Creek Running North

Chris.

I’m honored. Farland loved the poem: I don’t think she’d been so surprised in ages. She has a few questions for you (something about birds that build nests out of prickly pear) — expect an email upon her return.

So thank you, again. I had a wonderful time. And not to worry: I’m still intending a weekday SF visit.

So neat to read of the same event from another point of view (and in another, well-done style).

Oh oh oh…

exquisite

like the flesh of a prickly pear perfect ripe and turned to the sun for its moment of glory.

We seem to have a prickly pear theme going here. Which can mean only one thing: time to go to the Mojave.

Which is, of course, what everything else in my life means all the time.

Thanks for this memorable portrait of a woman I, too, would like to meet someday. I’m going down my blogroll in alphabetical order, BTW, so I haven’t actually read Siona’s account yet…

Touched, and at the same time painfuly aware of my need to remain too too private. Like a jay bird, squawking in the tree. but I’ll fly at the slightest movement.

Siona and I were sharing thoughts about our ever hungry eyes. How we are unable to not see/not read things. We can’t tune out. We read the ads on those insulated rings around take-out coffee cups, we listen intently to the horrible ads on the telly and there fore are unable to watch anything except PBS. And there I was in my toxic Motel 6 box reading the label on the taffeta fairy skirt and it is made up of 50% polyvinyl chloride and 5% rubber.

Now about the prickly pear. Two times in the last few weeks I’ve found nests in my wanderings and climbed up to find them ringed by prickly pear cactus. What kind of creature does that, and how do they transport those spiky things up to the nest and what for? The nests were very different. One in a scrub oak about 10 feet off the ground and one in the crook of a pinion pine at a bit above eye level.

That adds up to 55%. I wonder if the other 45% is the air in the netting.

I was all set to guess who was building those nests until you said they were up trees. Woodrats build nests out of cactus sections fairly often, but woodrats are, to my knowledge, earthbound. Cactus wrens nest IN cacti, and are adept at handling small sections if need be, but that sounds wrong for them — not to mention location.

I wonder if it might be squirrels. At least one of the nests.