Beavers. Yes, beavers!

Meg wanted to show me what was going on in the woods by the lake where she lives. A beaver had settled in and she wanted to show me what happens to trees when they get sculpted by an energetic, talented, enthusiastic, driven beaver who apparently has not yet been interrupted with his work.

The beaver would gnaw the trees to a point and position the cut so that the tree would fall towards the lake.....and once it fell, would then complete the job of removing all the bark before floating it to the lodge construction site.

The rest of the trees on this beaver trail of "damstruction" had some of the bark removed prior to being felled.

What that beaver did with just his teeth is incredible...and also exquisite. The wood was so perfectly polished and smooth where it had been cut and where the bark had been removed...I sort of wish I could have brought one of the stumps home and displayed it as an art object because that is what those sculpted trees looked like. Meg admitted to rolling one of the small logs home and hoped the beaver wouldn't miss it.

This tree had a vine wrapping around it which got gnawed off in the same area as the bark that was removed.

This is the back of that tree. Just a little bit more gnawing on the other side will bring this tree down with its top part almost hitting the lake (you can see the lake in the upper left corner).

If you're not already impressed with what those beaver teeth can do, this is a hickory stump. Hickory is a very, very hard wood. It will dull a saw.

This is the rest of the hickory tree on the ground, bark completely removed, ready for shipment.

This beautiful stump of a tree looked like it had been polished. The wood was that smooth. Meg said not to get too impressed with all the trees we had seen so far because there was one at the end of the trail that was the grand finale to this nightly beaver business.

It was a tree that had to be at least a hundred years old. This was the beaver's biggest and most ambitious project yet.

The outer bark had been removed and now the inner wood was being worked on...this would take more than one night to complete (!!!).

And even though this tree was getting killed, it's hard not to just stare with your eyebrows as far up as they will go, and admire what this driven beaver had done.

All of these trees were a short walk from Meg's house and Meg kind of wondered, but didn't really, but kind of thought....why no beaver activity on her land? Well, we discovered he had been busy on her land too. He had just moved on to bigger trees.

There's a reason the word "dam*" goes so well with the word "beaver." Beavers cause so much damage to build their dams but dammit, what they do is pretty amazing.

I was telling Mary V about Meg's neighborhood beaver and Mary said that she and some friends were eating lunch outdoors somewhere in Colorado and while they ate their lunch, they watched some beavers build a dam nearby. By the time Mary and her friends had finished their lunch, the beavers were done building their dam and she insisted that she and her friends were not slow eaters. Beavers are just very fast at getting what they need to get done, done! You just have to beaver-y impressed with what they do, you know?

Violet is eighteen years old today! Eighteen!

I thought she was sixteen going on seventeen...

...but nope. I had to check to be sure and she's eighteen. Eighteen!

And she knows what she wants.*

*(a can of Fancy Feast just about every two hours.......and she usually gets it because well, you know, she's eighteen!!!!!)

"You remember me?"

Last month an old beat up car drove up my driveway and the driver, an old Asian man, yelled that question to me...many, many times.

I was in the middle of planting crocuses. Tilly had managed to retrieve some of them to tenderly chew while her brother walked off with the box that held all 500 of them. Well.....that's how many there were before the dogs got involved...and I noticed one of those dogs had walked off with my dibber too while I tried to get things in order while that car came to a stop.

"YOU REMEMBER ME?"

I had never seen him before. I was sure I hadn't.

"You gave me beer. You gave me cake."

Well, that sounded like something I would do.......but I was pretty sure I had never met him before. But maybe I met him at the barbecue Aussie's family had earlier in the year so I asked him if that was where we met. Now it was his turn to look bewildered.

"Nah......You no remember? You give me beer. You give me cake."

I told him I think he probably had me confused with the previous owner of the land from years ago. She was a former beauty queen (he must have some crazy eyesight to have me confused with her).

He considered that and then we both confirmed to the other that we had never met. Glad that was figured out. Turns out he lives in a house up the road. Sarah told me that when I live in the country, be prepared for people to just drop by and walk right on in through your front door.

He enthusiastically related his biography. "I'm Korean. My wife, she white. I am 66 years old. We've been married 38 years. That too long."

He went on to say that he had two sons. One of them went to Harvard and is now living in the Philippines. What took me a little aback was not the Harvard education but that someone's kid actually moved some place that was not next door to his parents. It seems like everyone's kid moves next door or to some other house on the same property. Out in the country, you could say they live on family compounds.

He said that the house he lives in is the house his wife has lived in her entire life (I think she was born in it). They thought they might have to sell a couple years ago because of the economy but his wife cried and cried about that because she knew every tree on that property (and had probably grown up with a lot of them) and did not want to leave her trees behind. That just touched me. I guess my neighbor was able to keep the house by finding yet another job to add to the ones he already had and that kind of ends his story and mine for the day.

I don't have many photos from that day because of the unexpected long conversation, me trying to get approximately 500 crocuses into the ground, and then having to search for the garden tools that were not in my hands when I was talking to my neighbor. Those dogs wandered off with everything.

Bo did show up on a later day with a lost spade exactly when I needed it so I know everything I lost is still out there...I just have to be patient for their return. One day one of those dogs will show up with another one of my lost tools in his or her mouth and if garden tools could talk, I'm sure they'd say, "You remember me?" And I would!

More birdhouse perils

One mullet birdhouse went up...

...and then the other mullet birdhouse went up.

It was completely uneventful getting both of them up and that made me very, very happy...confident even. Those two houses looked good despite me having a hard time figuring out what straight was (even with a level) because I don't think one tree out there grows straight up.

But when I tried putting this birdhouse up, the tree immediately started to pour out sap as soon as I drilled a hole for the bolt that would hang it. The sap just gushed away. My confidence was gushing away too....panic had moved in.

That oak tree was shooting out so much sap that after a couple hours I took the birdhouse down because it was as sopping wet as the tree. This was horrible. What was going on? This has been an odd winter (all winters are odd to tell you the truth) what with day temperatures in the 40s and 50s and sometimes 60s and night temperatures in the 10s and 20s and 30s. Sap flows when the weather sets up like that but why this one tree and not the others....and why oh why would it not stop?

A couple weeks later, it was still leaking. I wasn't sure what I could do at this point...I was kind of thinking about putting a tampon in it. :-/

But rather than do that (!!!), I decided to wait...and hope that that tree figures out a way to heal itself soon. In the meantime, I put up the birdhouse I had removed earlier and hung it high on the hill...on a tree that stayed dry once I drilled a hole in it. If any other tree gushed like that one oak, that would be it for me regarding the drilling of any future holes in any future tree. It's not like the birds out there need my birdhouses anyway because there are plenty of dead hollow trees for cavity nesting birds to use for their nests. Makes me feel awful hurting a tree...I just don't want to risk doing that again.

But now confident with another birdhouse successfully put up without a tree crying about it, it was time to put up my very last birdhouse.

It was such a pretty day. Although the earth was brown and there was still ice on parts of the creek, the sky was a glorious blue and the temperature was in the.....60s! Fabulous.

That last birdhouse went up uneventfully....exactly what I was hoping for....and then I dropped (!!!!!!!?????!!!!!) my ratchet wrench.....directly down into the creek. Well, what's the big deal in that? Well, take a look at where my eye level is and where that cedar tree is in the distance. That's kind of high up.

And I had dropped my wrench in a wild part of the creek that I had never set foot on before...because the sides of the creek are steep from the top all the way down to the water. There are no flat areas on the banks (what banks?) to walk on. I also imagine lots of snakes hiding in and around all the rocks in the creek bed too. I couldn't get down the slope where I had just put up the birdhouse, it was too overgrown and too steep so I had to find a flatter area to cross the creek and then make my way back again to where the wrench was lying...

...on the thawing ice just a little bit beyond this tree. I have to admit it was kind of exciting because I had never been in that part of the creek before. Bo smartly stayed on the other side of the creek and distressingly cried and whimpered but Mary followed right behind me (with her 6 foot branch she kept whacking me with) while we made our way across the rock and ice and cold water to get to that darn wrench.

But hurray, it was retrieved! And if Mary and I could figure a way to easily navigate ourselves across the creek on the flatter parts ahead of us.... we could celebrate with some canine Costco confections once we got ourselves back to the "treatmobile." Which we did.

It was such a pretty day and I finally had all of those birdhouses up (three went up last year, nine went up this year!). What a great feeling.

When I drive to my land in Kansas, I cross the Kaw River and always think about stopping and taking a photo but before I complete that thought, I have already crossed the river. The sky had been beautiful all day...and when I stopped my car on the bridge because I had preplanned to do just that, the view of the setting sun was exquisite. A perfect ending to the completion of this year's birdhouse making and hanging project.

One last thought about birdhouses (probably because it took such a long time to get them put up and I still can't believe I'm finally done, done, done)...

Somebody has already expressed an interest in moving into this birdhouse I put up a couple weeks ago...or maybe they already have.

I had checked the other two woodpecker houses I put up last year to see if the interiors needed cleaning...which they did(!!!!!)...so maybe this birdhouse will see some baby flickers (or whatever was hatched in those other two birdhouses) this spring too. :-)