Friends in green places…Just add water!
Plants ready for potting...
Wait a minute...who is this?
Gorgeous leopard frog!
No doubt taking a rest from the heat, the dry dry wind and the longest day of the year! We’re having to fill bird baths, frog watering dishes, the bee-beach*, and other watering holes daily. So many birds, butterflies and creatures need water bad about now around here as we’ve had no rain here at Larrapin for a long while.
Be sure to keep your waterers full and fresh and make sure some are on the ground for frogs like this one and those cute toads that are your garden’s friends. For ideas and tips on watering, here’s a previous post on easy ways to water: http://ozarksalive.org/larrapin/?p=910
—A Larrapin Garden www.larrapin.us
*will explain the “bee beach” soon… Posts most wednesdays & weekends. Don’t miss any—you can subscribe by Email here. You can also get bonus links and recipes by “liking” our Facebook fan page atwww.facebook.com/larrapin.garden. We’re even on Twitter athttp://twitter.com/LarrapinGarden. Thanks for stopping by—leave a comment and share what’s at your water source this week!
Spring: beauty everywhere..and a wood duck
Mendy's flying pig among 'liberated' daffodils...will tell that story soon ...now that the statute of limitations is probably up...
There is so much beauty popping up everywhere—singing, flying, blooming, buzzing, growing—that it’s hard to keep up with all of it! And of course I can’t, but it sure is fun trying. As Emily Dickinson puts it, “To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.”
Beauty also shows up in unlikely places, the scum pond, as we affectionately call it, for example. On the property next door there is a shallow cow pond. It’s not remarkable at first glance. In the summer, thanks to the cows and sunshine, it has a brilliant green scum on top that sticks to the cows as they cool off. When they emerge from the pond, they are covered with green confetti. A lovely sycamore that stood with feet in the pond was badly broken in the ice storm a couple years back and looks the worse for wear.
Yet the pond is such a treasure. Iridescent dragonflies emerge in shimmering colors. I watched our resident pair of hawks mate (!) in the broken sycamore just recently. In the early spring, we wait for the chorus of peepers to begin the singing season, later deeper voiced frogs take over for summer. (You can listen to a springtime chorus of peepers I recorded at the bottom of this post. If you are reading this by email, you may need to go to the actual post to play it.)
Then last week on a cold, rainy day I looked out from my home office window and saw a small duck on the pond. I dashed inside for binoculars and camera.
Wood Duck at Larrapin!
First ever sighting of a wood duck at Larrapin Garden. What a beauty he was! The sighting was more delightful because we’d seen our very first wood duck ever — a female standing in a tree— just the week before on a vacation to Crowley’s Ridge, Arkansas. And here was another one, this time the beautifully colored male. He stayed and dined on something in the water for a few hours, then flew on to wherever he was headed. What a great day. Here’s to beauty everywhere.
If you enjoy wildlife in the garden, I heartily recommend one of my favorite blogs, Beautiful Wildlife Gardens for inspiration and ideas. And please listen to the spring concert in the audio in the podcast player below, courtesy of spring peepers at Larrapin, and a few thoughts thrown in by yours truly. It’s about a minute and half long…just click the arrow to play. Enjoy!
—A Larrapin Garden www.larrapin.us
Posts most wednesdays & weekends —you can subscribe by Email here. You can also get bonus links and recipes by “liking” our Facebook fan page at www.facebook.com/larrapin.garden. Geesh, we’re even on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LarrapinGarden.
Woodpeckers O’Plenty: Suet Feeders
Yellow-Bellied Woodpecker
Here at Larrapin we’ve kept suet feeders going every winter and spring for years now. The result is a cornucopia of woodpeckers! Since the feeders are outside the kitchen window, they provide lots of entertainment while doing dishes. Some, like the red-belly woodpecker above, are very bold and can be easily photographed while I lean over the sink.
Pine Creeper...ok, his rump anyway
Others are notoriously difficult to catch on film, like the Pine Creeper above. Not only does he blend with the pine tree bark, he is very, very fast and always in motion. Usually he’s creeping around eating the bits of suet the nuthatch stashes behind the pine bark!
Female Downy Woodpecker, Our darling...
