Squirrels?

I started filling my bird feeder a few weeks ago.  The birds have come in abundance, but it is strange, a pint scoop of bird food lasts three days right now.  Last year, I put out that much before breakfast and it would be gone by lunchtime.  The difference seems to be the squirrels.  Last year they were brazen, three of them hanging about the feeder, one swinging  and spinning on the feeder like it is an amusement park ride and two underneath enjoying the bounty sprinkling down upon them.  Then they frisked about, ran up and down the tree and tussled in the yard.

This year there are squirrels, but they are behaving differently.  They hide.  The sneak.  They scoot from one point of cover to the next.  They are acting like the prey that they are. I'm guessing either the hawks have been voracious or a neighbor has a BB gun.  Whatever it is, the birds are able to eat the food that I put out for them.

So far this year, the usual birds, cardinals, juncos, chickadees-both Carolina and blackcapped, bluejays, nuthatches.  The titmice have been hanging out at the picture window making faces at the cats on the other side of the glass, teasing, usually the wrens do that.  The cats tightly swish the tips of their tails and make their "eh-eh-eh" hunting sounds and bonk their heads on the glass as they try to fire themselves through it.  They recover with their usual, "I meant to do that. I knew what I was doing, really." look.  I swear I heard the titmice  snickering.

The crows are strange.  They appear around the hedges from the neighbor's yard and slowly walk, like middle school kids, in a loose bunch, talking amongst themselves.  The stroll down the hill, about 50 feet, and then eat some of the millet  that has spilled on the ground under the feeder. Some days they pick at the ground to eat other things.  When they are done, they gather together and slowly walk back up the hill and disappear back around the hedge.  There are other groups of crows that fly in, but this bunch likes to hoof it. Strange.

Up in the Sky

I have been bemoaning the lack of birds at my feeder and suspected that the reason was that I was the equivalent of the lady who passes out Smarties on Halloween and by my current evidence, my guess appears to have been correct.
 
I am now the lady who hands out full size candy bars from an unguarded bowl. 

I had bought a less expensive bird seed, and it had made a difference, it wasn't the stuff the birds craved, someone else was passing out something better.  During my weekly grocery shop I picked up a bag of sunflower seeds, went home mixed them into my bird seed and voila two days later the diversity and population size of the birds in my backyard has soared. (pun intended)  The pine tree has a line of birds waiting for a turn at the feeder and the nearby bushes bounce up and down with all the avian activity.

Some poor neighbor is probably wondering where all the birds went, their mid-grade birdseed just isn't measuring up anymore.

I haven't even started with the suet cakes yet.

I've been out hauling manure for the garden again, I have extended the front garden bed by about six feet, with more to come, so that that back garden can be converted to a thin strip of veggies and the remainder converted into either currants or shade tolerant flowers or both.

It has been great working outside lately, the temperature is just right, there is little humidity and the blue sky intensifies all the other colors.  Up in that sky have been some interesting clouds, a new hobby of mine.  The library had had a book faced out on one of its shelves a few weeks ago called The Cloudspotter's Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds  by Gavin Pretor-Pinney.  I remember the elementary lessons on the types of clouds, but the old lesson meant little until I spent some time reading about each of the types, the weather that it indicates and some of the factors that will determine its shape and type. 

I look up more now, I've always loved the varieties of cirrus clouds, but now I have names for them it seems even more fascinating.  It is neat to be able to see the patterns, like "mackerel sky", and understand why the sailors took their clouds so seriously.   Such a pretty harmless seeming pattern of high wispy clouds indicating that the next day will be windy and rainy.  Just as promised, it rains the day after I spot it or at least it has the total three times I've seen it since I could name it.

I hate when there are six different cirrus patterns in the sky at one time and I notice them while stopped at a traffic light, a couple seconds later I have to put all of my attention to the traffic and pedestrians.  Can't everyone just stop and check out the really cool cloud formations and lay off those horns?? Oh, yeah, reality.

