Benny the Beaver Bounces Back

Benny makes for some bushes, presumably for his evening meal.

Keepin' his head above water.

Just when the dogs thought it was safe to go back to the water, Benny the Beaver has returned for what may be an extended stay. Nella, our border collie mixed breed, is obsessed with Benny and plunges into the pond as soon as she hears a fish jump. She then swims around in circles going after every trout and minnow that breaks the surface in her immediate vicinity, hoping to snag her first beaver. Meanwhile Benny will be swimming nonchalantly at the other end of the pond. He doesn't seem too troubled by the presence of humans, and I could have gotten some pretty good photos if I had had my camera late this afternoon while walking around the pond. But of course one of the laws of amateur photography is that you never have your camera with you when the best shots present themselves. I did get the photos above, which are passable, from the deck using the new super-duper zoom on my new camera. They were taken while 75 - 100 yards from the pond. O.K. photos I guess. I mean you can tell it's a beaver or at least a large swimming rodent. Still, I'm disappointed so far in the quality of photos from the new camera. We'll see if they improve as my familiarity with the camera improves.

River Dance

The family surveys the raging river.

Nothing says Summer like a boy, a dog, a stick and some water to throw the stick in.

Searching for good beaver dam sticks and/or rocks.

One of the construction engineers strategically places a rock on the "beaver dam".

My oldest son and his family arrived for their annual visit yesterday and today we all headed down to the river for some serious play. There are three grandkids in this bunch. The oldest is a girl who is 9. Number two is a boy who is 7. The youngest, another boy, is 4. With a couple of sticks and the river, the kids can keep themselves occupied for hours, blissfully leaving the adults to sit in beach chairs, sip coffee and take pictures. We did however collectively undertake something more serious this year, the construction of an ersatz beaver dam. This was motivated by the desire to deepen one of the shallow pools along the river in the hope of transforming it into a swimming hole or at least a deep wading pool. The dam got off to a really good start and everyone had a good time contributing logs, sticks, rocks and gravel to this first phase of construction. We even appear to have raised the water level in the pool behind the dam by 3 to 5 inches. Wow! Who knows, if our dam is good enough maybe Benny the Beaver will come back, finish off the dam and settle in. We'll see.

How does our garden grow?

The impressive corn, bean and sunflower patch. We're thinking of installing an ethanol refinery.

Tomato plants and marigolds.

View from the pond.

The bed of greens.

Strawberry bed. We just planted these this year, but they are already full of fruit.

The "hanging gardens".

Not too bad, thank you for asking, although we don't have any cockleshells in our garden. Catherine is the head gardener and landscaper in our household, so the garden layout and plant selection is pretty much hers. My contribution to the garden is essential if less glorious and consists primarily of "grunt" work. I can't even lay claim to doing all of the grunt work, as Catherine was the one who filled half of the raised beds with soil and compost once I got them built. (You'd think as a society we could come up with a more politically correct name for sweaty manual labor than grunt work, something like "tactile value-added activities". If you have any good suggestions, please share it in a comment.)

Last year we just threw some seeds and seedlings in the ground so we could say we had a garden and the results were mixed at best. The tomatoes and herbs did great; the corn was pathetic. In fairness, however, our time last year was pretty much consumed with getting the ground roto-tilled and the fence and arbor built. Actually growing anything was really just an afterthought. This year we have done better and so far the results are encouraging, for Vermont that is. We know that in most of the country gardeners are already on their third or fourth crop whereas we are still at the stage of oooing and aaahing over every flower that appears on the tomato plants. We'll really be excited when some tomatoes actually appear. Still, our strawberry plants are robust and full of berries, the greens are ready for harvest and the corn even shows promise. Heck, it's already 3 or 4 inches high! I promise photos as the harvest starts to come in.

Ansel Adams...Move Over! or Gadget Guy finds Nirvana

My rather shapely foot.

My first decent bird photo.

The new camera as seen by the old camera.

Wish I knew the name.

Nella watches for the bear.

Zazou helps me look for wildflowers in the river.

Beautiful but unidentified at this time.

Ditto.

Orange Hawk weed.

Tall Meadow-rue

Wild strawberries.

Nightshade?

