Young Folks

Early summer at TellTheBees... This is the time in which our woodland surroundings are the most vivid. The yards and woods are literally humming with activity!

There are fawns on the driveway,

Baby birds all over the place, in nests and gourds and birdhouses and hollows, like these tiny chickadee babes Jake found in a hollow tree...

The phoebe on top of the railing/branch worked so hard to attach a nest on the quarter inch ledge above Alexander's south-facing bedroom window, and this year found success! For the past several years she's attempted in that very spot, enough times that Jake built her a little platform right under the eaves, but yet again she ignored it to build 3 feet from his crib. I like to think she's the same pheobe that built a nest on the header of what was to become our screen porch five or six summers ago. She seemed pretty tame, hanging around even when we were working right underneath her, and  enough that she let us move her nest to a nearby but safer spot when we needed to close in that area.

Baby raccoons! A few weeks ago this tree on the far side of the garden snapped off about 15 feet up during a particularly strong gust of wind, and a family of raccoons was disturbed. This tree hangs over the compost pile, which had probably been enough to keep these racoons away from our ducks and chickens, so we, and Echo, were surprised to discover their presence. They are our secondary suspects though, in the disappearance of the six banty chicks whom we discovered missing this afternoon on our return from Madison. The mom squawked at us gently from the chicken tractor, those fuzzy peeps nowhere in sight, and a tiny hole burrowed under the fence from one side. Sigh.... lesson learned.

 A human baby popped by for a visit last week too, with her parents who are dear friends who now live far away in Seattle! She was born four days before Alexander, and is already a head or so taller than him! Hopefully this is the beginning of a friendship as special as the one we enjoy with her lovely mom and dad.

Our little guy is seemingly loving life, mostly from inside one of our various packs or wraps, as seen above, or from a supine position, observing ceiling fans or treetops, and more and more frequently making eye contact and smiling. Today, he laughed! Not at us, but reflexively, upon hearing Marco Rubio's voice on the morning news. Those silly Republicans!