I’m just muddling through, but it’s a successful muddle, I guess. Most things I intended to accomplish today got accomplished, so I’m calling it good.
I even learned how to erase ugly power lines and make phone photos unnaturally bright.
Anyway, I muddled through making my hair more blue and did a particularly crappy job of it. I wish I could get to the back of my head more easily. I should pay my hair lady to do it next time.
Sorta blue. This shows me taking a regular photo and making it portrait mode.
Could my day get more exciting? Sure. I bought food for the very small Thanksgiving meal I will cook Thursday and was friendly to everyone I encountered. Why not? I do hope I don’t have to drive to Temple any more this week, though. People drive weird. Everywhere.
This is supposedly rose gold. Well, the camera a fun new toy, even if it isn’t the fanciest phone one.
I would have taken lots of bird photos today, but the memory card was hiding (not really—Lee had it). So I enjoyed the binoculars a lot. This evening I must have spent five minutes watching a female Cardinal chowing down on juicy, black greenbrier berries. Like I’ve said before, our woods provides plenty of bird food.
I’d take some if you have it to me. Sad phone photo.
That’s about all the excitement other than bird stuff. Horse’s are fine but still muddy, and the fowl are enjoying their daily food as usual. Lee, the dogs, and I are also content.
Penney is very content. She loves Lee’s porch chair.
I grew up near beaches and I like them okay, though I prefer marshy land near beaches, which have more interesting birds.
Beach sunsets are pretty fine! I do love Hilton Head.
But I really love mountains and always have. I looked forward to visiting Chattanooga, where my paternal grandmother lived, each summer so we could look at streams, go through tunnels, and drive along the Blue Ridge Mountains.
As an adult, I’ve treasured my visits to other mountains in all weather. There are really good birds, too, and each area is so different! if I were rich, I’d head right over to Breckenridge and hike and snowshoe and be just fine. Or maybe Ruidoso, since it’s in another state I love.
Sedona, also fine rocks.
Just dreaming. I’m here in Texas looking at a small hill. At least I have all these birds!
Look. I finally took bird photos you can identify as birds. Eastern Phoebe.
Off topic, but I enjoyed watching a huge flock of Brown-headed Cowbirds roosting and then departing en masse this morning. I had the good camera (Cameron EOSR5 Mark II) and telephoto lens in the birding area. Distance shots are from the phone camera.
So many birdsGood camera viewClick to enlarge—you can see each bird!Bye!Supervisor
I also dragged the camera to the Wild Wings Bird Sanctuary to practice close-ups. I got lots of chickadees and titmice at the feeders and a few others. I think a couple are pretty good. At least you can see details on them. I’m gonna practice this week so my camera muscles will be all strong for next weekend. Anyway, here are cute titmice.
I can’t choose between these two Both are my favorite Eating
And here are just a few Carolina Chickadees. They pose well.
I also got a couple of nice shots of water dripping into the birdbath. Look carefully and you will see many honeybees from the nearby hives.
I took lots of photos of new Wildscape plants, but that will be in a Master Naturalist blog. But here are a couple of insects!
Painted ladyFunereal duskywing Honeybee and carpenter beeGulf Fritillary Honeybee hiding in salvia Another fritillary
So, whee. Mountains are great, but no matter where you are, there are birds, insects, and plants to explore.
It’s a good thing I like naps, since I’m very good at falling asleep at this point in my life. I had a very nice nap on the porch this afternoon with the sun keeping me warm and a breeze to keep me from being too warm. Other than waking myself up snoring from being in an awkward position, it was great.
And the good news is that I still had time for horse activities before sunset.
I did have a pretty busy morning after a leisurely birding hour and a little walk. Lots of bluebirds were out competing for grasshoppers, which is always a joy to watch.
Phoebes were also very vocal.
I can’t say my morning project tired me out, because after Chris did the hard work of pounding the hanger into the ground, putting up this cool solar birdbath was very easy. And the best part is the bubbler is quiet and doesn’t interfere with bird listening. I hope birds use it. This evening the sparrows were eyeing it.
It turns off at night and when the water runs low.
I spent the rest of the morning doing volunteer work at the Wildscape and bird sanctuary projects. The Master Naturalist volunteers I have done a great job clearing out the space so new plants can go in.
Not the previous riot of plants! The succulent area still looks good. This day flower escaped the weeding
I enjoyed the sights, including a shy kitty and a chicken who laid an egg right in front of me.
The killer rose has beautiful blossomsCarpenter bee actionCatherine and Kim ready to attack meCrouching kittyChickenHer eggSalvia
I had a great time at the bird sanctuary, where there were at least 20 species out and about. Just the chickadees and titmice were at the feeder, but I saw and heard many more.