As you can see from the eclectic selection of photos above, I put the new camera into operation today. I didn't have the best conditions for a photo shoot; it was cloudy and rainy all day, or as us artists say, I didn't have "good light". Still, I thought I owed it to the readers of the blog to show what the future holds now that I have the right photographic stuff. I also couldn't resist playing around with my new gadget / toy / essential accessory of modern life.

I should perhaps first give everyone the specifications on the new camera. It's a Panasonic DMZ 18. (I guess the model name comes from the fact that it was built in a demilitarized zone.) It has something like 87,000 mega-pixels. For the uninitiated, a mega-pixel is 1 million pixies, and we all know that a pixie is a small faerie with magical powers. Apparently with a digital camera, when you click the shutter all of those little pixies furiously paint whatever they see during the brief instant that the shutter is open. That means that my camera has 87,000 x 1 million pixies painting each time I take a picture. Obviously, the more pixies painting, the better the picture. Fortunately the camera comes with an automatic brush cleaning feature which makes the pixies pretty much maintenance free. It's amazing how today's technology can harness yesterday's superstitions to make our world a better place. Otherwise the camera is pretty straight forward although it does have more computing power than what was needed to send a man to the moon in 1969. I wonder, how they were able to take such good pictures during those missions to the moon? Everyone knows pixies can't survive space travel.

Anyway, not having, as I mentioned, "good light" today, I thought I would concentrate on photographing some of the wild flowers growing around the place. I threw in the other stuff just to show off. Enjoy.

Ready For Our Close-up

The new camera arrived late this afternoon. I promise to post lots of pictures, good and bad, tomorrow. I know everyone is breathless with anticipation.

We finally cave-in...

A newly minted lawn cowboy rustles up some grass clippings.

Find the grass-cutting Waldo in this scene. This gives an idea of how much grass we used to cut with the push mower.

The beast waits for a chance to cut more grass.

View from the rear.

When we bought our place in the Fall of 2006, it came with an old lawn tractor. When I say old I should say 17 year old lawn tractor. After a lot of fussing and fiddling and spending money on parts, I got the thing to run three times during the early weeks of the 2007 mowing season. When the old thing refused to start anymore we thankfully got rid of it. But that posed the question of whether we should replace it. We had an almost new push mower, and using it seemed much more environmentally responsible than buying a big ole lawn tractor. Plus, if our bathroom scales were anywhere close to accurate, we really needed the exercise. So last year we put in the exquisite wildflower meadow to cut down on the total mowing area (see earlier post), and we mowed our 1.5 to 2 acres of grass with a regular old push mower. Wasn't even self-propelled. We felt pretty darn virtuous (and pretty darn exercised) I have to admit. But then a funny thing happened this year. As the mowing season began in earnest, the more we mowed, the more our virtue began to have a bitter taste. It would take us 4-5 hours to mow the lawn which we basically did an hour at a time over 4-5 days. Then we'd get a day or two off and start over again. On a recent visit our daughter asked us what in the world we were thinking. (That's what children tend to do when their parents are doing something completely irrational.) We defended ourselves of course mentioning in no particular order global warming, noise pollution, our carbon footprint, dying polar bears, the global food shortage, Chinese child laborers and a few other things that I can't remember right now. But late at night lying in bed, too sore to sleep because of all the mowing, we would dream of a lawn tractor. Then Sears had a sale, and we became weak and went out and bought the darn thing. Funny thing is, the tractor uses less gas to mow the lawn than we used to use with the push mower. Wish I'd known that last year!

p.s. For you gear heads, the tractor runs a 24 hp, 2 cylinder, Briggs & Stratton Intek engine coupled to a hydrostatic transmission. The cutting width is 42 inches.

An Old Friend Returns (Along with some of the usual suspects)

A female kingfisher with a recently whacked fish.

The dark bands on the female's breast make the kingfisher one of the rare birds where the female is more colorful than the male.

Male kingfisher showing off his uncolorful breast.

The rose breasted gross beak waits for the purple finches to finish at the feeder. (Click on the photo to get the enlarged version.)

The gold finch waits on the purple finches to finish at the feeder. Notice a pattern here?

