Friday bird blog

Western woodpeckers color plate from A Field Guide to Western Birds by Roger Tory Peterson

Bird sightings reported to hotlines, cooperative extensions and nature centers tend to be exotics. The friendly birds who habituate my feeders might resent this just a tad, because they are faithful and reliable, just so long as the feeders aren’t overlooked too often. A lapse or two in dispensing our special house blend is forgiven pretty quickly. Cats minding the store are another matter altogether. Even friends have limits.

This week – maybe I should start these columns, “It’s been a slow week in …”. All the men are definitely not good-looking, however. Nix that idea. But this week, the snowy owls still are around the southern lower peninsula, Ross’ geese appear here and there on Lake Michigan, there’s a varied thrush in a very improbable spot in Muskegon County, and this week’s feature bird is the Black-backed woodpecker, a/k/a the artic three-toed woodpecker, here from the northwestern US or Canada.

I’m assuming it’s a male present in Dickinson County, which is in the UP, site of Iron Mountain and many mining towns of the late 19th Century. The black-backed woodpecker – I guess that’s his official name now – is a resident of evergreens in the high mountains of Canada and west in the US to Montana and Wyoming. Iron Mountain is a piddly hill compared to the Sierras, but when one is w-a-y off base, so to speak, one must compensate like mad.
Black-backed woodpecker, male
Dickinson County, Michigan was a minor “fever” spot in the late 1870s when iron ore was discovered. One of the town patricians of Niles, Michigan, where my father grew up, was Henry Austin Chapin, a dry goods store proprietor until his 40 acres in Dickinson County yielded a lot of lucrative mineral deposits. (“Then one day he was shootin’ at some food, And up through the ground came a bubblin’ crude.”)

The family had built a mansion which was near where my father’s family resided, though not nearly so splendidly. In 1933, the depth of the Great Depression, the Chapin family sold the house to the city of Niles for $300. at auction. Today it houses City Hall.

Alles Gute zum Geburtstag!

Musicians everywhere celebrate today, the 21st of March, the birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach. This is the 321st anniversary. Both of his parents were musical and from families who had served as town musicians of one sort or another for generations.

One of the preeminent geniuses of western civilization, he never traveled more than a couple of hundred miles from his birthplace, unlike his great cosmopolitan contemporary, Händel, who lived most of his creative life in London and who is buried in Westminster Abbey. Although much is made of Bach’s life of ordinary struggles, the cognoscenti understood that a giant walked among them. Like most geniuses, though, he was plagued by the bourgeoisie and worse and lacked political sense.

In 1724 for his first Good Friday at Leipzig, where he was kantor of the St. Thomas Kirche (the director of all musical activity) and where he spent the last 27 years of his life, he composed the St. John Passion, which, while theologically difficult, offers some exquisite musical insights. The town council, Bach’s employer, admonished him after the performance not to compose anything so complicated in the future. Five years later (or three years, depending on which authority one consults) he presented the St. Matthew Passion, a choral masterpiece, one of the high points (in a magnum opus that offered no low points, you understand) of his output. The town council responded by cutting his salary. The Leipzig Brahmins were upset. Too real. Too immediate. The suffering was too present. Then, as now, it usually is risky to challenge expectations or to afflict the comfortable.

Here are some recommendations for your listening pleasure:

Solo Instruments

Unaccompanied violin partita no. 3 in E Major, BWV 1006
The suites for unaccompanied cello BWV 1007-1012 (I heard Yo Yo Ma perform all six in one of the best concerts I’ve ever attended.)
The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, composed for double manual harpsichord, usually performed today on the piano. Glenn Gould made two recordings of this work, both memorable. Also can commend Rosalyn Turek’s recording
The Well-Tempered Clavier, Books I and II. (I heard Daniel Barenboim perform Book I last year. Some of the critics didn’t like his “Romantic” interpretations. I’ll bow to whatever Barenboim wants to do. He is one of the most gifted musicians on the planet.)
Prelude and fugue in E flat Major (the St. Anne) for organ, BWV 552

Choral Works

St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244
Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248
Cantata No. 4, Christ Lag in Todesbanden, BWV 4
Mass in b minor, BWV 232

You cannot go wrong with Bach, but the unaccompanied violin partitas and the Brandenburg Concerti are a great place to start.

A true Victorian lady

This day was my grandmother’s birthday. She was the matriarch of the entire family and still is, actually, even though she died in 1956. Everyone loved her, even the in-laws. Her children and their spouses didn’t analyze their parents as much as we do in my generation, but she would have stood up, regardless. My parents’ generation is all gone now, too, and my generation does not get on too well, but we all have Grandma as a lodestar.

