A Little Culture

Wednesday was a beautiful day to get out and enjoy some of the great sites of Kansas City. It's time for Shakespeare in the Park and we enjoy doing that especially when we have beautiful evening.

That is what so nice living in a small town but one close enough to enjoy the offerings of a big city. We packed up a couple of drinks, cheese, grapes and chocolates and our lawn chairs to enjoy Macbeth. It is fun to see what other people drag out to the park, not just lawn chairs but blanket to set them on, a small table and coolers of food and drink it is really a great big picnic.

Ken has started on the floor, taking up some carpet and treating the floor boards to get rid of the cat urine. He ran into another little snag so he is fixing that.

We've been enjoying our jelly feeder activity, we have a catbird, a pair of Baltimore Orioles, a Robin and occasionally a Red bellied Woodpecker coming to the feeder. The Robin was guarding it for a while but he seems to given up on it now.

That's about it for us.

Until my next post, enjoy your week.

Birds, Butterflies and Bugs

We had an interesting trip Sunday to Dunn Ranch Nature Preserve up by Eagleville, MO.

Mark and Ruth our leaders took our group around the area stopping at places they knew from their breeding counts where we may be able to spot birds. (They have been doing the count for 10 years and they were going to do another starting today, we were they're scouting trip.)

Mark is passionate about conserving the prairies of MO and the few Prairie chickens left.

We didn't see any Prairie Chickens as they are most probably on the nest or taking care of chicks (we hope). Mark told us that at last count there were only 11 males left in the area and the hard winter and wet spring were not good for the birds and their chicks.

The Nature Conservatory purchased the ranch as it is the last of the native prairie that had not been touched by a plow in MO, it had been overgrazed by cattle and some nonnative grasses such as fescew had invaded areas. The conservatory has worked the area back to a natural state and is getting help from area farmers as some are converting some of their pastures back to prairie by cutting down trees and burning to get the native plants back which in turn help the prairie chicken population and other prairie species such as the Upland Sandpiper and Bobolinks.

Saturday we went to get some zinnia plants at the local hardware store (Walmart here isn't carrying many plants this year). Ken was looking at the dill and fennel and found several containers had Black swallowtail caterpillars on the plants, the plants didn't look too healthy as they were getting root bound. We asked if they would give us the plants with the caterpillars since we were going to purchase several other plants and they did.

So we took them home put the plants and zinnias in the garden, we had 10 caterpillars, we hope they will become butterflies not food for our robins.

We found this Cicada at the Overland Park Arboretum, actually several but later on Saturday we stopped at a neighbors and they had a yard full of their larva shells. These are the 13 year cicadas, pretty little bugs but we will be having a noisey summer!

Just a few of the little things we like to take notice of.

Til next time, enjoy the little things!

Feels like summer

We have gone from chasing birds to chasing steam engines, Monday we caught up with the 844 as it was heading to Lexington. We may chase it again when it heads back this way next week.

It feels like summer with todays temperature around 91 and with high humidity. We got an early start today and visited Overland Park Arboretum.

It has planned gardens and wild woods to walk through, it is really a nice place.

The woods would be a great place to visit in the spring for the bird migration as the Wolf Creek flows through it.

The birds are hard to spot now so we have changed back to our original interest of butterflies and flowers.

We added damsel and dragonflies to our list too, they are so strikingly beautiful no wonder this one is called a jewelwing.

Here's a common silver spotted skipper enjoying what is left of this flower.

We haven't given up on birds, in fact we are going on a little road trip Sunday to see Prairie chickens, hopefully.

The walls are painted now we just need the trim around the door.

Til next time, enjoy the little things.

Happy Memorial Day

Hope everyone had a nice Memorial Weekend.

Ours was quiet, the weather was nice for us just to sit outside and enjoy.

We are still working on the walls of our house, getting close to finishing.

We found some Giant Swallowtail babies on our Rue in the garden, we will watch their growth if the birds don't find them. I need to get some zinnias started for when they are butterflies.

