Hanging Around The Garden

This little fellah was spotted behind the garden.  

My kids and I were out helping and the gardener pointed him out. 

His mama took off, but a cubs first instinct is to climb. 

And that's what he did.

He stayed up there long enought to put on a show for the guests. 

And when we were all done and had left, he took his leave. 

I'm assuming he met up with his mama. 

A big thank you to Adventure Man for the use of his photos. 

N is for Nest

This is the redneck of bird's nests! 

They've been here for years. 

Long ago abandoned.

C is for Cubs

These cubs are growing and we hope we get a chance to see them again soon. As you may recall, these pictures are from last year, when they where a year old. But you can see more of the family and compare how they've grown here.  

By the end of the summer they thought they owned the place.

Hopeful, this year, they won't become such a nuisance that they have to be removed.

Photo credit to Adventure Man

Just Buzzing Around

Trying to take a picture of a busy old bee is harder than I thought! 

Those suckers are Fast! 

Bunny was watching this little fella and was squealing with joy. She loves bugs! I've made a point of not getting creeped out about bugs so my kids would not fear them. They are fascinating! (Although Adventure Man did ask me to stop taking pictures of spiders…)  :) 

That reminded me of a story my mom tells. She says I was about 2 years old when she heard me singing in the back yard. She looked out the window and saw me sitting under the Bird of Paradise holding a bee in between my fingers. I was singing to it. The bee was struggling. 

I think it was this story that made my brothers start to call me the bee charmer. I wasn't stung that time, but I've been stung before. I was even attacked by a swarm when I was five. But I've never been afraid of them like some people are. 

In fact, I would even say that bees are my favorite insect. This is a bumble bee. There are 20,000 known species of bees.

Do you have a creepy crawly that you can't stand? Do you have a favorite? 

Why Aren't They Swimming?

There's no one in the pool! 

Why aren't you swimming? 

 Oh MY Gosh! 

 Mom saves the day... and the spider! 

(Not that HE needed help, HE can walk on water! 

Trust ME I tried to flush one of these guys before… he swam right back up again!) 

 Now back to working on those freckles...

:) xoxo

The Little Sip Cafe

This is my hopping little cafe that has got my sugar tub running on empty! This was taken this spring, before all the hollyhocks where in bloom. We aren't quite as busy these days.

What. Is. That. SMELL?!

It all started the day my brother and his family were here. I walked into the living room and said, "What is that smell?" They all looked at me as if they had know idea what I was talking about. OK. My brother has 3 boys. Three teenage boys. Maybe that's just their boy smell.

But I wasn't convinced... At All.

These boys are good looking kids and they practices good hygiene. I was pretty sure it wasn't them.

Our living room is the log cabin, a one room home that was once owned by one of our wrangler's grandparents. Whether they lived in it year round or just used it for a hunting or vacation cabin I don't know. Perhaps I should ask! The rest of the house is an addition. And really quite nice for an older home. The only complaint we have is the lack of bathrooms. No wait, we DO have bathrooms, what I mean is we don't have enough. Really we just wish there was a master bathroom.

The next day the smell was stronger. Can you really not smell that? They didn't seem to notice. By this time I knew what it was. It was a mouse. A dead mouse. I know that smell, I have a cat! I started checking the traps. The one behind the wood burning stove was still set. The one under a cabinet was tripped, but had caught the extension cord. I'm guessing that was from yanking the standing fan in front of the screen door too many times.

I had put out more traps just a few nights ago because I had seen a mouse run past the stove at 3 AM when I was up with the baby. He had come out from under the T.V. and had paused when he saw me in the big chair. I had paused too. I don't think it was for the same reason. But maybe it was. Maybe when a mouse sees a human, he gets a shiver down his spine. The hairs on the back of it's little neck stand up. But then again, maybe not.

