I should have titled this thread
“Ask the techno-nerd from the city who ended up in rural Thailand, 70 miles from Nowhere City.”
Although late October, we still get some hot days, and the cone mushrooms are still sprouting on our land. This restricts my wife’s movements, as they must be cleaned within a day of picking or their taste suffers.
Sorry for the misidentification. I’m usually careful, typing in the Thai name my wife tells me, Googling to find Latin name, etc. In the case of that bird, I think my wife herself just called it “hummingbird” in English.
Other fauna on our small plot of land include squirrels, mongooses (mongeese?), etc. We have fish in our swimming holes – we don’t stock them but they arrive in flooding season. We have several Red-whiskered Bulbuls who have taken up residence recently; this excites my wife though Wikipedia suggests the bird is quite common. We have too many varieties of invertebrate to mention.
And flora. We have far too many fruit to eat ourselves, and my wife insists they can’t even be given away – everyone is faced with the same glut. My wife’s garden includes innumerable different herbs. Today our dinner was prepared with tasty wild betel. It’s in the pepper genus but not spicy hot like yesterday’s herb, clove basil.
We also grow rice so would be almost self-sufficient for food, except I insist on eating meat, milk and chocolate. Our dogs try to contribute now-and-then by stealing chickens from the neighbors. (One neighbor has lost at least one expensive fighting cock to our dogs; the fact I once rushed his wife to emergency room may be the quid pro quokeeping that from becoming a police matter.)