Monday, September 23, 2019

birds and frogs and feathers and flowers


Blogger was being a pill Sunday morning being too slow to respond and the spammers were busy Saturday evening while we were at the party. Came home to find three sets of spam comments on 7 different posts which I deleted and almost immediately another set of 7 spam comments appeared which I deleted and then Sunday morning another set of 7 spam comments which I also deleted. I wonder, just how much response do these spammers get with their multiple spam comments, especially ones they put on old posts that probably no one is ever going to ever read again.

Ah, well, I solved the Blogger problem. It was not Blogger but my wifi. We have two modems, I forget why we have the second newer one, each with its own password. Well the new one has a password, the old one is unlocked due to our little protest against corporate greed. If neighbors want to piggyback on us, we don't care, but I don't think anyone does since all the neighbors have their own locked wifi. Anyway, back to Blogger not responding, for some reason the new locked modem does not function well on my computer and sometimes when I turn it on it will select the new modem so I have to switch it to the old unlocked modem.

I refreshed the hummingbird feeders yesterday morning but we still only have the two hummers that we have had while my friends at the other end of the block have them swarming their feeders. Leonard says he has to refill his feeders a couple of times a day. We have a variety of small flowers in the yard though, penta, hummingbird bush, zinnia, indigofera, plumbago, and he says the hummers will go to the flowers before they will go to a feeder.The red wasps like the one in back and when I cleaned out the one in front and it must have had 3 dozen tree ants in it. I was teasing Leonard about hogging all the hummingbirds . 'Take some with you when you leave', he says, 'they're eating me out of house and home.' I can just see me walking down the street like the Pied Piper followed by a stream of hummingbirds only instead of playing a flute, I'll be holding aloft a feeder.

I have a lot of bird houses scattered around that I've acquired at various estate sales and while the birds don't seem to care too much for them, the tree frogs and wasps make themselves at home. It would help considerably if I would clean them out every fall but some of them have no easy access and are pretty much just decorative. In fact I only know for certain that two of them have been utilized at least once and those by wrens.

look close to see the tree frog peeking out

I have another picture of a different birdhouse with a tree frog sitting in the opening with a wasp sitting on it's head as it entered but it's on high magnification and the light isn't good and so I opted not to post it, being all dark and blurry. I can tell what it is but not sure anyone else would. The little frog was completely unfazed by the wasp sitting on its head. Oh, what the hell, here it is.


I did get a little bit accomplished yesterday, constructed the base for a flicker feather. Might work on a blue jay feather today.


I've been collecting the gone by zinnias for seeds for next year. Even in decay they are they have a certain beauty.






8 comments:

  1. The color of those zinnias is now ashes of roses. One of my favorite phrases.
    I get a few hummingbirds at my feeder but I have a feeling they are happier with the fire spike out front. I watched two dart and dip in Jessie's fire spike the other day, right outside the dining room window.
    I love the little frogs. I know you do too.

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  2. Finches have eaten most of my zinnia seeds now. I am not going to clean up the garden this fall as the new promotion is to let it go uncleaned throughout the winter so that the insects winter over. I will clean is up in April!

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    Replies
    1. I never clean up the garden until spring. usually it's the orange cosmos that the birds eat the seeds of but this year there were much fewer returning and only one has already bloomed and bloomed itself out. big plants, no blooms yet.

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  3. Couple of things. You can tell your computer to "ignore" a modem in the preferences panel. Once you do that, the computer will no longer automatically switch connections. Or you can do what I do and just use an ethernet cable between the modem and your computer. It is the fastest connection and it doesn't eat up your wireless bandwidth. Of course, assumes your modem and your computer are nearby each other.

    We found that our hummingbirds don't like ants or other creatures in their feeders. We had to put an ant trap under the feeder to keep them out. We also had problems with a nest of ground bees next to the feeder. We eventually "coaxed" the bees to move elsewhere.

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  4. Wasps and ants are getting the last food of the season before the cold weather sets in. But that won't be until the end of November for us Texans. When it rained last Tuesday, David couldn't figure out why so many wasps were flying around one of our rain gutters. He set up his ladder near the commotion and found a fairly large wasp nest blocking the gutter. It had dammed up the thing. So David got the wasp spray and got the whole lot of them. Little wasp bodies came out of the gutter once he cleaned it out and sprayed it with the hose. I have two hummer feeders and hardly any hummers. Your neighbor must be stealing all our hummers too.

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  5. I love zinnias. There's a house nearby that has a nice stand of them - makes me think I should plant some, but I'm not sure where.

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  6. Thanks for the preview; I see the bee and the froggie. I hope you don't begrudge the wrens. I love the little things. I don't really have a garden to clean up, except my hanging baskets. And I'd better be thinking of them soon.

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  7. I wish we had humming birds in Europe.
    The locals at the Dutch seaside town told us that crows have started to scare away seagulls as in survival of the fittest.

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I opened my big mouth, now it's your turn.