Saturday morning I saw my first duck on my pond, then two more that afternoon! :D
I haven't seen any since, but am sure they will be back, and maybe they are coming around when I'm not down there! :)
I didn't get a good enough of a look to tell what kind they were, but they should help clean out the grasshopper population whatever variety they are!
WIll be interested in what kind, and I suppose they were a pair?
Once I got so interested in wood ducks on a pond I nearly ditched the car *oops*
ANYTHING to help with the grasshoppers!!!
... Pickled?????
The Amish markets over this way often have quail eggs ... so ... cute!
More like decoration than food, not that that stops me from diggin' in for long!
Have duck eggs here too. There is nothing better for baking.
Was D-day for the newest ducks today so we now have 4 in the freezer and only 2 in the coop. We kept a male this year so hopefully the two left will repopulate. Love roasted duck in cherry sauce. yummm :)
... here in NJ we are over-populated with Canada geese ...
There's the occasional hunt, but they're largely protected.
WHAT IF there's a hunt for goose eggs? The nests are not hard to get to ... granted, they are very protective of the nest, so it might take 2 people ...
Hmmm ...
Anyone ever try doing this?
Heather,
good luck with your ducks, both in repopulation AND in the cherry sauce (it IS very good, sometimes with a little orange marmalade thrown in) :)
Larry, hope you don't mind we hijacked your wildlife observation thread into a Food & Table topic *sorry*
I started a new thread titled "Tasha Tudor" in the Chat Forum that relates to this thread, in case anyone's so inclined.
Non further sightings, but yesterday I found a few duck droppings and one feather in and around the pond!
Wednesday I saw a frog in the pond, Thursday I saw a Salamander, which hung around all day!
Where on earth did they come from?
It's amazing, I hope they stay in spite of the dog, silly puppy.
Larry, I thought you were absent from the forums for a bit because you got a call to consult on the following article:
http://www.dailyrecord.com/article/20100701/LIFE01/100630053/-1/LIFEFRONT/Bog-gardens-add-interest--biodiversity
Ya never know, people become experts in all kinds of ways!!
It's a nice article.
:)
Neat article! My bog garden is looking pretty sad,,,,oh well!
The frog and salamander must have come from either the wetland along the road about 3/8 mile from me, or the river 1/2 mile from me.
Glad you liked the article. Give your bog some time to get established Larry, and perhaps you've found this out for yourself, but for me, sometimes I spend too much time making minor adjustments, tweeking this or that ... when things grow when I step back a bit.
I guess frogs and salamandars are too small for mini-cams ... yet!! I'm sure lots of critters are on the move when I'm off in sleepyland.
:)
Very nice article, reminds me of the time we took down one of those big blue inflatable pools(like Walmart/Kmart sells) and when it was only 1 ring high we let it fill with rain water. Wasn't long before we had tree frogs, frogs and soon after tadpoles and more frogs. You should have heard them at night. What was really cool tho was the amount of dragonflies it attracted. We had all kinds and they were colorful and neat looking. We joked about having our own little pond with critters. Just goes to show doesn't take much work..they will come.
I think it had just been hiding! I would see a movement like a fish every once in a while rippling the water, then today when I went and looked for it when I saw this, it was back!
Before when I had checked for it it must have been too leery from the dogs trying to catch it, at least it's sure similar to the one I saw before!
The pond is sure low, but the neighbors hay field is almost through with this cutting of hay, so they should flood irrigate again soon, which should help raise the level of my pond.
Well, good luck! Maybe with more water it'll attract another salamander and who knows...you might end with a family.
My son's been studying salamanders in the NC mountains, he loves doing day trips on the creek and finding them, one of his favorite critters.
I sure love mine!
A whole family of them would be wonderful!,,,just think of all the bugs they would eat!
Yesterday a flock of 7 Pelicans was circling the pond while I was down there taking a cool soak, I was almost ready to leave when they came, so I went ahead and left in-case they wanted to land, but they flew on anyway.
Then this morning I saw 5 of them near the fishing access when I went for my morning bike ride.
Pelicans are always so cool to see. Last time we went to beach we saw 5-6 fly over and land out in the ocean.
Pelicans not south, not by ocean ... wow.
Dresses up the day to see such things.
There was a surprise for me this morning as I looked out. There was a white blob in the top of the tree line and it wasn't there yesterday. Got out the binoc's and it was either a white heron or egret just hangin' around, grooming, looking here and there. Neat!
We're about 1/2 from the river and last year we had a green heron fly over and roost in a pine tree across the street from our house. I figured it must of heard our water fountain in the garden.
Alas, no fountain this year(pump died) and no herons sighted.
The pond was getting pretty low, now it's knee deep again! :)
The trees are now growing good again, since they have had a chance to soak up a good amount of moisture!
Yesterday I saw a pelican again, they are kind of rare around here!
Also, the small birds have been having a hay-day around here eating grasshoppers, mosquitoes, and grass seed, but I put out bird seed yesterday anyway! :D
Good to hear your trees are thriving (and your story about the bumblebees was great, you have new pals!). I've been doing catch & release for ladybugs who get in the house.
