Author: admin

That was the headline in the local section of the paper. The statement is generally true, but a bit late, it’s been in full swing since April. I’m grateful the mosquitoes aren’t very numerous yet, I had my first bite, but they’ll be in full swing themselves in a week. I’m also grateful there are no deer flies out there, I’m hoping to be outa town before they arrive. I am grateful that the black flies plaguing my every outdoor moment will be gone in another week or two although all it means for me is that they won’t tend to fly into my eyes, nose and mouth. How can I possibly leave this outdoor paradise?

I’m making recordings of the birds in the back yard. I picked Sunday because there is less shooting. Not none, just less. On the other hand as spring progresses, the rooster next door is in full voice. A thundershower came through and then the birds came back, it should be a nice one. The trees, as they fill out ,allow the birdsong to bounce around a bit, sounding like we are in a gigantic concert hall. Still no evening veeries. I do hope to record some before I move, they don’t frequent the pacific northwest.

June 17 or T minus 7
So the latest is that my neighbors have been mowing my yard and then my high school age lawn mower and house sitter neglects to mention she’s only done it once because someone else (my neighbors) is doing it.  She stopped responding when I suggested that I’d apparently been paying the wrong person.Anyway now I have a guy named Dave Parker who will do it until my own mower gets there. I have to mow here once more than Guy comes over and siphons out the liquids so it’s road worthy.  I can’t really imagine what my place looks like.  Dave stopped by last night.  He asked if he should mow at the shed and all the high grass, and I told him just mow whatever has already been mowed.  But then he asked where my garden was, he couldn’t find it.  He was clearly skeptical that I really had one but giving me the vbenifit of the doubt.  Even after I mentioned the large wisteria vine growing, hanging over, the garden gate, he still seemed bewildered.  I understand the man doesn’t know wisteria, probably far fewer than 50% of folks do, but he missed the “huge vine covering the fence with a gate under it” so my imagination is running wild about how overgrown everything else is, that someone should miss that wisteria.  
It will be so interesting learning how the seasons treat my place over the next year, and decade.  I want to get the fence fixed by the creek and I’m still thinking goats but I found an ecologist who has focused his study for several years on the Abernathy Creek watershed area that my Tour Creek flows into.  My heart palpitates (non-symptomatically) at the idea.  The things he can tell me!!!Apparently the Oregon City watershed folk say the blockage in my creek is on or near my property.  It’s either a beaver dam or a slide.  I’m not sure how it can be so close and still indistinguishable but they put me in touch with an ecologist who is going to come and look at the situation.  Also he’ll give me some advice on how to deal with the canyon sides.  As you know there are areas that are practically vertical.  I’m so excited to find someone who is an expert in my particular backyard ecosystem before I make any bad decisions about the property.  Wouldn’t it be cool if there were river otters in the creek?????

This is an evening view to my north, it reminds me of the eastern view from Ram in the sunset

I watch a bunch of British TV and often use the subtitles because I have trouble hearing a word here or there.  I have becxome a fan of british captioning, although I’ave seen some good ones elsewhere.  My most recent, I’m watching the British mystery, Father Brown.  Several times while watching a scene with Father Brown officiating at Mass, the caption reads “Father Brown talking in a foreign language.”  Why not “Father Brown talking in a dead language?”
Faint sound, caption “whimpering” one character, “What was that”  The other, “That was whimpering.”
Another one I admired was “Birds singing, crows cawing.”   Lots of inging going on.  

The latest news on my section of canyon:
Rita Baker from the Greater Oregon City Watershed Council and some other folks went to look at the creek down in the canyon in my yard to see why it’s not flowing.  They said they think there was a landslide or beaver dam and it might be on my property. She said someone needs to explore it from the water.  I mentioned my kayak and she said she was thinking of waders.  Anyway, she told me about a man who is a watershed ecologist who can not only give me more information about the creek, but also about the canyon walls, that in one place are practically vertical.  

