The other day two flickers were courting in the box elder tree I had trimmed south of the house last Fall. Flickers have made a nest in that tree trunk the past years but as the holes were getting larger I boarded them up after I trimmed the tree last Fall. Since the flickers were busy courting in that tree I wonder if they made or found a new hole in the tree? One flicker was making lots of noise and wagging her tail feathers while the other flicker watched her and me. Or was it the other way around between the male and female? I think the one bird wanted some privacy before he or she made their move.
Then today I found a flicker in my barn's attic. It was at the one window trying to get out. I had to get a ladder and open up the attic door so the bird could fly out before it broke the window. The attic has a few openings under the roof eve and it seems each year one or more flicker climbs up the barn wall and squeezes through the opening to get into the attic only to forget how it got into the attic. *sigh* At least the bird didn't break any windows this year.
The tulips around the house are starting to come out of the ground.
The potato trucks are now hauling seed potatoes for planting. The semi trucks that haul potatoes for planting in Washington have started arriving and departing this week.
I am up to nine pocket gophers trapped this year. I checked the pasture for signs of regular gophers as I am sure there were one or two I didn't catch last year. No signs of them yet though I did see a couple old holes near their area.
Yarrow weeds are greening up. I seen them in the middle pasture where I didn't get them sprayed before they went dormant with the dry hot weather late last Summer. This year I'll get them!
Tuesday I filled in the holes from the tree stumps I had burned last year. I filled in six of them. Granted I had half filled them in last year, but still it was a lot of work to completely fill them in. I attempted to fill in the hole where I burnt out an ant pile but I discovered part of a tree stump on the side of the hole. *sigh* Tree stumps never end. I dug around the tree stump exposing it to air for drying. It will make a nice small bonfire for when Tammy visits me in May.
I pounded 20 two-by-four boards next to tree stumps to mark their location for avoidance with the harrow and for later digging. I ran out of two-by-four boards. I'll have to cut points on more boards for marking more tree stumps.
Wednesday I filled in more tree stump holes/depressions. This time the holes were from years ago which I never got around to smoothing out. I worked on four of these. Two went well. One I found part of a rotted stump and roots all of which I was able to dig out. Then at the fourth and deepest hole I spotted the top of a stump. Ahhh...!! That is why I never filled in that hole yet. I had burnt that humongous stump over two years back in 2003 and 2004 or 2005.
I tried to dig the stump out hoping it also was rotting. Nope. It was an old western larch stump and I think it takes a hundred years or more to rot. It was solid and looked as fresh as the day the tree died.
So today I dug and cut the stump out. I didn't save it for a bonfire as I wanted to finally be rid of it and move on to other stumps.
Then before I could fill in the hole I found more of the tree stump hidden in the dirt.
Okay.. bye, bye stump! (after some hard work) Note the dirt from this stump went to fill in the hole where I had dug and cut out the other part of the stump.
Here are the remnants of the stump. See how after many, many years of being dead, and after five years of being burnt by me, the stump still looks fresh. That's a Western Larch (Tamarack) for you. Also note the area around the stump was rocky and I almost filled the wheelbarrow with rocks.
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