For the Birds

Spring has finally sprung, perhaps a little bit.

I belong to a birdwatching group/organization on facebook. A few weeks past, a large number of people started commenting on a funny little bird everybody was seeing that is normally a rare sight in the province.

It's called the American Woodcock.

Woodcocks are native to Nova Scotia but normally shy, nocturnal, and live in deeper wooded areas away from common sight. They use their long bills to probe for worms in the ground.

When they got back this year, the ground was still frozen solid and snow-covered. They were showing up in unlikely places, desperate for food, starving, dying.

Somehow, the tale of their plight became a widely known thing, and the plight of all the other migratory birds arriving back after a long journey to find the landscape looking nothing like spring.

The response was amazing.

I've never heard local and national news talk about the plight of migratory birds. I've never heard so many mass calls for people to put out a little something, anything, to help.

My walk to work in the morning takes me through a pretty sketchy, very urban neighborhood. I saw piles of cracked corn and bird seed out in piles on the lawns of apartment buildings. Someone was back in our spot in the woods leaving piles of seed and chopped fruit. (We did as well.) People bought up nightcrawlers and fishing worms at stores to put out in dishes in their lawns. A local store owner bought massive bags of bird feed--and gave them away for free.

It was inspiring to see so many people doing what they could.

Spring is coming slowly now--weeks later--there is a lot more bare ground, green growth, but still so much snow. Things are not as dire, but they are still not great for mid April.

I had placed a handful of peanuts out on the deck one morning, just after (yet another) several inches of snow. I thought perhaps some crows would find them. They went uneaten, until several days later, when the snow had melted away. A pair of Blue Jays came and grabbed them up. I gave them more, they came back.

They're starting to trust me now, and they have me trained--in the morning, I hear a scream or a squawk, around 8am, of a blue jay on the deck wanting his breakfast.

We also keep a feeder out in our spot in the woods. We were there yesterday and saw it was empty. This afternoon I went out with my wife, and my dedicant (who was visiting) and filled the feeder. It took five minutes at most for the woods to come alive around us. Goldfinches, chickadees, juncos, song sparrows, fox sparrows. They were obviously needing the food. It made me beyond happy to see them all, so suddenly, and know that this is helping them even a little. If one more bird survives a miserable winter and this slow awful spring, it's worth all the money on birdseed and the wet feet and traipsing through melting slushy deep snow in April to fill that feeder even once in awhile.

And now it feels and smells and looks like spring is coming.

We'll be all right.

Illness, Books, Mead and Horn

I've been a bit under the weather as of late--almost literally. The climate this year is fubar, and it's not uncommon for us to swing from temperatures in the positives--as high as plus 6 or 7 (Celsius) to minus 20 or more with windchill. This has been screwing with a lot of people health wise, since nobody can get adjusted to the climate. We're also finally entering the stormy weather part of winter. This has never really been an issue before the last few months, but I've been getting headaches, which my wife and my doctor both think are migraines, sometimes lasting DAYS before a weather event. I'm not sure if it's age, or stress, or what brought this new thing on, but man. The pain isn't debilitating alone, but after that long, it drags on me. I've also been having bad breathing the last few weeks, despite taking my puffers pretty steadily. I now have a script for an oral steroid to help my breathing, and for migraine abortives to help the headaches, and I'm going to be sent for a CT scan to make sure the headaches have no worrisome underlying cause. Prednisone spent most of the day fucking up my guts and making me feel like general poop. Bleh.

I just wanted to share that, since I'm actually kinda proud of how much I've accomplished in the last few weeks despite feeling like shite so often.

I ordered four new books with giftcards I got at Christmas (we jokingly coined in Bookmas). The Prose Edda, the Poetic Edda (translated) a book called "Elves, Wights and Trolls", and "By Land, Sky and Sea" by Gede Parma. I finished the Prose Edda and moved on to Gede Parma as a change of pace before I tackle the Poetic Edda. I'm enjoying Gede Parma's book enough that at some point when I get all of this sorted, I want to read Penczak's Shamanic Temple.

Once I'm done all four of these books, I'll have 4 of my 6 required "further learning experiences" needed for the year, to maintain my IDGAF Initiate status. I need to catch up on my Land Stewardship--with the weather so up-and-down, it's been hard. I have a suet cake to put out for the local birds, but whenever we're due for cold temperatures and snow, we're scheduled to get pouring rain within a day or so, which will melt the suet. I've been trying to wait for a bit of consistently cold weather, and it just ain't happenin'. I want to get it out there, too, because the mild temperatures at the start of winter meant that a lot of birds who would normally migrate stuck around late, and are now struggling in the colder weather. (Birdwatcher. I know these things.)

We bottled our sweet mead batch this Tuesday, as I was home from work due to severe weather. It's been sitting for months while I waited to make sure it was ready--and it's actually drinkable now, not needing to be aged longer in bottle. It has a sweet honey finish that is somewhat floral. I like it.

Last, but not least, I finally finished the cleaning and fancying of my drinking horn. It took a lot of work to get it clean, and for awhile I despaired actually getting it clean enough to drink from--it had a horrible smell that wouldn't go away. I finally soaked it with rubbing alcohol, and then scrubbed it before curing it twice with Guiness. Now it smells like nothing when dry, and a bit like CowBeer when wet. To make it more "mine", I dressed it up with some leather (which I cut, stamped/carved, and dyed myself) and a small carving.


A shot of the carving and stitch work in the back...  The carving was "darkened" slightly with plain old brown colored pencil (Prismacolour, which are wax based) to help it stand out since I couldn't really get it deep enough with the tools I had to make it "pop" on it's own.

 And the leather work on the front! The dragon is (in case it wasn't obvious) a pretty important personal symbol for me, hence why I added one.

I have been "informed" that to consecrate the horn, I need to use it in a blot to Odin when we do our Imbolc rite, (which we are waiting on for the weather to be more "end of winter in sight" than it is now;) using our own home made mead. 

I will mention a little bit about my decision to engrave the horn with the Valknut. I have seen a million and a half explanations of what that symbol supposedly means, the only historically accepted one is "knot of the slain" and "something something Odin" (It's seriously really vague and not seen much.) I've seen some modern heathen takes on the symbol, ranging from "Odin can take you (ie. get you killed) whenever he wants to be Einherjar--and you're cool with that" (I haven't been able to find any source for where this came from though) to "sworn to/works with Odin". My take is more the latter - I associate the symbol with Odin, he has given me things in meditations bearing that symbol, and I accepted the challenge of taking and keeping these gifts. He was willing to allow me to put the symbol on this horn, provided I consecrate it in the manner described above.

(In case anybody who stumbles on this needs it clarified--the Valknut is not a racist symbol. Some skinhead groups have appropriated it, along with other Norse imagery, but nothing about the symbol itself or it's Pagan/Heathen uses is inherently racist. Just wanted to clear that up.)

Man guys, I used a lot of parentheses tonight.