“What kind of bird do you think that is, sitting on the deck railing?” my friend Pat asked her husband this week. She was in the kitchen looking out the window at the deck, which is one story above the back yard. Len was in the dining room, looking out a window from which he could see the yard. He jockied around some and said, “I think it’s a baby turkey that flew up there. There are two female turkeys in the yard.”
Pat and Len moved to another vantage point, which afforded a more complete view of the yard, and decided that the mystery bird was indeed a baby turkey. Because, all together, there were thirty-nine turkeys in the back yard! The flock stayed in the yard for some hours before moving on.
“I don’t think they’ll be back,” Pat said. “They picked it over pretty well. If I knew what they were looking for, I’d be happy to provide it.” Then she sighed and said, “It’s probably better if I don’t, of course, because that wouldn’t be nature’s way. And who knows what effects it would have on the other animals back there?”
My sweetheart and I had to stop on Huron Parkway yesterday, as turkeys blocked the way forward. When the big birds let us pass, they headed up onto the sidewalk that occupies the narrow strip between the roadway and the dense woods. As we drove off, a bicyclist came around a curve of the sidewalk, headed right toward them. From what I could see out my window and in the side-view mirror, there was trepidation on all faces. Alas, we were around the curve by the time bike and turkeys were due to meet.
Rascal and I were walking on Argonne this morning when we happened upon a man sitting in a patio-furniture-type chair at the side of the road, as if he were supervising the bustling construction site below. He was disposed to talk, and it turns out he is an electrician working on the project. Today, he and another electrician will be pulling cable to power the new elementary school.
What he and the other man, who was out of sight where the cable would connect to the building, were doing at that moment was testing the cable, which crackled at that moment as if to illustrate this point. It was a big crackle. The man was guarding a live line.
I confessed that the cable was smaller than I would have expected you’d need to power a whole school.
“This cable is sixteen thousand volts,” he assured me. Yikes
He told me something else, too. I’ve been noticing a lot of utility poles in this area with red metal bands around them, six or seven feet off the ground. The bands have medallions on them that say “visual inspection 2025.”
Our immediate area includes four large construction sites. The electrician said that the bands indicate someone has come and inspected the work done on that pole. That makes so much more sense that what our speculation has been, which was that the poles themselves had been inspected. For, say, rabbit damage.
Which isn’t quite as silly as it sounds. In the last year or so, many, many of the utility poles around here have had metal collars wrapped around their bases, collars that extend several inches down into the ground. It’s great to learn what the bands really mean.
There is a fire hydrant at the corner of Nixon and Traver that has a long extension attached to it. As Rascal and I walked past it on Tuesday, a city worker was drawing water from the hydrant to fill the water tank on his truck, a truck he drives around to water city trees that need it.
We exchanged “good mornings” and I asked him if he knew what the long extension was for. There are other hydrants here and there that have the same extensions.
“It’s there so I can use the hydrant to fill up my tank,” he said, sounding altogether pleased about the whole arrangement. My guess was that he was a student working a summer job with the city. And not only did he enjoy the work, he was delighted that the city had gone to such lengths to make his job easier. He was there again this morning, filling his truck’s tank at the hydrant, as the dog and I walked up Nixon, and he sent a nice smile our way.
That young man has a gift for happiness. May he nurture it and keep it all his days.
15 August 2025