A Story About a Few Hummingbirds

This is a female Broad-Billed Hummingbird who built a nest and laid eggs by our living room window this summer. Predictably, we watched her a lot and took photos. We noticed when she disappeared.

You can see the chick's beak and head emerging from the nest here.

I was hanging out in the hammock near the nest when I realized that the chick was chirping incessantly. We had some friends over for dinner and we sat at the table out front. After dinner I noticed that the chick was still chirping and the mother was still nowhere to be seen. I googled it and found an article claiming that if a chick chirps incessantly it's starving and needs first aide immediately. I gave it some sugar water with a dropper. The chick settled down.

Our dinner guests excused themselves (they had a baby bird issue at home, too!) and I went back to Google. After seeing the chick and mother every day, watching her harvest spider webs for the nest that started out as a weird little tuft stuck on a vine... after all that, I didn't want to see the chick die. But who would help me? It was a Sunday night. If I can even get a hold of anyone, they will say it's the process of natural selection: baby birds die all the time.

But I care. I posted a photo of the tiny thing on facebook and somehow it got the name "Chuck." (I misspelled "chick" and then it stuck).

I found a Tucson wildlife rescue online. There was a phone number--and someone answered. I explained my predicament and the person gave me Noreen's number. (There was an awkward moment when her husband answered the phone and I was like Is Doreen there? And he was like Who? and I was like this guy wonders who the crazy is calling his wife this late on a Sunday. "Doreen" tuned out to be Noreen Geyer-Kordosky, founder and director of Tucson Mountain Hummingbird Rescue.) First she asked me if the thing was definitely alive, since I had given it sugar water with a regular dropper. (Sugar water can be lethal to the hatchlings and feeding them from a regular dropper can drown them; they take sustenance through the gullet and it gathers in the crop. The dropper needs to have a type of extension.) Noreen also explained that when the chicks go from hatchlings to fledglings, the mother doesn't sit on the nest anymore. She just comes for quick feedings periodically. She explained that for me to know for sure if the nest was abandoned, I had to watch tomorrow morning at peak feeding time (5:00 a.m.) for an hour and a half without blinking. (She was only kind of kidding.) If I didn't see the mother, then she was really gone. In that case, Noreen would come pick up the fledgling.

I was so pleasantly surprised that Noreen had actually volunteered to pick up Chuck. This is one of the reasons why I'm going to miss Tucson. There are people who care here. They even care about a tiny little bird I thought and it made my heart warm.

I googled the issue some more and found that hundreds of baby hummers in the U.S. are "rescued" unnecessarily by nest audience members. In other words, my case exactly: a closely I mean closely watched nest.

I got up at five the next morning and curled up in my hammock. I had the phone in my hand. I watched the nest and the until an hour and a half had gone by. There was plenty of bird activity, but no sign of mom.

I called Noreen at 6:30 on the spot. (She had told me she'd be up.) Finally I was free of the hammock and more importantly, free to brew coffee.

It was great to meet Noreen in person. She showed me a tiny worm-like hatchling she had picked up that morning. She had rescued 60 hummers since January--a number a bit up from normal. Wow, that many other people care about baby hummingbirds? Noreen told me Chuck's outlook was good and she could release it back here when it's ready and did I want to sponsor a feeder?

Of course I volunteered to sponsor (maintain) a feeder for Chuck. I anxiously awaited the day I would see the wee bird again. But weeks went by and I didn't want to call Noreen because I didn't want to hear bad news. She must not be calling because it went bad.

This is Chuck as a hatchling and the egg that never hatched.

One day Noreen called, and she was very honest, bless her. She had forgotten that I had volunteered to sponsor Chuck; she recovered fully and was re-released. Chuck was (of course) a female. And there had been another egg in the nest I had hadn't seen. It never hatched.

But would I like to sponsor a feeder for another female Broad-Billed who was ready to be released? Yes! I was just happy just to hear Chuck was fine!

The next day Noreen brought a skinny little hummingbird in a mesh "carrier" (pictured below). She had a branch in there to perch on and she showed me quite a skilled hover. I took some pictures while Noreen unzipped the carrier. It took the bird a second to realize it was open, then she hovered out carefully and perched for a moment on an orange tree branch. Assertively, she shot up into the sky, so high that she became a microscopic spot my eye could no longer follow. They do that, said Noreen. You may see her again but she may go somewhere else. She's free.

I can't say that I've seen/recognized the released hummingbird around, but I've been maintaining a clean feeder and it has been getting a lot of action. (Don't let black mold get in there! It can soften hummer beaks!) I moved the feeder closer to the window where I work. The other day I saw a hummer just hover squarely in front of the window, as if looking at me behind my computer.

