MamaStories

Friends are coming to visit for a couple of days, and I doubt I will have the time, or the inclination, to interrupt the fun we always have to post here. But before I go, a few notes:

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Turns out that the bobcat I heard a couple of weeks ago was most likely a fisher cat. My neighbor saw one crossing the street this morning and immediately fired off an email to let me know. And it clicked, because Suldog had raised this possibility in his comment to my post. Apparently fishers make that haunting sound during mating season, though they’re also know to make it when they’re trapped or attacking. No bobcat, then, but pretty wild anyway!

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I’ve signed two petitions in the last two days.

1. One for allowing chickens in Cambridge, Mass. (there’s a blog article about it here, and the petition is here).
2. The other for allowing the sale of raw milk by a dairy farm in Framingham, Mass (about raw milk in Massachusetts, click here, and here, and to sign the petition, click here).

There’s a Food Revolution and I’m on it!

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I totally missed the “Focus on Feeders,” which the Mass Audubon Society organized this year on 6 and 7 February. But I am thinking about sending one or two photos to their amateur photo contest. Here’s a selection (click for larger):

They are: Black-Capped Chickadee, Tufted Titmouse, Rose-Breasted Grosbeak, Downy and Hairy Woodpecker side-by-side, female Northern Cardinal and Red-Breasted Woodpecker (photo taken yesterday).

I like the first two because of their wintry atmosphere: the birds seem cloaked in the snow-laden sky. The Grosbeak was such an exception at my feeders, and I love the color of his breast. The Hairy Woodpecker (the large one) is so darn ugly; even his eye looks scruffy! But it was great to see the two kinds side by side. The female Cardinal gives us such a stern look, and look at the soft colors of her belly. And that last picture is just so vivid.

Do you have any favorites?

The first of that big snowstorm assailing the East Coast has flurried in, and so did the flocks of birds. I’ve noticed that the regulars - the flocks of snowbirds, sparrows, finches and mourning doves, and the lone cardinals and blue jays - come out to the feeder when it starts snowing. Maybe it is something about filling the belly before it all gets covered?

Today, though, the largest flock by far was made up of Robins. They flew in en masse right before the snow started falling. About two dozen of them foraged in the leaves and straw, and ate the berries off the bushes near the feeder.

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The seeds are safe and snug in the basement. My hands are itching to tuck some more in, but I am going to stagger sowing this year. Let’s see how long I can manage to hold off!

Of course we could also stagger eating. At least the lettuces and spinach, no? Mm…

So this happened half an hour ago, at 10 pm.

I’m sitting in my living room, working on the laptop. Suddenly there is a racket in the street. A small dog barking very, very loudly? Surely that’s not a dog? I go outside with my flashlight. It’s 10F and I’m wearing a skirt and a thin sweater and my breath is almost obscuring my vision, but the first new yowl I hear sets my whole body on fire. Hair-raising. Repelling, but oh so magnetic too…

I see two dark shapes moving across the street, about 40 yards away, down the hill in and out of the bushes. A large and a smaller shape. Cat like movements. And that cry: a short, repeated scream from one of them.

My street has no street lights, but there are some small porch lights - I wish it was one of those crystal clear full moon nights we had a couple of days ago. Then I see the eyes: two large yellow eyes sharply reflecting the light from the neighbor’s porch, and perhaps my own flashlight. A pair of smaller yellow (or was it white-bluish?) eyes right behind it.

By now, curious, drawn in, I’ve moved about 20 feet outside my door. The lit eyes disappear and I lose sight of their dark shapes. The screaming too has stopped. They’re invisible, who knows where, and I realize I’m easy prey - no really, that was my realization, here, in a Boston suburb!

I run inside and close the door.

It was this sound, the first one on that page. A lynx or bobcat, maybe a mother and her young.

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It was exactly around this time year that I heard the Great Horned Owls singing to each other behind my house. I’ve not heard them yet. The world is full of wild creatures, reminding us of what we are not. How good it feels, to be reminded!

I enjoy nothing more, in winter, then sitting by the big window with a cup of steaming tea and a good book or chess game, and observing the birds at the well-stocked feeder. We have the usual flock of juncos, who love playing in the snow. They are having it out with a flock (the same size, 6 or 7) of passerines.  Then throw in a couple of titmice and a pair of wrens. Add to that two cardinal pairs, as well as an assortment of downy woodpeckers, among them the one Red-Bellied Woodpecker. And then there’s this fellow:

He (she?) is new: an American goldfinch. Here’s another view. Such gorgeous coverts, and that yellow muffler!