HERE ‘TIS FOR ANYONE WHO WADED THROUGH THE ABOVE:
I don’t know if you heard the single tolling of a huge bell on the 24^th, but The Move is now set and it and looks like I will actually hit the Oregon Trail before the end of the year. 
My move is becoming real, tediously, slowly, but getting there.  And getting more complicated of course, especially vehicularly.  I have to get my car on a truck in Portland, ME, rent a car, the movers will pack me up on June 21^stand take all my possessions away. I will get back to Portland with the rental car so I can hop on the train down to Boston where I get the plane the next day.   I have tickets for me and M’Weec to fly out on June 24^th. 

I have no idea if my family have any appreciation of how much clearing out I am doing.

Home is where the cat is.

I don’t bother to read other people’s sappy reminiscences about their mothers, and I can’t put into words other than one, soulmate, for mine. The rest is between us. But to mothers all, I stand up and salute you. The sun shines for you today.

I’m grateful that I can make long recordings on my phone.  For the longest time I used a set of nature sound CDs, one of frogs, one of rain, one of waves, birds.  I still have them but I also wanted to make my own.  Mine aren’t quite studio quality, but they are an accurate recording of the sounds around my house.  Including road noises.  I especially like the morning and evening songs.  We don’t have the veerys and hermit thrushes here yet which sing my favorite songs, along with the cat bird.  But the brown headed cow bird has arrived, which has a call like two large drops of water and then a screeee.  I’m including the link to the Cornell website, listen to the flock sounds, like a babbling brook!

The poor cow bird gets a lot of grief because they lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and the cowbird chicks kick out the others.  It’s caused significant harm to song bird populations.  They probably evolved following buffalo  as the herds traveled, hence the inability to have their own fixed nest location.  Still, I enjoy listening to them.

https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Brown-headed_Cowbird/sounds#

May 10th.
My 4th and 5th tick, this season, I must be grateful for the 4 months, Dec thru March when I didn’t worry about ticks at all 😉
And I am not doing a lot of outdoor activities!
So far all I’ve found are dog ticks, not a vector of disease but the dangerous ones, the deer ticks are now in the nymph stage, I despair of ever finding one of those, they are the size of a pin. Also we got ticks here now that cause disease right away, not politely waiting 24 hours like the deer ticks to infect you. I mowed for the first time and that evening felt a slight tickling at my hairline in back. I was able to grab her but when I tried to flick her off into the toilet bowl, she flew to the floor and I spent several tension ladened moments searching for her.
Flushed.
May 12, 2 more ticks, Orkin will be out here tomorrow!!!
It’s interesting, lots of people up here blame Conn. for the ticks because a lot of the first turkey reintroductions came from there and they say the turkeys brought ’em. I had a guy at the transfer station, he’s from Conn. no less, say it. I reminded him that we hardly ever had ticks in Conn when we were kids, just like up in Maine at that time.
Of course we weren’t in Lyme.

They came and emptied the dumpster, so I have a whole new gaping maw to toss stuff into. Only this one last maw, I hope.

I saw this big ball way up in a tree and initially thought it was a turkey, but when I got closer I found it was a porcupine, or my preferred name for them, the archaic porpentine.
One day I saw a car at the end of my drive just sitting. When I walked down there, it turned out to be an older couple who were watching a porcupine trudging along with great perplexity. They were grateful to learn what that waddling spiky large rodent was.

This is a robin’s evening serenade.

The red squirrels are back, sigh. Well, one is. I wasn’t putting out birdseed in Feb when I was in Oregon and they haven’t been around since until now. So far I’ve just seen one, and it was quiet. The only good squirrel is a quiet squirrel! And an outdoor one too. Red squirrels can be very destructive in a house.

I follow Oregon City weather when I check on my own, and although lower, our sineish curve of temp is similar albeit lower over all, but this week we are all wet, and/or cloudy and OC is mostly sunny.  Has summer begun there?  We have forsythia and daffodils blooming but only just.  No magnolia yet or other spring flowers.  The shad bush is one of the earlier bloomers, that and cerulean cherry, necter lovers have nothing to eat before then.  I planted a cerulean cherry a couple of years ago and it’s buds are swollen almost to bursting.  It’s a bit late, I hear, but it grows on a northern slope by the driveway.

