Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
The first squash are in. The tomatoes will follow soon. Everything in the garden is blooming copiously, and last night a good rain fell. I’m hoping for a good garden year.
As for the figs, it’s highly likely that the squirrels will raid the orchard and get to them first. The fig wars should begin in a few weeks.
As for the deer, these two no longer make any pretense of living in the woods. They live in the front thicket, and this year they ate every last one of my day lily blooms.
For eleven months of the year, blackberries are terrible neighbors. They come up everywhere. If you get anywhere near them, they reach out and grab you with their briars. Their stems are as tough as Kevlar, and it’s very difficult to cut them back.
But for one month of the year, blackberries pay you back with — blackberries. May was a good growing month, so June promises to be an outstandingly good blackberry month.
There will be pies.
The new LED fixture, aimed in such a way as to limit its coverage to 180 degrees.
Acorn Abbey is near the end of an unpaved private road. The abbey feels remote and isolated, but there are other homes on the road. Luckily the other places are closer to the nearest paved road than I am, so there is no daily traffic past the abbey. The closest house is across the road, though that place is out of sight down a steep hill. But I have been bedeviled for as long as I’ve lived here by a so-called security light by the roadside across from me. Its light washed into the abbey’s bedroom windows, lit my house so starkly that the only real shadow was behind the house, ruined the night sky, and all too often tricked a mockingbird into singing in the dead of night.
It’s a vacation home over there; the owner lives in Florida. I’ve tried over the years to persuade her to get the light removed, but she wouldn’t do it. She believes that so-called security lights actually provide security, though some studies have found that increased lighting actually increases crime.
Not until a week ago did I learn that electric companies actually have reflector shields that can contain at least some of this light when neighbors complain. Also, electric companies are in the process of replacing the old mercury vapor lights with LED lights. The LED lights are much more directional. The direct light from them can be limited to 180 degrees.
As soon as I learned that reflectors existed, I called our electric company. The electric company here is Energy United, a small (and very friendly) co-op company. They sent an engineer to see what could be done. The engineer proposed an LED fixture mounted on a S-arm aimed across the road, away from my place.
What a huge difference that has made! Now no direct light falls on my side of the road. I can’t see the neighbor’s place anyway, because it’s down a steep hill. So all I see now is light falling on an oak tree across the road. The oak tree glows a little and shimmers like the ghost of an oak tree. But I don’t mind that, because I don’t get any direct light anymore. The sky is dark again. No light glows through the abbey’s front windows.
If more people complained about light pollution from those infernal “security” lights that can’t be turned off, then electric companies would be forced to come up with even better solutions to keep the light from trespassing.
Click on image for high-resolution version
While getting laundry off the line this evening, I noticed this tiny egg shell in the grass. Its diameter is not much greater than the diameter of a pencil. An ant was checking it out. I have no idea what hatched out it.
I don’t get to travel as much as I might like. I would like to point my camera at grand Ansel-Adams landscapes — or, even better, at rocky seascapes. But for now I must make do with pointing my camera at smaller and smaller things. A macro lens — not to mention a microscope — is a very good thing to have when you’re stuck in one place. The photo of the egg shell was taken with a Nikon 28-85mm 1:3.5-4.5 lens in macro mode. In macro mode, the lens will focus as close as five or six inches.
Whatever the tiny thing is that hatched out of that egg, I hope that it is safe and thriving in the back yard.
It’s as though March and April got reversed this year. March was obscenely warm. April has been dangerously cold. The warmth of March teased all the plant life into venturing out, so that April’s frosts could bite. The fig trees had put out leaves, and all those leaves were killed. With luck, the fig trees’ stems didn’t freeze, and there will be new leaves.
Otherwise, we seem to have survived what probably will be the last frost of Spring 2016. The peach trees and pear trees already had bloomed and set fruit. They seem to be unharmed. The apple trees are in the late stages of blooming, but they seem to have survived just fine. Once again, I am reminded of the risks involved in exotic species (such as figs). Whereas the tried, true, and experienced local species pretty much know what they’re doing. Some people covered their lilacs. I trusted my lilac to know what it was doing, and luckily it seems fine.
The apple trees are looking great this year. The trees had their adolescent pruning two winters ago. That really reduced the number of bloom buds in the two subsequent springs. But this year the apple trees are looking nicely balanced, with lots of bloom buds. There will be fruit in the orchard this year, though the squirrels and raccoons are likely to get more of it than I do. Not until the trees produce more than the wildlife can eat is an orchard truly productive.
Above, a young pear.
Above, a young peach.
As for the chickens, they don’t mind the cold. They actually seem to do better in winter than in summer. Nothing is happier than a chicken — a chicken, at least, with freedom — in the spring.
Apple and cherry bush …
Pear blossoms. I saw lots of honey bees today, by the way.
Peach blossoms.
I call this a cherry bush. It’s difficult to focus close-up on blooms like this, because the wind shakes the tree.
Deciduous magnolia
A different deciduous magnolia, which blooms a bit less red
Spring chickens in high clover
A bluet
The spring peepers are singing in the woods, daffodils are bursting out all over, and the early-budding tree buds are starting to open. All signs including the 10-day weather forecast seem to be pointing to an early spring.
A daffodil
A day lily shoot. They will bloom in June.
The abbey is a great place for bird-watching. I feel guilty that I’m not more systematic about bird watching and that I’m not better at identifying birds.
Just as interesting as watching the birds, though, is listening to and studying bird song, because the abbey is a very quiet place except for bird song. Maybe because I have an ear for music and for language and for accents, I’m very familiar with the bird songs that I commonly hear, although I usually have no idea which species of bird I’m hearing. I tend to hear both words and music in bird song. For sample, the bird that says, “Diaz! Diaz! Diaz!” with a lisping Castilian accent is, I think, a male cardinal. There’s another bird that says “Whip her! Whip her! Whip her!” with a country accent. I don’t know who that is. Another bird (a wren?) says, “Cheeseburger! Cheeseburger! Cheeseburger! Cheese!” Another bird (I heard it this very morning) sings, “Beet sugar! Beet sugar! Beet sugar!”
While Googling to make sure that I wasn’t stupidly misidentifying the bird in this photo (is it a sparrow?) and while looking at a page on house wrens, I saw that an old book published around 1921 actually did musical transcriptions for many birds:
Needless to say, I have ordered that book. Since the book was published before 1923, I believe that it would now be in the public domain.
Here is one of these, a wren song, played on the abbey organ, six flats and all. I apologize for the keyboard clatter. The camera is right over the keyboards. Also, I’m sure that the bird’s actual tempo is a good bit faster than I can play this phrase with only a minute’s practice:
It doesn’t exactly sound like birdsong, but how easily I could imagine J.S. Bach composing a toccata on that theme! And below, it is an octave higher and twice as fast, thanks to a little tweaking in iMovie. That makes it sound a bit more like birdsong, though I’m afraid I gave that opening triplet only half the time it is owed:
The bird in the photo, by the way, appeared at the deck door to wonder why there is no longer food on the deck. Answer: Because it’s no longer snowing, and I swept up the mess.
P.S. Further Googling reveals that, in 2004, NPR did a story on F. Schuyler Mathews’ book and his musical notation: NPR audio