Sorry about the hiatus. My computer had to go to the hospital (memory implant), and as soon as it was discharged, the World Tour cranked back up.

Last week’s stop was Highlands, North Carolina, where I delivered something called the Zahner Conservation Lecture on Thursday evening (modesty prevents me from describing the audience’s wildly enthusiastic response) then signed books at the town’s independent bookstore, Cyrano’s, on Saturday.

As you approach Highlands, signs announce that you are entering a bird sanctuary, and I believe they’re telling the truth. On Friday, equipped with an I-pod on which was stored every conceivable bird song, the gracious, funny, and very knowledgeable John Stowers led some dozen of us on a bird hike along the Bartram trail to a destination called White Rock. We saw scarlet tanagers, indigo buntings, and an assortment of warblers, among other species. Even I, your binoculars-challenged armchair birder, had great looks at black-and-white and chestnut-sided warblers. Other folks in the party saw hooded and black-throated blues. It was almost enough to make a person want to go birding.

Yo! Big shout-out to Clair Simpson, proprietor of Cyrano’s–more proof that the independent bookstore is alive and kicking.

OK. Back one last time (I promise) to that lovely, downy chickadee nest inside my bluebird box. After watching the phoebes on the front porch go through the whole process, and especially those latter stages where you wonder how the three chicks can still fit inside the nest, I have to say one more thing about that chickadee nest. It was–and still is–clean. Once or twice I saw the parents fly out of the box with a bill-full of baby poop, and thanks that kind of devotion, the nest and the inside of the box remain pristine.

But by the time those little phoebes had fledged, whoa! It was just a world of bird dookey out there on the front porch. Once we were sure the birds were gone, Dede had to get out the Lysol and swab the place down.

I mention it because–you guessed it–the phoebes are back with nest number two. And the way the mama bird is sitting tight even when we’re on the porch, my guess is that the eggs are about to hatch. Not that we’re complaining. Actually, the more we have them around, the more I appreciate these skillful little flycatchers with their twitchy tails.

They get no credit for gaudy plumage, but I like the way they look, especially in the evening when their pale underside takes on a kind of incandescence in contrast to their otherwise dark bodies. And when it’s time to feed those babies, I see them out on the low fence that keeps the dogs out of the garden, busily harvesting the insect pests that would otherwise defoliate my peppers and cucumbers.

As much as anything I love that hoarse little cry: phoebe, phoebe, phoebe–one of the first signs of spring in these parts. James Russell Lowell nailed it, I think:

Phoebe is all it has to say

In plaintive cadence o’er and o’er,

Like children that have lost their way

And know their names, but nothing more.

Chances are this second brood will do it for this year. As the hot weather arrives, the phoebes tend to head into the deeper woods, where, in fact, they lead solitary lives, not even socializing with one another.

They will be missed, but even as we clean up the second round of dookey, we’ll take consolation in knowing we helped them multiply.

So many reasons not to play golf–or, if you do play, to deny it.

The two most obvious ones–it costs too much and takes too long–should suffice, but if they don’t, they imply a third: privilege. That is, anybody who has that kind of money and time is “privileged,” and nobody, these days, wants to face that indictment.

Then there’s the gear: clubs, bag, balls, tees, gloves, towels, caps, shoes, one tool for repairing divots and another for scouring grooves . . . . You might as well be going on safari (a fairly rich analogy, when you think about it).

Worst of all, though, is golf’s smug self-righteousness. You get the impression that if we didn’t have golf to build our character, we’d all be snatching purses and drinking Thunderbird out of brown paper bags.

But. Here’s the thing: birds love golf courses just as much as privileged white males do. I was about to hit my second shot on the ninth hole of my local course the other day when I saw a kingbird perched on a yardage post, the white band at the base of its tail announcing its identity to all and sundry. I have long read about this bird’s aggressive intolerance of larger birds like crows and hawks, but I have never seen it anywhere except on the golf course.

I write in the book about never having seen a wood thrush. Actually, I have, scratching around in the shrubbery of a lawn bordering the golf course. And as for that beautiful bird the sight of which (it is said) led Alexander Wilson to become an ornithologist, you absolutely cannot play golf–in Georgia at least–without seeing a redheaded woodpecker swooping from one pine tree to another.

Canada geese? Plenty, assuming your golf course has a pond or two. And on those clear-blue February days, the wide sky above the fairway is the best place in the world to watch sandhill cranes headed back north.

See? It’s not that golf has me by the short hair. I’m really just a naturalist in a goofy hat.

The good news is that the phoebes have fledged and gone. Same, too, by the way, with the chickadees in the bluebird box. (And I have to say, even if I’m saying it again, that the chickadee nest is a real improvement on the bluebird nest; the top layer is all soft, downy stuff, a marvel of comfy.)

So all is good, except that I’m left with one large copperhead somewhere very near the house. Now the copperhead is not an aggressive snake. When disturbed, according to the experts, it would rather “beat a dignified retreat” than get all riled up. On the other hand, copperheads, like many other snakes, tend to stir at night, and Dede and I sometimes stir at night, too–like to go out by the garden and dump the compost. And since one good way to get bit by a copperhead is to step on it, I’d just as soon not have the damn thing as a boarder.