She was of solid Yankee Protestant stock, particularly influenced by the values of the Congregational Church, like one founded by her ancestor, William Kelsey, in 1650s Connecticut. He and others of the Braintree Company removed from New Towne (later Cambridge, Massachusetts) to a spot (later Hartford) on the Connecticut River in 1635, as part of an advance team for their leader, Thomas Hooker. It is thought that the term “Yankee” was coined by the Dutch already present when William’s little band arrived on the scene from the Dutch word for “squatter” or “thief”, so he might have been among the original “Yankees”. (Demystifies it all a bit, eh?) It sounds so smug, but if ever there was an example of stalwart Yankee virtue, it was my grandmother.

Grandma probably never knew all the genealogy that I’ve dug up, although her name appears in the 4 volume Kelsey genealogy begun in the 19th Century, under the guidance of Edward Claypool, who was a prominent genealogist. Many of the stories I’d heard about names and places have turned out to be accurate, and those stories undoubtedly came from her. A Victorian through and through, she never would have called attention to herself, though. When my sister received a pretty sweater for Christmas and commented that she’d be the best dressed girl in school, Grandma remonstrated with her, because that was boastful and common. One showed one’s breeding by what one didn’t say, I suppose.

To this day, I cannot slouch in a chair. That is part of her legacy. Lazy posture was akin to moral turpitude. (I swear a lot, mind you, and I do feel guilty about it, because my mother and grandmother would most definitely not approve.) Likewise, whining, rudeness, cutting corners - - all verboten.

She was influential because she was selfless, stoic, loyal and kind. We tend to aggrandize the dear departed, but character was significant, not money or possessions, which might induce vulgarity and wantonness, but doing the right thing, being of service, doing a job the best one could even though no one else might ever know. All these things were expected, de rigueur, standard.

Growing up with benchmarks like those has its pitfalls. The rest of the world doesn’t operate according to Grandma’s strictures. She was a product of pioneer Protestants and Progressives, though, not swindlers and conmen, and she behaved like an aristocrat, even though she was far removed from their company.

Her name was Beatrice Hortense, a very fashionable name for 1889, the year she was born. Her mother, Marjorie Copper Kelsey, ceased naming her children after grandparents and great grandparents, choosing Albert and Blanche, as well, instead of Sarah, William or the Old Testament names adopted by their Puritan ancestors, like Moses, Zachariah and Rachel, all names in my ancestry. She must have been quite modern, possibly a consequence of life on the pioneer trail to Nebraska.

Grandma would be agog at the world today, disapproving of all our lack of discipline and capitulation to materialism has wrought. Her world was hardly perfect, and she suffered many hardships and disappointments, but she wished for her children and grandchildren to have a better life, not necessarily one of wealth or fame, but one to make a difference even in small ways. Isn’t that what family values are all about?

May the road rise up to meet you

O'Connell coat of arms

"When laws can stop the blades of grass from growin' as they growAnd when the leaves in summer-time their color dare not showThen I will change the color too I wear in my caubeenBut till that day, please God, I'll stick to the Wearin' o' the Green. "


This day could not pass without a homily regarding St. Patrick’s Day. (A caubeen, by the way, is an Irish soldier’s headgear.) I am about 3/8 Irish, another1/8 or so Celt – Welsh and Scotch – English, though their antecedents were Norman and probably the “Danes” who settled in East Anglia in the 600s, and the rest German.

I love being Irish. The Irish fight back, they talk back, are quick witted and quick tempered, I might add, and love story telling. My father, half Irish, was one of the best story tellers around. Surnames in my ancestry include O’Connell, Kenney, McGinty, McKee, O’Rourke, Dunn and Slattery. Most of my Irish ancestors came to the United States in the 1860s and ‘70s, first to Boston, then to Chicago and over then to Michigan. That was my father’s side, anyway.

My mother’s grandfather was born in the Finger Lakes region of New York in 1867, his parents having come here from County Tipperary, Nenagh to be exact. They both died when he was three years old. An influenza epidemic, I believe, was the cause. He was raised by a mean aunt and took off for happier horizons when he was 12 years old, walking to Chicago from Lima, Livingston County, New York, with a friend. When they arrived at the friend’s relatives, they shut the door on my great grandfather, Patrick George Kenney, so he made his way to Michigan, where he lived (and eventually prospered) to the age of 101. He was a Justice of the Peace, an ardent Democrat and a heller all his life. Everyone knew him.

Dad’s mother was Katie O’Connell and a very sharp woman. She was the only child of Richard and Mary Slattery O’Connell, who married quite late for those years. Mary was 40 or 41 when my grandmother was born. They lived in an Irish enclave of the city of Niles, Michigan, a great railroad town which featured a magnificent train station made of glittery granite and beautiful gardens all around it.

As near as I can figure out, my grandfather, who was a mason by trade, must have met my grandmother through her father, also a mason, who I believe worked on the Notre Dame cathedral in South Bend. They were prosperous enough to have dedicated several stained glass windows in the St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Niles, which fact we discovered only a few years before my father died.

