Grackles

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A group Common Grackles are visiting our feeder. It’s a mix of adults and juveniles…evidence of a successful breeding season for the birds.

The first time I saw them they stayed around or our deck for long enough for me to start photographing upstairs in my office and then go downstairs for a different perspective. Many of the young birds were standing on the deck railing with their beaks open but the parents were not bringing them anything…maybe some tough-love to force the young birds to forage for themselves. The food on our deck is insufficient since the birds are heavy enough that the seed holes in the feeder are partially closed (and the perches are not spaced well for a bird their size). There is some seed spilled by squirrels or the wind on the floor of the deck but not enough for this number of birds to get more than a nibble. They fluttered around for a few minutes but then flew off.

They were back again a few days later. They intimidated the other birds that were trying to come to the feeder – size and attitude are in the grackles favor. The juveniles seemed to have developed more independence in the few days since I photographed them previously.

Note the grackle hanging on looking disgruntled and how the feeder seed hole is mostly covered…not as completely as with a squirrel…but enough that the grackle was frustrated.

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Breakfast on the Deck

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Now that the deck staining is complete, and we’ve moved the furniture back and hung the deck curtains to block the afternoon sun – I am having breakfast on the deck. My breakfast is in 2 parts: a first breakfast at about 7 AM which always includes dark chocolate (usual herbal tea to drink) and then a second breakfast about 10 AM which varies more. On the morning I took the picture it was crustless quiche with sunflower seeds on top with diet Pepsi.

I open at least one of the drapes so I can see the maple tree. The birds are generally active during the early morning – blue jays and grackles were the noisiest on the morning I took the pictures. The vegetation is so thick this time of year that they are heard more than seen.

Sometimes I take supplies to make a Zentangle tile after I’ve eaten the dark chocolate. On this morning I was surprised at how cool it felt….I opted to make the tile indoors.

Overall – the morning is the most pleasant time to be on the deck in the summer. Some outdoor time is a great way to start the day.

Home Maintenance

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We’ve been catching up on some home maintenance this month.

My husband had started the process to get the deck stained back in June but there were so many rain days that it was only completed recently, and we moved all the furniture back that had been stored underneath the deck in the interim. The table had accumulated quite a lot of pollen and dust.  We also hung the curtains to block the sun in the afternoon. I’ll start spending some time on the deck in the mornings.

We also fixed a divider piece between vinyl and carpet flooring that had come loose. I held the piece while my husband hammered in some longer nails with small heads. It is great to have it firmly in place again.

Last but not least, I discovered another chair that belongs with a kitchen table my daughter has in Springfield. It needed some wood glue and screws tightened before it was in good repair…ready to be taken on my next road trip to Springfield…and left there.

It feels good to be working off out ‘to do’ list of things that need to be done around the house!

Birds on our Deck

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The bird feeder camera has not been as interesting recently, but I noticed two sequences where there were 2 or more species of birds there at one time. The first one is a Downy Woodpecker joined first by a female Northern Cardinal, and then a White-breasted Nuthatch.

The next sequence has a female finch (maybe) on the side of the feeder away from the camera and a Tufted Titmouse. The titmouse moves around a bit and is then joined by a Carolina Chickadee. The titmouse flies away and a White-breasted Nuthatch comes. The finch stays on the same perch for the duration.

The pictures I take with my camera through my office window are sharper. The Red-Bellied Woodpecker (female) is coming to the feeder periodically. There must be plenty of food in the forest since she does not come frequently.

The House Finches sometime come in groups. They are probably the most frequent species at the feeder.

The Carolina Chickadees are high energy visitors to the deck…and not just to the feeder.

The Chipping Sparrows sometimes  come a lot and other times appear to be gone somewhere else temporarily.

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A male Downy Woodpecker comes periodically.

Mourning Doves survey the yard from the deck railing. They also like the bird bath…and clean up any seed that falls from the feeder.

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The strangest photograph this month was of a Carolina Wren….that appears to be missing a tail! I didn’t notice the oddity until I looked at my images on a bigger monitor. The bird behaved normally so maybe it will survive (and grow new tail feathers).

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Unique Activities for Yesterday:

Mourning Ruth Bader Ginsburg….an increase in concern for the future of our country. So many things are adding together to make 2020 a traumatic (and tragic) year. Maybe times like this are the ultimate test of our character as individuals and as a society.

Sycamore Leaves

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I took a pictures of sycamore leaves with holes through the window of my office. They are easy to find on the tree; I estimate that 25-30% of the leaves have noticeable holes. I looked at the pictures enlarged on my computer screen…searching for caterpillars…but didn’t find any. There are probably several different insects making the holes. Notice that sometimes the hole leaves the vein intact….other times the hole crosses a vein. Sycamore leaves are tougher than tulip polar and maple so it takes a caterpillar with stronger mouthparts to eat the leaves.

