By Judith Deutsch
While the Coronavirus raises havoc, it has also created an unprecedented opportunity for everyone to truly note, appreciate, and enjoy our surroundings, and experience nature from our own homes, gardens, and environments.
I have my own little ecosystem on a 4’ x 10’ balcony just outside my city condo, where nature’s drama plays out every day. Most of my personal contact with the animal kingdom rests with dogs, cats, guppies, goldfish, and a mountain lion I met napping on the hood of my car! I have ridden hunter-jumper through Torrey Pines Park chasing ecstatic hounds posing as foxes. In grad school, there were red fox dens in our stone Civil War wall and a cardinal who made her nest against our dining room window. We left seeds for the birds and meat for the foxes in Winter.
Being a southern Californian, I have run with wildlife from a fire that broke out in Malibu Canyon while hiking with friends, and have helped rescue horses from multiple brushfires. But my pride and joy are the Monarch butterflies in the milkweed, and bees in the lavender, of my neighborhood organic garden plot—about 144 square feet of lovely, fecund space to grow vegetables for myself and the inevitable insect and aviary kingdoms. Our gardeners built a perch for our visiting hawk and just completed a nesting box for our resident owl to the delight of everyone.
Back on my balcony, pigeons, doves, hummingbirds, crows, ravens, an assortment of little brown birds (I really do need to get an Audubon guide to birdwatching!), and an errant squirrel shower in my fountain and enjoy the bird houses, three trees, bushes, and flowers, that qualify my balcony as a bird sanctuary by the National Wildlife Federation.
My not-so-popular squirrel, Pesky, has been banned from co-existence since I found him frisking among multiple planter chards he had just created. This led to a little red pepper sauce painted on the balcony railing to discourage visits while my favorite guests—the hummingbirds—feast on two feeders and the flowers that survived Pesky. Since hummingbirds are territorial, I have two feeders on opposite ends of the balcony and love to watch my guests feed and chase around my small space. I placed plants in front of the windows to prevent collisions.
Adventures with my hummingbirds include two nestlings who sat on a feeder as I watched their bellies expand to the point of too much nectar for takeoff. I threw oranges to deter the crows who followed the oranges sailing over the balcony. I have replaced the perched feeders with flying-room-only ones to deter overindulgence. I love to watch hummingbird antics, which include pecking on the windows if I am too slow to refill the feeders, breaking the beak off a hummingbird whirly-gig, and buzzing any male joining me for brunch on the balcony. They have no fear of me, and it is comforting that in this time of unprecedented isolation, I have my winged friends to love.
Judith Deutsch is a bit of a renaissance woman. She began her career in art conservation at the J. Paul Getty Museum, continued on to a career in fundraising for the arts, education and healthcare, is an artist, educator, historian, editor, ghostwriter, nature lover, bibliophile and world traveler, and is starting a personal chef business. She sails and is a hunter-jumper horsewoman.
