San Francisco Gate
7/1/2006
Susan Lyte King, Special to The Chronicle
Saturday, July 1, 2006
was an odd child with a fascination for birds. My most fervent wish was to have a Bird Nest Museum to display the nests I carefully collected from neighbors’ rooftops, treetops, public buildings, telephone poles and other perilous venues.
My dream came to an abrupt and painful end when my father returned from work and discovered that I had begun excavating the dichondra in the backyard to create a future staging ground for swallows and other mud dwellers. My friends were those who shared, or at least tolerated, my passion. When Lisa Cunningham confided in me that she discovered a hummingbird nest on the slender limb of her patio tree, we became fast friends. We oohed and aahed together, observing the gossamer spiderwebs that anchored the mossy thimble to the branch. We sat patiently for hours, hoping to catch sight of an emerald blur.
But it was fall, and the brood had come and gone. So we hacked the branch from the tree, and Lisa gave it to me. I tucked it under my bed, awaiting the construction of my Bird Nest Museum. Then we weren’t friends anymore.
I saw no danger in scaling telephone poles, the better to view tree-top bird nests. Even today, the smell of creosote triggers a bird’s-eye memory of Karen Tranklas’ bamboo trees.
When I realized that the shortest path to my favorite thicket of trees was across my neighbor’s lawn, I simply steered my bike over their grass enough times to etch my own shortcut.
I spent endless hours perched high in the treetops, eating my tuna fish sandwich while peering through the leaves. I rescued countless chicks that had tumbled from their nests. Those with bald, transparent skin never made it, even when warmed by my desk lamp. The older fledglings seemed to do well for a day or even a week, but generally they died, too. But I kept trying.
Obsessed, yes; single-minded, no. I did have other interests. For a while, I liked to crawl along the edge of our bushes, eating chipped beef and pretending that I was a rabbit. That was a blessedly short phrase.
Apparently, I was also the self-appointed president of the Bible Prayer Club. I know this because I recently discovered a faded card festooned with stickers of lily-draped crosses. It announced the club’s formation and lists the members — all two of them. My pliable younger sister served as vice president, a token title I bestowed to make up for the way I bossed her around. The club was short-lived, I’m sure, because I don’t even remember it; most likely, I invented it in a childish scheme to justify my incessant prayers for a Bird Nest Museum or at least more bird nests to tuck under my bed.
So, I abhor chipped beef, I don’t do Bible clubs, but I still love birds.
I keep binoculars on the kitchen table to view the visitors in our yard. Right now, a phoebe flits across the swimming pool, touching down briefly to snag a bug. Tiny goldfinches cluster around the thistle seed feeder. Just yesterday, a sharp-shinned hawk perched several feet away, surveying innocent prey. And from over the fence, the trill of red-winged blackbirds pierces the summer air.
The Bird Nest Museum was never constructed, but no matter: I built it in my mind. There it houses an irreplaceable collection of adventures and images. Silk-webbed hummingbird nests. The scent of creosote. Frantic bike rides home with a fledgling nestled in my Stingray’s woven basket. The plaintive coo of the mourning dove echoing through the gray light of dawn. And watching this year’s brood on their maiden flights, heralds of summertime.
E-mail comments to home@sfchronicle.com.
Â
July 26th, 2006
Victoria Times Colonist
(Registration Required)
7/11/2006
Sarah Petrescu, Times Colonist
Published: Tuesday, July 11, 2006
WHAT: Concert in the Barn at Penfold Farm
WHERE: Penfold Farm, 1444 Maple Bay Rd., Duncan
WHEN: Sunday, July 9
FOR MORE INFO: 250-746-8654
- - -
With its country-barn setting, surrounding gardens and winding-drive location, the concert at Penfold Farm was more of a total experience than a performance.
Concert-goers sat on haystacks and lawnchairs in the cool shade of the converted Maple Bay Road barn for the Sunday afternoon show featuring Austria’s greatest composers and five first-rate string players.
Farm musk was thick in the air, a family of swallows dove in and out of their nest high in the wood rafters, and a modest stage was strung with white lights and lanterns.
It’s a casual setting to hear “serious” music, but intimate enough that it is not distracting. It was also clear from the packed house and nods and waves that these were dedicated fans.
Despite the open-air concept, the sound was surprisingly good, even uniquely so.
In Schubert’s Rosamunde String Quartet Opus 29 in A minor, Joyce Ellwood’s cello playing reverberated with an earthy richness not heard in a concert-hall setting. Each instrument was piercingly clear, though the volume was low in the rickety barn, which made utter quietness in the audience essential and the squawking swallows not-so-quaint by the end of the first piece on the program, a selection from Haydn’s The Emperor quartet in C Minor Opus 76, No. 3.
In the second half of the concert, Mozart was honoured (in light of the 250 anniversary of his birth in Austria) with the Quintetto VI for 2 violas K.516, featuring Ellwood, violinists Muge Buyukcelen and Mariana Lorens, and violists Mieka Kohut and Donna Robertson. Seeing five talented women play this music together was especially profound — given that female musicians had been shut out of professional performance for most of the time since the composer’s era. Only in recent decades have women had the opportunity to earn a full place in orchestras around the world.
The concert at Penfold Farm is part of a series, organized by illustrator Ken Hicks. Hicks runs the successful summer series, now in its sixth year, almost entirely by word of mouth, with no outside financial support or major advertising. The key to this concert series is nabbing tickets before they sell out. During intermission, Hicks had a lineup of people wanting to buy tickets to his next shows, which include Russian composers on Aug. 6, and German composers on Sept. 3.
July 26th, 2006
Times of Malta
19 hours ago
Natalino Fenech
Four young swallows raised in a mud nest in a garage complex at Tas-Sellum, Mellieha, have fledged and left the nest in the middle of last week after hatching on July 7.
Another pair of swallows have bred somewhere in Xaghra, as a family party of two adults and three fledged young were seen at Ta’ Gajdoru, Xaghra, on July 4 and on the following day.
In a way, it was quite a miracle that the Mellieha swallows fledged. The site they chose for their nest was a very unusual one as it was built against a concrete beam inside a corridor that serves as a driveway for garages. The swallows were making their way through one of the shafts and literally had to dive down the height of three storeys in the narrow shaft to find their way into the corridor where the nest was situated. When the birds hatched, one of the owners of the flats overlying the garages decided to install a screen as a sun shade in the shaft, unknowingly blocking the swallows’ passageway.
But the birds started using another shaft as well as the driveway, which they had not been seen using before.
The area adjacent to the garages is a construction site and workmen were taking their break in the same corridor the swallows were using. The workmen were fully aware of the swallows’ nest and in no way did they molest them. Very often, they sat and watched the swallows coming in to feed their young.
Garage owners noticed the birds flying above their heads but some of them were not even aware of the nest.
The breeding swallows were first noticed by Michael Sammut, a most active birdwatcher. The managing warden of the Ghadira nature reserve, Charles Gauci, had been observing a pair of birds feeding together and collecting feathers to line their nest from the islands at the reserve.
The ones nesting in Gozo were first observed by veteran ornithologist Joe Sultana.
Individual pairs of swallows have nested in Malta from time to time. In 1974, a pair had bred in an old farmhouse in Mqabba. Another pair raised two broods in the Buskett area in 2004. A pair must have bred somewhere again last year as a family party of six, four very recently fledged young and two adults, was seen at Ghadira last August.
July 26th, 2006