When You Feed the Birds, You Feed the Birds

We put out a few bird feeders to attract birds. Over the course of a year there will easily be a few dozen regular species. Of these species, one is the Red-winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) and another is a Cooper’s Hawk (Accipiter cooperii). Our feeders regularly bring in the Blackbirds for the various seeds and nuts. The Blackbirds bring in the Hawks.

Unfortunately, for the Red-winged Blackbirds, an encounter with a Cooper’s Hawk may be its last encounter.

Something we’ve observed is interesting. The hawk will usually come swooping in from around the side or over the top of the house and the smaller birds, in an attempt to get away, sometimes fly into a window stunning themselves. The hawk swoops right in, grabs the prey and flies off with it to finish it off and then enjoy a meal. We’ve come to accept that the big birds have to eat too and feeding the little birds means feeding the bigger birds too.

Housing Crisis

Don’t let them tell you we don’t have a housing crisis. We witnessed one in our own back yard! First a pair of these guys were checking out a hanging nest bird house.

Shortly one of these birds (a House Wren) showed up and gave the same box a once over. It didn’t take long until the Black Capped Chickadees were chasing him away.

Not five minutes later yet another candidate for the nest box showed up. This one didn’t need to be chased away as it quickly determined the hole (1 1/8″) was too small for it. If you’re building next boxes/bird houses, keep the hole to 1 1/8″ in size to exclude sparrows and larger birds if the smaller ones are your target species.

Once the owners established themselves they went in to inspect their new home. Shortly after we witnessed one poke its head out.

It quickly flew off.

Perhaps 5 to 10 minutes later it returned and had a mouthful of what looked to be moss. This web site, (Chickadee Eggs and Nests), supports the moss guess as they state (and have pictures) of Chickadee nests where the base is made from moss.

This year, we hope to continue to see the Chickadees nesting and successfully raising their young in our yard.

Some sites suggest that Wrens will drive Chickadees away however we have 3 more nesting boxes in our yard and by the end of the week I hope to build a few more so there should be more than enough homes to go around. We also witnessed the exact opposite, instead the Chickadees chased away a Wren.

In previous years we had House Wrens frequently make one or more of our next boxes into their home frequently having 2 or even 3 broods a year.

Liquid Gold

Does your yard look like this?

If so, then you have your own liquid gold. Really. You can turn a yard of dandelions into this.

What is this? Well, it could be jelly or it could be syrup. Or it could be jelly that failed to gel so I called it syrup! You too can make your very own dandelion jelly (or syrup). Plan on a couple of hours or so from beginning to end. The taste is almost like honey with a hint of green tea although this will vary depending on soil conditions and your yard.

Dandelions are quite edible. Just about all parts of the plant can be eaten or made into something including salad greens and wine! Toady we’re going to make jelly/syrup.

Start by picking the flowers. The one on the left is better than the one on the right as you’ll need less but either size will work. You need about 3 cups although if you pick more the recipe is fairly easy to double. One word of caution, make sure you are not picking where insecticides or pesticides were sprayed. Your yard should be free of chemicals before considering picking from there.

Looking at the photo above you can see on the left the flower not fully open while the one on the right is fully opened. Make sure you stick with the fully opened ones as they are “ripe” and easier to work with.

This is about 6 cups worth and will yield about 4 cups of petals or enough for two batches.

All you need are the petals, not the bracts or green parts and definitely not the stem. In the next four shots you can see the process I use. First, hold the bottom of the flower. Start squeezing and turning. Continue squeezing harder and harder as you turn it. The petals should almost completely pop free. Grasp them and pull. A few green parts in the mix won’t hurt but I’ve heard too many introduce a bitter flavor.

Put the petals in a measuring cup and keep going until you have 2 cups of petals.

At this point simply follow the recipe that I found here. Briefly I’ll also describe the process here.

Put 2 cups of petals in a pot and add 2 cups of water. Bring to a boil and then simmer 10 minutes. Strain out the petals and return the liquid to the pot. Add sugar and lemon juice and boil for a few minutes.

Add pectin and cook as described on your package of pectin.

Pour into jars (I used 4 half pints here) and follow the standard water bath canning practices, although if you will use it almost immediately (say within a few days) then you should be able to forgo the canning process.

And there you have it. Liquid gold. If it does solidify use it on toast. If it stays liquid, use it on pancakes or french toast. I hope you enjoy it as much as we have and hopefully this will change your view of dandelions.

What’s Not In My Yard

What’s in My Yard?
Or rather… What’s NOT in My Yard?
The answer would be: chemicals.

We’ve had an unusually warm month of March and suddenly lawns are becoming active after a winters dormancy. One day I noticed a distinct difference in the rich, healthy green of our lawn and that of our neighbors whose lawn was dried out, with a dead-looking, pale straw color. Their lawn has used a service that applies chemicals. The unhealthy, almost dead look most likely came from applications of, among other chemicals, nitrogen.

