Dee and Luke

Dee, Luke and some sheep

Happy Birthday to me! 61 today and starting to wonder just how long you can go on saying "Yes, but that's not REALLY old...." We had planned for a nice quiet weekend, relaxing, eating and drinking maybe a little too much, avoiding doing anything unpleasant or arduous, and we had no idea we were in for quite a treat from an unexpected direction. This would rather snooker the "quiet" bit of the plan but left everything else intact.

Dee takes her turn at the bottle
feeding of Bábóg

Welcome to the happy home, long lost cousin Dee and her son Luke. Dee is the same age as Elizabeth but her whole family emigrated to Australia back in the 60s when the girls would have been only 6. There is famous family story that when Dee (and the rest of the children) were being brought round Dublin to say farewell to the various cousins and relatives, young Liz so didn't want to lose her playmate that the pair conspired to hide Dee in a wardrobe buried under a pile of clothes.

Luke, Elizabeth and Dee

Well, it seems the missing Dee was eventually liberated from her hidey-hole and taken away to the airport. Dee has never been back since and grew up and had her own family out in Gold Coast, just south of Brisbane in Queensland. One of those family is eldest son Luke (30) who has joined Mum on this trip.

The by-now-traditional dippy Lisacul goose-egg breakfast. All
our guests seem to love this.

48 years later, Dee decided on a trip back "home" - a 3 week mission to see a bit of Ireland and to catch up on as many of the rels she had left behind, as she could. She already "knew" us a bit from Facebook and this blog. She and Luke are now 2 weeks into this and have done a lot of the tourist-ing and have met 'Steak Lady' and the 'Silverwoods'. This weekend is our turn before they head on to Mullingar to find 'Sparks' and Kim. Thanks for coming, Dee and Luke, you have been a pure pleasure to host and you are welcome back any time.

Dee is obviously delighted with the toast.

One amusing anecdote from all this is that Dee has only now found out how her old family name "should" be pronounced. She has spent 50+ years saying it with a hard 'T' and a long 'U' vowel, as kott-yule-y. When she arrived in Ireland 2 weeks ago she found they were all calling themselves with the very different pronunciation , 'kotcherly'. It was quite a surprise, she says, like suddenly finding out you are adopted. She has a whole new family.

Fox deterrent - 3 dogs, a male turkey, a human and a
smokey fire

That visit has obviously eclipsed the rest of the news, such as it was. I'd just been quietly bimbling around enjoying the increasingly warm weather, the spring flowers and everything warming up. It was nice to be able to spend some quality time outside.

Making smoke

One of the mornings I decided to burn some of the brushy wood brought down from the larches by Storm Eleanor. This would kill 3 birds with one stone. I would be out there for hours in full view of any foxes peering in. I would burn a pile of brush behind which the fox could keep hidden while getting dangerously close to the chickens. I would also remove that same pile which the turkey had been trying to lay an egg in when she got mauled by our foxy friend last week.

Flowering cherry

So, we are all tidy now and that risk is removed. It is a bit ironic that we spend all day trying to stop our chickens dying at the hands of the fox but then, occasionally, we have to 'off' one ourselves. This was the fate of a surplus rooster recently. This bird was becoming increasingly aggressive and amorous so that a level of stress and intensity had built up in the chicken flock without us really noticing. Once we'd ended his little run, we are both delighted and amazed by how relaxed calm has descended once more.

Flowering currant.

You can go outside and watch the birds for hours - nobody is squabbling, battling or trying to sneakily 'tread' anyone else's harem. That's the way we like it. Millpond smooth and still-quiet. That's if you don't count the bleating baby lamb, the 'buckwheat buckwheat' cries of female Guineas, the gobble gobble and chirruping of turkeys, the occasional cock-a-doodle-doo and dogs barking and the cackle of a successful and proud egg-laying hen. Or 15.

Horse chestnut "sticky bud"

Ah well, That's enough for this one. I must away back to my guests and my Birthday.

Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord...

Stir up Sunday

A blog post with at least some of those words in it is by now almost an annual tradition. A blog of mystery and unpredictability, this is obviously not. We do love this process, though and can think of no finer way of creating the 'pud' and the Christmas cake. Off then on a special shopping mission on the Saturday (25th) and some of the dried fruit doused in Jameson overnight.

