doomed

While taking my morning wake up walk I found myself subconciously tallying up the estimated next few days death toll due to the impending freeze. We'll lose the little cherries so abundant on the tree, guess the plums are a gonner, too. Are the paw paws far enough along to abort? Will the baby nuts and seeds and berries all come crashing to the ground on the third morning, instead of rising from the dead? Will the drought make it so that this first try at reproduction be the final effort for the critter food crops for this year? My sister Mary says that it will drive some birds northward, where things aren't so far along.

Took some premortem memorial photos of wildflowers and brought in reams of lilacs from the bush to "stink up" though house right good.
After work today, must cover with row cover the spinach, lettuce, herbs, bring in the potted ferns, spread straw around the peas, bring in firewood, rustle up some kindling...whew! lotta work comes from screwed up weather.

wild winged wonders of the small kind

This year the vernal equinox was the most explosive transition between seasons I have ever experienced. Literally, the cherry was in tight bud one day, and full bloom the next. Swallowtails, honey bees, carpenter bees, beetles, ants and red wasps (my favorite kind of wasp) all appeared on the magic day as if responding to a curtain call.
I unceremoniously ripped the plastic off of the windows and threw open the sashes, letting the wind rustle papers and curtains and sweep seed packets off the table onto the floor of the cabin.
Today was the first day to liberate the feet and luxuriate in the feel of gravel massaging the winter tender feet. A day to notice the nuances and textures. A day to reroute the climbing rose and tear down old morning glory vines, a day to plant and dig and plant some more, and cheerfully (if naively) trust that it will rain.

little bird, big brain

"Nutchatches seem to understand chickadee" this just blows me away, but not for the reason that the article was written. Any child of the woods (someone who hangs around outside watching stuff with no agenda, the way children do) knows that interspecies bird communication happens. They warn each other, they fight with each other over food and territory, using not just their body language, but their own species language, and other species learn/know, pretty much what they are saying, the same way an english speaker might say "gracias" at a mexican restaurant. After all, they are sharing the same habitat and the food table.
As kids, we worked hard to mimic the call of a hawk, then we would go into an area with birds feeding, give the call and watch everybody duck for cover...cheap thrills.
Years later, I was amused to see my own children mimic hawks and send the chickens running for cover, and then fall into the grass with peals of laughter over the "village idiot" chickens who would just cringe and hunker down right where they were at, because they were confused about which way to run.
The fact that people are getting paid to play with speakers and recording devices is what blows me away....where do I sign up?? can I be on the team??
The best part of the article is at the very end......

"Also, said Dhondt, who was not part of Templeton's research team, black-capped chickadees have been known to produce false alarm calls, causing other birds to fly away, leaving the cheating chickadees to enjoy a food source by itself."
Yea, chickadees are like that...clever little things.I have also seen chickadees give the "come and get it' food call to lure all the cardinals to the front feeder, then sneak around the other side of the house to the other feeder that is actually fuller.

Hillbilly conversation type #7 - "the truck"

"That yo truck" I asked Mikey as he steadily unloaded slab lumber from the saw mill onto my dwindling fire wood pile.
"Yep" he answered, slowing his toss a little.
"Shore is a nice un" I said, speeding up my tossing a some, giving him a little room, in case he wanted to carry the conversation further.
"Well, it orta be" he replied, " I was a hopin' to have it paid off afore winter, but had a hard time finding work this summer."
"Oh Yea?" I said, making another opening.
"My older brother, he got his paid off a lot quicker, but that was before all the mexicans"
He hurridly added to his statement, "it ain't that I got nothin against mexicans, you know, its just that you can't get no farm jobs, now, like in tobacco or humping hay, cause they only hire mexicans, cause they come in a team, you know. Kindly makes it hard, Daddy said he seen that and tried to get me on up at the trailer factory for the summer, but they up and closed down, moved out and took their factory to mexico.... funny, you know what I mean? our jobs going there and them coming here."
"Yep" I replied, moving around to start tossing off the other side of the truck.
"So mostly I am hauling wood as much as I can, waiting to graduate high school so's I can drive to Nashville or somewheres else far off like everybody else has to do to get work."
He paused slightly and glanced around. I've seen that look before many a time and knew he was taking in the entire farm in a quick glance. He went right back to work after having determined quickly that I didn't have nothin of count to trade on.
In a quieter voice he said, if you call me ahead a time,next time, I can bring you a big ol' truck bed load and a-hauling a big ol' trailer a-hind it and stack it all for you for 35.00, it could be drying then for next winter.
It was his way of sorta apologizing for the slabs he'd brought me being so green and wet.
"Well", I said, "my fault for not having enough put up."
"Well" he said, "you aint the only one caught short, its been a right hard winter, wished I had some real wood to bring you, but its been gone a month now and its been too froze up in the woods to get a chain saw through nothing. Now you,holler back at me end of the summer and I can bring you some real wood."
"Will do" I said, "take care of that truck, least till you get er paid off!"
He grinned at that and said, "Yes m'am, and much obliged for you calling on me for the wood"