The tree seems to be mostly recovered from the damage of last spring (cold weather late in the spring) but there are still some dead branches and brown leaves from that time. They are increasingly covered with green leaves getting larger and larger as the summer progresses and new leaves are still forming on all the branch tips. Every time a thunderstorm comes through, we have some leaves on the ground. I walked around the deck and took pictures of some leaves that fell recently….and found holes in every one!

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I also noticed that a branch broke in the upper part of the tree. It is too high to get down without a tree crew. It’s in our back yard so I am leaving it for the time being. I’ll watch it during the next storm. It appears to be firmly wedged in the other branches (i.e. going no where soon). If it falls, it will go on the yard or chaos garden….and it appears to be mostly leaves.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

Interrupted lawn mowing. My husband tried to mow the grass between rainy days even though the ground was still very wet. He did the front and sides…then started on the back. It stays wet longer than other areas of our yard since water drains in that direction. He stopped about halfway through. Hopefully, he’ll be able to get it mowed before the rains from Isaias get to the Maryland area.

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Ten Little Celebrations – June 2020

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We are still at home almost all the time, so the celebrations are mostly based there. There are two that celebrate the changes that we made in June that are away from the house….creating a sustainable new normal for the coming months.

Double rainbow. Seeing a rainbow is such a great way to celebrate summer! We’ve been having last afternoon thunderstorms and one of them was moving fast enough that the sun came out while it was still raining in the east….and it created a double rainbow! The arch was interrupted by our oak tree – but the colors were vibrant for enough time that I got a good series of pictures. I was so engrossed in taking pictures from our front porch that I didn’t notice our 18-year-old indoor cat escaping until he meowed; I was able to catch him before he escaped into the bushes.

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Day lilies. I enjoy having flowers in my office. It’s a way of bringing a bit of the outdoors into a place I can celebrate at closer range.

Ice maker fixed. My husband and I installed the part he ordered to keep our ice maker from allowing water to overflow into the rest of the freezer…..and it worked. We are both celebrating that we were able to do it ourselves rather than requiring a maintenance person.

Deck drapery. The deck drapery turned out to be a great project for us and we are celebrating the extra time we are already spending on our deck.

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Black squirrel. The black squirrel has only come to our deck once. I celebrated seeing it when visited because it was different than our usual squirrels….and it didn’t try to raid the bird feeder.

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Fledgling red-winged blackbird. If I hadn’t seen the parents nearby – I don’t think I would have seen it or be able to identify it. It’s a celebration of new life at the neighborhood storm water retention pond.

Plastic containers. The cabinet where we keep plastic containers in the kitchen had gotten so disorganized that it seemed to be overflowing…with us not adding anything new. I took about 30 minutes to reorganize it – putting the things we use most in the easiest to reach places…and putting some things in the recycle, trash, or give away. Moving from disorganized to organized is always something I celebrate.

Pleasant early mornings on the deck. Even on hot days, the early morning is wonderful on the deck. It’s a great way to start the day – often feeling like we are in the middle of a bird celebration.

Grocery shopping. Beginning to do my grocery shopping again is worthy of celebration. I take precautions (wear a mask, lots of hand sanitizer, go in the early morning, use self-scan and checkout, shop for 2 weeks rather than 1) but getting out just that little bit has made the new normal a lot easier to sustain.

CSA season. I always celebrate the beginning of our Community Supported Agriculture veggies. Picking up the share requires a mask and hand sanitizer…just like the grocery store. It’s an adjunct to the grocery shopping that makes the summer foods easily and abundantly available.  

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Unique activities for yesterday:

Rearranging deck furniture. The first afternoon I sat out on the deck to test the effectiveness of the deck drapery, I discovered that the table and chairs were not well positioned. They were in the patch of sunshine coming through the triangle of undraped screen near the ceiling.

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It was too hot to rearrange furniture that afternoon, so I did it during the cooler morning temperatures. I am also going to buy another prong to tie back the drape near the bird feeder (in the far left of the above picture) so that we can see the bird feeder when the drape is tied back.

3 Free eBooks – June 2020

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So many materials available online…

The three I am featuring this month are a bit different. The first two are slideshows available on Internet Archive. It was hard to choose just two; check here for 300 or so of them. Each of the slide shows is accompanied by a brief biography of the artist.

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Hussein Amin Bicar (1913 - 2002) – Egyptian. I enjoyed both the modern and the ancient depictions. I chose one of the modern images for the sample.

Josef Sudek (1896 - 1974) – Czech photographer. As I looked at the pictures – I thought about what made them most appealing to me and decided that there were multiple reasons:

  • The way the photographer captured unusual light and arrangement of places.

  • The historical aspect (I assumed that many of the damaged buildings were the aftermath of World War II).

