Archive for March, 2013

Another lunch by the sea

Sunday, March 31st, 2013

[IMAGE] sunflower seastar at lunch

…click to listen:

…about the music

Don’t forget to tip your waiter!

I looked up from my work to see a bright orange object flying through the air. Around here, I don’t usually see bright orange things in the sky. I think that’s more like what happens in Russia.

The bright orange object was treated to a dizzying aerial view of the coastline, gripped in the beak of a first-winter herring gull who was determined to outpace five other, older gulls chasing him.
Watching the sharp turns and swerves, I thought of the car chase scene from Bullitt.

Gull McQueen here got himself quite a feast: A Sunflower sea star.

[IMAGE] gull and lunch
A sunflower sea star has twenty four limbs.

[IMAGE] gull and lunch
Twenty three.

I’m really fond of these creatures. Almost every time we tugged a crab pot up over the edge of the sailboat hull last summer, instead of the Dungeness we desired, or along with them, would be one of these huge squishy guys:

[IMAGE] sunflower seastar in the sun
Thanks to Dan for his professional hand modeling services.

Forget about the Circle of Life. Let’s talk about the Triangle of Lunch:

A friend eats a turkey lunch, and gives us some extra turkey parts.
We put the organ donor’s leg in the crab cage.

The crabs love a turkey lunch, too (although I think they’d appreciate a little deli mustard).
One or more sunflower seastars crawl in right along with the crabs, and often take over: if they’re not sucking down some clam innards (see first pic above), these guys also love a turkey lunch. Hold the rye, hold the mayo.
And they can, cos’ they have all those limbs to hold anything they want.

When we pull up the pot a day or so later, we throw the seastar back in the water.
We throw the female crabs back, too (how else would we have all these crabs to eat?).
We keep, cook and eat the male crabs who are large enough to be legal (they carry little I.D. cards to show the bouncer).

Voila: Our crab lunch, via everyone else’s turkey lunch.
The Triangle of Lunch is complete.
All for yum and yum, for all.
Even for those male crabs… for a while!

[IMAGE] don't forget to tip your waiter!
The Salish Sea version of a well catered party.

Name that lunch

Friday, March 22nd, 2013

[IMAGE] lunchtime

…click to listen:

…about the music

Blue Plate Special.

Photo blog disclaimer!
Warning!
The following photos are lousy quality.
They ain’t nuttin’ compared to my recent pix of a a young gull attempting to swallow a large flounder, or these pix from 2011 of a seal devouring a cephalopod.

Nonetheless, I’m posting them for you, in all their blurriness.
Why?
Because, as you can see from this prior post, I’m a digestion junkie. I’m absolutely spellbound watching creatures eat their lunch.
Which, most of the time, consists of other creatures.

I’m going to bet that most people who read this blog do not live somewhere they see this sort of thing everyday. Therefore, just as I’ll always appreciate a blurry photo of metropolis wildlife like Donald Trump’s toupee, maybe urbanites will get a kick out of this.

All right folks, yes-sirree! It’s time to play another round of, “Name that Lunch!”:

[IMAGE] lunchtime

[IMAGE] lunchtime

[IMAGE] lunchtime

[IMAGE] lunchtime

A clue?

Notice how the entrée changed color.

Need one more clue?

In the second photo: not only does the photo suck, but so does the lens subject.

Give up?

The gull is eating a juvenile Pacific Red Octopus.

Captivating as it was to observe, this made me sad. I love octopi. Not to eat: to greatly admire, as fantastic, smart, delightful creatures.
But in this world, we’re all up for being on the menu. I witness this nearly every day, while I’m composing, and taking care of publishing stuff, and brushing out Bella’s long thick fur, and talking to someone on the phone, and… oh… wait! Look! Geez… [crunch]… [slurp]…

It’s far less heart-wrenching to watch the Canada geese.
They’re vegetarian.

[IMAGE] geese

Truth be told, my digestion fetishes go in both directions, like digestion itself.
Critters in, critters out.

For instance, walking around the rocks here I often spot small clumps of tiny, beautiful little shells. I always wondered what they were, and how they got there. Each smaller than my fingernail, they blend perfectly in the granite nooks, and would be easy to miss unless you were really looking for them.

[IMAGE] shell clump

One day, I glanced up from my desk at a lone gull on the rock in front of me, just in time to witness him…

…upchuck.
Kind of like a cat with a furball.

Gross as it sounds, I was riveted.
It was fascinating.
So much so, that I failed to grab my camera. Never before has a girl been so compelled by the reverse-digestion of a bird.

