I'm thrilled to report that we have cattle as neighbors again. I love when they arrive in the spring and am heart broken when they leave in the fall. Right now there are only three, a black Angus Bull and a cow (the cow has her head tucked against her side napping) and the short horn mix although that is a guess. This muffled gray cow is my favorite. I am pretty sure this isn't the same one that is usually in the field during summer as the shading on her nose is markedly different but maybe it's her daughter or granddaughter. I don't know why I love this coloration so much but I do. No calves yet. I'm hoping more cattle will arrive in the pasture but that's up to the cattlemen raising them.
In April, I took Tutu walking quite a bit on some property with a lot of wildlife. We are taking a break though until paths can be mowed as more than a few ticks rode home with her. Even though her medicine keeps them from attaching to her, they can ride in and be found on the cats' tails, climbing the wall, on my pants, or even on the bed duvet!
Tutu enjoys hunting and even flushed her first rooster pheasant! However, I did not have the sd card in the camera when I took the shot so, no pictures of her flushing the pheasant, much to my dismay and my Dad's disgust.
I did get these lovely shots of a hawk being chased by a songbird...if you look closely you might see some unidentifiable prey in the hawk's talons, and I wonder if the songbird in pursuit was from a fatal attack on its mate.
And later that evening I got these nice shots of a drake Mallard duck.
We have more mockingbirds than usual around the yard this spring and for a while they were squabbling with the robins quite a bit but now everyone seems settled into their cares with their families. We have sparrows and bluebirds nesting in the nest boxes and we have Eastern Meadowlarks in the field with the cattle. I have a killdeer sitting on a nest with four eggs so the lavender will be completely overrun by weeds when they finally hatch. Killdeer love gravel and their eggs are camouflaged to blend right in. Every time they nest I watch and wait, hoping to get some killdeer egg shell for my nature collection but I can never find the remnants after they hatch. Unlike robins, sparrows and bluebirds, killdeer babies are ready to run as soon as they hatch, looking more or less like miniatures of their parents.
I enjoy the mockingbirds very much. They are so distinctive with their white barred wings, long white and black tails, and their sequence of songs and other sounds. one year I had a mockingbird that could ribbit like a frog.
In other news, Andrew has tried his hand at bread baking with the white sandwich bread recipe from Cook's Country.
It toasts very well and is perfect for an egg sandwich.
The cook in our family, Andrew also made this Cook's Country Recipe, Buttermilk Ranch Chicken with modifications of course for my lactose intolerance and the sweet potato corn bread was a tag team effort.
The marvelous sheet pan pizza (foccacia style with rosemary from our own garden) that Andrew makes with pizza sauce from our own tomatoes also comes from Cook's Country.
The houseplants are all doing pretty well. A couple of my spider plants are beginning to throw up some really beautiful new leaves, long and light green. The pothos plant has recovered from a run in with Moxie and I'm hoping to train it to grow on either side of the bathtub rim as well as up this lovely makeshift trellis from Lily's Garden in Urbana.
As for books, I have two I've read in April and early May. One is going in the donation bag and the other one stays.
This one I probably could have skipped, but once I started it I powered through thinking surely I would learn something new about Jane Austen, but no, it wall all stuff I knew. There was some commentary on themes in her literature but even those were more reminders rather than new ideas to me.
This beautiful book on bees, is a keeper as I can see myself reading it again.
The writer covers all aspects of bee life, by season as Sue Hubbell did but this is a much denser read. Longgood's voice is overall very good and compelling although I did tire of the occasional paragraph made up of half a dozen questions about the bees' life and motivations.
However there were some great short sentences and passages like:
For the bee, honey is the ultimate reality. It represents the fulfillment of her life mission, the triumph over her enemies, the continuity of the hive, the justification for working herself to death. Honey is to bees what money in the bank is to people--a measure of prosperity and well-being. But there is nothing abstract or symbolic about honey, as there is about money, which has no intrinsic value. There is more real wealth in a pound of honey, or a load of manure for that matter, than in all the currency in the world. We often destroy the world's real wealth to create an illusion of wealth, confusing symbol and substance.
Throughout the book, Longgood revisits the question of the individual bee, her life, her tasks and contributions, in the context of the life of the colony as it's own living organism. The hive cannot exist without the individual contributions of thousands and thousands of bees and yet each bee in conscripted to an unalterable path of work and death depending on which kind of bee they are and born at what time of year and yet the colony endures.
I also like this pithy line when talking about honeybees who turn to robbing other hives of their honey:
In nature, where force and guile dominate, stealing is a fact of life, enabling the sly and quick to live at the expense of the industrious and dull.
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