What's up?

Amanda, who occasionally comments, said she is a birder  and she looked up "Ohio Rare Bird Alert, and the only thing I can find for your county, and it seems right in your neck of the (literal) woods is a Kirtland's warbler. They would be in the bushes, and need a big lens if you're photographing them since they're a small bird. When I was in Indiana, I used to make pilgrimage every year to bird the Lake Erie shore just west of Cleveland to see the warblers; it was heaven for a birder!"

Who would have known there is an Ohio Rare Bird Alert!  Thank you Amanda. First thing this morning I called the park, because the fellows were on park property, and a very disinterested ranger told me they probably were birders, but that’s all he could/would tell me.  If you google Kirtland’s warbler, you’ll see a pretty little warbler and a habitat that goes straight through Ohio and ends in the Upper Peninsula.

Amanda’s blog is St. Ann’s Reel, though she hasn’t posted for several years. While I was googling, I checked out St. Ann’s Reel, also one of my all-time favorite songs. You can hear it fiddled “Irish” or “Bluegrass” style. I like Irish myself; Bluegrass is just a little flatter. If you can watch the fingering, the neck, under the strings is worn about bare.

I went out today to check the flowers. We have one final cold night coming on. The mandivillas are fine. Their leaves are not overly fragile. A little more leather like. They will be fine. I keep trying to take a picture of the allium, and I cannot get it in focus, in the brilliant light of day. The poor old allium flower is squeezing itself open, one flower leaf at a time.

I looked up at hawks circling overhead in the brilliant noon time sun. I could see nothing on the screen, it was too bright. This was literal point and shoot. I cropped them small enough to keep only what I wanted, the moon, the birds, the sun. I could not crop them small enough to locate the hook at the tip of a hawk’s wing, so I do not know if these fellows are hawks or buzzards.