The nights are around 50F now, and the birds are packing on fat for migration. There have been a lot of hummingbirds in the garden, but they like to feed at dusk.
I took dozens of low light hummingbird shots last week, and they’re all blurry. Each of these birds are speedy fast, and jewel-like in their beauty.
According to Wikipedia, a hummingbird that survives its first year is likely to live a decade or more.
How could a little bird live so long in such a dangerous world?
Beauty, speed, keen mental maps and luck hardly seem enough to keep such ethereal beings among us.
Published by Alice on August 20, 2010
in dogs.
Gracie (the Bernese mountain dog) started mountain climbing.
She likes it very much. This is a shot of Gracie at 12,000 feet with the westernmost part of the continental divide behind her.
We’ve paused in a meadow below the last steep climb to the top. We admired the tiny people on top of the ridge (none of us went that last bit) and Gracie made friends with other climbers picnicking in the upper meadow.
Gracie was such a good dog that they shared their food with her,
and then she came barrelling back on a whistle.
Back in the valley, this dog is a handful. She knows lots of commands, and you can sometimes see her weigh whether or not to obey… and choose wrong. She’s a teenager with questionable judgement. But take her above 12,000 feet and she’s good as gold for 24 hours at least.
A true bonsai,
a triple pine,
and this log is for Bob, who loves wood.
After I saw a flicker regurgitate food into a grown chick’s beak, I started to see lots of birds doing it.
This evening grosbeak is giving its chick a second meal: the parent filled up at the birdfeeder, regurgitated the food into a chick perched on an aspen, and flew back to the birdfeeder to stock up again. I got my camera and waited, along with the chick, for the parent to provide a second helping, shown above.
In the high mountains, most of the wildflowers have passed their peak. The red Indian paintbrush are gone,
but the smaller hot pink paintbrush is also striking.
The fleabane, fleshier than at lower elevations, is a little tattered,
and the fields of wild delphinium are mostly past but still splendid in patches.
For a while, this straight branched coral fungus had the beauty prize, but in the end it was
the little gentian blue that stole my heart.
Published by Alice on August 13, 2010
in dogs.
Three days ago, Gracie found a heavy set of bones near a trail we often hike. She collects bones, and these were very fresh.
She’d heft them into her mouth like you’d slung on a backpack, and run fast until she had to drop them.
She’d catch her breath, nuzzle the bones a bit, and do it again until she couldn’t keep up and had to leave them behind.
The third day, she had the bones within half a mile of our house.
She was sure that this was her last day on the project, but about 1/8 of a mile from home her jaws gave out.
So Bob carried them the rest of the way home.
Lucky dog.
P.S.
The neighbor’s apricots are nearly ripe, and a yearling bear has been hanging around hoping to harvest them. They’re using lights, radios, air horns, and electricity to try and keep the bear away from the apricots.
I heard the air horn go off, and saw this little cutie sitting under a ponderosa, wondering what to do next. He doesn’t like me getting so close to him, especially after having his ears rattled by the air horn,
so although I’ve been telling him what a good nice bear he is, he climbs straight up the tree.
He’s more of a tree scamperer than a tree climber, and went high into the ponderosa with a flick of his little bear tail.
I went to get Bob, thinking it’d take a while for the bear to get down from the tree, but when we came back the bear was already on another adventure,
taking a bath in the ditch! He’s sitting down with his feet splayed out, ploshing the water with his paws. I don’t know if you can see how dear he is, but this guy has the same sweet-heartedness as a teenaged boy–I want to hug him and feed him.
Good luck with the apricots, buddy.
And watch out. It’s a dangerous world out there.
Durango is a little farther south than Washington, DC., but at 7,000 feet we’re much closer to the freezing temperatures of outer space. Cosmic! This far south the temperature doesn’t drop much below zero in the winter, and the summer is hot by day but drops to 60F at night.
Most of the annual moisture in the southern Rockies comes from snowpack, and the snowmelt soaking into the land is often the only moisture we get during May and June. July is the start of our monsoon season, and a good year brings hard rain every afternoon for some minutes. We average around 20 inches of rain a year, so it’s fundamentally dry and Bob is a master irrigator.
Tender fruit trees, like peaches, do well except that random late frosts often take out the crop by freezing the blossoms (resulting in a bigger crop next year). With a mixed orchard, trees bloom during different weeks, so you might lose the apricots but get peaches, or lose the sour cherries but get the sweet; apples and pears are reliable, but the tender stone fruits aren’t.
We put in this Montmorency cherry–a sour cherry for pies–two years ago. It ended up outside the fence, so Bob cut its radial roots this spring and we’ll transplant it inside the fence this fall.
Here’s the new orchard. We put in a Wenatchee apricot and a Hale Haven peach; for apples we did Haralred, Lodi and Honeycrisp; we’re are waiting to find a Damson plum (sour for jam), and are wondering which pear to plant.
The hops have a toehold and are half way up the fence, delicate for now but not for long.
Here’s the greenhouse as it looks today. Bob filled in the trench and seeded it more than a month ago, but it’ll take a year for the grass to fill in.
Bob built the greenhouse for tomatoes and lettuce. The nights are usually too cold for tomatoes to ripen, and at the end of the summer the giant Colorado-grown tomato plants are loaded with green tomatoes that will never, ever, ever ripen on the vine. Lettuces grow perfectly well outside , but we’ve had a family of pretty little tufted-ear squirrels–Ebert’s squirrels–living in the ponderosa pines for years, and they eat every leaf down to the nubbin. They’re a species of special concern, so if they want my lettuces they can have ‘em… hence the greenhouse.
There’s a shade cloth cover to reduce the interior temperature, and the humidity is so low that Bob installed a sprinkler system that sprays a fine mist from the ceiling for one minute every quarter hour. As you can see, his tomatoes (grown from seed) are happy as can be. There are a few layers of cardboard under the gravel, and in theory the grass is supposed to die by the time the cardboard rots, leaving a bare earth floor sealed with a few inches of gravel.
The greenhouse is about 60 feet from the house. There are two new beds that Bob plowed this spring and planted with annual rye as a green manure: the bright green patch in front of the island is a big oval bed we’ll transplant asparagus into this fall, and the big bed flanking the greenhouse will be used for rhubarb and delphinium (more fall transplants).
We had almost no rain until recently: 0.02 inches in May, 0.04 inches in June, and no more than a few drops until two days ago. The bear and deer are normally up in the high country now, but without rain there’s no food. They started trickling down to the valley (and the river-fed vegetation) a few weeks ago.
And we finally got rain, a little in the day, more at night, and it’s raining again today.
The insects and birds are singing in jubiliation.
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