Project Oriole

Have you noticed how, whenever any group wants their initiative to sound cutting-edge, they drop the article and change the juxtaposition of the words "project" and whatever the project is about? I think the government started it. If that's the case, then the cutting-edginess is really laughable. I mean, when was the last time the government was on the cutting edge of anything? And anyway, what does everyone have against the "the?" Not the band. Never mind.

Well, I am on the cutting edge of birding. Oh, yes. Not because I am any kind of record holding birder (see movie The Big Year) or because I have any kind of really special equipment. As a matter of fact, my equipment is laughable. I took this picture of the heron who fishes at our pond by holding my digital camera up to one side of my binoculars. No, I'm on the cutting edge because in pursuit of birds, I have been doing a lot of cutting up of string. It started like this: I kept seeing something to large to be a Goldfinch and too orange to be a Western Meadowlark. I never got a solid enough glimpse of it to figure out what it was, and it was driving me bazonkers, as we say around here. There were several possibilities in my bird field guide, but I never got a long enough, close enough look to be sure. I even took to wearing binoculars everywhere I went. Washing dishes without dipping ones binoculars is a real acrobatic act, by the way. 

Then last weekend, we were working on digging the post holes for our raised bed garden and I caught sight of it in the nearby pine tree tugging at a piece of twine the boys had left tied there. Was it a Kentucky Warbler? No, too yellow. A Yellow Warbler? Not yellow enough. ARG! The next day, I was in the laundry room, when I noticed out the window the same bird landing at our construction site, tugging at the guide strings we had placed. I got a good look at it when it flew over to the swing set to tug on a string left tied there by some crazy scheme of the boys' and mine. Ah-ha moment! 

Checking me out while I check her out...

Being coy on the side of the pine....

This was a female Northern "Baltimore" Oriole, gathering string for her nest. I was delighted. In the past, I have seen only one Oriole around my yard. All attempts to attract them failed. Only hummingbirds came to my "oriole feeder." Only ants came when I nailed an orange to a tree. Nothing but raccoons and opossums came when  I left out dried fruit pieces; and since I think opossums are the creepiest animal to walk the earth, I gave up. But now, with renewed hope, I started leaving bits of twine about 12-18 inches long stuck to trees all over my yard. It worked like magic. Like. Magic. Suddenly I had not one, but about three separate pairs of orioles regularly visiting to tug on my strings and flit away again. I found that the males will come if the females do, much to my great delight, and I have spent the last week being distracted by a whole new, living set of shiny (orange!) objects. 

During this process, other lovely discoveries have come about. For one thing, my lovely Mockingbird friend has two fuzzy babies in her nest now instead of brown speckled blue green eggs. She had three eggs, but one seems to have been a dud. I was going to collect it and preserve it until I read that I could get fined $500 just for having it. If I'm going to pay $500 for the privilege of having an egg, it'll be made of gold or perhaps Faberge. Right... those things are priceless... 

Also, I have seen four Zebra Swallowtail butterflies this spring when, in the last six years altogether of living here, I had only ever seen one.

And while battening down the hatches for a storm that was blowing in, I found this little fellow who, after meeting us, will never mistake a roll of bird netting for a good log hiding place again. While I'm glad we found him and put him safely in a tree, I will miss his really loud, close trills whenever I am outside working under the canopy of our porch. Last, but far from least, I've found that our decrepit old marten house has been taken up, not by martens, but by a sweet little family of Eastern Bluebirds. Whether or not I'm setting any records, this has been a Big Year so far for me.

 Happy May from this tiny viola that volunteers in my yard....

Head over to http://aimlessmindpoemlesslines.blogspot.com to read a May poem or two!

Battling the Evil Forces of Rhus Toxicodendron

For starters, I feel it only right to update you on our family's urushiol induced dermatitis. There seems to be unlimited lore about how to deal with poison ivy if one is not content to sit on the couch all summer or to venture outside only in a full body contamination suit. Myself, I am a firm believer in Ajax, Epsom Salts, and Tecnu. While Abe recovered nicely with the help of corticosteroids, I got rid of all my little patches from the battle with the hydra (i.e. the fence row) by washing several times a day with the above combination. The most annoying spot, which was between two fingers on my right hand, required an Epsom Salt/Tecnu paste held in place by bandages. That one seems to be thinking about leaving a scar. But I WIN THE PRIZE! I got a poison ivy rash on my face from, best that I can figure, urushiol oil on clothes I was putting in the laundry. Where's my cookie!? No, I meant the cookie I don't have to bake myself. Where's that cookie?

Most of my experience with poison ivy has been how to deal with it after the fact. Baking soda paste. Oatmeal paste. Tecnu. Epsom Salts. Meditation. Sacrifice of a young goat under the full moon. You know the drill. But my Brilliant and Venerable Father (official title) told me of a preventative method passed down to him by his grandfather. For this approach you will need water, Ivory bar soap, and probably some serious lotion for afterward. When you know you're going to be venturing into the rhus toxicodendron danger zone, you lather any skin you intend to leave exposed with Ivory soap and don't rinse. Make the lather heavy and let it dry. Multiple layers of lathering will ensure no missed spots on the skin. Once you have let your Ivory shield dry you can go to Toxicodendrontown with no worries. After you're done for the day, take a shower, and any urushiol oil that has stuck to the soap layer on your skin will rinse away without effect. I haven't had a chance to test this one myself, but I will theorize that 1) the Ivory shield itself will be irritating at first, and 2) may dry your skin after you've rinsed it off. Thus the lotion. I'll report back once I've tried it.