Hours of fun, too, on the Sunday adding final ingredients, mixing and doing the obligatory stirs before tipping the mixes into their respective cookware, lined with grease-proof or covered in same and foil, tied down with string like Mamma used to make. Now cooked too - 8 hours gentle blupping for the pud - and left to rest for the required amount of weeks. The icing of the cake is my department - I have a cunning plan but need to source some coloured icing, which could be tricky.

Temporary fences allow the sheep to access all areas. 

Friends of the Blog following our hosting of local gardening journalist, Paul Kirwan may have been expecting our story to appear in the Roscommon Herald today but unfortunately we got 'bumped'. Paul had had a story about his involvement in Golf Course "gardening" sitting on the back burner for weeks and the paper decided to go with that one this week. 'We' are therefore postponed to next week. More on that next week, maybe.

As bad as it got slush-wise.

We had a short burst of winter over the weekend. Nothing impressive or photogenic, just lots of raw, biting wind and wet wintry showers. No real frost either, so we are very sloppy under foot and pinned down to indoor jobs.

The ever reliable duck eggs. 

Rather bizarrely, our white Sussex hen, 'Connie', has decided to go broody. We have no idea why she thinks it is Spring but just maybe she has worked out that by doing the broody thing she can sit in a lovely warm nest in a shed and be given waiter-service on the food and water, protected from piratical 'sisters' trying to drop more eggs in on her by the cage I have built around her little hidey hole.

Not so much 'frozen' as covered in a
layer of part-melted slush. The pond
goes gun-metal grey.

I have, though, stitched her up. Not wanting any more chickens just for the moment, I have slipped 5 duck eggs under her. She will not be able to check on her diary but her instinctive Day-21 will come and go. Duck eggs take 24-28 days at least to incubate. Day 28 will put her right on Christmas Day so, with luck, our guests will get to see cute, new-hatched ducklings. Chickens will generally just sit tight, unaware of any problem and not visibly concerned that the chickens look a bit 'funny'. You do then need to take the babies off the Mum by about Day 10 because the Mums get quite upset that their babies will not learn to scratch and peck and do not try to stay dry. We'll have to see how that goes.

The turkeys are still thriving and impressing us with their size. We reared three because in previous years we have given them to family, one going to Sparks for a special dinner he used to do for a gang of his Dublin builder mates. Sparks is no longer in that world and now lives outside the capital, so tells us he doesn't need one, and neither, apparently, do any of the Silverwood gang so we have three turkeys and only ourselves and our guests to satisfy. Turkey for Easter anyone? St Patrick's Day?

Finally just a couple of pics for the usual reason, that I have them. First up, Lizzie. When you are wiped out by a cold and chilled to the bone, wrap up well in the 'onesie' and under a blanket. If that's not warm enough chuck a couple of cats and a dog on the bed too. Toasty.

Next up the two grown-up boy-cats, Blue and Soldier who have lately been fighting a bit over the best roosts and nests. Here they both grabbed the top of the book-case under the stairs, with their heads against the woodwork in a quiet stand off. Anywhere you can climb, I can climb higher? In the end Soldier blinked first and jumped down, leaving Blue to stretch out luxuriously across the case-top with a rather smug look on his face. The status quo is restored. For now.

Things that (don't) go Bump in the Night

Kato is un-impressed by my carving skills.

A quick (and short) post tonight as Hallowe'en night slips by almost un-noticed by the local Trick or Treaters. Or so it seems to us here, anyway. We have often only had one or two callers and on one occasion none at all. I think about 15 is our best score - across 4 families. Little armies of costumed un-dead usually safe inside Hi-Viz jackets and carted round by Mums or Aunties in big 4x4 vehicles. Some are let come up the drive by themselves, others come up shepherded by a parent.

They are invariably very well behaved, very polite and nervous and try to take only one or two chocs from our proffered tub. You have to insist and persuade them that it is OK to grab a hand-full. They look for re-assurance from Mum to check this is allowed. This is very different from the kids we got in Kent (UK) I remember, particularly in the Medway Towns where there was a real risk of running out of sweeties half way through the night.

As I type this it is 20 to 8 so it is probably all done (though, as I have said before, never say 'Never') and we have had a grand total of 3 kids in one family group. These were little ones we did not recognise but it now seems to be the local modus operandi that you, the householder, advertise your open-ness with a pumpkin Jack-o-Lantern lit up on your gate pier. If you don't want the visits, no pumpkins and everybody respects that.