My  husband told me that I'm getting even more nerdly. I bought the companion book, The Cloud Collector's Handbook, so that I can keep track of the types of clouds I've seen and have toyed with the idea of joining the Cloud Appreciation Society.  I noticed a few days ago that Gavin Pretor-Pinney wrote and Op/Ed article on CNN and that he had a TED talk too.  All of this media presence and I found him because a librarian turned the book to face outward, strange how things work.

Fall, I think.

I heard my first public Christmas carol of the season yesterday, at the gas station.  It felt right in that it was crisp and cool, with a touch of winter in the fall air, but it was missing one thing--digesting turkey.  I prefer my Christmas season to be short and intense, the tree goes up a few days before Santa comes, cookies baked, traveling, wrapping presents, (all bought before the turkey comes on the scene, I hate to wait in lines and I like to have a choice) all that holiday cheer crammed into a week and a half.  Some folks like to start the holiday shortly after the kids return to school, but I don't belong to that club.  Unfortunately, we've had to bend the "no carols before the turkey" rule in the past few years. My daughter is in the school band and each year they have a winter concert featuring songs that the students have been practicing since September--so those chestnuts have already been audibly roasting in our house for a while.  Luckily, the chestnuts roast more beautifully each year.

The leaves peaked here this past week and are now starting to fade and drop, that must mean that it is time to start hauling manure again to make new raised beds in the front yard.  The back garden is too close to those walnut trees causing too much shade and juglone issues.  This past year the tomatoes all stretched laterally toward the sun, I'd tie them back and a few days later the new growth would be straining back in that direction. This coming year I won't fight it, they will receive the garden where the pumpkins went wild with full sun blazing above.  I will tote in soil for a new garden bed for the pumpkins over the next few months.

Snacking on millet

What eggs?

The chickens are enjoying their extended adolescence, they are due to start laying any day now, in fact, they might be laying and hiding their eggs from us, ignoring that lovely next box I installed for them.  They will be 24 weeks old tomorrow, according to the books and websites they can start laying anytime from 20-26 weeks, but there has been no sign of eggs.  They have started to make horrendous noises that sound like strangling geese, which chickens do during and after laying an egg.  I have searched to see if their are any little warm brown orbs awaiting us, but I have found nothing.

The girls are also enjoying all the millet that falls from the bird feeder. The birds are starting to discover it, but the squirrels will need to remove their fuzzy little behinds once in a while for the wild birds to have any chance of tasting the sunflower seeds.  The first winter we were here, we didn't see any squirrels, this year we are very nearly overrun with the critters.  Maybe it is because we have had two mild winters in a row, or maybe it is because I asked the neighbor kid with the BB gun not to use it on our property. (When we bought the house we had to replace two windows because BBs had damaged them.)

Three more "starting at 500K" houses have begun to be erected down the street. I have visited people who live in similar homes, they seem like giant caverns and are not very homey.  The ones I have seen have almost no furniture in them, so they seem that much more cavernous.   I find it interesting that the lower ceilinged rooms adjacent to the caverns have furniture and appear as if they are used, unlike the cavernous spaces. The practical New Englander in me thinks about the heating bills for cathedral ceilings. I am certainly glad that I won't be writing those checks.  The tree hugger in me thinks about the energy wastage associated with having those soaring ceilings and the real spacial needs of an average family.  The city planner in me thinks about the traffic that will be caused by the sprawling American landscape and the disconnected society caused by poor neighborhood design.  The farmer in me thinks about the loss of the farmland that the houses have usurped and that it would be cool if they landscaped with food bearing plants.  The mom in me thinks about how many more kids will be crammed onto my daughter's bus (which was an issue earlier this year), they forget when they set the bus capacity that each child will be bearing a 25 lb or more backpack and half of those students will tote band instruments three times a week.  I hope no one  in those new houses plays the tuba. It would still be better than the third world buses I have ridden with women carrying baskets of flowers or crates of chickens on their heads, with everyone packed so tightly that there was no chance of standees falling down if the bus stopped suddenly.
I digress, but my whole blog is one giant digression...