Dressed in their bright yellow, they find a high perch and let loose their song. The Meadowlark is one of the first birds to announce spring here at the house, their song filling the morning. We have a handful of males that have staked out our property as theirs, they compete to attract the females with their song. There seems to always to be that one male who doesn’t find a mate, singing long into summer in the vague hopes of getting lucky. He just stopped singing this past week. There is a definite silence because he’s quiet and signals that summer is coming to an end. I don’t want summer to end yet, so the silence has a double meaning. I’m missing their song.

Summer thunderstorms here in the Bitterroots are a double-edged sword! They are gorgeous, loud, and impressive for sure. This one produced 550 strikes in the area and started ten new fires, and very little precip. That’s the downside, the upside is the storm’s beauty. It’s hard to stop watching as it floats by. Thankfully, our first responders are the best, and the fires are either out or contained. It’s nice to be able to continue the beauty after the storm.

We don’t put out food or houses specifically for the squirrels. We do tolerate them because at times, they are entertaining. In the springtime, we are pretty diligent to keep them out of birdhouses. As you can see here, even after placing a secondary baffle to resize the hole, this mom still chewed through enough to get in. We came back from a week’s absence to find she had taken up residence and had dropped four kids. While we are the landlord, we couldn’t evict them. We would check on them every so often, much less than Maggie, who was pretty much plastered to that tree. Every time we’d get this stare. You look closely at mom’s eye, you can see me standing there with the Z180-600 on the Supadupa looking back. She’s always seemed to be saying, “Who you lookin at?!”