Hi-tech cheese presses.

The only "Trick" mean-ness I have heard of is some 'egging' of house fronts in the village. My Honesty Box was empty (sold out again!) but we brought it in under the trees out of sight of the road as a precaution. Our neighbour(s) have in the past brought their small gang of 7-ish along but not this year, so I guess they are all feeling a bit grown up now and such childish pursuits are maybe not 'cool' any more. The Silverwoods are, from the blaze of pics in Facebook, still leading the charge down in Co Laois - there has been a fun-shoot at the archery and all the family seem to be carving the most excellent and intricate pumpkins.

Cheese just out of the moulds, waiting for their dry salt-cure

Ah well. What else is going on? The short answer is plenty but not a lot I can tell you about. The 'plenty' is one of those "someone else's story" things where I do not have the blessing of the key players to 'report' the story on the Internet. Sorry about that.

Home made wine. 

Other than that we are chugging along making bread, making cheese and starting into our home made wine, which is really nice and quite a revelation. We are now on GMT, of course, so all the bird lock-up and evening duties are now moved forward to 5 o'clock and the long dark evenings are upon us and I am back to being woken up by the dogs at around 7 a.m.

I think I'll leave it at that. Have a good Hallowe'en. Don't run over any little witches, ghosties or ghoulies. Or the Feast of Samhain, if you prefer.

Bucket List Item....Tick!

Back in November I wrote a post in which I noted that the Silverwoods had managed to find some archery and that I was going to join them and fulfill a life long ambition. The post is at

http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2015/11/patterns-and-toiles-bows-and-arrows.html

 if you would like to re-cap. At our age we are all supposed to have a mental or written "bucket list"; a list of things you would like to see or do "before you die". I am not sure why it is called a bucket list but my mental one includes plenty of pricey stuff we are never likely to achieve now that we are no longer DINKYs swimming in cash (African Safari, Mountain gorillas, terracotta warriors and Great Wall in China, drive a Mk 2 Escort (preferably red and with a POO 505R number plate) with respectable speed through a Welsh forest stage... that kind of thing). But one item which I should have ticked off years ago is the archery and now it seemed I would finally get this done.

'Playing' in the back garden - lots of bad
technique here (flappy sleeve, 4-finger
grip, stance etc) but I had not yet had
 a proper lesson.

Then along came one of the named storms of late November and made it unfair to leave Liz minding the farm overnight, and then the loss of Theo, then Christmas and so on, so I got postponed until January. We finally made it this weekend just gone. I drove down to the Silverwoods' Saturday lunchtime, met the gang all there. We had a first play and demo of the bows and arrows there - Steak Lady has a nice car-width drive up the side of her house ending in big thick solid gates, where Mr S sets up a serious, woven straw, circular target on a tripod so that they have a mini archery range out there. We adjourned for a lovely curry (Thanks, SL!) and then headed for the proper evening club session in a village near to Portlaoise where club-founders and instructors, James and Tom put a gang of around 17 of us (including myself and 2 other complete, Day 1 novices) through some paces.

None of your bendy yew tree wood
for us. A modern "riser" .

They use a big church hall where 5 archers can stand in line and fire arrows down the hall to either thud successfully into the foam targets or to be gathered up by a heavy drape curtain behind designed to catch and stop any misses. It is all very safe. Your group of 5 fire off a set of 4 arrows each before everyone puts their bow down flat in the floor, once all are ready, the instructor tells you "Go collect". You then get another 4 shots and on till you must stand aside (behind) while the next group of 5 archers take their turn.

