Ice, the Hawk and Chickens!

Last night we had our first hard freeze. The pond was covered with a light sheet of ice this morning.

As you can see the pond looks terrible and is very low. That pipe shows the height of the pond when full. Oak leaves have nearly covered the surface of the pond. The leaves are nearly done falling and hopefully a good rain will sink the leaves. I can not recall seeing so many leaves on the pond.

 My last post I introduced you to our three roosters. Here are the remainder of the flock, the two hens. Above is Light Bulb, she is apparently a rock mix as you can see feathers on her legs. Below is Penquin we have no clue what type of chicken she is? Both of the hens were bought at a feed store in Wilmington by Meg's daughter and she named them.  As you might have guessed the chickens were not sexed at the time of purchase, three roosters were not intended. Neither has laid any eggs yet and they are around 6 months old.

OK, now to the hawk. This morning I let the chickens out, no problems. Came inside and made coffee and sat on the bed with Meg. Meg saw a Red-tailed Hawk perched on the bottle tree right behind the chicken yard, the chickens were out and clueless about the hawk. I attempted to get a photo, but just turning the lock handle to the back door scared away the hawk. We now have a 6 foot fence around the chickens. It seems the 4 foot fence was not enough for Stripe the rooster who wanted to help me water one of the cold frames on Friday.

And now even with the 6 foot fence two of the roosters jumped it because Chip the rooster was chasing them. Not sure what we need to do to keep them inside and safe.

Red-tailed Hawks diet is rodents and rabbits mostly. I know these hawks can take a full grown chicken. Hoping there are too many other meals out there to keep the hawk busy. We have plenty of hawks around here and two other neighbors have chickens as well.

Camellias still blooming in the garden is 'Moon Festival' above. These huge flowers are just stunning. And below is 'Leslie Ann' with these 2 inch slightly pink flowers, only 4 flowers this year, it's second year in the garden.

The Pond is Back!!

Today it rained, currently my 5 gallon bucket rain gauge says over 4 inches! I was home working on a big quote to remodel an entire house and the rain came down in sheets here. Turned on the TV and the weather was on talking about a bad weather system, and for once we were in the middle of it. The rains came at least 3 times, the first rain was an 1 1/2 inches, the rest came later on in the day. Anyway the pond is back, never quite dried up.

 Still the pond could be up much higher, at least all the frogs and toads are safe now.

The rain chains were overflowing, one was nearly useless in this big rain. The video above is the rain chains next to the screened porch, it usually carries water fairly well. The water from this rain chain goes to a 300 gallon rain tote which was filled up last night before today's storm.

 This rain chain does not like a lot of water going down it at all. Pretty unhappy about it. The water basin drains to the pond. I dumped about 10 of those 5 gallon buckets into the drain to the pond. Even the garden path by the big deck was flooding and falling into the pond, I have never seen that happen before.

Here is an update on the rain. My buckets showed a 5 full inches (combined from the rains) after another storm late late night. So we are watered fairly well now and the pond is a little higher. No damage to the garden, I did see a few drowned bees at the hive entrance.

The End is near.....

For our pond this is. It looks like the pond will be dried up by Tuesday! I'm thinking at this point we have more water in the two rain totes (about 350 gallons) than the pond has water. Pretty sad considering hurricane Irene has left devastating floods all up the east coast and just gave us winds with a tiny bit of rain.

 We do not have fish, not having fish is good for the frogs and dragonflies. So we'll loose a lot of tadpoles and some dragonfly larva and damselfly larva. I think some might be able to bury themselves in the mud and survive. The pond dried up in 2008, the recovery was not too bad. I'm sure we'll have wonderful frog concerts next spring just the same.

For forecast currently is spotty for rain. These 1/8  and 1/4 inch rains only coat the top of the ground and dry up very quickly. What we need is several rains of 2+ inches to bring the pond back. Hurricane Bob years ago overflowed the pond, the only time I have seen it overflow in the 14 years I have lived here.

Just wanted to remind any local people visiting this blog that The Paperhand Puppet Intervention show will have the last three shows in Chapel Hill this weekend. Next weekend it will be at the Raleigh Art Museum. We went last night it was a lot of fun, should not be missed. They also have a parade you can see my photos from October 2009 it was a blast. Last night guess what? I forgot my camera....

Snowy Weekend in Durham!

Yesterday the weather man said we might get snow, but it would not cover the ground. The snow was supposed to be from 3pm until 6pm. It started at 1pm and was still going a little at 11pm when I went to bed. In total I think we almost got 2 inches of snow!

As some of you might know we are collecting wine bottles for building a bottle wall along the pond. So far I have 25 blue wine bottles like these covered in snow. Anyone with a good source for blue bottles please let me know, I'd love to have a few hundred blue bottles for my project.

Eastern Redbud covered in snow, see all the dark seed pods on it!

Camellia 'Pink Butterfly' this bloom did OK with the snow and 28 degrees this morning. More blooms were under the snow.

This is a vitex tree with loads of seeds in our garden.

Another camellia 'Kanjiro' was covered in snow lots of flowers on it right now.

