I was looking at the website of the Xerces Society recently and came upon the following sentences, which I swear I am not making up. I was so enchanted by this info that I immediately sent them a donation. I mean, you’ve got to love an organization that’s devoted to things without backbones (excluding the New York State Legislature), and that can produce prose like this:

“There have been few sitings of the Oregon giant earthworm in recent years. It can reach up to 60 centimeters long and it reportedly has spit that smells of lilies.”

Last week i bought myself, for my 60th birthday, the Pyramid Deluxe Composter from Garderners’ Supply Company. I’m im love with it. When i go, just toss me in and pitch me around every two weeks. By spring: compost!

i was sooooo proud that i assembled it myself. In the directions it says you “might need”  a second person to hold one panel upright while you bolt the adjoining panel to it, but … not Genie Abrams, SUPER- ASSEMBLER! The sliding doors work, the hinged lid works … i can’t believe it! The whole thing works! i’m stealing tons of newspapers from the Record so i can shred them and toss them in with my kitchen scraps.

i put it out near my raised garden. i also bought the Super-Hot Compost Starter, which is a bag of … dirt, it looks like. But it’s supposed to make your crap turn into compost faster, so i’m sprinkling a little over my coffee grinds, eggshells, banana peels, etc.  every time i dump them in.

The whole affair is about 3 feet high, 3 feet wide, and 3 feet deep … a very dignified, handsome, dark brown thingie with rubberized-plastic walls, a magical pyramid lid designed to let in just the right amount of rain, and built-in slits for “proper aeration,” though it also says in the instructions that i am to  toss it with my pitchfork every couple of weeks. (How do you like me, having a PITCHFORK?! There was an old, snaggle-toothed one in the shed, with its handle broken off so the whole thing’s only about 3 feet long, but it works fine! i’ve left it leaning against the composter at a jaunty angle, so all the neighbors can see it and wring their hands with envy.) So far, i’ve been pitching it every couple of DAYS. It’s so much fun! All i need now is a big straw hat, bib overalls and a piece of hay to chew on.

With the 10-inch stakes to steady it from the wind, the Super Hot Compost Starter and the cost of shipping, it came to $230, but Tim Riss doesn’t have to know that, necessarily. i mean, Rachel Quimby gave me a sweet, white-ceramic counter-top compost pail for my kitchen, and it really doesn’t make any sense to fill that up with scraps each week and then … do what with them? Just toss them onto the garden for the woodchucks and skunks? NOOO!

WATCH OUT! Genie Abrams, master composter, is In the Yard!

In today’s Times Herald-Record, on Page 4, we’ve run a “correction” that has to be the prize-winner. Yesterday, we ran a story by Meg Murphy about (slow news day, or what?) a sedge wren. Granted, the sedge wren is quite rare in this area, although the Cornell Lab of Ornithology lists it as among the “least endangered” species of birds nationwide. Anyway, one seems to be nesting in Montgomery, a sleepy little community 20 miles or so west of Newburgh.

It’s a tiny, dull thing, hard to find in the weeds. (The sedge wren, not Montgomery. Although, come to think of it …)

We actually ran a story about the same damn wren early this spring, when it was first sighted here. i’m not sure it was Meg who wrote that first story; can’t remember. But she was definitely all over the Wren Follow-Up. Apparently, folks from local birding clubs, having seen the first story, have been trooping out to this field in Montgomery with their binoculars to try to get a glimpse of the feathery little bastard. So anyway, near the end of this sweet little feature story, Meg was writing about a group that was tramping around looking for the wren a few days ago, and she wrote: “A pewee flycatcher dipped its way across the sky, but the wren didn’t appear … They pointed binoculars toward the brush to see a song sparrow, then a mockingbird … The group made its way along the path, spotting a woodpecker, a goldfinch … ”

So why did we “have” to run a correction? We lowly copy-editors are not told such things, and can only shudder at the magnitude of the error. But rumor is that it’s the goldfinch family that lives “along the path,” and the freaking song sparrows that live near the brush, not the other way around.

Or something like that. Leave it to a birder to know and/or care, and to call in demanding a retraction. But i wouldn’t be surprised if the Goldfinches themselves called in, outraged at being mislocated in the sparrows’ lowly neighborhood, and then the Sparrows’ attorney (a crow, no doubt) called in right after that saying his clients were shocked and sickened to find themselves wrongly listed as living near the damn Goldfinches, showoffs who flash their yellow jackets all over Montgomery and fly like drunkards and with whom they would never associate in a million years, and adding that he was prepared to file a libel suit if we didn’t run a correction immediately.

And the Record hastened to do so. Check it out for yourself.