Warren, with all the herpers you met this weekend, I dont know if you'll remember me (I was there when you found the yellowbelly basking near that log), but it was nice meeting you. Kieth, I wonder if this weekend would be the best one yet. It has been theorized by some that the main migration hasnt even begun yet. This makes sense to me for two reasons. 1.) I didnt see many snakes at all along the bluffs this past weekend. Most densites that had many snakes in or near them last year were empty this year. 2.) Except for one night last week, these past 3 days have been the first cold snap of the year. The warm days of this weekend would surely get the snake moving. If I had it to do over again, I would have waited until this coming weekend to go. I hope somebody gets down there this weekend because I would love to know how the snakes moved.

I asked the ornithologist/bander, Scott Weidensaul, if I could quote from his email(s) here and he had no problem with it. spedigrees: You might be interested in his website http://www.scottweidensaul.com/hummingbirds/ which has a wealth of information on the recent movement of western hummingbirds, like the rufous, which are now beginning to appear in the East and Southeast. It sounds like you may see more of them in the next few years. In regards to ruby-throated hummingbirds that may be late to migrate, and the concerns people have as to whether to keep feeders up, he says: "I agree, looking at your photos, that the bird you have is a ruby-throat, and likely a hatch-year male based on the throat stippling. Within any population you get some birds that are programmed at the genetic level to migrate exceptionally early, and others whose instinct is to stay north as late as possible. This one could be in the latter group, or he could have something physically wrong with him that's preventing migration. Impossible to say, even sometimes examining the bird in the hand. One thing to understand is that your feeder is not somehow preventing this bird from migrating -- after all, if that were the case, we'd have evening grosbeaks and purple finches all summer at our seed feeders. I strongly urge you not to try any fancy nectar mixes -- just stick with the normal 4:1 water/white table sugar mix you use in the summer. As in summer, this bird will find plenty of insects, which comprise 60-70 percent of hummer's normal diet; there are a lot of cold-hardy midges and such even on cold days. Don't waste money on Nekton, and for the sake of the bird's health, don't try "supplementing" nectar with things like fish food and other garbage that people sometimes add to the mix. It will get a balanced diet naturally. If you're concerned about the feeder freezing up, you can easily rig a heat lamp with a 150-watt PAR/38 outdoor flood lamp in a utility hood, positioned eight or so inches to the side and above the feeder. We use that setup a lot with western hummers like rufous, Allen's and calliope that are increasingly common in the East in late fall and winter. In all likelihood he'll move on, but if he doesn't (or, more likely if he stays, can't) there's sadly not a lot you can do for him. Rubythroats lack the ability of many western species to go into deep torpor at night, but they can take temps down into the low 20s and and upper teens, and are hardier than people realize. But I'd trust his instincts to kick in eventually -- and with a full fat load from tanking up at your feeder, he'll be able to fly roughly 600 miles nonstop in about 24 hours (the same distance and time span rubythroats cover crossing the Gulf of Mexico), which can get him quickly to a warmer environment. Quite a few are now overwintering in the Carolinas, so he may even be one of those hardy birds." This is a lot to add onto a Spring Migration thread but I hope some of you will be interested. Claire

Being stuck inside with a big puppy who cannot run around outside is driving me almost as crazy as it is driving him. He is smart, he is learning all the standard commands like No, Come, Sit, Stay, etc. but he seems determined to engage the cat, Lucky, in a battle of the wills every single day. The lesson he has not yet learned is that her claws are going to win every single time. I am on the verge of losing my sanity here. I need a vacation from the big puppy. He is a bundle of love, but a very energetic bundle. Jennifer, It always is challenging the first time a person processes something new from the garden---new to them---and sometimes the sheer quantity of whatever needs to be processed is quite daunting. I'm glad you're making progress on the Seminoles. You do need a root cellar! I've always wanted one but never have been able to convince Tim that building one would be worthwhile. If our clay wasn't so impossible to dig, maybe we would have one by now. We started digging out a spot for one once and simply gave up---digging that dense red clay is like trying to dig concrete. After decades of trying to raise as much of our food as possible and spending far too much time canning, freezing and dehydrating it, I'm sort of over it and really, really wanting to cut back more and more. I no longer can 600-800 jars a year and I don't miss all those long hours in the kitchen. I don't think my body can physically tolerate being on my feet all day every day in the summer any more either. I'll always can some stuff, but more and more I focus on food that