A ton of rocks for the weekend

No hummers yet...could our feeder be too bleached out and not enticingly red enough? They are over a week late.
No black snakes yet...but the snake picker that Hardwicks gave us for Christmas is ready to go.
No bears yet...but that's OK.
No chipmunks by Gambol yet...but Buddy found a rabbit nest and dispatched 3 babies (with Gambol's help) last weekend. (amendment: see below)
No morels yet either.(correction: 3 today)

On the other hand, cherry and apple trees are in beautiful blossom.  Grapes are leafing out on the  arbor.  Asparagus, lilacs and violets are just waiting for Elise to claim them as her favorite purple.  Peonies and lilies of the valley promise a great show in a few weeks. Chickens have responded well to the additional light by giving us 9-12 eggs a day. We heard the FOY cicada on May 5We picked a couple of (40# chicken food) bags of garlic mustard to burn and continued with the black knot eradication project, this time below the meadow. And only 2 tents in the cherry trees.

We still have a ton of rocks distributed around the forest and meadow so after taking out all the overgrown liriope that the chickens nested under last summer, we opted for a neater rock wall along the side of the house. It's just 4-5 rocks high now but holds the composted soil well, and as a work-in-progress, it will get higher. We used the bigger flatter rocks as a stepping path, narrow enough for the ATV to drive over, but high enough to keep us out of mud from the hose and hill drainage.
Next up is to remove the self planted elderberry and repair the lily wall behind the house after the lilies have bloomed.  The meadow rock wall is over 12" everywhere and only 30 feet from the turn to the walnut grove.   We don't seem to have diminished the rock supply.

Team Paul and Gambol 1; Rabbit 0
Team Gambol, Buddy, Paul and Leslie 0; chipmunk 1 (too much help isn't a good thing.)

Kitty Lapps

Another birthday event for Shannon: the Kitty Lapps that we rescued from Arlington, Va before Lady Terra moved north, and that the Baron lovingly composted and coddled, have bloomed at The Barony.
Although today was very windy (gusts to 35 mph) and 85 degrees, we planted and composted 10 Arbor Day spruce near the Toy Shed to soften that forest edge, and a few DCNR apples. Prince Smiley-face's spruce is at home in the upper meadow line. The middle tree line in the meadow doesn't have as many holes as we thought. We did have to trim some of last year's cicada damage off, but most of the trees (apple, hawthorn, walnut, dogwood) made it through last year's winter.
We gave Gambol his Saturday morning rawhide to keep him busy until 0800. This one is the size Chicago Baron likes. Gambol hardly knows what to do with it; he can hardly get his mouth around it. Success!

Early Summer Flora and Fauna of the Barony

This year in Pennsylvania we are having a bumper crop of 17 year locust. Apparently every year there is a hatch of a different brood of these cicadas, but this brood is typically has a large population of insects hatch out, and sure enough, this year is no exception. There are red-eyed locust, about 2 1/2 inches long. Their call is muted from the normal screeching of a cicada that you hear in the heat of the summer. In fact, this cicada brood sounds to me like the "death ray" from War of the Worlds, sort of metallic and with a slight wavering tone. Anyway, we have these little critters flying about and crawling all over the trees, looking for a mate. They only have a life-cycle that lasts about 4 weeks, so they have to get busy quickly, and that is why they give off their call almost 24 hours a day. There are some times, during the middle of the night and even in the daytime during a particularly cloudy or rainy period that the calls are silent, but otherwise their calls are a background noise. The Baroness has been on a mission to kill off as many as she can (I guess she doesn't want to see as many in 17 years). It is very easy to catch the cicadas as they wait on the branches of trees, looking for a date. In the attached picture you can see 7 cicadas on a dogwood tree branch, just about at eye level (notice the drops of water on the leaves of the trees--we had a pretty good rain last night and this morning the cicadas were out on the wet leaves). If you are gentle and quick, you could probably catch each one of the 7 cicadas you see in this picture. As long as you don't shake the tree branch and move quickly, the cicadas don't react. In fact, just walking around in our forest and meadow you are likely to have one of these guys land right on you--which isn't all that much fun. They can't hurt you but they sure can scare you.

The down hill side of the Toy Shed is filling with wild flowers, some native and some not so. This coryopsis and bee are my new screensaver.


BT did a good job on the gypsy moths as far as we can tell now. We have a few totally defoliated trees and many are raggedy, but we don't hear the constant rain of their frass and when I go on my cicada stomping walk-about, I only find a handful of gyp-cats. Hurrah! The Bt didn't get every caterpillar because we still have butterflies.



A new bird for the year (and life) list: a hooded warbler. He sang to me for 15 minutes just off the upper Jennifer Trail. At one point he flitted off to catch a moth and was about 10 feet from me almost on the ground.

Since we weeded yesterday, this guy is helping us keep the small things at bay.

Small and large fliers

Found: 1 red eyed cicada

We were in the meadow planting and renovating trees. It's dead now. Check out Cicada Mania for all you'd ever want to know about these beasties. Centre County will be gifted with a heavy emergency of brood 14 any time now. Put them on top of the gypsy moths and eastern tent caterpillars and a few too many deer, and I wonder if we'll be living back on the prairie soon. We really haven't heard the singing, yet, so I guess the real invasion has yet to come. Too bad they all don't eat each other.


From a letter to Joe:
One of the nuisance critters on our property is the groundhog. It is a rather large rodent that lives in underground burrows or dens. The dens have a main exit hole about 1 foot in diameter and 2-3 emergency exit holes that are 6 inches in diameter. The larger holes are a hazard to animals and people walking over them and we are even reluctant driving our RTV over the main holes. I have a World War II vintage .22 caliber rifle and since the Pennsylvania hunting laws treat the groundhog as a nuisance, I can hunt them just about any day of the year and there is no limit in the number I can shoot. The groundhog is rather crafty, in that he crawls on all 4 legs through the grass, but every so often he sits up on his hind legs to check for predators. When the groundhog is up on his hind legs, he presents a perfect target because he is quite visible above the grass and virtually motionless for several seconds. Well, last week I sat out in the meadow near a large burrow and waited for Mr. Groundhog to emerge so he could introduce him to the dangers of high speed lead poisoning (Baron: the Great White Hunter!) The groundhog finally emerged after about 30 minutes of waiting but this groundhog was reluctant to sit up and present me with a good target. He eventually took a shot through the grass and ended up with a clean kill. Now, The Baroness has refused to cook a groundhog and I don't have any desire to eat one, so we usually let Nature take its course and clean up the carcass. Last year I shot one groundhog and within 24 hours the carcass was reduced to a clean skeleton. We put out the trail camera to record who came to our dinner invitation. The turkey vulture in the front of the picture was caught by the camera while he was coming in for a 2 point landing (The Demmert Olympic judges decided the vulture stuck his landing and awarded a perfect score of 10.) To get an idea of the size of these birds, their wingspan is 4-6 feet long, just shorter than a mature bald eagle, so they are big birds.
I think the groundhog won with this picture although neither vulture really fancied baked groundhog (nor do they appear to like "cicada on the wind").