  • The pictures of office clutter. I’ve known people that had similar piles of accumulated ‘stuff’!

Another reason I liked this artist: Half of my ancestors were Czech; the families immigrated to the US in the later 1800s. The life span of Sudek was like my Czech heritage grandfather’s (1896-1974 and 1901-1976). My grandfather was younger by just enough that he did not fight in World War I; Sudek did and was severely injured (an arm was amputated). What a difference in the way they experienced World War II! My grandfather was farming in eastern Oklahoma; Sudek lived through the Nazi’s in Prague and then Soviet domination of the country. Sudek lived most of his life in a European city: Prague; my grandfather lived on a farm, a small city, then the suburbs of a large city in Oklahoma and Texas. In 1960, my grandfather was injured in an accident (a leg was amputated). As I read the short biography of Sudek, I felt that in the last decade of their life, they would have enjoyed knowing each other.

I selected the sample picture because it was an unusual collection for a still life. The peacock feathers reminded me of the peacocks my non-Czech grandparents kept. The shells are something collected in travels by people that ordinarily live far from the sea (i.e. Prague or Oklahoma).

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The other eBook I chose this month was autobiographical…with names changed which I guess turns it into a novel. It was known as autobiographical when it was published so is usually discussed from that perspective.

Scott, Evelyn. Escapade. New York: Thomas Seltzer. 1923. Available at Internet Archive here. The parts that resonated the most with me were the author’s description of her pregnancy and the immediate aftermath. Her writing about her emotions and physical situation are so vivid. Her experience is often more intense because of the upheaval in her life early in the novel (eloping, moving from the US to London to Brazil) and then subsequent poverty and isolation. A brief biography of Evelyn Scott can be found here.

Unique activities for yesterday:

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Bright heart of the forest. When I first went into my office at 6:10 AM, the sunshine was bright on a tulip poplar tree trunk that normally does not stand out in the shade of the forest. The glow lasted for a few minutes before fading as the sun continued its rise. It was a good start to the day to see the tree appear as if lighted from within.

Zucchini muffins. I used up some summer squash by making muffins at mid-morning. It’s an easy process using the food processor to do the shredding. I chose a recipe for Zucchini Spice Cake from a Moosewood Restaurant cookbook…brought back memories of the restaurant in Ithaca when my daughter was working on her undergraduate degree at Cornell.

Finishing the deck drapery project. My husband and I put up additional hooks to hold all the deck drapery panels and I made tie backs for them. We were both hot and tired when we finished because the day was so hot and humid. It was not better by dinner, so we waited to have an outdoor dinner for another day.

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Deck Drapery Project

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Our screened deck is on the west side of our house, so the afternoon sun has always been a challenge. We had two sets of rolled shades that lasted about 10 years each before they began to fall apart (we’ve been in the house about 25 years). This time we opted for indoor/outdoor drapery. The drapes we purchased are light green and have metal grommets for hanging. Our initial experiment was to see if the hooks already above the windows would hold them (and, if so, we would simply add a few more hooks to make sure the last gromet on each side would have a hook).

We hung two of the panels up just before a blustery thunderstorm came through. The drapes got wet, but they stayed on the hooks!

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So – our next step is to add the additional hooks and create some tiebacks to use when we don’t need the shade (there are already some hooks that were used to tie the pulls for the old rolled shades that can anchor the tie backs). Even on sunny days we’ll enjoy our deck in the afternoons (when it’s not too hot).

Unique activities for yesterday:

Sycamore leaves. There were thunderstorms and winds…..and then sycamore leaves on our deck. And down in the yard.

I arranged a size sequence of leaves to show how much the size varies. The leaves continue to grow larger as long as they are on the tree so as the season progresses there are more very large leaves. This year the tree is scraggly with the damage from the late frost in May. It still has lots of new leaves developing and – I hope – will look better as the season progresses.

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There were leaves on the stairs from the deck down to ground as well. Note the dark mass under the leaf on the right side of top step. It’s racoon poop!

I looked at the bird cam videos and the racoon visited early Sunday morning (6/21)…and left a ‘present.’ (Two views of what the bird cam captured are below). I think the racoon must come through the yard relatively often since I found 2 poop piles when we mowed the grass on the 13th.

Another color of day lily. The darker orange day lilies are beginning to bloom. Once the buds are developed enough to continue opening, I cut them…denying the deer a flowery treat.

Jelly Fungus

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Our deck is over 20 years and has tiny stands of jelly fungus fruiting bodies in the knots of its railing after a heavy rain. I photographed on knot in late July just after they appeared

And then a day later. They expanded very rapidly.

The jelly dried up but after a heavy rain last Thursday they were back and even bigger.  They have a blobby beauty.

This means that the deck railings are rotting...and will have to be replaced at some point. Fortunately, the other parts of the deck have no yellow blobs!