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.

Chiggers, Ticks, and Frozen Shoes

In the Ozarks, Spring is a wonderful time. Leaves on trees turn again to green. Myriad flowers bloom in glorious colors. Blooms on vines and bushes give way to fruit - wild blackberries, wild strawberries, wild blueberries, grapes. Grasses begin to grow.


As early Spring turns to late Spring and then to early summer, all kinds of critters come out to play.


Among those are chiggers and ticks. Chiggers and ticks. Ticks and chiggers.


Chiggers - microscopic bugs, too small for the human eye to see unaided. You are out in the woods enjoying nature, hiking in the woods, enraptured by the sights, the colors, the fresh smells of flowers in bloom.


You return home from your nature hike, having enjoyed it so very much.


The next day, you experience a horrible itching on your ankles, your legs, behind your knees, and around your waist. Red welts rise in those places. Time to get out the summer medicines.


Chiggers, nasty creatures that they are, don't really bite. After you picked up the unseen hitchhikers, they crawl around your body, looking for a place to settle down for a feast. They begin to feed if they reach a barrier, such as the top of your socks, the waistband of your clothes or your armpit.


They attach themselves to your skin, inject saliva with digestive enzymes that helps to break down your skin cells, which the chigger drinks. These enzymes cause the itchy rash.


That is why it is good to use a repellent, like DEET, although that does not work 100%. That is why is is good to shower or bathe, thoroughly, scrubbing twice, after you have been out in nature.



Ticks - not so microscopic arachnid, yes, related to the spider. Unlike chiggers, which run to you, ticks wait for you to come to them, often at the top of tall grass or weeds. You can actually see them if you look closely when walking in the woods, as they wave their arms, as if to say, "Come to me!"


Around here, we have the lone-star tick, a hard tick. The females are distinguishable by the white dot or "star" on its back. The males can also have dots or white streaks on the edge of their bodies.


Either before or after bathing to rid yourself of chiggers after a day in nature, you need to check for ticks - everywhere, even the nooks and crannies on your body. The only way to remove them is with tweezers. Any other method can leave their mouth still on your body and can lead to infection. In addition, ticks, from the beginning of their life cycle to the end, feed on various creatures and humans. They can carry diseases from the animals to you, injecting them into your bloodstream.


What do you do with the ticks after removing them? We keep a "tick jar" in the kitchen. It is filled with rubbing alcohol, and we simply drop them in the jar where they die a horrible death after a brief struggle!

In addtion, when we come in from outdoors, we place our shoes in plastic kitchen trash bags and stick them in the freezer overnight. This kill the chiggers that may still be on the shoes.


It is so easy to bring the ticks and chiggers into the house with you. Which is why we have another plastic kitchen trash bag to drop out clothing into. Later the clothing will be washed in very hot water.


Still, by the time late fall and early winter roll around, the rashes and bites have healed, the annoying itching is gone, and all we remember, until next summer, are the joys of experiencing the beauty of nature.

Tornadoes

I just realized I mentioned an April tornado in the last post, but have never posted the story.

The story begins Wednesday, April 9, 2008.

It started out with almost continuous lightning and raucous thunder. The sky was lit up with the lightning almost as bright as sunlight. The thunder, lightning, and rain continued almost non-stop. At some point during the night, I was awakened by a bright flash of lightning, a loud thunderclap, and what souned like a tree being hit by lightning. I did not have my rain guage out, so I had no idea how much rain we got overnight. It sure sounded like plenty. We lost power sometime during the night.

The power came on again around 2am Thursday. It was still on when we woke up at 6am.

Around 6:30am, Colleen was sitting in the living room putting her shoes on. Suddenly things got very, very dark, windy, and torrential rains come down. The power went out immediately. I was sure it was a tornado (we were under a tornado watch). The wind was beating relentlessly against the windows. It frightened us so much, we ran to the bathroom and hid there until it passed.

When we finally came out of the bathroom, we saw part of a pine tree lying next to the dining room window. It was continuing to rain, though nowhere as heavily as it had just been. We took a short walk outside to see what had happened. We saw that the pine tree had fallen in such a way that the outer top branches just brushed the dining room roof.

When the rain stopped and the sun came out, we started walking around our property to check out what happened. We saw six or seven more pine trees which had fallen behind our garden shed. Most of them fell against another large oak tree. One tree fell into a cedar tree just behind the garden shed and thus the shed was spared any damage. The front yard was littered with pine branches.

We then walked down the driveway that goes out the northernmost part of our property. We saw even more pine trees, and some oaks, that had fallen over from the roots, had snapped down near the bottom, or had been twisted off the trunk a few feet from the ground. During that walk we saw the remains of a pine tree which had been struck by lightning, charred from the top to the bottom, with a barber-pole like stripe down the tree where bark had come off when the lightning struck.

All in all, we counted two-dozen (at least) trees that had gone down during the storm. They were in such a straight-line pattern, it sure seemed like it was from a tornado.

Then we walked down to the "gentle" creek that flows across the road a little further north of our property. This creek, usually a few feet wide and either very dry or with a gentle flow, was now at least ten feet across with the water rushing in a mad torrent. That made me think we must have received several inches of water since the storm had started just a few hours earlier.

We also saw another pine tree which had fallen from our property across the dirt road at the east of our property effectively blocking any exit to civilization. There is another creek to the southeast of us that we found out was so bad that even the trucks from the electric company would not cross. Trees were down all up and down the road. In one spot the road was covered with water where there is not even a creek.

Later that afternoon, I discovered the pine tree that fell outside our dining room was not one but TWO pine trees.

Oh, yes, the electric company. The storm had snapped four power poles in half and it took them most of the day to replace them and get power back. The power came back at 8pm. It was the next day before we had telephone service.

This was more excitement than we could stand and we were exhausted.