The hills of the north Willamette Valley are beautiful in mid-May, when the crimson clover fields bloom scarlet red. Crimson clover is an annual, grown only for the seed here, not for the forage.

Crimson clover flowers open from the bottom of the flower head to the top. Growers hope for cool, cloudy days during the bloom period, so the flowers will open more slowly, giving the bees plenty of time to visit each one.
Well, this year is definitely a winner in the cool and cloudy aspect!

Besides these crimson red fields, blue is another color that's jumps out at you about everywhere at the moment. First there were the Bluebells ....

                                          

Followed by the super-strong smelling lilacs, their sweet, heady scent that is almost cloying  almost a little too much for me ..

                                     

And just this last week the Wisterias are starting to bloom, like this gorgeous one in Doug and Brenda's yard ..

I never realized but they smell really nice as well, almost sort of citrus-y ..  at least, these do, I've heard of some varieties that smell like cat pee!

I even found a little nest with the prettiest little blue eggs .. too bad it had fallen out of a tree and they were all broken ..

                                                                      

In our yard a war has been declared ... it's us versus the squirrels!
A group of about 5 or 6 of them are raiding my bird feeders on a daily base .. and that's after they first clean out their own feeders.
So, the game is on! Here you can see James installing some plastic disks at the ends of the wire that the feeders are hanging on (they're actually plant-pot saucers) :

                         

And in between we strung lengths of PVC pipe .. both are slippery and turn freely on the wire which hopefully will give the squirrels no place to hold on to ..

They've already checked things out, but have not tried to jump .. yet!

If only they weren't so darn cute!