Pickles

A somewhat more recent effort:

Used to be everybody made pickles. Most featured cucumbers, but there were pickled beets, pickled carrots, and pickled green beans too. Believe it or not I never saw a zucchini until I was pretty close to adulthood, but that soon joined the pickle lineup as well.

It was quite an undertaking in earlier days, and certainly still can be. My favorite aunt sometimes makes sweet pickles that take nine days. I tried making them once.

And only once.

I have a hard time waiting for bread to rise, let alone spending nine days in a pickle. They are, however, spectacularly sweet and zingy and crunchy…probably my favorite pickles.

The history of pickles goes back a long way. Curing food in a salt solution, that is brine, preserves it. Over longer term storage, fermentation in pickles also helps prolong shelf life. Up until relatively recently in the tapestry of time, we did not have refrigerators or freezers to keep food from spoiling. Even canning is a fairly new process. However, fermenting and pickling were early discoveries.

According to the Pickle History Timeline from the NY Food Museum, ancient Mesopotamians pickled food at least as early as 2400 BC. Cucumbers were later brought from their native India to the Tigris Valley around 2030 BC.  They were mentioned in the Bible…twice…and revered by Romans as strength enhancing food. Julius Caesar is said to have fed them to his troops. Napoleon did the same, and offered a large monetary award to anyone who could find a way to preserve food safely. “The man who won the prize in 1809 was a confectioner named Nicholas Appert, who figured out that if you removed the air from a bottle and boiled it, the food wouldn't spoil.” 

Cleopatra considered them an important part of her beauty routine.

You are of course familiar with the name of our amazing nation, and the continent upon which we reside-America. It was, according to many sources, named after a navigator called either Amerigo or Americus Vespucci, who wrote of his travels here in books published in the early 1500s. Due to some confusion at the time, map makers thought he had discovered the new lands and named them after him.

 Mr. Vespucci was a pickle peddler in Seville, Spain before he got the urge to wander, and indeed packed plenty of pickles in barrels on his ships. It is said that his sailors probably avoided scurvy because of this.

That other famous explorer, who missed getting much other than a city in Ohio named after him also brought pickles along on his voyages and is said to have grown cucumbers for the purpose on Haiti.

Shakespeare liked pickles and mentioned them frequently. Thomas Jefferson was a fan as well. He said of them, “On a hot day in Virginia, I know nothing more comforting than a fine spiced pickle, brought up trout-like from the sparkling depths of the aromatic jar below the stairs of Aunt Sally's cellar."

Elvis Presley liked them fried.

Pickles were produced commercially as early as 1606 in Virginia.

Mason jars revolutionized home canning of pickles. They were invented by a tinsmith named John Landis Mason in Philadelphia in 1858. Made of heavier glass than regular jars they stood up better to the stress of hot processing.

In 1893 Pickle Packers International was formed to represent the pickle industry and its workers. It still exists and its website, Ilovepickles.org, offers recipes and information. The organization’s membership represents 87% of the pickling cucumbers grown in North America, and, “PPI’s presence is world-wide, with members from 16 countries, including Belgium, Canada, China, Finland, Germany, Holland, India, Japan, Mexico, The Netherlands, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United States, and United Kingdom.”

Pickles were rationed during WWII.

Today, China is the world’s largest producer of cucumbers, followed by Iran, Turkey, and the Russian Federation, with the USA coming in fifth in production.

Technically the cucumber is a fruit, having grown from a flower, and in fact, by botanical definition, it is actually a berry, as are tomatoes, eggplants, and grapes.

However, you may be comforted to know that the USDA lists pickles under vegetables. Here in America we consume more than 2.5 billion pounds each year. Florida is our top cuke state with 33% of cucumber production taking place there, although they are grown in over 30 states.

In 2013, in New York, 3,100 acres were planted to the knobby green critters. The state ranks 7^th nationally in production and acreage, and the harvest was valued at nearly 17 million dollars that year. NY grows 6% of the national crop and 5% of those cukes or thereabouts go into pickles.

Americans consume more than 9 pounds of pickles per person annually and buy them roughly every 53 days, unless of course they make their own. 67% of American households participate in pickle consumption. Although there are hundreds of varieties of pickles with many vegetables involved, cucumber dill is the number one most popular. Pickles are fat free and low calorie, with the average dill having only 40 calories.

