Long weekend

'Tis the season for baby toads.


Everywhere a nest, nest.


Woodpecker playground.


Top of the previous tree, now on the ground.


Somewhere behind these leaves, many warblers were cheerfully singing.
(Kentucky, Blue-winged, Common Yellowthroat, Northern Parula, Louisiana Waterthrush.)


Happy with "just clover".


Black Knot & the Cherry Tree.

Green green green

Much better than last year's drought, but my nose won't stop itching.

Problems with Blogger comments

If your blog has one of those "Comment as" buttons just after the comment space, don't expect any comments from me.

My comments on your blog disappear into never-never land, no matter which type of ID I choose. Even "Name/URL". Even "Anonymous". I have never been able to comment on any blog that uses this type of comment form. (Blogs with "Choose an identity" work fine.)

I can't figure it out. There are plenty of other comments, so those people didn't have problems. It's just me. Only, it's not just me - I've found a few other folks wandering the internet in search of a solution to this problem.

But I haven't found a solution. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

Wolves at the door

The one who was the church clerk

Last week my cousin from New Hampshire was visiting, and we made the genealogy rounds.

Samford University's Special Collections has a treasure trove of old Alabama Baptist church records. In between learning that one ancestor was a church clerk and that another was excluded (thrown out) twice, I overheard this conversation:

"Listen to this. The church has been in two previous locations."

"Oh, really?"

"Yeah. It says they had to move the first time because the church was built in a spot with no access to water. The second time, they had to move because of too much activity from Timber Wolves in the area!"

Actually I'm sure they meant Red Wolves (Canis rufus), since there never were any Timber Wolves (Gray Wolves, Canis lupus) in Alabama.

The Red Wolf was declared extinct in the wild in the 1980s.

There are now over 16 million Southern Baptists.

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Red Wolf Recovery Project

Red Wolves of Alligator River

Red Wolf Coalition

This page shows the historical range of the Red Wolf. The subspecies that lived in Alabama, called the Florida Red Wolf (Canis rufus floridanus) was completely extinct by 1930. A second subspecies, the Mississippi Red Wolf, Canis rufus gregoryi, was extinct by 1970, leaving only the Texas Red Wolf, Canis rufus rufus, the species being used in the Recovery Project.

Ain't no sunshine

The sun came out long enough to make a Sun Dog.



Still no garden planted. Too wet. We were under three miserable inches of rain this weekend. Last year it would have been a blessing — this year it's just increasingly annoying.

The forecast is for at least 3 days of sun though, so keep your fingers crossed for me.

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The temperature dropped so low last night that the heat came on at 1:23 am. I know the time, because the smoke alarm was also roused (presumably just from dust). In the hour+ that it took me to fall back asleep, I wondered if I should create a "grab and go" drawer of important things that I wouldn't want to get burned up. I was secretly proud that my purse and cell phone had been within arm's reach. (But not my computer.)

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My new words for the week:
Chatoyancy
Nixtamalization

Deer feeding

We have unwittingly set up a deer feeding station in our back yard.


Mother and son

For several years it has been a chicken feeding station, poached by no undesirable critters other than the occasional grackle or bad dog.

But our luck wore out, and it seems that deer have excellent memories as far as food is concerned. They're daily buffet visitors now.


Scruffy deer

Hubby thinks they're cute. "You won't think so after they eat the entire garden," I warn, but he doesn't believe it.

This would be the non-existant garden... the garden we've yet to find time to plant. When I moaned about it at a meeting last week, a man told me that he hadn't planted yet either. "The signs aren't good until Thursday. Then they'll last for about 10 days."

Since it's supposed to rain almost every day this week, I'm not overly hopeful. Instead of planting by the moon, we usually use the "when we're both here and it hasn't been raining buckets" method. And those signs have been terrible lately.

Odd anole

I met this jaunty little anole outside a restaurant recently.



I tried not to stare, but something was definitely odd about the skin on his head.



Has the skin had actually been scraped off? Eww. Or is that just discoloration? An infection? Problem with molting?

He disappeared around a corner before I could probe further.

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Green anole (Anolis carolinensis).

Friday Ark.