All Eggs Great and Small

My blog friend Shannon over at the Not So Virtual Homestead was writing recently about a huge egg that one of her chickens surprised her with.

We got a surprise too, but it was in the opposite direction.

One of the Dominique chickens must have gotten tired of laying normal eggs, and left us this tiny one.

A normal Dominique egg is on the left for comparison.

I didn't realize until I uploaded the pictures, that the depth of field on the macro setting was so shallow that to have the little egg in sharp focus meant that the normal one was a little fuzzy. Oops.

By that time my curiosity had gotten the best of me and I'd already cracked open the lilliputian egg to see what it looked like inside. So, no do-overs.

The inside looked pretty much like a normal egg in miniature.

(My sister recently made a comment about my liberal use of 50-cent words, so I had to work in "lilliputian" just for her.)

Decoys part 2

Decoys on the water.

They do look amazingly real from a distance. The last time our In the Army Now nephew was here, he came back from a walk to report that there were some ducks in the water... so it's not only other ducks that they fool.



I think this is what you call listing to starboard.

I'm itching to get out and see what other wildflowers might be coming up, but we've had nothing but rain since early Monday morning.

Really Big Shew

Show floor just after set-up

My feet are still tired, but we survived our first spring craft show.

We managed to achieve our two main goals, which were:
1) don't spend more than we make, and
2) don't eat the whole time.

It was fun chatting with old customers and meeting new people too.

Our next show will be outdoors, at the Bloomin' Festival in Cullman, April 16 - 17.

The show benefits St. Bernard Prep School, which is run by the Benedictine monks at St. Bernard Abbey.

The show is held on the grounds, and I love telling people how to find us at this show: turn right after the entrance and walk towards the back. We're just at the right hand of Jesus.

A brief hiatus

As promised, here is a summer view of the workshop.

It will probably never look this nice again. I took the photo when we were first thinking about buying the place.

The previous owners were paying about $300 a month for landscaping services, to keep everything looking manicured.

We tend to favor a more natural look, probably because it involves a lot less weed-eating.

Show set-up is today. If I don't have time to update here until it's over, I'll be back on Monday.

Note: It seems that "Hello", where I'm hosting my pictures, is having a little trouble today. If the pictures aren't showing, try hitting "reload", or just try again later... sorry!

Great Blue Heron

Jasmine loves chasing the Great Blue Herons. They're big and they squawk a lot when disturbed.

Herons are smarter than you might think... Normally a heron lands on the path and then walks around a bit, looking for a likely place to fish before walking down into the water.

The local ones have learned to land in the pond itself, below Jasmine's vantage point.

Idiotic bored hunters around here sometimes shoot at them, so this one wouldn't let me any closer to take his picture.

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.