can be root-cellared (or maybe I should just say kept in dry storage since I don't have a root cellar) or frozen. Nothing makes a person appreciate things like onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes and winter squash like the fact that you can harvest them, cure them, and put them in dry storage as needed until you use them. This summer I processed and froze all the excess tomatoes in 8-cup batches for salsa back when we were harvesting tomatoes, telling myself that when the weather cooled down, I'd spend October-November turning them into salsa. So far, I haven't done that. If everyone is going to get salsa for Christmas as planned, I need to get busy canning salsa. After all, October is almost over. I think I'll do a few batches of salsa next week, and I haven't yet decided whether to make apple pie jam, candied jalapenos or Habanero Gold to go in the gift bags as well. I need to decide on that and get it done because it seems like once Halloween arrives, Christmas is here in the blink of an eye. I dread doing all this canning for the holiday gifts. I know I'll enjoy it once I start doing it, but I'm so burned out from doing so much for so many years that I don't absolutely love doing it the way that I once did. I wish I did absolutely adore doing it as I did 10, 15 or 20 (or longer) years ago, but I just don't. There's probably a lesson in here somewhere about pacing one's self better over the years so you don't burn out, but I didn't learn that lesson in time. I wish I had a nickel for every night I stayed up canning and cleaning up until midnight, and then got up at 6 am to go out to the garden, harvest tomatoes, and do it all over again....until midnight again.....and again, and again. I used to feel shocked when my older friends here gave up canning in their 60s or 70s after a lifetime of doing it, but now what I'm thinking is that I'm surprised they didn't retire from canning sooner than they did. I may can a lot more after Tim retires---he'd be here to help lift that heavy canner filled with water and filled jars, for example. On the other hand, I may decide that I completely retire from food processing when he retires from his job, though I really don't think I will. I am not sure he wants to help with the canning, because every time he walks into the kitchen now and I'm canning away like a mad woman, he sort of gets that deer-in-headlights look in his eyes and cannot get out of the kitchen, and the house, quickly enough, like he's afraid I might put him to work in the kitchen. lol I'd like to point out that I never once have asked him to help me can, dehydrate or freeze anything, so I don't know why he gets so twitchy when he thinks it might happen. Nancy, I hope the new faucet works out. I hate plumbing work. Tim can do it, and he does do it, but it always requires at least 3 trips to the store to get all the right parts, as if it is impossible to buy all the right parts the first time. I realize that when you start taking apart old plumbing, sometimes you find a part in there that you didn't expect and have to go get one, but it drives me nuts...partly because it is such a long drive to get to a store that has what we need. I hate having to go out in the rain anywhere for any thing at all. Nobody here can drive in the rain and we have a lot of motor vehicle accidents everywhere when it rains, particularly on I-35. We joke that people here cannot drive in the rain because rain is so rare they lack experience in driving in it. Yesterday, within 5 minutes of the rain starting to fall, we were paged out to an auto accident in town. It boggles my mind how common this is. Jen, I love dogs but couldn't have that many of them underfoot all the time. It would drive me crazy. There is a really nice pet boarding facility north of Marietta and some friends of mine who love animals worked there for quite for a while (several years, I think), and it was a tremendous amount of work. We needed the rain and I'm grateful we received it, and now I'm ready for it to end and be over already. We've got about 2.5" in the rain gauge, with light rain expected to continue falling today and tonight. I'd be happy if no more rain fell, but it still would be very wet, chilly and miserable out there even without any more rain. At least we aren't getting snow like those folks in western OK and northwestern OK. I am not getting one single thing done with this dog in the house. He just has too much energy, and I am too kind-hearted to send him out to play in the rain. I'm going plant shopping tomorrow, come hell or high water, because being stuck indoors is driving me almost as crazy as it is driving the dog. Next week's cold looks discouraging. It looks like summer held on forever, and winter is coming early. I miss the long, pleasant autumns we used to have. Dawn

