Baby birds make their debut

A few mornings ago I was sitting on the porch, fiddling with a new camera, reading the directions. One booklet about something called “image stabilizer” showed how to shoot through bars (say you are at the zoo and there is this tiger . . .), shoot in such a way the bars disappear.

Pretty cool I thought. Then I felt movement, something, from just outside the porch – the arbor where a gourd hangs. A pair of Carolina wrens made a nest inside. Mom and Dad (can’t tell them apart) are ferrying food as fast as possible. Must be babies in side, hungry babies. But it wasn’t a parent coming with food.

Instead I looked up and there was a baby bird sticking its head over the opening, looking around – all mouth and beak and I could see lots of fluff – hasn’t gotten its feathers yet. Up went the new camera. But wait! It gets better. More baby birds – three in all, crowed around the entrance hole. Amazing.

Ah, spring. Fledgling season. If you are a cat owner and your cat goes outside, now is the time to keep your feline inside. Cats kill baby birds just for the thrill. Horrible to think about but true. Better yet, make your feline an indoor companion all the time. That way wildlife can survive.

Right now all three of my felines and the two dogs are on the porch with me taking sunbaths. Those baby birds are less than five feet away in their gourd. Mom and Dad don’t worry about us because WE ARE THE ONES IN THE CAGE. The screen keeps us in and protects them.

Seeing the baby birds made me thing “it doesn’t get any better than this”. Then, the next morning, I looked out the kitchen window and there was a hummingbird darting through the fountain spray in the middle of the pond, taking a bath and sipping water on the fly. How cool was that?

Go outside. Sit a while. Listen. Look. Let Mother Nature have its way with you. Do it now because summer is coming and it will be too hot for all of us. Now is the golden time. Enjoy.

Lucy Beebe Tobias is a freelance writer and photographer living in Ocala, Florida. Her book 50 Great Walks in Florida was published by University Press of Florida in Februrary 2008.

Growing old and ill is hard to do

Suzi is dying. There is nothing I can do about it. Oh yes, I know death is the flip side of the life coin. Heads and tails. Sooner or later it comes up tails. Saying it is one thing. Living it is another.

Every day she dies a little bit and I die with her. I had no idea it would be this hard to lose a dog. Suzi and I have been together for 13 years. She’s a boxer-Golden Retriever mix with a total mind of her own. Call her to “come” and Suzi looks around to see if she has a better offer. Tell her to “sit” and she thinks about it. So obedience is a work in progress.

Once in obedience class l asked the instructor, Letty Towles, if she thought Suzi could pass the Canine Good Citizen test and get certified. Letty laughed. It is not a good sign if the dog trainer laughs at your dog’s chances to pass a test.

Suzi thinks everyone she meets is her newest best friend. One part of the test has a stranger coming up and asking to “pet your dog”. The dog has to SIT STILL the entire time including being touched by the stranger. Never going to happen with Suzi. She’s going to jump up, twist her butt towards her face and try to turn herself into a pretzel. That is Suzi’s way of saying she is glad to see YOU.

Her job inside the house is following me around from room to room. She reads the signs. If it looks like I ‘m going to plop down for a while, she curls up on the floor. If it looks like I’m just passing through, she waits to see where I’m going next and follows me there. It is her mission to keep and eye on me and an eye on the refrigerator door opening. Wouldn’t want to miss anything good.

Last fall I mentioned to the vet that I could feel two lumps in her neck. A biopsy showed lymphoma. Since then they’ve enlarged and lymph gland in one leg has gotten very large. She’ has lost 13 pounds in four months. I said “no” to chemo recommended by the vet. In time the vet found a holistic vet nearby.

Suzi went on a buffet of vitamins and it seemed to help her immune system fight the invader. The glands didn’t get bigger. But she is emaciated. Every bone in her body stands out. Put food in her all day long and nothing sticks.

She is still social, happy to see people, even if she walks slower, looks like a concentration camp survivor, is going blind and her hearing, always selective, is now definitely on the decline.

I wish I could say people are happy to see her but they are not. She doesn’t understand why some people don’t want to pet her. Heck, they don’t want her in the same room. She is not a pretty girl any more. I rarely bring her out any more to say “hello”.

