Field Notes 4
The day the Great Puddle War was averted
It hailed yesterday. Hard. In my garden today, the swiss chard wobbles in the wind like tattered flags on a defeated ship. The sunflowers are still standing tall, but their leaves are shot through, wounded soldiers holding the front lines and providing a semblance of shade for the last of the green beans. The potato plants have a hail-hangover droop. Only the tomatoes who hug the side of the house seem relatively unscathed. That was a doozy of a storm, ranking high on the scale of prairie storms for theatrical razzle-dazzle and racket.
Before the storm, before the afternoon build-up to it even, there was a lone puddle in the street. I could see it from the kitchen window where I had occasion to glance while I was doing kitchen-y stuff. We had rain the day before, nothing extreme or ambitious, just regular rain that falls and turns August lawns greenish again and temporarily fills empty puddles. So there it was, this puddle in the street, just being a puddle in the shade of the crooked poplars and berry-stripped saskatoon bushes that line our front fence. In all honesty, I didn’t really even notice the puddle until a graceful Eurasian ring-necked dove started strolling about in it. A pair of these doves have been hanging out in our area for a few years. In the winter they often feed on the seed that falls from the bird feeder. This year I think they nested nearby; their all-day coo-coo-cooing provided an accompanying rhythm to my weed-pulling and pea-picking.
Curious, I stopped at the window to watch this dove-in-the-puddle. She strolled the perimeter of it, pausing occasionally to take a sip. Then she moved to the middle and looked at her reflection. Took another sip. Then, as if she couldn’t control herself, she shimmied and fluttered and voila! Some of that delicious water was now on her tummy, on her wings, her tail. And oh, that must have felt good, because the next shimmy-flutter was more like a full-body dunk and then she just sat right down in the water with her wings all pointed up like sharp feathered triangles. She looked very vulnerable just then, sitting smack dab in the middle of the puddle, vulnerable and yet oddly comfortable. She splashed and flung water here and there, then rose up to flap-flap her wings, air-drying them before stepping primly from the puddle and proceeding to stab and poke and preen every feather back into place. She flew away and I smiled guiltily at having just spied on a bathing dove.
Later, mere hours before it would be subsumed into the hail-rain deluge, the puddle had two birds visiting it: a northern flicker and a robin, a combination I found somewhat surprising. The flicker was in full-feathered bathing mode, splashing and fluttering and squiggling and flipping water every which way. The robin stood cautiously along the edge, wanting to join the fun, but not quite willing to trust the flicker. And rightly so because the flicker suddenly flushed from bathing mode straight into attack mode and rushed at the robin to chase it away. The robin was ready, however, and nimbly hopped to one side, only to step back into the puddle as soon as the flicker returned to his splish-splashing. This back and forth, chase and flee, continued for a minute or two, with ready-robin always keeping just out feisty-flicker’s reach.
I was beginning to wonder when robin would simply give up and fly away when another flicker swooped in. Now it was a two-on-one situation and little robin seemed doomed to go unwashed, permanently barred from the puddle by a bully-bird wearing a black necklace. But flicker number two wasn’t any more welcome by the self-appointed king-of-the-puddle than robin. He was quickly chased off before having a chance to dip even his littlest toenail into the water. Robin used the distraction to squeeze in a micro squigglefluttersplash or two. Flicker number two decided that he needed to rethink his strategy and flew away. Not far, but far enough to regroup and assess whether this was even a puddle worth fighting for.
Apparently it was, because he swooped in again, perhaps encouraged by robin’s moderate success in alluding the fractious bather. Perhaps he sensed that the bath had started to mellow flicker number one, to soften and enlarge his heart enough to make space for others to enjoy a feather-wash just as much as he did. Whatever each bird might have been thinking and considering, the scene ended with all three of them flap-flap-splashing and doing some puddle-side preening before each went off to wherever birds go after a puddle-bath.
I smiled again, finding pleasure in a peaceful end to what could have been the Great Puddle War of the century. Well, maybe of the day. Either way (no surprise here) the conflict was diffused when someone simply shared instead of hoarding. Generosity won over greed and selfishness. Works with people, too, I think.