Sometimes I think Chuck's mom built her nest where we could see it because she knew she wasn't going to make it. She made us Chuck's godparents. That maybe sounds cheesy but I kinda believe it.

HUMMINGBIRD FEEDER CARE:

Feeders can make a difference for hummingbird survival, especially during the dry season when nothing is blooming.

Use 4 parts water and 1 part sugar. You don't need red food coloring. In fact, it may be harmful to hummers over the long run.

Clean the feeder regularly by flushing with warm water and scrubbing the inside with a toothbrush.

Once a month clean the feeder with a weak Chlorox solution.

Never let the feeder grow black mold as this can be very harmful to the birds.

If you are having a real hummingbird emergency, contact Noreen at 520-743-0677 or 520-240-2686. If for some reason she is unreachable, call The Wildlife Rehabilitation in Northwest Tucson Center at 520-743-0217 .

At The Loft: Super

SUPER: Movie Trailer. Watch more top selected videos about: Kevin Bacon, Nathan Fillion

Being that the only two posts of 2011 thus far have both come on the heels of tragedy, in a sense, I think it's time to lighten things up a bit.

Tonight we went to see Super at The Loft.

It's a little weird because it borrows from a few different genres, making it feel at times like a movie that doesn't know what it wants to be.

The excessively graphic violence is congruous with the comic book genre, for example, but perhaps the more tender, human moments make scenes where heads get bashed in or blown apart even harder to stomach. (For more relevant theorization on the topic of violence in film read "Masculinity as Excess in Vietnam Films" by Susan Jeffords.)

I was hoping the presence of Ellen Page (playing the side-kick) was an indicator that the film does something beyond typical Hollywood gender roles, (I'm thinking about Hard Candy) but...meh, not so much. The side kick is just that, a side kick. In this case Page's character, Libby, is played like an overly enthusiastic junior antihero-cum-sacrificial lamb. Liv Tyler plays a whore of circumstance who needs saving. Pretty predictable female roles.

What I do like, however, is that the film has some "heart," if you will. Frank, (played by Rainn Wilson of The Office fame), starts out as someone who can only recall two perfect moments in his life. By the end of the film things have not gone the way he wanted, but he gains something precious: he has collected an arsenal of perfect moments. He represents them in naive-style drawings but we aren't compelled to belittle them. Instead, we are brought to acknowledge that this really is the magic stuff of life: any chance we have to share and connect with others, a scene as quotidian (and moving) as a moment of affection between a person and their pet rabbit.

Having seen this movie shortly after, Megamind, I have to wonder if the antihero is on the rise. I'd like to believe films like these are a sign of how collectively tired we are of oversimplified "bad guy/good guy" constructions in current-day dominant media representations related to war situations in which the United States is currently embroiled. I mean, I'd like to believe that.

Tucson Unified School District Board Meeting 5/3

This is a photo from The Arizona Daily Star taken at Tuesday night's Tucson Unified School District Board Meeting. For detailed reporting on what transpired, read this Tucson Weekly report.

The person standing in the blue shirt is a a good friend of mine. A Ph.D. student and a gentle, non-violent guy. This is a photo of him being brutalized by the police. These are his words: "Yeah, we're fine. The cop seems to have had a good strategy. The first thing he did was smack me in the face and almost break my glasses. My automatic reaction was to try to pick them up off the ground, which made me break the chain... not to mention... that he was standing me up by my hair!"

There was no official warning to disperse. The cops just started right in with their violence.

Meanwhile, Tucson Police Chief Roberto Villasenor has stated that "No one was dragged, no one was pushed or forced, no injuries of any kind."

At the beginning of the meeting board president Mark Stegeman said the police were there for student safety, but obviously they were there to intimidate and control the opposition. They didn't protect anyone. What really happened was they arrested students, the parents of students and brutalized students. (There is an Abuse Clinic being held this Friday. It's urgent that we attend.)

Here is footage of the first arrest.

There were 100 police there, many in riot gear. There were also motorcycles, paddy wagons, patrol cars, a trailer and a dog unit. I also have footage of a police helicopter that flew over several times. THIS WAS A SCHOOL DISTRICT BOARD MEETING. As I looked around at the display of force, I had to ask myself "Where am I? I thought we were in the United States, you know, land of the free?"

Not to mention, given the state's financial crisis I'd like to know how much all that so-called security cost.

I don't care what you think about Ethnic Studies. I'm not even going to touch Ethnic Studies. This is a post about the sanctity of PROCESS.

The students and their parents want to have their voices heard. They want their opinion to be counted in regard to the fate of a program that means so much to them, (regardless of what it means to anyone else.)

The students are the ones who are the most effected by this issue, and ironically they are also the most powerless in this process. Too young to vote, how else can they have a chance to be heard, especially when board president Mark Stegeman has orchestrated a perfect situation in which he doesn't have to listen?