In her youth, Suzi and I did 5 K races. She could have won if she ran with somebody worthwhile. But she had me and we were always in the back of the pack. Those days are gone, for her and me. We still get out. She, and my other dog Annie, five years younger, like their daily walk.

Today we went in the car over to the Greenway and walked a short distance on a trail shaded by trees. There were lots of good smells. At least the dogs thought so. I couldn’t smell anything much, just a whiff of pine fragrance from trees putting out new spring growth.

We didn’t walk far or fast. Back at the car I picked her up and put her in the back. Annie can get up by herself. Suzi has a way of dropping her jaw and smiling when she is happy. She was smiling. It is enough. We take it one day at a time.

Lucy Beebe Tobias is a freelance writer, author, artist and photographer living in Ocala, Florida with these four-legged family members – Suzi and Annie and three felines, Amy, Tito and Grace.

Heart of Florida Paint Out Going on Now

The sun is shining. The sky is blue. What are you going to do? Why paint, of course, or at least go watch lots of plein air artists paint.

Charles Manning works on his under painting.
“See the meadow in the foreground has a lot of grass, that is too much green, so I foreshortened it, brought the trees in the background up closer.”

He starts with a charcoal sketch, and then transfers that idea onto his small canvas. The under painting is in deep brown to establish shapes. Next he’ll begin painting in full color oils.

Manning, a plein air artist from Tallahassee, is standing on Orange Lake Overlook – a high hill with a magnificent view of rolling pastures, palm trees and bushes meandering down to the lake itself.

He is one of 44 plein air artists from all over Florida who have gathered their easels, canvases and paints to capture the Old Florida landscapes of Evinston and McIntosh for the Heart of Florida Paint Out from April 11-18.

On Saturday, April 12, around noon it is windy and quite warm. Charles is wearing a broad-brimmed hat and so am I. It is the fashion that works. Other spectators walking around watching artists work are also wearing hats to ward off the bright sun and carrying cameras to capture the moment.

The Heart of Florida Paintout is amazingly well organized. Painters turn out small and large canvases that immediately go to one of two “wet rooms”. Spectators can buy wet paintings right off the wall at the new Windmill Gallery at the Orange Lake Overlook or at the second “wet room” at the Wood & Swank General Store down the road in Evinston. The store is also Florida’s oldest post office.

Margaret Watts, a plein air painter from Ocala, worked in a landscape with a palm tree at the overlook Saturday morning then moved to the train depot in Macintosh for an afternoon session of painting.

“A wide variety of people stopped by to watch me work – young families with children, old people, even a woman on a motorcycle who told me she was a painter too.”

Margaret says she gets asked a lot of questions by people who want to know how the whole process works, from sketch to finished painting. She enjoys answering their questions.

So does Mary Jane Volkmann, a Gainesville painter.

“I like talking to people, ” Volkmann said as she planned out a study of flowers in a wheelbarrow in front of a historic McIntosh house.

Volkmann likes plein air painting.
“It is a chance to study color and light right on location. There are all these signs of life and I love natural things, including listening to the birds.”

Spectators like myself are impressed with the easy, outgoing manner of the artists and how quickly they capture the scenes they see. Wouldn’t it be fun to do this? Oh yes. I don’t know how or when that would happen because life is a little nuts lately but it certainly is inspiring. Next year?

Painters will be on site doing their thing at Evinston and McIntosh and the Orange Lake Overlook until Wednesday, April 16. Then on Friday evening April 18 there is a Collector’s Gala from 6-10 p.m. at the Thomas Center in Gainesville. That sounds black tie but it is not. The Gala is free and open to the public. Very casual. Meet the artists, hang out and buy the plein air paintings on a first-come, first-served basis.

There is something magical about being outdoors with an easel, capturing the beauty of the moment.

“I came home at the end of the day tired but it was a good tired,” said Margaret Watts on Saturday evening and she added, “I can’t wait to go back tomorrow.”

What fun!

To know more about the Heart of Florida Paint Out visit their Web site.

