The baby phoebes are growing rapidly. They now have feathers and are starting to look like respectable birds. The harried parents dart back and forth carrying insects, in a desperate attempt to assuage their youngsters’ ravenous appetites.Walt and I are still amazed that our fairly constant , noisy use of the backdoor right under the nest has been so well tolerated by the phoebe family. Apparently, a secure, warm, dry location for a nest more than makes up for the constantly slamming door and the exuberantly noisy young dog. (Actually, once she is done announcing her presence, Maisie spends quite a lot of time quietly lying on the back stoop right under the phoebe nest. I think she considers the phoebes her friends. She pretty much considers everything and everybody her friend. Read the rest of this entry »
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Phoebe Nest on Light
Mama and Papa phoebe are very busy this morning, rushing past each other as they ferry insects to their fuzzy progeny.
Mr. and Mrs. Robin still don’t seem to have any chicks. Sometimes I wonder about the parenting skills of robins… In past summers, we have spotted many a de-nested baby robin scurrying aimlessly along on the ground, or else lying featherless and lifeless on the ground under a sadly under-engineered nest.
Yesterday evening I spent another hour transferring tadpoles from their nearly algae-free natal rain barrel into two more barrels. We now have tadpoles in five of our thirteen rain barrels. I hope our algae production can keep up!
Usually we have to put Bacillus thuringensis israeliensis (B.t.i) dunks in our dark, opaque, open-top rainbarrels in order to kill off the mosquito larvae, (the translucent white rainbarrels have proven to be completely unsuitable as nursery ponds for mosquito larvae, so we don’t put B.t. in those barrels) but this year the larvae cannot compete with the hordes of ravenous tadpoles.
I have high hopes that our upstart tadpole-breeding operation will be a success; that next year we will be deafened by the singing of myriad Grey treefrogs; and that our rainbarrels will serve as their nurseries. If our frog-breeding program is successful, next frog season we may need to wear earplugs to bed, and if we manage to hatch out another enormous batch of tadpoles, I hope to share tadpoles with other would-be frog ranchers!
Tags: algae, animals, birds, eggs, Green Barbarians, nests, phoebes, rain barrels, robins, tadpoles, water
Robins' Nest on Garage Light
Walt and I are happily overseeing the raising of three different batches of youngsters this summer.
In the ten years we have lived here, we have been lucky enough to hatch out several nestfulls of phoebe chicks, which have been hatched, raised and fledged in successive nests built atop the light over our back door. There have been a few years without backdoor phoebes, usually because Mama and Papa phoebe have been frightened away when we used our back door. Though last year was a rather sad summer, with a rather lonely and angry male Phoebe who seemed unable to find a mate, and whose cry, “Phoebe! Phoebe!” sounded quite unusually loud and angry all summer, as if he were yelling: “Phoebe! God Damn It! Phoebe!” And there have been a few summers when we eschewed the use of the back door, in order to encourage the phoebes. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: algae, animals, birds, eggs, Green Barbarians, nests, phoebes, rain barrels, robins, tadpoles, water
Walt and I drove to Chicago a couple of weeks ago for Addie’s graduation from the University of Chicago. Dmitri and his girlfriend were subletting an apartment in the Pilsen neighborhood for a month, from the friend of a friend, so the entire family would be in attendance at the festivities.
Dmitri had suggested that Walt and I stay in the apartment, rather than in a hotel, in order to save money. So we did, and we did. A lot of money, actually, enough to pay for quite a lot of nice meals in restaurants.
The living arrangements in the sublet apartment were interesting nearly to the point of hilarity, and we all spent quite a bit of time speculating about the apartment’s Legitimate Occupant, who was rumored to be an environmental engineer who was working on a project in China. Why, for instance, was his bed up on stilts seven feet in the air? And furthermore, I asked, as I unsuccessfully attempted to leap onto the bed like a spawning salmon negotiating a waterfall, why hadn’t this engineer included an access ladder when he designed this lofty bed? Accessing the bed required standing on the windowsill, then on the dresser, and then a big heave onto the bed, which loomed up at my collarbone height. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: chicago, other people's lives
Click on the photo for slideshow
Check out this Scientific American article/slideshow, and then share it with anyone you know who “doesn’t believe in global warming.”
Tags: global warming, Himalayas, water
Walt and I made one of our very rare shopping trips together last night. We needed to find an ottoman so we can sit together on the couch. Walt’s long skinny back gets sore if his feet aren’t up, and he’d spotted an ad for a storage ottoman for half price, so off we went, with our worm money clutched in our hot little fists.
The mall was nearly empty, perhaps because “American Idol” was down to its last two contestants of the season. We trotted up Penney’s escalator, hot on the the trail of our ottoman, wandered around in disconnected circles for a while, until finally Walt asked the young saleslady for help. She brought him to the aisle where the ottoman should have been, but wasn’t. She explained that those ottomans have been extremely popular, selling out immediately when they go on sale, and then checked the status of the item on her computer. She then checked to see whether any ottomans were lurking in two different storage areas. They weren’t. We thanked her and headed for the escalator. We were halfway down, when we heard hallooing from above. The saleslady was on the escalator above us, waving frantically and calling out that she’d found one! After a brief flirtation with the idea of running up the down escalator, Walt and I decided to use the up escalator. We all got upstairs and the saleslady triumphantly showed us a box with the coveted ottoman inside. We checked it out and decided to commit, but not before we took a photo of our favorite saleslady, whose name is Anna, sitting on the box. Walt took the photo with his Trackphone. (Tracphone? Tracfone?). He’d never used the camera on that phone before, so the Anna figured it out for him. When we figure out how to get the photo onto the computer, I will post her photo. Talk about fantastic service! Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: good people, inspirational, kindness
I’ve just entered another idea contest on the Jovoto site. I’m not asking anyone to go and vote on it–it’s been made clear to me that the site is not hospitable to casual viewers–my friend Ann just visited the site in order to rate my idea, and this is what she wrote about the process: Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Green Barbarians, money, papercutting
I wrote about the relationship between health and eating eggs and other high-cholesterol foods in “Green Barbarians,” because I never cease to be fascinated by how easy it is to convince people, especially people who should know better, that perfectly natural, harmless foods are unfit for human consumption. Despite the fact that there has never been a single study that proved that consuming eggs and butter was actually harming anyone at all, experts have been warning us for decades that butter and eggs are hazardous to our health and bad for our hearts. Read the rest of this entry »
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