Hot heron?

OK, we've established that chickens pant in the heat. But do wild birds do this too?


I guess so.

Or maybe he was just hoping that a fish would hop right on in.


We've gone for the "natural look" around the ponds this year, can you tell?

Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias).

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Edited to add:

Leave it to Swamp Things to know that this behavior has a name: Gular fluttering! I looked it up, and it's not exactly the same as panting: the bird is rapidly vibrating the floor of its mouth and upper area of its throat. According to what I read, this does not require as much energy as panting, and is exclusive to birds.

Wild potato vine

I don't normally venture onto this part of our property early in the morning, so I didn't realize we had any Wild Potato Vine (Ipomoea pandurata) until my husband mentioned it.

It was still, as they say, o'dark thirty.

I knew the common name of the flower, and that it was a type of native morning glory, but that was about it. I researched it and learned several things:

The root can reach the size of a man's leg and weigh over 30 pounds.

Pandurate means fiddle-shaped. (The leaves can also be heart-shaped, as in this picture.)

Sweet potatoes are a type of morning glory.

Moquitoes are really, really bad in this area early in the morning.

Dog days

In the dog days of summer, Jasmine spends a lot of time under the porch. She's developed a bark-in-place policy.

During the daytime she only budges if you open the door to ask, "What in the world are you barking at?" Then she'll take off like a rocket towards the interloper (heron, rabbit, cow).

Lately I've wondered about hooking a walkie-talkie up to her collar so I could ask her the same thing when she's barking beneath the bedroom window at 3:30 am.

Handmade Soap

Life's on hold while I make soap!

Soapmaking by the cold process method involves patience. After the liquid soap is poured into the molds, it is insulated and left to harden for 24 hours. Then the soap is unmolded and air-hardened for one or two days before being cut into bars. After another few days the bars are trimmed. Then the bars "cure" for at least a month, to allow time for the excess water to evaporate.

Handmade soaps are perishable goods; they don't last forever. Soapmaking is a delicate balance of trying to meet demand with the freshest product possible. Make too little and customers have to wait. Make too much and you'll end up throwing it away.

I hate throwing soap away.

I also hate not having a particular soap in stock when someone wants it.



With my current equipment, I can make almost 400 bars of soap a day. But I prefer using only my newer molds (and saving my back), so normally I make about half that.

Our next craft show is Yellow Daisy, in September at Stone Mountain, Georgia. It's the best traditional craft show in the country. About 250,000 people will pass through the festival over the course of four days.

Beauty and the Beast

Two recent visitors:

A Great Egret (Ardea alba)







and two Black Vultures (Coragyps atratus)




The Black Vulture isn't really a beast of course. He's just got an image problem.

"Hey, compared to the Turkey Vulture, I'm a beauty queen!"

Actually I think they're both beauties. We see Turkey Vultures a lot more than Black Vultures, so I was tickled to see these guys perched in a dead tree last week on a foggy morning.

The Great Egret has decided that he likes our fishing hole and has been hanging around for the past week, getting used to us. The Great Blue Heron is the only one not happy about that.

He seems to think he's got exclusive fishing rights, and intimidates the Great Egret with lots of squawking and flapping. "Heron fight! Heron fight!"

There ought to be a law

(click for larger image)

When your neighbor's cows grow bored with their own several hundred acres and come to visit repeatedly. And erode the creek bank. And pulverize the ground with their hasty retreats. And gaze greedily at your pitiful garden. And smash your favorite crabapple sapling. And overlay the walking path with poop. When they kick at your sweet little doggy when all she's doing is trying to chase them back home.

When the neighbors have to be called a million times before they can be bothered to fix the fence. When you're afraid to leave the house for 4 days because you never know when those *@!%#&^$ cows might be back. And when the neighbors steadfastly refuse to give you a weekend contact number.

Well, in that case, don't you think there ought to be a law providing that the next time the cows come over, you're allowed to just keep one?

We could be twins

I always dress like this when I'm feeding the chickens. (In "a demure Grace Kelly-inspired chiffon dress and cashmere cardigan". Not to mention high heels.)

And my house looks just like that too. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Hint to Madonna: They're gonna want more than you've got in that little bowl.

Babies

The location of the Barn Swallow nests was a mystery this summer. The old nests were still there, but empty. (Had the European Starling cursed the building by hanging himself there?)

They visited regularly in the spring, to swoop down and carry off small chicken feathers for their nest building at an undisclosed site.

Suddenly this week, we have fledglings! There are about thirty of them, sitting on the wires or splashing down onto the pond to bathe in mid-flight. So cute!




Barn swallow (Hirundo rustica): the most wide-spread swallow, from Canada to South America, as well as Europe, Asia, and north Africa.

The juveniles have shorter tails than the adults, and are paler.

In other baby news, Shannon finally gave birth! So maybe she's through throwing up for a while.

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Interesting info on Barn Swallows, from someone who makes artificial nests for them.

More interesting stuff about other birds' nesting activity, from the same site.

Some great Barn Swallow photos.

Search story

Several months ago I came across a hilarious search story on the blog Frogs and Ravens. She took some of the Google search terms that brought people to her site, and made a story of them.

At the time my blog was still new, and I only had a few searches per day. Then I seemed to achieve a critical mass (other than in my diet) and the search engines found me. Lately I remembered the search story meme and decided to try it myself.