owls, fur and rain

found this lovely fur on the way to the old barn ruins out back...it was spread a little here, a little there, like bread crumbs along the trail. I wondered who got the rabbit meat that once was wearing this hair, don't think it was the dogs, because they like to flaunt the remains that they drag in, arranging them in the side yard that gets the most sun and is their afternoon napping area.
Though I do think it was the puppy who scattered it along the trail, I guessed that the predator was more of a legitimate one and I wondered if coyotes had moved in close again. So tracking the sparse trail towards the edge of the woods, gathering up the little tufts along the way to spin , I found the largest pile under a limb in the woods that is a known (well known to me, at least) barred owl hangout.
I like barred owls, I like to know that they are ever diligently swooping down on voles in the night, and their calls are comforting and musical.
So I thought of the owls this afternoon when I was working in the cabin and happened to glance towards the window. The gloom that had been hanging over the sky all day had suddenly gathered up darker and it looked just on the verge of actually dropping a much needed rain. Two things popped into my slow mind and caused me to speed up to put my boots on. One, you better get your firewood in for the evening so you aren't hauling it in a downpour, and two, is there an owl out there somewhere calling because it is about to rain?
As I wheeled the dolly towards the wood shed the first sprinkle hit my face and I heard the owl calling from his outpost tree by the old barn. Yes! should I be keeping score of the weather reporting owl?

yoohoo, fly up fast fast food for birds

tap! tap! tap! on the window and this morning the redbellied woodpecker is beyond requesting more seed for the feeder, he is demanding!
you in there? where's the gosh darn feed! its cold out here! isn't this the drive up window?

my whirled

Oh the cold! On this gloomy morning with my hands shoved into the fire I offered my kingdom for a sunny afternoon. And low, it came to pass. A sunny afternoon to peirce the chill and my whole kingdom still belonged to me. Not all richness is cut with a deal.
Such blessing I have been bestowed, a day above freezing and two hours to enjoy it! I called around hunting firewood, but there was none to be had. At first that seemed a waste of a day barely above freezing. It sure would have made it easier to load and stack, but oh well.. musta been another purpose for me on this sunny day.
My bones creaked up from the workbench and carried my flesh up on the ridge where I observed some sort of sign.
I was wandering along the ridge top, lost in tracing my eyes along the curvy beech branches overhead against the intense blue of the sky when a movement and rustle caught my eye not far on down the path in front of me.
Almost never without my camera, today I had left it behind as a sort of half-thought-out spiritual discipline, and for an instant I felt regret that this might be the missed bird photo op of a lifetime.
But I didn't see a bird, I watched in rapt stillness as first one leaf and then another lifted animatedly off the ground about a foot, swirled around and flopped back to the earth with a decided rustle. Two leaves dancing became three and then four and then I realized it was a jerkily choreographed and ever so sublte whirlwind. Back to the earth they would fall with a rustle. Then another little square of dancers would rise up a little on farther down the ridge and repeat the display. Each little whirlwind was moving a little closer to me. And I wondered what would happen when their path met mine. I stood at total attention, searching the tree tops for any sign of wind, but it was very still and blue and cold and sunny, except for the tiny advancing whirlwind. Picking up new leaves and dropping the old ones every yard or so, it finally reached me.
It rustled the leaves and swirled them around my feet, up my legs and around my waste. Then it was gone.

ground hogs day

is a great holiday and not just because it is my birthday, but because it falls exactly between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, that is auspicious, indeed.
It is also one of those spontaneous universal mythology stories..almost every culture has some sort of critter checking on something for this astronomically important day.
For my birthday, I got snow in the holler!!' not a tracking snow, but a fluffy, bird feather scattering snow.