On Working at Home

Sitting here at my desk in my Austin apartment, I have a pleasant view of the north end of the pool with a few lounges, and a couple of tables and chairs with beach umbrellas, guarded by a 4 foot wrought iron fence. Since the pool's in a courtyard, the background is another apartment building similar to mine. Between my window and the pool fence is a shady, 10 yard stretch of mostly sand and dirt, with scattered patches of ground cover. The shade is provided by several oak trees. In season, through much of the weekend and occasionally during the week, the pool area is well used and not particularly noisy. The intervening space, including the oak trees, is almost as well used - in season or out - by the local squirrel population and a few mockingbirds whose sole purpose in life, apparently, is to devil the squirrels.

I guess that will have to do for a view, but I have to admit that I really miss the view I had from my desk in Kennesaw. There, I sat right next to the window and could see at least half of my patio, a 10 foot wide strip of (usually unkempt) lawn, at the base of a 10 foot high bank covered mostly with pine needles and dead leaves. The pine needles and dead leaves were the accumulated debris of the woods that extend from the top of the bank, past the property line, and nearly to John Ward Rd.

When the turkeys came they usually ignored me at my desk but, if they caught sight of me reaching for my camera, they'd scramble away till they could no longer see me. In the case of the picture above, they stopped 10 feet away to strut in front of the sliding glass door of the next room. That allowed me to get my camera, slowly rotate the vertical blinds open and get several shots of this pair not 5 feet away. Their own reflections were much more interesting to them than any small movement they might have noticed within the house. I know; not up to my usual standard - the relatively poor cropping of the picture was because I was shooting through the vertical blinds.


There were few days that I didn't see at least one or two of the big birds, but it was hard to predict where they would show up. This one had been sneaking around at the top of the bank and was already leaving the area when I spotted him. I stood up right at my desk and shot this picture through the window. Another day I was looking out the kitchen window as three toms marched between the houses towards the deeper woods behind the neighbor's house. They looked like a pretty well behaved bunch to me, but apparently not to the large screech owl that hit Tail-End Charlie square on the back like a bolt from the blue. The hit staggered the turkey and was loud enough for me to hear it through the closed kitchen window, but it was not repeated and all three turkeys beat a hasty retreat.


This hen was in charge of about a dozen and a half chicks, six of which you can see across the bottom of this picture. I know little about turkeys except what I observed in Kennesaw, but I suspect one or two hens babysit all the chicks in an extended family. I've never seen a hen with just one or two chicks, always a dozen or more. They were always interesting to watch - adults, adolescents, or chicks - and I almost always grabbed for my camera when they came 'round.


This cardinal settled into the ground cover at one end of the bank where he could observe the strip of lawn which was often a bit soggy after a rain and, I suppose, a great place to find a meal of worms. The cardinal is a beautiful bird and probably the state bird of about half the states on the East Coast. As much as I love Texas, what pass for cardinals around here are some really crummy looking birds.


One bright, clear Sunday morning in late spring I looked up from my computer and saw this scarlet tanager alight on a branch right outside my window. I'd never seen one before, but there was no question in my mind what it was. I grabbed my camera and, after getting a couple of shots through the window, I went out on the patio and shot him a dozen more times over the next 20 minutes as he tried different perches all over the back yard.


Two days before I encountered the scarlet tanager, I'd read an article in the New York Times about someone possibly having found an ivory billed woodpecker in the swamps of southeast Arkansas, 40 years or more after they'd been declared extinct. (The last reported sighting had been in 1944.) From the descriptions, I decided I would love to have seen an ivory bill. I remembered seeing a huge woodpecker in the woods behind my first house in Georgia in 1986. I did some checking at the library after I'd seen it, and decided what I had seen was not an ivory bill, but a pileated woodpecker. Thinking back to the one I had seen in 1986, I looked out my window and saw the one above only 20 feet from the house. I took half a dozen shots from my desk, afraid to move into the living room to try for a closer shot. When I finally did move to the next room, he had disappeared.


Occasionally there are more than one player in these little glimpses of a bird's life - like the turkey chastised by the owl. In the drama above, the bluejay took the stage first, standing precisely where the Downey woodpecker is in the picture above. The Downey dropped in, ignoring the bluejay which was forced to jump back to his position in the picture. Both birds were apparently too close to the entrance of the chipmunk's den, about 8 inches in front of the Downey. The chipmunk, which had been going nuts, running back and forth at the top of the bank when the bluejay first appeared, decided a more aggressive approach was necessary when the Downey arrived. He raced across the top of the bank and leaped at the two birds, landing where he is in the picture. Neither of of the birds appeared to be put off in the slightest. The chipmunk continued to approach the birds, carefully, until he was midway between the birds and his hole. Both birds seem to regard the chipmunk as the local "crazy", and after a few minutes both of them flew off.

Were I not retired, if I had to make a living working at home - in Kennesaw at least, if not in Austin - I'd never make it. I'm much too easily distracted by little happenings going on around me.