Yellow-bellied Sapsucker

I was sitting at the computer and glanced out into the yard. I saw a woodpecker and first dismissed it as a hairy, but almost immediately decided the gizz was off, so I looked closer. It was silently hammering on the side of a grand old maple tree in my woody backyard. It was brownish mottled on the belly and patterned black and white on the back. It's bill was straight and sharply pointed, very crisp to my eyes. And then I began to see some reddish blush on the throat and top of head. I don't see these woodpeckers very often so this was exciting. And even better, this bird stayed pretty much in the same spot on the same tree for hours.

Maria and Richard came and stayed overnight after we had a party at Tom and Eunice's. A YB sapsucker would be life bird for Maria but I didn't expect it to still be around the following day. There was a lot of wind in the night, lots of small branches and twigs all over and a group of neighbors' mailboxes were all askew due to either the wind or vandalism. We were watching the reconstruction at the mailbox scene when I remembered the sapsucker, looked out at the maple tree and it was there! So Maria got a good look at it.

Again, amazingly, this bird stayed in that same spot nearly the whole day. While at the computer, I need to look through a window and screen, and it was overcast today and the backyard is shady, so it looked like a clump of leaf litter hanging on the tree. Maria couldn't even see it for about 15 seconds as it was camouflaged somewhat. But when we looked closer and from a better window, it was very obvious. The white vertical "racing strip" and a suggestion of yellow belly, black and white head, with the above-menioned beginnings of red, thereby identifying this as an immature male.

Traver On Fishing by Robert Traver

Rober Traver of course is John Voelker best known for his novel Anatomy of a Murder. After that great literary success, Voelker quit his job on the Michigan Supreme Court and fly-fished, wrote, played cribbage and drank bourbon for the rest of his life. This is a collection from several of his books about how and why, where and with whom he fished and drank and played.

He is a wonderful writer, absolutely passionate about fly-fishing, specifically for native brook trout in secret places in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. He is witty, observant, irreverent.

His love for the woods and waterways of the Upper Peninsula is reason enough to read his stories. Or to read a poignant lovely vignette titled The Intruder. Or to laugh out loud as he writes of his friends and neighbors, his fellow Yoopers. Or to read hundreds of fine sentences like these:

"For trout, unlike men, will not--indeed cannot--live except where beauty dwells, so that any man who would catch a trout finds himself inevitably surrounded by beauty: he can't help himself."

"Since all fishing seems inevitably to involve progressive dementia, next summer I'll doubtless do my fishing from a streamside padded cell, for diversion making up long languid leaders of out of the dangling cobwebs."

"There is no substitute for fishing sense, and if a man doesn't have it, verily, he may cast like an angel and still use his creel largely to transport sandwiches and beer."

I have always felt it would be a wondrous thing to cast dry flies on trout-water with enviable skill, but since I will never do that, reading Robert Traver is a vicarious venture into this magic.

Finding Chandra by Scott Higham and Sari Horowitz

Chandra is Chandra Levy who disappeared in the summer of 2001 near Washington, DC. This is the story of her disappearance and, for a long time, the investigation of the main (and only) suspect, Gary Condit, a Congressman from California, with whom Chandry was having an affair.

The cover hype was that this book is "Washington's In Cold Blood.." Not even close. It was mildly interesting but no one emerged as a fully drawn character. As someone said on the radio this week in another context, but it applies here: "Washington is a seductive town..." It is, and power and sexual adventures and misadventures are common threads. Almost always, it has been powerful men who mesmerize the young women who come to work in Washington, and who then succumb to these men.

In the end, Gary Condit was not the murderer, but he lost his credibility, his power and position in Congress as the case remained unsolved for so long. The police were focused on Condit far too long, all the while ignoring most other suspects. The book makes that point and also focuses on Condit. Yet, there is almost nothing written about his family and how his behavior affected them, nor all that much written about Chandry. Don't write a book about such a case if so much is left unsaid.

Chandry's remains were found nearly a year later in Rock Creek Park, very close to where Ingmar Guandique had attacked other women during the spring and summer of 2001, but the news thrill and scandal of a married congressman who was involved sexually with a young woman who had disappeared preempted rational inquiry, or so it seems.

This is another sad story recounting the vulnerability of women from sexual predators, be they deviant and brutal and murderous or members of the powerful elite known as Congress.

