Meadow Musings

At webmeadow HQ, we like it when our animals are happy. Food, water, shelter, sure those are all great. But what are we doing for fun? For the baby ducks, that's pretty easy -- water. Baby chickens, it turns out, need two things to be happy: dirt, and sticks. They like to, uh, "clean" in little patches of dirt, and to scratch in them for... well, frankly, for more dirt. They are too small to make any real bug-finding progress.

Sticks: now there's the real fun! If you prop up a nice sturdy stick, it does not take very long before the little chicks find it and make their way up. Sometimes they hang out at the top, but mostly they jump off and flap their little wings and fall like rocks* to the grass below. And then climb up, and jump again. Whee!

* That is not quite true. Rocks don't bounce like that at all.

Now, for the 12-year-old in all of us, a joke:

Guess what??

Yesirree folks, we've got more baby birds!

Why are they in that plant pot?, you may well ask. I say, Hhmph! You try spending time with the tiniest of baby birds and not posing them in household objects, I dare you! The plant pot has a good view of the rest of the chicks in the brooder (AKA "the purple plastic wading pool"), which makes it an ideal setting for photo ops. If you take chicks too far away from their flock, they will try to make a break for it while you're fiddling with the camera. That yellow one pitched off the edge twice until I brought her a playmate.

We have 4 different chicken breeds this time: Rhode Island Reds (shown above hiding behind the tree), Buff Orpingtons, Barred Rocks, and Silver-laced Wyandottes (shown below, and above if you're looking for a butt-view). Aaron has named the lot of them "Tikka" and "Masala".

The little Wyandottes look like tiny hawks, and are the heaviest of the bunch, weighing in at a whopping 43 grams. We will take some more (and better) pictures over the next few days once the sun comes out. Stay tuned!

A few weeks ago we went on a hike that loops around to the peaks of Mt Welch and Mt Dickey. We lucked into the perfect day for this hike -- a morning where it hadn't rained, and wasn't too sunny. Normally neither of those things would be very important on a hike in the White Mountains -- you're almost always in deep forest, where the sun and rain are diluted by all the trees above you. But this hike (which was about a 5-mile loop) spent a good 3 miles out on open ledge.

In the woods near the trailhead, we spotted these nifty Monotropa uniflora. (Normally I am not a latin-binomial kind of person, but the common names for this plant are "indian pipes" and "ghost plant", and those are both kind of lame.) And the entire ledge was full of these tiny blueberry plants growing in every crack. Zillions of them! On the south-facing ledges, we picked a handful of blueberries each without even stepping off the trail. On the north-slopes, the plants are a few weeks behind and are probably ripe right about now. It was pretty awesome to have some fresh wild blueberries with our lunch on the trail.

It was pretty, but more than a little hairy (literally! hairy algae!) in spots. The ledge is criscrossed with tiny streams (taking water from... where exactly? The sheer cliffs above?), and wet granite is slimy and slippery! Fortunately most of the streams are narrow, so you just have to hop carefully across them. At the very top there's a spot where you have to actually climb through a cave (at the top of a mountain!) to get through to the next piece of the trail.

All in all, a great hike, although I gather from the 80-car parking lot (complete with bathrooms and everything) at the trailhead that this is a pretty busy route on the weekends.

Do you live in Washington, DC? Do you want to have super-crazy-buff core muscles? Call Ivory at Flat Belly Pilates! She'll come to your home and give you (and a friend, if you want) personalized Pilates classes. This is a brilliant plan -- you can learn Pilates in your pajamas, and take a shower afterwards without needing to wear flip-flops!

Ivory contacted us and wanted to have a new-and-improved website in honor of her business' one-year anniversary. She wanted the new site to be clean, informative, and inviting. Because Ivory regularly participates in charity events and other promotions, she also wanted to have a "Latest Updates" section that she could update on her own with current information. We built the site in Joomla, which we like because it has a very straightforward interface for adding new content. When Ivory adds a piece of news, it is automatically added to her "Latest Updates" page and also is included in a rotating banner on the front page of her site.

Check her site out today, and be sure to let us know when you can do a full set of the Hundred!

