The Truth about Bats and Blogs

When I was a freshman at Harvard, a wise alum gave me a piece of advice that I have carried with me throughout my life. "No matter how much you think you know about a subject," he warned, "someone who knows a whole lot more about it may be standing right behind you." For someone who's outspoken and loves to pronounce upon what little she knows, that's a potent life lesson, one that I learn again and again and again. Lest you be tempted to think it happens more at Harvard, I can attest that there are experts lurking in every corner. Here's a letter I got from Dr. Timothy Winship, who has been quietly reading my blog, but who couldn't get past Google's comment guard dogs to post this comment:

"As a professional virologist, with a background in animal viral disease, I appreciated your post about rabies in bats which contained a great deal of accurate information. A few points to clarify, though: the figure of 0.5% for rabies infection incidence in bats is cited quite a lot, but in fact this is based on a very limited sampling (it's surprising how little research on infection of bats with bat strain rabies viruses there is!). It probably isn't true, but what you must bear in mind is that 0.5% is NOT a low incidence given the number of animals we are talking about. That's one in two hundred animals, or 5 in 1000, or 50 in 10,000 and so on.

Because bats may roost in colonies of hundreds or thousands, this presents a problem. Dr. Winship continues:

"Also, most of the information we have regarding the pathology of rabies in bats is from laboratory infection of bats with canine strains of virus. Under those conditions bats develop a fairly typical pattern of disease seen in other mammals. However, very little is known about what happens when bats are infected with bat strains of the virus, and in particular how bats infect other bats. Your statement about not knowing the incubation period of the disease in bats is quite true but covers a lot of unknown ground! The actual level, or potential for asymptomatic carriage, of bat strain virus in bats is not known, i.e. I can't find any evidence in the scientific literature that anybody can tell you that an asymptomatic bat can't transmit rabies. Certainly these kinds of viruses, under the right conditions, can establish very persistent latent infections. I personally don't agree that we know that an asymptomatic bat cannot transmit the disease.

And as I think about it, who knows enough about normal bat behavior to say what's normal and what might be abnormal? Not me! Bats are bizarre little things.-JZ

Dr. Winship continues:

"The evidence from bite exposure records held by the CDC is disturbing--most cases are not from animals aggressively attacking and biting humans, i.e. acting rabid... You are right about health department records of bat testing being skewed towards unhealthy animals, but the statistics do tell us something about the geographic distribution of the disease, at least. If you haven't already seen it, here are the numbers and distribution of animal found in Ohio last year. It's also important to bear in mind that while the number of human rabies cases acquired within the US yearly is very small (averages something like one per year) the number of exposures is quite a lot higher (last I saw about 50 per year in Ohio). And, last I looked the cost of post-exposure prophylaxis was on the order of $12,000 per person. (Which makes the $700 pre-exposure shot series sound cheap). Anyway, I'm glad you're being careful. I enjoy your blog greatly and want to keep doing so for a long time! Thanks again--sorry this was so long-winded. "

This letter, like so many of your comments and emails, hit just the right note. I'm grateful to have knowledgeable and caring people reading this blog, and I'm doubly grateful when they speak up and add their own experiences to the discussion, holding up a light for us all to see by. That's one of the big reasons I can't seem to give it up--I learn so much.

Spurred by Dr. Winship's letter, I rooted around a bit to find out more about a case I'd heard about, of a Missouri man who'd had a bat get into his home in the Ozarks in October 2008 and gotten bitten by it. It's always tempting to think that someone dumb enough to handle a bat somehow has it coming to him if he gets bitten, but watching this video should persuade you otherwise. Here was a bat (the video shows file footage of a little brown, but it was more likely a big brown) that got into the living space of a home, acting normal. In the course of dealing with it, this good, intelligent, caring, wildlife-loving person allows it to climb up his coat. (Sound like something the Science Chimp might do?) It gets up next to his neck, he turns his head, hunching up his shoulder as you would; the bat gets frightened, squeezed by the coat, and nips him on the ear. Concerned, he keeps it around for a couple of days, but it acts normal and he decides to release it. His family is concerned, too, even teases him about getting rabies, but it just doesn't seem possible that anything bad could happen. It's just a bat, and people get all hysterical about bats.