Although not in any way inclined toward nine-day pickle production, (although I have always been happy to eat them) and having had terrible experiences with canning anything but jams and jellies, I can still turn out refrigerator pickles like Cleopatra’s cooks.

Liz grows the cukes, as I have black thumb in that department, or they arrive with favorite visitors. I boil up some vinegar, sea salt and sugar and let the resulting brine cool. Pack garlic and dill heads and clean, sliced cucumbers in jars, dump on the liquid, and screw on the lids. Let it all set in the fridge for a few days, and hey, presto! We get to participate in a tradition that has been handed down nearly as long as civilization has existed. I do love a good pickle and I guess I am in good company.

There are a couple of jars pickling in the fridge right now in fact.

Fencing is an Olympic Sport

More 2012:

Monday I woke up expecting to do bookkeeping most of the day-bad enough on the best of days, but just plain nasty on Monday. I used to swear I would never do books. You know how that goes.

Thus Monday was already sporting a gloomy aspect. There was a weekend’s worth of everybody-home-and-nobody-being-tidy housework waiting for me in all its glory too. I didn’t exactly roll out a bundle of joy.

However there isn’t much that the first cup of coffee can’t fix or at least dilute a little bit, so when Becky went out to clean her pony’s stall before morning chores I had reached a reasonably even keel.

Then she came inside and asked, “Did any cows get out yesterday? There are hoof prints up by the horse barn.”

Oh, happy, happy news. A quick look assured us that the five heifers that live in the heifer barn were indeed ALL missing. Unbeknownst to us lightning had fried the electric fence controller and for some reason known only to the bovine mind they smashed a six-bar gate so badly it looked like a cheap accordion.

Coffee abandoned, boots donned, sorting sticks gathered, there was a mass exodus from the house. The miscreants were almost instantly located. They had obligingly sequestered themselves up in the pony yard. Capturing the hooligans was a simple matter of closing the gate.

Talk about lucky. Problem was that the pony yard is a long, long way from the heifer barn and the entire trip is unfenced. Instead there are no fewer than four driveways, plus a huge expanse of lawn, an old-fashioned bowling green and some odds and ends of garden, none of them designed to look like anything but a fun park to a bunch of heifers. It was easy to postulate that the minute we drove them out of the pony yard they would select any route but the one we wanted and the rodeo would begin.

Added to that, the fastest runner among us had just left for to New Jersey for his other job, so he wouldn’t be available to chase anybody who got out of control.

Frankly I was scared stiff at the idea of moving them from point A to point B. There was no way four people could cover all the exits, especially if one of the four was me. I swim faster than I walk and I don’t swim very fast. It was only a hundred-yard dash, but comparing the speed of those heifers to the speed of this particular old lady is like comparing Usain Bolt to a three-toed sloth. The boss doesn’t exactly motor as fast as he did back when he ran track either, although he still walks faster than I “run”.

The dark depths of the office and the mountain of dishes were beginning to look pretty good.

At the table after chores I sat drinking that long-awaited second cup of coffee and wishing there was a fence from the pony yard to the barn.

Any kind of fence.

Wait a minute. Why not build a fence? There was a whole pack of temporary electric fence posts right next to the porch.  The boss needed to go buy a fencer to replace the one the lightning ruined anyhow, so he could get some light wire, an extra bag of nice, new, yellow, plastic insulators and, perhaps most importantly, a roll of flagging tape, which surveyors use to make stuff visible.

Supposing we stuck temporary posts in the lawn, strung them with temporary wire, garnished them with temporary fence flagging and pretended that they were actually a real fence that would stop wild and woolly great big heifers.

Would they go along with our make believe? I posed the question to the rest of the crew and the consensus was, well, maybe.

Worth a try anyhow.

So the boss trundled off to Hand’s to get the missing components of our pseudo-fence and we went to work.

It doesn’t take very long to put up a fake fence. There wasn’t much we could do about the west side of the area that the heifers needed to transverse. There are barnyards, a cow lane, an old calf yard and a deep ravine there-no place to really put up such a structure. Thus we limited our efforts to the east side of the lawn and the east and north driveways and merely shut all the gates over on the cow side of the farm. If they got over there, there was no place for them to escape anyhow and we could just start over again.

