Animals: The barn swallows

The previously-mentioned barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) have laid eggs now. I had to use a mirror (the gold stuff at the top), as Errant suggested Saturday, to get the picture.A web cam, which some of you suggested, was never going to happen -- we don't have one already, and the money's not there to buy one. As Pat said, checking on the nest too often may cause the parents to abandon it and

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Random plant event: fern gametophytes, or, How to Make Your Own Ferns at Home

I was curious about how difficult it really was to grow ferns indoors from spores, so I took either a frond or a part of a frond from a holly fern (Cyrtomium falcatum) at work and brought it home. I also took some damp toilet paper at work and wiped it on a Asplenium nidus that had formed spores, to collect those (I didn't want to cut off the frond).When I got these home, I took a smallish (about
Read more

Three easy pieces...

Image
Last summer I was lucky enough to finally find gas plant in the wild: it happened to be Dictamnus angustifolius , very similar to Dictamnus albus v. purpureus I have grown for many years. Above you can see the latter combined in a sort of furious pastel pastiche with 'Diabolo'--that instant classic dark leaved form of ninebark and a Canadian rose in our "Perennial Triangle" in my Quince garden: the three make for an easy piece of springtime magic. Here gas plant thrives on rich, dark loam and regular watering. Below there are two very different variations on the theme: in the Rock Alpine Garden the clashing orange fury of Glaucium acutidentatum makes a stark contrast to the towering cool pinkness of Dictamnus : our hot sun and sleek steppe modernism almost lets us get away with the antichromal audacity (to coin a phrase). Finally in the last easy piece a rogue gas plant popped up in the front of one of our old rock gardens at Eudora: I know we dug this up and brou...
Read more

Random nonplant event: bird's-nest fungus

Yet another yard fungus. (Previously.) Most of what we get here are pretty normal, little beige mushrooms, but something about the unusually cool, wet summer must be encouraging the weirder ones. Or maybe something about the unusually cool, wet summer means that I spend more time outdoors, and am therefore in a better position to observe weird fungi. Whichever. That on the left is a Portulaca,
Read more