I sat on my back porch one day last week watching the birds around the feeders in the back yard.  For thirty years I have never seen a red headed woodpecker come to those feeders until this year.  Those beautifully colored woodpeckers like to be around water, and a pair have nested down by the pond for many years. But they have never come up to the feeders by the back porch until now and the pair have been getting well fed throughout spring.   

Also this spring, we have been feeding grape jelly to several orioles, which nested here for the first time. They usually are gone by early June but for some reason two or three of them are still here. The blue grossbeaks came for just a few days and left. Rose-breasted grossbeaks were here through most of May and then took off, despite the grain and sunflower seeds we put out for them above our flower garden in those squirrel resistant feeders.
As a kid, if I could bag a pair of squirrels or maybe three, I considered myself a great hunter.  Now there are seven young grays in the back yard attacking those feeders every morning.  We would eat some of them if I were’t too lazy to skin them.  It makes me realize that if I had had a bird feeder as a kid, I could have got a limit every time.

On my screened porch, as I look out across the Pomme River Valley, I do a lot of deep thinking. For instance, have you ever thought about how colors describe so many birds and fish.  Like the yellow billed cuckoo and yellow sucker, gold finch and goldfish, and white crowned sparrow and white bass!  While sitting on the back porch the other day, I realized that for almost every bird with color in the common name there is a fish of the same color in its common name. 

Here are some samples, and sometime when you are in the mood for some deep thinking, put together your own list.  Here is mine… bluebird and bluegill… black bass and blackbird… green sunfish and green heron… red headed  woodpecker and red snapper... brown bullhead and brown headed cowbird…grey gnatcatcher and grayling and on and on and on.

But the purple finch and orange-throated darter are all by themselves. No bird is orange but the Baltimore oriole, and no fish is purple.  But the drum fish is purple colored on both sides. Well I don’t always think about birds when I sit there.  Sometimes I think about nuclear phishics.

In high school, Rex Hamilton was a big farm boy who was a friend to everyone.  After high school, he established a successful business acquiring a huge tract of land south of Houston, MO he named, Hamilton Native Outpost. He and his wife Amy began raising and selling the seeds of native grasses.  To learn more about it go to a website of that name.

On their land there is a huge herd of buffalo. Rex passed away a year or so ago and on the day of his funeral one of those buffalo cows gave birth to a white calf.  That is as rare as a royal flush… as rare as an honest politician… as rare as an honest police force in a small town.  When the Sioux Indians saw a white buffalo, they considered it a sacred sign of some sort. They sort of worshiped it as a sign from God. I imagine that Amy Hamilton would take you out to see it and that sprawling sea of native seeds if you are interested.  Just find her phone number on that website.

And by the way, it is the only example of  ‘white’ amongst mammals.  I can’t think of any mammal with a name starting with  ‘white’!

It is going to be hot all summer, so I recommend that you sit on your porch in the shade and read a lot.  And as a coincidence, I have written 12 books about the outdoors which you will maybe like reading.  Contact me and I will tell you where you might find them close to where you live. You can email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com  or call my office at  417-777-5227. Or go to my web site, larrydablemont.com to see them all.