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Yesterday I wrote about the warmish weather and watching the rain wash away the snow. Then the rain turned to ice.

It was still sleeting this morning when we woke up to a hoop house dangerously weighed down by that snow that has a bluish tint. Read: high slush content. By the time we had mobilized, the situation was dire.

The moment I touched the structure, the precarious balance gave and the whole thing started caving in. The pvc pipes creaked, something on top cracked, and clips that hold the cover to the pipes were literally flying all over the place as the plastic pulled loose. Luckily DH was there to jump inside and prop the whole thing up while I cleared away the snow. We got away with only one of the connectors on top breaking and a couple of tears in the plastic cover. What do you think: redesign?

While the dust mites in the bedding were freezing (to death, hopefully)…

We warmed up this cold but sunny morning by splitting and sorting firewood, playing with a neighbor’s dog, and scouting out some animal tracks. Here are some tiny bird tracks next to my fingerprint:

And these are some huge bird prints next to my footprints:

And these claw marks are interesting:

Then back inside for a steaming cup of tea and some reading of (library) books on bees, and chickens.

To do this week:

1. plan Spring and Summer garden
2. inventorize left-over and saved seeds
3. read all the gorgeous seed catalogs that arrived while we were gone
4. order new seeds
5. figure out a better seedling “hotbox” - buy seed mats?
6. enroll in bee school, chicken class, and pottery

The plants under row cover in the hoop house have stopped growing, but they are all alive and well, just waiting it out. I am planning to get some fresh horse manure from my neighbor and creating a small “hotbed” in the hoop house for some early spinach. It would be interesting to compare the growth of those plants to the ones under the row cover, and to what extent the decomposing horse manure heats up the hoop house.

I am out there twice a day to clear the snow off and away from the hoop house so light can penetrate and the structure isn’t too stressed. I am happy to report that the hoop house has withstood heaps of snow and  gusts of wind, so our reinforcement of the top connectors seems to be working.

I managed to finish both volumes of Edible Forest Gardens when I was in Belgium and my first project will be to thoroughly re-assess our property. Digging holes and staking out areas will have to wait until the two-foot-thick blanket of snow has gone, but I will have to eyeball some of it and decide on some bushes and small trees.

It’s great to see the juncos play in the fluffy snow and vie for a place at the feeder with the cardinals and the passerines.

Whew, we got the plastic on the hoop house frame right in time, a couple of hours in fact before the snowstorm blew in. We used 6 mil landscape plastic, which turned out more opaque than we thought it would: will it reflect and diffuse the sunlight too much? Well, it will have to do for now. We bought PVC clamps from a greenhouse store - it was the delay in the order that took us so long. All in all, this greenhouse cost us less than $300. The doorway still needs to be fixed.

I also got a lot of wild wood kindling in, in time before the snow covered it all up. Here is about a tenth of what we have, drying on the old soil screen in the shed. It’s good stuff, especially the long dead, already barkless wood that falls out of the trees on a windy day. These sticks dry out in no time, weigh very little, and they light like match sticks (very fat ones).

The last thing we provided for was food for the birds. I have the feeling that there were much less birds during this Fall migration than last year, though I must admit I spent much less time keeping an eye on our feeder. I’ve seen a couple of juncos, but for the rest it’s just us and the woodpeckers.

… baffleth not.

We are seeing lots of new birds at our feeders this Spring: a Rose-breasted Grosbeak and a Catbird are making regular visits, and I’ve seen glimpses of an Oriole - bright flashes of yellow and black.  Perhaps someone advertised the Black Oil Sunflower seed I got for them at the Audubon shop?

And yesterday I was fiddling with my camera when:

Click!

Taking a break from our construction - we were setting tiles till 4 am - and gardening Amie, her grandmother and mself ran off to our favorite place in the US (aside from our own Robin Hill, of course): Drumlin Farm.

There were birds, wild (Eastern phoebe?) and tame:

And farm equipment (defunct):

And strawberry picking - and eating:

And, when we returned, the littlest Robins of Robin hill (not so little anymore):

{Update} They have left the nest…