Earl - A Poem

Earl

In Sitka, because they are fond of them,

People have named the seals. Every seal

is named Earl because they are killed one

after another by the orca, the killer

whale; seal bodies tossed left and right

into the air. "At least he didn't get

Earl," someone says. And sure enough,

after a time, that same friendly,

bewhiskered face bobs to the surface.

It's Earl again. Well, how else are you

to live except by denial, by some

palatable fiction, some little song to

sing while the inevitable, the black and

white blindsiding fact, comes hurtling

toward you out of the deep?

"Earl" by Louis Jenkins, from North of the Cities. © Will o' the Wisp Books, 2007. (buy now)

Naked Sunflowers

As I was laying in bed one morning I was watching the Lesser Goldfinches in the yard. There have been more Goldfinches this year then we have ever had. There will be 30 of them on or around one feeder at a time!! We have three thistle feeders, you do the math! Now this morning they would be on the feeder and then they would move off onto the two Sunflowers that were growing in one of the flower beds. Jessy and I had planted this bed with Coneflowers and Daises the beginning of summer. Sometime along the way the birds decided that they wanted a couple of sunflowers in there also and they went ahead and planted them. I figured why not and left them to grow. They were getting pretty big with their normal huge leaves and beginning of a flower starting.

As you can see from this picture of a sunflower that I took a couple of years ago the leaves are nice and large and there are lots of them.
Well, that morning as I watched the Goldfinches something happened to those poor old sunflowers. At first I thought they were just eating the ants off the plants. There are always lots of ants everywhere and I know the birds do eat them so I thought good, the birds get something to eat and I'll get the ant population reduced for a couple of days. The more I watched the weirder it became. This is how the sunflower ended up:

In flocks of thirty or so the Goldfinches ate every leaf off those two sunflowers!! I had never seen behavior like this although I'm sure it is quite common. Steve said that he noticed the same thing happening in his yard. That is one of the advantages of having a backyard habitat, you get to see things you wouldn't notice in the wild.

The good news is that this picture was taken a couple of weeks after they ate the leaves off and you can see it didn't stop the sunflower from growing and blooming.