Orioles

Terry got home from North Dakota last night. It was a quick trip, only Sunday through Thursday, but I found myself overwhelmed by the extra chores that we normally share, such as getting the garbage and recycling together for pick up, bringing in the mail, and tidying up for the cleaning ladies. I ran out of clean socks and had to do the laundry, for heaven’s sake! 

In the midst of all of that, doing my blog post slipped my mind until this morning. So I’m late. Sorry.

The big news is that the orioles are back! It was just one male at first, as far as I could tell, and boy, was he mad about the absence of jelly. He sat where the feeder was conspicuously absent and sang his little heart out: “Hey! Hey! Where’s the damned jelly, slackers?” 

"Hey! Where's the jelly?"

I asked Terry (this was before he left) where the jelly dish was. He said he’d look, but when I hadn’t heard back from him by noon, I went out to the greenhouse and found one. Yesterday, I saw an orchard oriole and a first-year male. 

I am sad to confirm that I was right about the poor life choices of the toads. The vernal pond has strings of embryos stopped in their development before they wriggled out of the slime that enclosed the eggs.

Strings of dead toad embryos. So sad.

The rain has continued most of the week, but the toads have not come back for a second attempt. Maybe it is because it’s been cold; maybe one try is all they get in a year, although I’m sure there are other toads out there. We’ll see what happens when it warms up again. 

I’m pleased that all of the Virginia bluebells that I bought and planted two years ago are up this year, even though four of the five did not come up last year. Hooray! The one I planted under the solar panel is going to bloom. 

The large leaves are Virginia bluebells. The narrow leaves and blue flowers are scilla

The Dutchman’s britches is blooming, with its little upside-down-pants flowers. 

Dutchman's britches

It has been three years since I planted mayapples and trout lilies. The mayapples are finally taking off.

The umbrella-like mayapple leaves are beginning to unfurl. I count 19 in this photo.

The trout lilies seem a little more numerous, but no signs of flowers yet. 

The trout lilies are the mottled green and blackish leaves. The rest are weeds.

The ramps are still limping along. They don’t seem much inclined to propagate, more’s the pity. Hilda did not live long enough to see a harvest. At this rate, I might not either. 

Ramps that may never be numerous enough to harvest

I’ve been working in the high tunnel, as it doesn’t rain in there. I have planted three tomato plants, four herbs (rosemary, sage, oregano, thyme),

Supersweet 100 (cherry), Celebrity, and New Girl tomatoes in cages, herbs are in the bed behind.

And two cucumbers 

Cucumbers by trellis

The chicks are going to be shipped next week. We are waiting on a call for our bees also. The birds and the bees…Next week might be quite busy! Stay tuned!

Love is in the air!

The reproductive season has begun. The first flowers I saw here were scilla back by the creek, where I planted them last year. I never feel confident that plants will survive the winter, so the blue flowers brought a little joy to my heart.

Scilla, our first flowers of spring

Terry alerted me to pussy willows growing on the north side of the property. I must have walked past them a few times without noticing. It isn’t as if they weren’t obvious. I just wasn’t paying attention.

Pussy willows against the sky

Here is a closeup of the anthers (pollen producing structures).

Pussy willow anthers (yellow)

Speaking of not noticing, Terry told me that mourning doves were nesting in the conifers by the tractor shed. He had always assumed that they were ground nesters. It is possible that this is the first time they have nested on our land, although we’ve always had them around. Hilda’s friend, Mary G., though of mourning doves as the juvenile delinquents of the bird world. “They just hang around the feeder,” she said, disapprovingly. “All day long, just hanging around.”

A mourning dove scared the beegeezus out of me when it exploded out of a small spruce tree as I walked past. I peeked in the branches, and there was the nest, no more than a flat pile of sticks. The mourning doves are not only delinquents, but also seem to be underachievers in the nest building department.

Slap-dash mourning dove nest

Compare that with the more elaborate nest of the robin, built of mud and woven grass, in this case, under the deck.

Robin nest under the deck

We had quite a bit of rain last week. Our vernal pools filled, and soon the air was filled with the songs of chorus frogs. Shortly after, I heard the deep hum of toads. I put on my Wellies and went out to investigate. I counted 8 pairs mating in a pool where I had not seen them before. I was again amazed at the diversity of colors. Some were almost black.

Dark toads

Some were brown.

Brown male on darker female, black ad white spots are egg strings

Some were a light tan that made the dark warts stand out. The male is on top in all these photos. The female is considerably larger.

Tan male on brown female, strings of eggs everywhere

This picture shows strings of eggs apparently from a single pair. Look carefully for a squiggly black line from the lower left to the upper right. That’s not even the entire length! Amazing.

Black strings of eggs from upper right to mid-lower left

Sadly, these toads made poor life choices. Two days later, the cold days returned. Worse, the puddle dried up. Oh well. Toads have Type III survivorship. Lots of offspring, no parental care, high early mortality. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: the strategy is to feed everything that eats eggs and tadpoles and have a few left over at some point during the toad’s lifetime. There’s always next year.

The seedlings that I started in the middle of March are ready for the high tunnel. I have been way to busy for a retired person this week, but I hope to get them planted over the weekend.

Tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers ready for the high tunnel

I planted a cover crop in the high tunnel by broadcast sowing oats and field pea seeds. In theory, tossing the seeds in the air is supposed to produce even coverage of plants. What we have learned is that I suck at broadcast sowing.

My cover crop ended up very patchy indeed!

I uncovered the garlic,

The garlic has sprouted

And the rhubarb is up.

Rhubarb cake is just around the corner

If it ever warms up, it will begin to feel like spring!

 

Cold chicken feet

 We moved the hens out to their summer pasture in the apple orchard last Monday night. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Terry spent several days before the transfer putting mulch around all the apple trees, in spite of the fact that the hens would systematically kick it all over the place as soon as they took residency.

The de-mulching of the trees is great fun to watch, chickens flinging wood chips and pecking at the morsels revealed underneath. I wanted to get some pictures but ran into the same problem all observers encounter when watching something/someone. The behavior of the observed may be influenced by the presence of the observer. It has some fancy scientific name like “the observer effect.” In this case, the presence of the observer causes the chickens to run to the gate, clucking, “Treats? Treats? Treats?”

The observer effect: Drop everything! Someone's coming!

I waited in the orchard for the hens to give up on getting scratch grains and go on about their usual business. It was only partially successful. I was not able to capture full-blown flinging. This is the best I could do.

Kick to the right

See what's down there. Kick some more.

Do-si-do

Change partners

Then it got cold. Really cold for this time of year. The temperature dipped below freezing, but for two mornings, I could chip the ice off the outside waterer and carry on. Friday morning (I think) it was 27°F, and the water trough was frozen solid. Even the nipple waterer in the coop had ice in it. I brought the outside waterer in the house, let it melt, and filled it at the laundry sink. Then I had to schlep it back to the orchard with a gallon and a half of water in it. Since then, I have brought the waterer in when I close the coop so it will be ready for filling in the morning. It will be nice when we can use the hoses again.

The wind blew hard. The poor hens huddled together under a bare apple tree “like penguins,” Terry said. He was fascinated that they would behave like this. In the winter run, they spend windy days in the coop or in the shelter of a covered dog kennel in the run. Coop 2, the summer coop, is half the size of Coop 1. It is only for sleeping and laying eggs. Normally, the hens are perfectly happy spending their days outside. Apparently, they don’t like to spend time in Coop 2 during the day even to get out of the biting wind. I could drag the kennel down to the orchard, but it would kill yet another patch of grass and be hard to mow around. It will get warm soon. I hope.

I looked out the window this morning and said, “The girls are not going to like this!”

6:00 a.m. this morning

Terry was just getting out of bed. “Is it cold again?”

He looked out the window. “Oh! We must have two inches of snow! We were only supposed to get a dusting.”

The girls do not like to walk in the snow. When I opened the coop door, they looked out in surprise instead of flying out to the grass. Blackbeard took two tentative steps onto the ramp….

Damn! It's cold out here!

Then turned around and went back in.

Enough of that shit.

We are not going out.

I'm not going out. Are you going out? 

We really mean it.

In fact, we're going to cower in the farthest corner from the door.

So I left them. By the time I got in the house, half the flock was at the waterer and/or wandering around in my footprints, where the snow was not so deep. I went back out and scraped some snow aside with my boot. A scoop of scratch grains got everyone out so I could fill the feeder and clean the bedding a little.

I knew from the forecast that it was too much to ask for sunshine. It wasn’t all that cold, yet the snow hung around until early afternoon. Not a good day to be a chicken.

 

This is spring?

 Mother Nature’s April Fool joke continued with heavy, wet snow that whole damned day Saturday, April 2. It varied from small, barely visible crystals to large balls of flakes stuck together.

Heavy, wet snow

The temperatures hovered a little able freezing, and an equilibrium was reached in the midafternoon. The snow melted as quickly as it fell, resulting in no more net accumulation.

Once it got this deep, it didn't get any deeper

Fortunately, it melted the next day.

Tuesday evening, seven deer gathered in the field.

Six of the seven deer grazing

We think they were does with yearlings. Some of them were frisky, jumping and darting around as youngsters do.

All seven deer with one frisky juvenile in the center

Certainly there were size differences among the individuals. This photo shows a large one, presumably Mom, with two yearlings.

Mom (center) and two small  juveniles

The goldfinches continue to molt into their breeding colors. I’m sure they all hope to be done before the prom. Nothing worse than showing up with those dreaded tan patches on your back and your black beret not quite finished. I continue to be surprised at how much variation there is in the molting schedule. I have read that the brightest colors do correlate with various factors that make a good mate. It seems reasonable that the earliest male to achieve said bright colors would have an advantage.

Goldfinches at various stages of molting

Here a house finch photobombed the goldfinch picture.

Photobomb!

Red-bellied and downy woodpeckers are frequent visitors to our feeders.

Red-bellied at the feeder, deck post at right

 They immediately fly off to the partially rotten deck posts (replacement is on the list of renovations for the summer), where they peck at the seed. At first, I thought they were caching, and we would have sunflowers sprouting from the posts. Further investigation revealed no seeds, however, so they are just cracking them open there. It isn’t doing the deck any favors.

