Friday's Hunt v 3.16

Another busy week for me, but I managed to get myself organized for Friday's Hunt with Eden Hills. This week the prompts are:  Starts with P, Week's Favourite, and Feet (or foot).  

Starts with P
P is for pink!  This is the first non-crocus flower that has begun to appear in my garden.  It is the flower of Daphne mezereum, which has a common name in some places of February Daphne.  It would be really nice if we had flowers in February here, but we don't.  So it's April Daphne to me!  Also, the flowers are in a format that is called a panicle.  A panicle is a group or cluster of flowers, rather than a single flower form. You often see panicles on grass crops like oats.

Daphne mezereum is native to all of Europe, as well as the Caucasus, Turkey, northern Iran, and parts of Siberia.  It is very hardy, which is why it does well here. The flowers come out first and the leaves will follow later in the spring. Unfortunately, all parts of this plant are very toxic, so I need to be sure the goats and sheep never get to it!

P is also for purple.  The purple crocuses are really spectacular now - in large groups and sporting their lovely orange stigma - the bees love them at this time of year.

Week's Favourite
So, I was very excited today because I finally (FINALLY!) got a picture of an owl.  I had it in my head that today was the letter O, and I thought it was just perfect.  Then when I went to check the prompts, I realized that today was letter P.  So, my owl picture has become my week's favourite.  I have been trying for many weeks to take a picture of an owl.  I keep hearing them in my woods and even wrote a separate blog post about the owls thwarting my efforts.  Today, my effort finally paid off.  I was actually helped by some crows who were mobbing this poor owl, so they tipped me off to its location.  I had been hearing a barred owl in the woods, but this one is actually a great horned owl. It was very high in the tree, and there were a lot of intervening branches, so it was a difficult shot, but at least it's recognizable.  I hope to get a better picture in the future.  The owl was watching me and I knew it was already upset by the crows, so I didn't want to stress it out even more.  I took my picture from a distance and thanked the universe for such a wonderful gift.

Feet
Today I took a picture of Marc's feet.  He was up on the ladder working in the garage, so his feet were at my eye level.  That made them a convenient photo subject!

He is continuing his work on the outbuilding that will become his workshop.  Today he was installing two lamps that will be over a workbench.  They are vintage lamps that he purchased at an antique shop.

Hopefully they will be just what he needs for proper illumination.  Bulbs will help, I'm sure!

Friday's Hunt v 3.07

I have been tremendously busy this week - feeling rather unable to keep up with everything at the moment.  Work is extremely busy, which it is sometimes, and I appreciate that, but it doesn't leave much time for photography and fun!

Our prompts today from Eden Hills are:  Starts with G, Week's Favourite, and Pink.

Starts with G
Goodness gracious, we've had a lot of snow!  Great, gleaming, glistening, gargantuan piles of it! Mostly accompanied by gloomy, glowering skies.  I'm getting very tired of it.  So is poor Marc, who is doing the snow shoveling because my arm is very painful these days due to ulnar nerve problems. Here are some images of our ghastly weather.  We think we might need a larger snowblower for next year, if we can fit it into the budget.  Or we might give up and sleep from January through March!

The route to the sheep and goat area was not easily passable when I opened the door earlier this week.  We've since had another couple of feet of snow, so you can just imagine how it looks now.  Carrying a hay bale through this from the garage to the fenced area is not an easy job.  The snow was at my hips in some places, and I am 5'10", so that is a very difficult path to navigate.

Here, just for fun, is a "find the GOAT" picture!

The snow has already covered the bottom of the bird feeder and the new tray feeder that Marc made me is almost covered.  Can you catch a glimpse of a little face peeking out in this picture?  Maybe the next picture will give you a hint.

Week's Favourite
I managed to capture this image of the squirrel taking seeds from the bird feeder.  I love the way he's hanging on, but looking in my direction.  You can see snowflakes on his face but he still looks like he's smiling.  Now you can go back to the last picture and see his little nose peeking up just at the bottom of the tube feeder, if you missed him the first time.

