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.