Best Photos of Camp Week

This week was the first time I ever saw a loon chick....and this young eagle was very obliging.

Our Dangerous Southern Border

Affects unexpected people in places we might not normally imagine......

I Want It

Side A

and Side B
of the same screen door

Gimme, gimme, gimme.....rowrrrrrrrr

A fat flock of fledgling robins can be frustrating


If you are a house cat and they are inches away on the other side of the screen

Rain on Sumac

A sudden thunderstorm one hay day afternoon.

Catches the men unready and unawares, way back up in the fields.


Almost catches the laundry out, but I outsmart it by ten minutes.

The drops plink on the sumac fronds, depressing the leaflets one by one, like hot green piano keys played by ghostly hands.

A sumac player piano. I like that.

Blessing

Standing on the sitting porch in the mid day sun. Suddenly, a breeze on my arm, an eager buzz and I am being investigated.

Closely, bzzz, bzzz, bzzz, tiny jet bead eyes staring into my eyes as if wondering what I am. Pausing finally for a quick nip of sugar juice, back feathers glowing fire coal green, then back to buzz bombing me again.

Soon there are three of them, whirring around my head like airplanes on a baby's mobile. Sometimes it is a very fine thing to be the center of attention.

I think the hummingbirds have children.

Curious, glorious, bright green children.

I like them

Sunday Stills....Summer

The epitome of summer for me.....

For more Sunday Stills.....

Camp

Some among us are off to camp for a week. Fishing, swimming, canoeing and hopefully, lots and lots of sleeping. See you next Saturday, although I scheduled a few posts for the week.
Have a good one!

Strange Things in the Stats

Don't you just love

I am sure most of us who use traffic meters see some pretty strange search terms now and then. I get a kick out of watching what lands folks here and sometimes wind up scratching (or shaking) my head (although I rarely get any that are as funny as the ones Jeffro gets.)

Anyhoo, now and then Googlebot shows up in the results ...maybe five or six times a week...and it is always interesting to see what sent it here....usually calf names and growing lettuce indoors and such. However, last night it stopped by and stayed....and stayed...and stayed.....for over an hour and a half. To the tune of thirty pages.

Photos that have

Anyone more knowledgeable than I who knows what's up with that?

And what are the funniest searches that bring folks to your neighborhood?

Nothing whatsoever to do with the actual post?
(Or maybe I found the Googlebot out on my porch
and grabbed pictures of its head, paws and fur....)

Second Nesting

(Not unlike second breakfast, only with birds). In all my years here I have never seen anything like this one for birds. We keep remarking about it. Phoebes have chosen the house yard for their second nesting and they are right in front of the windows all day long. And I do mean right in front. You can see every detail of feather color, even the shading between charcoal neck and dingy grey breast feathers (they should really do their laundry.)

Now that I know the call of the indigo bunting I am awakened by them several times a week. The baby robins on the porch have shown phenomenal growth this week. From the bare ugly skull heads of last week to cheeky fat robin faces complete with the little white markings in less than three days. They still sound exactly like the bearings on the washing machine when it is spinning off balance and thus still drive me crazy thinking I have to fix it.
Earl will probably remember the killdeer baby we saw in the opening to the thirty-acre lot when we walked up there. All week long the guys regaled me with stores of how it would jump in front of the tractor when they passed and run before them all the way down to the ag bags. It slowed them down a lot but they got a kick out of it just the same. Anyhow yesterday it finally figured out how to get out of the road.

Saw the sparrow hawk streaking for the heifer barn like his tail was on fire. In hot pursuit behind him, the house mockingbird. You wouldn't think a fast little falcon would be intimidated by a clown like the mocker, but he was really moving.

Saw what I thought was a new warbler right at the window yesterday too. Warblers are not usually so obliging and are hard to identify. This one was just feet from my eyes, picking insects off the cow parsley. I looked her up in Peterson's first after getting out my lovely stack of field guides and there she was...a female yellow. We have had yellows all along the driveway all spring,,,,but just were seeing the males.

And then there is the gold finch picking larvae out of the wasp nests at the big windows (excuse the lack of clarity...I will wash them later) and grabbing spider silk, evidently for its nest. It is a bold little critter and let Alan get these pictures.

High Tech for Everybody

But us. Ag columnist Chuck Jolley shared a link to this well-written piece on Facebook. Mike Barnett man tells it like it is and I wish I could walk up to him, shake his hand and thank him for it."

Wordless Wednesday

Four

AM that is.

Got up a while ago to see Liz off on her trip to Cornell. Cat and dog are cared for and water heating on the stove for kitchen clean up...hint to the boss...I am out of firewood. Warm showers are good. Cold ones are character builders, but not so pleasant.

Another hay field about cleaned up yesterday. Cows are back in the heifer lot and liking it there. And when someone drops off a shopping bag full of beans, you rejoice and freeze them.
So that is what I did.



In the afternoon I worked on this guy. Need to get him done so he can go to his new home wherever that may be. I will miss him I think.

The porch robins...taken through the screen door, sorry.

More Melamine in Milk

Yet another reason to keep it local when it comes to buying dairy products.

Middle 'O Summer with Frogs and Fogs

Gratuitous green frog, just because I can

The mist is lying soft on the foothills this morning and tossing scarfs of itself all across the heifer pasture. It is creeping down across the old horse pasture as I type this, fading the trees to shadows of themselves and dewing up the grass.

