Fifteen Years on the Erie Canal

A bit of Erie Canal history we visit several times a week

Or at least that's how the song went in my head last night as we listened to the High Kings play it at the Egg in Albany. They sang a slightly different, but also correct, version mentioning fifteen miles instead.

Can you believe that according to George Murphy they learned it just for our enjoyment at the show last night as they had made the trip from Albany to Buffalo so many times? How awesome is that! I sure enjoyed it, having learned the song in grade school and loved stories of the canal as long as I can remember. One of my favorite books when I was a kid was Molly's Hannibal, which you might enjoy if you like kids' historical fiction. The boss's great grandparents worked on the canal at one time.

There was plenty of other new-to-us material, as well as enough older favorites to get the whole crowd out of their seats, clapping, singing along, and downright enthusiastically at that.

Great fun, with the added treat of some lovely young Irish dancers from a local dance school performing to the rousing Whiskey in the Jar.

Thanks Becky for the tickets, and the boss for driving, especially for the trip home in greasy, gleaming rain that made it hard to see the road. I realized last night how many times these guys' songs are featured on the jukebox which plays pretty much continuously in the back of my mind. Not a bad thing.

Taken looking down at the water in one of the remaining locks on the canal

Happy Birthday

To Amber, our very dear new daughter-in-law. We love and miss you guys and hope you have a wonderful day and a great weekend.

Finally!

A half-way decent shot of a Black-throated Green Warbler. I have several embarrassingly awful shots of them. However, today the yard was full of them. I swear every third bird was a BTGW. This one was foraging in the Winesap apple tree and held still for at least one whole second....just enough...

More Things

Tall tall trees

The Things you See

Question Mark

Winterberry

A Fluffy butt

Wilson's Warbler

A cutie heading off to school

Carolina Wren

Morning

Common Yellowthroat

The sun is slowly creeping over the horizon. I have been up for hours writing and working on stuff.

Magnolia Warbler

Time to reward myself with a quick trip outdoors to look for warblers and fall sparrows. We saw the first White-throated Sparrows of the fall season yesterday in two different locations. Plus over the past couple of weeks it has been a veritable warbler extravaganza here on the farm, with the year total reaching fifteen species....much to my excitement...

Blue-winged Warbler 7/28

Palm Warbler 4/27

Black-and-white Warbler 8/6

Blackburnian Warbler 5/5

Yellow Warbler 5/2

Common Yellowthroat 5/3

American Redstart 5/20

Pine Warbler 8/26

Black-throated Green Warbler 9/15

Magnolia Warbler 9/15

Blackpoll Warbler 9/12

Bay-breasted Warbler 9/19

Northern Waterthrush 9/20

Yellow-rumped Warbler 9/22

Ovenbird 7/13

***Update: Northern Parula this morning. My first ever!

What will this morning bring? Maybe only common birds...maybe something really cool.

You never know until you go look, so off I go. Talk to you later. 

Cathy, your warbler came to visit...Wilson's Warbler, one of my favorites

Who Dunnit?

First and Last

Last of the Coneflowers

First Moonflower. Thank you Linda!

First Heavenly Blue, first thing this morning

Last Ruby-throated Hummingbird? Ours have been gone for a while,
so this one and her partner are probably passing migrants
I put the feeder back out, just in case the cannas run out of nectar

Of the season.

They were tremendously hungry and mostly ignored me

Oh, Honey

Tis the season of roadside stands and we have been taking full advantage. Winter squash from one Amish farm, apples from our favorite orchard, and tomatoes and homey from a new place we discovered in our travels.

I love honey but I won't buy it if it isn't local. Foreign honey is often of dubious quality and we have a number of excellent bee keepers in the area.

We stopped the other day at a stand on a rural road near here and bought some nice tomatoes and a little jar of honey.

It is wings down the best honey I have ever tasted. Like Mozart for your mouth, sweet, light, fragrant, and flavored just like you might think flowers would taste if you ate flowers. Better than orange blossom honey and that is saying something.

We went back for a second jar for me and one for my folks and may even go back for more before the season ends. Good stuff!

My new bench

Crew Cut

Corn is being harvested at a breathtaking rate around here. Corn crews are flying over the fields; the big corn trucks rumble down the roads at a scary pace, and the landscape looks different every time we drive by.

We went over to look at the stuff at the fall machinery auction yesterday and grabbed the video below of one of the big farmers actually chopping. Don't miss the bunnies late in the clip....they were in a big hurry to get out of Dodge.

Mud Flats

They were not kidding about lowering the river.
What fun to walk here

Lots of stranded mud bugs

Which we rescued if we could

Mud Birds..Greater Yellowlegs

In the Cloud

Woke up to the scent of water today, as if  driving up to Peck's Lake and crossing the magical boundary between town and mountain. As soon as you enter the trees you can smell the water there.

This grumpy old cloud named Florence isn't really raining so much as she is bleeding warm water, drip, drip, drop, drop....

So many drips, so many drops. Sheets down the driveway. Puddles everywhere.

So much water.

They lowered the upper dams on the river locks yesterday, from Scotia to Fort Plain. Mad props to them, as this will hopefully mitigate the threat of flooding. We have seen enough of that in the past few years. It makes for good birding with all those shorelines bared for foraging. I am hoping to get down to see how she looks, but there are a lot of busy people with other agendas in line ahead of me.

This will sure slow down the corn harvest for a few days though. Over the past week it has been astonishing to see how fast the fields have been stripped. Drive by a cornfield on the way to a reservoir we visit and see a full field of stalks and ears. An hour later nothing but stubble and the big choppers have moved on to another field and then another. 

The landscape is changing fast in a hurricane of corn.

Kinda like a barber shop at a Marine base at the beginning of basic training.

And who can blame them. It is much nicer and more efficient to chop on hard dry ground than it is to wallow in mud. All this water will make plenty of that.

Speaking of water.....

To the Far Blue Mountains, and the Wild Mountain Lakes