Come Lope With Me

There's a line in This is Spinal Tap, where the 80's hair band is trying to make the best of a somewhat flaccid set of engagements, and Nigel Tufnel says something like, "People should envy us. I envy us!"

That is just one of dozens of lines from that brilliant Christopher Guest/Rob Reiner film that I love, that pervade my life and get repeated weekly. 

People sometimes tell me they want to grow up to be me. Which is very sweet, but also odd, when you think about it,  because I feel like I still haven't grown up. And don't ever want to. At some point I will have to concede that I'm old, but I guarantee I still won't have grown up.

That said, I never envy me more than on a May morning, when I get to check my bluebird boxes.

It's like Easter, every stop. You never know what the bunny might have put in your basket.  

Ritchie box, 05/05/15. This pair of eastern bluebirds got a late start, because they were waiting for me to clear the massive briars that had sprung up around their box. I also had to bring my sledgehammer and some stakes and reset the leaning box pole (the guy who cuts that hayfield always seems to clip it with his deck). I think she started building her nest the same afternoon I finally did that. I could feel her hot breath. 

So I was headed to drop Liam off at the bus, then run Duck Creek Road, one of my favorite resorts of late, to get a big fat bird list, "run" 4.5 miles, and check the two new boxes I just put up out there. I told Bill to take a morning to bird from the tower. He was delighted to do just that, logging 60 species before he had to take off for work! May.

A wisteria-covered barn said good morning! If it were my barn, I'd cut that crap off of it, but I'm sure glad the owners don't seem to care it's there. I borrow its beauty for the one week it's beautiful. I hate wisteria with a passion the other 51 weeks of the year. 

Speaking of invasive exotics, European garlic mustard is just now invading Washington Co. Ohio, and is just coming into bloom in shadier spots. You really can't find it until it blooms, and then you see it freakin' everywhere. I saw red when I spotted this big clump just blooming on my treasured wildflower safari road. It would all die, starting immediately. This is just one of about sixty reasons why I can never do a timed run. Too easily diverted by bird, butterfly, flower, sky, cloud, weed...

Before. You can see the tall spindly white-topped spires of garlic mustard (and hear my teeth gnashing).

And after my savagery. Now you can see the Virginia waterleaf, false Solomon's seal, yellow impatiens, and celandine poppy the garlic mustard was already smothering. The thought of this horrid exotic getting established and outcompeting the wildflowers on Duck Creek Road literally makes me sick. It loves disturbed soil, like the road grader makes, so it makes its first inroad along the road, then marches unstoppably through the woods, making a botanical desert of solid GM wherever it goes.

While I was pulling and throwing the budding mustard plants into the road, our elected Washington County Court of Common Pleas Judge and his wife stopped to chat and ask what I was doing.  They've been seeing me loping along past their house for months and took that chance to figure out who I was and why I'm always out with my little doggie. I was delighted to give them a quick lesson on GM identification and control. They'd never seen it before, and like most people, weren't aware of what it does. Randy offered to take the huge wad of plants home and burn them for me. I gladly took him up on it, warning him not to lay them anywhere first lest they release seeds. I told him I feel a sense of stewardship toward this county, and he said he does, too. 

Just a few hundred yards along, I found the biggest stand of twinleaf I've ever seen, and the white stars of Trillium grandiflorum. That whole green carpet is twinleaf and Dutchman's breeches. Ahhh. This is why I pull garlic mustard.

In front of the judge's home, a lost little least sandpiper was mucking around in the ditch. Poor baby. So tired, having flown all night. I let him be, wishing him a good feed and a good migration. Not one of my best bird photos, but I have only my phone when I run. He was species #29 for the morning, on a morning when I'd log 76 in three hours!! Ah May. May may may may MAY.

The fog persists well into the morning along Duck Creek. I love it, and make sure to get out by 7:15 so as to get max fog. It extends the birds' singing time, and cools me as I lope along. 

All too soon it will be hot, hot, hot. 80's all this first week of May. Arrgh. Not running weather, unless  you get out early and run in the fog.

The Bacon appreciates the cool, too. When he begins to lag behind me, I know my Dogmometer is getting too hot.

A not-so-old homesite, with remnant lilacs telling the tale of habitation, of where the front walk went.

By and by, the blue struggles through. 

And the woods is so full of song and promise.

In my next post, we'll check all my bluebird boxes, and see what's inside them! 

The Last Rocket Standing

Some of the wild mustards are known as rockets, for the speed with which they shoot up and bloom in the springtime. Some of them, particularly the yellow rocket, are horrid, invasive pests--this species is from Europe. You'll see it blanketing bottomland fields in a cloak of brilliant yellow. Blaaa. Pretty but bad, bad, bad. Bill and I have been pulling yellow rocket since it first showed up on our farm three years ago. It's an annual, and it has the grace, like the dreaded and horrific invasive garlic mustard, to pull up cleanly by the roots. That's about the only thing I like about either plant.So I'm walking along the driveway, coming back from taking the mail out, pulling mustards from the ditch, planning to take them to my fire circle to burn (the only safe disposal for those darned seed-bearing siliques). There's a new word for you, quite a pretty one--a silique is the slender seed capsule of the Cruciferae. And I come to the last rocket standing, and this pearl crescent butterfly flutters up and nectars on its uplifted, tubular yellow flowers, and I hesitate and watch. The butterfly flies off and finds a mate and they hook up right there in front of my eyes, fueled by rocket sauce, presumably.Rocket, rocket, all of my rocket sauce.

Voyeuristic butterfly photo captured, I turn back to the rocket. Now I'm gonna pull it. I really am. And from underneath a leaf, midsection, pops the cutest little jumping spider I have ever seen, even cuter than Boris, the black Phidippus who used to live on my studio windowsill and leap on mealworms that I'd toss to him. Jumping spiders are my favorite spiders, thanks to their fabulous faces and endearing ways. They watch you, just like mantids, and they're very curious and , being territorial, they can be revisited again and again. I'm always delighted to get to know an individual, be it bird or spider.
Oh, let me see you a little closer.
Cute doesn't do it. You are adorable, with your RocketMan hair and your bright black eyes.
Woodsman, spare that tree! It was a microcosm of the death of my beloved Privacy Tree, with me the jumping spider, looking at the logger as his chainsaw snarled into its yard-wide trunk. The spider kept ducking under a leaf, then popping back out to see if I was gone yet.

I left the mustard standing.

The next day, I went back and carefully checked for RocketMan. He had vacated. I pulled the plant and tossed it on the fire with the others. I'm a softie, but I still hate yellow rocket.

Just as much as I love Eastern Tailed Blues. This is the best blue butterfly picture I've captured. You can even see his tiny tails. The 70-300 mm. zoom telephoto makes a darn good butterfly lens.A little flake of sky, fallen to earth.