Full Mosquito Hawk Tornado Moon

5-8-23 Shoots! How did this happen, AGAIN? Thursday/Friday exploded on me, I totally lost control of my life and work, it was end of final week, whew! Oh, I also lost 40 student's names and grades from the Moodle grade book, gulp. luckily it was operator error and I didn't delete them, whew,  I just hid them from me...and found them again. So... the FMHTM rose and set without my letting the three or four of you listening know about this great event, again. I'm so sorry. I'll work on my flaws and try not to let it happen again, sigh.

This is what the FMA would have said:

5-4-23

Greetings to (all three of you) my readership! May the fourth be with you!

Middle of final exam week here in my world and I may still pull this off. I taught my last class last Thursday 4-27-23, a dizzying event for me but I'm now over it. Yulp, the old guy is retiring as of 5-31-23.

It looks like the full moon will happen here tomorrow, Friday 5-5-23, just minutes before the sun sets. I'm thinking of journeying this afternoon over to Eddie B's to catch a preview rising enjoying his vantage point out there on the edge of the great overflow swamp Atchafalaya! Maybe he will even offer me a drink of something Old Fashioned...Eddie has a longer view than we do down in the deep woods as the cane fields run on forever around his home, especially east and west. Think I'll bring my own brown water just in case he runs out or isn't home...

3-8-23 Jumped a hummer nectaring on Hamilton Hall native planting Virginia Willow blooms.

3-9-23 I broke tips of Live Oak tree branches for class this morning, as an example of male and female flowers on same plant, the new growth, especially the catkins, were full of small beetles. I guess they were harvesting pollen from the catkins (and perhaps pollinating too, though the LO is normally considered wind pollinated). There was no leaf feeding damage showing, so this is my guess.

3-11-23 Pecans sprouting in my rectangle of this grand green Earth.

3-12-23 My Pecans are actual in full leaf out, IT'S SPRING Y'ALL!

3-13-23 Cool front y'all, windy and chilly, there goes spring...sigh.

3-20-23 Spring Equinox

3-25-23 My Iris nelsonii is in full bloom now, quite a show. It is full of leaf rust this year, not sure why. I do not see it on any of the other Louisiana Iris in my yard.

3-26-23 RTHB on my Tropical Sage, yeowser, this is great!

3-31-23 Beautiful day, first day of the Books Along The Teche Literary Festival. I will do a Ancient Tree Bike Hike on Sunday morning. Oh, it is my 76th birthday! Yay! I'm excited that I can still keep a bike upright y'all.

4-1-23 Saturday, I rode the ATBH route to refresh my brain and just to get out and to check the timing of the entire darn thing (I never finish on time and most seem not to care, but hey, why push my luck). The Festival 5K was finishing up, this was a very poorly attended event, not a good omen for my Bike Hike tomorrow.

4-2-23 I worried over nothing, we had 22 bike riders for the BATLF-ATBH ( that's Books Along The Teche Literary Festival - Ancient Tree Bike Hike, y'all, (in case you were wondering), nice crowd for our 9am start. Returned home smiling to a yard full of Hummers, then off to a nap. Yay, and was it wonderful.

4-6-23 Attended the "Chuck and Mac Show", two of my heroes, Dr Charles Allen and Dr. Malcolm Vidrine were awarded the James William Rivers Prize for contributions related to Louisiana's culture and history by the ULL Center For Louisiana Studies. These two giants discovered remnants of what was considered extinct regional coastal Tall Grass Prairie (originally 2 million  plus acres), they studied it, wrote about it, restored it, fought for it. I am so proud of them and their award and our our Cajun Prairie!

4-11-23 RTHB (Ruby Throated Humming Bird) tearing up my native Iris, so very cool y'all.

4-14-23 A young RTHB taken by one of our two cats and left lifeless on the mat at our door for us to find and appreciate. I was at my chicken coop doing some mindless chore when P walks up with it in the palm of her hand. She asked what we could do for it? It did not seem the worse for wear but it lay there on its back, eyes slit open, tongue sticking out, she said she could feel its heart racing...What to do? 

Then I remembered something I learned from Dave Patton on the day years ago when he came over to band a winter hummer, a Broad Tailed Humming Bird, we spotted hanging around in the off season for hummers. Once he trapped and immobilized it he showed us how to weigh a hummer, you pin its wings to its sides, then lay it on its back on the postage scale and it will not move. So very cool y'all. 

