Archive for the ‘Wildlife’ Category

An Osage Orange stand

This morning I went for a walk/ride.  Its been hot and humid, but this morning wasn’t as bad so before the sun had been up too long and warmed things up I went up to the field we call the Upper 40.  Homesteaders dug a well and built a cabin up there.  I can see why because its beautiful.  The raspberries are ripening and I roamed around the hill grazing on the sweet ones.

Despite the fact that we are drier than normal, there are lots of plants blooming all over the place.  The grass is yellow, but throughout are green plants blooming.  There’s this one that I’ve been watching to get pictures when all its purple flowers come out.  Recently I’ve been pulling a trailer behind the 4 wheeler where ever I go with a shovel and fencing supplies so that I can dig up musk thistles to try to keep them down before they can go to seed.

my thistle-control-mobil

I’ve learned that even when I dig them up they will live for awhile before they die.  So if they are young enough that they don’t have flowers, once they are dug up, they will wither before they can produce seeds.  But if they’ve already developed a flower I need to carry them away or else they will still mature (hence the trailer full of thistles).  Now when I go out I’m always on the look out for thistles, but I’ve been thinking maybe I don’t need to be getting rid of all these thistles.  When we moved back from Sudan I had a similar knee-jerk reaction to kill any snake I saw.  Farmers, especially ones that grow crops, are programed to defend the farm against thistles.  But calling a thing a weed says as much about what you want to produce as it does about the “nature” of that plant.  Musk thistles really have pretty flowers.  Insects, and especially butterflies, love them.  And once I could see them without the bias of their being a “weed” I started wondering if I was fighting something unnecessarily.  They’re colorful, they add to the diversity of plants in the fields, insects like them, they provide more organic material for the cows to trample into the soil, and they help hold moisture in the soil.  So should I worry about cutting them down?

Mmmmm, breakfast

Our giant picture window in the living room gives us the opportunity to observe birds as they come and go.  This weekend, it seems that the entire cardinal population of southwestern Missouri has decided to meet in our front yard.  At any given time, we can count over fifty cardinals in the branches of a single tree, in addition to the woodpeckers, finches, chickadees and occasional blue jay.

Set against the contrast of last evening’s snowfall, the brilliant red of the cardinals is captivating and we couldn’t help but share it with you.