Gaia Garden

The New American Landscape

2012-01-21T16:26:00.000-08:00

The New American Landscape: Leading Voices on the Future of Sustainable Gardening, edited by Thomas Christopher, was my latest garden read. (Note: One friend saw me carrying this book and asked what class I was taking! The dust jacket face is basic and simple - lots of green. But I certainly wouldn't call it a textbook!)

Sustainable gardening has gotten some negative press over the last few years, tarred (in my opinion) by the fear of people who are scared to change anything about the way they garden or angry that someone might consider their way of gardening to be "wrong." The definition of sustainability is "to meet present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs." (p. 9) This doesn't seem negative to me. In fact, it seems like a very honorable goal - a positive that's not only well worth striving for but actually necessary, if humans are to survive over the long term on our planet.

So why don't "normal" gardening practices meet this goal of sustainability? What's so bad about them? Well, another quote precisely pinpoints the problem, "...beginning with a dream of lush fertility, we end up fostering environmental depletion and degradation." (p. 9) How's that?

When you stop to think dispassionately about all of the chemical products (herbicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers) spread upon our lawns, vegetable gardens and flower gardens, it's obvious that our gardening has become a non-sustainable battle which we're losing. Constant tilling constantly brings new weed seeds to the surface to germinate, bare soil washes away and compacts with rain and footsteps (or fills up with weeds seemingly overnight), plants designed to live anywhere but here are planted in great numbers because currently they're the "right" plants according to the design magazines. All of these typical practices and more actually act to kill much plant (and animal) life, rather than fostering it.

So what gardening practices are sustainable? That's what this book focuses on, in broad, general terms. From describing the principles behind sustainable gardening, to handling home landscapes in a sustainable fashion; from building healthy soil to using water wisely; from using natives in the home landscape to making vegetable gardens more sustainable, this book presents a wealth of ideas to ponder and slowly incorporate into our gardening lives.

Getting down to the nitty-gritty.... Since I've been interested in sustainable gardening for a long time, there was understandably a fair amount of information that I was familiar with. Because of this, I quickly skimmed through a few chapters. Others I read in greater depth. Some chapters were certainly easier to read than others, but I haven't tried to analyze whether that was because of my interest in specific topics or because of the style of writing in those particular chapters. I did a fair amount of underlining in some chapters, a moderate amount in some chapters, and none at all in a couple. (That's my informal measure of how much important, new material I'm finding in a book.)

A new gardener would greatly benefit by reading this compendium because she could start out sustainably: designing her landscape and concurrently learning to garden with sustainable methods from the very beginning. That said, there is plenty of "meat" here for more experienced gardeners, too. By explaining the underlying principles (the whys of sustainable gardening), long time gardeners can decide which of their current patterns really need to be reworked and which are fine, just as they are.

So, my final analysis? I will be keeping this book and recommending it to folks interested in sustainable gardening. This is not a coffee table book, but a theory book for hands-on gardeners. You'll need to go elsewhere for lengthy lists of native plants or insects, for lists of the "best" varieties of vegetables to grow, or for which specific tool will help you the most - but you will find the reasons why healthy soil is so important and how to tell if your soil is healthy, what benefits a green roof might provide to you, or why you will generally still have healthy plants if you quit using pesticides every time you see an insect. Definitely worth a read!

Cottonwood Moment

2012-01-15T13:34:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite trees in Kansas is the Eastern Cottonwood (Populus deltoides). I'm lucky enough to have several in the yard: a couple small ones in the front yard and several large ones behind the house, in the draw.

Two mornings ago, as dark clouds were moving in from the west, I happened to look out the kitchen window and notice that one of the cottonwoods was highlighted against the dark sky by sunlight shining on it from the east. At first I tried to take pictures from the ground floor, but the trees in the backyard blocked my view pretty thoroughly, so I ran upstairs and captured this dramatic photo. By the time I'd come back downstairs again, the sunlight had softened and the dramatic lighting was gone. It only took a moment....

Sapsucker Signs

2012-01-15T13:24:00.000-08:00

If you come across a series of similarly sized holes drilled in one of your tree trunks, and those holes are placed in rather amazingly horizontal lines, you're seeing the work of yellow-bellied sapsuckers. Often the series of holes becomes quite large, with many layers of horizontal holes drilled in sequence. Here are two lines of sapsucker holes, not a very impressive display at this point, that have been drilled into one of my honeylocust trees.

The sapsuckers feed on the sap that flows from these holes. It is thought that they feed on any insects that are drawn to the sap as well.

Other species, such as warblers, can also occasionally be found feeding at sapsucker "wells."

In Kansas, yellow-bellied sapsuckers are primarily a winter species. They are rather shy and retiring birds, so often you'll see their holes but never see the birds. The ones that you do see are often immatures, with very drab, dirty-looking plumage. They'll assume their flashier, breeding plumage in late winter or early spring, but they may be headed back north by then.

I've seen at least 2 sapsuckers in my yard this winter. The first is a juvenile (seen here, contesting a starling for access to the suet feeder),...

the second one is a male. (The picture below isn't too clear, but the red - which looks dark - in the chin area of this individual identifies it as a male.) Of course, I could be seeing more than just two individuals, but it's hard to tell unless I see them together.

Although sapsuckers can make a lot of holes in a tree, this usually doesn't seem to harm the trees. It may be more of an issue in the northern country where sapsuckers breed, but in Kansas, I haven't heard of any issue. So far this winter, I've only seen holes in my honeylocust trees, but there could certainly be feeding going on in other trees that I simply haven't noticed.

Sapsuckers certainly aren't rare in Kansas, but they're uncommon enough that I always get a little thrill to see one. Having two is especially interesting this year!

Redtails in Love

2012-01-12T11:46:00.000-08:00

Two days ago, while waiting for Greg to get home, I went out back to see if I could find any "winter interest" to photograph.

I found my resident pair of redtail hawks, cozying up to each other in the top of one of the big, mature cottonwoods in the draw.

Generally, in raptors, the female is actually the larger of the pair. There is no gender-based plumage difference in this species.

Towards the end of last winter, I noticed this pair building a nest near the top of the one of the big black willows. I watched hopefully for signs that they'd laid eggs, but I never saw any incubating behavior.

This year I have hopes that, with less nest building to attend to, Mr. and Mrs. Redtail may provide us with the excitement and enjoyment of watching new little hawks being raised!

Another Cardinal Abnormality

2012-01-09T12:22:00.000-08:00

It's odd. Today I saw my second abnormally plumaged female cardinal at my feeders. This one is a partial albino. I've never seen this particular individual before.

I did my best to get mug shots. Here she is from the side....

And from the front....

And here, just for comparison, is the other abnormally plumaged female that I've seen this year at my feeders. Unlike the partial albino I saw this morning, this brighter-than-normal female is a regular at my feeders.

I'm curious to see if either attracts a mate this spring.

The Garden of Eden?

2012-01-09T10:58:00.000-08:00

At the risk of sounding horribly sacrilegious, has anyone else ever wondered if "The Garden of Eden" isn't Earth itself? And if our banishment from "The Garden" didn't come about when we started considering ourselves so smart and special that we became convinced we were smarter than nature, better than any other species on Earth, able to design "better" than nature, and therefore we began to consider ourselves free to destroy and desecrate our planetary home for the feeblest of excuses?

Hubris. "Pride goeth before a fall." I think our tendency to think ourselves god-like gets us in major trouble in so many ways.

So What Kind of Citizenry Are We Aiming For???

2012-01-07T17:01:00.000-08:00

I feel grinchy, but more and more these days, it feels like we're trying to raise a nation of citizens suited best for hand-to-hand combat, or plowing fields without machinery, or running the Pony Express without the ponies. I don't know the numbers, but it seems like even our colleges and universities are more likely to award "scholarships" based on athletic ability than on scholastic ability. Really, folks, let's call these "athletiships" and at least be honest about it.

In our local paper (and in most local papers that I've seen), the sports section is at least as large as the national and international news, if not larger. Tyler Teenager, awarded a minor football scholarship to a junior college, gets a huge photo and more inches of column space than some major national piece of legislation that will effect our lives for decades. The public school systems rush to cancel arts and music programs when times get tough, but they sure don't seem to consider sports programs for any meaningful cuts.

