Ruby-throated Hummingbird

Don't you just love them when the do that loopy thing, chattering at the top of each arc of their matting dance? And boy are they showing off for their gals. They're pretty feisty little things. I've seen them fight off other hummers. I have had them come right up to me and drink from the hose I'm watering from--too cool.

Last spring, when I still had a husband showing off for me, we had a hummer feeder hanging outside our kitchen window. We also had several bird feeders that the raccoons would get into at night and make quite a racket. And during the day, the chipmunks and rats would help themselves.

We get rats around the water--I mean they are a problem here. They hang out in warm compost heaps and outbuildings and under houses. And they can get into very small spaces--like a knot hole or between boards where the don't fit together tightly. We had them come in the exhaust vent from our furnace and make a nest inside the ducting. The house started to smell bad and the husband decided to look elsewhere for fun, and I said I smelled a rat; I was right.

Rat poison in the outbuilding and lots of cleaning out nest stuff and droppings. Lots of folks don't like to poison them, but what can you do? They ate my dad's leather ice skates when he was a kid, and they ate my friends books--just last week. She'd stored them in her garage. We never had a rat problem until the cat died. Ozzie, boy I still miss the dude--he was a good hunter and a real sweetheart.

Well, tomorrow it is the first day of summer. Can you believe it? Summer. And colder than a... Happy day anyway, and don't forget to get those seeds in the ground. They'll sprout eventually.

Ciao!