I was on the phone talking about the white heron I saw and I stood up to look out the window at the time and would you believe a pair of them were playing in the sky? Heck of a coincidence!!
I bet your birds are going ga-ga with the feasts, but the feeders are good for those not so competitive ... birds can be pretty fierce.
I guess the word is out in the animal kingdom that your making a mini-Eden. :)
It is beginning to look more like a mini-Eden, but for a long time it seemed more like the other place! ;)
Well Larry, I was advised that "Time" stands for
T hings
I
M ust
E arn.
And obviously you have!
Last night and this morning I saw that the Pivot Irrigation was going on the hay field to the south of me, and the farmhand was getting the irrigation going in the Irrigation Ditch to the north of me later this morning, so the pond should fill up more, I noticed just yesterday it was going down again.
I think up lots of things I wish I had money to spend on to improve the place, but what little hand labor I can handle is working! :D
... we'd all be doin' alot of shovelin' the __ __ __ t. *LOL*
Dreams keep up going, for sure Larry. Do a little here, a little there, and before ya know it ... it's happened!!
Now it was gift enough to see those 2 white herons.
And then there were 4!!! We're gettin' a whole flock going here. After years of nothing bigger than a bluejay, it's awe-inspiring.
I bet one of 'em got my nightly serenading bull frog too. The pond is at least 80 yards off thru the trees, and that bullfrog sounded like it was about platter size!
*good gosh*
keep dreaming, you can be to live out your dream,,,,"Where there's a will there's a way!". :)
I thought all seven of my Japanese Algae Eating Snails had disappeared from the pond, but recently I've been occasionally seeing them again one or two at a time, plus some smaller snails about the size of my native snails that may be babies of the Japanese snails as they are shaped more like them. :D
The native snails are brown and pointed on both ends, the Japanese snails are pointed on one end and almost flat on the other, also these new snails are the darker brown of the Japanese Algae Eating Snails. :)
The Sandhill Cranes are back in the hay field again! :D
I hope they eat lots of grasshoppers this year! ;)
Snails are neat, I'm glad they took to the pond.
And the cranes are beautiful too.
I just love the Cranes! :)
Later in the morning after the cranes left, they began irrigating in the hay field here at my end out where the cranes were, so the cranes should be happy to return with it moist now, and the pond should fill up more again! :D
I wonder if it's the very same one I saw a while back as a larf and wondered if it was the offspring of the one or more salamanders I saw in the pond earlier on in the summer? :D
It's almost as long as the other( s ), and not quite half as wide. :)
I don't know how long it takes to grow tho.
Go Salamanders!!
I rescued a very small toad once from a very hot parking lot and took it off to the edge of the woods, and its markings didn't make it easy to figure out what it was. But later in the summer, I saw it again full grown ...
(no snide comments please) There was on section of a path through the woods that if you lifted the bigger rocks up you would always find a Salamander.
Neat! They're just too strange for "when I was younger" ages to resist.
Pennsy has such a great variety of plants and animals ... I miss it. I was visiting in Penn Run and in walking out to a pond with monster -- and supposedly tame -- bass, there were monarch butterfly cocoons every where ... it was awe-some.
(since you're younger than me, you won't get any snide remarks!!) ;)
on encouraging more wild life will be to continue cultivating the poplar trees down by the pond already and to continue planting grasses that will do well with lots of water and have deep enough of a root system to survive low water level in mid summer,,,,I had mixed results with planting trees down there as just like the rest of my property, the drainage was too good while the water table was low during the warmest part of summer, and I'm not sure yet if some of the trees will even survive till fall.
Lots more new sprouts from the existing trees did come up this year, so they will fill in on there own eventually, I had just wanted to speed things up anyway!
I saw to dead salamanders that had been hit by a vehicle over night, just makes me wonder how many made it through to where they were going!
There must have been lots more! :)
I couldn't tell if they were the same kind of salamander I've had in the pond, they were similar, mine have been dark grey and white, almost look like static on a TV screen, these were light grey and greenish pale yellow in the same size splotches.
We had got a good rain storm last night, I guess they thought it was a good time to look for a new place to live, as they were very young like the one I saw a few days ago and since it was the first decent sized rain storm for quite a while!
... move like that and there's quite a variety of colors and patterns.
Little hidden treasures :)
At first I thought it was a beetle in the pond, a very big beetle, but then I decided maybe it was a baby turtle! I'm going to do some research to try and figure out!
is nice and fresh and clear again from all the rain we've gotten!,,,Not that it wasn't before, since my all natural water treatments worked so well, just that it's been refreshed by the .88 inches of rain we got!,,,and it may rain more tonight and tomorrow! :)
That's alot at one time for you isn't it? Store what you can, you have rain barrels I thought.
Good to see you figured out your aquatic creatures!!
It is for us, especially this time of year!:)
The rain barrels aren't very big, but they go a long way for soaking some of my water loving trees!
