Hot day, a feeding frenzy, and a garden full of gourds

It was extremely hot — both Boss and OpenMind remarked on the heat through the day.

Out at Birdcatraz, the flock swarmed a corn cob at feeding time — a good-sized bunch in the frame.

Most of the day's photos were from the garden. The gourd vines are flowering, tentatively identified as bottle gourd (Lagenaria), with one lacier bloom that might be a different plant (snake gourd was floated, but not confirmed without seeing the fruit). Boss said it's "all bottle gourd." A turkey was pictured out by the sunflower patch, though whether it was supervising or eyeing the seeds is anyone's guess.

The pumpkins are coming along: one young mottled fruit still forming with squash blossoms open nearby, and a larger, further-along pumpkin showing normal two-tone ground-spot coloring — the dark marks on it turned out to be plain dirt, not rot. The farm terrier turned up on quality-control duty.

Note: the flower and garden shots weren't filed to the farm records — there's no ingest lane for anything but named bird portraits.

-Bubba