The Compost Bin

Okay, now this is getting ridiculous. Somehow my yard has become a hotel for ducks.

As long as they stay out of my garden, I'm okay with my new tenants. It's the woodchuck that has to go.

Last night, when my wife came home from food shopping she noticed this egg was sitting there next to our azaelas. Earlier that day, she had dug up some of my burnt Zinias and now there was an egg in this burnt zinnia hole. No one noticed any birds in the area so now we have a mystery egg staying warm in the mulch.

My best guess would be that it's a duck egg. I don't know anything about what bird eggs look like but I say duck egg because we always have ducks hanging out by the pool. A few years back the pool was broken and we had ducks and frogs living in there so I guess these ducks remember the good old days and like to visit.

My son thinks it's a dinosaur egg and that would be pretty cool although I think we would have noticed a T-Rex popping a squat in our Azaelas.

I don't think it's spring yet.

As a blogger who writes about composting, I have set up a Google news alert to notify me of any compost related news. Yes, it's sad but it's true. In the news today is an interesting article about zombie chickens.

It reports that when egg laying hens reach an age where they aren't as productive, the hens are being euthanized and then composted. Yikes! But the even scarier part is that the euthanizing process doesn't seem to be 100% effective because some "zombie chickens" rise up out of the compost piles.

Maybe it's time for me to get rid of the compost news alerts, but I definitely plan to keep a close watch on my compost bin.

My kids, ages 4 and 2, believe that multi-colored bird houses attract the most birds, so they decided to use all the colors that they had to paint this bird feeder. This chickadee doesn't seem to mind.

Have you ever tried to take a picture of a hummingbird in flight? Well I tried unsuccessfully for way too long (as my wife was so helpful to point out). So here's a few pictures of hummingbirds sitting still. In flight, they are amazing looking but much too quick (for me anyway) to capture the moment on disk.

These hummingbirds live at my Dad's house in rural CT. Taking the kids to visit Grandma and Grandpa is always a lot of fun.

And I think that taking a 1/2 hour sitting by the window to take some pictures for my blog is time well spent. The kids (ages 2 & 4) are going to create havoc whether I'm watching them or not. :)

We know that composting is great for you garden but did you know that it can help stop the spread of avian flu? When the disease is detected in a single chicken on a farm, the entire flock must be disposed of. That's where composting comes to the rescue.

Maryland Scientists Dig Up a Response to Bird Flu. It seems that the heat of a hot compost pile is enough to stop the spread of the bird flu.

So composting the dead birds is a better way to deal with the disposal problem.