Fickle Spring

 It's a fickle spring we're having here in the Pacific Northwest. Days so warm we forget it is April and I begin to wear summer clothes and buy bedding plants that thrive in warm temperatures. I got the patio umbrella out for the herb garden table so I could enjoy lunch there in between spats of gardening.

 The pine siskins flock to our feeder in the herb garden, very close to the garden table. We keep the feeder full of black oil sunflower seeds. The siskins aren't shy birds, nor are the chickadees and towhees that feed there.

 The duck that was faithfully tending her eggs on the other side of the Blue Bottle Garden fence finally hatched out ducklings.

 Then fickle spring revealed herself by sending so much rain & hail that Cedar Pond appeared to have re-entered winter. The rain & hail came down accompanied by lightening & thunder. Thunder that shook our house. The hail stayed on the ground  into the next day , looking very much like snow.

 Bedding plants I just bought to plant sit in their hail-covered box.

No worries though, the sun warmed the gardens again. The Cheshire cat I painted for a tea-party a few years ago, is smiling underneath the Hostas in the Blue Bottle Garden. Fickle spring brought more rain today, then bursts of sunshine. Rain is predicted for the entire weekend with thunderstorms. A good weekend to stay home and be cozy. I have a few books to read, a rug to finish weaving, and lots of blogs to catch up on because our computer has been on the fritz and we've been off-line for awhile.

Prayers for those of you enduring the destructive and deadly storms in the mid-west.

Spot of Duck Watching

~Ferns unfurling new fronds near Cedar Pond.~

Our only ducks to have survived the coyote slaughter in December have become a pair. An odd pair ,yes. But they are a pair. They did their courting and mating on the pond and the tall,closed- umbrella shaped runner duck laid about 25 eggs she carefully concealed in her nest of feathers, twigs and leaves , in the pen we built for them. One day I let them out as usual to run and swim freely until pen- up time in the evening and...she waddled out of the pen about 20 feet, stopped..turned back and ran into the pen onto her nest. I could almost hear her duck brain thinking " Oh, I almost forgot. I am to be a mother and I have responsibility. Back to the nest! " And now she patiently sits on her nest only to get off once or twice a day to eat, drink, and relieve herself.

If you are not close to her it is hard to distinguish her from the leaves and feathers around the nest. She is well camouflaged. It takes about 28 days for duck eggs to hatch.I hope she does hatch out a few, I am curious about what the ducklings from this mating would look like. See, here is the father , the duck partner. See how small this Call Duck is ? He is smaller than the standard chicken that shares the pen with him and his mate. His voice makes up for his small size though, you can hear his loud quack from everywhere around here!

~The pond after the rain, yesterday.~

The wood duck pair is still here. My husband and I wait at the pond's edge every night , unless it is raining hard. The duck flies into the snag like clockwork, 6:30 every night. On Mother's Day we observed her fly in with the male, he landed on the pond, she flew into the crevice in the snag. According to the books, he will desert her after she lays all the eggs in her clutch and then she will sit on the eggs for up to 35 days. We are hoping to see the young jump out of their nest onto the ferns below. We'll see.

"Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things." Antonio Smith