more mysteries

Mystery #1:

When did this happen? Those storms only gave us a little wind, not much in comparison to what knocked down trees in the city only an hour or so down the road (& no rain). And that was days ago. No, it was all quiet for a few days, hot, still and muggy. I come around the corner of the house from the veggie garden and voilà! I think this rotten old limb was just ready to fall down!

You'll remember that this is the same tree which dropped another large part of itself across the drive in nearly the same spot not too long ago!

Mystery #2:

Every morning, I hear what sounds like the purr of a motor, the rapid-fire of a small hammer on wood. The bursts of sound go on for several seconds at a time, up to 1/2 a minute sometimes. Todd, the young man I hired to mow the lawn, said, the last time he was here, that he heard the sound too and followed it to an old tree at the corner of that old abandoned house across the laneway from my house. There, in the old tree, there is a huge hole. He thinks it's the nest of the pileated woodpecker that he saw in the tree.

Now, I recognize the call of the pileated w.p., but they haven't been noisy in that part of the farm -- perhaps so as to not attract attention to the nest. And the hammering is not like that I've heard in the past from the adults either. I mean, as my former housemate, Ann, used to say, the adults sound like they are "puttin' a serious hurtin' on the tree" when they are hammering away! I wonder if it is the young who make that noise, most often in the wee hours of the morning?

Mystery #3:

Can you see the corn?? Nope, I can't either!

I did have a nice row of corn coming up (I really did!!), but something wanted to eat it now -- before the corn could even grow enough to form any ears. I even tried reseeding the corn...and that too has been dug up.

This is peculiar, and here's why. Farmers around here have fields and fields and fields of corn, and not too far away at that from my own little garden, so close that I wondered about possible cross-pollination. Why is that that whatever dug up my corn seems to ignore the farmers' corn?

Now I don't know if it isn't perhaps a gardeners' myth, but I've heard talk that even wild birds at the feeders prefer organically grown/non-genetically modified seed. Could that be why the relative banquet not even a km away is scorned in favour of my teensy-tiny corn patch (which is now non-existent, by the way, because I'm giving up on corn for this season)?