Too Quiet

(Why I play such sad and haunting music when I am alone and hubby is on the other side of the world is something only a well-experienced psychotherapist could explain.  I skate dangerously close to the precipice as an aging soul.)  

The photo below is a perfect example of the breathtaking beauty and strength of old trees in the West.  The air is dry and the sun is hot and wood just seems to grin and wrinkle and age in such a lovely old way.  It becomes a parchment skin that is neither fragile nor brittle.  Instead it is a thick skinned dinosaur that reminds you of its magnificence just a few decades ago.  It lies about  paths and trails daring you to stop and study true aging, to stop and see what you can learn from the patience of a dignified life.  While sometimes a cold gray color, it is not cold, but welcoming and just begging for your touch, which, of course, you must do gently before moving on down the path to a destination with a view.

Big Sky Country

Wide open spaces.  You can see for miles and miles and sometimes even to the ends of the earth.  Big sky country.  Enough piney air to breathe and enough land to get away from it all.  The wild west always lives up to your expectations.  Above is a little hike we took outside Denver, Colorado, on the second day we arrived.  We did not see much wildlife, but with such open land, the animals know how to hide when hunting season is near.  (It is getting harder to take a photo without a house in it!)

One Blog Room is Clean

I find that this blog seems to have no malware warnings when I try to open the pages where my other blog did...for a while.  I had to break the link to Kenju's blog, Imagine, and for some reason it helped.  Maybe when my head clears of code and malware I will write a true post.

Sighing

How can she be so lovely and peaceful?  How can she end the day with such grace and quiet charm?  Just last week she was angry, spewing tears everywhere and thrashing about like a 4-year-old.  I am tiptoeing about hoping she is done with her temper tantrums for this year!

Tough Love

While taking my granddaughter around the zoo the other day, I had fun watching all the wild birds.  Wild birds in large numbers hang out at the zoos since the food is so abundant...seeds and fruit leftover from cages, dropped french fries from the kids, and garbage cans full of interesting foods.  The birds are not intimidated by humans, I am guessing we are just more zoo residents to them.  I wasn't able to take the dozens of interesting behavioral photos that I would have liked to take, since my granddaughter required much of my attention.  But I did get the interaction below from a baby bird (no longer a baby!) begging for food and a mama bird telling him to fly off alright already!!  The zoo if full of food all along the sidewalks, so this fledgling was being super lazy.

Still Standing

Amazingly after Irene's visit the fig tree written about in the post below is still standing. Trees fell to the right of it and to the left of it, but only one branch was broken and we thinking of pruning it more carefully this winter anyway as the fruit grows on new wood. 

The night of the hurricane I opened the front door to the torrential downpour and roaring winds to check and see what had fallen and I ended up frightening a small wren that had taken shelter under my porch.  Out she flew into the deafening storm.  I made sure I did not open the door again until morning, feeling so guilty.


As we surveyed the damage the next morning, the front yard barely being recognizable, we saw a hummingbird fly in and stop at a few blossoms still standing by the sidewalk and this was followed by several butterflies looking for what remained of the cosmos and zinnias for their morning refreshment.
Birds were singing, if not energetically, a least musically and the hornet sound of chainsaws had not yet begun across the neighborhood.  It was time for taking a look and being thankful for all the big stuff in this world...which unfortunately also includes hurricanes.

A Fall Sweetness

The first year that our fig tree produced we got about a dozen figs over a two week period.  Hubby and I carefully shared them.  They were like rare pieces of candy and we were amazed at how they tasted like figs!  Imagine our surprise at not being duped by the fruit tree catalog.

This year our fig tree has produced about ten cups of figs and we hurry to pick them the day before ripeness so that squirrels and raccoons and perhaps the resident ground hog do become aware of this tree candy.  We have been eating them like popcorn because they are still a luxurious rare form of fruit for us.  Then I sliced them in half and made a lemon/fig tart as the abundance became too great. 

The tart was made with sliced lemons, honey, butter crust, figs and fennel seeds. It was sweetly delicious.  Honey and figs make me think of the Bible or some exotic tent in a desert with an Arab offering his figs.  I have so many now that I made a date bar recipe and froze half of it because it was made in a large pan.
The next figs picked as this season ends may be frozen as well, because I have read that they can be kept that way.  What on earth will I do next year as this tree gets bigger?

Feeling Green

I am exhausted.  I have been one with the green earth and a 6-year-old boy for an entire week.  Are you green with envy? Little boys seems to find green things most easily. So these photos are just something we found on our recent hike.  Click on photos for closer green.

Hear ye, Hear ye!

One of those very peaceful very early Saturday mornings in late summer.  The air is not clear because there appears to be a gentle haze of smoke from some distant fire hanging across the river.  The gentle birdsong of these woods has been abducted by the brass band call of a murder of crows in the ravine.  They had landed mid-tree line, and with the determination of a political candidate, continued their wining and screaming and protesting across the woods, each one determined to caw louder than their brethren.

In a few minutes just across the top of the trees a shadow was silhouetted against the gray sky.  A brown hawk flew in and quietly landed in a nearby tree.  The crows ignored or missed seeing the new visitor.  Then a few minutes later another brown hawk entered the foray, but with much whistling and sharp singing making his/her presence known.  The second hawk landed in the highest tree and cried and cried and cried.  To no avail, as the crows ignored it and continued their shouting and cawing.

After some time the noise of all the feathered cast diminished and the shadow of what appeared to be a third hawk flew quickly and quietly through the dark greens of the mid-level trees into the distant peninsula and beyond my sight.    I did not see the other hawks leave, but the woods became silent once again as the crows followed quietly.