When all was in place and our fancy little sorta-fence was hooked up to a real, genuine, brand spanking new fence controller, the boss went up to let the miscreants out of the pony yard. I didn’t see that part of the game as I was backing up the fence down by my flower garden, behind the big apple tree.

Almost too soon they appeared from behind the pony barn, heads high and all snorty and wild, but still inside the “fence”.

So far so good. Suddenly one of them veered west. The rest followed. (Of course they did; it is against the rules of the game for things to be TOO easy.) The boss went in lukewarm pursuit, since hot pursuit might have spooked them and that we did not need.

After a while they trotted back to the east, having perused all the lanes and barnyard gates. They made the turn north at my post and headed up to Becky at the sharp corner, while Liz blocked egress to the south.

Bada bing, they were in and astonished to discover that their own yard, (where they belong), still contained a watering trough and a barn where they could escape the flies, just as it always had. They settled happily back in.

As for us, I think we deserve at least a silver medal. Fencing is, after all, an Olympic sport. 

Hezzie

Just an excerpt from another 2012 column: (I still have him btw)

Anyone who has a family has found out, probably the hard way, that there are some things you should keep quiet about. All your little quirks and phobias. Never tell your children. 

Never.

For example the whole garden gnome thing. Normal people are uncomfortable around clowns, fear and loath ticks with a passion, and dislike garden gnomes. Right?

I mean, how could you not get the creeps from the little creepers? Pointy hats, smug smiles like they were high on grape vines or worse; they are evil, I tell you, just evil.

And stupid me, I let my kids know that I hate ‘em. I spent hours playing the computer game, Super Granny, wherein you get to bash gnome after gnome after gnome.

I warned them (actually threatened them with grievous bodily harm) that they would be in trouble if my Mother’s Day gift ever involved an ugly little guy with a pointy red hat.

For years, decades even, my sensibilities were respected. No gnomes at Northview.

Then one day, not so very long ago, Hezekiah showed up. I suppose he is not quite as creepy as your average garden gnome. At least his hat is sort of dark blue with sparkles instead of glaring red.

I tried to be a good sport.

But then I opened the microwave at O’dark thirty one morning, and there he was, grinning slyly out at me. I must have jumped forty feet (quite a trick inside the kitchen.) He even had a little note suggesting that he likes cream and sugar in his coffee.

Got me once.

The next day, well before the old synapses had begun to fire, I opened the back door to let Nick out for a run. There he was, just at eye level, perched on the cross bar of the screen door.

Got me again.

Next he was snugged down in my Sunday chair, wearing safety glasses, still grinning like a goon.

Crouched on the edge of the stair landing, just where it turns, lord of the railings, the snarky little rat.

I tried to get even, put him in beds, set him on the steering wheel of the Blue Bomber, and more. Sadly, kids don’t possess the over-developed startle response of the rapidly becoming elderly. I never got much of a reaction.

However, when the kid got called back to work down in the Big Apple, I tucked Hezzie under his hard hat on the floor of the truck and figured that at least I wouldn’t see his ugly physiognomy for a while.

Hah! I opened Facebook this morning, hoping to get my personal version of the daily news. While the networks focus on politics, murder, mayhem and madness, my personal page features one friend with 11 new standard poodle puppies down in Florida, another selling cute baby chickens in Great Britain, and lots of birds, cats, dogs and local folks, all going about normal life. There are a lot of farmers and ranchers on Facebook too, and they do many interesting things every day.

And there he was, propped on the dashboard of a truck, speeding past Giant Stadium and whirling through China Town, enjoying the delightful scents of dozens of wonderful things cooking all around him. (I wonder if gnomes go on rumspringa.) He was tooling along in the gloomy rain, across the Brooklyn Bridge, past the Freedom Tower, and then he went to work.

He looked pretty silly in his hard hat, not much showing but his shoes. He couldn’t reach the controls on a single machine, so he was forced to stand around with his gnomey little hands in his gnomey little pockets, smug plastic smile unwavering, until they tossed him back in the truck.

Got me twenty more times and still counting.

Although I am glad that he has been lured away from humble Northview by the bright lights and big city, I shudder to think where he will turn up next. And thanks to cell phones and Facebook, I’m sure I will find out.

Chilly

It is so chilly that the skeeters aren't biting and the dragons aren't flying

And Bailey

Another one, just to keep you from getting bored while I fish and swim. Also from 2012

Even though winter has been fairly benign so far, seed catalogs hold a great deal of charm. Thus there are piles of them at strategic locations around the house to fend off gloom and empower dreams of brighter seasons.

However no seed catalog could fuel the uproar that a livestock supply catalog in the hands of our male offspring generated the other day. And all he did was read aloud the names of some of the products offered for sale therein.

The first product mentioned was a sheep chair. My mind was instantly filled with the image of an older sheep, perhaps a bit grey around the temples, but quite distinguished, glasses perched on his narrow, patrician nose, frowning self-importantly while he perused the WSJ from the comfort of his recliner. He might be wearing slippers (wooly of course) and be smoking a polished cherry wood pipe in his tastefully decorated den. (I know you can see a sheep doing this too; they are such mockers.)

Then I envisioned a granny sheep, rocking comfortably back and forth in an old Boston rocker near the wood stove in the kitchen, while she knitted wooly mittens for the little lambs playing around her feet. They would be leaping and caprioling on and off a blue and pink rag rug, their little hooves thundering on the wide planks of the floor. I could see it clear as day.

However, reality was much more prosaic. (What a letdown.) The sheep chair in the catalog was just a little canvas sling thing used to confine sheep comfortably while their hooves are trimmed.

And then there was the lamb and goat chariot. Okay this one was easy. The only hard part was whether the goats would be harnessed to a little wagon and driven by lambs in Roman garb, or the other way around. Or maybe they rode together and had a pony to pull the chariot. It could possibly even have referred to a low budget remake of the 1959 classic, Ben Hur, sheep and goats being a bit cheaper than chariot horses.

Ah, but no, the lamb and goat chariot was “designed with the sheep showman in mind” (and not Charleton Heston either). It consists of a two-wheeled metal cart (hence the chariot part I guess) with places to halter either lambs or goats so they could all be trained to lead at the same time.

Having had occasion to attempt (and I use the latter term advisedly) to train sheep to follow along politely on a halter, I truly understand the need for a chariot. You would think upon observing a sheep, small compared to a cow, soft and wooly, not usually possessed of great big horns or a long tail to batter you with, plus a buttercups-wouldn’t-melt-in-its mouth-expression, that a sheep would be easy. Not so much. With a low center of gravity, sharp little hooves for extra traction, and a hair trigger panic button, sheep are tougher than they look. And when something trips that panic button, if they can’t go around, they will go over, under, and/or through anything that gets in their way. In retrospect I can see many uses for that “four head” chariot.

The catalog also features “Mother-Up” spray intended for grafting lambs, foals, calves and kids (the caprine kind). No twigs, tapes, or ties involved in this operation though, just something intended to convince reluctant mama animals to accept babies that aren’t necessarily their own.

A llama chute, but alas, no water park or slide, just a stall intended to facilitate clipping or medical work. Stone tattooers. Waterers, weaners and weather stations. Tweezers, twitches and six kinds of tape-duct, fencing, illuminator, measuring, umbilical and weighing….. (The scary part of that is that we have and use all but one of those here at Northview, and Alan uses the other one on his job in the city.)

The best item we found in the NASCO catalog was not a bit strange however, just wonderful. We use a brand of automatic water bowls made by the Humane Company for the cows’ comfort and entertainment. They are shiny robin’s egg blue things with yellow plastic paddles. Each one is suspended between a pair of cows, which, when thirsty, press the paddle down to run fresh water into the bowl, then drink their fill.

When they are finished drinking they let the paddle spring back up and the flow of water is shut off. (Except when springs break or dirt gets into the valve or the cows bang on the bowls hard enough to break them off the water line. Then we find a lovely flood the next time we go into the barn and emergency repairs and water removal occur.)

However some cows get bored, or even learn bad habits from other cows who got bored at some point. They take their nice fresh drink, then spend hours and hours and hours licking at the water in the bowl, flicking water out to splash on the floor. Determined cows can create near-floods and big messes that require big clean up.

Just such a cow is Bailey, number 155, who stands in my line and is otherwise a nice, unassuming cow, who doesn’t bother anything. However, all day long when she isn’t eating or sleeping or being milked she slaps water out of her bowl. Some days it is enough water to flow down two stalls to the walkway, down the walk way and into the gutter. It makes a slimy mess of any feed left in the manger too.

