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Yeah, I am about 2 (3?) months late. :)

However, flowers are pricier this year, and I haven’t been able to get to the retailers to pick up what I’d like, anyway.

I’ve always wanted to grow plants from seeds, but had limited success over the years. And yet greenhouses do it every day! ;) So this must be an achievable thing. Practice makes perfect, right?

So I will have pots full of late-blooming plants this year. I’m going to plant my seed-started plants separately so I can bring them inside this fall and enjoy their full life cycle after the world turns to brown-and-gray, rather than losing them “early” in October.

The seeds I planted today included:

Giant Violet Zinnias
Thunbergia (black-eyed susan vine)
Balsam (not the tree!)
Profusion zinnias
Mixed sunflowers
Four o’clocks
Sweet Basil
……. and, Italian Oregano

I also have a couple packets of nasturtiums that I’m going to plant up at my Mom’s house… as well as some multi-colored Columbines for her yard, too. :) We love fragrant butterfly- and bird-friendly flowers. And unlike my deck, she doesn’t have bird predators (cats) to eat our little feathery friends.

With the exception of the Four O’Clocks, which as I understand are quite fragrant (and might end up up at Mom’s as a result if they attract too many moths and flutterbies), I have tried to pick flowers this year which are not attractive to hummingbirds particularly. One of my cats is quite adept at catching the little things, and she likes to bring them in the house and eat them on my bed.

YUCK!!!

Let me tell you, there is nothing quite as nauseating as discovering a little bird leg and 50 teeny-tiny feathers in a little pile on your bedspread.

Hopefully through better flower choices this year, I’ll attract fewer hummers (because it is very upsetting to me to know they are getting murdered on my porch) and then all the cat will have to dine on is cicada bugs. Yes, cicadas. In my bed. Headless.

*barf*

Memorial Day Weekend in Door County, Wisconsin… just the sound of it brings enchanted, sunny, warm, leaf-doppled memories of years gone by. This is a splendid and perfect weekend. It is the doorway to happy, joyous summer.

For everyone else. Because I am flat on my back in bed, sicker than a freakin’ dog with a cold the size of Montana, doing my best to hack up a lung through my clogged and irritated little windpipe, watching the sun bathe the rich luxurious grass carpeting the ground in warm, golden light.

I have been in this bed since Monday. Monday!! It is now Saturday. >:(

Truly, I do not remember being this sick since winter ’03 when I had pneumonia … that was pretty grim. And the pneumonia was only outdone by July ’95 in Tomahawk, at summer camp. I should have been in the hospital for that one.

I’ve been so tired, in pain, and feeling awful that I haven’t even had the energy (or desire) to crack open the laptop and screw around online. It was so easier to just lay here with my eyes closed and not think. Or lay here with my eyes open and not think. Just all quiet. No effort. My body was working too hard just to breathe, to make it to the next minute.

Thanks to some Claritin I found that expired 3.5 years ago :) and a rediscovered vaporizer, I am crawling back to the land of the living. Please bear with me! I will be back in the saddle just as quickly as possible.

May 10, 2008, saw first blooms of:

• White Trillium (Trillium grandiflorum)
• Large-Flowered Bellwort (Uvularia grandiflora)

A few straggling Bloodroots (Sanguinaria canadensis) continue to bloom at the trailhead next to the old Weborg Cemetery (at Weborg Point).

The Forget-Me-Nots (Myosotis spp.) are barely poking their heads above the leaf cover, in clumps. Ditto for common grasses, which will flow over the forest floor like a lush green carpet; right now it is still mostly dead brown leaves with young clumps of grass poking through.

Some wise-cracker planted a few daffodils along Skyline Rd between Middle Road and Sven’s Bluff. Please rest assured that daffodils are not native ;) they were very much planted by some creative visitor …….

The Dwarf Lake Irises (Iris lacustris) are supposed to be blooming right now, but I didn’t see any sign of them at Weborg Marsh on Sunday May 11th. It has been an average of 10-15°F below normal most days this spring, so I expect the dwarf lake irises to follow the same pattern as other flowers thus far, and probably bloom sometime in late May. ##

Happily, all 3 nests atop cellular towers in northern Door County (at least the three I watch — Fish Creek, Ellison Bay and Gills Rock) have been reoccupied as summer residences for pairs of ospreys.

The first nest activity I witnessed was on April 4th, which I thought was a little early? and it was definitely very cold for those poor things to be back. But by April 6th both the Fish Creek and Gills Rock nests were occupied and being repaired/redecorated by fastidious females.