Was this a young'un being driven away by the resident crows and being protected by mom and dad?  Made me wonder if hawks ever gang up on crows to make a point?

Hot and Heavy

This summer heat and humidity has meant that I can go outside and just stand in the shade and within minutes sweat starts to trickle down my temple and into my eyes and ears.  Really.  I have showered so many times a day that I am worried I may start growing fungus all over!

Then, as I am pulling three foot weeds (which are now growing a foot a day) and deadheading flower blossoms (which bloom in the morning, sigh with limp petals in mid-day and begin to drop crispy petals by late afternoon), I have to be careful or I encounter these yellow fellows below.  I have destroyed a few of their webs unintentionally.  They build the strongest and largest capture units I have ever seen and there is nothing more breathtaking than getting some sticky web across your face or in your hair while you are focused on something else!  This garden tenant was really this large!

GOTCHA!

My Final Look Back for Now

I think in all this heat we might need a smile now and again.  I wrote this post the first summer we lived in this house.  I am driving back today and should be back to a routine soon.  Wonder what the last few days have left of my yard?

Another Look Back

This is one of the best frog photos I ever got.  It was taken so long ago when I first started writing about  the magical life in my new yard.  I have not seen a frog like this again, but I hear them!  Please click on the photo for a close-up.

Looking Back

I am on travel (vacation with family) so I thought that I should give in to my ego and help you look back over my earliest posts during a summer a while ago.

Here are some of my first efforts at bird photography in the heat of the day.

Hiding or Hidden

I live in a world where the young, smooth, quick, colorful, shiny, loud, and moving is the beautiful.  This is what the eye goes to, admires with lust and what the eye cannot turn away from.  But this would not be able to exist under my gaze if it was not for the old, rough, slow, fading, muted, quiet and still that is around every day in every way.  Just remember all that must come before so that the new can exist.  It hides and usually works when the weather is very hot or very cold and may be just beneath your footfall while you are gazing at the beauty under your eyes.

Skipping

The butterfly above is the Silver Spotted Skipper. I do not think the name is an accurate description of this common butterfly.  I see them all over my yard and sometimes they have yellow or orange patches as the flyer above shows, sometimes they only show white.  They are the largest of the skippers.  The caterpillar form looks like a green exclamation point with the head being large and dark brown.  They scatter their frass (poop) a distance behind them to distract and confuse wasps who follow the smell.

One thing you may notice is how large and bulbous their eyes are.

These butterflies seem to like everything that blooms in my yard, but I did read that they do not favor yellow flowers.  I will have to see if I observe that.  They are not wary for photographing, but do not sit still for more than a few seconds in any one place.  I was most happy to capture this 'flight risk'.  At night they build themselves tiny wispy shelters using cut leaves and they hang out under the leaves until daylight.  

Pretty In Your Face

Let me share with you what gets me out of bed in the mornings.  This is the time of the year when all the flowers are blooming at once and I spend much of my time staking, dead-heading, pinching, picking off bugs, removing dead leaves, watering and cutting.  Busy days, but I am rewarded by these beautiful faces:

Gifts

This photo has been photo-shopped and a larger version was posted on RedBubble, and therefore, probably looks better there.  Anyway, one of the wonderful benefits of feeding birds all winter is that come spring and summer you will get surprise sunflowers scattered arbitrarily throughout your yard.  I have tried in prior summers to plant sunflowers and all were eaten by bunnies before they even got a few inches high.  The ones planted by birds somehow make it through to full bloom, although they may prosper in the most inconvenient or unusual places.  This sunflower is growing right at the very edge of my driveway and I have to carefully miss it as I pull out of the garage.  It is tucked just in front of my tall ornamental grasses and that may be the reason it was overlooked by hungry animals.  I also have two larger sunflowers in bloom in the middle of my flower beds, one in my herb bed with the sage, one out in the garden with the blueberry bushes, and one tiny one struggling further down the edge of the same driveway.  This is certainly a gentle reminder of the natural order of things.  Whatever we do does come back to haunt us, so we must remember to do nice things only.  I took this photo in the setting sun while waiting for the goldfinch to drop by who have also found the blooms.

(I am currently watching the goldfinch (which I do not normally see since I do not put out seeds in the summer due to fear of disease issues) land on these sunflower blossoms and pull out the unripened seeds.  I keep trying to get a photo, but they are pretty shy.)

Splish Splash

I live in the mid-Atlantic which means the summers are long and hot.  This year we have had a good amount of rain which makes it easier on all the plants and animals.  When a week goes by without rain in such high heat, the animals begin their search for water.  There are a few springs in our woods and the deer seem to be able to get through marsh grass to those.


I have two bird water baths.  One in front and one in back of my yard.  Birds rely on these often, both for drinking and for bathing.  Yes, they do drink their own bath water!  It is fun to watch them splash and shake the droplets every which way.  


I keep the bird bath in the photo above clean.  Washing it with hose water and little bleach every so often, but certainly spraying it out at least once a week and filling with fresh water.  We are on a well, so I do not have to worry about city chemicals, either for me or the birds.


I have read that the 3% of birds that are marine species have salt-control systems because they spend so much time away from fresh water.   They can remove the excess water by using larger kidneys, oily lipids that break down in the digestive system to produce water, and salt glands that sit in bony pockets over the eyes that are important for the excretion of sodium chloride.  They must cry very salty tears!

This is the Cute Season

Bored?

Nest sitting can be very boring work in the heat of the afternoon.