Busy busy busy

An autumn view of the workshop where I'm holed up working like a maniac this week. We've got a craft show that starts Friday, and as usual I've got a lot of last-minute preparation to do.

The show is in downtown Birmingham, Alabama. If you are local and would like to receive a discount coupon (for our handmade soap and other stuff, valid only at the show), send me an email (address in side bar) with "coupon" in the subject line.

In other business news, I found out that the answering machine doesn't work so well if it's not plugged in. Apologies to anyone who's tried to call and just got an endless ringing phone.

Decoys

Blue-winged teal decoys

When my husband had the idea of putting decoys on the pond to attract ducks, I thought he was nuts.

Jasmine chases off the Canada Geese that try to visit us, so I thought our days of seeing wild ducks at the ponds were over. But she must have gotten used to seeing the decoys, and decided that ducks are ok. (Either that or she doesn't see them flying in.)

The decoys work like a charm. All winter, we've spotted Hooded Mergansers near them. I know I'm being anthropomorphic when I say that sometimes they can be a little sad too.

The Mergansers swim right up to the decoys, and I always imagine that they expect some sort of ducky discourse. They're bound to be disappointed by the decoys' aloofness. (Why won't they talk to me? Do they think they're better than us?)

I know it's silly, I just can't help it.

Some real Blue-winged teal were here once last year, and we've seen Wood ducks several times.

Many ducks spend the winter here in the south, but it's also hunting season, which makes them wary. Sometimes they flush so easily that all we see is their tail ends flying off.

Ducks at a Distance would help, if we could remember to carry our binoculars all the time.

Woodsy idyll

The kind of thing you think you'd be geting away from out in the woods

Steadfast Plastic Articulated Man

One of Jasmine's favorite games is to find ways to get outside the fence. We repair the fence, then she finds (or creates) another place to get out. We fix the fence again, and so on.

She loves getting into the neighbors' garbage, which they conveniently leave lying all over the ground.

I figure that they are going with the old rural concept of a burn barrel, only without all the fuss of an actual barrel.

The neighbors' kids must have too many toys, because they leave a lot of them outside. If it rains, they get washed into the ditch and float down towards our place. Finders keepers, says Jasmine.

The man was already this far gone by the time I found him in the yard. It reminded me of the Hans Christian Andersen story about The Steadfast Tin Soldier.

I couldn't help but wonder if there had been a Weeble out there who loved him, who sang "Farewell, farewell, O warrior brave, Nobody can from Death thee save" as he was being washed away to sharp dog teeth.

Too many roosters

The result of too many roosters

Roosters tend to hang on to the hens' combs and the feathers on their heads. We currently have too many roosters, so this poor pullet is looking a little plucked.

Teenagers probably wouldn't want so many boyfriends, if it meant they'd end up bald like this.

Roosters for sale!

Night chorus

For the past two days we've heard a symphony of frogs in the late afternoon and early evening. Down by the swamp the noise is almost deafening!

I don't have a separate microphone for the laptop, but I hoped that the built-in one could pick up the sound since it was so loud. I was disappointed in the quality but I guess you can't expect much without a real microphone.

Here's my short recording of the frogs.

I was able to find a nice page that features a few frog sounds, and learned that most of our singers are Spring Peepers (Pseudacris crucifer). Go there to hear a recording that's a lot better than mine.

We could hear (but couldn't record) at least two other frog species that we haven't identified yet. I think one might be the Southern Leopard Frog (Rana sphenocephala) but I'm not sure. We had those frogs at the water garden at our old house, and I thought I knew what they sounded like... but the recordings I checked seem a little different.

Edited to add:
As a result of them starting to sing earlier than anyone else the next evening, we were able to better isolate the sound, and identified the American Toad (Bufo americanus) as another one of our mystery amphibians.
(end of edit)

While we were down by the ponds appreciating the frog chorus last night, the Barred Owls (Strix varia) chimed in and made us smile even more.

This page has recordings of the owls' "courtship duet". In real life it often sounds like a courtship quartet (or more). The owls seem to work themselves into such a frenzy of calling that you'd swear you were in the deepest jungle.

It doesn't seem confined to just their courtship time either - you can sometimes hear groups of them cackling like maniacs during the summertime.