That night I put out a lot more traps. But the next day I took them all down again because we were having a birthday party and I didn't want to trap party guests. Or gross out any moms. I checked all the corners where I thought there might be a forgotten trap but found nothing. The smell was getting worst. I could hardly stand to be in the room. Adventure Man couldn't smell it! My sister-in-law couldn't smell it. She asked what it smelled like and I told her, "a dead mouse!" No one knew what I was talking about. I tried, for the sake of our guests to not complain. To not say something. What if  I was wrong! What if teenage boys really DID smell like that! Heaven help us all when our girls start dating… when they are 29…

It wasn't until the day after my brother, his wonderful wife and all those great boys left that we found it. Bean bent down to the speaker next to the T.V. Then she come and whispered in my ear that she found the mouse. There was one more trap, in one more corner that I had missed. And it had been there for at least 4 days in a room  without AC in the hot summer heat.

I threw it all away, trap and all. I scrubbed the area, and let is soak to loosen that which was stuck to the floor. That was when Adventure Man walked in and said, "I smell it now!"

Darn Right You Smell It! And I Cleaned It UP!

I am happy to say, that my living room smells much MUCH better. And it wasn't my teenage nephews at all!

Mr. Cottontail Is A Daddy

We have lots of cottontail rabbits. I believe there is a family under the house. We have another family in the barn, and in the shed, and probably in the woods. We see them a lot.

But this little guy was much smaller than the others.

He seemed to be just as interested in the kids as they were in him! 

He was very little!

The pictures aren't very good because I shot them through a screen. I used the Nikon D70 which probably helped me get the focus past the screen so we could see the bunny. I haven't taken very many pictures this week because I have miss placed my other camera. My point and shoot panisonic. That's the camera I use the most. I took the pictures of the wildflowers with it as well as the horseshoes and the hummingbird at sunset.

 

Danger! ~ Wordless Wednesday

This sign greets our guests, as well as us, each time we drive in. 

And for good reason! 

Wordless Wednesday

I left a light on the other night, and it attracted these two lovelies.

Wordless Wednesday

Big Sky Sunsets and Little Red Birds 

Family Time, a Missing Pond and a Piss in the Woods

We had a day last week when Adventure Man was off. In fact, I think it was the first one since we opened! So we went for a hike. More of a walk really. We went to the pond just up the trail from our house. We went up last year, almost exactly the same time (last year was the 12th and this year was the 14th) and took family pictures. It was beautiful.

June 12, 2011 

This year I was amazed at what an easier time I had. I had just had a baby last time I hiked it. That, and last year was a very wet year. There was water on the trail. Mud threatened our every step.

When we got to the pond we realized just how dry this winter has been. 

June 14, 2012 ~ After a dry winter 

As the kids ran off to investigate the mud Adventure Man and I looked at each other. Knowing the trouble a dry summer can bring after a drier winter. What every awe inspiring thunder store can leave behind on a mountain top like ours. Fire.

The mud puddle that used to be the pond. Makes me think of The Land Before Time! 

Rock Staking By Adventure Man

We headed back home. We all had a nice hike. We got lots of fun pictures.

Little Bear in my "piggy-back" backpack still has a cough and wanted a ride.
Lou Lou took the picture. 

And then my 4 year old announced, just before the house was in sight, that he had to go potty. As the rest hiked on, I told him the wonderful secret of how the bears do it. He was delighted! 

I Don't Want to Alarm You, But… There's Something Out There!

The dog stood on the back porch. He was barking. There was a hint of panic to it. Not the usual "please-let-me-in-now, I've-done-my-thing," kind of bark. He didn't take his eyes off the woods. I let him in and then fiddled with a pot on the porch. The dog, who was in the house at this point, came back out. He stood by me, and looked at the woods. I felt his consern. I felt his worry.  I decided to take his advice.  I didn't study the line of trees that come to an end at the edge of the yard. I didn't even wonder what could have showed it's self even for a moment, just a few feet from my boy's sandbox.  I went into the safety of my home and shut the danger out. And forgot about it. Or did I?

What is in the woods? Dorothy said it was "Lions, and tigers, and bears! Oh my!" But is it really? Ok, I have already proven to the world that we have black bears in the woods. And I've seen a young grizzly wonder down last spring. But we chased it off and I've not seen it from the house. The Staff may have seen them on their wildlife watches in the spotting scope. But I don't see as much as the rest of them.

