Red-winged blackbirds returned to our feeders today. I’d better stock up on sunflower seeds.
It took three separate parts orders and some creative modifications, but our thirty-year-old clothes dryer no longer sounds like an elementary school heavy metal band.
Finished reading: I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong 📚 This is an excellent book by one of the best science journalists around. It concerns the closer than intimate relationship of plants and animals with their microorganisms. Bacteria are not just in us and on us; in a lot of respects they are us.
Stories
My wife and I had dinner this past week with a couple who we had met recently. This was something that we hadn’t done for several years.
Why is it unusual? One reason is we are introverts. We do enjoy meeting people in small gatherings, but you will rarely find us in settings where there are lots of folks. We don’t have the opportunity to meet many new people, and we don’t make much of an effort to do so. We also live in a rural setting. It is easy for us to go several days without speaking with anyone other than each other. We’re not hermits. We have children, grandchildren, and close friends who we see often. We volunteer in nearby communities and attend a local exercise class where we met our new friends.
It was good to spend an evening with some genuinely nice people who we knew nothing about. We shared our story and listened with interest to theirs. We are all at a point in our lives where there are more milestones behind us than ahead. The stories were much more complete than when we met people in our younger days, and this made them more satisfying to me.
It is one of those gray winter mornings where I can’t tell where the earth ends and the sky begins.
It’s -22° F at our place this morning. That’s the coldest we can remember.
We went to a production of “A Christmas Story” by the Lewiston (Idaho) Civic Theater. The music, choreography, and acting were excellent.
Finished listening to: Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison. This is a well-written and performed urban fantasy. 🔊📚
Finished reading: My Man Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse. This is a classic collection of short stories. Every one of them made me smile. 📚
We received the holiday catalog from the Vermont Country Store. I don’t think there was anything in it that wouldn’t have been there 50 years ago.
I rescued a young hawk that accidentally flew in the door of my workshop this afternoon and couldn’t figure out how to leave. Fortunately, I was wearing gloves, and it let me pick it up. I released it outside apparently unharmed. It’s hard to say, but I would guess it was a sharp-shinned or goshawk.
As I was doing the morning chores I had the full moon setting in one direction,
and sunrise in the opposite direction.
It looks like lawn mowing season is over.
A peaceful scene out our front window this morning.
A pair of nighttime plum aficionados in our orchard.
Nice sunset tonight.
Gopher vs. human. The eternal contest.
RSV and covid vaccines are in my arm. The covid vaccine effects were much milder than the previous 4 boosters. Now for the flu shot next week and I’ll be ready for winter.
A Farm Mystery
We have a small flock of chickens, 15 hens and a rooster. The birds have a large fenced yard and a spacious coop. A month ago I noticed that one of the new hens we had purchased as a chick this year was missing. My wife and I searched the birds’ pen carefully, and then the area around the pen. Occasionally a chicken will fly over the fence, but they never go far. Our search was unsuccessful. We concluded the hen had fallen prey to a predator. This isn’t common but happens occasionally. In the past we have had problems with raccoons and weasels. We also have coyotes, and had watched a hawk make an aborted attack this past Spring. Attacks by any predator usually leave an explosion of feathers, which was missing in this case. We were disappointed as the hen had just started to lay, and produced eggs that were a dark brown. She was one of a trio of chicks we purchased this year. Even after they were big enough to be released into the general population, they hung out as a cohort separate from the rest of the flock. It was sad to see the trio reduced to a pair.
Several weeks went by and I was emptying the compost bucket into pen when I noticed the prodigal hen had returned. She seemed no worse for her absence, and immediately started contributing her dark brown eggs to the daily production. We are at a loss to come up with a logical explanation for her disappearance. Chickens are not solitary animals, and it seems unlikely that she could have been nearby without our notice. We are glad to have her back, and will have to let it go at that.
A warm October evening brings out clouds of woolly aphids.