Not too long after the gull flew off (maybe to find some more food and begin this charming process all over again), I walked out to the spot and shot these photos of the fresh evidence.

[IMAGE] shell clump

Not one, but two clumps. A bonanza.
I am the Annie Leibovitz of bird puke.

Like many birds, mama gulls regurgitate food for their chicks. But the adults– quite the greedy scavengers– have to get rid of the stuff they scarf up that’s indigestible, and occasionally, just like us, it exits from the front rather than the rear.

It’s likely that the gull’s lunch of a fish, a crab, or a sea star, had consumed these tiny clam-like beings for its lunch (not realizing that this would be the last supper). Or maybe the gull just scooped up a quick snack of some kelp and seawater, and ended up swallowing lots of teeny tiny bivalve molluscs.
One way or another, out they go.

Gull forensics. My next profession!

If there’s every a “CSI: Intertidal,” I demand to be the composer on the gig.
Call my agent!

[IMAGE] shell clump

The cat’s outta the bag

Sunday, March 17th, 2013

[IMAGE] Bella

…click to listen:

…about the music

One cool cat.

My life at home as a worker bee composer is pretty uneventful. There’s the sedentary aspect: sitting at my desk, managing my business, putting some music on the page, yada yada yada. Which is balanced by intense physical labor: pacing around the living room as I search for elusive ideas (funny; the little suckers aren’t under the sofa where I left them yesterday), and tamping down an already worn path that betrays my many treks to and from the kitchen for, well, anything. Because consuming anything is always easier than composing something.

As much as I travel throughout the year (I’m just shy of the 500,000 mile mark on my Delta account, and fully expect them to send me a gold watch), my absolute mostess very very favoritest thing is to hole up here in this cabin by the sea and do my work. Or not do my work and just fret about needing to do my work. It really matters not; the point is, I’m beyond thrilled just being here, and am becoming far more circum-spect about the circum-stances for which I’ll agree to flit away. I love my uneventful home life.

If you read the previous blog post or glanced at my Facebook page earlier this month, you know I have one more furry reason to be flit-resistant: Bella. She was an amazingly docile trooper on our flight/buses/ferry/car ride (did I mention spaceship? I think there was one of those, too) from Los Angeles to Friday Harbor, and is settling into island life nicely (Bella didn’t need the kitty prozac, but toward the end of the journey I was eying it with great interest). Her tolerance for living with someone from whom bizarre, semi-musical sounds erupt at random moments is admirable. Sweet natured as she is, after I finished a mix the other day (entailing playing back the same stubborn passages over and over and over again) I actually felt sorry for her that she didn’t get adopted by a librarian. So far I think her sole heartbreak has been the devastating discovery that not only do I own a vacuum cleaner, but that I occasionally plug it in and turn it on.
Poor kitty.

Nonetheless, there are perks to living here, in addition to the free-flowing high-end kibble and tons of petting. She and I enjoy a shared hobby of birdwatching: each morning I put seed out on the deck, and like clockwork, it’s time for her favorite channel, Cat TV, to begin its daily broadcast.

[IMAGE] waiting for birdies

At the moment, red-winged blackbirds, cowbirds and starlings are our seasonal nest-aurant clientele. Apparently pleased by the menu, they all chirp hysterically on one side of the door. Bella chirps back on the other side, with that funny dry cackle that some cats have. Her huge tail swishes back and forth like a whip as she crouches low, pounce-ready. Were she on the deck with the birds, between the sound effects and the dance moves, she’d have zero chance of catching one of them.
But she doesn’t know that,
and the birds don’t see her behind the glass.
My blessed kingdom is at peace.

Having never before seen eagles, the look on Bella’s face when one flew by was priceless.

[IMAGE] fascinated kitty
WTF??

And she probably thought the same of me, since every time I see one (which is roughly twenty times a day, because I’m smack dab in the center of their hilltop perches and rocky outcroppings), I’m in awe. Whether they’re taking off,

[IMAGE] lift off!

Or coming in for a landing,

[IMAGE] touchdown!

my excitement just never lessens. They’re magnificent.

(Yes, this may be the only blog you read today that features both cute kitty pictures, AND Bald Eagles.)

So, with a new fuzzy companion underfoot, I continue to pace, and hem, and haw, and munch, and grab my camera at any opportunity, and even more than occasionally… actually get the work at hand, done.

The difference is that now, I am under 24/7 surveillance.

[IMAGE] studio kitteh

Bella is keeping me honest.
Bella knows all.
I’m so relieved cats can’t talk.
Pardon me while I head back to the fridge.

[IMAGE] Bella