VISIT FROM THE WRENS (AGAIN)
Well, the wrens blew in for another visit this year, this
time, mercifully shorter than last!
Could it be that the ‘art’ and ‘science’ of child rearing
has been refined? Had they been reading Dr. Spock? I’m guessing that it had more
to do with this early and gentle Spring…
Once again, the parents have been yipping and pipping around
the studio, leaving their droppings here and there. While the chatter can be a
little bit grating, and the droppings are maybe not helping with my studio
cleaning efforts, it IS WELL worth
enduring for a month or two, for the pleasure of seeing these cagey little
beings hopping and flitting about. And perhaps indeed there is some ego
involved, cause these little bastards LOVE my tire sculpture! And seeing them
perched so adroitly on the curving bow of a ‘tire limb’ brings me a certain
aesthetic satisfaction, that really would be hard to top!
Furthermore,
this year, they have become quite a bit more comfortable with me, and so, for
better worse, I found them hopping around literally every surface in my studio,
exploring, or foraging, I really wasn’t sure.
The
other day, I caught taking a dust bath in the soil in a house plant. They were
really making them selves at home! Thankfully, its nice to know that even Wrens
rest at night!
HATCH DAY
Well,
they also get up early. One morning I awoke to quite a racket of squaking, and
peeping. No doubt, as it is for all parents on graduation day, it is a bitter
sweet mix of pride and alarm, when your bushy browed pups sail off into the
wide wild world. In this case, for a day, that wide wild world was my studio,
and these parents were making quite a racket, coaching them, breathing over
their shoulders, and telling me to get the fuck outta here!
Somewhat
sheepishly, but looking back, perhaps somewhat spitefully, I stumbled to the
kitchen area, and began working on my own breakfast- frying a few eggs.
Actually, I really was feeling pretty
guilty about this, considering all of the trauma that everyone was going
through around me. What a terrible way to welcome these creatures into the
world, by cooking up bird embryos. Or maybe that was my graduation present to
them- “Well, you made it through egghood with out ending up an omelette,
congradulations kid.”
Well,
my guilt was soon laid to rest after breadkfeast when turned around I found the
mom or dad perched on my spatula,
picking bits of fried eggs off to fly over to his little runts! I guess, as
they say, protein is protein in the animal world!
Interestingly,
in the course of trying to photograph these darting birds, I learned something
about their ‘habits’, that made the task of capturing them on film just a
little bit easier. And that was that the parents, (similarly to airplanes!),
working a quite regular routine pattern around my studio space. And thus,
trying to get a certain shot of a wren perched apon a certain mound of tires, I
merely had to wait for the wren to make its way around this circuit around the
room, until eventually it would return to lite briefly before my tripod, before
racing off again. Some how, this made a certain kind of sense, that in their
seemingly chaotic, jittery movement, there was in fact a grander scheme, with
an efficiency of clockwork..
Of
course, the babies were adorable. At one point, I found three of them hiding
out in the bowl of a tire in my studio trash can!
Well,
fortunately, they all found their way out of my studio, and have left me some
piece to work in (unlike last year, which had this all taking place up to the
11th hour of Eno preparations!) I guess they are out there
somewhere, maybe exploring the abandoned building of Siler City, or the woods
out behind the tracks, or maybe on a carribian cruise!
Hopefully they are chatting up some cute potential boyfriends
and girlfriends, and perhaps they will be back next year, to follow in the
footsteps of their parents).