'Caging' the balloon north, south east and west

The name of the game at this early stage is nothing to do with trying to hit the bullseye or even the target circle, it is about finding a consistent technique and stance so that all 4 arrows in your set land in a tight group. You can be anywhere on the target board as long as all your arrows hit within a few inches of each other. Beginners tend to see one go low left and mentally adjust up right etc, spraying arrows all over the gaff. You need to learn the correct process and stance (feet just so, Right* arm straight and rigid, left hand with thumb in and main three fingers round string, pull back till your first finger is at the corner of your mouth, breathe, relax, steady and release). You don't aim by looking straight down the length of the arrow with the feathers (fletches) poking in your eye, but rather along the top of the arrow and lining the point up with a likely place on the target. That way, says the theory, if you always line up on the same place and use the same pull and technique, your 4 arrows will all fly the same trajectory and all land together. What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

Happy Beginner

Ah well, I had an absolute blast and loved every minute of it. I did reasonably OK at the archery but also had a great time meeting people and talking to them. Towards the end of the session James clipped a load of balloons to the targets for a bit of fun and had us shooting at them. I achieved a certain notoriety by missing with all 4 of my first arrows but managing to cage the balloon with an arrow touching in north, south, east and west. The balloon was undamaged but held firm. "Bet you couldn't do that again!" they said. I nailed the thing with my 6th arrow. It was a brilliant day and my heartfelt thanks to the Silverwoods and SL for their hospitality and letting me play. Also to the newly formed "Laois Archery" club, James and Tom. I must now go off and find a more local group (There is one in Castlerea) to save me the 2 hour drive and to practise more and see whether this is something I do, indeed, want to take up properly and even get good at.

I pass the 700 Tweets mark on 'my watch'

The other pastime mopping up all my spare hours last week, you will recall, was the curatorship of the @SmallHoldersIRL Twitter account. That was good fun too but I am not a natural 'tweeter' so I was quite tired of it by the end of the week and happy to hand the account on on Sunday evening to the next man. He is a pig and water buffalo farmer on the Beara Peninsula (I kid you not - the buffalo are apparently the perfect solution to the rough grazing and wet bogginess of County Cork). My stuff seemed to go down well and I was quite popular as a poster. We had plenty of sharing and banter going on. I may take another turn in the future but it will not be for a wee while yet.

*'I am left-eye'd despite being right handed, so I shoot holding the bow in my right hand.

Coldest, Wettest, Slowest, Latest?

Bramble still tiny and hard-green on 21st Sept.

I don't know if this summer will go on record as the worst, but it is certainly our worst since we have been here, admittedly only 4 summers so far. We have seen figures for July which rated it coldest/wettest for 50 years but not so far for August which was also pretty dismal. Everyone is amazed at the lateness of crops and we have certainly had more failures and almost-certain-failures than we would welcome in a season.

This yellow Kniphofia, glorious last year, is barely
showing colour on 21st Sept 2015.

We are managing to keep ourselves fed on some crops - mange tout, black kale, chard, broad beans, spuds, toms and onions but we have managed to get through the whole season (despite some repeat sowings and plantings) without producing a single French bean, spring onion, courgette, squash or 'normal' pea (as opposed to mange tout). No French bean got beyond the 'germinate and the slugs will graze it off' stage. Crops like red beet are so far behind that they sit there in their row like little red pea-sized pellets with a few leaves up to about 9 inches. Red beet is such a large-seeded plant (OK, seed 'clusters' technically) that it never fails.

The bees were still active today in the lovely afternoon sunshine

The slugs left me only one Purple-sprouting plant and that, stressed by having few leaves left, started sprouting when only a few inches tall and gave us one measly sprout to share. In previous posts I have said that apart from a crab apple tree looking promising and a tree load of plums stolen by magpies, the apple and pear harvest will be very poor. I worry that the impressive stands of parsnip and carrot foliage may have nothing hidden under them. The bramble, which would normally be dripping at this time of year with a few over-ripe berries which you missed when you picked them over several times in early September, are still mainly hard green and tiny. They are so backward that I wonder will they miss altogether this year and just abort these unfinished trusses as part of autumn die-back. Do they do that? I have never seen it before.

Starting to load the log-store.

We have come by a couple of wine making kits entitled "Hedgerow Wine" which have all the yeast, food, grape concentrate and other goodies you'd need to get some blackberry wine going as I did many many times in my youth (memories of 26 1-gallon demijohns arrayed on shelving around my bedroom all at various stages of completion. It was quite a hobby). We were hoping to put these to good use with our normal bucket loads of blackberries from nearby fields. I think that boat may have sailed. We may have to use frozen currants from earlier in the year or frozen blackberries from 2014.

Tomato chilli jam labelled with JM's excellent charity labels.
The picture on them shows our house in c1900.

