Another Cold and Gloomy One

But it is supposed to get nicer over the rest of the week. That short little summer we had was wonderful but what a tease! Still remarkably few interesting birds around....lots of assorted black birds, song sparrows, and winter holdovers, but the coot I saw on a national news show this morning was the most unusual sight all week. Where is our woodcock anyhow?


Opening day of trout season yesterday passed unremarked. I am too much of a wienie to fish in such weather...and really I think the fish are far too girly to bite when it is this cold too. The best trout catch I ever made was when a couple of friends and I rode horses for several days up to Murphy Lake and camped to fish. I was untangling a line someone had snarled up, sitting on a big rock with my toes in the lake with the worm dangling just over the surface while I teased apart the messy coils of monofilament.


Wham! A nice brookie that made a nice breakfast cooked on our campfire. Usually although I LOVE to fish I don't catch much.


I have written of that insane trip before. Only a complete and utter fool would ride a black horse into the mountains on opening day of early black bear season...and guess who rode a little black horse for well over twenty years.... (In my defense it was an unusual September season and we just didn't know, but still...when we came out of the woods to find the road lined with trucks and bristling with armed guys looking for large black animals...well....)


Anyhow, the calendar says spring, the buds on the tulips say spring, the daffodils are already folding their tents...now if the weather would just get on the same page.

Today vs Yesterday

Two seconds before I shot the lower photo, yesterday when it was sunny and nice, vs snowy and cold, the cat was sniffing the daffodil. What a great opportunity right? Alas, too slow as usual. 

Clotheslined

I'm sure that in the winter a clothes drier's a fine thing...just a rumbly, numbly, grumbly and your laundry's nice and warm.


And on those gloomy, damp and rainy days too, I'm sure gonna bet.


Not much else that you can do when all your stuff is wet.


But on a sunny, June-in-March day, not unlike this outright fine day


A couple trees and a hank of rope is plain flat out the best way.


A nice, long, waving clothesline beats a homely metal box.


Nineteen ways to sideways, and seven days a week


Bracing breezes set the jeans and sweatshirts dancing, 


Do-see-do. 


A junco twitters sweetly from the spruce (wish I could "follow" him and hear his "tweets" all springtime long.)


Sun-shined purple petals on the crocus by the pond and the maples cross the river have their summer lipstick on.


Yeah, on days like this I'll take a clothesline any time...Laundry isn't work at all in this sunny springtime world.

Something is Blooming

Weather

Simply amazing, although not unprecedented. Just before my dear brother was sent to Korea we had a spring like this. Had the fences all built by the end of March with his help and oats planted in early April.


Too wet this spring for much of that, but the boss and I have both spent some time cutting brush out of the pasture fence. I needed some alone time Saturday so I hung the camera case around my neck, grabbed my brush nippers, and headed up the hill. Took a while to get into the swing of things...been feeding with the men all winter long, so you would think I would be in shape, but nipping off rose bushes and honeysuckle takes different muscles than hauling hay on a pitch fork.


Still, I cut all the way to the first creek and didn't get sore at all so I guess I am not too bad off for someone who will officially turn old this summer.




The boss went out while I was doing housework yesterday and cut all the way to the first ravine on the south fence, which is pretty darned good. He came in dripping and shedding sweatshirts though.


You can just see a haze of green on the hillsides and I am so grateful. We are buying all our feed and it is painful in the extreme, what with fuel and grain so high and milk prices free falling. Can't wait until there is enough grass to turn out and I surely want to get the fence back up on the old pasture this year. It is real rough going, but there is usually quite a lot of grass out there.

Can't wait to see the girls arrayed on the hill behind the house like spotted beads on an invisible string....one of my favorite sights of all.

Blustery as a Politician

(But without the hot air.) 


Migrants are coming though quickly now, on their way to northern nesting spots.  Nothing exciting yet, but we saw the first turkey vulture up west yesterday.


This morning Cananda geese stretched across the sky from horizon to horizon.


Our horizons are a lot closer than they are out west, but that is still several miles of flock. I paused in the pulling on of socks to marvel at the sheer numbers of them. 


