In case you’re shoveling snow, or slipping on ice, or inventing new cusswords to hurl at frozen water pipes, you’ll be pleased to learn that you can relax. Because on Monday of this week, March 20, 2023, Spring has arrived. I knew you’d want to know, before you hurry out to buy more rock salt or thermal underwear.
Ode to the Spring Equinox (found on the internet🙂
Spring is sprung,
Fall has fell.
Winter is here.
And it’s colder than usual.
Here on Kartar Ridge Ranch, we don’t need warmth or the calendar to know that spring has sprung. It’s, yes, kind of eerie, how it magically happens.
Every spring evening, we are exposed to a symphony choir of sex-crazed tree frogs valiantly hoping to impress the lady frogs with their seductive “ribbit ribbit”. The frogs in our neck of the woods are known as Pacific Chorus frogs, for obvious reasons. They’re only about 2 inches long – one lived with us, rent-free, on our back porch last summer – but they have gigantic tenor voices considering their size. Eatcherheartout, Andrea Bocelli! https://youtu.be/wEYCCpjEXe0
Also, the horses and pony and donkeys haven’t checked the calendar date but they’ve just started shedding the winter coats that Nature kindly provides for them. Not me, though. I’m clinging to my long underwear until further notice from the thermometer or until the watermelon goes on sale, whichever comes first.
Another sign that spring is creeping in is that daughter Susy and granddaughter Josie made a trip to the Dollar store this week and came home with 36 packages of flower and vegetable seeds (4 for $1). And since there’s over 100 dahlia tubers to plant or re-plant, the dandelions won’t be the only busy “breeders” around here.
Lately we’re seeing flocks of big beautiful snow geese resting on pastures and ponds. They usually look graceful when all or part of a flock take flight, but tonight, coming back from church, we saw one flock trying – and failing – to fly in a V formation. They spend their summers in an Arctic region of Russia so they must be practicing for their estimated departure time from Enumclaw. We’ll be sorry to see them leave.
They haven’t showed up yet, but we’re waiting to greet a pair of mourning doves who spend their summers in a tree near the farmhouse. Mourning doves (sometimes called turtle doves) have a unique, kind of gently hypnotic call, that all of us always listen for. The female will lay exactly two eggs and both parents will incubate the eggs and then feed the baby birds after they hatch. Mourning doves make very desirable neighbors.
I was browsing YouTube to find a video so you could hear the call of a mourning dove. There’s lots of their sounds there, but in doing the search I stumbled on this amazing, two-part home video by “Weird Old Uncle Henry” of a pair of mourning doves acquiring and raising their family. It’s an intimate real-life drama featuring these beautiful birds and I couldn’t stop watching it. Here it is. I hope you can find time to watch it. Part 1 is 14:36 minutes: https://youtu.be/eZjO8uisg_k
Part 2 is also 14:36 minutes: https://youtu.be/3id52ygqNmI
I have not watched the dove’s videos yet but I did hear the mournful “coo coo cooo, coo coo cooooo” call this very morning. The Eurasian collared mourning doves have returned to Kartar Ridge Ranch to raise their babies!
Also, one other sign of spring happening around here…. The horses refused their morning hay and trotted down to our lower pasture to graze the fresh green grass instead!
Best time of year, except for summer and fall. You can keep winter, though.