Outside our ground floor bathroom window, about three or four feet from the glass, grows a head-height-tall some kind of thistle.
I have not yet been stirred with enough enthusiasm to bother looking up what scientific attachment has been added to this thistle in order to give it proper ID. It has a smallish leaf and beautiful long-stemmed, tight purple flowers.
Having the advantage of living rural route, well back from the road, eliminates the need of having frosted glass in the porcelain parlour window. This gives year-round, four-season advantage to one who often pauses to sit and think.
But this summer, during thought, having a daily view of this thistle, I was able to watch its growth and the pattern of its development. But what I did learn had everything, yet nothing, to do with the thistle.
What I did learn was that it was basically being farmed as a food source by a small group of so-called wild canaries. These olive green females and bright yellow, black-capped and black-winged males are native finches, which are now in full eclipse plumage. They nest in late August because they have no need to migrate south in the winter. They just change plumage and join look-alikes to snitch lunch now and then at your feeder.
I first saw them picking off tiny insects as the flowers began to open. They never bothered the larger pollinating insects that, with long proboscises, were sucking nectar from the deep-throated, tightly fitted, slow-to-open blossoms.
In mid-August, as the flowers set seed, the males started carrying away large mouthfuls of the fluffy down in directions, I suspect, to where their mates were skillfully lining their well-hidden nests. Over the years, after use, I have often found these tightly woven nests full of water following a storm. The mother, while hatching, canopies the nest with outstretched wings to keep out the rain.
Now, back to the thistle heads. While mom incubates the eggs, dad pulls mega mouthfuls of fluffy down from the thistle heads and just lets it float away. At first, I could not figure this out, and then it suddenly hit me, similar, I suppose, to a brick hitting a politician square on the head. What it was doing was keeping the soon-to-ripen seeds from floating away on their tiny individual fluffed-out silken parachutes.
A week or so later they were back again, gathering the high-protein, now ripened seed to feed his lady love and her newly hatched brood of wide-open-mouthed, hungry young babies. These are the exact same seeds that would have randomly floated to faraway places on their own individual little parachutes. They returned each time to the same seed head until it was empty.
Does this not make one now stop and wonder how many of these dried, seed-storing, thistle heads will be revisited during the deep, snow-covered dead of winter?
Does this not make one, too, stop and wonder how many similar little intricacies of nature go on sight unseen close around us? If you think that God and Mother Nature walk not hand in hand, then you are talking to the wrong guy.
Is it not time that man smartens a little and starts working with nature instead of toiling so persistently against it?
Take care, ‘cause we care.
barrie@barriehopkins.ca
519-986-4105