Our Pond Has Its First Residents…

*My first sighting of Pacific tree frog eggs…the first of many!*

Once the weeks-long freeze ended, the Pacific tree frogs came down out of the woods to our wet areas to call out to each other and breed. This has been going on every year since we moved here, and their nightly croaking is music to my ears.

But this is the first year I was moving slow enough to notice frog eggs. Sure, I’ve seen the tadpoles. I go looking for them. But this year I spotted eggs and, once that happened, I found them all over…including along the shoreline of the new pond.

These are the first residents at this fledgling pond, although they won’t live there long. Once the tadpoles morph into frogs, they will make their way back to the woods. And next winter, they will return to our wetlands to start the cycle all over again.

And now these eggs are morphing into teeny tiny tadpoles. I hope you can see that in the photo.

Pacific tree frog eggs and tadpoles — *The white specks are the eggs and the black squiggly lines are the teeny tiny starts of tadpoles. How amazing is that??*

I’m 60 years old and only just figuring out something that has been going on around me almost my whole life. What else have I been missing out on? Whatever it is, I hope I discover it soon. Because I heart nature!

And that’s it for now.

Photo of Pacific tree frog on a glove was taken by a conservation district worker out here planting trees.

March 17, 2025 0

Why the Sight of These Swallows Filled Me With Awe

It’s mid-March and the annual bird migration has begun. Around here, the robins returned in February, and I thought I saw a turkey vulture. As the weeks go by, I will hear plenty of different types of birdsong in the woods, letting me know the seasonal residents have returned and are ready to breed.

But this migration took on new meaning yesterday. Here’s why…

After feeding the cows, I happened to catch a glimpse of movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked up and I saw about a dozen barn swallows flying overhead. At first, I was excited because I thought it was “our” barn swallows returning for the summer. But they just kept flying and I realized, “Oh my gosh. They’re still migrating. They are headed somewhere farther north than our farm.”

All of a sudden it hit me and I was awestruck: Those birds are exhausted and hungry and anxious to be home. They had already travelled thousands of miles to get to where I was standing and they had farther to go. I was watching the wonder of nature play out before my very eyes.

I spent some time pondering why this sighting caused such awe in me. I’ve watched geese migrate. I’ve watched Turkey vultures meander south. I’ve seen the swallows gathering to head south in the fall.

But I’ve never before seen a flock of migrating birds near the end of their journey. It gives me chills even thinking about it now because this wonder of nature goes on around us all the time. This migration has been going on long before we were here and I hope and pray it goes on after we’re gone.

Seeing that those birds working so hard to fulfill their destiny despite everything makes me that much more committed to doing what I can do to help by fighting light pollution, planting native plants, and choosing organic (because pesticide use kills off the insects the birds like the barn swallows eat)…just to name a few.

And seeing that wonder reminds me once again just how much beauty there is to be seen all around us if we slow down and pay attention.

May you also witness a wonder today.

That’s all for now.

Barn swallow photo by Mike Kit: https://www.pexels.com/photo/barn-swallow-on-wooden-stick-17326952/

March 14, 2025 0

When Nature Is Our Calendar, We Are More In Tune

It’s January and I saw the kestrel is paired up today while walking the dogs. We installed a nesting box for her three years ago and she has used it faithfully every year since.

That got me thinking about what’s next, because nature is a sort of calendar for us since we moved here. One event leads to another. It’s a wonderful, peaceful way of tracking time, when we can slow down enough to pay attention to it.

Later this month we’ll start hearing the Pacific treefrogs in our wet pasture areas (and our new pond, we hope!). Sometimes the noise is so loud it’s hard to hear someone talking to you. We love it!

February brings the robins back and it is also what I call salamander season, when we have to start watching where we walk on the logging road. Stopping to watch salamanders slowly meander across my path will never get old!

March means we’ll see the first barn swallows (always a very big deal!) and April brings the violet green swallows.

April is also when the migrating birds start showing up in the woods behind our property. The bird song gets louder as we move into May and the Merlin Bird ID app installed on my phone starts telling me I’m hearing 20 or more birds at once. It’s mind blowing!

Then as we progress into summer, it’s bees and butterflies and dragonflies.

Admittedly, summer is kind of a blur because we are so busy, and it brings with it invasive weeds to hunt down and dispatch. But it also means baby swallows. The violet green swallows usually only hatch one batch but the barn swallows easily do two and sometimes three. It is a delight to see them in their nests (barn swallows) or sticking their heads out of the nesting boxes we’ve installed for the violet green swallows.

Once the nestlings are fledglings and all are flying around, we see the swallows start to gather in groups which tells us they are getting ready to fly south in the late summer, early fall. That’s when we start to hear the crickets and grasshoppers in the pastures and the bird song in the woods starts to quiet down as those birds fly off and start their fall migration.

That’s also about the time I start walking through spiderwebs when walking the dogs in the woods. I haven’t yet figured out the seasonal significance of that one!

