He leaves. He comes back. He’s never gone for long. But now he’s been gone for over twelve hours.
Years ago, in Colorado, we had a cat named Yogi. She was an indoor/outdoor cat and would come and go whenever she wanted. Sometimes she would be gone for days at a time and come home smelling of fireplace smoke. We didn’t have a fireplace.
Perhaps our little frog will come home tomorrow, smelling of smoke.
Eating at the feeder. Then something weird happened. The cardinal went over next to a different kind of bird.
The other bird started begging.
And the cardinal fed it!
It’s not unusual this time of year to see a bird feeding babies, but this one was feeding a different species, a blackbird! Then I realized the big baby bird getting fed was a brown-headed cowbird. Brown-headed cowbirds are nest parasites. They’ll sneak in and lay their eggs in the nest of some other bird, and let that other bird raise their babies. This northern cardinal had just successfully reared a brown-headed cowbird!
Scissor-tailed Flycatcher.
Several people have asked about the compost tumbler. It’s called a Hotfrog. It’s available on Amazon:
The description says it can turn around a batch in as little as two weeks. The best I’ve done in our hot humid climate is a month. Initially, it seems like it fills up pretty fast, but as it composts, the volume reduces, and you can just keep adding bits to one side for a month while the other side finishes. If the yard clippings seem too big, we pile them on the ground, run the little electric lawnmower over them, and empty the catcher into the composter. For the bigger branches and palm fronds, we’ve got a small electric chipper.
The dogs and the frog. (We know it’s a toad; sometimes we just want to say frog.) They get along fine. Where the little guy lives in the fountain pond is the same place the dogs go to drink out of the “mountain stream”. He and the dogs don’t bother each other at all.
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No running or barking required!
It’s working great!
Another finished batch today.
Yard trimmings
Kitchen scraps
Paper bits from the shredder
Egg shells
Coffee grounds
Paper towels
Potato peels
Apple cores
Orange peels
Composted down to mulch and returned to the earth.
