Feathered Family Photos

One of the side benefits of the Great Monarch Relocation Project (which will be described in another post) was that the sandhill cranes came to take advantage of our progress. 

The extra special bonus was that, for the first time ever, the pair we've been seeing for a number of years was successful at raising a youngster!

So, of course, I had to take a bunch of family photos!

As an amateur portrait photographer, it's always fun to catch a candid moment with parent and child.

Not to mention the child's studio portrait that's inevitably shared with doting aunts, uncles and grandparents. 

Sorry, I got carried away there for a moment. It just struck me as funny that I had done the classic family photography session with these delightful birds! I hope you enjoyed getting to see them as much as I did. 

Also, many thanks to everyone who made the opening of the new Stampeaz.com website a success! I have the very best customers in the world. :)

A Garden of Delights

Before the weather started getting too crisp and autumnal, Baloo and I took a hike in a lovely area that used to be part of the state's mental hospital system. It's been renovated and the old buildings have been turned into shops, restaurants, and some senior apartments and assisted living quarters. Behind all this, though, there is a large wooded area with miles of trails to wander.

Last year, they added a beautiful pollinator garden at one of our favorite entrances to the woods and on this particular day, it was full of bees and butterflies taking advantage of the blooms before hunkering down for the winter or migrating to warmer climes. (There are at least four butterflies in the picture above.) 

Constant fluttering of brilliant wings made an already outstanding collection of colors and textures an absolute feast for the eyes.  

Incidentally, does anybody know what this tall purple-tufted flower is? It was the hands-down favorite with the butterflies and I would love to get some for my back yard!  Also, in the picture above, I managed to catch a monarch in flight - without it being totally blurred. That always makes me smile. 

This picture has a painted lady butterfly in the foreground and a monarch in the background - I didn't notice immediately, since they're both orange beauties. 

I liked the subtlety of the folded wings as these two fed quietly on that same (obviously delicious) purple flower. I've done some research and I think it *might* be a meadow blazing star, but I'm not an expert gardener, by any stretch of the imagination, so if you have a definitive identification, I'd love to hear it. :)

They had also planted an unusual type of mint that was absolutely humming with honeybees, but I didn't get any very striking pictures of that. I was just glad to see a bunch of happy honeybees, since this didn't seem to be a particularly prolific year for them.  Most of the bees I saw this year were of the bumble (or yellow jacket) persuasion. 

The Last Pieces of the Puzzle

Were you wondering when the last pieces of the puzzle would finally be put into place? Well, I think we're finally there. You can see that there are a lot of little parts that had to be sorted out and, while they looked a lot alike, they were actually different species. Not a perfect metaphor, but it was a fun way to think about progress. 

A funny thing happened on the way to the testing phase, though. I had asked a few intrepid souls who needed to order things anyway to put the new site through its paces to see what they might think of it. I only wanted a couple of people to test it, because there are always bumps and wrinkles when moving anything from building to testing to production. So, I turned the site on and told my few testers it was live for them to play with yesterday afternoon. 

What happened next was a big surprise for me. One of my testers got a little enthusiastic and posted on Facebook that the site was live! You can sort of imagine the chaos that ensued. There were, indeed, some bumps and wrinkles and I had to scramble a bit to get my hosting site to fix synchronization problems, figure out why a number of things weren't working quite as I was told they should and otherwise learn the administration side of the site under pressure. But, in the end, I think everybody's going to get what they wanted and, while I still have the iron handy for any persistent wrinkly spots, things are going really quite well. They'd have to be or I wouldn't be posting this, would I??  :)

If you want to see what you think, you can try it yourself (https://stampeaz.com) and let me know how everything works for you!!

Counting Crows - and an Update

Crows, ravens and magpies have often been considered birds that are prophetic, depending on how many you see at one time. There are a number of old nursery rhymes and poems to unravel their messages. 

When I see one crow, I always look around to find another one because it's supposed to be an omen of sorrow to see a single crow. Happily, they're social birds, so there's almost always another one in the area. I also always think of my grandmother, since she had a lot of superstitions that guided her life. :)

My favorite version of the old rhyme goes like this: 

One for sorrow, 

Two for mirth,

Three for a wedding, 

Four for a birth. 

(these four were wondering how to get at the ripening grapes)

Five for silver, 

Six for gold, 

Seven for a secret not to be told. 

Eight for Heaven, 

Nine for Hell, 

And ten is for the Devil's own self!

Since the collective noun for a group of ten or more crows is called a "murder", I suppose thinking of that number as the embodiment of evil isn't too much of a stretch. 

Every night, a flock of crows gathers along the beach to await a favorable wind (or the dying down of the wind as the sun sets) to help them fly across to the island in the middle of the bay where they have a rookery. They frequently get a little raucous and it's always enjoyable to see them stream across toward their home. 

Speaking of counting, the inventory is finished and entered into the new database and I only have a few more pieces of the new Stampeaz website to put in place before going live with it.  The biggest piece is that I'm still wrestling with finding the best solution for the shipping part of the site. Other than that, it's a bunch of little things (of course, those little things always take longer than I expect). 

So, it will be soon! Very soon! 

Thanks to all of you for your patience and you can still let me know if you need something in the meantime! 

A Different Kind of Meadow Hawk

Every now and then, I see something that perplexes me as I take my daily rambles with Baloo. Sometimes, I never get answers to my perplexities, but sometimes I do. A week or so ago, I started noticing rows of burrows that had been dug into the center hump of a two-track where we walk. These holes in the side of this shallow ridge had no tracks coming to or from them, they were clearly fresh, as the sand that had been displaced was still damp from the excavation efforts. The holes were perfectly round and not very large in diameter - maybe half an inch or thereabouts. 