Five weeks later, he falls ill, and dies painfully--all the more tragic, because his death could have been prevented by a series of injections administered immediately after the bite.

Here's the deal. If you get bitten by a bat or other rabies-vector species, you MUST get it tested and see a doctor immediately. Its brain tissue must be examined for the telltale ovoid bodies of the rabies virus. If it tests positive, you'll be given a series of shots, and you won't die. If you don't get it tested, and decide to take your chances, your family could be talking about you on a heartbreaking video like this one.

So, as enamored as I am of Dee Dee, and adorable and apparently healthy as she is, her welfare and her life is distinctly secondary to mine and my family's. The possibility that she may have a latent infection is small, but it's present, and we simply don't know enough about bat strains of rabies or normal bat behavior to say with any certainty that an asymptomatic bat is safe to handle. It's not. So if I mess up, and Dee Dee bites me, that's it. She dies, that I may live. Long sleeves and gloves for me, always, and nobody else handles her, ever.

Dr. Winship left me with a link to a terrific U.S. Geological Survey publication, available free and readable as a pdf file, that he describes as "the very best review of bat rabies I have ever found, and...recent as well." I concur wholeheartedly. Despite its foreboding title, Denny Constantine's "Bat Rabies and Other Lyssavirus Infections" is a great read.

Download it here.

Thank you, Dr. Winship, for bringing this issue into crystal-clear focus for me and my readers. It's good to have people like you, standing right behind me.

Bats and Rabies (What You've All Been Wondering)

ZICK ALERT! I'll be giving a free public lecture tonight, Thursday, at Jefferson Middle School, 21 Moffett Street, Pittsburgh, PA. Come see me! It'll be fun!

Is that a Pez dispenser, loaded with mealworms, or a bat in your glove? Nom nom nom.

All right. On to the health issue. According to the Organization for Bat Conservation, started by my friends Kim Williams and Rob Mies, I have a better chance of winning my state lottery jackpot or being murdered by my husband than dying of rabies from a bat bite. I just love that pairing of statistics.

Given my propensity for messing around with wild things, I suspect my chances of being murdered by my husband are better than average. I'm thinking of the time I promised him a turkey vulture wouldn't vomit if we drove it to Columbus in the Bird Watcher's Digest company van. And then, whoops, it did. So I'm not sure I like those odds.

Arming myself with information, I have taken a course in handling and keeping rabies vector species and learned a lot about the disease, its course in wild animals and humans, and its prevention. The course is required by the State of Ohio to get a certification to handle these species, which appears on my rehabilitation permit. The instructor of the course told me that, given the probability that I will be handling only one or two healthy bats each year, the rabies prophylaxis shots, while recommended, are neither required nor particularly warranted. If I were taking in a whole bunch of bats, coons, foxes and skunks, doing that as a full-time thing, it would be wise to get the $700 series of vaccinations. I wish it were as cheap to protect myself as it is to protect Chet. However, if I do happen to get bitten by a bat, even one that appears healthy, I'm required by law to have its head removed and sent to a state lab for testing. That's the cost of flying without a net. Obviously, my motivation to prevent myself being bitten is extremely high. I wear gloves and long sleeves, period. No one else in the house is allowed to handle the bat.

I know there are those who, reading this, will be afraid. Afraid for me, afraid for my family. I offer this: Yes, bats can get rabies. But they are not passive carriers of rabies, as I had always erroneously supposed. In fact, when they get rabies, they show symptoms and die from it, like any other mammal. Once a bat starts showing symptoms, it will be dead within a week. And only a bat showing symptoms can transmit rabies in its saliva, for the virus has to have infiltrated the brain both to cause symptoms and enter the saliva. We don't know the incubation period of rabies in bats. That would be a good thing to know. It's quite rapid--about a week to ten days--in most furbearing mammals, although one fox was known to have developed the disease 15 months after being exposed. Eep.

