Some Actual Field Notes

This sudden onslaught of warm hot weather has brought everything on! I love June for its fullness, lushness, and greenness.

As we drove the back roads home from the country store, licking our ice cream cones, my husband looked around at all the apple trees with their profuse blossoms and said, "Heavy blossoms mean a hard winter coming."
Consider yourselves warned.

The photo is of the apple tree on the bank of the river on our lot across the road. A pair of ospreys is tinkering away at a nest on that lot but they also sit in the original nest. Yesterday, we have five -- 5! -- ospreys flying over our yard, two who were in the original nest who flew off to circle underneath another pair, and a lone one who eventually flew away.
It's all very confusing. There will be no babies this year but we have more ospreys than we know what to do with. Not that we actually have anything to do with it.

Speaking of babies, we have goslings!
A pair of Canada Geese nested near our pond in the middle of the field and Dwayne saw three goslings toddling along behind the pair the other day.

As I drove home from Halifax yesterday, I listened to a radio program on which a woman discussed her problem with porcupines eating her house. Really! They're eating the verandah and the floor boards and the cedar shingles. The munching wakes her up at night.
All of a sudden, an idea for a children's book popped into my mind. With rhymes, no less. If I hadn't been driving, I probably would have written the whole thing right there in the car, but I remember it and I worked out an ending while walking the dog this morning so some thinking time with a mug of tea and a notebook are in order.
And no, she doesn't want to shoot the porcupines. Like me, she doesn't have the heart for that. 
Dwayne planted his sunflower seeds yesterday, seven rows in the two beds along the road. I think this profusion of sunflowers in late August, early September has come to mean a lot of people driving up and down our road.
I'm still being asked about "my" sunflowers and I always say, "Nothing to do with me. Those sunflowers are all Dwayne." He grows the happiness.