The feedersBonus squirrel
After chatting with others at the benches, I went to lunch with the group and had a very good time. I’m glad a was brave enough to do a group thing.
Jackie pretending to investigate a feeder while Debi looks on.
All the mice were out of the chicken feed box, so I can clean it out tomorrow. I guess I’ll need another nap then! Less rodent worry meant tonight’s sunset walk was calmer and I could enjoy listening to the Great Horned Owl and friends for a while. All is well.
Today was a fun one in the bird department! It was a beautiful day, and I guess the birds thought so, too.
Look at that bright sky and brilliant foliage.
I guess the birds are on the move or something. Of the incredible 64 species that either I saw or Merlin heard, there were even two hummingbirds! I know a few hang around during the winter, but I was surprised to see Merlin heard a Rufous Hummingbird! But, hey, it turns out that they do come through here in the winter! I wish I’d actually seen it.
See, it’s possible!
Other birds that have shown up in the past few days are more expected, though I don’t know if we get Towhees and Juncos very often here (common elsewhere in Texas). It’s as if we had a sudden influx of the birds from further south and west.
My notebook. Three full columns is 60 birds. I do abbreviate many names, just like Amy Tan.
Ones with an x in front are new this month, though I think the Brown Thrasher was here not too long ago. I love writing down the birds every day. It only matters to me, but it brings me joy to track their comings and goings on this one little spot where three habitats meet and there are many natural food choices. It’s not going to get written up for science, but it interests me (and a couple of you).
I’m almost done with my first pretty bird notebook. I’ll have to choose one with a winter bird on the cover next.
Other than birding and working, I enjoyed spotting a few intrepid flowers still blooming. I meant to capture some dandelions but forgot. All these cheer me up, though.
Camphorweed DittoAsterSaw greenbrier (berries)
As always, it’s good to have nature to distract me from…I guess, nature. Something has given me a stuffy head this week (Lee, too) and today my ears were clogged. We assume it’s an allergen, though maybe we got a virus while camping with all those germy people (just kidding).
I was around more people this evening, as I learned about bears at the Master Naturalist meeting. No one breathed too hard on me.
So why am I blogging with this sinus headache? I’ll be back soon!
When I got home from Blanco, my “birding station” was just about finished, other than some painting.
The good news is that the siding is close to the right color before painting.
It has a cute little metal roof and gets lovely morning sun this time of year, which is good because it’s been close to freezing the last couple of nights. The siding keeps the cold wind off my legs while the sun warms my top half.
My chair is in there. I ordered a little stool and side table for my coffee, notebook, and binoculars.
Next I need to measure the openings so I can order bamboo blinds to block the sun in summer and when sunset is trying to blast my eyes.
Inside ceiling.
So far it hasn’t disturbed the wildlife. This beautiful moth visited yesterday.
Lunate zale moth
I also enjoyed visits from a Viceroy and Bewick’s Wren.
We approve of the little shed
Today’s visitor was larger. She was very curious about what the heck I was doing.
Hello?
I’m looking forward to enjoying the winter sparrows and wrens from my station, especially once it’s a little warmer. Harris’s Sparrows arrived today, so the gang’s all here!
Yes, there was fun to be had on this chilly, blustery day. Did I say chilly? Well, the high didn’t get above 70°F, which is welcome. However, the wind made it feel colder, prompting a friend to ask if it was too soon to ask for summer back. Um, yes, I’m afraid it is. Tomorrow will be fairly cold, so I’m hoping the wind will die down.
It ruffled my feathers.
As for fun today, discovering the horses in the driveway again wasn’t part of it. I had to brave the gales to go shut the main gate, all the while wondering how in the HECK the gate got open, since I strongly remember fastening it. No photos. They looked just like last time.
Yep. They looked just like this.
Verifiable fun occurred during my birding time, when I plopped my chair on my unfinished birding station and watched a parade of geese, ducks, and cranes fly over, followed by a cat creeping to the pond and making the Kingfisher and Great Blue Heron upset. (Kingfisher seems to have moved in for a while).
The cat, fleeing when Carlton barked. Kingfisher and friends. Even though it’s blurry, you can ID this guy!Cardinal doesn’t want to be a cat meal. Grr feral cats.
Plus, I finally saw some migrating Monarchs. None of my better flowers are blooming, so I’m not seeing as many as Austin friends are. I hope the wind didn’t mess them up.
That’s the only one that stopped!
I also had fun at work, because I like both projects I’m working on, one writing and one helping folks. I enjoy the conversation.
The real fun, though, came when I opened the huge collection of acrylic markers I just bought. A whole new world of things I can doodle on has opened up, along with the possibility of ruining many things. So far I put flowers on a pair of glasses that needed some rejuvenation. They look better than I feared, thought not “fine art.”
