Skywatch Friday

Moon though the crabapple

October Sunset
Crawford County Kansas

Some recent skies in SE Kansas

For more skywatchers visit:
http://skyley.blogspot.com/

Picture of the day

Old Boot scraper

ABC Wednesday Letter O

O is for color orange seen here in the bittersweet that lights up the fence row near our pasture.

My wife makes her annual hunt for it among the other plants avoiding the poison ivy, most of the time.
For more O's visit ABC Wednesday at

http://abcwednesdayround3.blogspot.com/

My World Tuesday

My world is South East Kansas, a landscape a bit different than the rest of our state. Great swamps millions of years ago became the coal beds that immigrants began mining a hundred years or more ago. Today these areas are thick with trees and undergrowth that shelter deer, turkey and owl.

A few thousand or so acres of small lakes dot the landscape and provide homes for bass, water snake and great blue heron.

To see more of the world and to show your part of the world visit:

http://showyourworld.blogspot.com/

Skywatch Friday Mid October

About a week ago I went alone for a hike in the pre-dawn light in the mined land areas east of our house. The fog began to lift as I entered the trail, these areas are the remains of coal mining operations from the early to mid twentieth century and for the most part are are now thick with bur oak, hickories, and walnut with a tightly woven under-story of honeysuckle, sumac, roughleaf dogwood and greenbriar. In the spring this area is alive with tropical migrants, this morning was still except for a few crows.

Mid October Dawn
Crawford County Kansas

For more Skywatchers visit here http://skyley.blogspot.com/

Skywatch Friday

October Sunrise

October Sunrise
Crawford County Kansas
for more Skywatchers visit here http://skyley.blogspot.com/

A short walk

Here is a few photos from a short walk I took with my wife last night, she is recovering from surgery two weeks ago and is beginning to get a little stir crazy at home. So Ive taken her on a few short walks most days after work.


I haven't wandered too far from home lately, but even so the evenings have been nice.

Problems and Solutions

Fall is making its presence known, the sumac is bright red, the cottonwoods are turning. The garden spiders look a little sluggish in the cool mornings. The light is changing as the sun rises further southeast along the horizon of my pasture.
My computer has taken a vacation from blogging this week. I though it was the wireless connection we have here in the country but after several days of problem solving attempts I decided to bring home a lap top and try the connection, ah-ha! I will have to take the desktop in and see what gremlin is running amok in it.
The small black dots in the picture above are starlings. A few thousand have taken to roosting nightly in some cottonwoods across the road to the north at night. They line up and stage on the power lines before heading into the tree. Its a sight, they all sit a polite 4-6 inches apart and nosily exchange some kind of avian gossip.
Last night at sunset I walked out and shooed them from the power line with a few loud rounds of applause. When we lived in far western Kansas this was a nightly occurrence at times. Starlings would come in from the feed lots and roost in the only large group of trees in a sixty mile radius, town that is. I would arm my young daughters with pots and pans and we would lead a noisy parade around our small home. The birds would arrive in flocks of several hundred at a time and we would turn them away with our loud performance. If we didn't do this our cars and sidewalk and anything left out at night would look like a splattered mess the next morning. Even our fearless Brittany would seek cover from the onslaught. It did pose health problems as well.
In college I helped do this chore with a group of students for a wealthy neighborhood in Manhattan KS. We had several advantages at our disposal, specially made shotgun shells loaded with loud fireworks that would explode in the air at around 100 feet, a large air cannon and taped calls of owls played from a megaphone . That was a spectacle, a dozen or so wildlife biology students and 1000s of the birds faced off at dusk each night for three days. We shot the shells, boomed the cannon and the owl taped played at piercing volumes. The flocks were turned. We thought we had won the battle, we even received a nice letter from the homeowners. I really think that we merely moved the problem to a less affluent neighborhood. Not unlike the bailout we saw last week.
Solving problems in the natural world is like that it seems, solutions are always connected to some other unforeseen consequence. Starlings were supposedly introduced into this country by a well meaning gentleman who wished to see birds from the plays of William Shakespeare in Central Park in NYC. If this is true I am sure he never intended or foresaw anything like the spectacles Ive described in Kansas a thousand miles away and a hundred years in the future.

Saturday Reflection

“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road / the one less traveled by / offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”Rachel Carson

After watching the debate the other night,

I think "drill baby drill" is the deceptively easy road..

Skywatch Friday

We have had cool mornings lately, the kind where you start to hear a few birds and reach for another blanket. The windows are open. I decide to grab a quick cup of coffee and head out.

Everywhere the dew laden webs of last nights activity are hanging on for a few last moments.
A short hike before work is an adventure in itself, several hours from now the warm fall sun will make this place a different world.
Ghost like structures of tent caterpillars inhabit the edge.

The sun starts to creep up and burn off a bit of the fog.
There are still interesting things to find as I stop and listen to geese over in my neighbors pond.
Asters are the color of the week here.

My dogs sit and watch as I return. They have that "sure you left us here again look" I tell them "tomorrow boys, tomorrow"and pour them some fresh water.

For more skywatch photos visit; http://skyley.blogspot.com/