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Another Brand New Day

Apr10

I’m grateful on this brand new day for an abundance of sunshine and little yellow tulips, for the grape hyacinths, for sandhill cranes flying over head in their eons old migration, for evening grosbeaks, house finches, and piñon jays.

I’m grateful for the energy to cut back the curly rushes in the pond with the Sunjoe plant trimmer (though these photos are before the job), and Wren is grateful that we get to play down at the pond again.

She takes her Frog Patrol quite seriously, and I had to trim rushes in a pattern that didn’t disturb the frogs and also kept Wren at bay from both the cutting blades and the frogs so that everyone had safe space.

Our patience and persistence was rewarded with a rare sighting of a pair of courting Northern Leopard frogs. Once I spotted them we left the pond for the day.

No-Buy New Year is going pretty well a quarter of the way in. I’ve spent more than I’d like to on vet care, more than I needed to on groceries, nothing on clothing, and only indulged in a couple of justifiable gadgets. I dropped my mini-digital-voice recorder I’ve used for many years and it broke, taking with it irretrievable pearls of wisdom from the previous few months. Oh well. So I went without for a couple more months, but the phone voice memo app is awkward in many situations when I need to record a thought, detail, bird sighting, or perfect turn of phrase, so I just ordered a new recorder for $80 before the price goes up. (Or maybe it already has; but it will pay for itself before long anyway, and will likely only get costlier if I wait.) I didn’t order from Amazon, have quit buying anything from there, and am looking to support more ethical alternatives.

Yellow-crested Half Wit

Thanks to Neighbor Mary for the giggle with this image of the Yellow-crested Half Wit. With Easter on its way, I also appreciated this from Penzeys egg-seasoning email this morning: “Trump ran on lowering food prices from day one. With eggs this isn’t rocket science. A few practical low-cost regulations to lower the spread of bird flu. Getting the poultry industry all the workers they need. And if we do have to import eggs to stop demand from outpacing supply, don’t jack up import costs through the roof with economy-crippling tariffs.”

And a palate cleanser for our eyes, a reminder of sweetness and light.

Strange Little Creature

Mar27

That’s what Neighbor Fred called little Wren yesterday while he was pruning our apricot tree. It was a gorgeous day, almost hit 70℉ with abundant sunshine. He wasn’t wrong: as pruned twigs clustered with fat buds hit the ground, Wren trailed along behind him eating the buds from the twigs. Have you ever?

Fred had said he’d be happy to help me prune the tree, but in truth I was even less help than Wren. I sat on a bench and kept him entertained with mindful conversation when I wasn’t wrapt in the phoebes calling around the house. I heard at least two, maybe three, and one of them perched atop the roof and called and called for a mate. Fingers crossed!

Once Fred had provided her with all those snackies, Wren decided he could be her friend, and finally let him pet her. Ooo, he did it just right!

After our arduous work supervising pruning, we sat on the patio for lunch, and enjoyed a second exciting bird. Pinyon Jays are moving through, and some of the flock stopped to drink at the birdbath. All I need is a third bird, and I’ll be calm.

Screenshot

This Week in Turkey

Dec5

I gave thanks this week for the wonderful dinner my neighbors shared with me, and for the leftovers I enjoyed creatively all week long. I baked a pie to share with them, Vaughn Vreeland’s coffee-maple chess pie, which looked a lot better than it tasted. Oh well. The laminated crust was great but it shrank so much in the parbake I had to use a smaller pie tin. I’ll try the crust again with a regular chess pie the old fashioned way.

The first leftover day I made a sandwich with avocado, mayo, blueberry jam, cheddar cheese, lettuce and turkey, which tasted a lot better than it looked. Then, knowing I could never finish all of everything and would have to freeze some of it, I threw some of everything (turkey, garlic mashed potatoes, chestnut stuffing, green beans, turkey, and a splash of cranberry sauce) into a pot with a pint of chicken stock, and simmered and stirred until I had a creamy, delicious, chowder-like soup. Which both looked and tasted delicious!

Then I made turkey salad, also including some stuffing and green beans, along with mayo, mustard, and Penzeys spicy salt, enjoying that one day on toast, and another day with the last of the warmed up potatoes and stuffing. I’m grateful for the generosity of my neighbor and for having fun with food.

I had been wanting to bake homemade English muffins for awhile and had the little metal rings in the pantry waiting, when the need to bake them finally arose. I tried them two ways: one instruction had me place the greased rings on a griddle and fill them with dough; the other had me put the rings on a cookie sheet and bake in the oven. In both cases, I filled the rings too full, but the breads turned out light and puffy anyway, and perfectly adequate. I’ll try the griddle method again with a different recipe.

