Nature in Sub-Urbia

Skywatch Friday addendum, 16 April: If I don't cheat and use this as my SWF entry for this week I won't have time for one at all--so here's an update. The evening after I posted what appears below, the moth was still on the screen. But as soon as I switched on the porch light, he fluttered off. I guess I was sort of hoping he was dead, so I could "collect" him--but now I'm just as happy he was just resting for the day. The birds, however, seem to have moved in permanently.

A couple of days ago I was slaving away at the computer, and glanced out the window in front of me to see a gang of Cedar Waxwings frolicking in my birdbath. I say "gang" rather than "flock" because these birds are ruffians. They attack any unwary bush with anything resembling a berry on it, and completely denude it in moments. One day last week, they were busy stripping my pear trees of blossoms. No pears this year.

Right around equinox time they were at the holly, and I can imagine that it's only a matter of time before the pyracantha berries are ripe enough to gobble up.

After their group bathing experience (I only managed to catch three at it, and I had to shoot from inside the house), they gathered to sun themselves in a neighboring tree (see below). As I've mentioned in an earlier post, these birds once used to fly through, eat berries, and leave--after depositing the remainder of their meals on unsuspecting lawn furniture and laundry. Somehow they managed not to poop on the pillowcases drying on the line behind the pecan tree.

Nowadays they seem to treat this place like a cafeteria, especially since the establishment of the Carbon Sink on the southwest corner of the property. There's a lot of privet there, some of it probably contributed by these very birds, as well as the volunteer Chinaberry that grew from seed about six years ago and is now over twenty feet tall. This tree is, of course, thought by many to be a weed, but to me its a link to my Asian childhood, and also to Italy, where I saw it growing as well.

At any rate, when they're through feeding or bathing, they congregate for a nice long squawk, yellow breasts gleaming in the sun. I think I can put up with a bit of bird lime (the color varies with the meal) in exchange for tree ornaments and a concert every now and then. If you'd like to see what they look like in action, YouTube has a whole page of videos.

The latest oddity is the appearance of a Luna moth on the rusty screen door at the entry to the house. Beloved Spouse noticed it last night when he was shutting down the house at bedtime, and I snapped a couple of shots, assuming that the moth would be gone by morning.

But he was still there at sunrise, and so I photographed him from both inside the house and out. I love the shot with the shadow with the grids created by the screen and door muntins, but was especially pleased with the one backlit by the sunrise that opens this post.

I think this is the only time I've seen one of these beauties alive (if, in fact, he is still alive, and didn't just choose to die on my screen door; I didn't poke him for fear that he'd fly away). I knew they were in the neighborhood because I found a wing once when I was cleaning up the garden.

I'm heartened by the continued appearance of evolution's incredibly varied results, because in moments when I think we might be getting stupider and stupider as a species, something might survive our (ahem) lunacy. I guess it's just time to stop reading the op/ed pages of the Daily Poop, and certainly stop watching really bad doomsday movies (we caught the train wreck called Armageddon a couple of nights ago; very messy, stupid science, but a tear-jerker nonetheless).

Every time I drive by a manicured lawn (in the very economical and ecologically correct Vera, who has already rewarded me with four leaves for good driving) I can't help but feel slightly morally superior, knowing that my ratty, 100% organic yard has become a haven for all manner of flora and fauna. The Carbon Sink is now a jungle, full of edible goose grass, which is great in salads and cures all manner of ailments. Last year it was cow parsley, but this year the late winter rains seem to have drowned out some of that, and what the kids used to call "sticky weed" has replaced it.

The Beloved Spouse mowed on Sunday, and although back quarter-acre doesn't exactly look like Augusta National (many of the plants for which various holes on the course are named actually grow in my yard, too), it's rather more civilized now that it's been shorn; at least the clumps of assorted wild grassy stuff are all relatively the same height. I do wonder, when I'm sitting out enjoying it all, whether our lack of a chemical lawn service is going to make it more difficult for my neighbor to sell her manse (asking price is $519K). But I'm thinkin' that the kind of folk who don't like my yard will do one of two things: not buy the house, or put up a fence (saving me the trouble of repairing mine, and giving me something to hang bird feeders on). I live in hope that people will love the house (it looks rather like Morris's Kelmscott Manor), and think having scruffy, farmer-wannabe neighbors with a suburban wildlife sanctuary is a good thing.

Images: all taken with the Nikon D80, with minimal adjustments in PhotoShop.

Skywatch Friday: Birds of Winter

All of these photos were taken a few weeks ago, before the snow. But since then, all but the hawk have been hanging around--along with more robins than I've ever seen. As usual, the sky provides the perfect background for bird pictures.

I didn't take part in last weekend's Great Backyard Bird Count, but if I had the number of robins alone would have signaled some kind of weirdness--perhaps the kind Thomas Friedman was talking about this week in the New York Times, and that I ranted about in The Owl of Athena yesterday. Whatever the cause, the year's bird visitations have been odd.

The bloody cedar waxwings keep coming back and contributing rather un-artful decorations to any horizontal surface they happen to roost over. The color of droppings depends on the berries they ingest, but since they were stripping the privet all weekend, most of the fresh "bird lime" was purple. They've pretty much exhausted the pyracantha and nandina, which left orange highlights. The shot below shows them roosting in a Chinaberry tree next door--these berries are now too dessicated to add any color--but in spring they're purple, too, and they make birds drunk.

My coolest visitor over the last month has been a young sharp-shinned hawk. My vocally talented border collie/basset mix, Arlo (who can imitate a barred owl), has a special bark to announce the hawk's presence, and I've been able to catch him a couple of times waiting patiently for the unwary squirrels that plague my yard, or the occasional cotton rat. Squirrels may be absolutely brilliant at getting into bird feeders, but they're incredibly stupid when they're young, and the hawk got at least one of them while he was hanging around.

The shots below show him front, back, and (not very clearly) in flight.

My feeders and suet cages attract mostly English sparrows and cardinals (I have three cardinal pairs at the moment) and pigeons and mockingbirds and jays. But skittish little Carolina wrens and goldfinches sneak in when the others aren't hogging things--and I've put some treats for them away from the fray. Flickers and downy woodpeckers, and a few nuthatches and titmouses (mice?) show up, too. What I have missed, though, for several years now, are the little slate-colored junkoes and the song sparrows that were backyard regulars when my children were growing up. We'd even get meadowlarks on occasion--but not any more.

When the kids were little, we could get out of Plano in five minutes. Now you practically have to drive up to the Red River to see real open land. McKinney, where we live now, was out in the middle of nowhere. My children attended a Montessori school on a single-lane gravel road amidst open prairie, and we'd see roadrunners and all manner of raptors on the way.

That school is long gone, and the prairie filled in with tract houses and six-lane roads and strip malls. The dwindling forest cover is making every hawk sighting a special event--and makes me truly happy that I let what was once a pesticide-laden garden plot go wild. It's only about the size of an urban yard, but it gives me a small carbon sink and provides some good shelter and forage for 'possums and hawks and other beasties. It also limits the amount of open sky I get to see from here, but the sacrifice is, I think, well worth it.