Happenings…and Wildlife

Fall has arrived but we are still semi-trapped by Covid-19 and are likely to be until mid-2021.  Still, it is a beautiful time of the year.  Blog topics are a challenge without hitting the road but such is life.  Travel means exposure and risk…so we’re doing our best to stay safe.

Laurie always decorates our front porch during the month of October.  It’s a combination of celebrations…the fall season as well as Halloween.  This modest display includes real pumpkins and gourds, stackable metal jack-0-lanterns, a small metal ‘bag’ with a jack-o-lantern face and a few ears of colorful Indian corn.

Indian corn, also called flint corn, is one of the oldest varieties of corn.  It’s a type that Native Americans taught the colonists how to cultivate.  This corn’s colorful kernels are ‘as hard as flint’, giving this type of corn its alternative name.  It is less prone to spoiling and dries uniformly.  Flint corn can be used by people and livestock and it’s used in such dishes as hominy and polenta.

Laurie has continued with her efforts to capture the best bird photos possible.  In this case, it was a male yellow finch working over one of the remaining cone flowers.

Then there are the larger birds that regularly wander through our yard as well as the wooded lots across the street and along one side of our home.  We do see a lot of turkeys around here…

Who doesn't love bluebirds!  We seem to be very popular with these pretty birds, especially when we feed them mealworms.  However, in this case, he was just looking for a drink of water from our deck railing mounted 'water hole'.

We’ve got woodpeckers!  This hairy woodpecker had just grabbed a great nut from our feeder when Laurie snapped this photo.

Yet another woodpecker!  In this case a red-bellied woodpecker stopped by for a snack…

No…Laurie didn’t take this photo of a yellow-bellied sapsucker.  I borrowed the photo from the Internet in order to illustrate a bird story.  Laurie has rescued many birds over the years.  Recently a yellow-bellied sapsucker crashed into one of our windows at dusk.  He was stunned and out of it but still breathing.  Laurie picked him up, stroked him and talked softly to him.  When he became more alert, she placed him on out deck railing…and a short time later he flew off into the woods.

From time to time, a number of these colorful birds show up at our feeder.  This is a rose-breasted grosbeak.  This visitor stayed at the feeder and gorged itself until it was satiated…

…and of course, we always love to see our neighborhood deer.  There are about 4 regulars with occasional other strays, plus a buck or two from time to time.  One recent evening as we returned home after midnight, we spotted deer bedded down on a neighbor’s lawn…  The first photo was taken late in the evening and the 'fuzzy' photo of the buck was taken through a screen.

Once again you are correct!  This photo of a house wren was also borrowed from the Internet…and yes, there was a recent incident that caused me to include the photo.  The other night we had our front door open and our sliding screen door in place.  When it was time for bed, Laurie went over to slide the screen door closed and shut the front door. 

No sooner had she closed the screen door than a pretty little wren decided to come in for a ‘visit’.  It was 11:30 PM!  We’d stopped putting wreaths up on our front door because the house wrens love to perch on them at night…and because we’d already had 3 other wrens in the house since we’ve lived here. (On one occasion, 2 wrens came in at the same time…and our cat at the time about had a heart attack!)

This time it took a little more than a half hour to convince our wren to fly out an open sliding door.  It had taken up residence in the guest bedroom.

Another day and another appointment with one of my physicians… As we drove east on I-40, nearing the doctor’s offices, we came across this rather spectacular fire.  A large RV trailer had erupted in flames and it was parked right under a bridge.  The trailer was destroyed but all involved apparently survived although one person had to be rescued.  We wondered how the fire started…

…and then there was action right in our driveway!  When neighbors Mike and Sherry had their house built, the builder did so much damage to this tree right next to our lot that it just didn’t survive in the long haul.  A tree removal service took down a couple of large dead trees 2 homes up the street and then took a few minutes to dispose of this sad remnant of the woods that used to be next door.

I thought that I’d end this post with a recent photo of some of Laurie’s family members.  These cute kids are actually her cousins from Scotland.  When we last saw them in person at a Scottish family gather in 2016, they were a wee bit younger and smaller.  From the left we have Della, then Moir and last but not least, Maura.  Laurie and her sisters are planning a return trip to visit their Scottish relatives in 2021 or more probably in 2022.

Just click on any of the photos to enlarge them…

Thanks for stopping by for a visit!

Stay Safe and Take Care, Big Daddy Dave