Fall Fodder

Another slow week, and I think this is the new normal for me.  Im sharing some of the interesting things I saw this past week. We had a few rain days. 

The Cyprus trees at Goodale Park are changing, I hope to catch them when they get to peak...

I scared a Great Egret off his feeding spot...

This pic is not too sharp but I really like the curled proboscis so Im sharing, a Palamedes Swallowtail...

Golden rod  provides food to so many insects this time of year

And more creepy hairy things to avoid...

The colors are changing pretty fast, one thing I love about fall is all the full swaying field plants  lush with seed heads and providing food and shelter for all sort of insect and wild life.  

It's layers and layers of food, color, and cover.

These Tall Sedge tops  are a shimmering shade of blush it really sparkles...

Fall produces lots of great flowers for bees, wasp, butterfly and when these flowers fade, the seed heads appear and migrating birds will be looking forward to this as they make the big fall trip.  

Blue Jays love acorns...this guy has plucked 2 at one time.

I got the attention of a Pine Warbler

And Tulip is visiting, she is one of the regulars to my yard... this is the young doe who I saw early in the spring with a rear leg injury...somehow she survived, it looked like a broken leg to me, and she walked with great difficulty and up on the tip of her toe, that is why I started calling her Tulip...NOW she is walking with confidence, and she can jump as good as any deer, she really overcame a huge disability. 

its the back leg on this side, you can see the old scar ...she is so familiar with my yard she comes right into my flower beds and nips the top off the flowers...but how can I not welcome and love that sweet face...and a strong will to survive. 

PEACE

Every day is a new Adventure.

7 Ordinary days

Friday: 02.14.2020
I propped two very sweet valentine's cards that arrived in the mailbox up on the fireplace mantle...and I dug through the many cards I had saved from Mom thru the years, and I put one on the Fridge...because it reminds me of how much she loved me.  Do you keep cards given to you, and do you hope the ones you send are kept and cherished by someone you love? 

Saturday: 02.15.2020
I went back to the County Park, and found 2 Winter Wrens this time.  They both chattered back exactly to the playback from my phone...Since I didn't get a sweet look  before they disappeared into a thicket, I wanted to be sure it was Winter Wrens again...and it def was.  I got an exciting shot of the rosy blush of the Red Bellied Woodpecker against a wonderful rare blue sky.

The Water is receding but still quite high as the sign below can testify.  The new shoreline has no path along the edges so I hope the bank walk  will return. 

 

Amazing what you find, some sort of fish?  Catfish? Ancient Alien?

I hung out there a couple hours, then I drove to another park. I love fields where fence posts follow the road, some great birding can happen along those barbed wire perches! Today I found not one, but two Loggerhead Shrikes...the other was in a tree...a mating pair?

At the Lake Wateree State Park, there was also flooding, note the hiking trail...

You could bushwhack and get around it for the most part... This Great Blue Heron was finding his lunch there just off the trail on he may have been on the trail, I couldn't tell. 

No picnic today! This is the table we sat at on our last trip here. 

Sunday 02.16.2020:

I took part in the Big Backyard Bird Count.  It's a 15 minute quick look...So on Friday at 4 pm I had 19 species, on Saturday I had only 9 species at 8 am...then today it's raining again, so I watched from the porch at about noon...I got 13 species.   So I learned something; my feeders and yard attract more birds in the afternoon..

Spent the rest of the rain day organizing some of the Mom photos that I did not have in albums but were stored in bins...listened to my Seals and Croft LP's, watched cooking shows on TV, read your blogs, and worked on this post. The Pine Warblers are warbling loudly from under the Dogwood by the window in between rain showers, and I saw one American Crow carrying nesting material! Life continues.

Monday 02.17.2020,
It was a blue bird day as we say.  The sky was as blue as, you guessed it, the blue bird.  I hung around the homestead and worked on a project...My found item deck chairs needed a new coat of paint so I scraped and painted.  I got 2 of the 3 pieces done..and I used the left over paint from Mom's Ramp. A squirrel has already taken a few bites of the chair! I had to remove the cushions after they destroyed one. Somewhere there is nest full of polyester fiber!

Tuesday: 2.18.2020
Gloomy! Awoke to grey bleak skies, answered email and was reminded of waking up on Saturdays as a child.  That meant the day started with cartoons, and always a day outside playing and wandering. Days like that gave me butterflies.  When was the last time anything gave you butterflies? 

Wednesday: 02.19.2020
More gloom and rain! UGH>I had to run into town for bird seed! I got some onion sets for my garden pots, and checked out my already coming up Black Seeded Lettuce, and Spinach.  Birds are happy! I am keeping these pots covered so the Squirrels won't get my baby greens.  