 Imagine all those hundreds of birds, each the size of a cat, each with wings strong enough to knock you on your butt if you tangle with one, tumbling through the wind like acrobats, right above your head, practically hovering in front of the big living room windows.


The wind was strong indeed, because they were struggling to get moving and to stretch out in their Vs to go wherever they forage each day. 


Some of the flocks are breaking down into pairs already, but most are still in groups from six to six or seven hundred. They drove the boss nuts the other night when I was getting up and down with the sick heifer...they sound a lot like coyotes!


I won't lie and say I like cold weather but you can feel the seasons getting ready to change despite the winter storm warnings on the weather stations. And the daffodils by the kitchen corner are never wrong for long.

It's Official

The migration has begun. A Facebook friend out west heard sandhill cranes......


And while we were feeding last night, I was watching the sky as I always do, (once a sky watcher, always a sky watcher), and a flock of black birds surged by, intent, purposeful.
Racing for the best nest sites somewhere other than here.


Not starlings.


Grackles, first of the year. Mixed with smaller birds, probably brown-headed cow birds.


I was thrilled. Not that they are especially nice birds, but it gave me cold chills, like great music does. I went into the barn with my big fork full of hay, tense with a special excitement.


It may still be February but in just a few weeks the woodcock will be back, wings whistling his sky dance song in the horse pasture. The killdeers will scream frantically out on the hill. The spring peepers, (who used to be hyla crucifer but are now pseudacris crucifer just to confuse those of us who learn Latin names for the heck of it), will let out their first tenuous squeaks, then begin a vibrant chorus, then offer a deafening din from the swamps down on Corbin Hill Road to the south of us.


A little later the smaller brood over in the old horse pasture will tune up. I have to strain to hear them over the traffic, but it is worth every effort to know that their fingernail-sizes selves are singing near by.


To me spring is the most lovable of seasons, full of the joy of birth, newness, freshness, wonder and awe. Like the beginning of being in love when we want to share our new found happiness with everyone. This year it seems even more so...such a winter.....it is like climbing out from under a dark rock.


I know we still have weeks of winter left, but the first migratory birds are such a welcome and long-awaited delight. As I came in from the barn I paused, another thing I always do, and listened and wondered. What might be flying high overhead in the misty clouds shrouding the sky? I didn't hear anything, but the arrival of the grackles let me know that there could be almost anything up there just the same....except maybe sandhill cranes. 


***I saw on a bird list I read that blue grosbeaks and hooded orioles have been seen in western NY in recent years. I am eagerly hoping for a chance to check off the former on my life list and having them show up in NY makes that seem much more possible than before. I'm excited about that too.

Wicked Weather

We just got regular spring thundershowers. (Not like we needed the rain or anything, but not much harm done.) However, up west of here, right near the homes of some of the kids' friends it was really wild I guess.

Meanwhile, Liz bought me my first ice cream of the season. I took a ride up west with her yesterday as she had to get some hay and shavings and feed all the horses she and the BF care for. She stopped at Auntie Kim's and got me some sort of orange pineapple concoction that was perfect for our first really hot, sunny day of the year.

I also discovered that the weather this winter simply wiped out my herb garden. The lovage lived, as did the garlic chives, walking onions, regular chives and orange mint.

Pretty much everything else seems to be completely gone. Can you imagine a winter nasty enough to kill spearmint!?!

I began a complete do-over, re-dig mission so I can get some new thyme and such for the empty spots. Sadly the speedwell also bit the dust after nearly ten years of out-bluing the skies and jays. That will probably be hard to replace, since I have only ever seen it for sale once...the time I bought it.

In honor of the warmish weather I made hummingbird food this morning. They should be back pretty soon, cold or not.

Music of Our Days

Woke up from good sleep to a cardinal.

Singing, seemingly two inches from my ear.

Felt like someone sliding a letter opener into my head. He must have been perched on a twig right next to the window.

Thought with all that singing it might be sunny.

Nope, rain through Friday.

At least.

This cold, wet, weather is setting crop planting back, right across the nation and messing with the commodities markets something fierce, or so I have heard. It is messing, in a quite literal sense of that word, with everything here. Lotsa mud. Lots.

Not only is getting on the land a distant dream, but just cleaning up is going slowly.

