I was fishing from the shore just below the cabin recently (and got only one strike, which I didn’t hook) when I saw this little head pop up from the water near my feet. At first I thought it was a frog, which are common enuf near the shore. But as I looked at it more carefully, I saw that it was a snake.

Balancing the fishing pole in one hand, I managed to extract the camera from my pocket with my other hand and zoom it all the way in to take the picture you see above. No, it’s not the best picture I’ve ever taken, but it does the job.

Then I made the mistake of trying to step closer, and the snake glided away just below the surface of the water. It was clearly a snake, and I hoped I could get a decent picture of it, but I was too slow. I expected the snake to move to the shore and then slither into the tall grass, but it did the opposite, not only heading out toward the center of the lake but diving as it went.

Back at the cabin, I tried to look up what kind of snake I might have seen. I didn’t get to see its markings very well, but there are several harmless water snakes that are native to Missouri.

Later I went swimming, entering the lake at the very place where I’d had this encounter. Among my destinations that day was Danger Island to inspect the pines we had planted there. (Must visit as soon as possible to cut the scrub away from them and get them some sunlight!)

As I walked down the side of the island to re-enter the lake, I saw another snake slither into the deeper water. Life abounds.

Through much of the night, and even during the day sometimes, we are serenaded by several barred owls that live in the trees near the cabin. Their distinctive call, “who cooks for you? who cooks for you all?” is soothing and welcoming as we sit in the comfy chairs around the crackling fire.

Commonly, we hear one of these owls calling from somewhere east of the cabin, but still quite close. It happened that we were in that part of the woods hiking recently, and Libby spotted the cavity high in the tree you see above.

This was in the right part of the forest for our regular barred owl, and I tell myself it’s the bird’s home.

One night, as we were sitting around the fire, contemplating the universe, and listening to what seemed like a half dozen barred owls calling back and forth across the lake, it was all interrupted by the single, haunting note of a screech owl (sometimes known as a squinch owl). All of the owls went into a frenzy for a minute after that. They all began hooting and calling, rapidly and repeatedly.

Were they claiming territory? Calling a warning to each other? Responding to a challenge?

It was a bit of entertainment for us, and it’s always good to know that we are just two of the many residents of the forest.

This post is a bit of a departure for good old Roundrock Journal, but why not, right?

There is this meme running through the blogosphere lately about “found” book spine poetry. You examine the books on your shelf and “find” the poem that is among them based on the titles you see.

Thus, after a minute or two of searching, I “found” this poem:

Waiting for Aphrodite,

Far from any coast,

A great current running

The message to the planet:

Hardscrabble

Passage of darkness!

You can tell I’m no poet, but I can pretend with the best.

I’ve written of this walnut tree a number of times on this humble blog. Quick recap: I dug it out of my neighbor’s compost bin and planted in the good soil of the pine plantation. I fenced it and spoke kind words to it. That was perhaps seven or eight years ago now.

Every year it comes back with green growth, but it seems to have stopped getting bigger. I don’t have any quantitative comparison points aside from the height of the fence, but I’d have thought it would be thriving by now, shooting taller than I am (which isn’t all that tall, really).

Maybe this will be the year. Maybe I’ll wander to to the back of the Pine Plantation to find the walnut arching over the top of the fencing, robust and happy. (Or I’ll find that the parts of it that did arch over the fencing were nipped by the marauding vandal deer.)

It could be that the soil in this area is more favorable to shortleaf pine than to walnut. Some of those pines are now more than twenty feet tall! (The envy of my neighbors, all of whom insist that they’ve never been back on my property. And then they’ll say, “That sure is a pretty lake you have.” You can’t see the lake unless you drive all the way into my land. I don’t mind. Much.)

I do have native walnuts growing in my woods. Not a lot, but some. (I don’t have any native Shortleaf Pine — I’m a bit too far north for their natural range.) But I don’t have a lot of really good planting conditions, so I had reserved this corner of the former Blackberry Corner for this walnut I had favored, hoping for the best. So far, I’ve been mystified by the lack of response.

But I press on.

This is the overflow drain near the top of the dam. Doesn’t look like much of a drain, does it?

We’d had a lot of rain down in the Roundrock area in the week before I took this photo. If I can read the NOAA weather site correctly, about three inches fell in two days. That kind of event always washes a lot of debris into the lake, and it gets concentrated on top of the overflow drain as the excess water pours into it.

This stuff was about three inches thick. It pretty much made the drain inoperative, from above anyway. (There is an elaborate pipe arrangement that will bleed off some excess, and it would still work even with the top of the drain covered like this, but it couldn’t drain off enuf water to make a difference.)

I’ve learned to keep the pitchfork down at Roundrock for just this thing. It used to be one of the things I always took with me and then brought back home each trip. But there wasn’t much point in that. I never used it at home, and I frequently used it in the woods.

Forking the debris off the top of the drain is a bit of a production. The angle is bad. The slope of the dam is tricky. And I have to throw the debris over the top of the dam (rather than just back into the water). It takes a little patience, and I usually end up cleaning the steel grate on top by hand once I have the big stuff gone.

Now that I have those two magnificent spillways, I’m not as worried about the drain being clogged as I used to be. Still, it’s one of my lines of defense, and I always do what I can to keep it clear.

Well, Google Maps has finally updated my part of the world. Here is an image of my little rectangle of heaven on earth, a little place I call Roundrock. Not bad, right?

