Lucky Ducks

 "Our" resident wood ducks now have a new location for their assisted living home in our cove. We've had a duck box on a pole standing in the water, but it's been pushed sideways by ice and hasn't really been upright for a number of years now.

After much planning, Dale hatched a great plan to suspend the duck box over the cove, making sure to thread PVC pipe onto the wire to stop predators (squirrels, raccoons) reaching the box to eat their eggs. It has turned out beautifully - I sure hope the wood ducks approve and grace us with their presence very soon.

This is the remains of their nest output from last year

I'm always intrigued at how the shells look like deflated balloons

Larval Pathways

I was intrigued by these patterns on a few twigs lying on the lawn. They looked rather creative, like nature's version of scrimshaw.

Google lens kept suggesting this was striped maple bark, but there's no bark at all - this is under the bark layer. Each one has a ring around the branch, with lines reaching out from it in both directions. After much prodding on the Internet, I've decided it must be from one of the insects or beetles that lays eggs in a girdle around a branch. Once the eggs hatch, the larvae move off, eating a path outwards from the original area until they emerge from the bark. 

It does not appear to be the bug known as a twig girdler since that chews a girdle through the entire branch causing it to snap off. I don't know exactly which insect it is, but it doesn't appear to be the Emerald Ash Borer, whose pathways are usually s-shaped and sinuous.

Impressive!

Orange Treasures

I was able to notice some really cool orange items in between the renovations and clean up in Orange, MA this week. 

First up, a black bear's calling card on the lawn, with orange seeds embedded within

Next, an orange jelly fungus known as witch's butter

A neighbor's delightful (though non-native) crocuses with orange centers

And a 3 star orange glow from the fire pit

Embedded in Ice

I love the fragility of these wispy looking leaves embedded in textured ice

Oak leaves frozen in time, looking mirage-like

The remains of a flower head glowing in the sun above the dippled ice

Looking Good

The sky and light seems so much more cheery now that daylight savings has begun. What a difference the light makes! The meltwater on top of the ice is rain that has pooled on top and not been able to soak through.

Since taking this picture, a fair amount of snow has melted, and the edges of the lake are watery (not solid) as you can see in the next picture, taken 10 days later. It looks rather dreary without sunshine, but at least our yard is no longer 100% white. 

Trudging through the snow to the lake edge is like walking through a slushie.

 It looks so messy!

Scrumping: Thievery or Windfall?

When the word scrumping came up recently, it made me wonder whether what I do when I encounter roadside berries, fruits and timber is ethical. Hmm, am I stealing, as indicated by the Cambridge English dictionary definition of scrumping: "an old English word for stealing fruit such as apples from trees"?

It's not that I trespass on people's lands and fields to harvest fruit they would otherwise use. I don't climb over fences or cross boundary lines. Rather, I see it as an innocent way to use produce that would otherwise go to waste, of making use of public bounty along roadways and other non-privatized places. I don't like to believe I might be stealing - though I know it's not my land ... I usually only take things that appear to have been abandoned or forgotten, whose use or value to others is negligible.

But then I consider whether I'm merely seeing our resources from a capitalist viewpoint ... since nothing goes to waste in nature; if I don't "use" it, it will be recycled, composted and become transformed into a life form again. It's all part of the same network and cycle - it's not just a usability issue, and it won't ever go 'to waste,' for nature has none! But it's also my way of being thrifty, of making use of produce that I don't have to pay money for.

There's a very fine line between scrumping (frowned upon) and foraging (acceptable), a gray area indeed! A more modern view of scrumping is found in the free dictionary, Wiktionary, and is explained as "To gather windfalls or small apples left on trees," with no indication of thievery or trespassing. But I'm still pondering over my perception of waste ...

Prison Bars

Imprisoned by snow

Shadows, like bars of my cell,

Cap the illusion.

Entangled with Fungi

Dale and I listened to the most amazing, mind-blowing, phenomenal non-fiction book about fungi during February on our car trips to and from Orange, MA. It's called Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake. Highly recommended to anyone who has an interest in the natural world and wants to expand their worldview.

It's a revelatory and earth-shattering read, forcing us out of our preconceptions about the living world, and revealing how little we really do understand non-animate life. In addition, it's beautifully and poetically written, with outstanding, helpful metaphors.

Sheldrake describes the mycelial network of fungi as our planet's "ecological connective tissue", and a "living seam of sprawling, interlaced webs." He refers to fungi as ecosystem engineers, which "underwrite the regenerative capacity of the living world," and which contain "an ancient library of information" enabling fungi to re-model themselves as environments change. 