I understand that sports are fun. I understand that some kids do much better at sports than at academics. I understand that parents and community members like to socialize at sports' events and cheer their kids on. That said, school is supposed to prepare us for adult life, and I just don't see sports programs preparing today's students for much of anything but Sunday quarterbacking.

Seriously, in today's world the ability to catch a football or jump hurdles or wrestle an opponent to the ground and pin them DOESN'T TRANSLATE TO FUNCTIONAL ADULT SKILLS that will put food on the table, buy a house, or help a citizen decide which candidate is helping make our country stronger and which candidate is giving away the farm. It's these latter skills that the public school system is supposed to be helping our children be able to perform.

We're not going to do anything but spiral further down in the world economy when our community focus is more on training our children's bodies than on training our children's minds.

Personally, I think it's time to take all sports out of public schools and make them community intramural programs, funded by those who choose to participate. If the local taxpayers want to subsidize part of the expense or give "athletiships" to underprivileged kids, that's great. Otherwise, let's separate competitive sports from education and make realistic choices about where our money should be going.

Our schools need to return to being focused on academics, rounded out by basic gym classes, music classes, and art classes. Homework should not be dependent on whether the kids are tired because of sports' practice, but rather on the practice needed to learn the material deemed necessary. Standardized tests need to be minimized - a once a year per grade level, nationwide exam should be sufficient. (The key is that the community needs to be aware of the results, especially the trend of the results, and put pressure on the school board accordingly.) Results of standardized tests should be normed in some way, based on the number of special ed students that a school district is servicing who take the exams. A child with an IQ of 70 is not going to be able to function on a standardized exam at the same level as a child with an IQ within normal range, no matter how much extra tutoring or special teaching he/she receives. A school should not be penalized for serving a higher than normal proportion of children with lower academic "hardwiring."

It may be appropriate to award different levels of graduation certificates, ranging from whether a student showed up regularly and tried diligently to those that excelled in various ways. There are many jobs where simply showing up and performing reliably is more important than being able to memorize a periodic table. Employers might have a better chance of hiring suitable employees if they had a better way to evaluate their work ethic in this manner.

Let's be innovative and start teaching job skills at the high school level too. For those who are geniuses with their hands, in mechanical or artistic ways, for example, let's offer appropriate baseline education in those fields. All of us would do well with some basic mechanical knowledge, no matter what field we end up entering, just like those who become electricians or airline mechanics will benefit from basic history lessons as well. Graduation certifications could be tailored to show competency or excellence in those specific areas. Again, employers would reap the benefits of reliable information about the skills their entry-level employees were bringing to the table.

What initiated my rant tonight? The article in The Wichita Eagle on Friday about more than 15,000 K-State fans showing up in Arlington, Texas, for a rally the night before the Cotton Bowl. Now some of those may, admittedly, be K-State fans from the Dallas area - but I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of those are fans from Kansas who left their jobs, traveled to Dallas, stayed in hotels, and attended the Cotton Bowl. No wonder kids think that sports are more important than academics! Can you imagine any other sort of event - a job fair, an academic competition, a cultural event - that would draw that sort of enthusiastic, committed turn-out? I'd be willing to bet that, for many "citizens," sports are more important than voting or political knowledge or community involvement or most other things that keep our country running, let alone academics. And we wonder why our country is beginning to fall behind and spiral down economically?

I said I was feeling grinchy. I know that the Cotton Bowl was a special time for K-State fans to have a good time, watch their team participate in a national event, and take a small break from their routine. But my point remains: this should have been an abnormal break, while the main focus in the day-to-day grind should be the important stuff. The stuff that helps our lives improve from year to year. Let's quit playing and start getting back to the real world, people.

Mementos of Blog Entries Past

2012-01-07T08:14:00.000-08:00

Last month Greg helped me find a reasonable site to compile my early blog entries into a book (we ended up just going with the site affiliated with Blogger itself) and I ordered a compendium of my first year of blogging, using the calendar date as my cut-off. This nicely coincided with our move from Mobile, Alabama, to Clearwater, Kansas.

When the book arrived, I was tickled. I've been wanting to save my blog entries for some time now - if nothing else, just as a hands on keepsake of earlier times in my life. I'd tried printing them off at home, but the results just lacked finesse. The book is far from perfect, but it gives me a fairly nicely finished product that should last for most of the rest of my lifetime, at least!

