Box Turtle

As a break from all the lamb photos, here's a brief visit with one of our farm's other residents.  We have lots of box turtles here, and I do my best to protect them from harm.  They are so beautiful and interesting to watch!

Flying Blind

A few days ago, I heard a commotion in the kitchen, and went to investigate. As expected, one of our cats had caught something and brought it in through the cat door to play with it in the house. There was a wild bird trembling on the windowsill, and one of my cats poised to jump up after it.

I shooed the cat away and reached gently for the bird. To my surprise, it did not even duck away as my hand approached. I picked the poor thing up and examined it more closely.

Although it didn't appear badly injured, its beak was clogged with mud and blood. Its left eye was covered in a droplet of blood, and its right eye was plastered shut with a mat of mud and feathers. Presumably, when the cat had pounced on it, the bird's face had been driven into the mud, leaving it completely blinded and helpless.

I scraped the mud off the beak so the bird could breath properly again. Then I tried to wipe the eyes clean with a damp paper towel, with not very much luck. I tried gently rinsing the eyes with water. Still no avail.

At this point, I was starting to wonder whether the eyes were glued shut because the eyeballs beneath the muck had been punctured. Not a pretty thought to imagine!

But I figured that a blind bird was doomed for sure, so I couldn't make matters worse by at least attempting to help. I finally got the blood cleaned out of the left eye, and was happy to see that the only injury there was a tiny rip in the lower eyelid. Nothing serious.

So then I started working on the right eye. It was absolutely glued shut and plastered over with something that I hoped wasn't goo from a pierced eyeball. One tiny piece at a time, I picked off the bits of feather/mud/hay that had formed a solid layer over the bird's eye, hoping I was not going to be looking into an empty, oozing socket when I was done.

Luckily, the bird stayed still, and I got all the gross stuff off its face. And there, underneath, was an uninjured eye!

Nothing else seemed to be wrong with the bird, except for a mild case of shock. So I put it outside (in a place where the cats could not possibly get to it) to recover in private. When I went back a little while later, it was gone, so I guess it recovered and flew away!

Kamikaze Cardinal

TAP-Bump! TAP-Bump!

What the heck is that noise?

It's a cardinal who has been repeatedly bashing himself against my library window for the past three days. I only figured out what the sound was yesterday. Since then, I tried several times to chase him away, but he always comes back, even when my cats are eagerly sitting below, waiting for him to knock himself unconscious so they can eat him.

Maybe he sees his reflection in the window and thinks he's defending his territory. But if that's what he thinks, he's pretty dumb, since there are lots of other cardinals around, and he doesn't seem to be throwing himself at them.

Yesterday, he did have a girlfriend in the tree with him, watching his kamikaze act. Maybe he's just trying to impress her with his great feats of strength and courage (not to mention stupidity). He's definitely looking a little worse for wear, with his feathers all tousled and a kind of glazed, crazy look in his eye.

Perhaps it would be better for the gene pool if this one DIDN'T reproduce.

You can see a short video clip of his act here.

Defending Our Cherries

One of the nice surprises we discovered after we bought this farm is the cherry tree in the back yard. I'd never seen a cherry tree before, so I didn't identify it for the longest time. It's clumped in amongst the lilac bushes, so at first I just assumed it was some kind of ornamental shrub. Even after it formed fruit the first year, I ignored it, thinking it was some kind of crabapple, and not worth harvesting.

The following year, on a whim, I tasted one of the "crabapples" and figured out what we had. Yummy delicious cherries, free in our back yard! But things were busy and I was going out of town, so I didn't harvest any.

Last year, I had good intentions to harvest some. I checked the tree regularly, waiting for the day when they would be ripe. The day I thought they would be just about perfect, our neighborhood crows got up several hours earlier than I did, and stripped the tree bare before I could get a single one!

This year, we have a bumper crop, just starting to turn red. The crows and other birds have already been checking them, but they're not quite ripe yet. We don't have much time left to stake our claim to our share of the treasure.

So Ken went to the local farm store and got some bird netting. The tree is large and the majority of the cherries will be well out of our reach, so the birds are welcome to them. But we draped the netting all around on the part of the tree that we can reach, hoping that will protect at least a little of the crop for us.

I tasted one of the not-quite-ripe fruits today. It's still very tart, but wow, what a flavor. I'll have to decide what to do with the cherries I pick. Eat them fresh? Make a pie? Freeze them? Dry them? Make a cherry cordial? I'm a whiz at making home-made cordials---I've taught workshops on it, and have developed dozens of recipes.

I guess what I do with them will depend on how many we get. I'm just looking forward to getting SOME, for a change.