We heard Barred owls in the woods behind our old house in the suburbs too, so it's not just a rural thing.

Footprints

I've got small feet, but that seems like a pretty big deer print to me. The back parts of their hooves splay apart sometimes in the mud, and can make them seem bigger than they really are.

We see deer here a lot, but I haven't managed to get a good picture yet. They always smell us or hear us before we can get too close.

We see lots of deer signs though, from prints to scat to "rubs" (saplings that the bucks use to rub the velvet off their antlers).

Deer are becoming too numerous in this area. I've seen four roadkill deer on the local highway in the past few weeks, which at 65 mph usually means four totalled cars. Last year the deer ate all the tomatoes that we tried to grow, along with a large number of the trilliums in the woods.

I asked my mother once if she ate a lot of deer when she was growing up (in north Georgia). She said no, that there were not any deer around back then. Commercial hunting and clear-cutting wiped out most of the deer, and a lot of the deer habitat, by the early 1900s.

Most farmers hunted back then, but it was mostly for quail and other small game. I guess lots of southern grandmothers have old photo albums filled with pictures of men in overalls, posed with their hunting rifles and bird dogs.

White-tailed deer were restocked in many areas in the 30s and early 40s. Without many of their natural predators, populations have exploded.

Sapsucker holes

Sapsucker holes in cedar

Edited to say:
Here's what a yellow-bellied sapsucker looks like. One of these days I might get lucky and get a good bird picture... but not today.

According to most sources, a sapsucker's drilling usually does not harm trees.

Signs of spring

Jacob's Ladder Foliage (Polemonium reptans)


Virginia Bluebells Foliage (Mertensia virginica). Still weeks from blooming.


A little trillium coming up amid the cowcumber leaves.


Blue violet (Viola papilionacea) - the first flower we saw this spring. Some people consider this a weed!


Toothwort (Cardamine sp.) - the buds look purple, but the flower will be white.


Another toothwort with different shaped leaves. There are about 50 jillion types of toothwort I think. "Wort" is an old English word for "plant".


Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica) is small and can be easy to miss. Sometimes the flowers are more pink.


Hepatica - the foliage is not the light green blades, but the half-eaten brown leaf on the lower left. The flower blooms next to last year's leaves, then grows new leaves after the flower is gone. One of the common names is liverleaf. This is the sharp-lobed variety; there is also a round-lobed one. Sometimes the flowers are blue/purple, but I've only seen white ones in Alabama.


Jasmine stalks and kills the wild mustard.

I didn't get a photo of the least welcome sign of spring - some very annoying mosquitos.

Frostflowers

White crownbeard - Verbesina virginica

Before I knew the real name of these plants I called them Ice Plants. I'm a flower nut but mostly a springtime flower nut, so I haven't studied fall flowers very much.

They have small, somewhat coarse white flowers. There's a lot more leaf than flower to them, so sometimes they suffer from the "it's just a weed" syndrome.

It seems like half the time I ask wildflower experts the name of something, it turns out to be beneath their notice, and they'll say "I don't know, it's just a weed!"

Anyway, this plant is called White Crownbeard, frostflower, or frostweed. Here's a site that shows them in bloom.

The most interesting thing about these plants to me is what happens after the flowers are gone. The first time I saw it, I wondered if loose cotton had somehow blown into the edges of the yard.




It only happens after a really hard freeze. Although the plant remnants look like dry sticks by the time it freezes, they somehow produce all this ice. One website I visited said that they are drawing the water from the ground.

The first time it happens is the most dramatic, and forms the most ice, but it'll happen again several more times when we go through cycles of warming up and then freezing again.

So what makes it happen with this plant, but not with others? I have no idea.

After I wrote the above, I searched a little more on Google and found this page that explains more about the phenomenon. (And has lots better pictures than mine!) The frost from plants he found was very thin. On the plants here it varies, but is usually thicker.

John Wesley Harding (not the Dylan album)

I got a real big puffy head for a few seconds when I saw that John Wesley Harding had included my blog site address in one of his web forum posts recently. And under the words, "I would recommend the following blogs," no less!

Then I realized that he had written a line for everybody that had signed up (and included a web address) for the new forum so far.

So rather than being wonderfully interesting or wickedly amusing or devastatingly clever, I was merely... early.