The Steig Larsson Trilogy

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; The Girl Who Played with Fire; The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

All the action takes place in Sweden and that alone made reading these character and action-packed novels worth my time. I felt immersed in Swedish culture: coffee drinkers to rival the Dutch; summer chalets and cabins on the water and cold winters. The more general themes were computer hacking, sexual perversion, murders, journalistic integrity, the delicate balance between law enforcement and media, a more relaxed attitude towards sex (quite different from Christine O'Donnell's views), the proximity of Russia and the Baltic countries, and the intrigue of old crimes and modern punishments. I escaped for several days into this world.

The "girl" is Lisbeth Salander, an unlikely protagonist. Pierced and tattooed and socially inept, Lisbeth had been dismissed and discarded by most of society. She is now an adult and her character and her personal history were slowly developed in these novels. I was slightly weary of it all by the time I finished the last book but, for the most part, the plots, the many interesting and believable characters and the immersion into the Swedish landscape held my interest to the end.

Marinated Eggplant

Hmmmmm... While eggplant is quite a lovely color and an interesting-looking vegetable, I have not cooked with it more than once or twice. This dish is an appetizer. I sliced the eggplant, baked it and then immediately added garlic, dill, marjoram, parsley, lemon juice, olive oil and pepper, sprinkling all of these on the tops of the slices. Mollie says "...the ingredients will be in peak harmony" if it sits in refrigerator overnight. So that's what I did and the flavor harmony did happen. Unfortunately, this dish still did not make me an eggplant fan. It was just OK. I wondered if I would have been able to tell what I was eating if I were blindfolded. The texture is not firm, a bit soggy, and this diminished the appeal for me. Still, everyone has different tastes and it might appeal to some. It was much better eaten at room temperature than right from the refrigerator.

I suspect if one is writing a cookbook or is a chef and her main work is trying to creatively combine food ingredients, one has quite a different perspective on the issues of tastiness and successful recipes. How many tastings do they have on each recipe? How often have they made a particular dish? If they run a restaurant, how often is a recipe like Marinated Eggplant offered and what has been the feedback?

I am learning a lot about food combinations/preparations that I would never have tried were I not doing this. I am learning about fresh herbs and the utter importance of having at least one good KNIFE. I am learning about YEAST and kneading.

The timer is buzzing. My latest bread is about to come out of the oven and it smells damn good!

Tuscan Bean Soup

This was delicious! I used dried white beans, which soaked several hours, garlic, celery, carrots, green beans and a few odds and ends (salt, pepper, basil, lemon juice). The only thing I would do differently would be to add 1/2 to 1 cup more liquid. An easy, hearty, delicious fall soup. If this were made on a Saturday, it would be an easy nourishing supper meal a couple of nights during the upcoming week.

(I used Great Northern beans and they made a nice color contrast with the green beans and carrots.)

Cheese Nut Pate

Mollie says she thinks she has made this pate "more than any other recipe in the book." If so, she and I have quite different ideas of what is a success. This was definitely not something I would make again. It is something one would make and serve for a party. I am glad I didn't do that at any of my many soirees...

For the recipe, I mixed cream cheese, cottage cheese, cheddar cheese, a bit of minced onion, ground almonds and walnuts, lime juice, mustard, a bit of melted butter, dill, salt and pepper, baked it and then the idea was to garnish the whole thing, after extracting it from the loaf pan. Says Mollie, "The pate should emerge in one piece. If it breaks, you can easily mold it back together." I knew right then after reading this that it wouldn't unmold nicely and it didn't.

The garnish base is bland ricotta cheese spread all over the crumbly unstable load, after which one plays with nuts, olives radishes, cucumber slices and parsley to make it decorative (I guess). I admit I didn't do that since I hadn't made it for a group. Perhaps it might have been a bit more festive-looking at least. Mine looked like a salmon loaf, had only a mild, boring taste and it crumbled easily. I finally mixed the ricotta into the whole de-loafed shebang and tried a couple more times trying to convince myself it wasn't too bad. And it wasn't, but it wasn't that good either. I took some to the Wetzels and we never even tried it up there. I eventually threw too much in the garbage. I hate to do this, but....

So it goes when one is cooking one's way through a cookbook.

Least Sandpipers

Maria and I went to Ludington last Sunday and stopped by the best birding spot for shorebirds in that area, this being the sewage treatment plant. It actually isn't as bad as it sounds as the two lagoons are relatively odor-free (not so for the Muskegon Wastewater ponds). There are two ponds-lagoons in Ludington and also a lovely natural marsh just to the west.

