Friday Ark

Whoops, almost forgot the Friday Ark.

Frog sounds

Sounds from the frog pond on the neighbor's property. (Sorry I don't know how to make just a sound file.)



There are at least three types of frogs and/or toads I think, but Bullfrog is the only one I'm sure of.

The picture I accidentally made with streetlights:



A red satellite passed before the big dipper, but the current camera was not good enough to capture that.

Wooly Pine Scale

Snow? No. (It's Alabama in July.)

A heron's been sitting overhead? No. (Above us only sky.)

The strange white goop on this small Loblolly Pine (Pinus taeda) turned out to be Woolly Pine Scale (Pseudophilippia quaintancii).

According to ACES (Alabama Cooperative Extension System), small periodic infestations are not harmful to unstressed trees.

Of course due to a late spring freeze and the recent early summer drought, pretty much everything in north Alabama is stressed.

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Pine Needle Scale (Chionaspis pinifoliae) is another scale insect that looks like white gunk on pine needles.

World Snake Day

Just another vine hanging out on the fence... nothing to worry your pretty little heads about, my sweet little tweetie birds...

I was going to post this tomorrow, but I found out from Bug Girl that it's World Snake Day today so I had to put it up a bit early.

I wrote about Black Racers earlier this spring. (Still not sure if this one is Coluber constrictor constrictor or C. constrictor priapus.)

He didn't like me standing so close. I raised my arm to point at a Green Heron flying over and VOOM! The Racer was gone.

Recent Game Cam action

I swear they look more like cheap plastic toys than real animals, but they dig enough foxholes for a whole regiment of green army men.



Masked bandit who looks like she's been on a diet. (I dreamed I was about this thin last night, but when I woke up it wasn't true.) We had a lot more raccoons when we lived in the suburbs than we do here out in the country.



Looks like frost on the grass, doesn't it? But this is Alabama, not Minnesota. The camera hasn't moved, but the previous photo was before all the recent rain, and this one was just a few days ago. What a difference in the grass!



Why are you so skinny? You've eaten all but two of our chickens!

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Wayne has been showing some recent pics from his Cuddeback too. He's got a different version than we do.

I'm not sure what type Linda has, but there's been a lot of action at her house!

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I forgot to post a link to the Friday Ark on Friday. So go visit now if you haven't already.

If it were up to me...

Somebody should combine Japanese drums (Taiko):



with Stepping:



What a great new artform that would be.

It should probably also include some of the facial expressions of a Maori Haka:



I checked to make sure that such a thing did not already exist.

I found the Awa Odori:



But no, that's not it.

I'm afraid it will just have to be invented.

Oh, and I also think that all professional sports teams should be required to do it before games.



Better choreograph your own, though. The All Blacks don't like it when you steal their Haka.

Surprise visitors

I looked out the window and couldn't believe what I saw.



Oh! Oh oh oh oh oh!



A wild turkey with four babies! (Meleagris gallopavo.)



I was grinning from ear to ear all afternoon.

Sorry everything's a bit blurry - I never wash the windows. It cuts down on the number of birds that break their necks trying to fly inside. No, really! That's why. Really.

Still raining

The only problems with all this rain... a dirty dog and a grassy garden.

Oh yeah, and the yard can't be mowed because it hasn't dried out yet.

But I'm not complaining.

There won't be any such thing as "too much rain" for quite a while - we're still something like 20 inches below normal rainfall for the year.

Gray Tractor Frog

We aren't the only ones who've been glad of the rain.

One thing I love about Gray Treefrogs (Hyla chrysoscelis or maybe Hyla versicolor) is how amenable they are to posing. I'm not sure if they're smart enough to know that we don't want to eat them, or if they're just very laid back.

Hubby took this picture over the weekend while I was elbow-deep in soap. I don't normally work on the weekends but I'd gotten a little behind, and it was raining all day anyway. (I can't seem to quit saying that.)

Lucky 07/07/07

An inch and a half of rain yesterday! This system shown arrived in the wee hours this morning, and since then we've had a long steady rain for a total of 1/4 inch so far.

We are such happy campers!

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1.5 inches = 3.8 cm
.25 inches = 6.4 mm

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Other lucky things recently:
-Bobwhite quail singing in the yard (we've had that luck every day lately)
-Ran across the same turtle (I think) from the post of June 19, and got a pic of his plastron this time (coming soon to a blog near you)
-Old high school friend came to visit
-Cousins came to visit

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Updated:


The radar image almost 12 hours later.