Tick season has officially begin, they mentioned it on NPR! I’ll spray my red rubber boots with DEET and slip my feet into them whenever I walk around outside starting now, and I’ve been careful to avoid brushing against leaves or remnants of wildflowers from last fall in my pastures for weeks. No picking up stuff I’ve raked out of the garden, it gets lifted into the cart with tools. My zoysia beacons me with it’s cushiony, dry carpet. I dare not sit on it, even on a blanket, for fear of ticks although I might venture there in late August or September. I often find my first tick crawling up my laptop in spring, I think it’s warmth draws them out of my clothing.
They are worse every year and will be ubiquitous for the next couple of months. Though they never vanish, they are less problematic until fall, when they hang around until things freeze up.

Oh, and black fly season starts in a few days, that will be nonstop for the month of May, until the mosquitos take over. Black flies pupate in the dirt, so gardening becomes noxious without DEET on every exposed skin or a bug suit, looking like a bee keeper with my head and face covered. Mine is a full head covering worn over a brimmed hat to keep it off my face, attached to the mesh shirt and if it’s warm, mesh pants so I can wear shorts. I feel dirty with DEET on my skin and want to shower before I smear it all over my indoor clothing and furniture so I don’t want to put it on all over my skin if I’m not going to be out working for some meaningful time, or I’d shower 3 times a day or more, hence the bug suit.

We’ve only been plagued with deer flies for the past 4-5 years. They start about 4 weeks after the mosquitos, but they live in the shade so if you stick to the sun you’re fine. They are fast though, try running, and they just fly around your head in circles, able to fly more than 3 x your speed with ease (say hi to pi.) And on cloudy days it’s bug suits or DEET from door to door out there.
They won’t bother you if you wear a 6″, sky blue, flowerpot on your head. I know, crazy, right? But true. Researchers have tried all sorts of targets, paper mâché deer heads included!!!!
Really.
And if you stick it on your head while you mow, and cover it with tanglefoot (usually used for apple maggots,) you can eliminate the area of deer flies. Really!!! Other’s will move in, but it takes a week or two so if you use the flower pot every time you mow, I am assured, never having tried it, it works.
I didn’t really want to stick it on my head, I wanted to mount it on the front of my lawn tractor, but it was old and battered and pieces kept falling off. Then I got a new lawn tractor and it was too nice to gloom on a sticky, 6″, blue flowerpot covered with trapped flies.

I remember one bad black fly season some years ago, I was going to working in the garden, digging, which stirs them up viciously, for about an hour so no DEET, and had just suited up, hat, head covering, work gloves, shorts under bug pants and red rubber boots sprayed with DEET, when 2 guys from the electric company drove up to be sure the power outage down the road hadn’t affected me. There they sat in their truck, these 2 Mainers who work outdoors for a living, looking at me in my bug suit. Smiling at me smiling more at each other.
Times like these I try to remind myself to be grateful that I could bring a bit of laughter into another’s heart.
And I remember to be grateful that at least I didn’t also have a blue sticky flowerpot on my head.

Rereading what I wrote, I realize how different this place is in this regard, from when I arrived 20 years ago, and how unchanged. The black flies were exactly as vicious. They actually have teeth and they don’t puncture, they bite, chew. I’ve had a trickle of blood run down my face from one. And itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. Itch. The mosquitos are about the same.

The ticks are much more prevalent along with the potential diseases they carry. I worked with a woman who’s mother was the first in the state to contract, and die, from the Powassum virus for which there is no treatment once and if they even diagnose it. And the deer flies have been bad for about 5-6 years. And now the Lone Star tick is here. That’s the one that makes you allergic to meat. Beef, certainly and probably other red meat, at least for a long (months-years) time.

Now this is NOT, NOT, NOT

the island, where the mosquitoes roam in their hours as we all know. I think it’s far enough from shore so deer flies are unwilling to cross that expanse of sunlight, and ticks don’t seem to swim that far. I do believe that the mosquitos have painted a bulls eye on the underside of the outhouse seat though. In light blue, of course.