Today’s lunch was ‘eggamuffin,’ a treat from my days in the swamp when my neighbors and I breakfasted together frequently at their trailer. Oh those days in the swamp! I lived in a retired military quonset hut split into a duplex, along with a ragtag assortment of other mostly single residents in other huts, trailers, and a cabin or two, surrounded by live oaks, at the edge of a sinkhole that had filled in with water and was a magnet for herons, frogs, and the occasional alligator. Such a different habitat from the sere mesa I wound up on, both so dear to me in their own ways.

Maybe the best turkey of all this week was the flock of wild turkeys who wandered through the yard this morning! In the thirty years I’ve lived here I’ve only heard them in the woods a few times, and seen a couple outside the fence one time. It was a startling thrill that pulled me away from washing dishes when I caught my first glimpse of one strutting past the south windows. By the time I got to the east window they just kept coming, ultimately more than a dozen of them, strutting and pecking as they went, moving steadily.

I watched, delighted, until they had all moved through the yard and jumped the fence. It crossed my mind to send Wren out there to catch one for us to eat, but she hurt her paw in the snow the other day and wanted to lie on the heating pad and lick it instead. Just as well.

A Happy Outcome

Oct24

Garden season is winding down, the roller coaster crawling toward a full stop. Before the first freeze next week, I got in another couple of types of garlic, with gratitude to Ellie for sharing some local organic bulbs of two hardneck red varieties, Russian and Vietnamese. I now have two full beds planted with garlic, and I can tell the softnecks I planted a few weeks ago have rooted because they are sending up little green shoots. Between Friday and Monday nights upcoming, low temps are forecast to drop from 40 to 21℉. That will put an end to the remaining scarlet salvias, zinnias, and calendulas still blooming. I’m grateful they’ve held on for so long. And grateful to get the last garlic and some more tulips in the ground today.

Go figure: I transplanted these cauliflowers back in the spring and they stayed tiny for months before finally starting to grow good leaves, which were devoured by grasshoppers even as they grew. I held little hope for them ever making fruit, but left them in the ground all summer as grasshopper bait hoping they’d leave some of my other plants alone. They eventually devoured the leek and onion green tops leaving me next-to-nothing there, but still I left the cauliflowers in the ground. Lo and behold, at last they are making heads, albeit tiny. I wonder if they’ll survive sub-freezing nights, or if I’ll harvest these tiny heads this weekend.

I’m grateful for a next-to-last lunch outside with one of the last little tomatoes, leftover coleslaw, smoked gouda, and toast, along with falling golden birch leaves and the first volume of The Rain Wild Chronicles. I’m also grateful for some meaningful meditations, meetings, and conversations today.

I think I’m most grateful today for a happy outcome for this little dark-eyed junco who crashed into a window this afternoon. I heard the thump, dropped what I was doing, and went to the back door, where I was dismayed to see Topaz with the bird in her mouth. As I opened the door she set it down and walked inside! What a good kitty!

I picked up the bird who had no apparent damage but was limp with an open beak. I dripped a couple of drops of water into its mouth, and carried it to a secure fork in the chokecherry tree, where it was able to grip and rest. Not long after, I looked out the window and saw it was gone, so I walked out to look around and make sure it hadn’t simply fallen. It had recovered and flown away! A large flock of these little birds has been hanging around for a couple of weeks; or maybe there are multiple flocks migrating through. Three have hit a window in the past week, with one fatality; that’s more birds hitting windows here than over the past entire year or more, so I tend to think they are migrating through and are unfamiliar with the lay of the yarden. I added another visual barrier to the large window, and hope that’s the last accident for a long time.

Fun with Birds

Sep4

Morning coffee has gotten very exciting recently with all the bird action. A Woodhouse’s Scrub Jay flies from the Gamble Oak with an acorn as a hummingbird sits serenely in the next tree. The young oak is another beneficiary of the wet winter/spring, and consequently also the jays.

Lots of young hummingbirds zipping around the yarden now, sipping from the prairie salvia…

…the red salvia

…the purple whatever it is in this pot…

These hummingbirds are all juveniles and/or females so I can’t say which species any of them are. It’s hard to catch two in one frame when they chase each other away from nectar, but that’s my project for coffee time this week. I’m surprised I haven’t seen any males the past few days, but maybe this happens every year and I just noticed it this time. Maybe the males leave town early. I’m grateful for fun with birds on this first morning that feels like autumn.

Fledging

Jul10
Find the phoebe! Mama is in the picture, keeping watch over her little ones.

There are several reasons I wish I would go to bed earlier so that I can wake up earlier. This morning added another one to the list: I heard the phoebes after sunrise, but I dallied and didn’t get outside til 7:30. When I looked up at the nest–it was empty! They were all tucked in last night, and this morning, poof! Gone!

