the soon-to-come chirping babies, but it doesn’t matter what I think.  The mom and dad like it here in the yard, shadows stretching in the morning over an abundance of unwanted crabgrass and other weeds. Most of our regular plants must make do in the shadows of our cypress and pine.  Some of them seldom catch the sun’s warming rays.

I know my husband won’t like it (he says nature takes care of itself), but I set out a few nuts for my new buddies – acquaintances that certainly show their appreciation by squawking with more “whaaahacks…” and returning the next morning with precious hellos.

I still haven’t discovered where their nest is – but that doesn’t matter. I know they are planning a home, and that brings me great pleasure.

“Hey!” my husband shouts excitedly into the yard. “Have you noticed we have a blue jay visiting?”

Saturday, March 26, 2010

Two Eggs and Two Lies

By Diana L. Chapman

I peered down at the pinkish-champagne, colored eggs plunked in the grass by an apparently not-so-motherly peafowl.

They had sat there now for two days in my backyard, lonely and cold, on wet,  crab grass. The peahen must have forgotten her chicklets needed nurturing and warmth. Another theory -- a ravenous raccoon raided a nest in our Monterey Pine, which doubles as the Peacock Inn.

Every night, peacocks by the scores swoop into the tree so boisterous with screeching life that of course there has to be the other side – death.

Picking up the eggs, they were rock hard and dead. Still, I rinsed them off gently and carried them inside. For some reason, the two eggs reminded me of the two lies I had made on the secretlifeinmybackyard blog, which has gone long ignored for months.

In the beginning, I was so excited about plunging into that world, revealing the life-and-death struggles that exist in this rectangular plot of land at Los Angeles’ most southern tip, one that if you ventured much further you’d plunge into swirling, white-capped Pacific.

When starting this blog, I promised readers that I’d make daily visits to my backyard to bring stories filled with the simplicities and complexities of life from land blessed with visitors, the green lizards streaking across my home’s mustard colored walls, licking and punching their air with silvery tongues to the whispering winds whipping through the Australian ferns.

I believed I could bring the serene scents of the sweet pine into your home, the moisture of the cool air and the descending sense of peacefulness that cloaks me like a thin veil when I’m out there.

But over the last few months, instead of being out there, I’ve been inside. My blog has sat virtually empty of posts. My other writing interests took up so much space that I barely had time to even think about the secret life.

I am sorry to say I lied. I can find a marvelous number of excuses for what happened. First the intense rains came, bearing down with ungodly showers, right after I posted my other lie – that it never rains in Los Angeles.

Of course, it rained – and did so profusely – as soon as I published those very words.

It showered and turned so chilly, even my dogs quit venturing much outdoors.

I don’t know why the two eggs, which sit perched  next to my laptop, reminded me of all I had lied about, all I had not done. But they did.

I stare at them now, listening to my chorus of barking dogs, knowing it’s time to toss the eggs into the garbage. But I don’t want too because that very act saddens me.

But time rests her gentle hand on my soul, telling me it's time. A brazenly-cold winter has left, bringing on a chilly spring. And even though the eggs are dead and my lies have been confronted, I too must be ready to move on.

In just a few weeks, something fresh will happen. A new crop of peacocks shortly will arrive with spring’s bloom. Tiny tufts of feathers and fuzz will amble behind their mom’s up and down in a parade of dots on our hilly streets and onto our roof tops where they will practice the art of flight.

Spring has cast her spell; And if I’m not unwittingly telling another lie, I will soon be wandering again in my backyard.

Dec. 2

ONE-LEGGED PEACOCK SOMEHOW STRIVES AND THRIVES

By Diana L. Chapman

“Mom!” my son shouted. “Come here! There’s a one-legged peacock in our yard.”

My first instinct: That can’t possibly be. It’s probably just perched in the Monterey pine with its leg tucked under like a flamingo. It couldn’t  survive with just one leg.

“Come on, Mom!” Ryan shouted again. “You’re going to miss it!”

Muttering all the way, when I reached the back door I was astounded to see the royal blue male peacock standing like a king in his roost, peering disdainfully at us. He had the pride and plumage of an emperor, feathers of teal, liquid gold, emerald green and glittering bronze.

There was no mistaking the stump. The bird had half a leg – a glaring, bone-white half a leg. For a few moments, we watched in silence.

“How can he move anywhere? How can he feed himself?” I wondered out loud, knowing that Ryan didn’t know the answer anymore than I. The world is full of impossibilities. We were magically watching one of them --a miracle in our own backyard as twilight lazily lowered her dusky veil around us.

 Maybe  he hops on that one leg, we contemplated.  Losing interest in glaring at us,  that’s exactly what the peacock did next: a half-flutter, half-hop to the next branch ending our encounter.

For days to come, I would think about that peacock. Each time I wandered in the backyard, the sweet scent of the outdoors gracing the air, that bird came to mind.

He was a survivor.