This tones down the silver in the frames. Or at least that’s my claim So many colors
I sat there wondering if I could decorate my ugly plastic headband. Yes, I could. It ended up looking nice with my blue hair.
Just plopped on colorsLooks good on. I used a hair masque and wow my hair is shiny.
I also put identification in a subtle silver on my new binoculars and their bag, hoping not to have these wander away.
The decorations were fun to do. I just have to resist the urge not to decorate every object in my home. I’ll try to just decorate rocks or something. Many people paint rocks.
Dogs would prefer to remain unpainted.
My final fun was crocheting away while watching Elspeth so far this season. I will next watch Matlock. I like shows with quirky older protagonists. I feel okay not boycotting CBS, since Colbert was on Elspeth. So there.
Speaking of crochet, I finally have my temperature blanket through September. I look forward to months with more green and yellow…maybe even blue?
More thoughts on why I’m encouraged will be shared tomorrow. Ooh, passive voice! Reminds me to go finish reading The Language Puzzle, my current book.
I was musing about the birds I see every day around the Hermits’ Rest. I know we have summer birds, like Painted Buntings, and winter birds, like White-crowned Sparrows, as well as migrants who stay for a few days and head on their way to a final destination, like the warblers. But those weren’t my focus.
The White-crowned Sparrows are back, and I get to hear their beautiful call.
The birds I was thinking about are the ones I think of when I picture a “bird” in my mind. It’s just a few, and those species have followed me in Florida, Illinois, and Texas. These are birds I expect to see every day and feel a bit off if I don’t (luckily most of these are also in the other places I’ve lived in more than a few days, like South Carolina and Colorado).
I had no trouble finding today’s Bird of the Day!
To me, these friends are my daily companions:
Cardinal
Mockingbird
Blue Jay
House Sparrow
Wren (mostly Carolina)
Chickadee (Carolina here)
Dove (Mourning or other)
Crow
Mockingbirds have followed me my whole life, usually right outside my bedroom window.
When I was in that college campus and mostly indoors last week, I missed my birds. The universities I attended had all these birds, so I’m sure there are some on the Texas A&M campus, just not where I was.
I was hiding. Photo from Pexels.
I usually also see Black and Turkey Vultures, herons, Killdeer, Titmice, and a blackbird of some kind, but these seem exotic or special. Even the woodpeckers I see most days aren’t generic birds—they’re cool exotics in my mind. As are my beautiful bluebirds! It must be that these common birds weren’t in my parents’ back yard when my young brain was categorizing animals.
Lee says his childhood generic bird was a chicken.
I just assume the usual gang will show up every morning and don’t get excited until something seasonal or more rare appears, like a raptor or flycatcher.
This is my most thrilling sight from both yesterday and today. Beautiful bird.
But I do love my daily bird friends. They are always entertaining and fun to watch, even if I know their habits well. For example, I know a Cardinal from its loud wing flaps and a Chickadee by what it does to tree branches when feeding. And I know all their songs. So many different calls and songs come out of some of those little beaks!
These are some winter birds from last March. Each one makes various chirps, calls, and songs, which are so much fun to learn.
After thinking about how find I am of everyday birds, I got to wondering what the typical daily birds are elsewhere. How about where you live? What are your most familiar birds?
Nah. I have no need to go to the moon. I like it where it is and me where I am. All the lunar romance, metaphor, and legend falls away when you view the moon as a large cratered hunk of rock. I do think it’s amazing that our moon is the exact right size to create eclipses, though. That is one thing that makes me wonder if there’s an intelligent designer of the universe. Maybe the only thing…
…meanwhile, back in my little spot on Gaia, Mother Nature has taken on a benevolent aspect, at least for a time, and graced us with rain not just one, but two nights in a row! Yesterday’s total was over two inches, and tonight it’s rained hard for quite a while. There was a little water in the creek today. I look forward to seeing how our tanks look tomorrow.
I think the water looked higher.
But during the day, it was pleasant, which enabled me to get my eyes examined right in Cameron, Texas (what a luxury), which included interesting conversations on current events where I just listened. I rewarded myself with a visit to the bakery for a nice sticky bun. Mmm.
No photo of a bun, but here’s a Great Egret in a tree.
I’d thought my next task, getting Apache ready for a lesson, would be quick and easy. I was mistaken. I now have all dark gray horses, the exact color of our dirt. Apache had really been getting into his mud spa treatment and was concentrating particularly on his mane. He was encrusted. I regret not photographing it, but was pressed for time.
He looked like me, only bigger and more horse shaped.