Ahhh prolonged precipitation. Deep drenching. Slow sustained showers. Recurring relentless rain!

Tired Geckie

One sacked-out Leopard Gecko, basking under the heat lamp.

I love the way she sometimes turns her little feet up like that.

She's going through one of her not-eating phases, and this one has lasted a long time. She can live off the fat she stores in her tail, but as you can see it's getting pretty slim.

I don't think she sees very well, poor baby. She's about 7 or 8 years old I think, but LGs can live to 25 or so in captivity. If her eyesight gets any worse I'm not sure how we're going to feed her.

She used to prefer crickets, but now seems to favor mealworms.

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Find more critters at the Friday Ark.

Squash update

Man oh man are Zephyrs good! I had a little slice raw and thought "ok". But the flavor really comes out with cooking. Mmmm. Here's the recipe I used:

Cut the tip ends off, and boil the squash or zucchini until the skin pierces easily with a fork. Slice in half lengthwise, and make a few light cross-cuts on the open faces. Spread with melted butter or squeeze margarine. Sprinkle with seasoned salt and a little Parmesan cheese. Broil until the cheese is browned, about 5 minutes.

I wrote about this recipe once before - click there if you want to see a picture of the finished product.

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I worked the garden hotline last week, and one of the calls was about problems with squash. The caller asked if she should put Sevin dust (Carbaryl) on the leaves. A lot of people don't realize that Sevin is extremely toxic to bees. And bees pollinate squash. So no, I wouldn't recommend it! The bees seem to be having a hard enough time lately as it is.

If you must use an insecticide on your squash, apply it at dusk, when it will probably harm beneficial insects the least.


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There is an interesting Cucurbit Disease key by Vegetable MD online (from Cornell).

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The other squash in the picture is a pattypan or scallop type squash, Flying Saucer. Haven't eaten it yet - review on that one later!

Zephyr squash

Our first Zephyr squash. Should be ready to eat tonight!

I may have mentioned before that it's an experimentation year for squash. I planted eight different varieties, plus had one come up volunteer in the compost pile.

That volunteer squash turned out to be an acorn squash, sort of. It's either a not-true-from-seed hybrid or it's from the seed of a cross-pollinated one, because it was white-fleshed and not tasty at all. It was a pseudo-vegetable.

I have high hopes for my Zephyrs though. I'll let you know how it goes!

(As you can probably see in the picture, the grass in the garden really took off with the recent rain.)

Guadalcanal Diary et al.

It has come to my attention after reading the comments on the last post that some of you are lacking in proper alternative rock and/or janglepop musical education.

Yes there was a book and a movie of the same name, but Guadalcanal Diary was also -- not just a band as FC put it -- one of the best bands of the 80s. (Oh great Murray Attaway please excuse him, FC's a Jimmy Buffet fan.)

YouTube is a lot less fun now nowdays and this is the only Guadalcanal video that hasn't been yanked. It's not my favorite of their songs but it's still good: Watusi Rodeo.



I'm not sure what they are up to nowdays but I hope they kept themselves a few copies of At Your Birthday Party (not the Steppenwolf one) to sell on Ebay.

Another of my favorite bands whose name you could confuse with a movie, They Might be Giants:


Birdhouse in Your Soul

This next one requires slightly more effort. I can't embed it so you'll have to click here: Bearing Witness. But you should, you really should. It's a song from one of the most perfect albums ever made, Rough Night in Jericho. (Yes, another movie title, I know!) They broke up a long time ago but band's name is Dreams So Real. It occurs to me that there's a remote possibility Wayne or Glenn might know the singer, Barry Marler. In a "Oh you both work at that place with 10,000 employees so I'm sure you must know him" kind of way.

It messes with my continuity here since as far as I know there is no movie by the same name, but you should also see Blue Rodeo, if you haven't already. They are often called alt-country.


Trust Yourself

Got all that? Quiz next week.

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Update: Here's another DSR video, this one for Rough Night in Jericho.

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P.S. FC, I really don't have anything in particular against Jimmy Buffet. But I had a good friend in college (from Florida, big surprise!) who would only play Jimmy Buffet, so I had enough of that to last me for the rest of my life. I hear that Jimmy's sister's restaurant is mighty fine.