Still, I like snakes, and I’m a live-and-let-live kind of guy. Just how live-and-let-live? Well, in fact, I faced this exact situation last summer–a copperhead on the premises. I had seen it–almost stepped on it–while cutting the grass. Then, a few days later, I was on the front porch and looked down into the landscaped area just below. There it was, asleep in the sun, curled over on itself like a bow-tie. Of course I could dispatch it–have at it with my machete, blast it with my shotgun–but I couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger. Instead, I went into the garage and got our snap-on-lid trashcan and my long-handled spade. Banking on the copperhead’s reputation for lethargy, I slid the shovel under the snake, picked it up, and dropped it in the trashcan–pretty much all in one swoop. I don’t think it even woke up until it hit the bottom, and by then I had slapped the lid down tight. I put the trashcan in the back of the truck, drove a half-mile up the road (to a stretch where nobody lives), and let the snake go. It still seemed unperturbed by the whole affair.

I expect that, given the opportunity, I’ll do the same thing again this summer. If I don’t step on it first.

(Next time: back to birds–the one and only good reason to play golf.)

Sometimes I’m tempted to summarize my life in the woods with two simple sentences: I feed the birds. The birds feed the snakes.

In the book I write about one of my snake-in-the-bird’s-nest encounters: how I shone my flashlight into the dim corner of the garage to check on the broom-top wren’s nest and found myself eye to eye with a milksnake; how when I lifted it down with my walking stick I could plainly see its midsection distended with recently ingested wren’s eggs.

This past summer the milksnake was back. Dede and I were sitting on the porch, to the annoyance of the phoebes who had, once again, built their nest on the rafter under the roof, when I noticed a small snake on top of the porch rail. Another milksnake, I believe, but probably an adolescent, so I just picked it up and carried it out to the edge of the yard. The very next day, coming down the driveway, I looked up toward the phoebes’ nest and saw an impressive length of tail hanging from the rafter. Same snake already back again? No, this was that snake’s parent–or grandparent. Big, handsome fellow, like the one I had untangled from the wren’s nest the year before. I shoved him off the rafter, but the damage was done. Milked again.

Well, the phoebes do like that nice porch rafter, and they returned this spring. Sure enough, a couple of weeks ago I glanced out the window onto the front porch and saw that another adolescent-sized milksnake had made its way up onto the floor, looking ready to wind on up to rail level, and then . . . who knows? I grabbed him up and carried him a couple of hundred yards up the driveway–too far, I figured, for him to find the way back–and then let him go. (When biting me on the back of the hand didn’t do him any good, by the way, he became quite docile for the rest of the journey.) Based on last year’s experience, though, I didn’t figure to be done with snakes for the season.

I walked back down to the driveway and stopped at the faucet outside the garage to wash the snake musk off my hands. I was leaning over, rinsing away, proud of my little accomplishment, when–WHOA!–right there next to me, on the ground under the edge of the porch, was just a whopper of a copperhead. Now, how in the world was I going to get rid of that bad boy?

(To be continued . . .)

In the book I write about watching a Cooper’s hawk pick a downy woodpecker off the feeder and take it to the ground, about watching the big predator spread the little bird open, breast up, ready to have at it before I knocked on the window to scare it off its feed. I was hoping to save the downy, but of course the hawk flew away with the downy. I mentioned that my friend Don Hastings had seen a Cooper kill a chickadee, drop it as it was flying off, then snatch it up again before it hit the ground. I finished this little testimony to the Cooper’s prowess by quoting an account from E. B. White’s “Mr. Forbush’s Friends,” in which a Cooper was reported to have killed a flicker by “plunging it into a roadside ditch containing one foot of water and holding it under for three minutes.”

The other day I got a letter from a friend in Charlottesville, Daphne Myhre, who had just read the book and had a story to share. She says she and her husband have two hawks–”the red-eyed, yellow-legged Cooper’s and another with similar features but not the red eyes or yellow legs”–both of which regularly kill their prey “by driving them into our kitchen and great room windows, after which they scoop up the dead or stunned birds.”

On the day in question, Daphne and her husband were having lunch in the kitchen when they heard the “characteristic crash” into the window. They looked up to see their hawk out on the lawn, “trying to decide if it was safe to collect his kill, as he noticed us having lunch through the French doors.” With the human beings inside “as still as statues,” the hawk decided it was indeed safe and proceeded to walk across the stone deck, “between the barbecue and the patio furniture,” all the way up to the door, “within three feet of us,” and picked up his prey. “For that brief time,” writes Daphne, “you might have thought we had a pet chicken stomping around our patio.”

Good story, hunh? But I wish I could help Daphne ID that other hawk. From the not particularly detailed illustrations I have at my disposal, pretty much all hawks (including the sharp-shinned, often confused with the Cooper) have yellow legs, and it’s hard to tell about the eyes. Anybody got a suggestion?

(Next time: snake woes.)