Indigo bunting, cat bird, robin, mocker and who knows who else are singing up a dawn chorus as bright as the first of June. Last night the mother robin actually slept with the nestlings instead of standing on guard all night. Must be it was cool enough to brood upon them rather than over them. Chickadees are back from wherever they have been hiding and Alan rescued a baby yellow warbler from the path the other day. We have been blessed in the bird department this year.

No cows in the heifer pasture this early morning. They spent the night in the old day pasture. The grass is good and Bonneville had her bull calf there yesterday. She came down to the barn at milking time, but we wanted to let her go back to him so, despite wanting the cows to have a wagon of green chop in the heifer field, we sent them north and west instead.Sky is pink and gold and orange and it is still cool enough for comfort.

That makes two bull calves this week, one a fat, sleek, milking shorthorn cross and the other BV's Keeneland Astre Pat son. As time goes on we are not losing our liking for the good crossbred shorty calves. We sent a steer one to the processor for our freezer last week and I am much looking forward to having our own beef again. We raise it much, much leaner than store beef where there are high allowances for fat content. Ours has a very good taste and I love cooking with it. We have been without home-raised beef all winter, mostly eating game with an occasional store bought hamburger or hot dog thrown in. The menu is about to get a lot more extensive.

Liz starts her new milk inspector job today, with her first training trip with our regular inspector. Tomorrow she will be off to Cornell University for some formal class work. Most of that will probably be review as she did study in the field in college. I know this is going to be a challenging task, (the inspector comes to tell you what you are doing wrong, which is usually not anybody's favorite thing) but I suspect she will do it well. Meanwhile we will feed the pony and get the cows grained while she is gone and hope she has fun down in the other half of the state.

Enjoy the day!

PS, the boss heard a man on television last night, who said that there were detailed ingredient lists on cow feed long before they put them on foods for human beings!

Sunday Stills.....Shadows

For more Sunday Stills.......

Craig's List

A never-ending source of free entertainment (and strange, yet effective, spelling)(and no, this is NOT my ad...I just found it this morning and thought you might enjoy it too.)

FARM EQUMENT FLAGER - $888 (I KNOW YOU!!! TOWN)

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FLAG ME AGAIN ILL SET YOU UP AND KICK YOUR JACK ASS AND THROUGH YOU IN MY SEPTIC TANK WITH THE REST OF THE ???? THINK ABOUT IT SCUM MAGGET

For Sale..Roy Roger's Trigger

This is truly creepy,
I'm sorry.
There are some things I am just glad that I can't afford to buy.

Hotter Day

First sound- the baby robins chinking for food a-sound like someone chipping away at a musical stone. The proximity of their nest to our activities...right outside the front door, under the edge of the porch, gives us a chance to see what robin folk do at night.

Stand guard is what they do. Literally standing on the side of the nest, bill thrust upward in defiant defense of their small brood. They are suffering so from the heat, adults and chicks panting all day long, or the babies just hanging their heads over the side of the nest, drooping sadly. I feel about the same way.

First sight- the phoebe that has undertaken a late nesting somewhere in the yard. It either awaits on the wire just outside the landing window and looks me right in the eye or guddles around in the driveway jerking its tail as phoebes do.

First outrage- The %^&&** deer mowed the tops off my entire crop of green beans.
And tore down the foil pans I hung to deter them.
I was hoping they wouldn't find them.

Moved Sadie dog from the barn to her lounging dog house under the tree nearby. (She normally does night duty in the barn due to barking issues.) Don't know if that will keep them at bay, but it is worth a shot. A lot of hard work in that garden.....most of it mine. I was looking forward to some good meals out of it.

First scare-Becky kept asking me if the scrap man had bull dozed my rhubarb...grandpa's rhubarb really...I am just the guardian of the line. I kept wondering what the heck she was talking about. See she does the chores in the heifer barn and I don't. I couldn't see that he had inadvertently, while doing some work for the boss, cleared out all of my old garden fence and driven the bulldozer right through it. I gave up on that garden because me and my hoe couldn't outfight the nettles. However, my pink lilac and my big rhubarb bed are still there, surrounded by a wall of reed canary grass, but still much loved. When I walked down I was sure that my heirloom plants were gone, but he missed both bush and bed by about two feet. I am grateful. Guess I had better start moving them up closer to the house.

So in a world where there are murders right on the street, in the town where I was born, arson fires, heat waves from Hell and a flood warning, not watch, out in the other end of the county, I will go to work, aggravated by the deer and grateful for the grace that saved the rhubarb that I hold in Grandpa Lachmayer's honor.

July 4th Milk Dump Protest

This story resonated with me partly because of the photo. That is how our barn looked up until the Amish fixed it not long ago. I wonder how many roofs are going without patches, how many pieces of machinery are being cobbed together in hopes of just one more season, how many visits aren't being made to doctors because the health insurance is too expensive these days.......

Cows Before Folks

Sat down with a nutritionist today, a fellow with whom we much enjoy working. He brought his new boss along and in between swapping stories we worked out some new ideas for better feeding the cows. There is no question that we humans could probably use some nutritional advice too (although I don't suppose we would follow it) but the cows come first at least in that respect.

Learned some good stuff about putting up the Sudan grass we planted too, which will be useful I am hoping.