Red-bellied woodpecker cracking open a seed

Downy woodpecker doing the same thing on the same post 

As I was rooting around in the freezer for something, I found two one-quart containers of Tundra Surprise peaches. (“Tundra Surprise” refers to any food that has languished forgotten in the bottom of a freezer for an unspecified length of time.) I was moved to invite some friends over and make the first pie of the year.

First pie of 2022, Tundra Surprise Peach

People say, “Easy as pie,” but pie is not easy. Nevertheless, people love my pie, and I love my people. I got to thinking about a common joke from my childhood, I think in comics but perhaps also in sit-coms. A woman puts a fresh-baked pie on the windowsill to cool, and one or more children, typically boys, swipe it. Obviously, this was in the days before air-conditioning. Now that I am more familiar with baking pies, I believe this heinous crime should be a capital offence. At the time, it was considered nothing more than a prank. Maybe for women who made pies often, it was no big deal. Cooks in lumber camps make enough pie for all the men in the camp every day. I can’t imagine. Nor can I figure out where all that fruit came from. Canned? Dried? Buried under the permafrost? (Hey, it worked in Alaska.)

Anyway, despite not getting the top crust on straight—again—the pie was both beautiful and delicious, if I say so myself.

April Fool!

 On this April Fools Day, Mother Nature pranked us with an inch of new snow and 24°F. Ha ha. Very funny. The snow was gone by afternoon everywhere except in deep shade, such as the north side of the house.

Oaks 3 and 4 at sunrise this morning

I am ready for spring, but it appears that it will be chilly for at least another week. I hope to get out to the high tunnel to plant lettuce one of these days.

I saw one of our does with her two fawns Wednesday morning. The larger fawn lagged behind the other two; I did not get a picture.

Mom (right) and fawn

I was glad to see that the smaller one was still around. The last time I saw it, it was limping and had scratches on its back as if it had been jumped by a coyote. There are still some dark patches on its shoulder. The deer were out just at sunrise, and the light wasn’t great, but as far as I could see, the wounds were healing. It wasn’t limping any more. Both fawns have made it through the winter, and so have we.

Fawn showing dark patches on its shoulder and back from a recent injury

 

Burning the meadow

 It has not felt like spring the last couple of days. Sunday and Monday morning the temperatures were 17°F and 18°F, respectively. It was a balmy 29°F today. The good news is that it has been sunny for several days, which is always good for my mood. We are supposed to have another 1.5” of rain tomorrow, although we often see that number decrease significantly before anything falls from the sky.

At 11:00 yesterday morning, Terry called me. “Today is perfect for burning the wet meadow. I need to do it before the wind changed.”

I had just finished exercising and was about to step into the shower, but I got dressed again and went out to watch and/or help as needed.

“This won’t take long,” Terry said.

He was right. He started lighting the fire at 11:06. This picture was taken at 11:08.

Starting the burn

The wet meadow is, at present, a failed restoration. It looked good for a couple of years, but one year it flooded for a long time, and I couldn’t get in to do anything about the reed canary grass. Now it is mostly reed canary grass. The only native that has been able to compete is a tall aster that I have never been able to identify. As the burn progressed, the aster stems make little chimneys of smoke. They must be hollow.

Smoke coming out a "chimney" of a hollow aster stem

At 11:15, the meadow was already half burned. The burn coverage was good. The fire only went around two small spots.

A line of fire 8 minutes into the burn

Terry will mow the area a couple of times. Perhaps this year I can do something to beat back the reed canary grass.

We keep increasing the number of migrants we see at the bird feeders. Our favorites aren’t back yet. The red-winged blackbirds have been moving through for awhile, but some are now settling in and chasing the smaller birds from the feeders. Hilda used to get so mad at them! But a bird’s gonna do what a bird’s gonna do. Also in this picture is the first brown-headed cowbird I’ve seen. Hilda didn’t like them either, as they are nest parasites. I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I used to think that was a pretty low-down thing to do until I learned that it was an adaptation to a mobile life. Cowbirds follow herds of larger grazing animals, probably bison originally, and they can’t be tied down to a nest.

Brown-headed cowbird (left) with a red-winged blackbird

Grackles are back too. Its head has a pretty iridescence. I suppose it gets the bad rap from its harsh call and tendency to travel in large flocks. Like blackbirds, they can probably do considerable damage to a field of corn.

Grackle

I do not have to use my imagination to see that the gold finches are turning yellow. This one is ahead of the curve. I bet he gets the best girls.

A goldfinch gets his breeding colors

Oh, those turkeys. We had a big tom displaying to four hens last Thursday.

Four turkey hens, left, one tom, right

The tom never got much closer to the hens. Once he was all puffed up, he couldn’t move fast. He strutted slowly toward the girls, and they walked away at a much faster pace. He dropped his tail, folded up his wings, and tried to catch up. But as soon as he started displaying again, off they went.  Dude! Too early to be laying eggs!

Hey baby! Hey baby!

He finally gave up. Here he is, looking dejected. Poor Tom.

Where did everybody go?