Alabama Days

I recently returned from a week plus in a small town below Birmingham, Ala. visiting family. It is really nice to be in a small town for awhile. Walking in the woods right outside the door is a true treat. Of course it wasn’t so long ago that most Americans could walk out the door and into the forests and fields. After all it has only been in the last 60 years or so that we stopped being a place where most people were small farm owners or workers or lived in a town of less than a few thousand folks.

As we have spread out, the woods and fields and streams have taken a hit as concrete and plastic over ran them. And of course the many animals who inhabited these places are now gone to a great degree. As kids growing up in the south, my brother and I used to catch snakes, lizards, skinks, frogs and turtles all the time. Something today’s kids are hard pressed to even recognize more less find around their homes and neighborhoods. What a mess we have made. But there are still many critters out there squeezed into the last of the uncrapulated lands. Lets hope we get better in the coming generations.

 

Here’s a small horse farm across from the wooded hill my family lives on.

Looking out to the main road, a nice walk in the morning to get the paper and mail

Geese heading down to the lower pond first thing in the morning

A Pilated Woodpecker digs out some food from a small pine tree. Not so easy to find but you hear them in the woods often .

Lots of Hummingbirds to be seen if you have flowers and or a feeder.

Above is a bee chasing a hummingbird away from a feeder in the yard.

A pair of Yellow Shafted Flickers does a dance that lasted about ten minutes.