Enough Birds Already

OK, how about winter flowers. We’re getting to the end of the sassanquas but they are still very good and the camelias are just starting.

And for a bonus here’s Mr. Innocent, Who Me?, Do I look like I want to slaughter beautiful ducks?

 

More Bird Action

Thanks to our cat who celebrated the new day by bringing a wood duck drake in just after seven.  It was barely hurt and he chased it from one end of the house to the other before I got hold of him (the cat) and put him in Chancery.

Getting hold of the duck was another story with plenty of hilarious cartoon action as it waddled from room to room, went to ground in Ellen’s closet, hid under the bed, ran to the other end of the house and generally acted daffy.  I let it rest for a while, opened the outside door and herded it that way.  Once it saw the door open it took off from the middle of the kitchen, flew through the house, out the carport and off into the air squeaking with pleasure and relief.

 

Merlin Tiercel!

Here’s one way to keep the population of songbirds at your feeder down.  This fine tiercel missed a cardinal and then perched outside the kitchen window.  The digital zoom ruined the fine slaty blue color but still, it was exciting.

 

Another great walk in coastal Georgia

Because we can’t walk in our woods in hunting season we’ve been going afield and this week we found a real winner, Harris Neck Wildlife Refuge. Once a training air base for the Army it is now a park and it is beautiful. It’s peninsular location and varied habitat make it popular with the migrating and wintering birds. I’d been a little down about duck populations in the Atlantic flyway, roughly 10% of what they were when I was a little twitcher, and it was good to see such numbers and variety of water birds. Lots of teal (blue and green-winged), widgeons, coots, moorhens, all the waders, including wood storks and one thrilling fly-by of a female peregrine. Also the biggest gators we’ve seen in Georgia, even in Okefenokee. There are really fine trails through varied forest with good live oaks and moss and long leaf pine.

To make the day complete we went to the Altamaha Riverkeepers Clam Jam and dug into the oysters (from Louisiana, Florida and Georgia), clams and shrimp. A fine bluegrass band from Atlanta, the Dappled Grays played two good sets and we met some good folks. The riverkeepers in Georgia are fighting the good fight and we are grateful for them. We also support the Satilla riverkeeper, Gordon Rogers, a forceful advocate for an endangered ecosystem.

Green winged teal photo from christinevadai.com  Thanks.

 

Night swimming

Went out with a friend for some night time shrimping and it was really fun.  With a 75  by 4 foot seine net we walked out into the Brunswick River about two hours after high tide, around ten pm.  The water was about 74F, quite pleasant and there was plenty of moonlight along with the lights from the Lanier Bridge.  Once out to mid-chest level we turned downriver and forming a long curve with the net started to pull.  The water was alive, little splashing sounds all around, shrimps bouncing off me, phosphorescent trails and sparkles in the water.  We made four pulls and got about half a bucket of shrimp, say 15 pounds or so.  I also brought home a pail of crabs to try, never having cooked blue crabs before.  What do you know they’re pretty good.  It is a really fun way to fish, wading so far from shore, I can’t wait to do it again.

 

Other Reptiles

Not only do we have long skinny reptiles but big round ones too. Gopher tortoises were once very common here and their burrows are an important part of the ecosystem giving shelter to lots of other critters, including the long skinny kind of reptiles. We have a few of them here on the farm though one rarely sees them as they go about their unassuming business. They make a big sand pile at the mouth of their burrows and bury their round leathery eggs in the sand to incubate. Coons and coyotes sometimes leave evidence of egg feasts. This feller wandered through the yard on Friday and I put him in the screen house so Ellen could see him. That’s her hand for scale; he’s a big old thing and was pretty philosophical about an afternoon in the screenhouse.

Local opinion is that they are good to eat and watching him I was starting to think he probably is. General Winfield Scott hero/imperialist warmonger of the Mexican War retired from the Army at the beginning of the War between the States, spending his first leisure at Delmonico’s in NYC where he could get his fill of terrapin; “the best food vouchsafed by Providence to man” as he liked to say. A different critter but not much different. We don’t eat endangered species here, needless to say, even when they’re ‘vouchsafed by Providence.’

 

More Fun With Snakes

I know they say white men can’t jump and certainly my hoops ability tended to confirm that but now I know that its all about motivation.  I went reaching into the sandpaper drawer and was faced with this. There’s now a little head shaped dent in the roof of the barn.

 

Michael-ogical

The monsoon has made the yard bloom with an astonishing variety of shrooms. Given that they are the fruits of an organism of mycellial threads interwoven underground its curious they can all exist in the same space. There’s polypores, amanitas, agaricus and a fine Old Man of the Woods ( thats the grey shaggy one upper right ).

 

Strange doings in chickenland

I’ve been assembling the honey house and am finally done.  The extractor is up and running and we’ll have honey in the barn by the end of the day.  It will take a while to get it all done but having on site honey extraction is going to make possible better varietals and more exact harvesting.  In the past we’ve used  other facilities, one of them on Cumberland and its been more work than it should be.

Meanwhile back at the chickens, I was gathering eggs yesterday and was greeted by the sight of a 5 foot chicken snake getting its jaws around an egg.  Once I got him to yield up the egg and administered a lesson in not eating eggs I noticed yet another snake ( an oak snake, smaller, similar to the one pictured ) coiled up in the corner of the coop with the characteristic shape of an egg partway down it.  Eek.  The first snake in the coop this year and there are two of them, different species, side by side snacking on eggs. Strange doings indeed.  That rooster should shut up already and do some work.  If he can attack me, and he gave me the spurs just the other day, he ought to see off some puny snakes.

When I first heard of chicken snakes I assumed it was yet another southernism like ‘chicken hawk’ which refers not to a specific species of hawk but to all hawks that might like chickens.  My guide to local herps had no chicken snake.  Then during a trip to the Smithsonian I chanced to find the Okefenokee display and there it was, clearly identified, a chicken snake.  Egg snake would be more accurate because they don’t actually prey on hens but they love to steal eggs.  I don’t blame ‘em our eggs are delicious.

 

Dismal science

Well yes, there has been a little turbulence in the markets the last couple of weeks and its not easy to cut through the pablum served up by the media to figure out what it all means to regular folks, let alone bee farmers. One good analysis is up at Firedoglake, don’t miss the comments, especially #84, #107 and # 113. There’s some static, it being the web after all, but there is also some good thinking here.

I was in the Yucatan during the currency crisis Mexicans called ‘el Crack’ in 1993. With an odd group of friends ( a Mexican charter boat captain, a German retiree, an itinerant Aussie barber and others ) we would gather on the beach in the late morning to discuss classical economics through the lens of the chaotic and opaque events in the Mexican market and try to figure out how to use the day to day fluctuations to our advantage in stretching our hard currency assets. Since we were all, to some extent, gabacheros ( seekers of babes ) this was a counter productive activity because there is nothing that will turn people ( let alone babes ) off so quickly as the dismal science. Still we found it strangely exciting to be in a ‘crisis’ and tried hard to understand what was going on. It all helped me when I was in the middle of a very similar event in Asia a few years later. You see one crack you’ve seen, er……

I think there’s a shoe or two still to drop in this one, especially with the administration hunkered down trying to run out the clock.

Update: There’s a much shorter but interesting discussion of this at the excellent John Quiggin’s blog: