The Noisy Neighbors, Among Other Things

 This should actually be at least three blog posts but the likelihood of my sitting down again to do this is in question. Blogging generally gets bogged down somewhere amidst good intentions.

Above, you will see one of our new neighbors.  Meet, Mr.(or Mrs.) Red-Shouldered Hawk.  The young couple is nesting at the edge of our forest and have been obliging enough to rehab a nest that's had the for sale sign hanging out front for the three previous summers of our residence.

Having moved in and set up housekeeping they soon brought two new feathered bouncing juvenile red-shouldered hawks into the world.  This, has become a mild obsession and I now have hundreds of slightly grainy photos of hawks.  Grainy as the nest is in one of the tallest pine trees in the forest and is a bit beyond my best lens.  Of course, this also underscores why I need a more super-duper lens. (Perhaps, we shouldn't mention that to The Finman.) 

Here, is the first fellow to leave the nest. He was kind enough to perch quite close to the path I take with The Hound Dawg in the mornings. Poor Hound Dawg was a bit confused and miffed to find his walk unbelievably cut short while I scurried back to the house for my camera. Lesson learned.  Now, I always carry my camera on the morning walk. This has meant sacrificing my mug of coffee for the duration of the walk but I'm a woman on a mission and for this I can (briefly) step away from the caffeine. 

The young ones amuse me greatly.  They are both out of the nest and will sit perching near the nest or sometimes in a tree nearby.  They are not yet independent and the parents are still close by and still bring food.  Today, I noticed that although they now spend a great deal of their time out of the nest when the meal shows up in the form of Mom or Dad, they hop right back in the nest and wait to be fed.  Oh, and they are whiners.  You would think the poor things never had a meal.  This morning, I could hear them griping all the way to the end of our street.  Red-shouldered hawks have the "hawkiest" call of all the hawks and we have become quite accustomed to hearing them screech throughout the day.   (You should hear the things they say to their parents.) 

Now, lets talk about some of our other critters. 

Above, is one of my top bar honey bee hives.  I have two observation hives.  They are observation hives as I can open a door and  peek at those busy girls to see what is going on.  Both colonies are new this year and as they build comb, I will add more bars and expand the space in which they build by moving those dividing bars.  This is my second go 'round with this hive.  I built this hive last year and then got a very bad shipment of bees.  I didn't know enough about the process to refuse them at the post office and thus was stuck trying to nurture a very weak colony.  No such problems this year and everyone is looking good.

And here, meet our compost dwelling box turtle.  He has been dubbed Tommie.  He's pretty much eating the compost as it comes in and it will never make it to the garden.  But hey, he's cute.

Last, but obviously not least our bird feeder swinging squirrel.  Notice the feeder is empty.  It took him over a year to figure that out.  Wish I could say "I'm proud".

And to think, there is SO MUCH more I could blog... maybe next time.