Chris & Joy's Critterweb » Wild Things

Spring has gotta be coming when you hear the worms sing

Chris — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:21:45 +0000

Yesterday I was out in the yard just after dark and I became aware of a sound I couldn’t quite place, sort of a wet clicking or popping all around me. My first thought was “oh no it’s sleeting again” but I quickly dismissed that because it was waaaay too warm. It couldn’t be rain, I didn’t feel anything hitting me. Could I actually be hearing the trees and plants starting to grow….? OK maybe that sounded flat-out kooky. Maybe just light rain? No, nothing on the patio, nothing I could see in the pool of light below the utility lamp by the garage. Huh.

I decided it was so nice out that I’d do a few of my Qigong exercises while I was waiting for the puppy to go potty,* and as I stretched and moved, I kept listening to the soft sounds. Gradually I also became aware of subtle motion in the grass all around me. I hunkered down in a patch of light to see what was moving: it was an earthworm! It was halfway out of the ground and probing it’s way delicately around in the dead grass. There were dozens — probably hundreds — of them, all venturing forth from the dirt and creeping around. Those soft wet sounds I heard were the worms moving around. How cool is that?

*Puppy? What puppy? You must have misread that part of the sentence. Maybe you need an eye exam? That’s right, move along, nothing to see here…

The sense of being stared at

Chris — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 22:27:33 +0000

I was walking a dog at the shelter today and ventured up the hill behind the building so we could really stretch our legs. Something caught my eye sitting on the hillside in the sun… at first I thought “wow, what an ugly cat” but then I approached for a closer look:

He or she never moved, even when we got about twenty feet away, I almost got the sense I could have just walked up and nudged it and it would have fallen over like a statue. Of course, being an opossum, it might well have done just that.

Another surprise, of a perhaps more appealing nature…

Chris — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:09:49 +0000

Even though I am currently at war with the neighborhood squirrels, I can appreciate this. Lindsy tipped me off that he/she was in the yard. Sorry the pictures, well, suck, but that’s because our camera is dying and won’t focus fast enough any more. We’re going to upgrade to a camera with a big zoom (probably to a Panasonic Lumix FZ35) at some point but in the meantime enjoy the ‘bigfoot-sighting’ quality shots…

White squirrels aren’t really rare in this area – Brevard, NC even has an annual White Squirrel Festival. They aren’t albinos, either, they have dark eyes and most of them have colored markings like this one does.

Surprise!

Chris — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:07:30 +0000

You never know what you are going to find while harvesting herbs…

This little girl was hiding in the sage. Joy agreed to my letting her live, providing I took her FAR away for relocation. Which means, I am aware, that if one of our animals gets bit by a spider some time in the next decade or so it will be ALL MY FAULT.

She sure was pretty, though, in a scary sort of way.

I’ve been harvesting and drying batches of herbs for a week or so now. We’re supposed to get a freeze Sunday night so I need to get the last of the basil and sage, at least. The sage I already dried and rubbed is wonderful — the stuff from the grocery store is like a sad dusty imitation by comparison.

Because I am sure you were all dying to see them…

Chris — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 14:53:25 +0000

No doubt everyone was as excited as I am about the arrival of the black soldier flies to our compost pile, and disappointed that no photos of the actual squirming larvae accompanied my post. So here ya go. Aren’t they beautiful?

Fuzzy basil-munching invader

Chris — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 14:50:37 +0000

…which has since been relocated to a thicket far, far, away from our garden.

Some welcome, if rather disgusting looking, new residents

Chris — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 22:06:52 +0000

I noticed when I rolled the composter the past few times that our compost is now teeming with black soldier fly larvae – cool! We had them in the bins last year when we lived in Candler, and at first I was very alarmed because I thought the compost had gotten infested with wasps that were going to get agitated and sting when I messed with the bins. Anyway, I got a couple of pictures back then, and did some research and discovered that these were a good thing. So when I looked at the compost the other day, and saw hundreds of huge gray wriggling larvae inside, I was very excited to see they’d found us again.

