Back in the wooded lot...

I  haven't posted about the wooded lot for a while. Things were pretty quiet for a long time but now that it's turned cold, the birds and beasties are coming around. The main attraction seems to be the pan of water I set out every day. The squirrels, a large variety of birds and the four turkey boys come around to quench their thirst.

I recently started getting deer coming at night for a drink. I had a lot of family visiting over the Thanksgiving weekend and my grandson and three great-grands were delighted when three deer showed up outside my bedroom window in the early evening. There is a light on the side of the building so they were clearly visible.

                                          (Borrowed image)
So far I've only been putting out birdseed and bread or fruit scraps. With the loss of the bread thrift store where we were buying a trunk-full of stale bread for $5, I'm not sure how I'll feed them over the winter. I really hope I'll locate another resource somewhere soon.

                                        (Borrowed image)
Once we get some snow, the animals won't need the water anymore. Right now, with everything so dry there is a constant stream of birds and animals drinking at the water pan. I'm using the bottom tray from a large flower pot.

Sometimes I can hardly believe how very lucky I am to have all this wonderful wildlife right outside my window! 

Bad day for the Twin Cities

We had really bad storms move through the Twin Cities on Thursday and Friday nights. They were powerful storms with destructive lightning that caused a number of fires and straight-line winds that toppled hundreds of trees and caused wide-spread power outages. There are big sections of the area that have been without power for several days and won't get it back for several more days.

The terrible winds whipped up fierce sheets of rain that tore off lots of branches and along with them the birds and squirrels sheltered in them. The wooded lot is a shambles with broken branches everywhere. I keep looking out there to see if there are any survivors of the storm but nothing is stirring. I threw some birdseed down in there. This usually produces a several squirrels to come running. Today there is nothing.

The Wildlife Rehab Center is swamped with birds and animals rescued from downed trees. Sadly, there are many that cannot be rescued.

Meeting the Rhode Island neighbor

I had to take the car in for an oil change this morning. Coming back up the street, I saw that my neighbor lady was working on a flower bed next to the curb. Also digging around in the flower bed were two industrious chickens.

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I knew there were chickens living over there on the other side of the wooded lot because I could sometimes hear them clucking. I really wanted to meet them, so I stopped the car and jumped out to get a closer look. The owner, Catherine, was happy to share her love of the little assistant gardeners. The soil she had turned over was being meticulously inspected at close range by the pair. One was a Rhode Island Red and the other name I forget, but it was a pretty golden color with black specks on the head and shoulders.

After a few minutes, the golden bird suddenly turned around and started marching back to the coop behind the house. Catherine said, "I think she's probably going to lay an egg." Sure enough, several moments later, the successful hen started cackling loudly as if announcing her accomplishment. ( She said that with her three hens she gets two or three eggs a day.)

We finally had a sunny day today. A doe crossed the lawn past our patio this afternoon and the four bachelor turkeys came by. Breeding season is over so their heads are no longer bright red and their snoods have shrunk. Most noticeably, they don't gobble anymore. I haven't seen any of the seven female turkeys for over a month. They are safely hidden away somewhere. Maybe they're all mommies by now.

Another old post

This is a rerun of a posting from back in 2008. I didn't have any followers at the time and I was clueless about how to get some. So anyway...

Danger, Sparrow, Danger!

I've been getting some recorded telemarketing calls lately. They start out, "Do not be alarmed!" (They go on to offer some credit card insurance.)

This is so devious. How better to get you to listen to the message than to imply there is danger!

I don't know about you, but I don't have nearly enough danger in my daily life. My adrenalin level remains pretty constant. The most hazardous thing I ever do is back the car out of my tiny garage--and I have the dents to prove it.

The only wild animals I encounter are the opossums that I feed on my patio. There are also voles, squirrels and a few raccoons that come around, as well, but the 'possums are the stars. This is because they are newcomers.

Possums are common to the South, like armadillos. Because of Global Warming, however, they have been working their way north over time. And now, I am privileged to have my very own tribe.

Their arrival each evening is an eagerly anticipated event. The three cats and I sit inside the patio door and watch them eat the jelly or peanut butter sandwiches, meat scraps, fruit and whatever. The possums ignore us even though we're only a foot away.

I never know which ones will show up, but they always come separately. The first one was a big light-colored one with pretty pink ears that I promptly named Petunia. Next came Tank (a solidly-built little fella), then Elvis (a young one with small black ears). Last night, a new one appeared with a torn ear and 2-tone tail, so he became Rocky. The gender assignments are arbitrary, of course, and naming them is pure self-indulgence.

Now that the snows have come, I'm worried about where they've holed up for the winter. The poor things are not well-adapted to Minnesota with their naked tails and sparse coats. I worry about them--and so I feed them.

After, they face real danger every day!

The end of the story

Last spring, I posted about the widower Canadian goose who faithfully returned to the spot where his mate was killed by a car seven years ago.  This morning, I drove past that spot and saw he was lying dead beside the road near where she died.

