Feathers

For years I have been in the habit of picking up feathers wherever I go, bringing them home and sticking them in a vase in my office.

We had surprisingly few birds in Berkeley, probably because of the high ratio of people and cats to open space, so a lot of my feathers came from Tilden Park. My vase was rather large because it held a lot of big feathers from raptors and owls.

Here in Santa Rosa, we have acres of open space, and relatively few cats, at least until our nearest neighbors officially move in, after driving from Key West, Florida with two! Doesn't sound like a fun drive. They have a plane too, but he is "going to take the wings off and ship it." Apparently it is very small and cramped for such a long flight.

The birds that come to our Santa Rosa garden range in size from crows through woodpeckers, jays and morning doves, grosbeaks, finches and chickadees, to the tiniest birds--the hummingbirds. (If only we could get them not to fly into our windows, despite the stickers we have put all over them. The larger birds usually survive, but the wee ones are not so lucky.) Large numbers of vultures circle overhead, but rarely land inside our fence. We've also seen hawks swooping through the thermals and kites hovering like helicopters over the field, periodically dropping straight down.

Although they disappeared over the summer, the acorns I found stashed in a chink in our split rail fence are now being replaced. I noticed four of them in the same place as last year, as I went down to get the mail today. The woodpeckers drinking out of our fountain look quite crazed, probably because of their beady black eyes completely circled in white, and the fact that they take a sip, throw their heads back to swallow and then look right and left several times before taking another sip. I never see them bathing, although they must create quite a lot of dust and sawdust pecking away at our fenceposts and siding.

My new small collection of feathers, stuck in a tiny Balinese vase with leaves on it. The ratty looking owl feather was "modified" by Rudy, who apparently thought he was a cat and not a small dashund.