Ah well, swings and round-abouts. I had to nip down to our lamb-butcher and collect our meat from the twin ewe lambs Thelma and Louise. The deal there is that you can watch the lads butcher them up so that you can choose whether you want ribs or racks, gigot chops or full shoulder, legs cut in half and so on. They also bag up, weigh and label all the cuts as if they were going to over-the-counter customers. These two animals were possibly a bit smaller than the (store) lambs we have done in the past, coming in with carcass weights of around 43 lbs but we knew that and we needed that to happen for two reasons.

Lamb to go? Thelma (left) and Louise (right) ready for
delivery to the Silverwoods.

First we could not pile the 'fast crunch' in to them at 1 kg per lamb per day as you would store lambs, as we didn't want the ewes putting on too much weight (it affects fertility). Second, we needed them out of here before we took delivery of the ram, so they went at just over 5 months. Still, they were good looking carcasses and I am sure the recipients will be delighted with them. These two are off to Silverwood's today with Liz on a quick over-night visit. A definite success in our 'harvest' terms to counter all the fails. These were only our 2nd and 3rd ever lambs born and raised here, ear-tag numbers 002 and 003.

Dragonfly wing floating on the pond.

While I was in the butcher's I got talking to some lovely people, fellow small-holders. When I arrived they were actually in front of me in the queue, getting 2 of their own lambs processed and we got chatting about smallholdings, sheep, pigs and so on. When we had dropped our lambs off we had come home via Sue's to collect Rambo and, en route had pulled over to allow a car coming the other way to pass on the narrow road.

Tom the turkey has nearly finished growing his new tail back. 

We spotted that the car was towing a trailer with an eye-catching sheep-cage on it built from pallets tied together; quite a neat job! Liz joked that they were probably also headed for the butcher as there would not be much else they'd be doing on a Monday morning, that early, moving sheep about. Talking to these people and finding that they lived in a similar direction I wondered out loud whether this pallet-cage might have been them. Yep! That was 'us' they said and explained that their neighbour had sorted them out in an emergency with a replacement stock-trailer that morning. Impressive 'recycling' we thought. We chatted on some more about how you 'borrow' rams and about sheep health issues and ended up swapping phone numbers; we all think that you cannot have too many possible helpers and ways to share costs (e.g. for fluke doses which only come in bottles suitable for big flocks and you end up throwing 9/10 of it away when it goes out of date).

Rambo drives Dylan (right) away from Lily (left).

And finally on the good news front we have seen Rambo today for the first time paying some focused attention to one of our ewes, Lily. Liz noticed him getting very close behind her and wondered if he might be about to "start" (this is a family show, we'll leave the graphic stories to the David Cameron followers!). I did see him have a quick try-out but also spend some time driving away ram-lamb Dylan, so I suppose I had better record today's date in the calendar. He should definitely be full-on soon, if not actually tonight. Lily seems to be standing for him too, which is surely a good sign.

Kiltybranks

The big Five-O earns Sparks this beautiful cake created by the
Silverwood ladies

Full of 'happy hormones' as Liz says (admittedly in a very different context) after my successful lambing and completion of the Bee Keeper exam, I am ready to enjoy the rest of the month's events. First up the Brother-in-Law, Sparks, makes the big Five-O. This is much to everyone's amazement as 'my' Liz, being 'BIG' sister to our hero, feels obliged (nay, legally REQUIRED) to do her BABY brother down at every opportunity. To tease him, take the mick, prick his bubble when he gets uppity and even attempt to remove him from the picture (OK, possible exaggeration here but I've never had a big sister, so what do I know?).

Sparks at 50

Famously there is even an old faded black and white picture of Liz, at 18 months old looking for all the world as if she is going to smother this new baby brother when he first arrived, with a pillow; this has been treasured in Dad's wallet for 50 years and was pulled out on Sparks's day. Well, Sparks has managed to survive all this skullduggery and was there on Sunday to enjoy a big family meal down at the Silverwoods' base in County Laois. This was a real 'Gathering of the Clan' with spouses and children rounded up.