We walked around the west lagoon and saw a few immature palm warblers and dozens of barn and tree swallows and thought that was it until we started back down the center dike which divided the two ponds. But then we noticed Lesser and Greater Yellowlegs and got good looks at them as they leisurely poked about, their long, long yellow legs highlighted by the eastern sun. They didn't spook and were very cooperative. We did agonize some over which Yellowlegs they were, but finally decided we saw both. Still, this isn't as easy as it seems. Slowly, slowly, after hours in the field and hours perusing various field guides, one gets better. The bill of the Greater can be ever so slightly upturned, and we saw that on a couple of them. These are good-sized shorebirds and easier both to see and sort out than the smaller sandpipers, a group of shorebirds that the field guides call "peeps" and which belong to the genus Calidris.

Many shorebirds migrate through the middle of the continent this time of year from their breeding grounds in far northern Canada to their wintering grounds in the southern US or South America. So there is a window of time to see them as they migrate when they stop to feed and rest. Still, in September the peeps are in fall adult, juvenile or molting plumages which generally means they are all brownish-grey on top and whitish-brown below, similar in size and bill length, with about six to eight different species possible in Michigan. They all probe for food at the water's edge. Of course, as one becomes a more skilled birder, separating them out and identifying them becomes easier. At Muskegon, they spook if one approaches too closely.

BUT, at Ludington, they seemed not to mind human proximity, and we got excellent close-up views of the Least Sandpiper which happens to be the only small peep to NOT have black legs. We easily saw yellowish-green legs, and therefore could positively ID these birds as Least Sandpipers. We were able to slowly walk right on by a couple of them, at a distance of perhaps 6 feet. It is always a thrill to see a bird so well and so easily. The sky was blue with large white clouds; there was a cool breeze with just enough warmth from the sun and no annoying bugs (which is often an issue at Muskegon). A nice day to be outside looking for birds.

We also saw a Solitary Sandpiper, not quite so close, but good enough to see its eye-ring. As, as it flew off, Maria spotted the very distinctly black and white barred outer tail-feathers. Perfect!

Back home at their lake later that day and the next morning, we saw a Bald Eagle and Great Blue Heron, both flying about the lake. And, with a noisy clattering as it flew to the suet feeder, a Pileated Woodpecker showed up periodically. This bird is always amazing to see: it has an all-black back with broad shoulders, a ridiculously skinny neck and a showy head with the sides (cheeks) striped black and white, and with a bright red crest-crown. As the bird would maneuver on the tree, the early morning sun lit the red crest so that it almost seemed to glow! This bird is nearly twice the size of bluejays and the other woodpeckers so generally other birds do not approach too closely while the Pileateds feed. They do begin vocalizing though if the Pileateds take too long. Maria and Richard have a perfect setup for observing bird behavior, in addition, of course, to the simple pleasures of watching so many species come and go from their several feeders.

Tree Swallows

Swallows can drive birders crazy but occasionally they do sit still and not swoop madly about. I stopped by the Muskegon Wastewater last Friday on my way to Townsend and discovered (I have no idea WHY) hundreds and hundreds of tree swallows hanging out in the middle of the road north of the east lagoon. Hundreds. I drove slowly and they would fly out of harm's way but only at the last minute. The "white tertial tips" of fall adults and juveniles were very evident.

A Thread of Sky by Deanna Fei

A wonderful multigenerational novel: Three ABCs (American Born Chinese) sisters travel to China with their Mother, their aunt and their grandmother. They are not especially close to one another. The trip is an impulsive gesture and a gift from their Mother, who is the only one who really wishes to spend time with all of them. They go, but reluctantly, and their daily routines and relationships are briefly interrupted. The separate stories of all the women are told as they make their way to and through the "must sees" on a 2-week guided tour of China. It is a fluent novel and the characters are separate individuals, but also bound by history and genetics and an unpracticed, unspoken love.

I found it interesting that it seems anyone who is not white in America is perceived as not really belonging here, including these Asian girls who never lived in China and were born in America. There are so many new books currently being written by non-white authors. While these novels are often sobering, they also educate and enlighten us with their tales of very different lives in countries far removed from North America.

The author was born in New York and is a public school teacher. This is her first novel.

Safe From the Neighbors by Steve Yarbrough

Luke May is the main character in this novel. He has a wife and twin daughters. The family lives in a small town in Mississippi where Luke is a high-school history teacher. As the novel begins, his daughters have just entered Ole Miss as freshmen. The threads of the story are events occurring in the present time and events which happened in the the early 60s, especially 1962, when James Meredith becomes the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) in Oxford, Mississippi.