The percentage of wild bats with rabies is approximately one half of one percent. I was surprised to learn how low the incidence is. The percentage of bats (often visibly ill) which are brought to health departments and test positive for rabies is approximately five percent. Bats that are compromised enough to be grounded and captured are obviously a sample skewed toward sick animals.

My nephew named her Fledermaus, but I call her DeeDee. Middle name: Marie. And I am grateful that she has come into my life. It's like having a teacher in all things bat-related staying for a little while. And I can already tell that our time together will be too short.

Bat Care

The bat my mother-in-law found in her living room is a big brown bat, Eptesicus fuscus, as evidenced by her long, foxy muzzle. Little brown bats look kind of smoosh-faced but not in a cute, Boston-terrier like way; more in an otherworldly way. Their faces and muzzles are furry, not naked like the big brown's. Here's a photo of a little brown bat from batguys.com. I could definitely love a little brown bat, but it isn't as sweet and familiar looking as the big brown bat.


Little brown bat, Myotis lucifugus. Photo from batguys.com

Big brown bats are irreproachably cute micro foxes. And they're only big in comparison to pipistrelles and little brown bats. They're about 4 to 5 inches long, with a 11-13 inch wingspan. They weigh only 1/2 to 5/8 ounce. They don't have hollow bones or air sacs like birds; their flight is the feat of an acrobat who must flap continuously to stay aloft.

The vast majority of bats found in homes are big brown bats. They seem to be better (or worse, depending on how thrilled you are at finding one in your kitchen) at getting into the occupied parts of houses.

Care of overwintering bats is not difficult, because they sleep all day and almost around the clock. I can change the papers, food and water in her tank without ever disturbing her as she hangs on the sidewall, hidden in her toweling. She eats live mealworms, which are fed my new favorite nutritious substance, chick starter, with carrots for moisture. This is called "gut loading." The idea is, if you feed the worms good stuff, the bat or whatever eats them gets good stuff, too. I can attest that mealworms grow like Topsy when kept in chick starter. It would seem to me to be a good idea for anyone feeding mealworms to wild birds to keep them in chick starter rather than plain old fashioned oats. But then I'm all about taking care of wild things, and I'm thinking a lot more about nutrition these days, having had some evidence that we can hurt the things we love most with the wrong foods.

When the towels get soiled, every four days or so, I gently fold her into her dirty washcloth and place her in a lidded Tupperware. Then I thoroughly clean the tank and gently transfer her to freshly-laundered towels on the tank wall. That's my favorite part, because I get to talk to her and transfer her from one towel to another. At first I had to unhook her feet from the dirty towel, but now she scuttles up onto the clean towel as soon as I open my hand. Bats learn fast.

Routine care doesn't make her mad any more. I get just a little whiff of musk from her facial glands, a pleasantly skunky waft, a desultory chitter. And her fur is smooth and shiny, not all rumbly like it was when I first got her. She's been preening. I can see the towels shake as she rearranges her fur. Sometimes I see her licking her hooks and feet and armbones like a cat. She can scratch her head and neck with her hind feet. Having always thought of bats as kind of bound up in their own wing and tail membranes, I'm pleased and surprised to see how flexible and mobile they are.

I risk a stroke toward her back end as I hold her head and wings securely in the glove. It's amazing. Her fur is so soft you can't even feel it. She doesn't so much as turn her head, but she kind of shrinks in when I touch her. Her whole being vibrates, and I imagine she is talking, saying something about my temerity for daring such a thing.




She hangs there all day, sleeping and preening and scratching, folded into her towels. She much prefers dark colored cloths. She's become so tame that it's hard to get her to chitter and cuss at me now. I wish I had taken photos of her teeth when she was just captured--they are impressive! Edges like a pinking shears, oversized for her tiny mouth, and strong--she would bite the tweezers and nearly twist them from my fingers, clang!! No wonder I was a little eepy about her.