Amy, I haven't even stepped foot in the garden---I was too busy preparing for Halloween.....but I imagine my parsley, rosemary and fennel are fine even if not much else is because they always overwinter so well here. The autumn sage should be as well, but even if the cold weather nipped it back, it will regrow and bloom in no time. Autumn sage has bloomed on and off every winter since I first planted it about a decade ago, and I didn't expect that. I did expect late autumn blooms, but the winter blooms are just a bonus. We did drop down to 26 degrees so I'm sure all the warm-season annuals are toast. I do assume the tomato shade is why the chicory got long and viney---just searching for light. My snowstorm that I adored so much happened the same week that Dallas was hosting the Super Bowl, so it was the winter of 2010-2011, and specifically the first week of February 2011. I remember it well because Tim and Chris had such horrible commutes to work and it was the sort of crazy-busy week that you dare not call in to work unless you couldn't make it to work because you were dead. I think Tim stayed down there for 2 or 3 nights, sleeping in the guest room at his best friend's house because it was just a short commute. I was the one stuck at home dealing with snow piled up everywhere, but I didn't mind. The dogs loved it, but the cats and chickens not so much. We haven't had any sort of damaging or power-disrupting ice storm since moving here in the late winter of 1999. I have watched in horror as some of you have had them multiple times, but the closest a damaging ice storm of that type ever has come to us is probably about 3 or 4 miles north. Our county had extremely widespread damage to the power grid and trees from a very bad ice storm about a decade or so before we moved here, and that one did bring down trees on what later became our property. We eventually bought ourselves a just-in-case generator after watching all the news stories about ice storms causing power outages in other parts of OK so we're prepared if it ever happens here. So far it only has been used when someone is using power equipment too far from the house to use outdoor extension cords. The last time we put up a replacement fence around part of the front garden, Tim used the generator to power the power auger to dig the post holes. It was so much easier to dig them than using a manual post-hole digger. I think that if we didn't have that power auger, my chances of getting a fence finally put up around the yard in 2020 would be slim to none. Nancy, I laugh at leaving the leaves too. We always chop them up or shred them so they'll decompose into wonderful leaf mold quickly, and use them as we wish on compost piles or as mulch, but don't leave them lying there whole. First of all, with our OK winds, they're all going to drift or blow if left intact anyway. With the way we can have exceptionally warm winter days occasionally, the last thing we need is leaf cover on the ground to allow the venomous snakes to hide when they venture out on a warm winter day, and we've had those warm winter days that bring out snakes in Jan/Feb for at least each of the last three winters. Otherwise, I do believe in leaving standing plants and all non-diseased plant debris in the garden areas to provide food and cover for wild creatures. I've done it for a long time now and never have felt like there is any reason not to do it. Well, unless a person needs to take out everything to clear a raised bed to serve as a nursery bed for recently purchased landscaping plants that cannot be planted until the ground is prepared for them. I checked that nursery bed yesterday, by the way, and the plants looked as good as they did the day I planted them, so temperatures in the mid-20s didn't affect them at all. I forgot to look at the dianthus plants, which were in bloom, to see if the cold weather affected those, but they've overwintered for several winters now so even if the cold nipped them back, they'll recover quickly. There's a ranch across the road from us that was badly overgrown with trees when the current owners purchased it a few months before we bought our place. They hired a local guy to selectively clear many trees after we had our house built and moved up here---so he was doing that our first summer here, and I also he think he did a lot to contour the land to help manage water flow and decrease erosion. He did an amazing job, but.....suddenly, at our house, we had a huge population increase of the wildlife kind......snakes, possums, skunks, armadillos, rabbits, coons, etc. I didn't really mind it since we love most wild things, but it was just shocking how many we had all of a sudden. It makes sense---they needed habitat, cover and food and our property still had that in abundance. It was too much wildlife though, and too much competition for resources, and it took a few years for everything to get back to more normal levels. Jennifer, You must be exhausted after such a busy week. I hope you can restore order to your work environment and also get some rest. I remember that Christmas Eve snowfall. It was only the second white Christmas I ever got to experience, and the first one was in 1964 when I was only 5 years old, so my memories of it are sort of vague. I do remember my dad taking me across the street to the neighborhood park to play in the snow, and I remember how pretty our house's exterior Christmas lights were in the snow. I remember our recent white Christmas much better. I do hate the fact that returning to standard time means it is dark before dinner time. That means Tim leaves the house in the dark early in the morning and comes home in the dark in the evening. I'm sure the same is true for people who have a much shorter commute than he does as well. We just start counting the days until the winter solstice arrives and the day length finally begins to lengthen again after that. We never have had one single trick or treater at our house which is