The new dog-walk

This family all have a strong cooking gene in their DNA so we were in for a treat. The main course was boeuf en croute and the beef was sublime. The veg were gorgeous too, and I do like my veg - lovely cauli and courgette in cheese sauce with the top browned to perfection, carrots, superb roasties, boiled potatoes and gravy. The starter had been melon with parma ham. The Silverwood ladies had played a blinder and created a truly beautiful cake which shouted '50' from its top in a rainbow array of 'Skittles' (small sweets the size of Smarties, but chewy) and was fenced around with Kit-Kat fingers and bordered with more Skittles. The centre was a vanilla sponge but cleverly marbled in colour and taste by boring holes in the top and pouring in melted Skittles of various colours. The icing sticking it all together was creme-fraiche flavoured with melted orange Skittles. Low calorie it most certainly wasn't but, heh, who counts calories at a Silverwood 50th? Brilliant do everyone involved (including Liz once we got there) and thank you so much for having us. Happy Birthday and a huge congratulation on making the 50 to the Birthday Boy.

You can walk for miles across the bog here on these hard tracks
and even better, the dogs can come off the leads.

I have been exploring, looking out for possible additional survey walks for my bumble bee hunts. Less than 2 miles away, we had seen a sign promising a 'looped walk' in the nearby bog-land and forestry but had not got around to trying it, so that is where I headed on March 21st. Today, I returned with my camera. It is a lovely spot where I can let the dogs off the lead and we can walk for miles on hard tracks across the bog. The only flowers at present for the bees are on the gorse but it has the look of a place that might come alive with interesting vegetation species.

Old traditional hand-cutting turf 'works'. 

Way down off the road is a place where people have been cutting turf by hand in the old traditional way, with the fancy, L-shaped "slean" spade. Normally when you see this you know it is just for the tourists, but down here, there would be no tourists and the cuts were as fresh as the car tyre tracks and the boot prints - these guys had been out over the weekend. There was even an old, wooden-wheel turf barrow lying down there when I looked on the 21st, though that had gone by today. This "hand-won" turf could be the genuine article.

Pool of the Dappled Horses

One lovely place 'down there' is a point where the local stream widens out into a wide, size-able pond. The banks are grassed and you can imagine it would be a nice quiet, private picnic spot in the summer. The sign has been translated as best we can as "The pool of the dappled horses". Well, I can imagine the scene with a few of the local cobby ponies led down there to wade or drink, but there were no horses there today, only my three westies chasing about delighted by the freedom of off-lead action.

15 yards of new book shelf space.

Back at home we are, once more, officially "short of bookshelf space". Although Liz audited hard as we packed up the Kent house into the removal van and cleared boxes of books, we still brought a gazillion with us and we are now, three years later, back to stacks on the floor and double-depth stacks in shelves where we have run out of space. Our best solution to this in terms of reasonably priced but sturdy, solid shelves (we hate saggy book shelves!) is IKEA's 'Billy' range but IKEA in Ireland, means a trip to Dublin and, anyway, these are 8 foot tall cases, so they'd not fit in the little Fiat even as a flat pack. Luckily, we have a bro-in-law (see above) who might just be coming this way, right past IKEA's front door, with his shiny new 8-seater people-carrier Taxi. Sparks, of course!

Gorse in flower down at Kiltybranks

He is also bribe-able with food, so Liz cooked up a plan that she'd stay overnight at the party to get some longer bonding with her belovéd baby brother (not trying to kill him now, then?) and catch up on all the family gossip. I would zoom home on my own to rescue the dogs and look after the livestock and the next morning Sparks would bring Liz home accompanied by 3 big flat pack boxes of planks and we would do lunch here (chicken fajitas as it happened).

The lambs are now 4 days old

The book cases were unloaded and rattled together within an hour or two of the lunch eaten and taxi departing. Liz now has 45 feet (I think librarians measure it in yards, so 15 yards if you prefer) of clean, bare, shiny book shelf space to play with. The wall opposite the main open fire is no longer blank and decorated only with 4 prints of drawings of Dublin architecture. Liz is now puzzling over 'alphabetical order' and division of our goodly book collection by category.

Taddies at day ten, hatch from their individual jelly sacs

The only other thing to report for this one is that the tiny tadpoles, at day ten, have started to hatch from their individual jelly sacs. The next stage is that they gather on top of the spawn-mass, safe from predators below, while they eat off any more jelly they require before eventually dispersing into the safer bits of 'open water' and the tangle of vegetation. So far so good. They are also sufficiently far off-shore that our elderly but clever Marans hen will not be able to reach out over the pond and pick them off, as she does with water boatmen and pond skaters.