Last year we had a pair of banded kingfishers who took turns perching on the dead tree that overlooks our pond and a stretch of the river. It was pretty exciting to watch them dive into the pond and return to a branch with a fish. Then they would unceremoniously whack the fish on the branch to kill it before devouring it in one big gulp. I guess the kingfisher doesn't like for the fish to squirm as it slides down the bird's gullet towards oblivion. Anyway, we had started to despair of seeing the kingfishers this year since we hadn't had any sightings. Then they showed up a few days ago, forgoing the fish in the pond and hunting up some frogs along one bend in the river. They are large and beautiful birds with colorings similar to a blue jay. They are a bit larger than a jay however. Oddly enough kingfishers nest in mud banks along a river as opposed to in a tree. Most kingfishers live in warmer (read tropical) climes and there are many species worldwide. I'm even seen a couple on my trips to Benin, Africa. There's just the one species up here in the North Country, however, and we're glad to have them. They need to start cleaning out some of the over sized minnows in the pond. The minnows have been gorging on the food supposedly destined for the trout and some of them are now approaching the size of small tunas.
In other bird news, we appear to have 4 pairs of mating purple finches, a pair of mating goldfinches and a pair of mating rose-breasted grosbeaks in the woods right around the house. We surmise this because they show up at the feeders almost every day. I say "mating" pairs, but in all honesty we haven't gotten back their responses to the Kinsey survey so who knows what their coupling arrangements are? As soon as we get the surveys back, I'll post the data to the blog.

Moose Mania!

Maggie the moose doing her best horse impression.

Again with the horse look. (The bushes behind Maggie the Moose are about 7 ft high and 8 ft wide. Hopes this gives a idea of scale.)

Now that's a moose profile!

Maggie's had enough of the bright lights.

The big day finally arrived! We have seen a moose in our yard! Things all started off as I was finishing up my lunch out on the deck. Suddenly a large moose ran up the road, apparently startled by a car, and I watched it go by as well as I could. Unfortunately the view was pretty much blocked by trees. The dogs got as excited as me and we peered through the trees towards the back of the house for a while hoping to catch a final glimpse of the beast. No such luck, however, and I turned around a bit dejected. But lo and behold there was an adolescent moose standing near the now famous wildflower meadow and staring at me up on the deck. I quickly hustled the dogs inside before they could catch sight of the moose and then snapped the photos above with my decidedly crappy camera. After pretending to be a horse and posing for a couple of photos, the moose sauntered off and into the forest. About five minutes later a second, larger moose appeared across the pond headed in the opposite direction. I couldn't get any photos before she disappeared into the brush and trees between the brook and the road. So here's our hypothesis. The pair of mooses were a mother and her one or two year old calf. They were crossing the road when a car startled them and they scattered, the mother up the road and the calf into our yard. So there you have it. Our first confirmed siting of Mrs. Bullwinkle and her daughter Maggie. Such excitement here in the North Country!

The Wildflower Experiment or Crazy for Daisies

The vast expanse of the "wildflower meadow".

Even vaster in this photo.

Last May Catherine and I had two large areas totaling almost half an acre rototilled with the plan of turning these patches into our "wildflower meadow". We had been convinced that this would be a good idea after being hypnotized looking at the website for "American Meadows". Still in our hypnotic trance, we spent an obscene amount of money on wildflower seeds and then in our freshly tilled plots followed the sowing instructions for the seeds to the letter. This included pulling, in tandem, a very heavy roller by hand over the newly tilled half acre, like two mules. (Try it and see if that doesn't test your marriage.) We then waited expectantly. And waited. And waited some more. Finally in late Summer about half of the area we had rototilled and sowed bloomed with mostly Cosmos. These are nice enough flowers, I guess, but they were primarily pink and Catherine's not crazy about pink. To say we were disappointed at the fruits of our labor is a bit like saying Hitler was disappointed when that Stalingrad thing didn't work out as planned. O.K., maybe he was a bit more disappointed than we are.
The mix of seeds we planted last year contained both annuals and perennials, so we re-rototilled the sections where almost nothing had come up and left the rest to see what the perennials would do . And low and behold this year daisies appeared in great profusion! Not hundreds of dollars worth of daisies which is what they ended up costing us, but enough for us to start talking again about our "wildflower meadow". Of course we never replanted the sections that we re-rototilled, so they now look like someone went out of their way to plant a "nasty weed meadow". The "nasty weed meadow" is thriving so far and we've invested no labor or money in it at all. Go figure.