Here's the not-so-easy part of keeping a bat over the winter. It needs to be released when the weather warms reliably in spring, when the nights stay in the 50's. And several weeks before that, it needs to have a heated place where it can exercise and get its muscles conditioned for flight. And there's the rub. I have a tent made of nylon screening that would be a fabulous flight space, except for the fact that any big brown bat worth its salt would be outta there in two minutes. They're escape artists par excellence. At the Ohio Wildlife Center, they have to roll up towels under the flight room door, for goodness' sake, because the bats will go out that tiny space. Smart, smart, smart. And tiny, tiny, tiny, and endlessly flattenable, like flying Flat Stanleys, bats are. So I'll have to head to Columbus for flight conditioning several weeks before release time. And pray that Dee Dee doesn't have her bab(ies) before she's released near her maternity roost.


All right. I've made some of this bat care thing sound easy. But I have to tell you that you MUST have a permit from your state to keep any wild animal, and for a rabies vector species like a bat, you must also have a RVS certification on that permit. This is for your own protection as well as the bat's. They're not pets. They do a good job of looking like them on my blog. But I don't cuddle them and I handle them as little as possible. They're wild animals and they're destined for release.

The day my permit came in the mail with the rabies vector certification on it, I decided that I wouldn't trade it for a diamond ring. What can you learn from a diamond ring?

Big Brown Batgirl

Big brown bat, Eptesicus fuscus

Fasten your seatbelts. I'm gonna go all bats on you. And you're going to love it. Bats are pretty much my favorite animal now, right after ligers. Which, as you probably know, are bred mainly for their skills in magic.

Back to bats.

It's a late winter Wednesday. My mother-in-law, Elsa Thompson, notices a bat flying around in her living room and kitchen. While most people would scream and dive for cover, Elsa takes mild note of the event and hopes she will eventually find the bat where she can catch it. She's done this before. And she is not your garden-variety mother-in-law, being co-founder of both Bird Watcher's Digest and The Marietta Natural History Society.

Friday. Elsa opens the basement door and sees a bat roosting in the jamb, near her pegboard full of pots and pans. She captures it in a towel and installs it in a glass vase with a towel in the bottom and colander over the top. Later, she adds a ball of raw hamburger and a cut-up grape. She calls me and tells me she's seen the bat tugging at the grape. What else should she offer it? That evening, I swoop in on my way to the movies and give the bat a dozen mealworms off the end of a tweezers. Thank goodness I always keep mealworms on hand in a couple of plastic shoeboxes, where they reproduce and offer themselves up to save whatever foundling I have on hand, even in January. The bat is very hungry and thirsty, having expended valuable energy by flying around a warm house for three days. It's evidently found its way downstairs from the cold attic, where it should be hibernating.

While we're holding the bat in a towel, it squirms around and gets away, making loops around the living room. It vanishes and I stand stock-still in the living room, looking carefully. I find it resting atop a warm DVD player, and pick it up in the towel to continue feeding it. I will not realize until much later how lucky I was to have relocated that animal.

Sunday. I pick the bat up in the evening. Elsa's been ably caring for it and feeding it in the meantime. I've called the Ohio Wildlife Center and found out that protocol for a healthy bat found in a warm house in midwinter is to keep it until it can be released outside in spring. Oh! My! That sounds like a job! Thank goodness I'm permitted and certified by the State of Ohio to handle and keep rabies vector species like bats. Even so, I make plans to have Bill transport it to the OWC clinic in Columbus in the morning, where they are hosting eight overwintering bats in just the same straits. He's on his way to the airport anyway. You see, I am just a little eepy about handling and keeping a bat in my house. I am thinking rabies and disease and gloves and towels and guano and kids and eep eep eep.

Who are you, little one? You're so foreign to me. I have no mental template for how you should look or behave. I need to know you.

