Rats & Chicks

Well, Rats…

So remember me talking about clearing rats out of the feedroom back in February?  They made a stinking mess (literally), and chewed up a years worth of peacock feathers to making nesting material, and ate who knows how much of the peafowl’s food.  I finally realized they were even getting into the bag of large-sized dog bone treats, and munching their way through those as well.

Anyway, we cleaned out the mess in the feed room, and everything was put in metal cans.  That included putting any peafowl food that didn’t get eaten during the day into a metal can at night (sorry guys, no more midnight snacks).

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Friday’s Farm Fotos for May 27

Another week on the farm, and another week with tornadoes skipping around us.  Fortunately, these were baby-sized compared to the mega monsters that went through this area a month ago.  Aside from losing more shingles off the roof, and a few smaller limbs down, we didn’t have any damage.

Except, I really do wonder about our roof after the last couple of storms.  Yesterday I picked up a shingle out of the front yard.  This morning I found one down by the pond.  Makes me wonder what shape our roof is in.  Kind of hate to find out though…. a good friend who had a lot more tornado damage got an estimate to replace their roof… and wow!  Around $15,000!!!

I believe I’ll think about non-storm-damage stuff instead.  Like the fact our Rosebay Rhododendron is blooming.

It isn’t growing very quickly, but every year it has more blooms than the year before, so I guess that’s progress!

Of course, a whole lot of other things are blooming now also, including the rose bushes.  The rambler blooms have come and gone, and the climbing roses about the same.  However, the tea roses still have blooms, like this one:

The Farmer has put up chicken wire fencing around his garden to keep out chickens, guineas and hopefully rabbits!

How do you like our bright blue gate?  That bit of improvisation was my idea.  It’s the ‘skirting table’ I used to use when cleaning fleeces before selling them.  I painted it bright blue because that happened to be the color paint we had on hand that would waterproof the wood.

Of course, The Farmer left one end of the dug up garden dirt for a chicken spa.

They were all fluffing their feathers in the dirt until they saw me and decided to move on.  Maybe they are embarrassed to be caught bathing? 

The guineas do their share of dust bathing also, but they can also be found scrounging around under the bird feeder. 

The squirrels also like to look around in the grass and see if they can find any sunflower seeds.  This one is watching for his (her?) chance to jump down and check things out.

Other entertainment this week included watching a bonfire down the road at the neighbors farm.  They cultivate a lot of fields, and grow a lot of sweet potatoes.  They store them in big wooden pallet boxes, and evidently some of the boxes were past their prime and they decided to burn them up.

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Unfortunately, it’s hard to get a good perspective on just how big this fire really was since there’s nothing nearby to compare it to.  When The Cave Geek got home from work, he came in to ask if we knew something big was on fire.  We went out and looked, and it looked like someone’s house was burning.  It was a relief to see it was just a bunch of old wooden boxes!

And that’s the news from around the farm this week!

Periodical Cicadas

Bug-eyed monster movie coming now to a city near you!  No wait, this isn’t a “B” rated movie, this is the real deal!  And these bug-eyed monsters might be in YOUR area NOW!!!

They’re called Periodical Cicadas.  They belong to the order Hemiptera, suborder Homoptera and family Cicadidae.  In this part of the world, they belong to the genus Magicicada.

They are emerging this year, 2011, in these areas of the midwest and southeastern United States:

How will you know if they are in your area? All you have to do is LISTEN. The males make a distinctive sound by flexing their tymbals, which are drum-like organs found on their abdomens.   How does this work? 

They contract their internal tymbal muscles and that produces a clicking sound as the tymbals buckle inwards. When the muscles relax, the tymbals return to their original position producing another click. The interior of the male abdomen is substantially hollow to amplify the resonance of the sound.

Once a lot of them have emerged, the sound can get pretty loud out there! Here’s a sample of the cicadas noise, so you can hear what they sound like.  (Once you click on ‘cicadas noise’, a player should open in a new window.)

No wonder their name, cicada, is derived from the Latin word for “buzzer”!

All That Remains

If you can’t hear, you can see clues they are emerging.  Look for the remains!  In this case, the empty shells, or exoskeleten they leave behind.

Here’s a close-up of one:

The empty shells are all over the place, but what about the adults?

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Yes, they’re all over the place too!

These periodical cicadas are also known as “17-year locusts” although they’re not really locusts, and they also come in a 13-year cycle variety.

And although there are a lot of them at once, and that might look intimidating, they are actually harmless insects.  Cicadas don’t bite or sting. They are not venomous, and there is no evidence that they transmit diseases.

Cicadas generally do not pose a threat to vegetation, However, young plants may be damaged by excessive feeding or egg laying.  For that reason, it’s better not to plant new trees or shrubs just before an emergence of the periodical cicadas to be on the safe side.  Mature plants usually do not suffer lasting damage even from a mass emergence.