I wondered about this for a number of days, as we passed many newly created homes. I also  began noticing enormous wasps flying around in the field beside this two-track. Then, I witnessed one of these big, scary looking creatures land and disappear into a freshly dug hole. 

The next day, I saw one zip by and dive straight into one of the burrows with a cicada in tow. Then, another one, also laden with a cicada, flew in and I was able to capture a picture as it landed on the sand (the wings are still blurred in flight in this photo). I was stunned that it could fly with such a large insect weighing it down. 

It apparently came in at a distance from its home, since it kept dragging the cicada along toward me - it acted like it wanted to crawl under my boot and I kept backing up and out of its way as I took more pictures. 

I did a little research on these creatures and discovered that they are called cicada hawks or cicada killer wasps. The female captures cicadas and carries them back to her burrow where she leaves several of them, along with a single egg. Cicada hawks build these burrows for their young one at a time, sealing them up when enough provisions have been stored for the egg inside. Once hatched, the larva will feed on the cicadas and then spin a cocoon of silk and sand in which it will overwinter, finally emerging as an adult the following spring.  

These wasps are about two inches long, so they're a bit alarming to see flying around, but they really have no interest in humans and will only sting people if they're harassed. They are good guys, acting as a natural check on cicada populations, thereby protecting the deciduous trees on which the cicadas feed so voraciously.  

So, there's the final chapter in my cicada story for the year. I had fun learning something about both the cicadas and wasps. I hope you did, too. 

Completely Buggy

No, I'm not talking about the Stampeaz site building operation driving me a bit off the beam (although, the description is apt for that, too). I'm talking about the rare opportunity I had to watch a cicada that had just emerged from its nymph stage to grow into its adult self. 

I had often found the nymph husks of these creatures attached to a tree or the side of a building when I was a child and marveled at how they usually stayed stuck. This one had apparently come unglued during the process of breaking out of the shell and had to cope with emerging on the porch right by the door of the house. Check out those tiny, wadded up wings. 

In this second picture, it had pretty fully emerged from the nymph stage and done a face plant into the concrete stoop, since the nymph shell toppled over with the effort and weight of the escape. You can also see how its wings are just beginning to unfurl.

It found purchase on the door frame and latched on, as its wings took advantage of a little gravitational pull to drop even further. 

The wings were the most amazing color of green that fairly glowed in the sunlight. 

In this picture, the cicada has worked its way around to the front of the door frame and its wings have started to angle in along its sides, rather than flat and open as in the previous picture and they're starting to become less opaque. 

It kept climbing higher and the green began to recede from the ends of its wings, as they became more transparent. Of course, all of this took a number of hours to happen and we finally had to go make some dinner. 

The following morning, this foolish creature had found its way under the outdoor table, where I was barely able to save it from being eaten by Baloo, who thought it would make a crunchy treat. We did get to see that the green that remained in its wings had become more olive than neon lime and the wings were completely transparent (except for the veining, of course). 

As I was getting ready to put the little fellow in a relatively safe spot, I noticed the amazing nose on this guy. It reminds me of early car grilles. (Yes, you know me - I had to look up cicada anatomy to find out that it was called a nose!) Nowhere is terribly safe for a cicada, since almost every creature likes to eat them, from birds and fish to rodents, reptiles and spiders. Even some organisms without mouths snack on cicadas - like fungus. Other insects eat them, too. More about that in an upcoming post! 

People also find culinary uses for these high protein insects. I remember one year, when the seven, thirteen and seventeen year cicada cycles all peaked at the same time (the sound was deafening!), a local ice cream parlor made cicada ice cream and the confection was an instant sell-out. No, I didn't try any - it was already gone. However, I still think I would prefer butter pecan...

A Cheery, Cherry-Faced Progress Report

Baloo wanted to make me take a much-needed data entry break and go out on what should have been a lovely walk in the woods. Reality kicked in when we were completely beset by swarms of deer flies and horse flies and no amount of bug dope seemed to help repel the vicious little biters. The good news is that I got to be introduced to the cherry-faced meadowhawk along our way (what a great name for these winged wonders!). 

The bad news is that Baloo decided, while I was concentrating on trying to get a good picture of this striking dragonfly, he would foil the pesky flies by jumping into the mucky pond beside which this red beauty lives and hunts. Needless to say, stinky dog had to have a bath before he was allowed back into the house! 

Oh! You mean you don't care about my canine cleansing conundrums and what you really wanted to see was the promised progress report? Okay, here goes! 

All the different products that I carry at Stampeaz are now officially entered into the database. This is huge progress! A whirlwind inventory will need to be done before the site goes live, since some of the counts will be different from what I pulled out of the old database (I've sold some things since the crash), but that's a manageable task that should be done anyway, just to make sure everything's correct. 

Other than that, I still need to figure out the shipping and customer account parts of the new platform. From the research I have done so far, it looks like I may have to do something similar to what I did with the old store for postage, since I use the least expensive priority mail method I can for each order. My only option for accurate shipping is to use standard flat rate, which would be more expensive for my customers. So, folks may just have to put up with me creating the best estimate I can and refunding money that I don't need for shipping an order. Who knows? I may yet find a plug-in or add-on that allows me to do what I want, but it looks like I make things too complicated for that (no surprise there!).