Where the Fish Creek and Gills Rock pairs have been rather flamboyant in appearances (they don’t seem to care who sees ‘em coming or going), the Ellison Bay pair has been very low-key. Honestly I thought there wasn’t even a pair at the Ellison Bay nest this year, until last week … I hadn’t seen any nest-building activity, and I’d only seen an osprey perched out on the tower two evenings since early April. (Vs. the Fish Creek male, who seems to spend the majority of every day perched atop his Tower, overseeing his Kingdom, LOL)

Well, finally last week I drove my mobile bird blind (car) up to Tower Storage, and watched the Ellison Bay nest for a good 15 minutes through high-powered binoculars. After about 10 minutes of nothin’, the female osprey poked her head up and looked around. :-P So she’s there; she’s just not one of these “let’s stand out on the edge of the nest and screw around with stuff” types, perhaps. :)

I read online that often the same pair returns to a nest year after year. The Fish Creek and Gills Rock ospreys, I would definitely believe that is the case … they seem very familiar and comfortable with their surroundings. However the Ellison Bay pair, I’m not so sure. While last year’s pair wasn’t excited about human presence, they were nowhere near this low-key. I saw them perched out on the tower, or moving around in the nest fixing it up, a lot more (daily). This year it’s nothing like that.

Without tagging them, of course, we’ll never know. And no, I’m not calling for tagging them either. No need to stress them out like that. I’m perfectly content to watch them from afar and leave them be. ##

I broke my camera yesterday. Not on purpose, of course. I was taking pics at a major structure fire at 3:45 AM, and my tripod broke, and the camera went down lens-first. The lens housing is now jammed into the camera at an angle. It doesn’t go in or out. It is dead. :(

Everything I’ve read online has suggested repair is in the neighborhood of $250. Ouch!! For that much money I could nearly buy a new (and better) camera.

So, I am trying to decide whether I should pick up a cheapish point-and-shoot easy-shmeasy digital camera for the meantime, or if I should just pony up and pop for a new good cam and be done with it. I’m short of cash no matter which route I go, so that’s really no help either way.

All I know is that this is like having an arm cut off. My camera is an extension of my mind. My soul. My view on life. It captures those perfect moments, beautiful shapes, bits of beauty and hope. Without it, I feel like I have nothing.

No worries, my friends… although I haven’t been writing this spring (sorry!), I have been out & about snapping pictures of everything, nearly every day this spring.

I did, however, draw the line at rainy days :) neither I, nor you, need to see pictures of gray-brown muddy blah.

New entries will be filed by their actual date, which means they won’t appear at the top of the page, and you might miss them. So, I will post a “Spring 2008 Journal” table of contents, which will stay at the top. As I add new articles, I will link to them in that post! Then you will be able to quickly see what’s new.

In the meantime, let’s play “count the white-crowned sparrows” :) — click on the pic to make it larger. They’re easier to count that way. :)

Took a quick run over to North Bay yesterday (Wednesday) and saw 2 pairs of common terns (Sterna hirundo), as well as 3 pairs of green-winged teal (Anas crecca).

It felt great to hear the terns’ hoarse screeching again. It’s not a pretty call, but it is part of the backdrop that makes a Door County summer.

I awoke yesterday to a persistent, endless cacophony of bird song that I didn’t recognize. It was noisy, unique, and there were lots of birds singing the same song. And I hadn’t heard it before.

I peeked out my 2nd-floor bedroom window and saw a few little brown birds with black-and-white striped heads hopping around on the trees and in the grass. I thought they were white-throated sparrows (which are very common around here), but in the back of my mind it seemed rather odd that they were so noisy. I didn’t remember the white-throats being that ……. obnoxious?

Later in the day I Googled the white-throated sparrows, and realized that I didn’t recall seeing any yellow on these little birds’ heads. Hmmmm. I listened to the white-throats’ calls online, and they did not match. Not even remotely. And yet Cornell didn’t list any similar-looking species; to hear them tell it, the white-throated sparrow was the only sparrow with that obvious black-and-white striping on it.

Now I was obsessed. :) What were those birds???? I grabbed my camera and went outside. I tried to creep gently, quietly, unobtrusively to the side yard… no matter, all the birds spooked and flew off, sort of in a brown wave. *grin* Except for one brave little soul in a tree. I took his picture.

There were several more in a tree below my porch, so I took their pictures, too. After a few minutes, another puffy little fellow hopped out of a bush and onto the grass. He was particularly photogenic. I snapped his pic and he flitted away.

Good pics in hand, I ran back upstairs and cracked open my trusty, worn copy of Peterson’s. I downloaded the pictures, although I didn’t really need to, I had gotten a really good look at the little guys out there. A-ha! There they were, no question: white-crowned sparrows (Zonotrichia leucophrys).

They hadn’t been here the day before. They were here all day Wednesday. Literally, they were yammering from sun-up to sun-down. And when I awoke this morning, they were gone.

This morning my Mom wrote to tell me that all 3,000 of the white-crowneds were at her house today (11 miles north of me, as the crow flies) … and that yes, their song was definitely different than the white-throated sparrows. See? I asked … now you know why I was obsessed with them yesterday!!

Nothing like a new bird on a bright spring day. :)