Open meeting law states: “All meetings of any public body shall be public meetings and all persons so desiring shall be permitted to attend and listen to the deliberations and proceedings.” Less than half of the 500 people who showed up were allowed inside the boardroom. It was a terribly inappropriate venue, and what they should have done was re-schedule and re-locate the meeting as soon as that became evident. Instead, the meeting was dragged on for four hours so that by the time Stegeman started pointing out people to be arrested, much of the crowd was gone. Also, it was conveniently more difficult to record the police brutality outside under the cover of dark.

The mountains of data that were trotted out during the meeting were just a stalling technique. Stegeman had packed slides of data on what the programs cost, but when asked what percentage of the student population is Hispanic, for example, he didn't know. (It's 60% by the way!)

If he gets to drone on and on about data without making a point, then shouldn't everyone who wants to speak get whatever amount of time they want? If Open Meeting Law is not clear enough about this, then it needs to be changed.

Tom Horne says ethnic studies promotes ethnic chauvinism, but what I saw on Tuesday was essentially people of color and their sympathizers silenced and forced into obedience by white people through brutal police force. Let's not pretend we live in a post racial society.

Fuerza, Gabby!

Today is sad, sad day for Tucson and for Arizona. Andrew and I were returning from the supermarket when we heard the news from a friend. We drove by the hospital where she is on the way home. Our prayers are with her and all the victims of this terrible attack.

Adventures in the Tucson Rental Market

So you say you want to find a house to rent in Tucson? I just went through the process so I have some fresh advice.

First of all, there are a lot of properties available for rent right now and the more you look at the more it will all begin to run together. Maintaining a spreadsheet to help keep your potential rental properties straight may be a good idea. Andrew and I composed a Google doc we could easily share and update. It included fields such as: address; contact info; rent; # of bedrooms and baths; square footage; A/C, evap cooling or duel?; views?; open floorplan?; pool? etc.

How to find a property:

Drive around in the neighborhoods you like. Peek in the windows of rental properties that look worth noting. (More on this to follow.) Note to landladies/landlords: consider the importance of signage location. If you put the sign as far out on the curb as possible it really helps people scoping out your block for signs from the corner!

Go to tucson.craigslist.org

Go to Tucson Association of Realtors Multiple Listing Service (TARMLS.com)

Ask rental management companies such as Tucson Realty and Trust for their listings. (They have some online, but have more updated lists in their office.)

How to determine if you want to schedule a viewing:

If you found the address online, google the property to find more info, including pictures. This works especially well for houses that were for sale previously.

Google maps satellite and street view can give you a feel for the neighborhood and curb appeal.

If you are still interested, drive by and maybe peek in the windows if the property looks vacant. Use your best judgment and proceed with caution!

If you are still interested, schedule a viewing. I really suggest you do all the homework mentioned above so as to not waste your time, gas and somebody else's. Let your fingers do the walking.

A little about what to expect:

Properties closer to the UA, downtown and certain hubs are more expensive, but generally you can expect to find properties for rent at about $1/sq. ft. dropping off a bit after 1,500 square feet. This is a really broad generalization, but at least it gives you some ballpark figures.

You can expect to find great rental properties in virtually any neighborhood in Tucson these days. We saw lovely pools, stunning views, huge back yards, fully furnished, etc.

Since the market is flooded with rental properties, it's a good time to negotiate. Be polite and prepared for a no, remembering, however, that it never hurts to ask for a break on the rent; especially if you are willing to offer a few months of rent up front, in cash.

Andrew and I specifically found our place (not the pad pictured above) via drive by. It includes 2000 square feet, gardens, koi ponds, an Arizona Room, dual cooling, and other little details we're pretty excited about, like a washer and dryer!

Happy hunting!

Teresa's Mosaic Cafe

The view of the Catalinas from the patio. Photo from lifestylisttravel.com

As Andrew and I were searching for a new home, (blog post to follow), we noticed what a great view there is from N. Silver Mosaic. We were wondering if McDonald's would let us rent their place, when we noticed a building next door with an equally spectacular view. It turned out to be Teresa's Mosaic Cafe.

We came back a few days later for breakfast on the patio. It was one of the last perfect weekends in Tucson; they didn't even have to turn on the misters. I had one of the Oaxacan plates with their homemade tortillas (made as you watch in the main dining room.) Andrew was so inspired by their Jamaica that he got some hibiscus at Food City on the way home and brewed up his own batch.

What can I say? With ambiance, service, a view and food like that, Teresa's has given me a reason to venture over to the "other side" of I-10 more often.

Cee Dee Jamaican Kitchen

For forever Andrew and I have been driving by this place on Swan near Speedway (next to Top Banana, FYI) called Cee Dee Jamaican Kitchen. Its grand opening seemed to never come, but finally one day we were running errands and noticed an actual "Open" sign in the window. We instantly pulled a u-turn and stopped in for lunch.