Something happens to my brain (not a dread viral disease, but a chemical shift) between Sunday night and Monday morning, and I decide not to unload the bat on OWC just yet. I've been researching bat care online. And I want to make sure it can feed itself from a dish. I want to make sure it's in top condition before I fob it off on anyone else. I want to get to know it better. And I have a small suspicion that I'm falling out of fear and into love.


It's a female, and she seems thin and ribby to me, maybe a bit dehydrated. She chitters and cusses at me in an ultrasonic voice when I handle her. She sounds like an angry hummingbird, bzzbzzbzzzbzzbzzzbzzbzzz! For the next two days, I hold her in my glove while I feed her crickets twice a day. I can feel her voice vibrating even when I can't hear her. Then I find a good piece online, written by Susan Bernard of Basically Bats, called Bats in Captivity, which warns that hand-fed bats might not take food again on their own. Uh-oh. I decide to offer mealworms and crickets in a little shallow dish, and water in another as they suggest, and quit handling her to feed her. It seems a better solution all around.

By now the bat is installed in a plastic pet carrier meant for small mammals and reptiles. I've got a washcloth doubled and draped down the side where she can hang upside down in comfortable darkness. The food and water dishes are on paper towels below her. Since she'd be hibernating anyway, she doesn't need to fly around, and she's perfectly still and sleeping all day. The next morning, the mealworm dish stands empty. Well, that was easy. The next night, I creep in with a little flashlight cupped in my palm so only a tiny ray of light sneaks out, and I catch her elbowing over to her mealworm dish, which she lustily empties. I let a little more light fall on her and she glares at me and retreats into her washcloth roost, a tiny, deeply offended Dracula, fleeing the dawn. By now I am completely in love. I'm glad I don't have to handle her and stress her, and she is, too.

Maybe I can do this bat care gig. She's a whole lot less trouble than a macaw. And she is really, really adorable.

I'll be speaking about this little messenger from above (and a bunch of other stuff) starting at 5:30 PM tomorrow night, Friday, March 12, at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, for its William and Nancy Klamm Memorial Lecture in its Explorer series. There will be live music, refreshment, exhibits, a book signing, Phoebe and a very excited, dino-crazy Liam in attendance. I've spent the week tearing my Letters from Eden talk all to bits as only a crazy Mac Lady can. It's all new. If you're anywhere near Cleveland, I'd love to meet you. Remember to blurt "BLOG!" You can register here.

If you miss the Cleveland talk, come hear me at nearby Black River Audubon's "Outstanding Speakers" series the very next night, Saturday, March 13, at 7 pm. It'll be at Lorain Co. (Ohio) Metroparks' Carlisle Visitor Center. Details are here. Another big weekend!

And on Sunday I'll tell you more about the big brown bat. There is a lot to tell.

Zick Dough, Improved

photo by Mary Ferracci

I've borrowed this wonderful photo from Mary's View. It's a bluebird from her yard in North Carolina who is hooked on Zick Dough. See anything wrong with this picture? It jumps right out at the Science Chimp. He's not putting weight on his left foot, and the toes are swollen. He's in pain. And it's all my fault.

I've been quietly working this winter, learning about bird nutrition, perfecting a recipe, trying to right some wrongs. I've posted before about the joys and drawbacks of feeding the homemade suet dough that a lot of people are calling Zick Dough. And I've said before that I feel a little squeamy about having my name on that recipe, even moreso since I figured out that it can give birds who eat too much of it a painful case of gout. You can read about that in the original posts, "Uh-Oh, Zick Dough" and "Crack is a Better Name for It." If you're just joining us for this story, I'll recap:

I've been feeding homemade suet dough for years. The basic recipe has always been:

OLD ZICK DOUGH

1 cup peanut butter
1 cup lard
2 cups yellow cornmeal
2 cups quick oats
1 cup flour

And the birds in my yard have gobbled it up, everything from chickadees, tits and nuthatches to woodpeckers, cardinals, sparrows, towhees and bluebirds. Bluebirds are the biggest fans of Zick Dough. And therein lies the problem.