For an only child, there were many expectations, I suppose, but chief among them was to marry another Irish Catholic. Instead, my grandmother married a German Lutheran, and her father, Richard O’Connell, disinherited her. (Her mother had died when she was 15.) Maybe Richard was bitter. Who knows, but the Irish are very serious about their Catholicism. Richard, too, died in an influenza epidemic, the one accompanying World War I.

Richard’s arrival in America was not greeted with joy by his siblings who had made the journey before him. As the youngest child, Richard had been expected to stay behind in County Kerry to attend to the aging parents, thereby making it impossible for him to marry. One day he took the pigs to market, bought a passage from Cork and came to Chicago. He, too, was a character, and I have many stories about him passed down by my father, who never met him.

Richard’s cousin, Billy Casey, ran a saloon where my dad would go occasionally on an errand for his dad, and he remembered that Billy Casey always gave him a ham sandwich and root beer before sending him on his way. Billy lived in a splendid house which still stands and was always generous, another man who made good in America after an eons of mistreatment in Ireland under the British. I wish all the Irish in the United States would remember a little more of their heritage than the green beer and Leprechauns.

Friday Bird Blog

©National Geographic Society
female long-tailed duck with 7 eggs
photographed on St. Mary Islands, Quebec

Despite snow and ice, there is abundant sun here. Earlier this week, Monday and Tuesday, I believe it was, the sun was brilliant all day long. After days of gloom and fog, it feels like life is returning. Today we’ll have fairyland for a while – the trees and bushes look like they’re sugar-coated – but after a few hours of sunshine, it’ll be gone. Time for spring!

Dawn now features noisy chattering from the feathered crowd. On Sunday and Monday it was in the mid-60’s, and the robin was in full voice, notifying us of the coming rain. Rain it did. (and I have a mystery leak in the basement - - no where near an outside wall. Swell.)

The Michigan statewide bird report dutifully recorded each Thursday night, this week features 3900+ long-tailed ducks, formerly called oldsquaw, along Lake Michigan in Allegan County, site of many a bird walk in my days of youth. The duck’s official name was changed to conform to British nomenclature. As well, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska petitioned the American Ornithologist’s Union to change the name, potentially offensive, because the bird’s declining numbers in Alaska would require cooperation from Native Americans to sustain the population.

The sand hill cranes ought to be making an appearance soon. They were like old friends on the little lake where we lived when I was very young. My mother taught me how to identify cranes and herons in flight when I was maybe three years old. I was a font of wisdom, knew the black-billed cuckoo from the yellow-billed, the cedar waxwing from the Bohemian. When you grow up with this stuff it doesn’t seem difficult at all, and, of course, a child’s impressions are so strong and clear, not muddled and over-wrought.

We have a serious robin invasion, lots of squabbles over territory. Time to put out pieces of string and hair, although robins will use just about anything to construct a domicile. Maybe I should have a contest for the most original nest.

It's March 15, W

Sojourners cover,
September-October, 2003

Lame and frazzled, I bid you check out the referenced article. More later.

Sojourners Article by Jim Wallis

Friday bird blog

White winged crossbill
Illustration by Louis Agassiz Fuertes

Despite endless turmoil and uncertainty in the homosapien world, the birds appear unaffected. Two days ago I spied my first robin hopping about, plotting a settlement for the coming three-nester. This morning Mr. Mourning Dove was pursuing Mrs. (or Miss – can never be quite sure) Dove, puffing himself up and trying to jump her, to put an accurate spin on the scene. Crude, but nature never appropriated Victorian sensibilities.

The juncos are faithful, as are the downy woodpeckers, an occasional red-headed woodpecker, the titmice, which I love – cousin to the chickadee - how could they not be adorable – red-breasted and white-breasted nuthatches, the cardinal and blue jays, and ever-watchful crows, awaiting leftover popcorn. I made my own birdseed mix this winter, because I had lots of stale peanuts I’d bought in bulk on sale really cheap last year to make something or other and never got around to it. The can is empty, though. ‘Must restock.

It’s cold now here in Michigan. We have had little snow, though, in two months, and the tulips and narcissus are peeking through the ground. I went out the other day and cut through the landscape cloth I put down last fall, because I forgot to move a patch of daffodils. The ultimate effect will be more natural, which is what I always strive for, anyway.

The Michigan statewide bird report for yesterday mentions lots of owls again, a Bullock’s Oriole in Livingston County, which is in the southeastern quadrant of the lower peninsula, and a white-winged crossbill in Kent County, which is where Grand Rapids is located, home of Gerald Ford and where closed on Sunday has been a tradition ever since I can remember. Get the picture?

The Bullock ’s oriole is a western species and in any event is a summer bird in these parts, rarity though he may be at all times. What in the world is he doing at a feeder in Michigan in early March? Crazy weather patterns would be my guess.

The crossbill dips down from his winter range when food is scarce or the supply is running out or in extremely cold winters, which this has not been. According to the report he is chowing on the seeds in a mixed spruce and pine stand. Usually they travel in flocks, so next week we may hear of more.