I used all the searches, not just Google's, and I did them in the order that they appeared. This group of search strings is slightly different than usual, because it doesn't include searches for chicken and couscous salad, Leunig prayers, or turtle egg pictures, which I think are my top three search terms at present. But I writes 'em like I sees 'em, and just took the first 30 or so. So here you go. The search terms are bolded.

I needed a crash course in identifying caterpillars. While dining al fresco, I'd accidentally swallowed one that dropped into my zuchinni soup! I'd been worried and inattentive all day. With the chickens broody and denuding the trees of cedar berries, I couldn't stop agonizing: why do roosters pick on my hens?

That caterpillar must have been hallucinogenic. I imagined I could converse with weird looking turtles. They had good names no one else would think of, like Kitkitdizze! Their chief told me that they were all devoted arachnophiles. But their main job was to destroy all toads. Sevin was their preferred poison. After we spoke, they all crawled together into a chicken nest box, and enjoyed a catawba moth spread with witch butter that some Mergansers had sold them.

I set off on foot for the house of Jenny Zelle, who had a job sexing young chickens at the local hatchery. She liked my crazy chicken pictures, and knew a lot about herbal medicine.

Although it was broad daylight, a chorus of owls sounded from the trees. "At night they hunt catawba tree worms, Virginia" I whispered to my shadow.

Was I still hallucinating?

"A sapsucker! A chicken roosting in nest golf balls!" I exclaimed, when I reached the end of the country lane.

"You're not making sense," Jenny recoiled.

I sat down hard on her steps. "I need help identifying fuzzy caterpillars," I moaned.

I watched a Muscovy duck snatch a Japanese beetle from the Cataba in her yard, as I struggled to regain proper use of my tongue.

Jenny gasped. "Yellow fuzzy caterpillar?" she queried. "Near the chicken nesting boxes?"

I nodded vigorously. Jenny looked worried, but prescribed a strong dose of alcohol. "It's the worst caterpillar in Alabama. Buy Jack Daniels!"

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It's Friday! Don't forget to view the Friday Ark. And there is a new "I and the Bird" over at Charlie's Bird Blog this week too.

Mystery solved

No wonder she's up barking all night.

Further adventures in digiscoping

Mrs. Belted Kingfisher (Ceryle alcyon) came to the pond, so I tried practicing my digiscoping again. It didn't help that it started raining after the first picture.








The last one is especially blurry, but I couldn't help posting it anyway. How often do you see a Kingfisher yawn?

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Edited to add:
The Dharma Bums have Kingfisher shots posted today too!

Tomato hornworm

1.

2.

3.

Expletive deleted.

Technically this is a Tobacco Hornworm (Manduca sexta) instead of a Tomato Hornworm (Manduca quinquemaculata). But people tend to call them all Tomato Hornworms. The distinction is in the number of stripes and the color of the "horn". Damage to tomato and pepper plants is the same. My poor litle Sungolds.

Marans start laying

I've been expecting our Rhode Island Reds to start laying any day now. But the Cuckoo Marans, at least one of them, beat them to it.

We got one small, rather scruffy looking egg on Saturday, then this still small, but beautifully smooth and glossy one on Sunday. (Shown here with eggs from a Dominique and a Leghorn for comparison.)

From what I'd read online, Marans don't normally lay until 6 - 8 months old, so this was a happy surprise.

The first eggs from early layers are usually small. My mother-in-law calls them "pullet eggs".

Marans eggs are dark. Eggs from hatchery chickens will probably not get as dark as some of the lovely pictures you can find on the internet (here in English and here in French), but they're still considerably darker than other brown eggs.

Marans are a quiet chicken, not flighty like Leghorns. Unfortunately this seems to mean that they get eaten by predators more often. Out of the ten Marans we ordered in the spring, we've only got five left.

Other people have told me that non-white egg layers follow a pattern: The eggs are not their darkest for the first few months. Then they develop more color, and are as dark as they'll ever be. The following year(s) the eggs are lighter in color.

I've noticed that it does seem to be true with the breeds we've raised.


Note: Marans is both the singular and the plural form of this breed's name.

Veggie dinner

It won't stop raining. Our garden is a mess.

So we shopped the local the farmer's market.



We had one sad little tomato from our garden. It was only partially pink, and had a mushy spot on one side and a brown spot on the other. What leaves the bugs and rabbits had left were wilting and turning yellow. (I guess I should have sprayed. It was an heirloom tomato, not resistant to much of anything.) It tasted wonderful, though.

The tomatoes in this picture looked wonderful on the back of that pickup at the farmer's market, but ended up a big disappointment. They were ripe red and beautiful, but just like grocery store tomatoes, had no taste. Next time I'm buying the ugliest ones I see.

Everything else was good though.

Young Yukon Gold potatoes, mmm. Cut up, mixed with a little olive oil and herbs, then roasted at 350°F (177°C) for about 45 minutes. I used McCormick's Italian Herb Seasoning Grinder because I was in a rush. But just plain thyme or rosemary with a little salt and pepper is good too. (Stir 3 or 4 times during cooking.)

Eggplants, mmm. I like the smaller ones. Slice and marinate in Italian dressing for about 30 minutes. (I like Newman's. All his stuff is great and is made with fresh ingredients.) Then coat with a mixture of corn meal, parmesan cheese, and salt & pepper. Bake at 350°F (177°C) until browned on top. (This will vary depending on how thick your slices are. But in general it takes 15 - 20 minutes.) Normally I like real shredded parmesan cheese instead of the powdery stuff in a can, but the powdery stuff actually mixes better with the corn meal.