And if you’re hungry, lots of people think cicadas are a tasty treat.  Especially the females, as they’re meatier.

Yum, yum.  Anybody got recipes?

After the tornadoes. . .

We live 4 miles from the Alabama / Tennessee state line.  So yes, we were in the middle of all that tornado trouble this past Wednesday.  We had no electricity all day Wednesday (it went out sometime Tuesday night), and spent a large part of the day in a dark basement with little battery-powered lanterns for light.  I got plenty of exercise running up and down the stairs!  We’d think the storms were over, go upstairs, and uh-oh, the weatherman says another is coming and “take your tornado precautions!”  And there we’d go, back down to the basement.

There are toppled trees all around us.  Others have been split by the high winds or actual tornadoes, and part of the trees are broke off and on the ground.  The Bradford Pears that are so popular in subdivisions don’t fare too well in high wind.  That soft wood just can’t take it.  But there were oaks toppled or in pieces too!

We were very fortunate that we didn’t get a direct hit from the tornadoes skipping around the area.   We had a lot of tree limbs down, but not any entire trees.  (Well, we haven’t walked back in the woods… no telling what’s happened there.)  Our walnuts, oaks and elms lost a lot of small branches and some bigger ones.  One big branch fell off a walnut tree and landed right by the peafowl aviary.

Of course, several smaller limbs DID hit the aviary and it looks a little worse for wear, but at least the netting didn’t get all torn up like it would have if the bigger branch had smacked down on it.

There were some branches blown into other odd places, like this one:

And we had to move branches like these off the driveway so we could drive out.

Most of the day the guineas stayed out in the rain, even though they have shelters!

I suppose if a tornado had went right through here, it would have ended up pretty fowl!  No telling where the guineas would have ended up.

Once the winds and tornadoes were done for the day, the water started rising.

That’s not unusual.  After particularly heavy rains, the creek usually gets out of bounds and goes over the low part of the road.

But it didn’t stop there.

Nope, for the first time since we built our lovely spring-fed pond, the flood waters got up and over the berm, and flowed into the pond.

I took the above picture from the far side of the pond, between it and the creek.  I didn’t get to stay there long. The water just kept getting higher, and pretty soon it was where it had never been before and I had to MOVE!

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The water not only flowed into the pond for the first time ever, it came on out the other side and flowed around behind it also, and into the bottom pasture.

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Not only did the pond get contaminated and water flow through it and into the pasture, but the water got so high it completely covered the bridge across the creek.

That’s something I’ve never seen in all the years we’ve lived here!  There is usually one high spot visible during a flood.

Yesterday we started cleaning up.  The critters enjoyed the leaves off the downed branches.

And although we didn’t loose our roof, we picked up some roof and soffit materials from someone else’s house… who knows where.

Despite the inconvenience of no electricity for a day and a half, we are much better off than neighbors to the south of us who will not have electricity for 5-7 days.  And maybe we’re all lucky Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant didn’t take a direct hit, but just lost all the feeder lines.

Just a couple days after the storm and it all looks pretty serene here. . .

We’ve pretty much cleaned up around the farm, and if it wasn’t for the muddy pond, you’d never know we had such storms.

Sadly, it will take many of our neighbors that took direct hits from the tornadoes a very long time to put things to right, and some things will never be the same.

Friday’s Farm Fotos

Another quick post!  I’m trying to finish up the main part of a writing project today!  So here are a few pictures from around the farm this week. . .

We are getting more and more iris blooms in the flower bed around the big oak tree in the front yard.

At this time of year, it’s easier to see how far up in the oak tree by the end of our driveway that the rambling rose has climbed.  The leaves of the rambler come out before the tree leaves.  Even at that, it’s kind of hard to show up in a picture, since there are so many trees in the background.

It’s pretty impressive when it blooms, but it’s one of those sights that somehow just translate well into a picture.

Nearby, our two dogwood trees are in bloom.  One has the traditional white blooms, and one if a “red” dogwood.

The honeysuckle is also blooming, which the hummingbirds love!

 Of course, what with everything blooming and producing pollen, there is a lot of stuff clogging up the gutter.  Big clumps of stuff falls out of the trees and lands in the gutters and on plants below.

The sheep are enjoying all this nice, lush spring grass.

And of course, you can also hear the sounds of springs.  The frogs are getting very noisy, both in the pond and in the bog area of the bottom pasture.  The bullfrogs lend a deep bass note, while the smaller frogs put in a tenor note.

And of course, there are the storms of spring… we have a big thunderstorm happening right now, and I have the television on in the living room so if there are storm warnings I’ll hear them.  (I don’t usually think to do that, but The Farmer admonished me this morning before he went off to work to pay attention to the weather warnings….)

It’s a normal springtime.  I miss the lambs and goat kids we used to have, but not the work, or the heartbreak when one dies.

Hope you are enjoying spring wherever you are (unless of course you’re ‘down under’, then .. happy fall!)