Spring flowers, or maybe not

Spring slowly arrived in our country this year.  The days were cold and stormy, not encouraging to the human spirit nor to the earth waiting to burst into its annual blooming.  Finally the daffodils and narcissus poked up some green fingers.  Ah, spring is going to be here after all, I smile.  Where are my tulips?  Maybe  with the weather they are slower, wait and see.

Time passes and in a smaller bed of columbines there are tulips.   This means that all the red, yellow, orange, fringed are not coming.  They have been part of the voles diet for the winter. Miserable rodents!!  I should look at this from the scientific view and learn that bulbs from tulips must have a more delicious taste as compared to the daffodils and narcissus bulbs.  The grape hyacinth has only one straggler left, perhaps another bit on the vole menu.  I have found one tulip---a volunteer, unplanted---that valiantly pokes its green arms up each year, just a few feet northwest of the now bare-of-tulips area.  How did the crafty vole miss that one?

Voles are just another of the enemies of yards.  I see their paths here and there through out my greening grass, left as they have munched on the roots of the lawn grass.  In the dirt of the flower beds, no paths of course, but the evidence of their presence is very strong.  Now, some decisions, to put tulips there again for another year, or not?  In the meantime get planting something else that will brighten my soul and get my fingers in the dirt.  This is a very small adversity with which to deal.

Beautiful Natural Thieves

We have a thief that can cause us much grief.  No, I am not trying to be poetic.  This is a fact and a challenge not easily solved.  He visits in the daylight hours, on sunny days.  He is careful, checking for human presence if possible before he steals.

The thief is an eagle, monarch of the skies, a beautiful large aviator.  Male or female I know not, but I do know that his(perhaps her?) nest is not too far away.  His visits are too frequent to our neighborhood.  His visits take a toll, as is the case with all thieves. 

After flying high above our farm, he is always on the hunt. Lovely to behold if one did not know his intent.  His target its our fish pond and the lovely trout that inhabit those waters.  He can dive down, plummeting out of the sky, and sink his talons into the back of a fish as it nears the surface of the water.  Those hooks dig deep and the wiggling of the captured victim is in vain.  He  may fly away to eat at a more leisurely spot that where “man” may interrupt his dinner.  But he also may eat on the bank of the pond, if he is feeling undetected.  This is a picky eagle, he eats only the eyes and part of the fish’s head, discarding the flesh when he is sated.

One thing that this master of the skies does not like is bottle rockets that are launched to scare him away.  It is a temporary distraction and we know he will be back.  Three other fish ponds in the area are faced with the same problem.  The eagle is not our only thief with similar traits.  He is just the most recent one we have observed. Blue herons and sandhill cranes have a great hunger for trout. 

What can be done?   Here is a gorgeous bird that we all admire, our National Bird.  He has the protection of the government as being endangered.  He is above reproach.  He is a robber, taking expensive items much as any human thief would do, with no care for his victims.  This eagle has two victims, the fish and the man who owns the fish, who purchases the  expensive fish and feeds it.   In this case, both are helpless to prevent his assaults.

It is not so different from those ranchers and farmers whose animals are at the mercy of the wolf packs that have been invited back into the country where they once roamed free.  More protection, more victims. This seems an unsolvable problem when trying to uphold the laws of the nation.