Report from the Yard

The water snake is back in the pond. He scared the crap out of me yesterday evening. I am a little snake phobic. I could never leave the house as a kid without my grandma’s admonition not to “get on a snake”. Good advice indeed, but it made me a little paranoid. Anyway, the water snake is a little bigger this year and has shown up a lot earlier than last year. Where he winters, I know not.

The turtles have yet to appear. They really like the lily pads as cover, and these have not yet broken the surface.

There is a crawdad as big as a small lobster.

A pair of wood ducks has tried a couple of times to settle in, but the dogs won’t hear of it. They run off all the waterfowl as soon as they see them alight in the pond.

Swifty and Christine, the resident ruby throated hummingbirds, are definitely back full time. Mrs Vache Folle, ever frugal, has stopped using the red dyed commercial nectar and just boils up some sugar water, and the birds don’t seem to mind a bit.

We have observed a new (to our property, not science) species of sparrow around the feeder. We have always had chipping sparrows with their russet crowns, but these guys have blondish breasts and three jagged stripes on the tops of their heads. We have tentatively identified them as white crested sparrows.

There are at least ten raptors that fly over the property every day. I have identified turkey vultures and a red tailed hawk, but there are some other birds that I can’t name yet.

Some critter tore down the back feeder and ripped the catch trays off the tubes. There was no spoor, so I have no suspects at present.

I expect a plague of frogs this summer since the pond is lousy with tadpoles, and there are several large egg sacks that haven’t even hatched yet. Maybe the snake will help regulate the amphibian population.

There’s also lots of larvae of I know not what. I hope those damned triangular flies don’t show up this year. They made last June a misery. They don’t always appear at the same place, so there is a chance they will bother one of the neighbors instead of us. Two years ago, the flies congregated about 200 yards up the road and did not trouble us at all.