Local snake eating a mole
And sometimes we make nature hit itself on the head. Nearly every year in the fall we see a big snapping turtle making its way (we assume) between the cattail pond and the swimming pond. Its route has changed a bit as buildings and fenced gardens have popped up. This year we discovered it with its head pressed up against the foundation of the common house. It was easy to imagine it thinking, "This wasn't here last year." But once we gave it a little space, it found its way, turtle-paced, around the building and towards the pond.
Around the same time, a pair of snow-white pigeons found their way to the common house and decided it would be a nice place to roost. They are big beautiful birds, though the word from the common house building crew is they leave big less-than-beautiful messes in inconvenient places. [Breaking news: as of editing time, the pair had moved to under the roof of the Skyhouse porch.]
This has been a feast or famine year for rain for us. We either get five inches in one day (usually when there is a freshly-dug big hole in the ground to fill up with water) or we get nothing for many weeks. It was so wet there for awhile that crawfish were making many appearances around the village. In fact, we kept finding a big red crawdad that as far as we can tell from the brochures the Conservation Department gives out, should not be this far from the Mississippi. I fantasized about rivers so swollen with rain that these little guys were carried 50 miles upstream, all the way to us. I imagine that what really happened was much more prosaic.
My big focus this summer, though, has been on the birds. For my research, I was out in the fields nearly every day at Dancing Rabbit or at our neighbors' watching grassland birds. One focus of my research is a small brown bird called a Henslow's Sparrow. It is listed as a threatened species and has been declining in population for many decades. But Dancing Rabbit has tons of them! It has been great fun to hear them singing day and night, and to sneak up on the little fledglings. Considering how many we have here, it is hard to imagine they are threatened. But they are small, like to hide, and sing the shortest song ever (just two notes)! So, I am always joking that the problem is not that Henslow's Sparrows are scarce, it's just that no one can find them. But don't let that stop you from looking. There's always exciting drama waiting to be seen, outdoors.
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