Luke's father was a somewhat reluctant racist, probably not uncommon in that time and place. His father's good friend and their neighbor was a man named Arlan. However, Arlan was more affluent, he had a sexy extroverted wife, and this friendship becomes complicated as sexual and racial tensions increase. Luke grows up not understanding much of what is going on, but begins to seriously question his father's involvement in the murder of Arlan's wife and his father's role in the riots surrounding James Meredith's enrollment when Arlan's daughter moves back to fill in as a French teacher in the school where Luke teaches. Luke's parents are still alive, although his Mother has Alzheimer's.

While this is a novel with the common modern themes of love and sex and angst of aging, the author also writes of the racial turbulence of the 60s, a theme that is currently being reprised, IMO, as the proposed site of a mosque in Manhattan is being vehemently and viciously opposed. I like the way some writers of fiction place their stories on a broader historical canvas, as does this author.

Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt

Roger and Ginny Rosenblatt's grown, but still young, daughter Amy died very suddenly of a rare heart malfunction. She was at home on her treadmill and died nearly instantly. She left her husband, Harris, and three small children, Jessica, Sammy and Bubbies (James). Roger and Ginny move in and begin to help care for Harris and the grandchildren. This book covers the first year following Amy's death. It is a lovely, moving, unique book. Once grandparents, they now become parents along with Harris. Roger makes toast every morning for the kids, and he also has a Word for the Morning each day. He and Ginny braid their lives into those of the children and Harris. There are the everyday vignettes of life with three small kids, funny at times and poignant also, the moments of grief, the remembrances of Amy's life, the attentive goodness of family and friends and the knowledge that the constancy of love is a gift, both given and received.

Blindsided by Jim Cole

Subtitled: Surviving a Grizzly Attack and Still Loving the Great Bear.

Jim Cole survived TWO grizzly attacks, one in Glacier NP and one, far more serious, in Yellowstone NP. This book, however, is a paean to wilderness and the need to preserve it, for the sake of these great carnivores and for ourselves. He reiterates over and over how the bear is seldom at fault when a human is attacked. He feels both of his attacks happened because he surprised the bears. (NOTE: Make noise while hiking in bear country.)

He has hiked nearly 30,000 miles in Montana, Alaska and Wyoming, mostly because he absolutely loved these wild lands. For anyone who also has an ongoing love affair with our Western landscape, this book is worth reading. The land is under constant onslaught by trophy homes, and Jim Cole PLEADS with us to do what we can to preserve as much land as possible from development. The book is written well enough, but it is a bit disconcerting as the author mentions that he was criticized for getting too close to the bears or as he perhaps tries too hard to make the grizzly not a threat. I did wonder if there were more to the stories than he chose to tell. Still, he had a huge passion for these magnificent creatures and for the absolutely lovely National Parks that are their home.

So, the other day I was drinking coffee with Dave at JPs, and he mentioned the fatal grizzly attack that happened this summer in a Yellowstone campground. The man who was killed was in a tent, and a sow grizzly with cubs rampaged through the campground, also injuring two other campers in separate tents. (BTW, the victim was from Grand Rapids, Michigan. )

Not knowing the details, I went home and read about the attack on the Internet. It was odd, by all accounts. Food storage had been proper; the grizzly did not seem injured. I googled Jim Cole, the author of Blindsided, since I was curious how he would spin this attack which seemed to be at odds with his theories. And, weird! He had just died, been found dead in his bed, supposedly dying in his sleep. There was not much about what happened to him. He was not an old man. This was strange coming as it did just after the tragedy in Yellowstone and just after his book was published. I am still wondering what happened.

While I never questioned his love for the grizzly--the Great Bear--I personally would NEVER feel any ease sleeping in a tent in grizzly country. I have done this and was glad when morning came and I was still intact. I have hiked in Glacier NP and one always knows the possibility (very, very unlikely statistically, but still not the way I would like to end a hike or my life) of a grizz attack. I have seen grizzlies in Glacier twice, and both times they were far, far away and I was thrilled, both to see them and that they were a long way off.

I would recommend this book, though, as it is a heartfelt testimonial of the philosophy of: In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World. I suspect, Jim Cole was a controversial figure, eccentric and egocentric, but to have survived two separate attacks by grizzlies and then to be able to write so movingly about these experiences is pretty amazing.