On this morning while watering, I think of him again while watching a baby lizard streak across the golden wall of our garage. The sun shines his rays down as water sprinkles the cool, wet grass and a gentle breeze saunters by. Glinting in the sun, an intricate spider web hanging from the pine pitches gently in the wind next to our swinging, ceramic squirrel hanging from our tree.

Right now, lots of things are bothering me: family issues, the usual concern about finances nipping at me like a dog at my heels, and the depression from seeing friends and foes alike laid off in this horrendous economy.

It’s in moments like this that my backyard gives me solace, peace – an escape from the irritating mites swirling in my brain. I watch the lizard and marvel at its beauty. I spot a new tendril of the creeping fig inching up the walls. I’ve been waiting more than a year for that. Trying to grasp the vine to study it, I’m surprised when it sticks to the wall like Velcro.

Bravo! Something is working.

Then my thoughts slip back to the peacock. How did this bird ever make it? Why isn’t he dead? It doesn’t have a crutch. It has to survive on one leg – and if you know peacocks at all, they are not the best fliers. They spend much of their time on the ground like wandering cats, only with wings.

My mind wanders again (here in the garden it doesn’t matter if I lose focus)  and I look at the statue of a cherub reading a book –and that starts me reflecting on angels and who they are and where they come from.

Perhaps they aren’t flying around up in the celestial heaven we so often imagine. They might really reside in that little dog who saved her owner’s life when she smelled a fire. Or the stranger who pulled someone from a wrecked car before it exploded, only to disappear in the mist before anyone could say thank you.

Maybe this peacock is yet another angel reminding me that, if he can not only survive but thrive on one leg, maybe I can learn to live and work with my troubles.

IS JIMMY HOFFA BURIED IN MY BACKYARD?

Oct. 4 – Oct. 6

    A startling spider about the size of a nickel slips gracefully up and down a single thread. As I draw near on this dismal day, she stretches her legs, then rapidly tucks them in. When the rain begins – if you can call it that in Southern California -- she scurries back up the web.

    I’m standing outside looking at the gloom while the drops fall. Because it’s just a sprinkle, I continue to inspect our garden, cup of green tea in hand with my excitable dogs, Baxter and Boo, trotting alongside.

    The garden remains a mostly empty canvas with a large amount of grass and a gentle knoll,  just waiting for an incredible artist to paint it.

    I am not that artist and I know it. I’ve dabbled here and there with gardening and am thrilled to witness the English ivy climbing the wall of our mustard-colored garage  – exactly what I wanted!

Still, I realize how much work is needed. I have a much bigger problem. At times I’m convinced that Jimmy Riddle Hoffa, a Teamsters leader suspected of having Mafia ties who disappeared 35 years ago, must be buried in my backyard.

    Why?

     It’s because of what  the former owners of our property left behind:  broken chunks of concrete that, no matter how many times we haul away, always seem to be growing better than my English lavender or mother ferns.

     Whenever work crews come and start to dig, they find even more slabs buried beneath the earth. That’s when I wonder what lies underneath.

    Peering at an ugly mound of concrete in a corner, I find it impossible to hide that unattractive, urban look. A former owner designed some of the chunks – that weigh anywhere from a large Atlas to a couple of car tires put together – into a network of  planters. Even with that, they are difficult to beautify.

   I painted some of them forest green, which helped slightly. At least they fit better into my fairy tale idea –  a yard with fairies and gnomes reading books beneath  the shadow of a fern.

Another owner made a creative attempt and built a pathway from the slabs. But there’s still so much left. The nasty pile in our peaceful yard bothers me like a swarm of gnats.  “What am I going to do with all that?” I pondered.

  We just can’t dump it in the trash. We’ve come to call this area “the dead zone” – the one piece of land in the yard where nothing grows not just because of the cement, but also due to the peacocks roosting in our tree, who leave behind their much and messy business.

    It’s quite incongruous with the remainder of the yard, where pink Chablis nettle leaves lick at the ferns and spread across the roots of our towering pine. A smiling fairy nestled in the nettle smiles blissfully along green mushrooms.

  Dichondra provides a mossy look in the shadow of trees that block most of the sun, and  a giant frog king perched atop a stone leaf looks out proudly from his throne.

  I’m sure the frog king isn’t proud of the dead zone pile.

  The visiting critters live in the moment. Perhaps so should I. Opening the back door , a calmness gently sweeps over me from the garden’s serenity.

  It seems to whisper: There’s no Jimmy Hoffa here. Only nature. Just live it! 

The Day of the Bully

Sept. 13, 2010

I walk into backyard.  An  autumn chill fills the air and a fine morning fog hugs the coastline. A cold breeze slips into the yard, making me catch my breath and shudder. I love the fall and officially its only two days  away.

Unofficially, it’s here already because mother nature has her own calendar – “it’s a whenever-I-want-to sort of deal.” Later than usual due to budget cuts, Los Angeles students streamed back to school this morning including my son. He shouts:  “Bye Mom!”