We have discussed putting an individual shut off on Bailey’s bowl and turning her toy off when we are not in the barn. We have never done so though because it seemed kind of mean and not fair to the cow who shares that bowl.

And there in the catalog was the perfect solution- a splash guard for a Humane water bowl, held on with a simple muffler clamp.

Perfect.

Bacon

Just to keep you busy while I'm at camp...some old Farm Sides this week. This one's from 2012

What element turns a couple of slices of ordinary bread, a mundane tomato, and a leaf or two of lettuce into an indescribable culinary delight? What tastes great crumbled on salad, served up fried with eggs and toast, wrapped around a hot dog, or even baked into a muffin? What is said to be the single gateway food that lures more folks back to the omnivorous fold from vegetarianism than any other? It is made into edible roses, quiche, and even ice cream.

You guessed it-bacon. 

            At one time all pork was called bacon, but in these modern times we use the term to describe meat from a pig, usually from the belly, back, or side, which is cured using large amounts of salt, seasonings, nitrites and sometimes smoked as well.

Here in America we prefer the sides and belly of the pig to make what is called “streaky bacon”. Canadian bacon on the other hand comes from the loin and is much leaner. Other nations tend toward the leaner cuts as well. The word itself is thought to have originated with various words for “back” in French and Germanic languages.

Salt curing was one of the favorite means of preserving foods before the invention of refrigeration. Some sources trace the practice of salting meats to keep them from spoiling back at least to Ancient Egypt. Other meats and even vegetables were preserved in a similar manner, in order that people could survive outside of the growing season or travel away from traditional food sources. Indeed early Christianity relied heavily on salt fish in order to meet the requirements of Lent far from the sea.

We Americans like our bacon and I mean, we really, really like it. It is tied with pulled pork for popularity here in the US, where we enjoy 1.7 billion pounds annually. There are popular blogs devoted entirely to bacon; The Bacon Show, and Bacon Unwrapped are a couple of examples. The former features a new bacon recipe every single day, and according to the header will continue to do so “forever”.

Bacon is versatile. The Paleo Diet, which restricts folks to eating like cavemen, allows bacon.

Even our conversation is laced heavily with bacon-related sayings from “bringing home the bacon” to “saving one’s bacon”, which merely means to save one’s body from harm.

“Bringing home the bacon” is a phrase with disputed origins. Some sources claim that is was first used in Dunmow, England where men who could swear that they hadn’t argued with their wives for a year were given a flitch of bacon. This is contested by folks who insist that the phrase originated in reference to a boxing match in 1906, wherein one of the contenders was said to have managed to return to his domicile bearing cured pork.

It matters not; folks who use the phrase today obviously consider bacon to be synonymous with success in any endeavor.

And why not? Bacon goes well with almost anything, including for the adventuresome of palate, milk shakes.

Original bacon recipes probably featured curing the meat in a heavy coating of salt and spices with smoking to follow. Today commercial bacon production involves injection of nitrites and brine, vacuum tumbling, combing, thermal processing, smoking, chilling, pressing, slicing and packaging. Although the process seems more elaborate, it really isn’t all that different, with the changes relating mostly to quality control and the handling of large quantities of material in a standardized manner.

There are also a number of recipes for making homemade bacon, but the ones I looked at had me shying away from concepts such as botulism, which was mentioned in more than one article on the topic.

With all this fondness for salty, smoky, flavorful fat meat, the press was in a swivet a couple of weeks ago when the National Pig Association in the UK announced that a worldwide bacon shortage was inevitable. The organization cited drought in the US and Russia as making it more expensive to feed pigs and causing farmers to sell off their herds.

However here in the US a spokesman for the National Pork Producers Council said that, although some pigs are being liquidated because of the high cost of feed, it is happening at a much slower rate than in other countries.

It seems however, that universal price increases for bacon and probably other pork products can be expected. With a five percent rally in corn futures prices just this week it is almost inevitable. Food giant mandates for changes in hog housing aren’t going to help the availability of pork products, including bacon, either.

Steve Meyer of Paragon Economics, a consultant to the pork industry said on CNBC, “I’ve been talking about [rising meat prices] since 2006 but nobody would listen until someone said we’re not going to have enough bacon. If I’d known that I’d have used different words. Don’t take away their bacon!”