Our pond with it's first full blanketing of ice this winter. Temps are going to be colder than usual and I expect it to be frozen over for weeks. It did melt back today, most of it anyway. That smashed plant in the center was our swamp sunflower.

Our re purposed deck in the woods as it was snowing Saturday afternoon. I have $200 in replaced wood and bolts in this. It was the old deck on the back of the house before we added on. This is a great summer breakfast spot!

The cold frames as it was snowing Saturday. The ice remained on the glass door one in the front. I picked kale, mustard greens and rape for dinner tonight from the big cold frame

The Pink Flamingo Contest is still on!

The contest is still on, the pink flamingo is still standing out in the middle of our pond! The ice still covers to entire pond, two days ago it looked like there was open water on one side.
I'll recap the details on the contest:
The first 4 people to guess the date the Pink Flamingo floats in the pond wins a copy of my interactive CD book on the Butterflies of the Carolinas andVirginias. This CD covers every butterfly found in the Carolinas and the Virginias with excellent photos of every butterfly, 95 % of those taken by yours truly.

The flamingo is resting in mulch and the date(s) closest to when the flamingo and mulch float apart in the pond wins the contest.

So far we have these 18 entries:

Dave Jan 16
Shady Jan 17
Grace Jan 19
Di Jan 20
Tom Jan 22
Catherine Jan 22
Ginger Jan 24
Kim and Victoria Jan 28
Noelle Jan 29
Kathleen Jan 30
Meg Jan 30
Nancy Feb 3
Tina Feb 4
Ali Feb 13
Rosey Feb 14
Neil Jean Feb 28
Les March 7
Janet March 15


So those of you that have not guessed yet please leave a comment to when you think it'll float.

Both of these photos were taken about 9AM this morning January 16th.

Contest: Guess when the Flamingo floats

I thought a little contest would be in order! The first 4 people to guess the date the Pink Flamingo floats in the pond wins a copy of my interactive CD book on the Butterflies of the Carolinas & Virginias.

Please leave a comment with contact info or E mail me You must live in the US to win in this contest.

As of Sunday the ice in the pond was at least 4 inches thick. When will it melt and the pink flamingo end up floating? The flamingo is resting in mulch on the ice.

Hey can you believe I got Meg out on the pond on Sunday night!

Dot walking over the big cracks in the ice!

Our house as seen from the pond!

Crazy Curling on a pond in Durham, NC

The curling match between old friends really happened today in Durham, NC. Let me tell you these were not crazy young adults, I was among friends that were around my age (early 50s) to a few years older. The pond was larger than mine and we had nine people on the pond at one time.

Did the ice crack? Yes it did and often, it took me 30 minutes to get the nerve to join them as at 240 lbs I was the heaviest person on the ice.

That is me tossing my first curl. The water jugs were just thought up before the event since we did not have granite curling rocks. The blue bucket is the goal when tossing from the other side. You play this game kind of like shuffleboard.

X was our team, note the x mark on my 'rock'.

Barney a Canadian who has actually curled in a league!

You can't curl your rock without having someone brush away the ice along with the rock.

Ken on his knees after tossing his rock, he was on my team.

That is Roger another Canadian and the only player in skates! The white pipe there is the other goal, we did lots of improvising.

This is Jon he was on my team also. He is not from Belgium!

David from Australia. I was very glad to see him well again, the pond is in his neighborhood.

Ken from the USA is action!

Roger in action once again. Our team lost because when we reached 10 points to win, the rules required us to win by two points and since they had 9 points we played on and they scored enough to win the game. We were on the ice for 2 1/2 hours playing, what a hoot. I was surprised no one stopped in to see what we were doing as a good number of cars went by.

A view of the playing field once we were finished playing! It'll be probably a decade before we can have another match like this one as it is warming up all this coming week and ice like this does not happen very often in Durham.

Randy on Ice!

Several firsts today! My image on this blog and Meg's photography of me on the blog. This morning with the temps in the teens I walked out on the pond. For those of you that are not familiar with our pond it is egg shaped and about 60-75 foot across and about 4 1/2 to 5 foot deep at the moment. We are just north of Durham, North Carolina and we are in the Southeastern United States.

The ice is pretty deep at least 8 inches maybe more. Dot was not willing to stay on the ice, maybe she 'is' smarter than I am? Meg had a hard time getting this photo as Dot would not stay still.

Near the center of the pond! The ice was very sound here.

Yikes it's cracking!!! Did I forget to mention the 30 foot long crack about 3 inches deep in the center of the pond? I saw it days ago, but it sounded like a gun shot when I stepped on it!

All the way accross, the last 15 feet was a bit faster walking after hearing the crack!

This photo shows the big crack in the ice. The red arrow on the left is where I stepped and heard the cracking. The other arrow shows a right turn in the crack.

Tomorrow I've been invited to join in on a curling match on a smaller pond in Durham. We are going to use gallon jugs filled half way with ice as curling stones. It will be an international event with the USA, Canada and Australia being present and Denmark perhaps too. In the morning it'll be 16 or 17 degrees and what looks like the end of these mornings with teen temperatures. Next week the afternoons will be pushing into 50 degrees. so I doubt we'll be walking on any more ponds.