RURAL NEWS: Spring is Wild

Spring is always a disappointment.  But only at first.

Wet daffodils, well into May.

April is the cruelest month, breeding

 

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

 

Memory and desire, stirring

 

Dull roots with spring rain.

                                                                

The Wasteland, T. S. Eliot                              

Oh, the cold, the wet!  When will it end!

Then May arrives.   Well, somewhere around the beginning of May, anyway. 

Yesterday afternoon a red fox was dancing about in the field.  He trotted along, stopped, leapt in the air a few times, now and then eyeing his surroundings to make sure he wasn't been checked out by anyone or anything else.  He seemed confident, unperturbed.  At nearly the same time in the same part of the field a porcupine lumbered along, looking back now and then to be really sure dog Skyler was all bark and nothing more.  Soon after two deer tiptoed into the open, but for them, bark was as good as bite, and they fled.  So did a gang of turkeys, making a less graceful exit.

This is exactly what the fox looked like, black tips on his ears, the luxuriant tail.  With Ken's super binoculars–the ones he used to identify the area of the sky he would hone in on with his telescope–I could see him almost as closely as this.

Turkey hunting season is on right now, but it's not the kind of hunting that keeps people out of the woods, like in deer season when you need to wear hunter's neon orange.  Good thing, because there are ramps to be gathered now, those amazing plants that taste like garlic and onion all in one.  I haven't gathered many, to be honest, because it's still fairly muddy.  Walking in the field is all squish, squish.

Every bit of green in sight on this steep hillside is ramps as I saw them last spring.  But this is extraordinary, you are more likely to find groups of ramps here and there, often in the same area as in past years.

Birds are returning, bit by bit.  A pair of Canada geese have taken to dropping by to spend an idle afternoon on the grass or drifting around on the water in the big pond. Occasionally they are joined by a lone male merganser or lone male mallard.  (Have they been cast off?)  Of course Skyler is not that far away on the near side of the pond, but there seems to be mutual agreement that there's no offense taken on either part.

This time I am prepared for the annual visit of barn swallows.  The first sign they have arrived is a wad of mud plastered to the house, somewhere.  Sometimes they fling mud right at the front door while trying to build a nest just under the doorway roof.  That attempt is doomed by the constant opening and closing of the front door, not to mention humans going in and out, sending them in to a panic.  (Such fright behavior is what caused one bird, a chickadee possibly, to fly inside the other day.  I didn't realize what had happened until I found bird droppings and heard fluttering.  The bird flew to the highest possible point in the house. I closed all bedroom doors upstairs, making at least those room out of bounds, and opened a window, then hoped for the best.  Within an hour or so the bird apparently managed to sense where the outside air was, nevermind that it was only a tiny rectangle in an otherwise huge open area.)  This year I decided I was not going to continue my years of dealing with swallow poop, that gray-white mess that coats the floor and the wall around the nest.  I settled on using prayer flags to deter nest building.  It's not as if there aren't plenty of other choice spots available; they could nest in the big shed or the woodshed.  Why not?

I could barely see the bird, way up in the–what do I call it?–the cupola?

The culprits.  Three, of what are most commonly five, fledglings.

From the splatter visible here, you may be able to imagine the total accumulation.

My prayer flag solution.  Will it work?  Additionally, each light fixture below has a small rock on top, in case that seems a convenient nest site–again.  

A snake (harmless garter snake) slides around the side of the patio. It has a particular liking to hang around the stone wall when the sun is out and have a swim in the pool from time to time.

This one is probably one of the larger ones around, but looks bigger in the photo than in real life.

So  much for spring!

Sumer is icomen in

 

Lhude sing cuccu!

                                            Medieval ditty

See?  There isn't really any news here.