There Will be Blood...from turtles

Our freshwater leech.

Another look. Apparently the French like them sauteed with a little butter and some garlic, but of course the French will eat anything.

The new Tilly digging her nest (we think).

Disgusted she makes a break for the pond.

Back in her element.

We discovered a second snapping turtle, smaller than the first, digging away in our pumpkin patch today. This was a good 50 feet from the edge of the pond. More surprising for us was what we discovered on the turtle's shell. A big, black leech. Very odd. The leech was a freshwater leech and we're guessing our pond is well supplied with the little suckers. Snapping turtles (according to a couple of websites) are one of the preferred hosts for freshwater leeches although they will gladly load up on fish, frog or mammal blood. Hmm, I knew there was a good reason we didn't go wading in the pond.
As for the turtle, we've decided she was trying to dig a nest before we rudely interrupted. The poor thing finally gave up (minus the leech which I obligingly removed) and trundled back to the pond. We've had to do some rethinking on our turtle names with the discovery of this new, smaller snapper who appears to be a female. As a result she has assumed the mantle of "Tilly the turtle" and our original, bigger turtle will henceforth and forevermore be known as "Tommy the turtle".

Tilly the Turtle Takes in some Sun

Shy Tilly hides her head in the weeds.

A good look at Tilly's 14 inch carapace and crocodile-like tail.

Walking around the pond just a couple of days ago I almost tripped over Tilly the turtle. That's not recommend when the turtle in question is a good sized snapper. Having recovered my composure, I went back to the house for the camera and took the pictures above. Tilly seemed unconcerned about my presence or the the dogs polite sniffing. She seemed intent on basking in the warm Spring sun and stayed right where she was for several hours. She kept her head under the weeds, but we were able to move a few aside and take a look. Her head is the size of a large avocado and very impressive. Catherine has seen other turtles in the river, probably Eastern painted turtles, but I have as yet to see any besides Tilly. If I do see a different turtle on one of my walks, you'll be the first to know.

No-see-ums, Blackflies and Deer Flies

Biting midge or "no-see-um".

Black fly up close and personal.

A deer fly sitting down to eat.

Deer fly after having eaten (burp!).

What well dressed Vermonters are wearing these days. (In a sad note, the gentleman modeling this outfit died on a hiking trip from black fly and deer fly bites he received on his hands.)

We pride ourselves up here in Vermont on living in something of a bucolic paradise. Compared to other areas of the country we are quite spoiled as there are no fire ants, poisonous snakes, scorpions, horse flies, alligators or tarantulas. Until recently there were no ticks or fleas either although that is changing. Still, I've never gotten a tick in Vermont and never found one on our dogs. We've never had a problem with flea control either, on me or on the dogs. All of these entymological and reptilian advantages come thanks to our brutally long and cold Winters. So even at the cosmic level there is no free lunch. And in this regard our "lunch" is even more costly than it seems at first blush. For if we have none of these other pests, we do have a few of our own. We have, for example, no-see-ums which are biting midges. They live up to their name. You can't see em' and they can really bite. We have black flies, a miniature version of the deer fly which we also have. The deer fly is a miniature version of the horse fly. We don't have horse flies, generously leaving that particular insect pest to our neighbors in the South. As with horse flies, black flies and deer flies (also known as yellow flies) have a proboscis with multiple barbs that they plunge into your skin, the better to drink your blood. Being barbed, when the proboscis is removed it causes a fair amount of pain and leaves an ugly welt about the size of a golf ball. O.K., I'm exaggerating, but they do leave big welts. The welts itch painfully for about 8 hours or until you bleed to death from scratching. Black flies and yellow flies need water, like a pond or a river, to breed. That means we are particularly well served here on the old homestead what with our river and our pond. And I thought nothing could make me look favorably at mosquitoes.

p.s. I forgot to mention that only the females of these different species drink blood.