How I Pissed Off Merlin

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So I moved out to my idyllic country home in May and will stay here until I leave for Scotland at the end of August. The little house in the big woods has a screened in front porch. I’ve taken to having my morning coffee and doing my computer work from there, as it’s cool and comfortable and comes with live stereo.

The woods are full of birdsong. Birds are not creatures I’ve particularly noticed over the years, and perhaps part of the charm here is that I almost never see them–with a couple of exceptions we will get to in a minute. I told someone the birds here were like prayer: you don’t see anything but you feel the power.

Knowing nothing about birds, I did what Americans do: downloaded an App. Merlin is the most-recommended free app for IDing birdsong. You turn it on, point it at the woods, and wait to be told what you’re not seeing.

Which will have a name like blue-headed Vireo, red-eyed Vireo, yellow-shouldered Vireo, oh that’s a Blue Jay, green-footed…. you get the idea. It became a game: I would rush out every morning to see how many birds I could collect. The first week, it was five new per day. Then three or four. I reached 50 birds and felt as though I were winning at life, or at least whatever bird bingo game I was playing with myself.

It tapered off after 50. I started trying to discern the differences rather than bag the birds, and soon I could tell ravens from hawks and sparrows from cardinals.

Crows and hawks are the only birds I actually see, aside from the occasional swooping sparrow or goldfinch. The crows come in murders of two to seven, and yes, I have begun looking up folklore and counting crows according to old rhymes. Especially when a single crow perched on my back deck and glared at me.

But that hawk (red-shouldered, if you want to know) is not supposed to be here, according to Merlin, and that’s where my troubles began. The app will tell you what you’re likely to see or hear in your area, and if you record something else, well, it gets stroppy. A little red circle appears next to the bird it IDs and it says “unlikely.” But if you keep recording and the app records it again, it reluctantly turns the circle green and allows you to put the bird on your life list of those you have seen or heard.

We fought over the hawk for a few days until Merlin admitted it was here. Then came the ravens, distant ripples in the woods that sounded less like birds than animals fighting. Merlin said no way. Then it said maybe. By the time they sounded as though they were across the street, Merlin said ok, fine, have it your way, you have ravens. I learned to discern happy baby ravens from angry parent ravens. I learned to hear how they fought with the crows and jays. It was all going great.

And then one morning, distracted by some chore, I left Merlin open for 35 minutes on my front porch. When I realized it was still on and went to shut it off, it had recorded 133 birdsongs. Including peacocks, Mergansers, four kinds of woodpeckers, a heron, an egret, and a bald eagle.

Merlin was angry. Red circles outweighed the green. It is not possible in your latitude to hear pea hens, Merlin’s unspoken subtext said.

Poor Merlin. My neighbors up the street keep several exotic birds, including the unusual ducks and Asian fowl it picked up. I got nothing on some of the others except that May is a time when birds are moving past and our woods are enticing for a break; we have water with fish in it and air with bugs in it and lots of places to hide.

So now I have 152 birds on my life list, and Merlin doesn’t want to talk to me. I can live with that. The birds are making plenty of conversation.

The Cat Came Back

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I moved out to our tiny house (it’s a doublewide but tiny house sounds classier to some people) in the wilderness in May, emptying our house in town so it could be sold…. sigh. It’s a sluggish market and the house is STILL for sale.

But I have zippo regrets about moving into the county. The birds wake me in the morning and the frogs sing me to sleep at night. It’s cool in summer. It’s easy to keep clean. It’s hard to reach so only people who really like me come out here.

I brought the two cats out, of course. Molly our mouser took to it immediately and within a day was running around under the trailer’s skirt taking care of business. O’Carolan, our blind cat, located her diner and litterbox, then found her comfy rug and settled in for a stress-reducing nap. Later I showed her the home’s three porches and doors so she could acclimate in case she wanted to sun herself outside.

Which is probably how it happened. I was gone for a few hours, and when I returned, O’Carolan was not in the house. The front porch cat flap doesn’t have a door in it, so if she made it to the porch and something startled her, she could technically get out. My guess is the shaggy dog from down the way who seems to be a communal pet came just as she was sunning on the porch.

The ironic thing was that I saw her as I crossed the last stream (there are four) to reach my house, and she ran in panic from the sound of my truck hitting the water where she had been drinking. I just didn’t have any reason to think it was O’Carolan then.

Once I realized she was missing, I was back at the Last Known Location within five minutes, banging wet cat food cans together and calling “brekkies! supper!” etc. Nothing.

Two days of nothing. Well, two days of walking up mountains and along streams and through other people’s property, calling “O’Carolan” and rattling a food bag. The neighbors here want privacy. When I crossed one lot and saw a dog house the size of my front porch–with no dog in it–I figured I would meet him shortly and that was how I would die.

Two days of bargaining with God, then railing at God, crying over the sufferings a blind cat would endure in heat, in cold, in a woodland filled with creatures. A full day of despair. I got caught in a thunderstorm at the top of a steep mountain and literally slid down rocks on my butt. I found two abandoned houses in the wood. I found a thousand bags of high-end potting soil abandoned in the woods. (These were later redistributed.)

I did not find O’Carolan. I “knew in my spirit” that she had died horribly. And then my friend Amelia texted, “Have you told the neighbors she is missing?”

Sometimes logic deserts us in a crisis. I scribbled notes and stuffed them in the collection of mailboxes at the end of the state-maintained road: Big black and white cat lost, blind. If you see her please offer food and call this number.

That evening, as I drove past the house at Ford 3, the reclusive owner was leaning on the porch and waved me down. He pointed. “Your cat’s over there. We gave her supper last night and today. She likes head rubs.”

O’Carolan sat content in her new pipe home. Nice people, regular meals, outdoor living….

We had to tilt the pipe up and chute-shoot her into a cat carrier. She snarled until she was in it, then began purring. Home we went, where I set out a can of her favorite food and she walked around as though two days of terror on my part had nothing to do with her.

In the words of my wise friend Amelia, “You had a harder time of it than she did.”

All’s well as ends well, but I did apologize to God for some of the mean things I said.

(O’Carolan reminiscing on her adventures from the safety of her porch)