Meyer went on to say that even marginal increases in prices for foods, including bacon, cause harm where it can least be withstood, “Anytime you drive up retail prices — beef, pork, chicken, turkey, eggs, milk … it falls on people with low incomes and fixed incomes,” he said. “The people who can’t afford it.”

It makes one wonder whether Marie Antoinette, if she were alive today she might have said, “Let them eat bacon.”

At any rate, whether or not there is a shortage of bacon in the offing and whether or not we will continue to be able to afford the salty treat, we can certainly rally around celebration of International Bacon Day, which traditionally (at least since 2000) has been celebrated on the last Saturday before Labor Day. Participants have been known to commemorate the event by gathering to prepare bacon-based menu items and then consuming them. Sounds like a plan to me.

In fact I propose celebrating every Saturday or maybe even Sundays and week days if the opportunity is afforded. After all-it’s bacon; what’s not to like?

Decline Free Offer

Despite painstakingly doing everything I could to stop Microcrud from updating this poor old thing to Windows 10........

Despite reading everything I would find on how to avoid it.....

I still got the dreaded screen with the x that isn't exit.

Thanks to Kim Komando I knew enough to not click that x, which begins the install, but rather to click...twice....the decline free offer button.

Because yeah, I need a word processing program and mine (from what I have read) doesn't play nice with Windows 10. Don't want to buy another one. Don't want to mess with another one. I know how to use the one I have.

This is not a big problem for me personally, although it is annoying in spades.

What is a big problem is that I am going away for a week, tomorrow, and the boss will be playing with this. We share.

He is not tech savvy. He forgets.

If I come home from camp and find this thing running a program that won't run the stuff I use for work I am going to be really ticked off.

I am not sure what to do about this. How do I make sure he doesn't accidentally update?

Brotherband

Doin' Stuff

Of course I love the Brotherband books....just my kind of thing. Much to teach, all contained in a darned good yarn.

Even more so I love my own small brand of brothers, who are fine and fun, and although they don't venture to explore the seas of Scandia, they do have some good stories to tell. They also teach the young who are learning......things to help with life's good yarns.

Today is my baby brother's birthday. He is far away, at work in another state, but I hope you will wish him a happy...

As will I....Happy Birthday, Mappy. Thanks for all that good brother stuff over the years. Love you!

Finnbar

All the young people who promised so vociferously to aid in walking and so on will be held to those promises......because you talked me into it...you really did.

Almanac

Bama Breeze

The corn lilies are in full bloom, as are the seasonal breakdowns. Borked machinery is not my favorite part of farming, especially when I personally am expected to know where the Allen wrenches are.

I don't. 

So there.

Our 30-Acre Lot seems to have been recently enhanced by the addition of a multitude of cow pies....good fertilizer, you know.

Meanwhile, our meager three animals could not have produced such largess, and are still in their proper pasture....where I truly hope they stay....anyhow. I wonder whose cows got out......and how hard they worked to catch them.....

Next week is camp. This week is the week where I annually do two of everything. I am about done with the second Farm Side for the weekend we come home, but it is one I have been tweaking and twisting for quite some while. Frankly I am sick of it. Oh, well.

I have never been so slow about packing. Just can't seem to get in the swing. At least I am filling up the garden pond and putting in its needed enhancements, such as algae killer and water prep. 

There are going to be some ticked off hummingbirds though. I take the feeder down when I go away...no one to change the nectar every three days, you know. There is one we call Chatty, that is full of sound and fury and signifying outage whenever I clean it even now.

He...or she...I think it is a young of the year, chatters and chirps and carries on whenever it visits. If the feeder is gone there is a tumultuous uproar.

Sorry guys, I wouldn't want you to get sick on my watch. I'll be back a week from this coming Saturday and will fill your jar forthwith.

On a sad and sorry note, the days are already getting noticeably shorter....where is my summer going? 

The Stories you Discover

During weekly research:

Imported fish recalled

Serious Danger......"This is a health hazard situation where there is a reasonable probability that the use of the product will cause serious, adverse health consequences or death."

Birthday Birds

As a sort of an early birthday treat, Alan took me up to Montezuma yesterday. We "unwrapped" an amazing array of birdie gifts ..... Three lifers in one day for me. At least four for Alan.