As "chemical wizards", they are VITAL partners in helping solve the ecological disasters and climate disruptions from human activity. We owe it to ourselves not to destroy them further.

Do yourself and the planet a favor and dive into this incredible read!

Winter Blanket

My winter project is getting too warm to work with! This tells me it's nearing completion, and that spring is on the way, for real.

We had a steak and mushroom BBQ to capitalize on the balmy (60° F) weather.

Photo: D. Schultz 

In Praise of Shadows

I love how John Updike's poem "Penumbrae" begins ...
"The shadows have their seasons, too."

So very true. The ability of light to show time and seasons, as represented by shadows, is mind bogglingly simple yet profound. I always love how different the light and shadows look as we head towards spring.

     

Bargains

Ooh, I love a good bargain, especially when it's on my favorite cheese, Cambozola. I can't believe I found 3 pieces at $5.99/lb each, when all the other "Manager's Special" pieces were marked $13.99 (the reason why I don't usually buy this beloved cheese).

I was also lucky enough to scoop this deli bargain, labeled as Italian cold cut ends for .99/lb. These aren't the deli 'ends' at all, just thinly sliced Italian cold cuts so I'm guessing it was mislabeled and I benefited.

Whoop, whoop!

Contrast

Light and shadow play

On a silky black feline -

Mesmerizing sight.

Eye-Catching Abstracts

 

Cellar Spider

 

Small cellar spider:

Shadows and legs mingling,

A size illusion.

Lingering Mist

I encountered these beautiful scenes in the mist on my way to the dentist to pick up my new retainer.

No high-rises

or smog

Ah, Maine, the way life should be

Spring Thaw

A beautiful foggy morning. Temperatures have warmed up so the precipitation from the sky is rain, not snow, and there are pools of water on top of the ice. I'm sure we'll see mergansers returning pretty soon ... 🤞 I've spotted a few down river from us already, and today I saw a bluebird as well.

Moisture is in the air, everywhere, making night driving pretty difficult. It's not cold enough for the roads to ice up, but the visibility through the mist makes for challenging conditions.

Raisins for Breakfast

Yum! I love adding raisins and sunflower seeds to my plain breakfast yogurt. A few weeks ago, after I'd finished scraping out my breakfast bowl, I noticed a raisin had escaped and was lying on the tablecloth.

Not wanting to waste, I picked it up and bit through it with my incisors - to my absolute and utter horror, I discovered that it wasn't a raisin. I spat it out and bellowed aloud in disgust, wiping the specimen off on the side of my bowl. It was unbelievably FOUL - I had picked up a cat dingleberry (SLANG: a small piece of poop that had clung to the cat's butt and fallen off elsewhere), and bitten into it (obvious evidence of a cat having been UP on my table). Disgusting. Nauseating. Never mind "murder most foul,' this was "flavor most foul" (hat tip to Shakespeare's Hamlet).

I ran into the bathroom and squirted soap directly into my mouth with some water, raging inside as I swirled and spat, swirled and spat, getting anything and everything out of my mouth. NEVER have I tasted anything SO BAD. Next I got a bottle of whiskey, took a swig, rinsed and spat, then another swig, with more swirling and rinsing until my mouth was tingly with booze. The smell and taste of cat poop remained with me all day and made me feel quite sick (I can 'taste' it now as I write this - my sensory memory is torturing me). So revolting.

This is an incident that has taken me a month to 'get over' enough to write about, and now you may wish you'd never read about it! I'm still embarrassed that I made that disgusting mistake, and don't know if I'll ever live this one down. I'm hoping though, that having written about it (and having made a whole meal of the incident), I can put it behind me and move on (almost like an exorcism) ... now that I've polluted all your minds! Apologies.

Track-Footed Monster

Today is the anniversary of a most auspicious day - it's the last time I gave birth, 32 years ago, and remains oh, so beautifully fresh and memorable. But this day is not about me, so I am trying to move on ...

Allow me this little memory indulgence, though, of a time when I read books out loud to my kids. One story we loved was called "Zooey and Hazel" by Gill Bond (a South African author),

in which the children come across some tracks that they ascribe to a "track-footed monster," which is what immediately came to mind when I saw these tracks in the snow.

It was such a delightfully innocent child's interpretation of our world that has remained with me over the years.

Icicle Teats

Looking at all the icicles and their drips, I kept seeing cow's udders!

I guess cabin-fever has begun to affect me! Ok, so this last one is less udderly.

Cracks

These are cracks in our latest snow, but they also represent 

 the cracks and fissures in my psyche as I impatiently wait for spring to settle in.

These pock-marks mirror my brain riddled with thoughts of a dysfunctional world - I feel so disintegrative and rattled!