It looks like summer has finally arrived!!

Spring house work

We been working hard this week, Ken is doing some drywall repair in the living room and I have been doing spring cleaning. I've done the basement, garage and my art room so far.

It's been a cool drizzling week so I decided to bring in my Iris, especially the ones that smell like grape soda that way I can enjoy them.

We have taken some time to do a little birding between rain drops and cleaning.

We spotted a mother Louisiana Waterthrush feeding her babies at East Valley Park. We also spotted two Summer Tanagers in the park.

I finished reading this book about Phoebe Snetsinger who became obsessed with birdwatching in the 70's and at her death in 1999 she had a bird life list of 8,368. She spent most of each year traveling the world looking for birds, there are about 9700 birds in the world so she came close to seeing them all.

Well I don't think I'll get that obsessed with birding but I like her quote " One of the wonderful aspects of birding is that it is endless. There's always some new place to go, some exciting new thing to find."

Til next week, have a good one.

Biggest Week

We are back from our birding trip to the Biggest Week in American Birding.

We drove over 700 miles to Port Clinton, OH to see one of the hottest spots in the Western Hemisphere for warbler watching on their spring migration.

Magee Marsh has a mile of boardwalk and the birds are just fluttering among the trees and the ground litter feeding getting ready for their trip across Lake Erie to their northern breeding grounds.

(Remember you can click on the photo to enlarge it.)

The weather for the 4 days turned out to be great, we were afraid of bad weather since the forecast was for storms. We did have a couple of evening rains and drove home in rain.

We met our OH friends, Joyce and Dave whom we met in TX and did the Santa Ana Hawk Watch with, on Thursday afternoon.
We spotted 108 species over the 4 days, 27 warblers and 12 new species to add to our life list.
They are Whip-poor-will, Willow Flycatcher, Philadelphia Vireo, Veery, Bobolink, American Woodcock, Golden Wing Warbler, Black-throated Blue Warbler, Bay-breasted Warbler, Connecticut Warbler, Mourning Warbler and Canada Warbler.
At times, it seemed that there were more bird watchers and photographers then birds.
This was the 2nd year of the event even though birders have been coming to the marsh for years to watch the spring migration.



This is my typical shot of the birds, so I have deleted alot photos. The birds move around fast and I have not learned how to catch them. Ken is much better.

Can you find the bird? It's a Black throated Blue Warbler. I think I should have rotated the photo.

The Yellow Warblers will stay and nest here, like this one.

Can you find the Palm Warbler?

Saturday was International Migratory Bird Day so there were additional activities such as a raptor exhibit, a big sit fundraiser for Magee, family activities, book signings and song bird banding demos all to educate and get more people aware of the declining numbers of song birds because of loss of habitat.

We met Kenn Haufman who has written several guide books and his wife is the Exec. Director of Black Swamp Bird Observatory a part of Magee Marsh.

We did take a little time to sight see as we wanted to photograph Marblehead Lighthouse.

We also enjoy finding more than birds to photograph!

There are more birding places in the area that we didn't take time to visit, guess we'll have to go back and take the RV and stay longer.

So many places and so many birds!!

Enjoying Spring

It's been a beautiful week, one day of spring rain.

I've been doing a little straightening up of the house, RV and cleaned up the flower gardens. We go to East Valley Park almost everyday to do a little bird watching.
So far we have a count of 40 bird species for East Valley, we have seen a Black throated Warbler, Yellow Warbler, Wilson Warbler and a couple of different flycatchers and yes this Rose-breasted Grosbeak and a Summer Tanager.

We had a good birding day last Saturday with the Backyard Bird shop group at Squaw Creek NWR. We had a count of 82 species with five new species to us. It's a great place to visit, right now the shore birds are stopping for a rest on their migration north as well as several warblers.

The resident birds are busy building nests and some like the Barred Owl have babies already.

There was a report of a rare duck but our group didn't spot it.

We'd like to wish all the Mother's a great Mother's Day.