After a long winter and before the barn would be filled with the new crop of hay, the barn would become our playground when we were kids with all kinds of activities including swinging on ropes tied to the beams. Now most old hay lofts remain empty with the use of round bales and other storage methods, or in the case of this year, there hasn’t been many good hay drying days to put up hay.
Playing in the Barn
When the water levels are higher on the Amnicon River, then a small offshoot stream flows and creates the pretty Now and Then Falls in the Amnicon Falls State Park.
Now and Then Falls
Some days you don’t get much of a sunrise or sunset when a storm blows in and covers the sun on a summer day.
Sunday Summer Storm
Today is the Cranberry Blossom Day in Warrens and last weekend was the Cranberry Blossom Festival in Wisconsin Rapids so it gives you a hint that the cranberry vines are blooming in Wisconsin this time of the year.
Cranberry flowers are not capable of self fertilization so pollinators, like bees, are required to move pollen from one flower to another. Cranberry blossom do not offer the same nectar appeal that other crops offer so the bees might fly off and find other flowers to pollinate, such as area weeds or lily pads, but hopefully the bees will pollinate the blossoms in the shape of a crane head so I have my cranberry juice and other cranberry treats.
Cranberry Blossom
There was only a few native wild rose blossoms left when I walked by the shrubs last evening so their pink colors have faded for the summer and won’t appear until early June next year.
Last of the Pink
Last evening when I mowing, I scare up a tiny baby bunny, the size you could hold in one hand. This adult rabbit wouldn’t fit as easy in my hands but it was at least eating the dandelion leaves and not my garden plants.
Rabbit Enjoying Some Greens
The Bad River was re-routed by miners in 1902, which caused more flow to the east side accelerating the erosion. The Copper Falls drop was 30 feet prior to the miners blasting upstream and now is only 8 feet.
Copper Falls
A short video of Copper Falls.
I had to pick up a lot of limbs from the wind and rain yesterday morning, so I was glad to have a sturdier structure to be inside than a covered wagon during a storm. The pioneers were a brave bunch of people to travel west all those miles in just a covered wagon, carrying all their belongings and food to make a start a new life.
Covered Wagon
These Yellow Warblers are busy feeding their young chicks which is extra work with a cowbird chick in the nest too who is so much bigger than the little warblers. So a majority of the insects the parents bring to the nest are given to the bigger mouth of the freeloader.
Brown-headed Cowbird females skips building nests and instead put all their energy into producing eggs, sometimes more than three dozen a summer. They deposit their eggs in other birds nest to raise their young, often though at the expense of the unwilling foster bird’s own chicks. But the cowbirds don’t just dump and run but keep an eye on their eggs and young and if their egg are removed, they retaliate by destroying the host chicks eggs in a term called “mafia behavior”.
The nests of the Yellow Warbler are frequently parasitized by the Brown-headed Cowbird so the warbler often builds a new nest directly on top of one containing the cowbird egg along with their own eggs. Sometimes there may be up to six layers if the cowbird keeps redepositing eggs but it appears this nest is only one layer.
Yellow Warblers Feeding Their Young
The video has some clips of the Yellow Warblers feeding their four chicks and the extra cowbird (but I was mad at the freeloader so I cut out most of the clips where the big mouth was getting all the food).
On this warm, sunny day, it feels like summer and it should since it is officially summer today. And a perfect way to end a warm summer day is to watch the sun set over the water while listening to the ten foot waterfall on the Turtle River in the background. The sky changes color over the forty minute show from the more orange yellow colors while the sun is still above the horizon to the pinkish blues long after the sunset has slipped from sight and it is always hard for me to pick my favorite shot but since it is the first day of summer, I decide the warmer orange glow was more fitting to start off the summer season.
Summer Sunset Over Lake of the Falls