I did my best in the limited time I had to wash him off, but it was not successful. At least he was clean enough to put a saddle on and did well even with the distractions of gunshots and frolicking foals. He’s sure come a long way.
I’m sure he will enjoy the mud these clouds have created.
That’s about all I have to write about today, because rather than contemplating wasting my money going to visit a cratered rock, I spent the rest of the day contemplating the value of life, the importance of friendship, and how we need to enjoy every moment we have on this planet, even when things are more than a little wonky.
I enjoyed the moment I saw this Nuptial Scorpionfly today!
Please know that if you’re my friend, you matter to me very much. And even if I don’t know you, I wish you a good life.
I’m relieved to say I no longer have itchy stitches above my left eye. And yes, I removed them myself with clean (Anita asked, so you might also) nail clippers. One snip and out they came, saving me a couple of hours of travel and a visit to a place with scary germs.
Not bad! I’m almost healed.
I was surprised at how little the scar shows up. The stitch holes look worse than the cut. I know I’m a good healer, so I don’t think I’m deformed. It’s still swollen and tender, so I don’t plan any rash actions in the near future.
I’ll stick to artsy photos of dead thistles.
I did take my hurt black glasses over to Marvina’s House of Optical Whimsy (not its real name) to see if they could be fixed, but alas, the hinge is dead. So I made myself feel better by picking out some new (more whimsical) black frames and…maybe more whimsy. I do love eyeglasses. So does Marvina. Tomorrow I’ll get my eyes examined and patiently (not) wait for new frames. I just hope my prescription hasn’t changed so I can still use my other glasses.
So many choices. I chose none of these.
Other than bird drama (Sandhill Cranes, a marauding Harrier, and a friendly Bewick’s Wren) today was calm. The big rain isn’t here yet, all livestock are great, and work is dandy.
Such a friendly little guy.
I’ll stop before I make more typos. Sorry about the recent ones, for you email subscribers, but at least my friend Sue R finds them so I can fix them on the website. It takes a village!
Where to start? The day started out good and kept getting better. Look at this sunrise!
Hello to the day
And I was happy to see yesterday’s new calf and mama cow looked much perkier this morning and nursing was going well. I think they’re fine.
Thank you for your concern, humans.
I also felt better today, after a slow start. Maybe my head is healing. I’m at least able to do complicated tasks at work.
This strong singer helped wake me up.
After work came the best part of the day, very healing and gratifying. Jackie came to do bodywork on Apache, and I decided to see if she could maybe help out Drew, too. He’d been pretty good recently.
After grooming my sweaty Paint boy, I brought Drew out and proceeded to groom him. He was fine. So, as we waited for Jackie, I got to work on his tail, which, sigh, was full of burs, thanks to the horses grazing in the only spot that still has them (I couldn’t even see them when I called them in to eat; I just heard thundering hooves until they came around the pond). With no trouble at all, I got that tail all smooth and shiny.
See? Nice.
After Jackie arrived and started working on Apache, who she says is doing very well, I bravely approached his mane, sprayed detangler, and started brushing. There weren’t too many burs, but they came out with no issues. THEN he let me get burs out of his forelock! And asked to have his head rubbed!! What the heck?
I’m all groomed.
That was the start of a wonderful afternoon with Droodles. Perhaps the Adequin (or however you spell it) really kicked in and he feels better. But we had a nice bit of exercise in which he walked, trotted, and cantered pretty calmly, followed by some hand grazing and bonding. I could stroke him, rub his head, let him nuzzle my hand…no scary biting or kicking! Wow!
Zzzz. This is relaxing.
And he did a good job with the bodywork. When he wanted to say he was uncomfortable, he did, but Jackie could calm him right back down so he could stretch or whatever she asked him for.
This is Drew all relaxed getting worked on.
Afterwards, she showed me how she used calming breaths and distraction, while keeping herself safe. My mind was blown. I can do that! And it’s more how I’d like to work with him. This information was invaluable and encouraging.
Stretching exercise. She let him move around until he was able to bend. That must have felt nice.
We also had a great talk about how long it takes to create a great partnership and a great horse. Her story of Jambo, her horse who just retired, has inspired me. Maybe I can keep going slowly with Drew, work on the ground some more, make sure his pain is managed, and we can go forward.
Look at us all happy. He is not biting me.
I just have to get both horses to the vet to get assessed. Now that I feel less head pain, I will get to work. And maybe I can go back to enjoying both horses. It was SO nice to have a good day with Drew.
I had fun, too.
And one final good part of the day: IT RAINED. I think it was enough to measure, and will know more tomorrow. It was so exciting that Kathleen and I ran out to check for raindrops in the pool. We hope more substantial rain comes tomorrow, since it’s badly needed.
The Hermits' Rest 