Shiverish

 

As I sit in a house built of bones of old forest with elixir of beans from a far southern continent, I savor the flavor of seasoned fall gourds...or a reasonable chemical facsimile thereof... plucked sunny from fields just to sparkle my drink.

Somebody's sorrow gourd
Found in the parking lot of a place we bird

I shiver.

The cold has come, is coming and will come. I have made it through my annual challenge. Why must I compel myself to make it harder?

I don't know.

But every year from April to October, I wear shorts.

Every day. 

I count it as a personal failure if I break out my sweats during that interval, but I soldiered through all the way into fall. The weather cooperated.

This year, fool that I am, I decided to shoot for THRU October and have done just fine.

Up until now. The temperature is going well below freezing. The garden is toast....but I am.....not...

Four more days...

Just four more days....

Brrrr...

Also, it is time for two of my most hated jobs of the year. We must dig the cannas and put the insulation board and tarp over the big front doors, in futile hope of keeping out the north wind because that is where they point.

 We stall, and stall, and stall, every single year, until it simply essential to do the job and then we shiver and complain through it.

The cannas are worse. However, the hummingbirds love them so we perservere.

Happy Fall y'all.

Intruder

 Machine gun chatter of spruce-crazed squirrels, sentinel jays scream out their warning, intruder! Intruder! Intruder!

It's raining spruce cones again. Ripe ones now, so perhaps not as threatening as the hard green ones were earlier, but still I have to raise the thick hood of my father's old green Carhartt to stave them off sometimes. I wear it, partly because it is the warmest thing I own, but mostly in his honor. He passed down the love of the woods and the whole bird thing, and those are some of the best parts of my life.

In one spot so many cones are tumbling down from seventy or eighty feet up that I have to run (Imagine that...me, running!) to dodge them. (First time I have run since the days of chasing cows and I am amazed that I could. Didn't even kill me.)

I succeed in remaining undamaged, although some were mighty close.

Hah, hah, you missed me!

At least this time.

Anyone who imagines the forest to be a quiet place hasn't been there lately. The woods at the Blues at Burbine contain ten million, seven-hundred, and sixty-leven squirrels, both red and grey, along with a few dozen munks of chip, and as of Sunday, myriad migrating sparrows of all sorts.

Along with an occasional breeze rustling what's left of the leaves and the creaking of elderly trees and knees, it makes for a singularly unquiet place.

Which is fine by me.

 I do a lot of birding by ear and the noisy juncos and their ilk are quite unbothered by my visit to their domain. Most of the birds I saw yesterday were migrants, passing through or looking for a place to winter. However, at least one pair of Dark-eyed Juncos raised a brood of young right here in the woods this year. I got to see them shortly after they left the nest and hear them singing all summer long...which was pretty cool.

Meanwhile, I've been bringing home acorns for Ralph's chipmunks and carrying peanuts for our jays. They come streaming in from wherever they await, crying, "What has it got in its pocketses? Huh? Huh?"

Why is it

 

That there is a soul-deep joy in putting out the plants in the spring, in planting the cannas, in starting tomatoes and whatever strange and mysterious flowers that Becky has bought for me, yet bringing them all in is like a husky black cloud glooming up my day?

I don't know, but there are three rows of canna lilies out there to dig and store, plus a whole batch of the dwarf ones in pots to haul indoors. Ugh. At least the houseplants are in and safe.

BTW, this year and last I saved seed from my favorites of these little ones and grew new plants from them. I tried starting the seeds in peat pellets, which worked somewhat, but germination was poor at best. However I put some right out in the dirt in big pots in the spring and got lovely plants that bloomed eagerly. At five bucks a plant this is a real economy...plus I do love a garden challenge.

We had an incredible haul of tomatoes this year. They must love the hot dry weather we have had. There is still maybe a peck or two out there, mostly pretty green, but we will pick them all and see what happens. Becky has offered to see how fried green tomatoes do in the air fryer, so we can probably use them one way or another. (Update: nothing left out there now, but the Husky Red Cherry tomatoes that haven't ripened yet.)

I am not a winter person, and tending my myriad houseplants over the winter is a poor substitute for a real garden and cheerful flowers any place I can fit a plant. However, October Big Day is Saturday, and the sea ducks should be drifting through in the coming weeks, so there's that....

Happy Fall to All.

On Becoming an Influencer

 

I get da peanuts

I run on down

It started with peanuts. When you reach a certain age, you look for entertainment anywhere you can find it. In my case, I'm a pretty cheap date. Feeding peanuts to the Blue Jays works for me.

However, the bossman is a fan of the dastardly clever little chipmunks. He likes to feed THEM peanuts.

Chonk-munk

This creates a situation of great conflict, since they are both aggressive and ravenous. The 'munks gather continuously, stuffing cheeks full of anything that will fit (and many things that won't). 

I get the peanuts

And I scarf em on down

The jays have to carry the nuts away one-by-one and crack them out of the shells to enjoy them.

Thus the chipmunks have had about a four-to-one advantage over the birds.

Since nuts are pretty expensive to toss on the ground for the wildlife, I have pondered and experimented in ways to slant the game in the blue folks' favor.

I don't get the peanuts but this cracked corn isn't
too bad

This morning I became an influencer, if only in who gets the peanuts and who doesn't.

Because I was defrosting the big freezer I was later than usual in sneaking outside to my birding chair to parcel out my share of the nuts. The jays had evidently given up on me and by the time they came back to the yard the 'munks had eaten ALL the nuts.