Lucy Beebe Tobias is a freelance writer, photographer and artist in Ocala, Florida. She is the Authentic Florida Expert for VISITFLORDA. Her book “50 Great Walks in Florida” is available at www.Lucyworks.com

What’s Growing on Your Roadside?

Ah, spring. Now is good time to see a riot.

Florida’s wildflowers are in a full color, rioting all along roadsides. Masses of flowers crowd the right of ways. Hold the mower. We want to see this beauty.

Quilts of magenta and pink Drummond Phlox, sprinklings of Black-eyed Susan daisies with their black centers and bright yellow petals like rays of sunshine, clusters of Indian Blanket – they look like tied-died shirts form the 1960s with red-orange centers and yellow tips.

All this native color is no accident. The Florida Department of Transportation and the Florida Federation of Garden Clubs, Inc, partner to purchase and plant 20,000 pounds of native and naturalized stands of wildflowers each year. Wow! Thank you. Thank you. To know more about wildflowers check out the Florida Wildflower Foundation.

Yesterday we stopped the car on Interstate 75 and pulled well over on the right of way so as not to be hit by oncoming traffic.

While traffic zoomed by at 70 mph and better, we got out of the car and bent to the task of photographing wildflowers. Motorists must have muttered “What are those two crazy women doing shooting wildflowers?”

Ah, the answer: you enjoy beauty where you find it.

History is on our side. Here is what W.B. Skinner said in his book Adventures in Florida History:

“By Easter Sunday, March 27, 1513, Ponce de Leon was sailing north westwardly from the Bahamas for Cautio. On Saturday, April 2, he sighted land near present-day St. Augustine. The land he viewed that day was covered with many beautiful wildflowers. At this time of year back in Spain, he remembered, the festival of flowers was being held. He called the land ‘La Florida” for the festival of flowers.”

And there you have it. What’s growing on your roadside?

Lucy Beebe Tobias is an author, freelance writer, photographer and artist. Visit her Web site: www.Lucyworks.com

Let’s get down and dirty

‘Tis the season to get down and dirty. I’m doing it. It feels great. Over Easter weekend, I picked a sunny backyard location, put concrete blocks on the ground, then a large round container on top. It looks like stone but it is the lightweight synthetic stuff, less expensive and even better – and it was on sale.

I guess, the formal gardeners call this approach “raised bed gardening”, yep, really raised, so less bending over, easier on the old backbone. I like this part.

Spent some time happily digging up great dirt from the compost pile. My, those earthworms have been busy! Egg shells, orange rinds, leftover lettuce, onion skins, all magically changed into rich dark soil. Not like the sand in the yard (this is Florida, we’re built on sand and limestone). By the way, I have compost to give away if anyone wants some. Bring your own bucket. I’ll fill it up.

Next a trip to the plant store. One the way I saw several people in their front yards on their hands and knees, trowel in hand, planting flowers. They were smiling.
Brought home eggplant, arugula, peppers and tomatoes. Also seeds for zucchini, lettuce and nasturtiums (the flowers are lovely and are edible – I like them on top of salads, taste lemony!). Bought some starter seed plugs and planted seeds.

And I didn’t forget the butterflies. A red penta now sits next to a large fennel plant. The penta attracts butterflies, like the smell of fast food. They drink the nectar then look around to see if there is a host plant to lay their eggs. Ah yes, swallowtails lay their eggs on fennel plants. Nearby I have milkweed plants and monarchs lay their eggs on these. An arbor with passion vines serves the gulf fritteries and the zebra longwings.

By having both nectar and host plants, you get butterflies for life – they come, have dinner, stick around to lay eggs, then caterpillars emerge, eat leaves, get fat, change into chrysalis, and finally emerge as butterflies. How cool is that? This means, of course, that you won’t be using pesticides as they kill butterflies. Organic, pesticide free – Mother Earth thanks you.

Spring. Rejuvenation. Seeding the future. It is a down and dirty work in progress.

Lucy Beebe Tobias is a freelance writer, photographer and artist in Ocala, Florida. Her book 50 Great Walks in Florida was published February, 2008 by University Press of Florida. She is the Authentic Florida expert for Visit Florida.