Comice Pear Harvest 2013

Today we decided it was time to take the Comice pears off the tree. They're not ripe but we've been losing so many of them to the raccoons and the birds that we decided it was time to cut our losses.

About half of the pears have either fallen off or been picked off by raccoons. They were all from the lower branches, leaving only the highest pears still on the tree where they were ravaged by birds.

This second photo shows what we managed to salvage from the upper branches. We've had so many fruit flies around here lately that the pears will not last sitting on the counter, so we'll have to eat them or make something with them while they're still not quite ripe.

As green as they are, they're still very sweet. They taste sort of like a Red Delicious apple.

New Bat Photo

Last week Bugsy the bat was hanging from the window screen rather than the bamboo shade. So this time he was facing the camera. It's still not a very good photo but you can see his ears, and it is definitely a bat in this photo.

Why doesn't he like the nice new bat house I built for him? It's much more private, and it's located right over the flower beds so his little bat droppings won't fall on our window sill. Best of all, the bat house doesn't roll up at night. When that happens, he still hangs out between the roll of bamboo and the outer flap covering the pulley and pull string locking hardware.

Sometimes he doesn't return in the morning. We suspect he may have a girlfriend.