But back to music. After I wrote about my new song, my dear brother arrived on a mercy mission involving mom and dad's frozen food (which has been staying with us due to the death of their freezer, but now it can go home to their new one), with a CD full of songs he had burned for me. Then Jinglebob sent me three fantastic songs that he made.

I am awash in riches....just swimming in musical joy. Thanks!

And yesterday morning when we went out the daffodils were prostrate under the weight of a frost from night so cold it defied description. They were just getting pretty, the earliest ones a couple days in bloom

I despaired.

However, by the time we were done with morning chores they had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and were shining their sunny faces right at us. Such a glorious resurrection seems particularly fitting to me just now.

Fencing

Alan and I started today. He cut brush and fixed wires. I carried the bucket of tools and staples and took pictures.

Rinse Cycle

Upstate NY style.

Yeah, March looks like dragging on at least into August.

If you are droughty blame NY. Flood watches, flood warnings, cold, cold, cold, trains keeping us awake all night because the lowering clouds send the noise right up here.

We have your rain.

All of it, or so it seems.

If I could catch it and read its license tags I would call the rain control officer and send it back.

I know you need it......

And we just......don't...

Hey, wait, maybe it is micro chipped!

What Not to Do

Got out the shorts the day before yesterday. (Such a fashion statement when worn with high rubber boots and heavy sweatshirts). Washed and put away my ancient Brown's Feed winter hat and the fleece vest I won at the Midvale Vet Clinic picnic several years ago.... Which I wear between the several-many turtle necks and sweatshirts of winter and the once-blue, but now sort of slatey-dun over shirt to keep off the snow.

It has been in the upper fifties with sun, light breezes, sometimes a little nippy, but nicely invigorating. There be spring peepers and some new kind of sparrow, which calleth from the mulberry tree when I was working in the yard yesterday. Somebody with a thick, buzzy, guttural call I have never heard before.

Liz's boy friend even rototilled the garden last night. (Thanks, Jade.) Man, that dirt looks like crumbly chocolate cake, all fluffy and black and begging for seed.

Garlic is up and doing great. Becky and I planted FIVE ROWS last fall. (I normally plant about twenty cloves.) I don't know what got into us, but a good third of the upper garden is in garlic.

It is easy to see why the one farm implement I have never driven is the corn planter. I have chopped, I have baled, I have raked and raked and raked. I have cultipacked, and disked a little and driven the tedder for hours. But never the planter...or the grain drill for that matter. Not without reason.

My garlic rows are nice and straight.

Parallel, not so much. Looks like I was writing my initials in garlic, a sort of a smelly tribute to my homemade spaghetti sauce or something.

Alas as I sit here shivering at the computer with that freshly laundered vest on INDOORS plus long johns, and a heavy sweater and a turtleneck and a sweatshirt, I am figuring that it may be just a tad too early for planting anything but lettuce.

And I plant that in barrels.

Ah, well, spring is a firm believer in courtship, and makes us all dance attendance on her.

One step forward and two steps back. It'll get here, don't you worry.

Flight Delay

Coltsfoot blossoms buttering up the ditches

Big old yeller moon out painting on the town.

Bright golden sun bursting down the hallway

Greeting me when I get up.

Dagnabbit...

I overslept!

Those night meetings are just a killer.

The Calm Before the Storm

I wouldn't call it a calm really, more of a perilous pause. You can't take an eighty-degree day in April in the Northeast and not get something out of it when the evening cool rolls in.

You can surely feel that something coming. The air turns all dense and buttery, thick and thin at once. Like invisible water. Just starting to move. It crowds in all around you as you walk through it, feeling the strength of it and all the energy it has gathered up while the sun thumped down on it all day.

It is still...no leaves to move yet... the leftover grass lies pressed against the ground, the woodpile canvas shrouds the logs in silence. Distant sounds ring like an omen..is that train across the river coming right here up the hill?

Batten down the hatches. Unplug the computers, close the doors, feed the pony, air the doggy. It is coming.

Then a hay string on the dump truck canvas begins to twirl. Just an eddy. A thin little thread poking at it.

A bright pink flash cracks across the valley. lighting up the river.