The lake is nearly full in this photo. And the trees are green (not brown, as in the last image I had). I could zoom in a bit more, but there’s not much to see. My best guess is that this image was taken last summer. The cabin would be there, but with a green roof, it’s lost in the trees. The lake is dotted with invasive willows. Someday I’m going to do something about them. Danger Island looks like a green peninsula in the left end of the lake. (It’s an island right now though.) The pecan plantation (to the right of the lake) looks well managed. I’ll just leave that image in your heads, okay?

Nature takes care of itself. In the upper left you see Blackberry Corner, which I sometimes call the Pine Plantation. Some of the pines there are now twenty feet tall. (Others are barely three feet tall.) Growth is rampant this year. Despite my meagre efforts, the forest will fill itself with green and good of its own choosing.

I know this blog has been sporadic lately. I apologize for that. I hadn’t been out to Roundrock for two weeks, though I did spend three days last weekend there. Oddly, I only managed to take six photos in all that time. Time and motivation permitting, I’ll have some new posts here. It’s still a lovely place, a place I’d rather be than anywhere else in the world. I’m sure I’ll thing of something to say about it.

This is an astilbe plant we put into the bed in front of the cabin. There is another one in a pot near the porch.

I like astilbe. They have a nice flower, and they seem thrifty with their deep green leaves and sensible blooming period. But they are not Missouri natives (as far as I’ve determined — let me know). But the whole point of planting the astilbe here is to attract hummingbirds to the front of the cabin.

We’ve put a lot of effort into plantings that would attract the hummers (some not so successful). We’ve put in hybrid salvia, which has proven itself a hummer magnet. And you already know I’m cultivating several red buckeye plants before the cabin that will, in their time also be attractors. As with the astilbe.

We’ll see how it goes. If we’re sitting in the comfy chairs on the shady porch overlooking the sparkling lake, and the hummers are buzzing among all of the plants we’ve planted for them, and the astilbe does its job, then I have no complaints.

The photo above is evidence of actual “hard” work I did while at Roundrock last month.

Some critter had been burrowing behind the little retaining wall I had built above the overflow drain in the dam. Any burrowing on a dam is a bad thing. So on a recent trip to the woods I took the wheelbarrow and shovel across the dam to the spillway where a good amount of silt had collected. I shoveled the silt into the wheelbarrow, then wheeled it to the overflow drain. I then packed the silt into the holes the burrowing critter had made. I held no illusions that my silt would stop the burrowing, but I did shove a lot of rocks into the holes before I filled them. At the very least, I hoped to prevent rainwater from rushing into the holes and further compromising the dam.

On subsequent visits, I found that the silt I had packed there was undisturbed. It seemed a success. Until I saw that the critter had simply dug a new entrance to its lair nearby.

Still, it’s a pretty nice photo, don’t you think?

I’ve come to think that the wall I’ve built in front of the cabin is a sort of microcosm of life. I’ve seen little critters like these more than a few times on the stones. I suppose there is something they like about the wall, or the stones that comprise the wall. The stones are warm and flat. Perhaps the hunting is good.

I bought the stones at the local hardware store in the little town near Roundrock. I’d much rather give them my business, and I’d much rather haul a load of the stones only 10 miles to my woods rather than 110 from my home. Even so, I once had two pallets of the stones delivered to the cabin. The service was free. Some day, when I’ve put together a couple of dollars, I intend to get another pallet of the stones and finish the wall all the way to the road. It will help define and maintain the area around the fire ring. (Plus it will keep old Pablo busy.)

I chose pinkish stones, which I think was the best choice given the options I had. I don’t like the gray ones; they look unfinished. The dark brown ones look dirty. The creamy ones will soon look dirty. Regardless, the regularity of the wall looks appealing to me. And perhaps to the critters too.

Last year, in the late spring, I picked up two hybrid salvia plants to put in the bed in front of the cabin. We had put in regular salvia as well as impatiens in the bed in a bid to lure hummingbirds, which would then entertain us as we sat in the comfy chairs on the shady porch overlooking the sparkling lake.

The impatiens didn’t last long at all. The regular salvia hung on a little longer but eventually died off. The hybrid salvia, however, stayed with us the whole, dry summer and into the fall. They still had flowers in November, and they were green into December. Best of all, the hummingbirds loved them.

Thus we’ve been on the look out for these hybrid salvia this year. The usual stores where we get bedding plants for the house in faraway suburbia either never heard of such things or were expecting a shipment of them “any day.” It happened that we were at a local farmers market in faraway suburbia when we came upon a grower who had several flats of them. They weren’t cheap, but they were large and flowering, and they were winners last year. I was willing to to spend a little money and get a few. But I dithered, and the grower sensed my hesitation, so she made an offer. I got ten of the plants for twenty dollars, which I thought was a good price, especially for large plants that were already flowering.

So when we were down at Roundrock last weekend, we put the salvia in he bed before the cabin. We gave them a drink of water (since there is no rain in the forecast for this week), and then I told them that I hoped they could begin attracting hummingbirds soon. (I assumed there were none in our area this early.)

Then we went to the pines to put up some fencing. The blackberries there (still trying to reclaim that corner of our land) were flowering profusely and promise a good crop of berries. As I looked at the white flowers, a saw a bright green jewel fly up to one. There was at least one hummingbird at Roundrock that day.

Later, when we were back at the cabin, Libby said she had just seen a hummingbird visit one of our newly planted salvia. The plan is working already.

Buckeyes are blooming in Kansas City right now, but my baby buckeyes at Roundrock were not. I didn’t expect them to this soon after being planted. I’ve read that they can bloom as soon as their second year, but I doubted my luck would hold out that far. Maybe next year at this time I’ll have some red buckeye flowers beside the cabin to help attract the hummers.