We were the only ones in the place besides the owners and a friend of theirs. It was a cool, cozy, tasty relief from a hot, busy day. Perhaps the locale was a little cee dee (seedy) but that's part of the charm, as the name suggests.

We both had the $5 lunch special consisting of a plate of food with two sides. I had the curry chicken (includes rice) with plantains and festival (possibly named after the likes of some fried thing you would eat at a carnival?) for my sides. I also got a glass of the carrot juice. (Tastes like a carroty version of horchata. Delish.) My ears were not left out of the fun as the reggae delighted them.

Hours are 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Sundays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and 11 a.m. to midnight Thursdays-Saturdays. Phone: 520-795-3400.

Tucson Cine Mexico 2010

Still from Voy a Explotar/ I’m Gonna Explode (Mexico, 2007, 105 min)

Tucson Cine Mexico 2010
March 4-7, 2010

All Screenings Free and Open to the Public

Harkins Theatres Tucson Spectrum 18
5455 South Calle Santa Cruz

Sponsored by Cox and Harkins Theatres
Media Sponsors: Univision, 102.1 KCMT La Caliente and La Estrella

The University of Arizona’s Hanson Film Institute and The Consulate of Mexico in Tucson present Tucson Cine Mexico 2010, a festival of Mexican film. Tucson Cine Mexico 2010 is the most prominent film festival in the US focusing entirely on the work of Mexican directors, with each screening being the Arizona premiere.

Tucson Cine Mexico celebrates the best of Mexican Cinema with Award Winning Filmmakers and Films, a Party at The Tucson Museum of Art, and a partnership with Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna’s Ambulante Documentary Film Festival.

March 4
8:30 PM

Tucson Cine Mexico Festival Opening Night Party

Tucson Museum of Art
140 N. Main Ave.

Beer, Tequila and Food!

with screening of the short documentary film

Tropico de Cancer

Minimal dialogue in Spanish with English subtitles
(Mexico, 2003, 53 min)
In collaboration with the Tucson Museum of Art

A poignant and powerful documentary, TROPICO DE CANCER is a meticulous account of the perilous conditions of a group of families living in the arid desert of San Luis Potosí in their quest for survival hunting animals to sell them on the highway. Both visually and narrative astonishing, the film is Eugenio Polgovsky¹s documentary debut which was screened in numerous film festivals around the world.

For a complete schedule of films, click here.

Tucson Saddletramps vs Montreal New Skids on the Block

We went to our first international roller derby bout last weekend: Tucson Saddletramps vs. Montreal New Skids on the Block. We were glad that we got tickets ahead of time: many people were turned away due to crowds over capacity.

I hadn't been to roller derby for nearly two years, so it was interesting to see how the sport appears to have evolved since then. The outfits continue to include silly flair (like neon pink underwear on the outside of the leotard), but in general, the uniforms are more about athleticism and less about stylized spectacle than they were a while back.

Another observation: the women obviously played hard, yet there was also a positive comradeship between the locals and the away team.

Ren Fest 2010

Adam "Crack" Winrich, the Whip Master, puts on a great show. Not only is he great with the whip; he's hilarious and he's easy on the eyes.

Liz is excited to get her picture taken with this Ren Fest heartthrob.

The queen strolls with one of the many royal greyhounds. Greyhound rescue organizations bring the best of their pups to faire. I spent plenty of time scratching the bellies of these graceful and sweet canines.

Our men get feisty.

The jousts are worth watching. It dawned on me that in order to put on this show, you have to be able to act (at least minimally), project your voice, ride a horse, fall off a horse, and have some level of aim.

The hypnotist in action. (Liz emerged from the session in a fantastic mood.)

The Annual Arizona Renaissance Festival is currently in full swing. We went on the opening weekend, at it was a blast, much like last year. I got my candle fix once more from Irie Lights Candles (based in Ohio). I prefer a musky scented candle, so they send me to aromatic heaven.

The entertainment was the big draw and what makes it possible to easily enjoy an entire day at the faire, in my opinion. A new act this year is the acrobatic trio Barely Balanced, (cute and funny). However, I do have a complaint. It's a big one. ENOUGH WITH THE GAY JOKES. Most of the acts incorporate raunchy humor, but there's a difference between making a sex joke and making a joke at the expense of someone's sexual orientation. Example: one trio of male performers was overheard saying the following during their act: "We've been friends...and we've been lovers!" at which point they paused dramatically with their arms around each other. "But not of each other! Ew! Gross!" at which point the crowd chuckles. LAME. If you wouldn't make a joke at the expense of a racial minority why would you make a joke at the expense of a sexual minority?