So I had P put the hummer in my palm and I rolled it over onto it's breast. It just lay there not moving for maybe 10 minutes, then slowly, so slowly, that I could not perceive the movement, it brought up its head, just a little, slowly pulled in its tongue, brought its legs up. But y'all, it continued to lay there while I photographed it from all angles in my flattened palm. As I was looking at some goings on in the hen house when I felt the vibration of wings and when I turned back, it was gone y'all, gone and sitting on a branch 5' up in the Live Oak we were standing under. Yay! Now that is a good ending!

4-19-23 I was out on campus with my Enviormental Landscape Design class during a sketching activity. Artist Anne Darrah generously came over at semesters beginging and taught us all how to see and draw what we see, so we honed our craft each class day outside before instruction began. That is when I heard them, MIKIs calling! Mississippi kites ususally arrive in our area about Earth Day. I did not see MIKIs until a couple of days later but they are here! 

4-22-23 Happy Birthday Jake, Happy Earth Day y'all!

As I walked the magical mystery mile to my chicken coop to check water and release them into their yard, I experienced an amazing Mosquito Hawk Tornado. The sun was up and shown on the ground ahead as I strolled along I notice the sparkle of Mosquito Hawk wings, I say thousands of them, blue and green ones, well maybe hundreds, but lots and lots, covering the ground ahead of me and as I walked, they lifted off to chest high, parted to let me pass and swirled around behind me. There must have been a big hatch the day before and they came to rest on my path last night. My guess. 

It only happened on this one day. Thus the name of this full moon.

4-23-23 Not a Miki in sight in New Iberia or around us in Lower Upper St Martin Parish. Lots of crawfish ponds in the bottom near us with lots of Mosquito Hawks (Dragon Flies). MIKIs love to hunt and eat Mosquito Hawks on the fly.

4-28-23 Daughter Amy, "The Pretty One" as my other daughter Rachel calls her (btw, they are both beautiful women), lives in an unusual development SE of Baton Rouge along the Big Muddy, Mississippi River in dthe Dutch TownCommunity. Everyone's back property line falls against a finger of swampy land that holds water most of the time. Lots of trees and brush between you and your backyard neighbor. This backyard swamp is part of the great Lake Mauripas Swamp adjacent to Lake Pontchatrain, Mississippi Delta, very unusual y'all.

MIKIs hang there in the warm season when they return from winter migration and she called today to say they were back, which according to her is usually at her kids birthdays, Matthew on the 29th and pretty Emma's on the 30th.

Eddie B texted to report a Swallow Tailed Kite flying through his trees with a Mockingbird on his "ass". the STKs tend to stay over the great swamp and Eddie lives very close, thus he gets visited often.

Festival International was a wild time, we only had Friday evening open to enjoy the music.

Margaret loves to dance and does so very often. She and Jeff were at the stage where Bonsoir Catin was playing at festival, (this is a notable an all-girl Cajun band) Jeff and Margaret took that opportunity to dance the night away. She created this poem to a memorable dance:

Festival Dancing

In the Bonsoir Catin tent,
Festival feet are two-steppin'
All the girls are playin'
fiddle
bass
accordion
acoustic and electric guitar.

The parking lot is full.
We bump backs,
step on toes,
twirl and lose a hat.

Cares tossed to the wind
that blows in a hurricane swirl
lifting my dress.

He tells me "You are light tonight."
as we dance, dance, dance.

Margaret Simon, draft

Go Margaret! Oh, and Jeff...

4-30-23 Red Eared Slider (turtle) laying eggs in the middle of our driveway, limestone driveway.

I drove to the Louisiana Arboretum this morning to meet the WWW, Women Who Wander, P's defunct Lower Upper St Martin Parish Bunco (a card game) Club. These ladies got tired of playing cards and decided to do something else once a month. I walked them about botanizing for a while, we had fun and learned about the natural environment. It was a perfect day.

5-4-23 May the fourth be with you! 

I asked my hero Chuck Allen about his ditty "If you have a fifth on the fourth you may not be around to go forth the fifth". Ha! He informed me that that one was for July 4th. Oops!