New Phoebe Brood

We've been having fun watching the second brood of chicks from our Eastern Phoebe family. Here are some pictures of the poor hungry chicks. When their little heads peek up over the nest they look like babies with bad hair days. In a couple of weeks they'll be flying away like their earlier brothers/sisters did.

Eastern Phoebe Chicks

For a few years we had one pair of Eastern Phoebes try to nest along the ledge inside our porch roof. We tried to discourage them by continually knocking down their nest before it was built. One year, we put a piece of wood in the corner to give them a bigger area. That year, the mother laid four eggs, but abandoned it before they hatched.

This year, we were gone while they built the nest. The ledge is one to one and one-half inches in width. We thought there was no way they could build a usable nest there. But, sure enough, they did. The mother laid four eggs and sat on them until they hatched this time.

Now there are chicks in the nest. I can see only two from my lower vantage point, so there is no way to know if the other two hatched and survived.

We've been waiting for them to start their peeping, but have heard nothing. I was told they probably would not begin peeping until they were fully fledged (never knew that was a verb, but it means to develop the feathers necessary to fly).

It has been fun to watch the mom sitting on the nest every night. I learned that if we did not look directly at her, she would not fly off if we came out the front door. If she is frightened, she flys away, but not so far that we cannot see her. My guess is that she is trying to lead predators away from the nest to they don't grab her babies (I never did finish my zoology degree, so I don't know for sure ;-)

From what I've read on the internet, the Phoebe will raise two to three broods during the year. They are monogamous. They will likely return to the same nest every year and can live as long as nine years. I also read that the female is the one who picks the nesting spot.

Everyone should have a birdfeeder

I finally refilled both birdfeeders this past weekend. One is outside the dining room window.

Everyone should have a birdfeeder. A birdfeeder is like the watercooler in an office. Everyone gathers around. The past few days we've seen all kinds of birds and animals, including mice, squirrels, and raccoons.

If I woke up around 11pm, I could look outside the dining room window and see a raccoon eating the leftovers from the ground. I once looked outside late at night and saw two raccoons and a possum eating what the seed the birds had dropped on the ground. The two raccoons got into a fight and the possum slowly backed away from the raccoons, but continued to eat.

Pictured here are an American Goldfinch (and some other curious bird), a Harvest Mouse, and a White-Crowned Sparrow.

Is the cold weather gone?

We woke up to 43 degrees at 6am and the high temperature briefly hit 86 degrees this afternoon. A difference of 43 degrees (as if you could not do the math yourself - but it sounds so weird just to say it).

Of course, with the warmer weather and temperature difference, we are being told to prepare for a stormy night.

It is time to write out our big "chores" for the rest of the spring, into summer and then fall. A lot of that will be cleaning up what remains of the debris from the January-February ice storm. While we did manage to get quite a bit down to the roadside before they came through and chipped it (and now we have a humungous amount of chipped wood we can use), there is still a lot to do - get out the chain saw and cut the trees and branches into manageable sizes, then get it stacked, and either chip or burn what is not worth keeping.

In the chore list will certainly be fixing the fence around the garden in the hopes of keeping out the raccoons. Not sure what all else will be on the list. Some things are indoor maintenance and repair.

Oh, well, at least working from home allows one the ability to gaze out the windows and watch the beautiful weather go by.

Ozarks Ice Storm 2009

We are making a Bentonville hotel our home for a few days, while we wait for the electric power to return following the ice storm. It's been out over a week now. After a couple of days of working off of battery power, we finally had to come in to town to literally recharge. It started icing over on Monday evening of January 26th. Then by the end of the next day, we had 1 and 1/2 inches of ice sticking to the trees and power lines. Then for the next few days, the forest sounded like a war zone. Trees and branches were breaking with exploding and gunshot sounds every 20 seconds. Our driveway and road was completely blocked off.

We were pretty cozy at home, with the wood stove and propane cook stove. But with no power, the well pump was also out. We had filled our tubs and every spare bucket with water in advance. Then, we started gathering snow and ice to melt inside for our wash water. We had enough battery power and were pretty well prepared for a 3 day power outage - but not for a week!


Last Thursday, we all got together to clear the 1/3 mile road between our house and the kid's house. I counted 4 dozen trees blocking the road. There are still power lines laying in the road going south. The forest service came up and cut a path through. We were able to drive out on Saturday to get to the hotel. This photo shows Ken with his chain saw hiking up the blocked road. The ice was beautiful to look at.