This didn’t happen in past years. They spent a couple of days in flight training from the nest, returning to it overnight. They hopped off the ledge onto various perches right around the deck, before staging into the trees just north of the house, and then later into the west woods. But this crew! They ‘flew the coop’ as a friend said, straight out the nest and… as I discovered a few minutes after my disappointment, right into the garden.

After I recovered from the shock of their disappearance, I turned toward the garden gate to go in and water the raised beds, and saw some fluttering… the chicks! I commend the parents. I can think of no better place for them to teach their chicks to fly and hunt. It’s full of grasshoppers, butterflies, and moths. I stepped back and watched for half an hour as the parents chirped, hunted, dropped down to feed babies; and as they flew together singing over the garden and the woods, demonstrating so many essential phoebe skills.

After awhile they had moved farther into the dog pen section of the garden, so I went in with the hose to water the beds. I continued to watch the parents but couldn’t see the chicks in the sagebrush and junipers in this transition zone between garden and wild forest. As I stood sprinkling the onions, I watched mama drop to the ground to hunt something, and she slipped through a gap under a chicken-wire plant cage stored in there: Suddenly she was frantically fluttering trapped inside the cage. I’m so grateful I happened to see it. I dropped the hose and ran to the cage, which has a flap on top that I opened, and she flew out.

Just as I got there she’d been trying to get out through the wire–which would have killed her if she’d gotten stuck. I immediately opened the other four cages. They’ve been sitting in there for more than a month. It had never occurred to me that a creature might get caught in them. You just never know what hazards you create for others!

It was so hot I stayed inside all day, but when I went out again this evening, I listened carefully, and heard the parents calling still from farther out in the woods. I’m so grateful for a successful fledging, and so glad I got to see some of the excitement from afar, and participate in a rescue so they didn’t lose a parent.

Growing Up!

Jul8

I’m grateful every day for my own growing up, a little more each day, and I’m also grateful for the opportunity and the joy of watching the baby phoebes growing up each day. Every chance I get between other obligations I step outside and shoot a few frames of the action in the phoebe nest. The feeding shot took place at 5:22 this evening, and the adorable ‘first flight’ (that I saw, anyway) took place at 6:55. It won’t be long before they’ve left the nest, but I am grateful that I have a couple of days ahead where I can spend a lot of time with them.

Good Food

Jul6

Last night our internet was down so I couldn’t post. I’m making up for it today with a catch-up on the week’s food. I could just say I’m thankful for food, but I am especially grateful for good food: food that has been grown organically, or prepared with care, or is extra tasty or nutritious, or comes from my own garden. This popcorn doesn’t come from the garden, but is organic, and was extra tasty. I craved kettle corn, a delicacy which I was introduced to late in life so haven’t had much of. And where am I gonna get it after dark around here except my own kitchen?

I’ve tried it just a few times, popping as usual on the stovetop, tossing with melted butter, salt and brown sugar, but the salt and sugar always fall to the bottom. A few nights ago, I made it and thought to melt the brown sugar in with the butter in ‘the right tool for the job,’ this beautiful and functional Dansk butter melter. It worked great! I just had to make sure to take it off the heat before it caramelized, and have the popcorn ready shortly after. So simple, so delicious!

The next day, something a little more healthy, red beans without the rice. I used these wonderful heirloom beans from Rancho Gordo, and modified a vegetarian red bean recipe from the same site with a little bit of smoked paprika, maple syrup, and Dijon mustard.

And tonight’s snack, fresh snow peas from the garden, sweet potato noodles, with a Thai peanut sauce from Mike Hultquist at Chili Pepper Madness. Making great use of that last quarter cup of peanut butter in the jar, and cleaning out the jar at the same time. I’m grateful for good food.

I’m not the only one eating well around here! The phoebes continue to spill out of their nest with all the growing they’re doing, from all the bugs that the garden provides. There are still four chicks, as far as I can tell. I’m trying not to pester them too much so only taking a few shots each day. Below, mama delivers a fat grasshopper…

… and then she cleans up! What an amazing system they have: not every time, but often enough after she feeds a chick it turns around and pops out a clean white pellet for her to catch and carry away.

Feeding Frenzy

Jul4

What a joy to see the Phoebe chicks outgrowing their nest! I’m grateful on this Interdependence Day that I got to spend some time outside watching the feeding frenzy and catching a few good pictures. I am also grateful that I got some thoughts on interdependence out on my podcast, Suffer Less with Mindfulness, available wherever you get your podcasts, or on my website here. Wishing everyone a safe and mindful holiday week.

Chirping

Jun25

The chicks are big enough now to see and I count three. Today I heard their tiny voices for the first time. I’m grateful!