Yellow-crowned Night Heron in the town park

Yesterday, on my rainy walk around town, I came across a (possibly resident) Yellow-crowned Night Heron stalking worms on the muddy town field. In the midst of a flock of robins all poking at the ground was this tall gray bird behaving as if it were at the edge of a pond. It was pretty funny to see it standing stock still staring at a patch of mud and then darting down to grab a worm. I assume it was grabbing worms that were being flooded out of their tunnels, as I didn’t see anything else, like hordes of frogs or toads, that it could be eating. It criss-crossed the field a couple of times while I was walking by, but when I passed by again on the way home it was gone. I believe herons return to the same nesting grounds each year, so this is likely the same bird I saw over the creek two years ago and in the branches of a tree last summer. I had thought it was just migrating through, but other residents reported seeing a mating pair later in the season last year.

Seeing the heron was a nice treat as I haven’t been doing much purposeful birding lately, and haven’t added any new species to my lifelist since last summer. I have, however, updated the list with photos; they’re almost entirely public domain photos from government sites, which is a handy way to illustrate a page like mine. I’m hoping to add a few more new sightings later this spring when we take a trip to Hilton Head at the end of next month. Even if I don’t catch sight of the endangered Wood Stork, I hope to get another look at the warblers and shorebirds that I’ve still only seen once or twice before.

Yellow-crowned Night Heron in the town park

garden log : long slow spring

Maybe it’s because I’m watching my spring bulb transplants like a hawk, but spring this year seems to be arriving ever so slowly. I’ve had only three crocuses bloom in the transplant bed, although six crocuses that I missed last year popped up in various places around the yard. The daffodils are just now opening, but only the plain yellow ones in the clumps that I didn’t actually move; the double-bloomed jonquils that surprised me last spring are nowhere to be seen. I’m hopeful that they’ll still make an appearance, as none of the neighbors have any blooms beyond basic daffodils and crocuses.

In other parts of the yard I’m starting to see signs of life. The forsythia is in full bloom, the flowering quince is covered with lovely salmon buds, and the peonies are being to poke their red shoots up from the dirt. The irises that I planted under the dogwood last year are also showing signs of sending up shoots; I’m sure the squirrels got to a few of the tubers, so we’ll see what’s left to bloom. I’ve gotten out and pruned the roses, although a couple of the bushes could use a second sweep since it’s been so cold. The large white azalea in the front of the house appears to have set buds, so I’m looking forward to that blooming.

From that list of happenings, it’s clear that I’m resting on last year’s laurels with the garden work this spring. By this time last year I had weeded and transplanted and dug and mulched. This year it’s been cold and I haven’t been motivated to get out and start digging up weeds. When I do get out there, one priority will be treating the foundation bed on left side of the porch as the sunny spot it truly is and rescuing the shade-loving azalea from the spot where it’s bound to be scorched through the summer. My neighbor’s removal of a thirty-foot magnolia from her backyard made our front yard quite sunny, and I am still tracking what that will mean for the plants. In the longer term, it probably means that we’ll have lovely raised beds of vegetables in our front yard, complete with bean and squash teepees.

garden log : long slow spring

dusting off the old keyboard

It’s been an embarrassingly long time since I’ve sat down to write anything here, for which I apologize. Of course, the longer the gap the greater the barrier to restarting. So this meta commentary is to serve as the restart. Go!

During the interregnum I’ve been busy with life. We took a weekend (plus a couple of evenings) and painted the bedroom, a nice warm beige that makes you feel like you’re going to sleep and waking up in a cappuccino. We then (finally) painted the upstairs bathroom, a nice soft blue that makes you feel like you’re brushing your teeth in…a room that’s blue. The blue is pretty mellow, partly out of deference to my partner’s desire not to live in A Fun House ™ but also because we’re trying out low-VOC paints and the color spectrum is much more limited. Apparently it’s the nasty chemicals that make you high as your brain cells keel over that give wall paints their lovely bright vibrant colors. Sad but true.

In addition to knocking those two interior jobs off our my seemingly endless list of home improvements, we’re mostly just planning planning planning. We need to install some exhaust fans, replace some light fixtures, make the basement improvements, and replace the second pump on the boiler which bit the dust last month (we’ve been using a space heater in the family room, which is the only area affected). And then, of course, I have big plans for the garden! Number one: make it seem like an actual garden! I suppose all the other plans are just sub-plans, really. With the gardening season comes the food-growing season, which now means the food-stockpiling season, so I’m kind of already looking forward to that. Even though we are still working our way through last year’s frozen and canned stockpile. Which is fine, because even though it seems like the bounty is just around the corner it’s actually a few months away. So there’s plenty of time to use the frozen cherries, squash, and blueberries and use up the jars of apple jelly, right? Right.

On the art front, my workspace has been disrupted by the water problems in the basement, so I’m switching gears while that gets completed. I’ve started a quilt, for which I am (a) using a pattern and (b) following generally accepted principles of quilting with regard to measuring and ironing seams and the like. I say this because ten 12 years ago I made a quilt, knowing absolutely nothing except how to use a sewing machine and pretty much entirely winging it, and I am therefore duly chastised by my partner whenever I refer to this new quilt as my first quilt. The use of modifiers like ‘proper’ or ‘real’ does nothing to help the situation.

So there you have it. Since I seem to be mired in domestic concerns, I am attempting to bring the art in where I can and just roll with it.

dusting off the old keyboard