Sunday, May 22, 2016

Da boids is back and other springy thingys

From the title you might assume I am drunk. You can assume anything you want, but the fact remains that I have had only one beer today. The birds have come back from their off season at the beaches and other touristy places they must hang out when they are not here. Here are a few hanging around the homestead.

The barn is hosting many nesting pairs of barn swallows. What do they swallow you might ask? They swallow bugs. Lots and lots of bugs. A couple of hundred apiece every day which really adds up when you have a couple of dozen birds. They move pretty fast, though, and are hard to see unless they are perching. I tried to catch them in flight which is silly, but you get the idea.

When spring hits and the grass is just starting to grow you have a chance to see what has been laying around for decades that you never saw before or were to lazy to pick up if you did. There is a certain history involved with daily living. Here is an old oil can and some bones that were right under my feet the whole time.

What beautiful sunny day would be complete without a walk by the creek and ponds? Did you know that male cattails just wither up and die (I know what you're thinking) and the females ripen and blossom into a seed machine waiting for the wind to distribute their little offspring? They look different than the fuzzy brown cigar look they have most of the time. Here are a couple about to let it go.

The marsh marigolds are now in bloom, so where ever there is a wet spot (that doesn't sound right) there may be marsh marigolds. They sort of look like this in my imagination.
But in real life they look like this.
A last look back at the old bait house that hasn't been used for about 25 years. I have thought about tearing it down, but just can't do it yet. Maybe because I am too lazy, have better things to do, just don't care, or would rather take a nap, but I just haven't done it. It had been used for 20 or twenty five years as the working building in a leech raising business  by the people who own this.
The locally famous Beaver House bait shop. So you see, it has historical connotations that I just can't get past. It might just be bad karma to tear down the source of so much happiness for walleye fisherpersons, so I haven't. It still has a significance in my life and local history so here it is in all it's abandoned glory. I leave you with The Bait Shack.



  1. Leech raising? That sounds like nightmare territory to me. Many years ago on a walk through the rainforest I collected over forty leeches. Including one is each ear. I am cringing twenty years down the track remembering...
    Love your birds though.
    So much.
    And naps are always good.

    1. I would love to raise leeches. It seems less vampiric than several professions I could mention :D

  2. spring is finally coming to MN, eh? are the walleyes and crappies biting yet? LOVE the double entendres in this post!

  3. I just love hummingbirds and barn swallows! And I love that big fish on the Beaver House. We call walleye "pickerel" here on the prairies. Good eating. The only fish I ever caught in my life was a pickerel. Catching it scared me to death, feeling it fight for its life on my line.

  4. Hi Jono, I love nature and everything in it, so I am really enjoying your photos! I love birds and, living in Montreal, I have never seen a hummingbird. It isn't that they aren't here, it is just that I don't have a garden or feeders, but some people whom I know do and said that the hummingbirds are precious...and very fast. :)

  5. just put my humming bird feeder out today. One flew up to our living room window as a reminder that we were late.
    the Ol'Buzzard

  6. Beaver House looks very modern and up-to-date. The Bait Shack looks like something out of a horror movie!

  7. I rather like the bait shack, it has a nice sense of the past about it. Weathered wood and all that.
    I saw my first humming bird this season a couple of days ago, and have seen an oriole in the back yard. Beautiful orange feathers. I hung up an orange as I read that they go for fruit but haven't seen it back again yet.

  8. EC, Just because I have used them for bait doesn't mean I'd like to have them in my ears. I'd be cringing, too!

    Bill the Butcher, Raising them can be quite lucrative. I think they wholesale around here for $15 or $20 a pound and they can be a good source of protein.

    anne marie, Yes,we can tell it is spring as it has been two whole weeks since our last snow flurries. Is there such a thing as a triple entendre?

    Debra, Pickerel is just one of the words that changes when we cross the border, but since I speak both Canadian and American I often have to translate for people. I have gotten away from fishing mostly because of the lack of time to pursue yet another leisure activity.

    Linda, Hummingbirds are amazing creatures. Their resting heart rate is about 250 beats per minute. Wings beat about 70 times per second creating that humming sound.

    Ol'Buzzard, I think this is universal behavior. If they arrive before we put out the feeders they start staring at us in that annoying way they have.

    Tom S., The tail of that walleye (pickerel) on the Beaver House will move in the wind. The shack may indeed be a great setting for a ghost story at least. What or who lies in the bottom of that pond?

    Shammickite, I get to see an oriole pass through about once or twice a season, but they don't seem to stay. They are beautiful!

  9. I like hummingbirds much better than leaches.

  10. What a charming, humorous post!

  11. JACKIESUE, It all depends on how you cook them.

    Iceland Eyes, Aw shucks! From you that is high praise. Thanks, (blush).

  12. Let me just say that I won't be going to The Bait Shack during a dark and stormy night. Or any night.

    Love all the bird pics. I'm intrigued by the Beaver House...just what are they advertising on that red area at the bottom on the front? Does that say "Beaver Flicks" or is that a U?


  13. P.Peeper, It is Flicks. They are a small spinner bait designed and sold there. If it were a U I don't think they'd be allowed to sell them. :)

  14. Loved the tour with standup comedy on the side. You can claim it wasn't the beer but we all know better :)

  15. The variety of birds is one of my favorite things about spring. Great photos!

  16. Lovely pics as always. I love it when the goldfinches model their brand new coats each spring!

  17. You have goldfinches already - lucky you! They only show up here for a couple of weeks in July, obviously on their way someplace else. And the Beaver House? Oh, my. How very, um... Canadian. Like @PixelPeeper, I wondered what they were actually advertising there.

  18. Remember that orange I hung up trying to tempt the oriole? A huge black squirrel shimmied up the pole and ate the whole thing! Damn tree rats.

  19. In Banff there is a store called Beaver Liquors.
    Love the bird pictures. My sister in Calgary has pictures of dozens of birds that come to her feeders. She knows them all. I recognize two kinds of birds. Robins and Not-Robins.

  20. Only one beer? So you wrote this post at 9.00am then?

    We had some swallows that were trying to build a nest in our garage. I was getting pissed off with the bird poo on my car so I shouted out every time I went in the garage. I think they got the message, and left.

  21. Only one beer? I'm having TWO tonight.
    Yeah, I'm a rock star.

  22. Mother Nature in all her luscious glory. And I'm not solely referring to the Beaver House. A Cat House next door would really confuse people.

  23. Your opening made me think you might be my long lost college roomie. Of course, you aren't

    Jack Peters packed a solid 190 pounds on a 6-3 frame, was a championship shot putter in high school, and often spared with a heavyweight champ on the U of Wisconsin boxing team. Few could claim to be more masculine. Yet the tough guy often saluted springtime by loudly belting out this refrain:

    "Spring has sprung, the grass has ris. I wonder where the boidies is. The boids are on the wing. That's absoid. The wing is on the boid."

    How's that for absoid?

  24. So many beautiful birds! This is what summer is all about.