MaryE's blog: 2023 #165 More packrats, hungry birds

Summer finally arrived! We've been having 90 degree days and are finally finished with those almost freezing nighttime temperatures that did nothing good for the garden. The beans finally thought it was safe enough to come up and most have been eaten down to stems by the bugs. Something is also making fine lace out of the squash leaves. That might be earwigs. The grasshoppers are still busy with the rhubarb but my spraying of the grass around the plants has helped. This morning I was able to pull stalks and deliver them to the produce buyer down the road. Last week she also bought garlic scapes.

A few more packrats have been eliminated. Another one is enticed into the trap every few days. I moved the trap from the feed room to a shed where I saw that something had been digging. This morning there was a packrat in it. This was a youngster so I think maybe I can catch the whole litter. Five, six, ten? I'll keep count.

I think every farmer and rancher in Eastern Oregon is busy making hay. As we drive along the roads we see cut hay, raked hay, baled hay, stacked hay. And it all smells good. Here in our dry hills we have a short irrigation season which is over now so there is no second cutting of hay. We have no reasonable expectation of having enough rain to make enough regrowth to cut so cattle will graze on the fields and do the harvesting, fertilizing as they go. Ranchers in the valley below us are on a different irrigation system fed by river water are blessed with multiple cuttings. We look over our dry pasture to the valley and see a lot of green, and then waves of dry hills beyond. Lots of variety and after living here for 30 years we still enjoy the views. We keep binoculars handy and use them to watch the activity. Sometimes we can tell what they are doing, other times we only see something moving with a lot of dust behind it.

Flocks of birds are eating a lot of the grasshoppers in the pasture. We see them flying low in flocks of hundreds, landing, gobbling up the hoppers, taking off and flying a few hundred feet and landing to gobble up more. I think these are some of the birds we feed all winter. They appear to be blackbirds and starlings. They are more than welcome to all the hoppers they can hold. Yum! All that protein!

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