Snap, crackle, bang, rattle, gust and howl, drip and slash, it is here just at dinner time. We eat our homemade spaghetti sauce dumped over an interesting mixture of assorted pastas that caught Becky's fancy and listen to it lumber down the valley....the first of what will surely be many of its ilk. I guess it must really be spring....finally.

Dawn Walk

This week's Sunday Stills got me thinking of sunrises and landscapes. When the sun started peeping out yesterday Nick and I ventured to the top of the heifer pasture hill with the camera.

There was not a lot going on bird wise..robins, killdeers, crows and assorted black birds, titmice, song sparrows and such.

The mist was rising off the grass though, the river was reflecting softly, the dog was being a good boy, and the sun put on a fine show.

Shadow farm wife with shadow farm dog

Morning

I take a lot of photos of this big spruce on our neighbor's lawn. About twice a week the boss looks out the window and says, "You know, that tree is just about perfect."

I guess it is and photogenic too. About two seconds after I took this the woodcock blew out of the bushes right at my feet, which made me very glad I walked down the driveway instead of driving.

Trying not to be Greedy

For spring. But it is hard not to be. Went out to check cows in a soft, early morning rain, an Irish rain, not enough to even wet my pull over, but wet enough to hear.(The kind of rain that just might bring on the new grass....I look every day at the hill behind the house...is it green yet? No but soon.)

Wet enough to get the robins going out there in the dark.

And going they were, dozens of them everywhere around, north, south, east, and west, and all points in between. Killdeers too, and four...at least four...song sparrows. The phoebes showed up at the creek day before yesterday, but either they don't like rain or they sleep late. They are not calling.

No woodcock either, although we have heard him a couple of times. I like to think of him out there in the short grass part of the pasture, trotting around on his stubby little legs and shouting imperatives to his lady. Then tumbling sky-high, all whistle and flute, only to drift gently back down and do it all again.

Just a couple weeks ago there were barely any birds and they surely were not singing before dawn. I took a little walk this morning though, just my Hall's cough drop and me, listening for more...new...better...different. Who else is back and taking up territory? Yeah, I am greedy for more spring no two ways about it.

No calves this morning and the sump pump the guys rigged yesterday did its job pretty well, so the flooding is negligible. Thankfully.

We are hoping for some decent weather to get some fencing done and some manure on the fields before the serious spring work begins.

One of my goals each summer is to learn a couple new bird songs. I am not good remembering sounds in that fashion so it is a challenge, but one that I much enjoy. Last year I got indigo bunting and Carolina wren......Who will it be this year?

Barnyard Math

Take one pair of pea fowl in a coop near the stove

Plus one bright, breezy spring day. It is really nice out.

Which makes them cheerful and talkative (pea fowl sound just like what you might get if you crossed a provoked pig with an amorous jackass).

Add one boss man splitting kindling so the old lady (who has cleaned out the stove) can build a new fire.....

And what do you get?

Whack....SCREAM....whack..SCREAM....whack..SCREAM.

Every time that ax hit the wood, the male shrieked as if he had been hit. It was funny as heck. Of course when the sun is shining, the air is full of spring and the sky is afluff with poofy clouds, it doesn't take a whole lot to make me laugh.

Chicken Polish

This guy's been hittin' it.

Hairy Butt

Hairy woodpecker that is. We have downies all the time, but this pair of hairies is the first in a long while. I heard them before I saw them..their chinking call is quite different, louder and more musical, than that of the downies. For some reason the female spent at least ten minutes guddling around under the stones in the herb garden the other day. Photo was taken through the window so it isn't the greatest, but I guess you can get the idea.

Things are in a sort of holding pattern here. Mud, sunken driveway, hard to get at the feed. Just waiting for better weather to bless us. It is always thus in early spring.....however, I visited the garden section while picking up a few things at Wally World yesterday.

What a sweet renewal! Red flower pots! Green flower pots! Dirt! Peat pellets! Seeds, seeds, seeds! Felt like a kid at a carnival.

Life was worth living again... I am going to save up and have me one of those glazed red flower pots with the nice water catchers, yes I am. Wouldn't it look nice with a bright, cardinal red geranium planted in it? And I just happen to have a baby one out on the kitchen window sill.