Just the road into the place offered Osprey nests in rows, some with adult birds perched on them, one with nestlings peering over the edge. We spotted thirteen species of birds before we left the parking lot at the entrance.

Of course, we quickly discovered the requisite unidentifiable LBB. Little brown bird. There is one on every trip... I think, after perusing the one foggy photo Alan was able to nab as it flitted in and out of the cattails, that it is a Marsh Wren. It never actually showed itself to me......wrong side of the car.....I have it up on the Facebook Bird ID Group of the World The members thereof have held my hand through a lot of tough birds and taught me a lot about how to look and what to look for. Where was the Internet when I was a kid learning to bird? *Update: Marsh Wren confirmed.

Once into the refuge proper, although numbers of birds were a bit thin, rarities abounded.

Cheerful Purple Martins are busy near the entrance. Note the chicks in nest number 12

First, we saw Black Terns. These are NYS endangered birds that nest there, which we had not before seen. We were scoping out one of the pools that could be fairly well seen from the road (cattails obscure the view in a lot of places) and they came swooping in in good numbers. What a thrill! 

There were American Coots in great numbers, Pied Billed Grebes everywhere, a few Blue Winged Teal, and best of all, many had chicks and ducklings. We had previously seen a grebe here and a grebe there on our visits, but they were everywhere yesterday.

Most people are quite courteous, but this guy had that NASCAR thing going on,
racing around the roads and even going the wrong way on the one-way parts.
There's one in every.....

We crept around very slowly, with cars passing us constantly. Didn't matter, we were getting the birds. A couple of Common Moorhens noodled around the mats of vegetation with the coots.

Over at the Tschache Pool, we climbed the tower, as always. (This time I managed not to slice my hand open on the railing) Thanks to the one what brung me, who has incredible eyesight, which I much envy BTW, I got to see a bucket list kind of bird, which I had despaired of ever actually finding. 

Way down on the now-dry pool, two cinnamon-colored birds grazed together at the edge of some dry vegetation. Not lifers for me, as I saw plenty of them in the west and south on long ago trips, but I had wanted to see Sandhill Cranes in my home state, and there they were. Oddly, we only saw the young birds, no adults, but a very distant photo Alan was able to take assured me that they were just what we hoped that they were. That was a biggie for me.

Next we drove over the May's Point Pool, which never seems to disappoint. Before we even parked Alan pointed out big white birds sitting on top of muskrat houses (every house seems to sport nests of some kind, or at least groups of birds perching on them.)

At first we were pretty sure they were Trumpeter Swans, but after second guessing for a while, I have them listed for the experts. There were cygnets..... Cute, fluffy cygnets. I had never seen any before. Update: confirmed Trumpeters

All in all, it was, as usual, a great day. Who knew that after all these years of listing, I could tick off three life birds in one quick day trip right here in our home state? Ain't life grand?

Any takers to ID this little blur? 

And, perusing some really distant shots of little birds on the edges of little pools, I found a something....smallish rail-sized, but white with a dark head and wings and a curved bill. What could it  be, what could it be.....stay tuned.

Little birders. Peggy has her baby on the windowsill watching birdies.

Here's our list for the day:

Osprey
Red-tailed Hawk
Tree Swallow
Purple Martin
Fish Crow
European Starling
Red-winged Blackbird
Common Yellowthroat
Brown-headed Cowbird
Song Sparrow
Great Blue Heron
American Robin
American Goldfinch

*And then we left the parking lot for the actual refuge*

Red-eyed Vireo
Blue-winged Teal (ducklings)
Virginia Rail
Chipping Sparrow
Eastern Kingbird
Common Grackle
Killdeer
Canada Goose
American Coot (chicks)
Ring-billed Gull
Pie-billed Grebe (chicks)
Black Tern
Barn Swallow
Common Moorhen
Tufted Titmouse
L. Yellowlegs
Mallard
Mourning Dove
Black Duck
Herring Gull
Turkey Vulture
American Crow
American Redstart
Black-capped Chickadee
White-breasted Nuthatch
Sandhill Crane
Bald Eagle
Yellow Warbler
Cedar Waxwing
Trumpeter Swan (cygnets)
Kestrel
Marsh Wren