Isn’t she sweet! In this photo above she discovered the suet cage door had been left open and couldn’t believe her luck! Thankfully we latched the feeder before the suet block fell out. If not, at least one of our weiner dogs would have mysteriously gained five pounds overnight and then pooped birdseed for a week!
My special darling, the Carolina Wren
All kinds of birds take turns at the blocks, like the Carolina Wrens.
Some are a bit piggish at the suet...
These guys above just eat and eat! I believe I’ve read that ‘eating like a bird’ translates to eating about half your body weight every day or so…
Pine Creeper
There he is again, the flash that is the Pine Creeper. Quick, snap the picture!! OK, so it’s a little blurry, but he’s blurry even in real life because he’s always moving so fast.
Traffic Jam
Everyone wants the suet block for their own. But sometimes if you are a little junco you have to just jump on a grab a bite because Big Mr. Piggish could be here all day! Nevermind that he’s staring you down…
There are only two woodpeckers that do not show up on the suet blocks: Flickers and Pileated. (Although the Flicker has been seen on the ground under the suet feeder picking up chips that fell down…) Next week I’ll post what I saw a whole family of FIVE flickers happily eating at Larrapin. Some people call it a ‘trash tree’ but after watching the birds’ delight, I never will!
—A Larrapin Garden www.larrapin.us
Posts most wednesdays & weekends. Don’t miss any—you can subscribe by Email here. You can also get bonus links and recipes by “liking” our Facebook fan page at www.facebook.com/aLarrapinGarden. Geesh, we’re even on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LarrapinGarden. Thanks for stopping by—leave a comment as to what is going on in YOUR winter backyard…
Woodpeckers are back
Once the weather gets cold, the woodpeckers reappear on the suet feeder. With the chilly week we’ve had, it’s rare to look out the kitchen window at the suet feeder and NOT see a woodpecker on it. Above, our adored red-head, the Yellow-Bellied Woodpecker. Occasionally, at the right angle, it’s visible how he got his name.
This tiny Downey Woodpecker has no trouble running off the big guys to get his lunch. They look so small compared to the Yellow-Bellied!
And here’s our 2009 pride and joy: an immature Hairy Woodpecker. It’s so fun to see the young ones figure out the suet feeder. Between them all, they are eating us out of house and home and making homemade suet cakes is on the agenda for the next few days.
Here’s another woodpecker post with pics over at the old blogger site:
Another juvenile woodpecker: a sapsucker??
Which of your favorite birds are showing up this time of year? Please leave a comment and let me know! (Bloggers just love comments….) 🙂
Read MoreSunday Blooms…Hoping for Rain
Ok, so it may not have actually hit 100 yesterday except in heat index (which surpassed 100). That’s what I get for looking at a bank’s temperature reading when the whole sign is out in the blazing sun! That sign (on a bank in Farmington) should lead to some amazing numbers being posted when we really do get hot in July and August.The Butterfly Weed above is doing well in the heat. I’ve yet to see any Monarch activity. (This is a native host plant of the Monarch butterfly. There are 100 kinds of milkweed and you can see pics of them here at monarchwatch.org ) I haven’t seen nearly as many butterflies of all kinds this year. I think the rainy, cold Spring may have set them back. The ac/heater guy who tuned up our system the other day said for the first time in his career he had made heater calls in May!
More weather lore: In June we’ve only had about 2 inches of rain per the NOAA website. They must have fallen somewhere around us, because I don’t think we’ve had that much righ here. So in June we’ve had half the normal rainfall for the month. In May we had around 8 inches, versus a normal of nearly 5 inches. Which all sounds (and feels) kind of crazy. At the same time, the historical charts say this area of the Ozarks can range anywhere between 21 and 70 inches of rain per year, with the normal being in the mid-40s. Fascinating! And I wondered why all the old farmer types are so interested in weather lore…it’s habit forming to start really observing these patterns. Now, when the patterns are as whacky as they have been this year, it can become a true gardening challenge.
Below, the Daylilies are still holding up, if fading a bit. No, those apparent raindrops fell from a hose, not the sky… Maybe we’ll get lucky and actually get that slim chance of rain today!
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