Peeking Into Nests

Having left Duck Creek, we're going down Stanleyville Road.  It's still May 6, a whopper of a day checking all my bluebird boxes. Warren #1 has five brand-new hatchlings. It's hot, and they're panting as the sun pours in the front of their little slot box. They'll be fine. A bluebird baby has a resting body temperature of 104.

Warren #2 has five two-day-old baby bluebirds (below), also dumping heat through their mouths. It's such fun to find all my bluebird boxes "full of meat," as my Dad used to say. When I got into bluebirds upon moving to Connecticut right after college, I came home and put boxes up for him on the old farm where he kept his huuuge collection of antique cast iron hit-and-miss gasoline engines in a chicken house out west of town that he rented for a pittance. He loved having that place to go to, where Mom couldn't holler at him for bringing grease upstairs from the basement. So I put up four bluebird boxes there, and he called me a few weeks later and said, "When I checked my boxes every one of 'em was full of meat!" Ha ha ha ha ha. He had a way with words. I laugh just remembering that.

I'm sure without even checking that the farm and DOD's ramshackle chicken house have long been sold and rolled under by housing developments. I'm not going back to Richmond to look. If ever there were a place you can't go back to again, the horse and orchard country west of Richmond, Virginia, would be it. I'm glad it was largely intact when I was growing up, but seeing it fall to development changed me. Watching them smash the fragant pineywoods for Circuit City stores and bulldoze the horse pastures and orchards for giant megachurches when I was a teenager made me who I am today: a rural hermit with a ferocious love for the land and country living. Protective of the things I hold dear. Old barns, woodland, meadows, bluebirds, to name just a few.

Hm. I was checking bluebird boxes. Right. Back to it. Warren #3 still has eggs, which by my calculations should hatch May 7. I hold them to the sun--my way of candling them--and see dark embryo and large gas space in all five...looks good. They should all hatch. I'd like to show you that, but I can't hold the camera and an egg at the same time without fumbling and maybe breaking an egg. Bluebirds come first.

Warren # 4 got started early. These chicks are six days old already! Hmm. She laid five eggs--let's see what's under these rather high-sitting babes. I tease down into the pile and unearth two unhatched eggs.

 Two of the eggs haven't hatched, and they won't now. They're infertile. I remove them, carry them off to the asphalt road and break them to see if the embryo ever started. Nope. Just yellow slush in there. I see that a lot, but it's usually only one egg that fails to hatch. I always break them to check, because I'm curious, and there's no chance they'll hatch after the other chicks are a couple of days old, because they won't get the direct heat from the female's brood patch, and besides if they were viable they would already have hatched. So I get them out of there lest they break when the babies get old and start jumping around, and make a sticky mess in the nest.

Note how big and fat these three Day 6 chicks are. That's because Mom and Dad have fewer mouths to feed. 

That finishes Stanleyville's four boxes. Now I've got 13 more to check on our road and farm.

On my way there, I see a frog leaping, those huge, high, desperate leaps frogs do when they are in trouble. It's 11 AM on a hot, dry, sunny day, and this frog has come up from Fergus' pond, climbed a very steep hayfield hill, and is crossing the road into another enormous dry hayfield. There's no water where he's headed. I cannot imagine why he's doing this.

The creased lines running from eye to tail mean he's a green frog--a good guy. Not a bird-eater like bullfrogs. I cannot leave him on this dry ridge in this withering sun. I'm amazed how wet he still is, but it seems to be just his own slime keeping him moist. Has he leapt all the way up the hill?

I can't leave him here. He's headed to nowhere, frogwise. So I impulsively drop him in a Solo cup I keep in the car for just such things, and pour some cool water over him. And I head home. Once there, I dump him out on the rock by my water garden. I lost Raoul, my 20-something green frog, in the horrible winter of 2013, and I miss him badly. I hope this is my next Raoul. I have a giant bullfrog in the pond I need to rehome. I'm pretty sure this sizeable green frog is too big for the bull to eat, but you can never be sure with bullfrogs. Ugh. Bullfrogs. Click the link if you want to know why I say Ugh. Bullfrogs. 

The frog seems stunned and amazed to have been teleported. He's got his back hunchd defensively, and he's frozen. Gently, I nudge him with my finger to face him toward the pond, and in a single leap he knifes into the cool dark water. See you later?

More babies and surprises anon!

Homeschooling

Duck Creek is a placid little stream that flows through the bottomlands of Whipple. Placid until it floods, and then it can cut off our main access to our house (which is on one of the highest ridges in the county) for days at a time. That hasn't happened for quite awhile. It was a moderate summer in terms of rain and Duck Creek never raised out of its banks.

Most of the time, the creek is a wonderland for us. It's got tremendous diversity and abundance of minnows, darters, sticklebacks, sculpins, and gobs of crawfish. We love to take the kids down to wade slowly through its shallows, looking for stream life. The theme of our late summer has been aquatic.A monster mudbug, almost qualifying for lobsta status. We told the kids they were rock lobsters. We tried to teach them how to pick up a crawfish, but we both got pinched and there was a lot of hollering involved. Just when you think you have it, and that it doesn't notice you sneaking up on it, the little mudbug whips around and gets you good. OW!!

People are constantly asking me if we homeschool our kids. I've gotten the question often enough, and my answer is so often met with visible deflation and disappointment, that it puts me just a bit on the defensive. Before replying, I think how eager Phoebe and Liam are for school to start, because they love seeing all their friends. Direct quote from Liam: "Ahh, the sweet smell of the bus seats. The sweet smell of school."That said, he is equally able to soak in the wonder of a golden stream on a late-summer evening.

I deliberately keep the questioner waiting while I think, "Well, I show them things constantly, and explain what we're seeing. Does that count?" So I take my time answering. I suppose that I should follow Emily Post's recommendation for any question you find intrusive and reply, "Why do you ask?"
A baby bullfrog, probably metamorphosed only this year. Bullfrogs are two-year tadpoles. In their second year, they're almost the size of an apricot. You can tell it's a bullfrog and not a green frog by the smoothness of the skin of its back--a green frog has two raised ridges running from each eye to its rump.
Dodder, a parasitic plant that lacks chlorophyll, and twines from honest plant to honest plant, sinking little white teeth into their stems, sucking sugars away from them. It has the audacity to be orange, and it looks like a strand of fly-fishing monofilament caught in the vegetation. This dodder is in full bloom, with little white clusters of flowers. Sometimes it gets so thick on stream banks it looks like an orange tarp. A vegetable vampire.
Coming upon some peculiar bones at streamside, I summoned the kids to look and guess what they might be. We put the pieces together like a jigsaw, but they were no closer to the answer. The Science Chimp in me was pant-hooting. There are so many excellent clues here.
The long icky looking gray thing stretched over the bark is a piece of leathery skin. Any closer?

OK. I'm going to soft pitch it, kids. Here's a good piece of the thing that's still hanging together. The problem is, they didn't yet know this creature existed, much less lurked in the shallows of Duck Creek. I'm going to let y'all work on it in the comments section. Bruce, over there waving your hand, practically jumping out of your desk, I know you know!

So I tell them nope, we don't homeschool.
Not much, anyway.