Pink
Pink is one of my favourite colours in the flower garden.  We are a long way from gardening season, so a pink cat tongue will have to fit the need for today!  Mitten the cat and Pippin the rabbit share this water bowl on the window sill, but they don't drink at the same time.  I tried, unsuccessfully, to get a picture of rabbit tongue.  Maybe another time!

p.s.  If you didn't find the goat earlier, here's a hint.

If you're still really stuck on the goat, let's zoom in a bit...yep....that's Lucky Nickel peeking through the snowy trees.

Friday's Hunt v 2.9

It's Friday, so that means it's time for Friday's Hunt, hosted by Eden Hills.  As usual, there are 3 topics for today:  Starts with I, Week's favourite, and Pink.

Starts with I
I have a few different things for the letter I this week, and I couldn't decide on just one, so I'm sharing all of them!

First, this week we were quite industrious.  Our new home is heated by a wood stove in the winter, which is located in the basement.  The previous owner advised us that he used about 7 cords of wood to heat the house per year, so we have recently had 4 cords delivered, with another 4 coming in late October.  Here is the wood as it was delivered outside the house.

We needed to be industrious to get the wood from the driveway into the house.  Each evening, Marc works on transporting the wood with the wheelbarrow into the garage, where he sends it down a chute into the basement wood storage room, where I, in turn, have been stacking it.  We have made good progress and are now on the 5th row of stacked wood in the basement (this picture was from a couple of days ago when there were only two rows in progress.  The rows go up to the ceiling, except for the back one because of the pipe being in the way.

Here's how much wood is left - we still have some industriousness left to go, but I am pleased with how well we have done so far!

Second, I'm sharing a photograph I took this summer of Idia americalis, a moth whose larvae feed on lichen and dead leaves. Its common name is the American Idia. The trees in my yard have a lot of lichen on them, and I'm surrounded by woods with decaying debris on the ground as is normally seen in woods, so it's not surprising that I see quite a few of these moths.

There are 18 different Idia moth species in North America that you might see if you look for them!  
An interesting Idia fact I found is that one species, Idia gopheri, lives in abandoned burrows of the gopher tortoise and feeds on its droppings. We don't have that species here because the gopher tortoise only lives in the southeastern US.

Third, I'm sharing a picture of our cat, Izzy, sitting on a hay bale.  I think she is glad that I have the sheep back and therefore have hay bales again, because she always loved sleeping on hay in my Iowa barn, and as soon as I put the bales in the garage here, she was on them!

(Hmmm.... letter J for next week.  That one might be tricky!)

Week's Favourite
This week's favourite is a photograph I took on Tuesday at the Sackville Waterfowl Park.  This young bird was scurrying about the reeds and grasses when I was there, and I was captivated by it, although it proved very difficult to photograph because it was always behind something!  When I finally downloaded my pictures that day, I sent this picture, which was the best one of the bunch, to the park staff to see if they could help me identify it.

I was quite excited when they responded quite quickly that I had managed to photograph a baby sora. This was exciting for several reasons.  Firstly, it's very late in the year for sora chicks, so seeing this one is surprising.  Secondly, sora chicks are not often seen - although the sora is a common marsh bird, it is also a secretive bird and is hard to spot, so seeing a chick is really quite rare, at least in this area! Thirdly, it's a bird I had never seen before! I'm hoping I might see it again as it grows. The sora chick starts out solid black and downy-fluffy all over.  This one is just losing its down and developing its adult feathers, which helped to identify it.

Pink
I know it's probably going to be a common choice, but I just couldn't help choosing to showcase pink blossoms for this prompt.  There were so many to choose from that I decided to put them into a couple of mosaics.  These are a variety of pink flowers from my garden this summer, as well as some pink flowers I photographed at the waterfowl park.  Pink is a bit subjective - when exactly does pink become mauve, or purple?  Opinions will vary on this matter, but hopefully we can all agree that at least some of these are pink flowers.

Clockwise from top left:  Spiraea tomentosa, unknown Geranium species, second unknown Geranium species, pink clover (Trifolium species), pink phlox (Phlox paniculata).

Clockwise from top left: Paeonia lactiflora cultivar (bi-coloured peony), Lythrum salicaria (purple loosestrife, bad invasive weed, but pretty), Malva moschata, daylily (with friend!), and rose (again, unknown species, although there was a tag for a John Cabot rose in the outbuilding, so I think it might be that one).