By October, it’s quiet as nature starts settling down for a good winter’s rest. We are usually busy doing our winter prep, from storing hay to spreading gravel to stacking firewood to canning. So I look forward to that rest as much as nature does, I think.

It’s not an exact calendar by any means. I certainly couldn’t schedule a work meeting or dentist appointment using it. But it is fun to be dialed into the world going on around me, because nature doesn’t need to know the date on the calendar. Nature knows what needs to happen when. And paying attention to that grounds me and slows me down, especially in winter as I’m learning to appreciate the restful time of dark.

Wherever you live, I hope you get the benefit of nature’s calendar too, and you find some joy in it.

And that’s all for now…

January 6, 2025 0

Learning to Love the Dark…and Why It Matters

It gets dark here. And I love it.

How dark does it get? This photo above is from a recent drive home: no street lights, no house lights, only our headlights.

I didn’t use to love the dark. When I first moved to this valley in 2010, before I met Bob, I was afraid of the dark. I lived in a rental on 10 acres with no immediate neighbors. The rental sat near the back of the property, butted up to logging land which is all trees for miles and miles. It was dark. And I was scared.

Slowly I got used to it and after only a few months, the dark was a comfort, not a concern. I took a business trip to San Francisco and I still vividly remember the drive home from the airport and the sense of relief as I left the lights behind and drove that dark, windy road.

And it is a treat to walk outside and see the stars and sometimes the Milky Way.

Now, to be honest, I get stressed when I have to go to a city or other area that is brightly lit. I feel agitated and it’s not until I get back onto a dark road headed towards home that I feel comfortable again.

We Stopped Using Outdoor Lights

We appreciate the dark so much that we limit our use of outdoor lights. Well, the people across the street have their property lit up like an airfield, so we don’t even need outdoor lighting, sadly. But we only have twinkly lights on the front porch that shine for a couple of hours in the evening (on a timer), and we only use other outdoor lighting if we will get home after dark. Other than that, it’s literally lights out around here, with no outside lights on at the house, garage or barn.

And Another Reason to Love the Dark…

Yes, I learned to love the dark when I moved to this valley, and Bob now shares that love of the dark. But these days we love the dark for a whole new reason: because the book Nature’s Best Hope taught us the importance of darkness to insects and therefore ecosystems. (Please read the book so I don’t have to bore you with my sorry paraphrasing here.)

And now I am reading The Darkness Manifesto, so I am getting even more committed to the dark. I stopped using outdoor lights, but I’d have plenty of lights blaring inside. Bob would laugh at me because I’d walk into our dark farmhouse and switch on light after light after light.

Now I am trying to get used to keeping the house a little darker too. Do I need all of the living room lights on if I am in the kitchen cooking? No, I don’t.

For an overview of The Darkness Manifesto, here’s a 4-minute overview by the author.

Bats! One of the Best Reasons to Love the Dark?

Finally, I learned to love the dark because I love bats, and our farm has them! One of the most peaceful things I can do at the end of a busy day is to sit outside and watch them, as in this TikTok video. And I can do that because of the dark.

Okay, So Why Does This Matter?

The darkness matters for several reasons. One, it is better for the insects and plants, and therefore our planet. That is–in my opinion–the most important reason. (See the books above for more on that.)

It is also better for us as humans. We are made to follow natural rhythms that are messed with by all the artificial lighting. We can be healthier and sleep better with less light, more dark.

Maybe we can all learn to love the dark?

And that’s enough for now…

October 8, 2024 1

Our Chicken Yard Looks Like Crap. Here’s Why…

We quit mowing our chicken yard, and boy, has that been hard for me to get used to! It looks like crap!

I’m trying to get used to the new look, because there’s a reason we quit mowing.

Ever since reading “Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard,” we have both of us been working on being okay with messy. By messy, I mean grass that’s not mowed or weed whacked.

And that goes against how most of us were raised: with the idea that grass must be mowed and neat.

But not mowing our chicken yard means native trees and shrubs have started to grow. We now have about a dozen Oregon ash trees, a few Pacific crabapples, what might be a hawthorn (?), and a couple of native roses all happily growing without being planted.

If we had kept mowing our chicken yard, we wouldn’t have any of that. We would have the one sickly looking non-native tree we planted before we learned differently. (Full disclosure: We planted three and two died. Duh. Of course they died. They weren’t native.)

Seeing the native trees and plants growing tells me we are doing the right thing by letting this quarter acre be wild and messy. But it is taking a while to get used to, I admit. To me, it looks like we don’t care, when the opposite is true: It looks like this because we DO care!

Plus I posted about this on TikTok and people made comments that helped me realize other benefits: more bugs for the chickens to eat and more predator protection for the chickens. Definitely two more good reasons to not mow our chicken yard!

Still…it is taking me a while to get used to.

@literalroadfarm
#nativeplants #nativetrees #learntolovenature
? original sound – Sharon

September 27, 2024 0