Spring Cleaning & Other News

Life is marching on as usual here, except that everything we do lately is with the purpose and objective of accomplishing our big move. We have given up trying to buy a house before Andy starts work in NH in early May, or before Aiden and I move down there in early June. After having one contract on a home fall through due to toxic mold in the attic and radon in the water, we have decided to rent a house until September so that we are not under pressure to buy something immediately and can get to know the area a little better.

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Our house in VT is on the market too, for-sale-by-owner, so we are trying our best to make it look as attractive as possible. Grandma Chris and Uncle Kenny came up recently for a visit and helped out tremendously by raking, pruning, and mulching the winter schmuck out of our yard. Aiden had a great time with the mulch pile, as did the white throated sparrows.

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We also enhanced our pond by adding a waterfall feature, which will hopefully help aerate the water and keep it from becoming an algae lagoon before someone puts an offer on the house! We've got loads of toads and wood frogs making whoopie in our pond. It's noisy! And today we noticed that the first little tadpoles have hatched from the masses of eggs clumped on every bit of vegetation. I guess if you build it, they really do come. We have to watch Aiden like a hawk in the yard because one of his favorite things is to whack the pond water with a stick or throw small pieces of gravel in.

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This is definitely a bittersweet time for us (and more bitter than sweet right now, I'd say), having to uproot from what is, for the most part, a great life that we've worked to build here the past 4 years or so. Andy and I are both spending a lot of time giving each other pep-talks to convince ourselves that we've made the right decision. I hope that we do look back on it and say that it was a good decision, but the thing is that at this point we don't know, there are so many uncertainties... will we like the area, find a good daycare, will I find a job, will Andy love his new job, will we find a place as nice as this one to live? It's overwhelming. And incredibly stressful. But I guess people do it all the time, so I imagine we'll live through it, hopefully a little wiser and stronger for the experience.

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We'll see...

Some scenes from Mom & Dad's pond on Turkey Lane. Andy caught some "monster" panfish while Aiden played with Chris and Kenny before dinner.

We took Aiden for a walk at Shelburne Bay awhile ago. He was running along at a good pace until he saw the excavator off to the side of the trail, and then he refused to budge. We had to stay and watch it dig forever. And guess what happened when we had to leave..... WAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!

Made a quick pit-stop at Bristol Pond (Lake Winona) to look for the resident Sandhill Crane pair there but we didn't see them. Still a beautiful early morning though.

Summer is officially here I guess... go sawx

Sapster in Training

Last weekend the sugar season was in full swing, so we went over to Timber Hill to help out. Aiden is getting to be an old hand at sugaring. He carries his bucket of sap all over the sugar woods and looks very industrious. Judging from how he whines to go outside and then whines when we have to go back in, I'd say he loves mud season.

Come near my sugarhouse and I'll break 'yer legs

Master of the Sap

So far this has been a pretty good year for Vermont maple producers, although I have heard that there isn't much Grade B yet and the season is nearly over (sorry to you "B" lovers out there). Grade B syrup is really dark and mapley, and is traditionally used in cooking, although many people like it better than the lighter grades. The lightest of all (produced first thing in the season) is "Grade A Fancy." We suspect that maple producers label it "Fancy" so that tourists will think it's the best and buy it up, leaving the really good mapley stuff for themselves!

Back in Tucson

Ok, so if you have read all these posts about Arizona, by now you're probably thinking, "What about the poor child of these insane birdwatchers? Doesn't he get to have any fun?" The same thing dawned on us right about this time in our trip, so we decided to take Aiden to a local Tucson city park to play. Aiden loves slides. Luckily for him, this park had long slides, short slides, tunnel slides, and spiral slides. He was in heaven.

And then we took him birding again. Actually, it was more like a picnic on the top of Mount Lemmon in Tucson, with some accidental birding thrown in. We all piled in the minivan and forced acrophobe Andy drive up the steep, winding cliff-edge that is the road up Mt. Lemmon. You start at the base in saguaro cactus and climb through three completely different habitat zones before you reach the alpine area at the top. A large portion of the mountain burned in a huge wildfire in 2003, so the plants and animals are slowly regenerating and re-populating the area. We had a wonderful picnic lunch at the Loma Linda picnic area, where we also saw several new birds.