As I've explained, eastern bluebirds are the ultimate addictive personalities. Given an easy food source, they will exploit it to the exclusion of almost everything else. If you stop and think about it, the recipe above is anything but a complete diet. It's fat, some limited protein, and carbohydrates, and it's really rich. It's kind of like living on, well, oats, lard and peanut butter.


Here is the foot of a female bluebird who gorged on Zick Dough all winter and into the spring of 2009. She can't put weight on it. It hurts. She's got gout. Or metabolic bone disease. Or something bad. And I strongly believe it was due to an improper diet, and I felt, and still feel, terrible about that.

The short-term answer was to suspend all feeding of Zick Dough. And her foot recovered, sort of. The swelling went down, but she had a permanently stiff middle toe, as if she were giving me the finger for feeding her low-value food. And I deserve it.

That bluebird disappeared sometime in the fall of 2009. I don't know what happened to her, but I'm sure that if she could come back to my feeder, she would have by now. I have to think that having a stiff foot was a handicap, and I'm ready to take the blame if she died before her time. I'll never know. All I know is she was here for years, and now she's gone. Maybe she was really old, and that's why she ate so much of the easy stuff.


photo by Mary Ferracci

I don't think it's a coincidence that a bluebird in North Carolina who also gorges on Zick Dough has the same problem. And that's my problem, and that of anyone who feeds this stuff to their backyard birds. Maybe that's you, too.

So. I'm cruising along early this winter, feeding my first batch of Zick Dough, enjoying my bluebirds and all the others, and so glad to be able to help them through the worst winter in memory. I didn't start feeding it until it got really cold--Christmas, for goodness' sake--and I planned to suspend feeding it the moment it got reliably warm. My suspicion is that feeding this rich food in warm weather is what got Gouty into trouble. So feeding it only in really cold weather was my interim answer to the problem.

One fine morning I get a Google Alert for Zick Dough (it's really out there on the Internet.) It's a piece written for the Maryland Bluebird Society's "Chatter" by Felicia Lovelett.

I devour it with great interest. In it, she cites my post, "Uh-oh, Zick Dough" in which I describe possible gout in my bluebird visitors. And she points out that suet dough mixes are very low in calcium, high in phosphorus, and "contain proteins that are relatively low in biological value." Further, she suggests that "Gouty" may have had Metabolic Bone Disease. Well, whether it was gout or MBD, there's no doubt she was all messed up, and I had good reason to suspect it was the steady diet of Zick Dough that messed her up. A male bluebird in my yard, also a heavy imbiber, had the same problem. And both recovered when I withheld the Zick Dough.

Ms. Lovelett suggests basing suet dough on a "formulated diet that provides adequate calcium, high quality proteins and other essential nutrients." And she mentions unmedicated chick starter as a base. Chick starter is an extruded pellet that crumbles easily. It's formulated to encourage growth and strong bones in young domestic chicks, kind of like puppy chow for birds. It's got a lot more nutritional oomph than yellow cornmeal, oats, peanut butter or lard.


My very next trip was to the feed store, where I bought a small (20-pound) bag of DuMor unmedicated chick starter. (You definitely want to check the label--the last thing we want is to give antibiotics to wild birds!) I spent some time fiddling around with proportions and finally came up with this:

NEW ZICK DOUGH: SMALL BATCH

Melt in the microwave and stir together:
1 cup peanut butter
1 cup lard

In a large mixing bowl, combine
2 cups chick starter
2 cups quick oats
1 cup yellow cornmeal and
1 cup flour

Add melted lard/peanut butter mixture to the combined dry ingredients and mix well.

I made a small batch first, and laid out two piles of Original Recipe and New Improved. It was a gas, watching the birds sample both.


Yes, it looks different...Some, like the titmice, tried the new but preferred the old mix. One female cardinal stuck to the old mix. The other cardinals preferred the new recipe.

Of my pair of bluebirds, the female liked the old mix, and her mate liked the new.


Importantly, they all accepted it immediately, and the switch to the new recipe was seamless and instant. I really hadn't expected it to be that easy. I figured out that the tufted titmice just like bigger chunks to carry off, and the new mix is more crumbly, so they can't find a big wad as easily with the new recipe.

