Dixie and Lois, an update

Yes, it’s Dixie and LOIS, not Dixie and Louis. Several weeks ago, we found that we had misnamed Lois - - she began laying eggs. For a while, each morning we found two eggs in the duck house when we went out to open up for the day. Duck eggs are not all that different from chicken eggs, except that they seem to be better for baking pastries, etc.

Sadly, we find only one egg in the duck house now because Lois was killed by a raccoon a few nights ago. There was a disturbance about 01:30 in the morning, and we found Lois had been dragged to a spot under the sycamore tree. I immediately prepared a grave near a lemon tree, and buried her there.

We have now made the duck house more secure.

Poor Dixie. She and Lois had been constant companions since hatching, and she is obviously very disturbed by this sudden turn of events. She spends a great deal of time frantically calling for Lois with extraordinarily loud “duck calls” – sounds she had never made before. I spend all the time I can with her now, and she calms down when she knows I am nearby, in the back yard.

We have found a breeder in a nearby town who says he can provide a Cayuga hen about the same age as Dixie, and I hope to pick up this new companion for Dixie within the next couple of days.

16 August 2008

Wild Trees . . .

. . . a book review.

A few days ago, I finished reading “The Wild Trees” by Richard Preston with maps and illustrations by Andrew Joslin.

If you love plants in general, and trees in particular (or a true story of people doing extraordinary things) get yourself a copy of this book and read it.

Until recently, the tallest redwoods were thought to be virtually impossible to ascend, and the canopies at the tops of these magnificent trees had never been explored. This book unfolds the story of Steve Sillet, Marie Antoine, and a tiny group of botanists and amateur naturalists who found an unexplored world at over 350 feet above California in the tops of the largest and tallest organisms in the world, the coastal redwoods, Sequoia sempervirens.

The canopy voyagers were young college students when they began their quest, and they shared little other than a passion for preserving and studying these trees. What they found in these “meadows in the sky” (my terminology, not theirs) was mosses, lichens, hanging gardens of ferns, and thickets of huckleberry bushes, all growing out of soil sitting on massive limbs in the canopies high above the ground. Animal life found in the canopies include earthworms and spotted salamanders as well as copepods living in the moist mosses and in small pools. Imagine that, shrimp-like critters thriving high above the California coastal mountains in the tops of redwood trees!

And there is much more, but I will leave that for you to discover in this fascinating book.

“The Wild Trees” was copyrighted in 2007 by Richard Preston, and was published by Random House / New York.

Here are a couple of quotes from Mr. Preston’s book:

“This book is narrative nonfiction. The characters are real and the events factual, told to the best of my understanding. Passages in which I narrate a person’s thoughts and feelings and present dialogue have been built from interviews with the subjects and witnesses, and have been fact-checked. So many stories never get told. My goal is to reveal people and realms that nobody had ever imagined.”

“Botanists have a tradition of never revealing the exact location of a rare plant. Contact between humans and rare plants is generally risky for the plants. Many of the giant trees I describe in this book, as well as the groves they inhabit, have only recently been discovered, and in some cases have been seen by fewer than a dozen people, including myself. To honor the tradition of botany, I won’t reveal the exact locations of giant trees or groves if these locations have not been previously published.”

Richard Preston not only talks the talk, but “walks the walk”. He learned tree climbing skills and joined these intrepid researchers to climb some of the tallest trees on earth.

“Wild trees”, within the context of this book, means trees that have yet to be climbed.

25 July 2008

Vinny, our current “top cat”, loves to take mid-morning naps curled around a small tree trunk.

Sometimes, he turns over and “curls” the other way.

We have had as many as seven cats at the same time.

Now, we are down to three: Vinny; his sister, Vicky; and Bill, our oldest. Bill is a retired top cat, and he sleeps a lot. Vinny and Vickie came to us as tiny kittens a few years ago – we found them under a tomato plant in the garden.

We have learned that cats have varied, distinctive, and interesting personalities.

All tolled, we have shared our home with more than a dozen cats over the past twenty years, or so. All of our cats have been “strays”. They come, and they go. We found homes for some of them, some died from “natural” causes, one died during surgery, two were killed in the street by automobiles, a couple simply disappeared and we don’t know what happened to them.

24 July 2008























These peaches are ripening on a tree that sprouted at the edge of the compost pile about six years ago, and there it remains. I never got around to transplanting the tree. This little peach tree has been blossoming each spring for the past couple of years, and this year it finally set a few peaches.

The tree seems to be perfectly happy right where it is even though it gets little direct sunshine, so maybe I will simply leave it where it sits. With an occasional pruning, and a bit of water now and then, it seems to be doing just fine, thank you.

17 July 2008

Summertime distractions have kept me from updating this blog for the past few weeks. Here is an entry to get things rolling again.

Dixie and Louis, our pair of Cayuga ducks, are now (almost) fully grown. I have found photographing black ducks to be a bit of a challenge. The background must be carefully chosen, else they seem to appear as little more than dark blobs in the photo.

Here is a photo of Dixie flapping her wings.

Dixie has never really taken flight, but she loves to stand on tip-toes, furiously flapping her wings. She bounces up and down as if on a pogo stick. Louis, on the other hand, has actually flown short distances. Louis is larger than Dixie, and his wings are more fully developed, but I have yet to catch him in full flight with the camera.

Here is Louis, waddling about near one of their watering dishes.

Some of the green iridescence is clearly visible on Louis' head.

In addition to their watering dishes, the ducks have a wading pool in which they can splash about and go for short swims.

Here is a photo of them in a couple of their watering dishes.

Louis, in the blue dish, is “helping” Dixie wash a munchie of some kind. Yes, they spend quite a bit of time in their watering dishes (which are plastic dishpans). The ducks seem to prefer their drinking water to be “seasoned” a bit before drinking it.

Their duck house, duck pen, and water facilities are works in progress; they enjoy full access to the garden in rear of the house until such time as I have finished fencing “their” territory. We were concerned that the ducks might destroy the plants in the garden, but they seem to be mostly carnivores, and do virtually no damage to the plants while searching for munchies hidden by the foliage. Snails, slugs, and earthworms are their favorite food. They will eat store-bought food that is formulated especially for ducks, but only as a last resort when they can’t find enough “real” food to satisfy their appetite.

These guys are excellent foragers!

09 June 2008

Tomatoes, turnips, and onions dominate the portion of our modest veggie garden this year. In this photo, there are some peas and beets hidden from view behind the tomato plants.

This particular garden patch is planted in an area between the house and the street.

Additional veggies, including leek, radishes, and more onions, have been planted in the garden behind the house, but their tiny sproutlings are not yet ready for prime time display.

30 May 2008

Dixie and Louis in their “wading pond”.
We have been using a small wading pond to let the ducklings get some exercise swimming around and diving below the surface.

They LOVE it!

We plan to have a larger and drainable permanent pond for them by the time they are grown. The pond needs to be drainable for cleaning because they love to make Gawd-awful messes while playing in the water. Ideally, they should have a pond with circulating water that cleans itself, but that is a bit beyond our “duck budget” right now.

Speaking of grown ducks, Dixie and Louis are a rare breed called “Cayuga Ducks”. (Yes, they have been officially declared as “rare”)

When they reach full maturity, they will look like this:

Meanwhile, we are enjoying the ducklings and all their cute antics.