Soldier flies are very efficient at breaking down food waste and keeping pest flies away (hmmm… wonder if that’s why we also suddenly no longer have as much of a problem with fruit flies in there?) by making the material less inviting to them. Supposedly, the larvae are very nutritious; in fact people actually breed them to use as as a feed supplement for birds and as fish bait, which might be something to keep in mind for when we eventually get a few chickens. In the meantime, I am just happy to see they’ve taken up residence in our bin.

Soldier fly on our compost bin last year (not a very good picture, sorry)

Scenes from the garden that DON’T involve tragic plant euthanasia

Chris — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 22:29:15 +0000

OK, here are a few other pictures we took yesterday that are not quite so gloomy…

Sunflowers (look close for Lindsy’s guest appearance).

Happy sunflower close-up!

Lindsy showing off the clematis (left) and jasmine (two plants on back fence) that we rescued from the end of season clearance rack at Ingles. The giant crabapple bush/weed tangle that used to occupy that space was chopped and dug out by me a few weeks ago.

Parsley anyone?

Our neighborhood hawk, who we hear calling frequently. Yesterday we heard a group of very angry goldfinches and this is apparently what had them in such an uproar.

One of my favorite spiders, a black and yellow argiope.

Grandfather maple

Chris — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 22:35:46 +0000

I don’t really have a description to go along with this picture of our backyard maple, other than, “isn’t this just an awesome tree?” I hope he doesn’t mind the indignity of the bubble wrap belt – put there to thwart Winter, who is better at climbing up trees than back down them, we discovered.

We measured the girth of the tree to see if a cat barrier I found on the web would fit it, and discovered that it’s about thirteen feet around. We think it’s a silver maple, and it’s probably at least as old as the house itself if not older.

Olive Molebane and the critterweb bird sanctuary

Chris — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 22:19:28 +0000

Two months of vigilance on Olive’s part (sitting motionless for hours along the fenceline) have apparently paid off; she has killed 4 moles in as many days. We feel bad for the little guys… though anything that can actually get caught by one of our inept animals probably doesn’t need to be passing it’s genes along to the next generation, and we suppose we should be thinking about controlling their population, if we are serious about doing a lot of long term gardening.

We had to top our fence with another 1 1/2 feet of wire a few weeks ago to keep a large neighborhood cat out, and Winter in. It seems to be pretty secure now. As I was sitting and watching the birds at our feeder the other day, I contemplated the effect we must be having on the local ecosystem, for good or bad. The cardinals, which at first had no idea what to make of the feeder, now frequent it all day and they have a nest in one of the monster forsythia bushes. None of our cats are either capable or motivated to try and tackle the bush, and the fence keeps the neighborhood ones out, so that is probably one clutch of cardinal nestlings that will have a higher than normal survival rate.

The catbirds, titmice, chickadees, song sparrows, starlings, and thrashers are all feasting upon the suet we put out, and we even get a blue jay here and there at our feeder. We have a pair of towhees that hang out in the yard, and lots of robins. Curiously, the local doves avoid it, not that we are complaining about that. We had to move Lindsy’s water dish because little birds were bathing in it… we’re hoping to get a birdbath for them at some point. So we’ve made a little oasis for the bird population, though the argument can be made that giving them an easy source of food is unnatural for them. Or should we look at it more as a way of balancing out negative effects on their numbers that the huge neighborhood cat population has most likely had?

On the other hand, as I already mentioned above, we have apparently made survival harder for the moles. We’ve not had much negative impact on the ant population, though not for lack of effort on our part.
#wren
Speaking of the large local cat population, we’ve also apparently aquired a part-time fourth cat (she has made it clear she’d be happy to make the situation full time if we’d let her in) who is on the back doorstep waiting for her dinner as I type this. She’s one of the white cats from next door, a tiny little thing that unfortunately also just had kittens, and she’s kind of attached herself to us since we moved in. She spends more time over here than at her house, and they don’t seem to care. We call her “Wren” because she’s got so much spunk for such a tiny little thing. It’s probably a good thing that her and Winter hate each other’s guts, making letting her in the house or yard impossible.