There's really nothing uplifting that can be said about it except that millions of new little Canadian geese are being hatched at this time of year. It's still the sad ending to a sad story.

                     (Rock on, all you lovely geese parents!)

Feeding Baby Birds

I had my first four-hour shift in the Avian Nursery last night at the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center. The nursery is in a large, very warm room lined with incubators for the smallest baby birds that are coming in every day.

In one of the artificial nests are four tiny house finches who were brought into the center last week. A family had been cleaning their yard and took down a Christmas wreath and threw it into a bonfire. Only then did they see that a mother bird had built a nest in it with the four baby birds. They were quickly rescued and brought into the center. If their enthusiastic cheeps and appetites are any indication, they will do very well.

They are kept in an incubator inside a plastic box half the size of a shoe box. Inside the box is a hand-knitted nest and inside that nest is very soft bathroom tissue rolled into a cone into which the birds are nestled. They are fed a special formula with a syringe every 15 minutes from morning until night.  The older birds are fed every half hour. When they are ready to fledge, they're moved to large outdoor cages before they're released.

The Avian Nursery is only 10% filled now, but in the coming weeks, it will be filled to capacity as more and more little birds are orphaned and abandoned--or mistakenly believed to be.

                                   (Beautiful, they ain't!)

Just another stupid Sunday

I'm really mad at myself today. I've been volunteering at a Specialty Clinic for Regions Hospital for five years. They had a Volunteer Recognition brunch today at noon at a very nice restaurant I could never afford. (A New Orleans Jazz Brunch, no less!) I had been looking forward to it for weeks and then spaced it out until 1:00. I've been torturing myself all day for being so stupid.

Sometimes I blame these lapses on having worked so many years in an office job that required constant multitasking. I find it hard to focus on one thing. I'm still mentally working on several things at any one time so I never make much progress. Of course, a lot of people my age call it "a senior moment" or Halfs-heimers"
or "Olds-heimers"--or even "a brain fart"! Whatever the cause, I'm terribly disappointed.

I've been having a turkey or two coming by for a handout every once in a while. They don't hang around. Jan who blogs at Revising Life informs me that a bunch of turkeys is called a gang or a rafter. I feel kinda silly for never looking it up myself.

I also got a comment about working with Wildlife Rehab from Susan who blogs at My Mother's Apron Strings. She says, "We took a Canadian Goose that lived on our pond to one in Connecticut--she had a dislocated wing (probably from a snapping turtle).  After two days, she escaped and walked twelve miles back to our pond. It took her two weeks but she wasn't about to be kept away from her new goslings!"
Isn't that an amazing story? It really warms my heart.

                                 (Borrowed image)

Here's a salute to all the wonderful men and women who rush in whenever there's a catastrophe. They are true heroes! (My granddaughter is married to a policeman and my grandson is married to an EMT.)

Another turkey tale

Yesterday,  it was bitter cold again and the turkeys were all roosting on the branches of a felled tree near the feeding area. They conserve heat and energy that way.

I noticed one big tom suddenly become alert and crane his neck around. Seconds later, the entire bunch simultaneously popped up and jumped to the ground. They were all craning their necks and looking up. When I looked up to see what was causing this alarm, I saw a large hawk perched up at the top of the cottonwood tree. On either side of the hawk were crows loudly cussing out the intruder. This angry cawing of the crows is what tipped off the turkeys to the hawk's presence.

The hawk was no threat to the turkeys who are several times bigger than it is. Yet, they were greatly upset by having it sitting up in their tree. I gave some thought to why they were so threatened and constructed what I think is their history.

When I first spotted them last June, there were nine newly-hatched poults with the mother. She was cautious and I rarely saw them until later in the summer when there were two hens with a combined flock of twelve chicks. When the chicks were all mature, I couldn't tell the mothers from the rest anymore. By early fall, there was only a total of ten in the flock--two hens and eight young.

In late November another undersized hen suddenly appeared, apparently from another flock. This increased their total to eleven. She had an injured leg and always trailed behind the rest as they moved around the neighborhood. Happily, she recovered and walks fine but she's still smaller than the rest of them. It seems that while she's tolerated, she is not fully integrated into the flock.

When I consider all the chicks that went missing over the summer, it seems likely that all of the resident turkeys lost siblings or chicks to hawks and other predators. Their instincts tell them to beware of hawks and that fear kicks in whenever a hawk appears. It will stand them in good stead when they start their own families in the spring.

All photos from google images. If you care to read my earlier posts about the turkeys, just click on the label "Turkeys" below and they will come up in reverse order.

Of Twinkies and hungry turkeys

Recently the Hostess Baking Company went bankrupt and closed. It made the national news mostly because they made the iconic Twinkies. I never bought any Hostess products except for an occasional Snowball so I didn't really give a care until today. But today, it suddenly hit home.

