So, a trip to the labs of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History positively identified our little shrew as a masked shrew. You can only positively ID the pygmy shrew by a cranial examination. The small mammal expert was gracious and generous with her time, and she was impressively knowledgeable- we learned a great deal and we are so very thankful for her hospitality. I think now we have a much better idea of what we are looking for, although now we are desirous of a dissecting microscope. It was a bit disappointing to find that it was not a pygmy shrew. One should be up to snuff on their species of special concern- there are several species that are so similar to their more common cousins and only close inspection can determine which it is for sure. For instance, there is the pygmy shrew which looks so similar to the masked shrew except for their teeth and there is also the smooth and rough green snakes, where only the rough is a species of special concern. The spotted salamander is another example, where the yellow spotted is rather common but the blue spotted one is endangered.

Have seen 3 different type of snakes this week, is it the heat, or do they show up better in the sparse brown grass? There was a green snake in a blueberry bush, a garter and an unidentified snake that was possibly either a rat snake or a black racer. Along with the snake we also saw… drum-roll… snake eggs!!! How often do you get to see them? At other times we have seen ring necked, black snakes, red bellied and milk snakes. Garter snakes do not lay eggs, neither do rattlesnakes. It will be interesting to see what hatches out of these eggs.

It’s blueberry season.. They were doing great early on but as you can expect, they do not like this record breaking heat. It has been quite warm and dry. We have been doing some sporadic irrigating but we are not set up like we ought to be. Hopefully we will do better in the future. A goodly amount of money spent on an irrigation system will ensure that this will be the last severe drought on this farm in our lifetime.
You can zone out picking blueberries for hours on end and sometimes there is too much time for your thoughts to get away with you. Unfortunately these days a lot of that thought goes to fretting. So sometimes a book on tape is playing while picking if there is not some companion to have conversation with.

This the caterpillar of the cecropia moth, It is huge!!!! it seems it would be more able to eat a bird than the other way around!! This picture is from last June, one wonders if it could possibly be the caterpillar of the moth we saw this year. It has a wide variety of host plants and quite a few are here on the farm -cherry, plum, apple, elderberry, box elder, maple, birch and willow, linden, elm, sassafras and lilac.

Making hay the old fashioned way! The baler is a New Holland 68 circa the 60's, still working well. we sold it all to the Amish neighbor which sort of seems backwards somehow. We can keep some of the second crop as we only need some for mulching.