We have a staff member who's position is a Naturalist. Our Naturalist or Nature Boy (or girl) as I like to call them, depending on who I'm talking about, take the guests on hikes and show them things. You know, the kind of things most people, like myself, would never know or see. Like bear claw marks on trees, or wolf scat.  They know the names of wildflowers and trees. Our Naturalist even knows which tree is called Mountain Lion Tree because it's where the cats like to sit and watch out for food to come walking up the trail. Yikes!


Evidently this tree is just up the trail. The trail that starts at my front yard. So Nature Boy put a camera in this tree. It's pretty cool because it's a motion sinser camera and it takes pictures at night. But would it be able to capture the image of what lurks just out of sight? Could it capture the image of a vampire, or a zombie? I'm thinking that's really what was out there. From reading we know that vampires live in the woods. And everything we read is true, right? ahem.

We all know there is a growing population of zombies. Have you noticed? I mean, there seem to be Zombie Walks all across the nation! And Zombie Runs! And in Florida somebody got their face eaten off. Really? Eating someone's face off? I think I'd notice that! If it's a zombie, that would be fairly easy to handle.  They're easily spotted, that would be why my deaf dog was able to sense it. You can kill them with a shovel. You don't even need a permit at all! Oh wait, apparently you do in Florida. But this is Montana. Everyone has a gun in Montana. In fact, I know most kids spend their free time shooting ground squirrels just for fun. That and if you don't keep on top of the ground squirrel population, they will over run you and create so many holes in the fields that your animals will be at risk of breaking a leg in them.

But I have never really seen a zombie here in Montana, so either I'm one of the lucky ones, or they just haven't gotten here… yet. No, I guess it's probably not a zombie. Or a vampire. But that might not be such a good thing. Why? What could be worst than a zombie? Well, back to what Dorothy was worried about. Back to that tree. That camera.

This is a picture from the camera from 2010

Just as soon as the camera was up and running it got footage of a mountain lion. But not just any mountain lion, no this one is pregnant! Ok, I have NO idea how they knew it was pregnant, I guess it's cool to wear tee shirts that say "Cubs on Board" out here in the woods. But since I don't really know enough about it, I'm just going to go with it.

There has been three incidences this spring where a wolf has been killed by a mountain lion. They know this because of the puncture wounds in the skull which is typical of the way these cats kill. I know this because I heard it on the radio. I really would like to question my sources about now.

There was a summer at the last ranch we lived at where we kept seeing cats. We finally got permission to relocate them with the help of Wildlife Fish and Game. That was a cattle ranch and the cats were on privet land. They had been seen stocking the cows. They were seen behind the employee housing. They had been seen around the resort's front desk area. It turned out that it was a family because we found the nest. Unfortunately this was a high risk situation and it didn't turn out as well as we planned. That's what happens when lions and people mix. It's just not good to have a neighbor who would like to eat you. I believe they only had to kill one but here is the account and photos from a friend who was working the front desk at the time.

During that time a very non-helpful person told me about an attack in Missoula where a lion came into a park on the outskirts of town and grabbed a nine year old boy by the head and ran off. (Maybe it was a five year old.) The father had run after the cat. I don't remember the end of the story, probably because I had my fingers in my ears and was shouting, "la la la la la!" to myself. Needless to say, I'm kind of freaked to let my kids out the door and out of my sight.

Mountain Lions are capable of attacking and killing animals as big as deer or elk. A small child in the woods that had always been so magical until now is nothing. I have to say given the choice of what could be in the woods, I'm really gonna have to go with zombies here, people.

~~ Credits ~~
Many thanks to Misty for many wonderful pictures of the Zombie infestation in Florida. To Anna for the picture of the dead Mountain Lion. To Jeff and Nikki from A Place for Embers, for the shot in the dark from the tree. And also to Google for more pictures of Mountain Lions. I hope I never get close enough to take a picture of one myself!