So I launch into my  new morning ritual to enjoy nature’s secrets in my own backyard. Looking up our large Pine, I’m surprised to see a clan of peacocks still roosting away at 8 a.m. and cooing, their heads beneath a wing. Isn’t that awfully late? I wonder. Usually, it seems they’ve awoken and fled, their gawky, giant par dactyl -looking wings-flapping across blue skies.

A “co-co-loo-co-co-loo”  streams out and I spot a single crow emitting this sound that roosts with the peacocks. Six of his larger, feathered-friends are sitting sporadically in the tree.

Suddenly, the crow decides he wants a female peahen’s perch.

He inches toward her  and starts to peck her face. Beak to beak, they’re going at it, until he forces the peahen  out and she gives up and flees to another branch. The other peacocks don’t lift a feather to give her any aid. Why should they? They are lazy and sleeping in on this morning.

“Co-co-loo-co-co-loo,” the bully garbles out again. “Co-co-loo-co-co-loo,” in honor of his coup. Suddenly, he flies away and the peahen can rest a spell from her tormentor.

 Even in nature, it appears there are bullies.

I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the peahen. We’ve all been there from time to time. My motto always was: go around, go over, go under and do anything you can to avoid bullies. But then this happens:

Two seconds later, the tormentor flies back and goes for an attack on the same peahen! Peck. Peck. Peck! Stab with the beak. Stab. Stab. Stab. Stab. The crow flits off, returning once more. This time, when he returns, she decides to make a statement. She moves to sit on top of him.

Off the crow goes again, not returning anytime soon or he might be squished. Life is full of bullies, even in the wild. But what I learned from the peahen that day is if you can’t go around, under or over a bully – just sit on them.

That seems to work just as well.

thesecretlifeinmybackyard

A DAY OF GRATITUDE AND MORE

By Diana L. Chapman

Once again, I was complaining to my husband about living in a massive metropolis – an  urban jungle of baking concrete, graffiti plagued buildings, massive freeways peppered with ugly billboard signs and the sheer lack of vision by our city fathers.

I’m not out doors enough, I whined, and am left with the sense here in Los Angeles that if I wander to far around our community, I’ll see that nature has completely abandoned us. 

Or at least, we have abandoned her.

“That’s why  I just sit in our backyard and enjoy it,” my husband responded. “I don’t work. I just enjoy.”

Those words stopped me.

He was right. With a backyard maybe about an eighth of the size of a football field, life struggles and stories go on amid the grass and lemon Marguerites routinely, sometimes, secretly.

We happen to live in Los Angles' most southern tip, a harbor region that juts out into the sea – an industrial area called San Pedro. Wildlife still continues to cling to survival here in these urban wilds.

Roaming raccoons, preening peacocks, chatty squirrels, solo opossums, bird-eating raptors, gabbing crows are the heartbeat of life that goes on daily in this, tiny drop of a square garden plopped in this city with nearly four million residents.

This particular gray-blue morning, I open the back door and call out for my son. Littered across our driveway,  small, soft gray-white clumps, blow about like fallen leaves. My forehead wrinkles with regret.

“It looks like a baby peacock was killed,” I said sadly to Ryan.

He agrees as another tuft drifts past us, carried down peacefully, by a light wind.

Ryan rules out our black-and-white cat, Buddy, “the brute.” He’s known for leaving us with many tailless lizards, he’s captured, mouthed and lost. But the brute has been indoors all night.

We will never know really what happened to our feathered friend. Perhaps a raccoon got it or another cat. It will always remain secret only our garden and the animals will know.

“Sit outside in the yard and just read,” my husband suggested. “It’s a place to relax.”

But it’s more than that, I discovered. Sitting beneath the 50-year-old Montery Pine  reminds me of the smaller wonders in life that most of us have forgotten. We no longer have time for. Our lives are so twisted up with events, work, schedules, errands, texting, e-mailing, facebook, myspace and other virtual chaos technology that those small notes slip by us, mostly going unnoticed.

 And that is what gave me the idea for this new blog – in the hopes that I can bring home and share a place of meditation, solitude and understanding of such small and wondrous things going on in the secret life in my backyard...

Sept. 8, 2010

I wander outside the garden and breath in the fresh morning air signaling the coming of fall.  My bearded-collie-poodle mix, Baxter, scampers around thrusting his curious nose everywhere, in the plants, in the leaves in the peacock feathers.

A blue jay hops on the fence before flying off. As I read the newspaper, a pearl dominant sky moves and shifts overhead. Three tiny birds  swoop in playfully, singing and chirping, before flitting off without giving me the chance to identify them. Perhaps they are finches.

Our summer has come again without much warmth at all. Fall marches steadily in. It’s the type of day many people in Southern California complain about it. Looking up at our pine, I take in its fresh scent; it fills my lungs. Looking skyward, I feel transported suddenly as though I’m in the woods.

It is a day of gratitude and beauty after all.