The first problem with an over-abundance of nitrogen is burned-up grass. Your lawn can only consume so much nitrogen over a period of time, and anything more in the soil is going to cause problems. In addition, high nitrogen fertilizers, even when applied properly, do very little for the long-term health of your lawn. Too much nitrogen in the soil will thin out turf, as well as kill earth worms and other soil-enriching organisms.

All around the neighborhood, I could tell, just by looking at lawns, which ones had been chemically altered… and which ones had not. It was a striking difference!

So I took some photos of our lawn and some of our neighbors and put together this simple, common sense flyer.

The Real Cost of Lawn Care.
What price do we REALLY pay to have our green, weed-free lawns? I did the research, so you don’t have to (o:

For far too long we have listened to TV commercials and seen glossy, color magazine ads telling us that we desired a perfectly green lawn free of weeds. We were all brainwashed into believing we needed the products that were advertised to achieve our goal: a lush, green monoculture. Fast forward to the present. We can now see clearly with Hindsight: n hindsight [ˈhaindsait]
wisdom or knowledge got only after something (usually bad) has happened. (freedictionary.com)

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“Weed and feed” fertilizers contain the harsh chemical herbicide atrazine, which excels at terminating fast-growing weeds like dandelions and crabgrass but can also kill other desirable plants and trees and DAMAGE YOUR ENTIRE YARD as TOXIN-carrying root systems stretch underground in every corner and beyond.
(from http://tinyurl.com/7eaokat )
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Atrazine has been banned in ALL of Europe.
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….. there is atrazine in the drinking water of 33 million Americans.

http://tinyurl.com/7m6fhjs
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Scotts Lawn Pro Step 2 Weed Control
Under #12
Ecological Information
Keep out of lakes, streams, or ponds.
(NOTE: ALL applications on lawns eventually makes its way back to lakes, rivers, streams and ponds through groundwater seepage or run-off.)

Under #14
Transportation Information
Comments; Classified as Environmentally hazardous substances.

(source: http://www.hardwarestore.com/media/msds/134254.pdf )
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GREAT info here: http://tinyurl.com/7eaokat

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Isn’t it time for us to think for ourselves instead of commercials telling us what to do and what to buy? We’re way smarter than that!! All the chemicals that they sell us are hurting our planet while making them richer. Not to mention it really doesn’t work (as you can see in the photos I took). So consider this as a new motto: Go Green and Save Green!!

Golden Fronted Woodpecker.. or is it?

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

So this morning I’m doing the dishes…look out the window…and see this bird…so I grab the binoculars and take a good look. I then run and get the camera and take numerous photos.

Booted up the computer and sent the photos via email to trusted individuals that can either confirm or deny that what I am seeing is a Golden Fronted Woodpecker!

Golden Fronted Woodpeckers reside down in Texas… NOT Illinois. Their range is Oklahoma to Nicaragua. To say that I was slightly excited and very perplexed is an understatement!

When I came home from work, my email inbox was full, and an expert reported this: “It’s an anerythristic Red-bellied Woodpecker; that means it lacks red pigment.”

Oh well, it sure was exciting prior to the expert identification! and apparently caused a lot of birder dialogue in the community. Had it actually been a Golden Fronted Woodpecker, chances are that we would have attracted hundreds, if not thousands of bird enthusiasts to our back yard! In that aspect, I feel like we ‘dodged a birdy-bullet!’ because I’d rather not have hundreds of people trampling through my flower beds, thank you very much!

I have seen ‘Goldie’ a few times since that day, but not for a week or two. Then… right after I wrote this, I saw her at the feeder! … so I had to happily rewrite the ending.

It is always a wonderful treat to see such an interesting and beautiful variation of a species in such close proximity!

Storing Seeds for Winter

This fall we witnessed something that we had never seen before. A bit of research on the web revealed that this is actually a common activity and it was interesting to witness.

The Black-capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus) is a commonly seen in our area throughout fall, winter and spring. Sometimes we’ll still see some in summer too. The observation that caught our attention started with a single Chickadee that would fly from a feeder to some nearby flowers, then after flitting around a bit return to the feeder. It wasn’t until we saw them in the zoom lens that we realized what they were doing.

They would fly from the feeder to the flowers.

In their beaks were a seed.

After a bit of poking around in a flower…

The seed was missing. It turns out they were stashing them, or storing, for use in winter when food was harder to find. It also illustrates that taking a bit of time to observe activities and you may learn something new.

Birds Nest Fungus

Yes, I said Birds Nest Fungus. From the “splash cup” family, the Cyathus stercoreus or Birds Nest Cup Fungus is an interesting organism.

You can see from the picture where it gets the name from. Each little cup is about the size of a pencil eraser and as it matures the top splits open revealing the black “eggs” inside. Now, it waits for a rain shower. If a rain drop lands in the cup it splashes the “egg” out where it can release its spores and hopefully develop more of these fungi.

The above image is a close up of the previous one with my finger in there to give an idea of the actual size of the fungus and the eggs.