Summer Tanagers and early seasons

Tanager at the Ozark Folk Center

Footloose and Sultan square off

This summer we've seen lots of Tanagers at the Ozark Folk Center. It's a great place for watching birds. Of course, I love the colorful Indigo Buntings, Goldfinches, and Cardinals but we have so many species.
I've loved the Tanagers since I did a report on them in... probably middle school. I've never been a birdwatcher, I've always enjoyed their songs and flashes of color, but I've found myself paying more attention to them this summer.








Another attention getting thing yesterday - the bucks decided they could not stand to share a fenceline. Usually dairy and angora goat breeding season starts in September, with a few thoughts of it in August. I've never seen the boys even think about that in the heat of summer. But these two have been facing-off through the fence since yesterday morning. I took Footsie away for a while and put him out on the transom to graze. They both took that as a break to drink and catch their breath, but went right back to it when he went back to his girls. Time to build the buck pens. Not something I wanted to do in the heat of summer. It's not catastrophic climate change, this is more on the annoying level. Twenty-nine years of raising goats, they shouldn't change their schedule now!