Pheasants, Orioles, and Strawberries

Michigan's spring weather has been prickly with more twists and turns than a wooden roller coaster. One day we think summer is back, then the bottom falls out. But the strawberries are laden with blossoms and the Baltimore Orioles are eating all my grape jelly. Can they be enticed to stay? Yesterday was gorgeous with calm winds. So calm my son tackled the extension ladder to fix a hole in the eavestrough where starlings were nesting and wasps were wasping. That problem was solved just before the wind kicked into high gear, shifting out of the North with plummeting temperatures and frost warnings for the entire upper two thirds of the state. So.... off to the strawberry patch I went to save the blossoms.

I have a double layer of shade cloth I've been taking on and off with each frost warning. Bundled up as if it were March, tight hood, snug gloves, and heavy socks, I wrestled the cover back over the row of berries, weighing the sides down with dirt and rocks. I have a plehora of them because a Mad Farmer always has rocky ground. 

On my knees (lo and behold, as grandma would say) I discovered that nestled under the plants were more than blossoms.  Plump berries are already starting to form. Strawberry season used to be mid-June to July 4th. No more. They keep coming earlier and earlier, like the lilacs and the asparagus and the peony. Topsy Turvey weather but don't call it Global Warming or the deniers will drive a stake through your heart.

But on the intermittent nice days of spring, I walk the pasture which is now our pheasant habitat. We left a large area uncut last year, and an impressive patch of Queen Anne's Lace went to seed. Now there's a stretch of stalks waist high to a tall man, two-hundred feet long by fifty feet wide that pheasants love. We hear their excited two-note calls all the time and a few days ago I saw one running through the grass, head bobbing above the seed pods. My pheasant habitat looks brown and weathered but there is a lot of life going on under foot. Anything but dead. So, why do I tell you this? Because there is something to be said for uncut grass, dandelion bracelets and ringnecks on the fly. Pesticides had thinned them rare, so to see them and hear them in the wild brings us joy. 

Now at nightfall the winds calm. The chickens roost and the pheasants hide. Jupiter rides below the quarter moon in the western sky and the earth sleeps.