What are peanuts?
Are they anything like lettuce?

I had two leftovers in my pocket and when one of my blue-feathered buddies landed by the place I put nuts, I made sure he was watching me and tossed one out by my feet. He tipped his head back and forth a couple times as if debating whether I wanted to eat him, then darted down and nabbed it.

Within minutes the local jays were gathered around watching me. Whenever I tossed a nut out of my pocket they were all over it in no time flat. The chipmunks only got one out of a whole pocketful

So now I am a backyard influencer. I can hardly wait until tomorrow when it is time to meet the morning flight.

Fie on peanuts
Imma get you all!
(This is not our cat, but if you know whose cat it is,
tell them they might want to keep him home...)

Attempted Murder

 If you visit the boat launch at Schoharie Crossing, beware of the lane near the aqueduct. It is a pretty rough neighborhood.

I bravely stupidly walked there today and was nearly assaulted. As I strolled under a black walnut tree, tennis ball-sized nuts began to rain down and I do mean rain. Thud-Thud-Thud-Thud-Thud, one after another a lot faster than I can type. The farther I walked the faster they came.

I held my binoculars on top of my head (better them than me) and hustled to get out from under that tree, only to realize (see stupid above) that the entire lane is lined with walnut trees. When I finally reached the relative safety of a giant black locust I looked back to see a red squirrel literally racing up a branch, nipping nut stems and dropping them as fast as he could run!

Dang! What did I ever do to him?

He kept dropping nuts until I was good distance away and then went back to gathering in for winter.

Speaking of red squirrels, check out this pile of spruce cones. Red squirrels gather and pile them for winter storage. They eat the seeds contained under the scales. They do a lot of dropping of these too, and they sound like cannon fire as they ricochet off the dry lower branches of the trees, but they don't seem quite as threatening as the walnuts.

Maybe I should get a helmet. 

Staycation

Gray Catbird

We had intended to visit Maine again this fall and Becky took several days off to accommodate same. However, she and I both had a hinky feeling about it and we pretty much stayed home...just took trips within NY. 

White-crowned Sparrow

Guess that was a good thing, as the car coughed up a stabilizer bar Saturday and was clunking mightily at every corner. It wasn't a big or expensive fix but it nixed our planned trip up north to Tupper Lake to see Canada Jays and look for other boreal birds, plus tourist around a little.

Since it got fixed so quickly we chased around a little yesterday afternoon, but the best birding of the day was from my chair in the backyard with the pleasant companionship of my good buddy Earl.

Earl is a wonderful birding companion,
never makes a sound and sits perfectly still

I have been pretty much stalled on adding species to my 2025 Montgomery County list, but two nice ones showed up yesterday, a Mourning Warbler that was noodling around in the honey locust tree and then flew almost into my face, and a group of Lincoln's Sparrows that seemed to be everywhere at once.

Song Sparrow

Why is it that the cool birds are so hard to photograph? I can get decent shots of Magnolia Warblers and Common Yellowthroats almost every year, but something uncommon like that MOWA is impossible to catch. I spent at least an hour creeping around the yard trying to get a photo of one of those LISPs, but only captured about a dozen Song Sparrows, another cooperative species of bird when it comes to photos.

Ha, ha, I win....

Guess I will go out now, and put the old sleeping bag in my chair, haul out my coffee, bins, and camera and see what I can find.

Looking for peanuts

The Blue Jays are hollering for their peanuts...

The chipmunks stole all the peanuts.....

Update: I was a bit luckier this afternoon....

Lincoln's Sparrow

Tripping with the Birds

 It appears to have been a while since I posted here. Busy, busy, busy, getting the houseplants situated back in the house, picking tomatoes and turning them into frozen red sauce, and chasing after birds all over the place.

First was the Barrens Birding Blitz, my first venture into competitive team birding. As you might imagine I loved it. I saw a number of advertisements for it., but knew I couldn't go, as we only have one car. Then my friend and birding mentor, George Steele, asked if I would like to team up with him for the day.

Been experimenting with editing....

Well, heck yes! It was a lot of fun. I hadn't been to the Pine Bush since the early seventies, and although it has changed...A LOT...it is still a magical place. I could walk all day on the sandy trails through field and forest. We found forty-two species in the five-hour time window and I came home with my first ever bird event tee shirt.

Then we took what turned out to be a staycation. We had intended to head for Maine for four or five days but real life intruded on that plan, so we did local-ish trips. A shopping trip for Becky Thursday, Montezuma for me on Friday, McFadden's machinery auction for Ralph yesterday, and hopefully a trip north tomorrow.

Montezuma was weird. They drained the main pool to control unwanted vegetation I guess, and although it is said to be refilling now, there was very little water and almost no birds there. However, we visited Van Dyne Spoor Road for the Sandhill Crane unit and that was packed with egrets, herons, coots, gallinules and ducks. The Audubon Center had a nice  number of shorebirds, but it was pretty hot by the time we got there and I was about walked out, so we didn't see all of it.

Black-throated Green Warbler

Home birding was nice too. I am working on taming the locals by feeding cracked corn and peanuts right in the driveway by my backyard birding office chair. The jays and chipmunks are hilarious as they war over the peanuts.

Northern House Wren

Anyhow, please excuse my long pauses in writing here. Real life is just so interesting this time of year. Hugs