Your Armchair Birder is back from Asheville, North Carolina, and a book signing at Malaprops Bookstore & Café, the laid-back hangout where native Ashevillians chill with their lattes and lit. I talked about my book to a dozen or 15 enthusiasts, one of whom threw me a bit off stride by asking why I hadn’t been on the birdwalk that morning just a little way out of town on the Blue Ridge Parkway. “We saw 11 kinds of warblers,” she told me, and proceeded to start listing: Kentucky, hooded, blackburnian, yellow-throated, American redstart, black-throated blue, cerulean (yes! cerulean)–I mean, it went on and on.

I had to tell her, “Whoa, whoa. Who wants to be on a fragrant mountainside looking at 11 kinds of warblers when they can be in the line of cattle being prodded from room to room in the Biltmore House?”

But Dede and I loved Asheville–and Malaprops. May the independent bookstore not merely endure, but prevail.

Back home, the chickadees that took over the bluebird house are beginning to feed their just-hatched young, and the phoebes that have returned, once again, to the beam under the eave of the front porch must be very close to the end of incubation. (Last year–and it couldn’t have been more than a day or two before fledging–a big milksnake gobbled up the babies. This year I hope to be more vigilant, though I don’t know how.)

Then, yesterday evening, I heard the distinctive chick-burr, chick-burr, and looked just off the porch to see, on the limb of a pine tree surprisingly close to the ground, that most spectacular sign of summertime in my own lovely woods–the gorgeous scarlet tanager.

So to heck with 11 kinds of warblers.

Dede just passed along to me an item she ran across in the New York Times. (That’s her homepage; mine is the lowbrow AT&T/Yahoo, where this morning’s headline was “Drew Barrymore’s double fashion fiasco.”) Anyway, it seems that the Con Ed guys in Queens and Brooklyn have a tricky problem: how to protect their power equipment from monk parakeet nests on their utility poles.

By blocking ventilation and trapping heat, the huge nests are particularly destructive to an expensive piece of equipment called a “feeder reclosure.” One operator complained of having had to replace the $20,000 device five times in two years. Solution: the birds can be scared off by a battery-powered owl that hoots and swivels its head. Complication: the parakeets are quick to return when the batteries run out.

You know, if you step back and take a little perspective, you see that this whole man-versus-animal problem has a relatively short history (a couple of centuries) but a limitless future. In reading about the parakeets, I was reminded of the story from a few months ago–about the U.S Airways jet that swallowed some Canada geese and ended up in the Hudson River. Good thing everybody survived the emergency landing, or geese far and wide might have been cooked in retaliation.

It’s true that, down here in Georgia anyway, there are more Canada geese than there used to be. When they start taking down our airplanes, lots of folks are going to say there are too many. Well, not this armchair birder. He can generally be counted on to take the pre-industrial view in these matters. No, there are not too many Canada geese, or too many monk parakeets either.

What we’ve got is too many people, trying to get too many places, too fast. According to reports from the National Institute for Urban Wildlife and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 50 to 100 million birds are killed by automobiles every year. How many do you suppose have ever been killed by people on horses, or on bicycles, or on foot?

(Next time: off the soapbox and back to the armchair. Meanwhile, the “Armchair Birder 2009 World Tour” stops this weekend in Asheville, NC, for a Sunday, 3:00, signing at Malaprops Bookstore. Looking forward to checking out the lucky birds that inhabit the Biltmore House.)

Hello, all good bird people:

John Yow here, author of The Armchair Birder: Discovering the Secret Lives of Familiar Birds (University of North Carolina Press, Spring 2009).

I see from roaming the blogosphere that I’m not the only armchair birder out there, but the term may mean different things to different people. For me it means not only watching the birds from my armchair (or office chair, actually), but also reading about them–reading about them, especially (but not exclusively), in the vintage works of people like Arthur Cleveland Bent, Edward Howe Forbush, and John James Audubon (where you will find, for example, Audubon’s hilarious account of being chased into the river by a wounded, and very angry, sandhill crane.)

It doesn’t mean that I don’t “go birding.” Actually, I’ve been birding once or twice. But it does mean that I’m not likely to get in my ratty, broke-down truck here in Acworth, Georgia, and drive to Choke Canyon State Park in South Texas to witness the first-ever appearance in the U.S. of the pine flycatcher. Some folks did. Steve Matherly drove down from Houston, three and a half hours away, and admitted, “The dollars [spent to get here] per gram of bird is kind of amazing.” Wes Biggs flew in from Orlando, and Dotty Robbins made the trip from Gainesville, Florida. “He’s not spectacular,” said Dotty, “but the sighting is unique.”

Now those people are birders–no armchair needed, thank you very much. And more power to them.

But I have to say: there’s a whole lot going on right here outside my window. Every day another question I don’t know the answer to. Like, why have the pine siskins descended upon me this year in flocks of up to 50 birds, when I’ve never had more than a handful before? Why have the bluebirds let the chickadees take over their box? And where the dickens have my redbellied woodpeckers gone to?

That’s the idea behind the book: OK, I know who you are, but what are you doing? And why are you doing it? That will also be the idea behind this blog. I hope you’ll talk to me.

(And if you want to buy the book, that’s okay, too.)