All the birds are perfectly happy with the new mix, and everyone is eating better this winter.

While I'm at it, I'm going to pass along my secrets for mixing Zick Dough in large batches. Here's my quintupled recipe.

NEW ZICK DOUGH: BIG BATCH

5 cups (1 40 oz jar) peanut butter
5 cups (1/3 of the 64-oz bucket) of lard (Wal-Mart, in the Shortening aisle)
10 cups chick starter (available at any feed store)
10 cups quick oats
5 cups yellow cornmeal
5 cups flour

Measuring peanut butter and lard by the cup is a pain in the butt. Instead of measuring, I just use a bowl scraper to empty out a 40-oz jar of PB into a medium-sized mixing bowl. It takes up half the bowl. Then, I fill the rest of the bowl with lard. This saves a lot of time and mess in trying to stuff peanut butter and lard into a measuring cup. There's no way to do that without getting it all over you.

Put the bowl in the microwave and melt the mix down (about 5 minutes on High). Stir it together.

Have all the dry ingredients--chick starter, oats, cornmeal and flour--well blended in a lobster pot before pouring in the molten peanut butter/lard mixture.
Stir well with your heaviest spoon, making sure you get down to the bottom. I finish by working it with my hands. I sit on the floor with the lobster pot between my knees and Zick Dough up to my elbows, but I will spare you a photo of that.


The great thing about chick starter is it keeps the mix from getting so gummy and ensures a lovely texture to the final product. And it nourishes your birds. It's a win-win all around.

Mmm, good enough to sample. And yes, I do. I like to make sure it tastes good.


Disclaimer: Even New Zick Dough is too rich to be fed once the weather warms up. The birds will still beg, but please suspend feeding once it warms up and send them off to get the live insect protein they need. Here's Gouty, about three weeks after I suspended feeding Zick Dough. She's using both feet, and looks a lot better, no?



The last thing I want to do is pretend I have the final answer here. Like life, the Zick Dough recipe is a work in progress. I'll be watching to see how my birds fare this spring, having had a winter's worth of New Zick Dough. If your birds are hooked on Zick Dough, please find a feed store and pick up some chick starter--one 20-pound bag should last you all winter--and mix up the new recipe. It's easier to mix, smells lovely, and offers better nutrition to the birds we all love so well.


Thanks to Mary Ferracci for her photos and her friendship. And to Felicia Lovelett, for the chick starter idea. Answer my email, willya?

Challishing* in Whipple

I'm sitting at a table alive with daffodils and bicolored tulips in vases. I had to buy those. Two huge appleblossom pink amaryllis tower over them. Those, I grew from babies. Outside, the ground and sky are stubbornly, resolutely white. It was a weekend. Friday afternoon Bill and I hand-carried a ton or so of music equipment up a snowy hill in a blizzard to the van, because we couldn't pull down to the basement door. Loaded that. Bill, the kids and I drove in two cars to Columbus in a three-hour, white-knuckle nightmare of slush and overturned cars so we could play our Swinging Orangutangs gig for the Ohio Ornithological Society. The other Orangs made it, but everyone was hollow-eyed and shell-shocked by the time they staggered in. Something about seeing trucks losing control in front of you takes the shine off winter driving.

The people who were able to get there at all enjoyed it, and so did we. The band busted down the doors and had a great time, ate fire-hot chicken wings and drank bad margaritas at midnight and then flopped in our hotel. That was nice. I drove home with the kids on Saturday afternoon, ran out of gas, coasted down the providential exit ramp, walked to a station, bought a $9 one-gallon gas can, and spent twenty minutes just trying to figure out how to assemble the childproof nozzle and cap so I could put the damn gallon in my dead car. By then it had started snowing again, and I resumed my death grip on the wheel to guide us home. The roads were lousy; our driveway was very nearly impassable. Another foot. Another freakin' foot of snow. What is going on??

