This morning this handsome cardinal was sitting on a tree stump in our front yard. This is not a mirror image – look closely! It’s two different pictures I put side by side. The cardinal just turned his head in opposite directions in the two pictures.
Merry Christmas to all!!!
Out in our backyard-turned-pasture where the sheep and the goats roam, there are also some underground dwellers roaming about. Their tunneling leaves behind a raised row of earth. When our livestock guardian dog, Neffie, finds one that’s occupied, she starts barking frenetically.
Then she starts digging.
It’s hard to see in the picture above, but she dug a hole in the middle of one of the tunnels, grabbed the occupant and carried it off.
When you got it carried far enough away to suit her, she dropped it. There it was, the digger itself, one ugly mole.
She seems to be wondering, “What should I do with it now?”
Generally, her answer is to carry her prize around for a while, drop it and watch it run, then catch it again. (Sometimes Neffie acts a lot like a cat.) I’m not sure she ever kills them.
But she’s really good at catching them.
And then here’s one of the Birds IN Paradise:
If you like warm weather, then Florida might be the paradise you’re looking for!
There are also banana trees:
And just to make things a little more interesting, after we make our fruit salad, we could watch the birds at the lake, like this one resting on one of the pilings near the shoreline.
This is a great place!
We have several walnut trees in our back yard that are producing a bumper crop this year. The Farmer gathered up a bunch of these, first filling a wheelbarrow, then several plastic bags. He put this horde of nuts in our storage hut.
One of nature’s other bumper crops discovered his treasure trove.
Yes, there are lots of squirrels scampering through the trees and all over the yard, and they discovered Nut Heaven. No work at all, right there in one place was a mountain of walnuts.
They helped themselves.
They went nuts for the nuts, and now… they aren’t many left. The full sacks and full wheelbarrow are mostly empty.
Wasn’t it nice of The Farmer to pick up all those nuts so the squirrels wouldn’t have to work so hard?