Thursday: 02.20.2020
Wow...lots of 2's.  In 202 years plus 2 days it will be 02.22.2222 None of us will be here for that...:o/  More rain! Im getting cabin fever, and we may get a wintry mix around 9 pm, it won't accumulate here they say but it could be icy overnight on the roads. Rain Rain Go Away...The SC roads workers have 9 tons of salt..trust me they don't know how to use it, once they salted a road near us and they put it down so heavy it disintegrated the tarmac and it became a gravel/dirt road again!  They repaved, but what a waste. 

 a few camellia blossoms fell off in the heavy rain

Friday 02.21.2020

Finally a sunny but very cold day!  I went to visit Mom...and now it's all final the date she arrived on Earth and the day she skipped outta here and Arrived someplace else...I hope there's trees and birds there...and she gets butterflies every single day. 

Please take a moment to check out the new Etsy link on my right side bar especially if you're into sewing in any way, the Fabric Corner Store, fabric is $1 per yd!!  There is some finished items as well. (....pssst it's family owned) 

PEACE

Every day is a new Adventure.

Down but Not OUT!

Still trying to pick up the pieces of our recent loss...and the weather waxes and wanes from good to bad every other day...yesterday was good! My sis and her husband returned home this week, I sure miss her and hope she has a great winter... lucky me I have 2 sisters and one has remained for a while I'm so glad to report.  We are taking care of the last affairs and going through some of Mom's personal things...its hard but it has to be done.

Y'all know we are into the cemetery photography and so we decided the best way to resume normal for us is to go tromp around a graveyard and with Jimmy beside us, we did just that.

We had a list of about 50 names to find and photograph the headstone of, and we did find most of them.  This cemetery is named Bethany Tiller Cemetery.  It is a rural cemetery and has some burials as far back as 1860.  Some of the ones buried here have birthdays of 1794, so many generations  planted here.  This cemetery is only a mile down the road from Mr. McSween's grave,  the Scottish Civil War Solider that I have blogged about before.  

I did see lots of Pine Warbler in the trees...but I got no decent photos of birds on this day...After a lunch eaten in the car, out of the chilly wind,  we headed to one of our favorite places not too far away...

a cropped shot of the Pine Warbler

HE'S BACK!!  You just don't know how much good it did me to see that the Beaver has rebuilt his dam and his pond has returned to it's previous glory!  I wish there was some way I could have this legally protected...They had him down but he is not OUT, not yet anyways...

Sorry for all those sun spots.  We hoped to see the Eagles hanging around preparing for January's upcoming nest season...I guess it's a bit early yet, but you can bet I will be going over to check.  Beaver are actually hunted YEAR round on private property, and there is actually a trapping season from Dec 1- Mar 1 and mostly they are treated as and considered  a nuisance animal!! Can you believe that?????????

                          

The little fellow did a fine job of repairing the man made damage that was done to his home...you can see it actually reaches across a wide place in this shot, from the foreground to the edge of the pond where you see the reflections...I hope one day to actually see HIM if I can be there at the right time. 

Just look at the master piece he created! This lovely pond for turtles, frogs, birds and other wild life, like the Bald Eagles who nest here last season. Without the beaver, will the Eagle come here?  Doubtful. 

His dam is so perfect, it allows just enough water to flow out so as NOT to flood the entire area...

Happy Turtles...

Large flocks of Common Grackle passed over as we were there and some rested a bit...

Some swamp and song sparrow were also around...hiding in the brambles...on the drive back we caught up with a huge mixed flock of Grackle and Blackbirds..My horrid video skills meant I needed to edit it before sharing so here goes...

I can't figure out how to work the volume on vimeo...;0/

Then we spotted this juvie dark morph broad winged!  but after further research I thought Red Shouldered, but that didn't really fit either so eventually I got it right Broad Winged Hawk.... The eyes's are a little dark...(adult Coopers have red eyes, and immature have yellow, Red tailed Hawks, have a white yoke). And Red Shouldered have those rusty wing patches,  We couldn't get around to see the shape and coloration of the tail without scaring him off..

So this was a good day.

----------------------------------------------

My Mom Tribute for this post is a candid shot I adore of her...we were on one of our many picnics and she was enjoying her July 4th watermelon...this photo was taken in 2011 at Sandhills NWR. 

Never Forgotten. 

Hope all of you had a nice Holiday...ours was simple and bittersweet.

PEACE

Every day is a new Adventure.

A place to call home

What a difference...with the lower temps of the approaching fall I have been outside doing chores, walking, birding, and  relaxing some too!  

The change is already in the air.  I see birds chasing each other...hmmm this means Get out of the Nest! I'm done feeding you, go find your own worms and your own home...lol. 

 

This looks like 2 dragons meshed into one.

