Something brewing?

A brewer’s blackbird

Several times a day we let the dogs out into the backyard to snoop around the landscape and do their business. If there’s   a neighborhood cat silly enough to climb the fence for a peek around, the dogs quickly dart after it, sending the offending feline back over the fence.

On this particular afternoon, Noah and Nica trotted over to the pool and stared down into it. That’s something they never do unless one of them has dropped a ball into the water. We took a look, but there was no ball, nothing but a few stray leaves that had blown into the unscreened pool. A few minutes later, I noticed the dogs were still studying the pool intently as if they were about to take a dive – something neither of them ever do.

I went outside, picked up our long pole with the leaf basket at the end and began casually scooping out the leaves. While working my way around the pool, I was thinking about contacting someone on Facebook who had just read Romancing the Raven and left a complimentary message. I thought I would ask her if she would put up a review on Amazon.

I set down the pole down and lifted the cover of the circular strainer at the edge of the pool and discovered that it was full of leaves. I reached in for the strainer basket, and suddenly there was a flutter of black wings in the pool right next to me.  My first impression was that a bird had crashed into the pool.

I jumped up, grabbed the pole and scooped up a black bird. I carefully directed the net to a nearby tree and the soaking bird latched onto a branch. I was not only startled by the sudden appearance of the bird so close to me, but the fact that I’d been thinking about Raven at the time.

It took me a few moments to realize what had happened. The bird probably had been  standing on the submerged ledge between the pool and the strainer basket. The ledge was covered with a couple inches of water, but the bird could rest, breathe….and hide from the snoopy dogs.

Who knows how long it had been in the pool. We had just returned from a trip to Orlando a couple of hours earlier. I studied the bird closely on its partially shrouded perch and realized that ‘blackbird’ is a generic term that covers a variety of species. Back in the house, I Googled blackbird and this Birds of North America site came up. Interestingly, the description of black birds mentions ravens in the second paragraph.

I knew my blackbird wasn’t  a raven, so I looked at several choices and finally recognized it as a brewer’s blackbird, like the one pictured above. For me, the synchro suggested that something was brewing with the book. If nothing else, a kind lady, Kathleen Ryan, from Lafayette, Louisiana, had read it and enjoyed.

Noah and Nica, chilling when she was just a tiny pup: