This Pearl Crescent is one reason why my To-Do list never graduates to Done. I’ll start a task—hanging laundry, pulling weeds, etc.—and then I’ll see a “bug.”
Full stop. Nothing else matters but a sudden, urgent need to know:
Who they are,
Why they are here,
What they need.
Here are my favorite “Whereas” statements in the new, bipartisan Resolution that just days ago declared April to be “National Native Plant Month:”
Continue reading “a National Native Plant Month!”
Easiest butterfly garden ever: let celery butts and carrot butts sprout, then stick ’em in soil.
Maybe I mean “easiest butterfly factory” ever, because these butts won’t just feed butterflies, they’ll make butterflies.
All summer, Black Swallowtail butterfly moms will find the leaves and lay eggs, and then you’ll have more Black Swallowtails.
And if you put your butts where you can see them every day, you can watch the whole butterfly lifecycle from the comfort of a lawn chair.
If you have not yet watched a butterfly lay an egg,
or a caterpillar hatch,
or a caterpillar molt,
or a caterpillar become a chrysalis,
or a chrysalis become a butterfly,
this scrap garden is your chance to increase your chances.
You MUST SEE THESE THINGS.
If you have a kid or a parent or a friend or soulmate or neighbor, then THEY MUST SEE THESE THINGS, TOO.
Continue reading “Instant Butterfly Garden (from scraps)”
“Smothered and Covered” works great for hashbrowns at Waffle House, but not for trees in your yard.
When invasive vines smother and cover trunks and branches, the tree—eventually—is toast.
Look around. It’s winter. Are shade trees casting shade from twigs that should be bare?
Are elms and hackberries magically green from soil to sky?
I have a winter hummingbird!
“Please consider leaving out your feeder year-round,” said the hummingbird researcher to Facebook, and for some reason I considered.
“Keep it cleaned, maintained and easily viewed and YOU might be one of the lucky ones to host a winter hummingbird.”
I want to be a lucky one, I thought, but I’m a slacker with feeders. It’s hard enough to keep scrubbing and filling and PROVIDING during normal hummingbird season (April to October), especially when I see no hummingbird for weeks at a time.
I need instant, gorgeous, iridescent, humming feedback that the work is worth it.
But, I fetched my feeder from storage. Maybe mold grows slower in winter?
Continue reading “Winter Hummingbird”
The Robin ‘Hood show is starting. Nashville ‘hoods keep robins all year, but we get an influx of winter robins, too, and right now all the robins are appearing in a hackberry near you.
November is the month I love hackberries all the more.
And, it’s the month hackberry haters hate them all the more.
The same reason explains both: ROBINS.
The Sidewalk Nature pic below is another Robin “hood:” the hood of a car. Surely the driver must was from out of town, because locals know better than to park under a hackberry full of robins.
Continue reading “Robins for Thanksgiving”Here’s another Wonderful Thing.
First, I’ll show you, then I’ll tell you.
But what you see here is NOT rain,
is NOT dew.
Look:
Look, a mosquito!
Should I:
1) Spray my entire property with synthetic pyrethroids that “target” mosquitoes and are “safe,” but which actually kill bees, butterflies, and all invertebrates, and can “persist in the environment” for months?
Or
Continue reading “Choices”
Even just the endpapers are helpful in Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds of Eastern North America. But this is the first time these endpapers don’t end a mystery. There’s this mystery bird, see, who I DON’T see, and who I barely hear: high, fast, faraway.
Continue reading “Birding by Star Trek”A Signs of the Season roundup for the second week of October:
Bumblebees go to sleep early now, and our Canada goldenrod is hung with dark, little blobs well before Civil Twilight.
Each blob is a bee or fly.
Few things are cuter than an upside-down bumblebee falling asleep.
