Heatwave for the New Year
Yes, all my beloved snow is melting even as I type. It's raining now and it will be up in the mid 50s by tomorrow and Saturday...
Gosh, I hope this doesn't mean I have to get my quite comely behind back outside in the yard to finish cleaning up those dead things from the fall??!! I was hoping some sort of little garden gnomes would take care of all that, but so far, no luck. They must be lazy little buggers. I don't really know much about garden gnomes.
Actually, though, most of the yard work was done before the snow hit, but I do have a ton of dead honeysuckle weighing on my arbor, that, once it gets snowed on, weighs even more...
But I am still feeding all the birds. My backyard has become a veritable Holiday Inn. I went out back to fill the bird feeders early on Tuesday morning and the backyard was a wild disaster. The snow was covered in thousands of little footprints and sunflower seed shells were everywhere, thistle was everywhere. I'm, like, Jesus; 2 cardinals, a blue jay and a couple finches make an awful lot of mess...
But then later that day, around noon, my god! What a racket! I looked out back and I had about 80 starlings in the maple tree, about 2 dozen sparrows flitting all over the yard, the 2 cardinals were there, the blue jay, about half a dozen finches were fighting over the feeder, and one busy squirrel in the middle of all that chaos. It was wild. It explained an awful lot about that insane-looking mess in the snow.
The starlings are really something. They fly in this breathtaking mass of synchronized movement and they form these jaw-dropping funnel like shapes; they sweep across the sky; hundreds of them at once. They look as though they are in some kind of free-wheeling ecstasy. It is quite something to watch. Unfortunately, though, they seem prone to doing this sweeping dance around the freeways. It's really hard to watch them when you're driving at, like, 80 miles an hour and it's lightly snowing... (that's when I begin to wonder if maybe it's really just some dastardly plot of theirs to rid the world, or at least this area of Ohio, of all these pesky humans in their automobiles.)
Here are some shots of them. I didn't take these photos, obviously; I got them off the Internet. But they are of starlings flying in formations. They are really, really awesome to behold in real life.
Gosh, I hope this doesn't mean I have to get my quite comely behind back outside in the yard to finish cleaning up those dead things from the fall??!! I was hoping some sort of little garden gnomes would take care of all that, but so far, no luck. They must be lazy little buggers. I don't really know much about garden gnomes.
Actually, though, most of the yard work was done before the snow hit, but I do have a ton of dead honeysuckle weighing on my arbor, that, once it gets snowed on, weighs even more...
But I am still feeding all the birds. My backyard has become a veritable Holiday Inn. I went out back to fill the bird feeders early on Tuesday morning and the backyard was a wild disaster. The snow was covered in thousands of little footprints and sunflower seed shells were everywhere, thistle was everywhere. I'm, like, Jesus; 2 cardinals, a blue jay and a couple finches make an awful lot of mess...
But then later that day, around noon, my god! What a racket! I looked out back and I had about 80 starlings in the maple tree, about 2 dozen sparrows flitting all over the yard, the 2 cardinals were there, the blue jay, about half a dozen finches were fighting over the feeder, and one busy squirrel in the middle of all that chaos. It was wild. It explained an awful lot about that insane-looking mess in the snow.
The starlings are really something. They fly in this breathtaking mass of synchronized movement and they form these jaw-dropping funnel like shapes; they sweep across the sky; hundreds of them at once. They look as though they are in some kind of free-wheeling ecstasy. It is quite something to watch. Unfortunately, though, they seem prone to doing this sweeping dance around the freeways. It's really hard to watch them when you're driving at, like, 80 miles an hour and it's lightly snowing... (that's when I begin to wonder if maybe it's really just some dastardly plot of theirs to rid the world, or at least this area of Ohio, of all these pesky humans in their automobiles.)
Here are some shots of them. I didn't take these photos, obviously; I got them off the Internet. But they are of starlings flying in formations. They are really, really awesome to behold in real life.
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