The fleeting illusion of fame was nice while it lasted.

I've got a postcard that I need to find, to show the other JWH-aholics.

It's the result of the last fan letter I wrote. The last one on paper anyway - I've probably sent a lot of little "like what you do" emails to various people over the years.

Actually the letter to JWH wasn't exactly a fan letter as such... As I recall it was more along the lines of a complaint about the (then recent) lack of witty liner notes.

To me, liner notes are half the fun of music sometimes. All of his had previously been witty and then all of the sudden they were... not so much. Just regular liner notes, like everybody else's, and geez didn't he know how good the previous ones had been?

I don't know what I was thinking though - musicians are always getting fan mail so they probably need some complaint mail...?! Believe it or not I was well past my teens.

He was nice about it though, and sent me back a witty postcard.

I'll try to get a picture of it soon, to show the other JWH fans who might end up here.

This was all back in the early to mid-90s, so I can't say if letters of complaint to JWH will still get you postcards.
He's probably a lot busier nowdays, what with the upcoming book, and preparing to be a major literary figure and all that.

If you are not a JWH fan already, you should be! He always has some free MP3s on his website, so go there to check him out. Or just listen to the Amazon.com snippets.

He has also written a book that's due out in April, called Misfortune. Since he writes the best Tour Diaries in the universe, I'm sure the book will be good too. It'll be under his real, non-Dylan inspired name, Wesley Stace.

Still not spring yet

Jasmine is looking forward to spring too, I think.

Yesterday one of the Dominiques failed to return to the roost when it started getting dark.

She's always the last one to go up, and she's also bad to wander off far from the others.

Since it was a gray day yesterday I figured a coyote had gotten her. (They always seem to be worse on dark days.)

I scolded Jasmine and told her that she was spending too much time trying to get out of the fence and not enough time guarding the chickens.

After supper Phil suggested that I go out and look by the coop again to make sure she hadn't come back. I didn't want to. I knew she wouldn't be there, and I was already sad enough.

I think half the reason she stayed away from the other chickens so much is that she was tired of roosters. We have three, and that's too many for 14 hens I think.

She is missing lots of feathers on her head and on her back, due to the roosters.

I kept thinking about the poor little half-bald baby all the way up to the coop. I was almost in tears over a chicken, again.

When I shined the flashlight under the coop, I couldn't believe it... she was there! Huddled up and looking all scrunched over and pitiful, about halfway back.

I eventually coaxed her out, and she even let me pick her up to put her back in the coop.

Whew!

How do they know?

There are a lot of technical problems with this picture. I've been trying to get a shot of the chickens when they are taking a dust bath, but it's hard to sneak up on dustbathing chickens, especially when a large dog insists on shadowing you.

They keep running away when I get close. Like some people, I guess chickens feel vulnerable in their bath. (Did they see Psycho too?)

So for now all I have is this problematic picture, too dark in one part and too light in another, distracting bits of wood that the dog's dragged into the area, and a picnic table sticking out in one corner. Sorry.

If you'd never seen birds taking a dust bath, you might think that they had gone nuts.

If there is no loose dirt available, they'll dig it up themselves (no lawn is safe).

They alternately flatten themselves in the dirt, and roll over onto their sides in it. They wriggle in it and use their wings to throw it up onto their backs. All while fluffing themselves up so that the dust can reach every feather.

When they've gotten enough dust on them, they stand up and shake it all off. Sometimes it seems like there's enough dirt in there to make a whole other chicken.

I've read that taking a dust bath helps with feather maintenance (absorbs excess oil) and keeps bugs away. Wild birds do it too.

But these chickens never knew a mother or an elder hen or rooster, having been born in incubators and shipped from the hatchery when they were just hours old.

So how do they know to take a dust bath?

Maybe it's hard-wired in their brains, a little instruction somewhere on the DNA.

Or maybe it's just obvious to them. Thirsty, drink water. Itchy, take a dust bath. Just one of the things that chickens are born knowing?

Ducks take to water!

The mallard is so happy, she is even wagging her tail.

I'm happy too, even though the ducks did not stay in the water very long. They went in on their own, without being threatened with big dogs or pointy sticks.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the move will become permanent eventually.

You can tell the male ducks by their curled tail feathers. It is not as evident on the white ones though (two of them are males also).