Annie was raising a ruckus in the yard a couple days ago a snake was coiled up under one of the shrubs and she had cornered it! My son to the rescue he was for a while into herps so he grabbed it..(don't do this if you don't know snakes the way my son does, he is sort of an expert)

Even tho this snake looks  menacing he is a big faker.  The hog nosed snake has many defenses..one is to hiss and flatten his head to look like a Cobra...if that doesn't work he will lay on his back and open his mouth and play dead...If that doesn't work, he has a musk gland and he will let loose an odor...he will open his mouth wide like he is going to swallow you whole...he did all that but he never offered to bite even when my son tossed a towel on him and got a hold of him to get him out of the yard!

When I checked these photos is when I saw the scar in his scales this is the same Hog Nosed Snake I had untangled a week ago. See right there is his mid section that is where the garden mesh had  tightened around him and held him in place they get caught they struggle and that makes it tighter and if they don't get rescued you will find a skeleton eventually.  So happy we were able to save this wonderful creature!  I got rid of all the Garden Mesh!

So even tho we keep taking him off the premises he returns, this is his home too!

Lots of Pine Warblers are back home agian in the trees this week.   I watched an episode of Expeditions with Patrick McMillan.  He is sort of a local hero here in our state with his own nature show on PBS.  In this episode he answered my question as if I had asked him directly..."why did we have so many Prairie Warbler, and Yellow Breasted Chats this year?"  I was on the right track of the "re- growth" from the clear cutting.  This is what these birds need....disturbance...in order to breed and raise their young.  Unfortunately the way man disturbs is not the way nature intended so these birds are having a hard time...

Its hard to tell the Imm Pine Warbler from the Imm Prairie Warbler, only way for me is to hear them. 

summer tanager

The Summer Tanager has always come to my place to live and the surrounding area I think they are happy to have the little open area of my field and the surrounding woods to provide them with the food and protection they need to raise their young...see the dead leaves?  That's why I got so upset when they sprayed the clearcut with some sort of herbicide.  It kills the plants the insects need, that in turn destroys habitat and food the birds need. 

a secret pond I found home to many frogs

 I know the clearcut will regrow and the birds will use it at least another year or two then it will become a "fake forest" again...Like McMillan  explained how the Oven Bird, that I never hear anymore around here, needs old growth forest to survive...at least 8 acres of it per bird.  Since they planted the surrounding area in yellow pine there is never any old growth forest, and the Oven Bird wants dry not wetland habitat...Keep these things in mind if you are managing a piece of land...maybe one day the wooded part of our lands will be mature enough to host Oven Birds. My trees are now 42 yrs and older.

We took a short drive to the Carolina Sandhills NWR to go birding and have a picnic.

Sis, this does not count as a picture of you...so my promise is not broken. :o)

And for my sis this lifer we found in the old growth Longleaf pines that the refuge has worked hard to conserve....these Red Cockaded Woodpeckers cavity nest in live mature LLPine. We saw 3 this day. Thanks to all us Liberal Tree Huggers and a pre Trump era Department of the Interior!

Red Cockaded Woodpecker

...still makes the rare sighting list on ebird...considered endangered since it was almost eradicated by the planting of the much faster growing yellow pine, a cash crop...

                                       3 in this shot they live in small family groups  

 We found at least 2 species of Pitcher Plant growing there...here is one growing low to the ground..see the water inside?  And note the flower...

And the taller variety...click to enlarge!

These plants need a "bog" situation to survive...we didn't see many around, only a few remaining as funding to manage habitat is not happening! The water level of the pond nearby has fallen to such a level the bog has dried up...if there is no Money in it what good is it...(the current political attitude toward the Natural World).   Understanding how and why nature works is one of the most important pieces of life's puzzle that we need in order to continue to survive...The burning of the Amazon Rain Forest is a huge tragedy...yet no million dollar homes are in the way so what's the big deal?   

Female Blue Grosbeak

No hurry cause now there is more room to grow Palm Oil...that nasty mess that is in everything we consume these days....This is a big deal...habitat loss is the biggest threat to the birds and animals we love; without them what would our lives be like? I just can't imagine.  Use your voice to scream out
I'M NOT OKAY WITH THAT!  

But Im okay with this.....fall color is springing up all over the place...love it!

 the Plant that announces fall the Goldenrod! 

This plant is called "Rattlebox" due to when the seed pod dries it  can be shaken like a rattle.  It is poisonous to livestock...

Who knew a Disco Spider lived on my place? Wow what a work of art..

Oecobiidae Spider Web

So when our birds go to South America this winter will they have a home to go to?  The Yellow Billed Cuckoo goes all the way to Northern Argentina What a shame some will face a dire situation.  Is there anyway we can tell these American Corporations we don't want PALM OIL in our food?? Maybe write letters! I stopped buying mircrowave popcorn, due to palm oil...but it's in almost every product that is processed...like the coffee creamer I love.  

There is no place like home...

PEACE

Every day is a new Adventure.