Meet Dizzy. As in Gillespie. She was named by the lovely Ivory of Flat Belly Pilates, and I tried to pick the duck with the poofiest cheeks.

 

You know, we got the geese with the intention of their becoming the enforcers of this little feathered mafia. Many people we've chatted with have childhood horror stories involving aggressive geese, and this breed (Chinese Weeders) are supposed to be particularly territorial. We figured that when random visitors show up (like bobcats, foxes, and the Fuller brush guy), the geese will run at them and scare them away.

In practice, thus far, the geese are absurdly friendly and will happily come over and try to nibble shoelaces and any bits of grass you hold out for them. (They act like it's a huge treat. As if they don't spend ALL DAY on the lawn.) However, today while I was out trying to take pictures of wee Dizzy up there, once they realized who I was focusing on they worked very hard to get between me and her, and eventually settled down on either side of her, pinning her between their big goosey butts.

Do you want to buy a house or some land in Panama?  OF COURSE YOU DO!  Panama is totally awesome and full of rainforests and coral reefs and tons of monkeys and interesting birds. 

When you get ready to start your new life in Central American, Chiriqui Coastal Real Estate is a great place to start.  Allen and Max came to us wanting two things out of their website:  they wanted it to be full of useful information about living in Panama, and they wanted a simple way to manage their property listings.

We built this site using the content management system Joomla, with a plugin called HotProperty.  It allows Allen and Max to easily add new listings and has a bunch of built-in functionality (like a really cool way to deal with multiple pictures for a listing, and forms so you can email the listing agent).  The rest of the site has a ton of information about moving to Panama, living in Chiriqui (a beautiful province that shares a border with Costa Rica) and lots more interesting stuff.

I will tell you right now:  if you buy the property in Volcan that has the 150-foot waterfall, you are officially required to invite Aaron and I to come visit.

Today we meet a very special duck: Pixel.  Pixel was named by our pals Chris and Bethany over at Avoca Designs.

On the left we see Pixel hanging out in a very tall patch of grass.  On the right, we see a picture showing the lay viewer how to tell Pixel apart from the other Indian Runners: notice the dark patch of feathers (nay:  pixelated splotch!) by her left leg.  As you can see from comparing her underside to the underside of Siren on the far right, she's pretty easy to spot.  (Ha!  Spot!  Pixel!)

The gang has been having a good time hanging out in the very tall grass lately.  Bruce and Spruce spend all day eating said grass, but the small ducks just hide in it.  You will notice their very protective fence in the background:  as of Friday the 23rd, we have had two bobcat sightings in our yard. No one was hurt (thanks to the fence and the early warning system of QUACK QUACK QUACK), but still. We hate the bobcat. (We also had a small-crazy-puppy sighting last night at dusk when a little black and white dog rocketed around the yard for a few minutes before heading through the woods to the horse barn.)

In other news, we went hiking last week and saw this great little eft! I love the efts, because they are so small (this one was the size of a car key) and so very bright orange.

As you can see, the little ones believe the solar panels to be a place of respite from the sun.  Or perhaps from hawks.  Either way, they hang out under there during the middle of the day.

In vaguely-related news, the New Hampshire's state legislature passed a bill recently (House Bill 1628) so that any grid-tied systems (PV, wind, or micro-hydro) can get $3/watt for their system -- up to $6000, or 50% of the system cost (whichever is less).  That is tres cool, because NH has been seriously lagging on the whole rebate front.

Alright, back to the birds.  The baby ducks have almost a full set of feathers now, though they are still only about 50% of their full-grown size.  Bruce is 85% better (still limping a little), and is again running around like a crazy goose.  The geese are growing noticeably slower than the ducks, and Spruce is only just now starting to get real feathers on her belly (the first place real feathers grow).

I am really sad that the camera focused on the near-grass instead of the far-goose, but I will show you this picture of Bruce anyway.  If you have met Bruce, you know that this is picture captures alot about his personality.  Namely, "GRASS.  GRASS FOR ME."

We went out the other day and ended up on a trail that was still covered in snow.   This is an odd time of year to hike -- trails are either still snowy, or very muddy.  This one happened to be both!  We soon realized that we were not the only ones using the trail:

Meet Siren: