Oh so distracted

[elainegrey]

Six different species at the feeder this morning. The usual tufted titmouse and Carolina chickadee, with a pair of Cardinals wandering around underneath. Then the distinctive (comparatively) shape of a nuthatch got me to look with the binoculars: a red-breasted nuthatch. And a Carolina wren, an eastern phoebe, and a pair of goldfinches. Whee!

Yesterday i found a arrowhead!! I was digging up Star of Bethlehem so Carrie and the cats don't try eating it as grass, and noticed the symmetric chip of stone. I think it's the first arrowhead i have ever found. Using http://www.projectilepoints.net/Search/NorthCarolina_Bifurcated_Other.html, i think it's most like Culpepper or St Albans, both of which are Early Archaic, 8000 years before the present. Which is kind of ... awe inspiring. (I go to touch it again.)

Also, i was digging up Star of Bethlehem bulbs. *cough* I am unlikely to run out and eradicate it because it is not as problematic as similarly aggressively-spreading non-natives. There are certainly native spring ephemerals i would love to replace it with, but it's not outcompeting them, particularly. Since this was all plowed ground, naturally getting small, native species back that aren't wind or bird distributed takes a nice bit of luck. The ones i have found so far are Partridge berry (Mitchella repens) easily explained by birds, Spotted wintergreen ... maybe seed capsules were caught in a critter's fur and then brought here? Once one was here, it does spread by rhizomes and the spread throughout the woods makes sense. The most mysterious for me is Spring Beauty. I've found two small clusters so far. I can't imagine them being brought by ants this far from the creek. I suppose i can imagine the seeds in mud that deer tracked up the hill, falling, and then establishing the small colonies. One was on the septic field so it was less than 25 years since establishment. http://www.nomadseed.com/2016/11/spring-beauty-claytonia-virginica/


Mom care this week: a visit to the hospital, before she was moved. Helping dad pick a good nursing facility (which was disappointing, as the nearby one is awful). Calls to find out what Dad needed to take for mom. Newsletter emails. Medical appointment wrangling and logistic calculations: morning appointments with the worst area traffic between the rehab center in Raleigh and the hospital in Chapel Hill.

Tomorrow i will visit her after i check out a coworking location very close to the nursing home, with the idea that a midday drive is less likely to hit traffic, and working from Raleigh for four hours should be agreeable. Then i can visit mom in the early evening and drive home after traffic clears.

Comments

[warriorsavant]

Awesome about the arrowhead. Very much appeals to my sense of history. That's the way I collect things: nothing systematic, just whatever happens along that's interesting. (Then I tend to obsessionally document it.)

[elainegrey]

Christine used to be incensed every time we found more garbage in the woods from the previous owners, but now she's collecting it to make some conceptual art photo documentary. The arrowhead certainly will be an oddity in the collection.

[warriorsavant]

Interesting idea. I would have kept the arrowhead as different and special, but that’s me. (Considering I don’t do much “conceptual art” - or really any other, makes sense for me, not you.)

[elainegrey]

The charm of photography is that the arrowhead can be kept and displayed with our native American pottery examples while the rest of the junk stays in the garage in a cardboard box until shooting time. So yes, different and very special. (I reread and see the many interpretations of how i phrased that.)

I still boggle at 8000 years. We have some things that may be around 100 years old or a little older: some furniture pieces, some books. I try massing them in my mind -- do we have 80 things around 100 years old? -- to try and imagine 8000 years.

[warriorsavant]

Understand. Had a friend who’d grown up in the mid-west. Anything 100 years old was OLD. Then she moved east, and something had to be 200-300 years old to be OLD. Then went to UK and the stakes were upped to 1000 years. Later to Italy and had to be 2000-2500 years old to be OLD. Lastly to the middle east, where anything under 4000-5000 years was modern junk. She was talking about buildings, but have accept perspective for other human-made works.

[yourlibrarian]

We've been waiting to have birds return to our balcony. We remove the food plate before we put up the holiday decorations, then return it after. However 4 days later the plate is still largely untouched. It's puzzling given that this has coincided with our first real layer of snow this winter so the ground is covered.

[elainegrey]

Could this coincide with people like me who only begin with the bird feeding with the first snow? Here in the woods (where lots are they are over 3 acres) it took two days for the birds to find my feeder after our first snow. (I lack a sense of your residence on an urban to rural scale, but "balcony" sounds more urban.)

[yourlibrarian]

We tend to have 2 sessions of bird food -- the first is in the fall when all the balcony plants come indoors and lasts until Thanksgiving when the holiday decorations go up. Then the second is after the decorations come down and stretches until the plants go back outside.

We did finally get a bird come by to eat this morning. There's more snow predicted tonight and tomorrow so the plate might be enticing then. And yes, we're at the outskirts of a city so chances are good they're feeding in someone else's yard.

[gurdonark]

Cool! An ancient arrowhead!

[egret]

Cool arrowhead!

Good luck with all that medical planning.