Polyphemus, Voletaire, and the Hydra

What an exciting time Spring is; everything bursting into life! If you really think about it, that's a very weird expression: bursting into life. Usually, things that burst are either explosive or rotten; but I digress. So... flowers and baby animals are positively everywhere! Butterflies and moths are testing their wings. And everyone in my family is sampling the delights of urushiol oil. We know how to have a good time in Kentucky.

The first person to kick off poison ivy season was Abe, and he did it in style. We went for a walk in the back twenty, which is  not technically a back twenty at all since it doesn't belong to us. It's okay, though, because this time I didn't trespass. We actually have permission to do as we please on this neighbor's property, which includes the pond, field, and woods often shown in the background of my pictures. Honestly, the lawfulness of the jaunt just takes some of the fun out of it. Anyway, we were walking in the woods, and I was having a fine time spotting different species of violets. There are an absurd number of violet species, so I won't name them. I'm sure you'd quit reading if you haven't already...  While I was ground-gazing, Abe must've performed the trifecta of woodland walk no-no's. 1) Do not walk straight into brambles. 2) Do not take revenge on the brambles if you do walk into them. See former entry. 3) Do not rub poison ivy leaves over the scratches you receive from the brambles. Okay, so that's probably not how it happened, but somehow Abe ended up with a nice, long scratch neatly outlined with poison ivy rash. Yay, Prednisolone!!

On the way back from the poison ivy--I mean the woods--we saw the Canada geese who seem to have made a nest somewhere around the pond. They boys went off to catch them, which totally worked--no, it didn't--and I followed at a much more sedate mosey. When I rounded the end of the pond, Abe was trying to stomp on something just a the edge of the water. Upon closer inspection, I found that what he thought deserved to die was actually a million tadpoles. Once I explained to him that these were baby frogs and not mutant bugs, he changed his plan from amphibicide to PETS! The result is that we have about three hundred tadpoles in a tiny terrarium. Every day, Charlie asks me, "How long does it take tadpoles to turn into frogs?" Every day, I try not to completely lose my cool, answering, "As I told you yesterday, assuming we don't kill them, we will see how long it takes." We haven't killed them yet, I think.

On Saturday, the weather was perfectly cool, breezy, and overcast--just the right weather for slaying the Hydra. "Slaying the Hydra" is the name I have given to our ongoing battle with "seedlings" and brambles in the fence row. Call me overly dramatic if you like, but you didn't see the scratches, bruises, and rashes the rest of us had after only six hours of ripping woody vegetation out of the fence row. After a while it did begin to seem like a monster that grew more heads after each one was cut. The seedlings were more like young trees, and you can see in this picture the size of the thorny bushes we had to cut out. Not only that, but a mouse that was literally the size of a chipmunk ran out of the hedge and yelled at me twice for screwing up its habitat. Being myself, I tried to catch it. No luck.

Charlie has decided his favorite activity is mowing the lawn. I have decided not to tell him that this is what most people call work. As he was finishing his mowing, and I was burning out the dead grass along the fence, I came upon another rodent that wasn't, for whatever reason, fast enough to escape me. I thought it was a dead adolescent mouse, but when I picked it up--of course I picked it up; haven't you been paying attention these last six years?-- it squeaked. Then, obviously, I had to put it in an old fish tank and show it to the boys and feed it until I could figure out what it was, because once I picked it up, I saw it couldn't be a mouse. Its ears were flat to its head, and its tail looked chopped off. Its nose wasn't the right shape either. It was a vole! You should know by now that the total inability to avoid puns is genetically ingrained in the Crum side of my heritage. Thus the name: Voletaire. Sadly, Voletaire's luck hasn't been as good as the tadpoles'. Either I poisoned him by feeding him apples, or the boys hugged him too hard, or maybe he was already hurt. He was only with us two days before going to grub for worms in the Great Lawn in the Sky. Thus our rodent friend was not a robust as his French sort-of-forefather, who lived to be 83.

And today, nursing our itchies and scratchies, we decided to annoy Mama Robin to see how her little family is coming along. She has two naked aliens, one cracked egg, and one whole egg in her nest now. She seems quite fiercely committed to them. She flitted about her net like a ninja, screeching at us so much that the daddy robin joined in, and then plopped back down on her babies the moment we vacated the tree. If my children were that ugly, I'd probably sit on them too.

While Charlie and I were performing our clown act otherwise known as "yard-schooling," Abe was digging for buried treasure in the front yard. His optimism seems to have paid off, as he found this fellow:

A beautiful Polyphemus moth the size of my open palm, which I have never before had the luck to photograph in the daytime. Hurrah, my tiny explorers!

I will leave you with a parting thought, just in case you aren't as glib about poison ivy as we seem to be: when hiking, carry a small bottle of Ajax dish soap. If you know you've just brushed up against our urushiol-wielding friends, promptly wash the spot with Ajax and rinse well. Ajax is cheap and designed to remove oils from dishes. It will also remove the oil from your skin if you don't let it sit too long.

I myself have tested this theory in several ways. First, while canning jalapeno peppers last summer, I thought it would be fun to wipe their oils into my eyes! I told you we Kentuckians know how to party. Blind and saying words my mother would have liked to treat with Ajax, I stumbled to the shower. Charlie brought me the dish soap with which I washed my face quite thoroughly. Oil removed! Then, just yesterday, while foraging for pretty perennial bulbs in the waste across the road, I blithely pulled aside a vine which, upon closer examination had those telltale "leaves of three." With my bare hand. You can take it to the bank when I tell you I fairly teleported into the kitchen to access the Ajax. Today, no blisters. It works, my fellow outdoorspeople! And in my experience, it's either that or a full body contamination suit. If you're going to set foot off the beaten path, there's no avoiding the ivy. Viva la Ajax! (I'll be expecting my ad money from your company within the week, thank you...)