We make a trip over to Minneapolis every couple of weeks to shop at the Master Bakery "used bread" store. They sell bread that is near the "sell-by" date at half the price. We always stock up on English Muffin Toasting Bread. It's the very best for breakfast toast and also grilled cheese sandwiches, BLT's or French toast. It's basically the only bread we eat.

Ever since I began feeding the flock of turkeys this summer, we had been buying expired bread that they sell for animal feed. We could literally  buy a car trunk full of bread and buns for five dollars. The turkeys happily gobbled it up, along with the squirrels, birds and assorted other animals. It was a feast by the wooded lot twice a day. Little did I know that when they stopped making Twinkies and other Hostess products, it would trickle down to create a problem for my menagerie.

Today, when we asked to buy a cart of stale bread, the gal said they didn't have any. She told us that when Hostess Bakeries closed down, people who had been getting bread at the local Hostess thrift store started coming over to the Master Bread thrift store. She said a man came in one morning who was with an organization that provided food for homeless people. He bought 50 loaves of bread. She said they are clearing out their shelves every day now so there's no leftovers to sell for animals.

It brings home the interconnectedness of everything that happens--and I will miss those yummy Snowballs.

Hostess marshmallow-covered, cream-filled Snowball. They come in lavender for Easter, green for St Patrick's day and orange for Halloween plus white for every-day.

Hidden Valley

The Hidden Valley turkey troop has acquired an 11th member. In the last several days, a little female has been tagging along with the ten others as they stroll around the neighborhood. She must have been from a later hatch, perhaps from another brood as she's noticeably smaller than the others. She also walks with a limp so she's always the last one to reach the food. There's always plenty so she eats well.

 

I don't know if I've mentioned before that my neighborhood is called Hidden Valley. The "valley" was created when a gravel pit was excavated on the north side of a big hill in the early twentieth century. It is about eight blocks long and bounded by a large cemetery on one end and a large greenhouse/nursery on the other. All the streets running south off the main road end in a cul de sac or a turn at the base of the steep, forested slope. The cliff rises 100 feet just a short way from my patio.   

Google image of Hidden Valley, click to enlarge--the small X marks my building. (The tiny car in the driveway in my old car that I crashed two years ago.) Directly north is the wooded lot that my bedroom window overlooks. The trees across the bottom of the image are on the slope. At the top of the slope is a fence surrounding the cemetery. There is a large woodsy area on the east side behind the apartment buildings, as well.

Tonight we will be watching Homeland and Dexter on TV. They are both gripping series we never miss. Last week ended the (old) British series William and Mary and Call the Midwife which we will miss. I'm hoping there will be a new season of Doc Martin coming soon! Martin Clunes is a really likeable guy.

If you feed them, they will come!

I often write about the wooded lot next door and the animal life there. I began putting out pans of water this summer during the drought and it attracted so many birds and animals that I've kept it up.

We also have been putting food out and the crowd of wildlife coming to the "dinner table" on the retaining wall by the wooded lot keeps growing. In addition to the dozen or so squirrels, an assortment of birds and the wild turkeys, there are three opossums, several raccoons and a two foxes. There are an occasional couple of freeloading cats, two cottontail rabbits and four or five deer. Someone down the block dumped their Halloween pumpkins in the wooded lot and the deer come to munch on them. The pumpkin seeds are gobbled up by the squirrels. 

My twelve wild turkeys have shrunk to ten. I suspect that someone poached the missing two--although the foxes may have gotten them. With Thanksgiving next Thursday and roast turkey being the traditional meal, I worry about the rest of them. It's illegal to hunt in the city but someone with a crossbow could sneak up on them. They stroll around the neighborhood all day and they're so used to being around people that it wouldn't be hard.

 

The traditional Thanksgiving Day dinner that I cook every year consists of: roast turkey with herb dressing, mashed potatoes and gravy, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, sweet potato/apple casserole, relish tray with pickles, olives and fresh veggies and dinner rolls. For those who don't eat meat, I also serve salmon (we don't have any vegans). I also make pumpkin pie and another pie. It's a lot of work, but it is sooo good!  

Thanksgiving 2010 (Note dog intently watching platter of turkey!)

A few follow-ups

I just spotted the mama turkey over by some trees and all 9 of her chicks are still with her. They look to be half-grown and they're fully feathered now.

                                   (Borrowed image)
Sunny's vestibular disease has not cleared up. He walks around with his head cocked way over to one side. He get disoriented easily but seems to be dealing with it. I'm still worried about him because that's the kinda gal I am!

                      (It seems to have affected his eyes too)
The tomato dumpling soup was not up to expectations. I had previously blogged about how messy and steamy it was to can peaches. As it turns out, making soup from fresh tomatoes is almost as bad! The soup was good but I need a better recipe for the dumplings. I think I'll try it with spaetzle next time!

When I went on Google to find a picture, I found this one that had a recipe attached. Now, who would have thought to go into Google Images to find a recipe!

The family reunion picnic on Saturday. My two cousins on the left and me between my two brothers on the right. We look like a bunch of old people!