Friday, July 01, 2011

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!

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