Grandma Chris and Aiden

Stellar's Jay at Loma Linda, Mt. Lemmon

View from near the top

Loma Linda picnic area

Yellow-Eyed Junco (a lifer)

Group photo after lunch

On our way back to the Dolans, we stopped at Agua Caliente Park. This is Carol's favorite city park, and it is really beautiful. Lots of open lawn and big date palms and wetland areas with flocks of waterfowl. Andy and I had never seen Ring-Necked Ducks or Wigeons that were this tame before! Aiden was practically petting them as he ran around shouting "Duck!" "Duck!" "Duck!" We've got him trained already...

Sierra Vista and Bisbee

We traveled out of Tucson on Tuesday to spend a few days birding and sightseeing in the Sierra Vista area. We actually stayed in Hereford, at a B&B called Battiste's Bed, Breakfast & Birds. Turns out it was a great choice. The owner, Tony Battiste, is a bird guide in the area, and from the moment we met him he was helping us find whatever birds we wanted to see. We said we were looking for Scaled Quail, so he immediately phoned up his buddy two streets over who reliably has the quails in his yard. He sent us over there and we went right through this guy's living room, waved at his wife watching TV, and out to his backyard to look for quails. No luck, but we did find another lifer, Say's Phoebe. On the fourth visit to the neighbor's house (we were really beginning to feel like stalkers by then) we finally saw 2 scaled quails! Tony also found us an Elf Owl one night, in a tree right in his yard. And he is a retired cop and a retired math teacher, so he had lots to talk about with Kenny and Chris too (besides birds).

The yard at Battiste's B&B is set up with all sorts of feeders and water features for birds, and even a photo blind for taking pictures of birds.

On Tony's recommendaiton, we went birding at the San Pedro Riparian Conservation Area one morning. It's a dry grassland habitat, so very different from Tucson or the canyons we'd been to previously. Vermillion Flycatchers were everywhere! If you have ever seen a Vermillion Flycatcher, you'd remember it. They are brighter than any highligher, a gaudy fluorescent red, and they especially stuck out against the tan background of the desert grassland. Aiden fell asleep in the backpack half way through our walk, so Kenny carried him all the way back to the van.

Grasslands at the San Pedro Riparian Conservation Area (you can tell exactly where the river is because its the only place trees grow)




Lesser Goldfinches

Vermillion Flycatcher

Our next stop was Bisbee, for some cultural interest. I thought Bisbee was a strange town. It's part hippie artist colony, part wild west, and part creepy abandoned copper mine. Everyone we talked to there seemed a little cuckoo-for-cocoapuffs. But they did have some great gift shops, and Aiden loved the old replica train in the center of town.

Bisbee

The old copper mine at Bisbee

Not much you can do with this big hole

Aiden riding the old train in Bisbee

The following day we left early and went to Ramsay Canyon, a Nature Conservancy Preserve. We had a quick hike (involving a Summer Tanager) and then hit the road to go to Patagonia, to someone else's private backyard. This area of Arizona is so popular with birders that some people with especially birdy locations have opened up their homes as public birding sites. We went to several such places, and they are even in the guidebooks for the area. You just park in the driveway and walk through to the backyard where there are lots of feeders and chairs set up for birdwatchers. It's great! Donations are usually collected for the "sugar fund" to feed the hummers. We hit the Jackpot at the Paton's house in Patagonia- we had four lifers in about 15 minutes! We got the Violet-Crowned Hummingbird (what we had come to see) and then Lazuli Bunting, Zone-Tailed Hawk, and Dusky-Capped Flycatcher too! Finally, we stopped at Patagonia Lake State Park for a quick hike before heading back to Tucson and the Dolan's house.

Hiking at Ramsay Canyon

Ramsay Canyon

Violet-Crowned Hummingbird in the Paton's backyard, Patagonia

Patagonia Lake State Park