Steve`s Country
For a smile as wide as a country sunrise
Coffee At Steve’s Country #6.
Good morning to all of you! It’s time for some coffee and a few minutes to relax here at Steve’s Country! Muffin is at the door ready to greet everyone, just bouncing around with excitement. It’s cloudy again with a nice temp of 21F (-6C) and the birds are already busy this morning. It was dark when I went out to put food on the feeders this morning. When I came back in I just stood at the window and watched for a while. It wasn’t long and there was a little daylight beginning to show out there, and something caught my eye. On the one small feeder was a chickadee getting his breakfast! I think these birds are pretending to be owls. That is amazingly early for the chickadees to be out.
Not too long after, Mama showed up with her young one. Actually it isn’t really her young one. The fawn’s mother must have been killed and Mama adopted her. They have bonded well together, and Mama won’t let the other deer give “her” little one a hard time, she will chase them away. And that’s not too hard for her since she’s the biggest female around here right now. She even chases the younger bucks. Speaking of chasing. Jasper was here sitting on a branch and the other squirrel came along from across the next street. Jasper waited, sitting still as could be, watching. The other squirrel came close and Jasper pounced! The two fought and the other squirrel ran. The chase was on, through the trees, running along the branches. Jasper was closing in when the other squirrel made a surprise turn and dropping to a lower branch.
That let him get ahead of Jasper but the chase was still going. Finally Jasper was on a branch just a little higher than the other squirrel and jumped! What a fight. But…Jasper lost and the other squirrel started chasing him. Jasper stopped and turned toward the other squirrel. The other squirrel stopped. They chattered at each other for about 10 minutes then the other squirrel left. This is not looking good for poor Jasper, but at least he’s not giving up yet. This happened a couple winters ago too, with two different squirrels. My squirrel lost and was chased away, but after 2 weeks he came back and those two really fought for 2 days, but my squirrel won back his territory and the other squirrel left. The pics today show some goldeneye ducks down at the river when I was there on Monday. There was quite a few of these ducks that day, mostly common goldeneye but also 3 female Barrow’s goldeneye. I hope you have a wonderful day and God bless!
Steve and Muffin.
©2021 Steve McLeod.
Little Things #2.
Hello once again everyone and welcome back to our post on “Little Things”. Our first post in this series was back before Christmas, and as I mentioned, this series will be posted every other week with the series “Art In Nature” which will be here next week. I hope you will enjoy this series as we look at many different little things that we find in nature. This week we have both flowers and an insect. If you don’t like insects, you might not like some of the pics in this series. However, there will be other things too, so hopefully there will be something for everyone. And perhaps, even if you don’t like something such as insects, you will still enjoy looking at some in pictures. There might even be a spider or two show up, but I’ll warn you about that ahead of time.
There was a spider last summer that built his web across the path to the river. It had four anchor webs attached to trees on either side of the path that were 6 and a half feet (about 2 meters) apart. The web itself was over 3 feet (1meter) across and was quite nice and round. The web itself was beautifully constructed but because of where it was I just couldn’t get a good pic of it. Anyway, that big spider was always curled up in a little ball right in the middle of that web. I did get a pic of him even though I did have to get fairly close to do it. Not something I really care to do. We do have a lot of different and rather large spiders around here and who knows how many small varieties. I’m getting off track here.
Anyway, our featured image is a group of “twinflowers”, a common and very small wildflower usually found under pines. They can really carpet an area and if there is no wind you can usually smell these flowers before seeing them. They have a strong, but wonderful scent, which is quite amazing considering the small size of these flowers. You have to get down on your stomach to get a pic of them since they seldom get above 3 inches (7cm) tall. They are so very beautiful but yet so very easy to miss them, especially on a windy day which blows the scent away. Then on the bright yellow buttercup we have a tiny insect that looks like some sort of bee. That little “bee” is about 1/4 inch (6mm) long. That little creature could be very easily missed if busy walking and not paying attention to our surroundings. Sometimes it’s better to walk slowly and enjoy the beauty around us, whether that beauty is big or small. I hope you all have a wonderful week and God bless!
Steve and Muffin.
©2021 Steve McLeod.
Steve`s Country 