Sunday morning I shoveled leaden wet snow for two hours, and practically had to call a Whipple Township trustee meeting to get our driveway plowed out so we could have 19 people over Sunday afternoon for an early birthday celebration for Bill of the Birds, who was still in Columbus volunteering for the OOS event (he's the emcee with the mostest). I had raided my favorite stores in Columbus--Whole Foods and Trader Joe's. I bought the biggest fattest Whole Foods spears of Mexican asparagus that you have ever seen; I was making sweet potato hash, baby Swiss quiche and slow-roasted baby back ribs for 20, and in my book having all that fabulous fresh food and an impassable driveway is an unqualified Domestic Emergency. Luckily the trustees agreed, at least in theory, and a huge tractor with a blade showed up to deliver this resolute foodqueen from disaster in her snowbound castle. The dinner was a smashing success. If I had had my choice, I wouldn't have started a full day of heavy cooking with several hours of shoveling wet snow and finding someone to remove same from a quarter-mile-long driveway. But this winter, at least for me, is all about having no choice. I feel like a feedsack full of boulders today.

Any more, our house feels like McMurdo Station, the outside having changed from my second home to an inhospitable, barely-navigable place that makes me miserable. The snow is a mess to walk through, all crusty and bumpy. The idea of taking a hike in it is about as appealing as pounding my shins with a hammer. Chet and I have grown fat and lazy in our enforced confinement. There was one day--one day--when we saw a few bare patches of grass, but by nightfall it was being covered up again, and within two days we had another foot of it on the ground.

After my shoveling and plowing adventure, I decided that I had one good thing to say about the latest foot of heavy wet snow. You can grab handfuls of it and scrub the starling sh*t off the bird feeders.

There. There's your silver lining.

Hence the vases upon vases of daffodils and tulips, the blooming amaryllis, the orchids. I am challishing**, and these are the decorations in my hospital room.


a detail of a new Guatemalan quilt I just broke out for the occasion.

My neighbor Beth said she saw a woodcock wandering along the side of our road. Poor thing. He should have been singing, displaying and mating for two weeks now. Instead he ekes out a living on almost nothing. I don't even want to think about what happens to woodcocks who arrive on schedule to find more than a foot of snow on their lekking and feeding grounds. I can't imagine what they find to eat. Maybe they go into the woods and poke around in the unfrozen parts of streams.

We're out of sunflower seed. Again. Gotta buy another 150 pounds of seed next trip into town. Gotta make another sextupled batch of Zick Dough. Gotta keep those bluebirds going. Gotta get another 40 lb. of corn for the four whitetail fawns who are losing all fear of me, the Good Corn Fairy. Gotta toss out the old pork roast for the three crows I adore, who will now come up right under the studio window and cock their bright eyes at me. If I look directly at them they turn their backs and wigwag away, arms crossed behind their backs, as if the last thing on their minds was begging, but they're begging, make no mistake. I've got them right where I want them, and they've got me. I love, love, love my crows.

I stick my nose into the daffodils and breathe deeply of their polleny yellow scent. The tulips, fainter but sweetly heady. They keep growing in the vase, their long stems twisting like curious necks. I don't know how they do that, grow with no bulb or roots as fuel, but I'm glad they do. Something has to be growing in this wasteland.


Never have I been so winter-weary, so thoroughly pummeled, pounded and beaten by a winter. I can't remember what it feels like to take the wheel of a car and not worry about the road conditions. I can't remember T-shirts or a warm breeze lifting the downy hairs on my arms. I can't remember going outside without a hat and parka.


So I fill the vases with storebought spring, and wait.


** a lovely Yiddish word meaning, "to die slowly, inch by inch."

Happy Birthday, Bill!

It has been a long winter. Beautiful, if somewhat harsh.



It seems fitting that you should have been born on the brink of spring.



Like springtime, you bring fun


music

dance


joy

and love.


Soon it will be time to take to the woods again


to look for the riches hidden all around us.

Remember us in all your travels


and hurry home


to find what waits for you here.