one of the pitfalls of being so very rural and living so far back from the road, so that's 20+ years of not really having a Halloween, except for going to a party at someone else's house, which we did last weekend. This year, Jana and Chris invited us to come up and do Halloween with them and Lillie. Aurora was at her dad's house because he and Jana have joint custody and she spends one week with her dad, and then the next week with Jana and Chris and this is her dad's week. Friday evenings is when she goes from one parent/household to the other. So, Jana and I took Lillie to downtown for the trunk-or-treat that ran from, I believe 3-5 pm, while Chris stayed home preparing for trick or treaters and doing meal prep because he takes in his meals prepared in advance when he works his 24-hour shifts. He doesn't have to do that, since they do cook at the fire station, but since he's training for a half-Ironman, he is eating super healthy and preps all his meals in advance to help him stay on track. Because their house is just SW of downtown, we just had to walk maybe 3 blocks to get to Main Street, and Lillie's dear friend from next door and her dad walked with us. The trunk or treat was very long...blocks and blocks and blocks....but the kids had fun. Once we were back home, we ate dinner and got ready for the onslaught of kids, goblins and ghouls. Tim had taken off work a couple of hours early and was at the house by the time Jana, Lillie and I got back. As soon as we finished dinner, the first kids arrived, but it turned out that most of them were Lillie's friends from the Cub Scout pack stopping by to see if she could join them for trick-and-treat in the neighborhood. Off they went. We had tried to prepare for what a neighbor told Jana and Chris would be a huge number of kids driving in with their parents from other neighborhoods. They were not kidding. The 500 pieces of candy that they had bought was going quickly so almost as soon as the trick or treat activity began and we could see we were going to run out, Tim ran to Wal-Mart and bought probably twice as much as we had started out with in the beginning...and mostly got the good stuff (chocolate) as that;s what they had purchased. The four of us handed out candy for well over three hours and got to see every possible cute, adorable, scary, terrifying and just weird costume you can imagine. Some were amazingly clever. The kids just kept coming and in the latter part of the evening--after 8 pm--we all got the feeling that we were seeing very tired parents, mostly with older kids, who'd just gotten off work and were trying to squeeze in a little Halloween fun with their kids. Tim, Lillie and I headed home (no school today) about 8:45 pm but Jana stayed out for quite a while longer and handed out candy for as long as kids kept showing up. By the time she was finished, there was almost nothing left in her treat bowl and Chris was sound asleep because he usually gets up sometime around 3 am on the days he works. Overall, Halloween was a huge success. After Lillie's group of friends finished collecting candy around the neighborhood, they went next door and played with a Ouija board (and who knows what else...whatever would amuse 4th and 5th graders on Halloween). Chris and Jana feel better prepared for next year now that they know what to expect and are enthusiastically planning more decorations for next year, better lighting near the sidewalk and steps, and the plan is to buy a bunch of the big bags of candy from Sam's Club so no one has to make emergency trips to the store. Tim and I just enjoyed being able to participate in Halloween activity in a way we cannot in our remote, rural neighborhood (where there's not even that many kids around us to begin with). I want to plant shop today, and places like Lowe's and Home Depot might have Halloween decorations on clearance sale today, so we are going to be out for a few hours seeing what we can find after Lillie eventually wakes up. She is sleeping the sleep of the dead, so to speak, after staying up really late with me last night to watch the original Friday the 13th. She's seen some of the later sequels but this was the first time she watched the original. I guess if she sleeps away most of the day, we can plant shop and Halloween shop tomorrow, which will be warmer anyhow. Damon Lane posted a thing last night about Halloween 2020, so don't say you were not warned: next year (leap year) Halloween falls on a Saturday, it is the night of the full moon and it is the night we turn the clocks back, so we have a Halloween trifecta. I think it is safe to say that sets us up for an amazing Halloween. We only had a sliver of moonlight last night, but we'll have the whole thing next year. It was awfully cold again last night, but we hit our low temperature pretty early and then the temperature climbed for the rest of the night. I think we had hit 25 or 26 before midnight but then we climbed back up to 28 pretty quickly and it was around 32 by the time the sun came up. Most of the time we hit our low around sunrise at this time of the year, so last night was odd. Happy November! I guess we'll remember 2019 as another year in which we went from summer to winter in the blink of an eye. Maybe next year we'll have the long, leisurely autumn we all crave. I'm just hoping we don't have a bad winter, but this early cold is making me wonder if we will. Dawn