Primarily Phenology

Some of you have seen this already, since I've been fooling with custom lists and coming to the conclusion that, for me, with the way my mind works or doesn't, such lists are probably just impossible.

I've added some remarks about birds to the end, so it's not exactly the same entry. Just to be more annoying, that's why I did it.

Immediately post-Minicon phenology differed very little from pre-Minicon phenology, since, for practically the first time in recorded memory, the weather became cold and discouraging for the duration of the weekend, so that I did not fret perpetually to go home and look at my flowers.

Things are burgeoning now, though.

Blooming:

purple crocus
yellow crocus
blue-white crocus
winter aconite in the front yard, very copiously. Hmmm.
all the scilla
waterlily tulips
dandelion
ice pansy

leafy:

violet
hairy bellflower
coreopsis
dame's rocket
rudbeckia
Shasta daisy
Henry Kelsey rose
wild rose
neighbor's lilac; it also has deep purple flower heads just beginning to form, very small and very purple
mock orange
all the daylilies
anemone -- I thought I'd lost it; yay!

Just up:

true lilies
hosta

The grass is green where I've watered, otherwise quite discouraged.

I've got so many volunteers in the yard that I am about to go out and move them into the beds to which the hollyhocks are not returning. I'll plant some hollyhock seeds later, too.

In the evenings when I go out to look at the planets, chickadees are still yelling "Phoebe!" and cardinals are whistling. The mourning doves, silent or maybe absent all winter, are doing their Hoo-wah hoo hoo hoo call, which I love partly because doves sound exactly that way at sunset in the Sonoran Desert.

A couple of days ago the flickers came through. There were maybe half a dozen of them on the lawn, walking about and stabbing their bills into the turf exactly as if it were a tree, with that woodpecker motion. I hoped they'd stick around, but I have had only the one sighting.

I think the juncoes have left.

Pamela