Since the first year's efforts came out so nicely, yesterday I sat down and ordered the second year's compendium. In doing so, I reread all of my blog entries for that year - our first year here - and I was struck by how much more philosophical I was in my blog at that time. There were many fewer photos (which wasn't necessarily a good thing), but much more mental interaction with books, current events, cultural trends, and ideas.

And, having looked back, I rather miss that focus on this blog. So I'm going to try to recapture some of those concepts in the next couple months. We'll see how it goes. My life is busier these days, as I've come to know more people in the area, assumed a few community obligations, and developed larger, more extensive gardens. I've become more aware of how important photos are to many readers. (For me, photos often lead to discussions of the subject of the photo, rather than to miscellaneous musings.) In those earlier entries, I often didn't really know what I was wanting to say until I'd actually written it - a fun exercise in self awareness, but rather time consuming too!

Lastly, I can get rather political, which is not the focus of this blog, but is a big part of who I am. If you, as a reader, don't agree with my politics, please use this as a forum to (civilly) discuss the areas we don't agree with, rather than as a reason to get mad and quit reading. So many important cultural trends seems to be falling under the "political" umbrella these days. I'd love to hear your side and have a chance to talk back and forth. Maybe we can all learn a bit from each other! That's always my hope.

I'm looking forward to stretching myself again. And I look forward to being stretched by my readers as well! Thanks, in advance, for working with me on this one!

It Certainly Didn't Play Possum!

2012-01-04T19:52:00.000-08:00

I had a usual visitor at an unusual time of day today: an opossum decided that the birdseed in one of my feeders was much too delicious to leave alone just because the sun was coming up.
I've had opossums at my feeders off and on over the years and I knew that I was hosting at least one this fall, since I would find the pellets in the feeder in the morning. (Also, when we were having skunks visit regularly in the evening, we would often see them while we were doing a skunk-check with a flashlight before letting the dogs out.)

This morning, when I somewhat blearily surveyed the backyard feeders, I suddenly woke up to the fact that the tree trunk hadn't, in fact, grown a burl overnight - there was a fairly small opossum on it, perched a few feet above the hanging platform feeder. It stayed there most of the morning, carefully watching my movements in the house. When I let the cat out, she noticed the opossum and climbed the tree (to investigate more closely?) but stayed at least 3' away at all times. The opossum simply kept quietly watching her and me.

After I went upstairs for a while, the opossum decided the coast was clear and descended to the feeder to continue chowing down. When I let the shepherds out for their walk late this morning, Becker and Blue looked at it for a while but made no effort to catch it, although it was probably well within their reach on the feeder. In fact, the cheeky little thing didn't really get upset at all, even when I decided this was an opportunity to get a closeup photo or two. Throughout all the staring and shutter snapping, it stayed firmly on the feeder, watching carefully and occasionally pulling its lips back a bit. By the time I got back from a trip to town later this afternoon, though, it had moved on.

I learned something new tonight: a "possum" is actually an animal that lives in Australia or New Zealand. Our North American marsupials are correctly called "opossums." There are apparently 103 species of opossums in the Western Hemisphere! The species we have here in Kansas is the Virginia opossum, Didelphis virginiana. It was originally confined to the East Coast, but was spread to the West Coast during the Depression, perhaps as a source of food.

Opossums have never concerned me too much. They are fairly resistant to rabies and thus are very uncommon carriers of it, perhaps because their body temperatures run low for mammals (94-97 degrees Fahrenheit). They are not really aggressive, hissing loudly when threatened but not likely to attack. And, of course, they are well known for their habit of falling over, as if dead, when really threatened.

As I did research this evening, I learned that opossums are occasionally called "Nature's Little Sanitation Engineers" for their eating habits: primarily animal material such as snails, slugs, insects, spiders, rats, mice, even snakes. They will also eat fruit (especially fruit drop on the ground), berries, nuts, and vegetables. And they eat carrion. As is typical of such omnivorous animals, they are easily attracted to yards with such attractions as pet food left out overnight, garbage cans without tight lids, and...full birdfeeders.

On the plus side, one source I read even suggested that opossums may help reduce the spread of Lyme disease, since they "kill off" (eat?) almost all the ticks that feed on them.

Overall, I consider opossums to be benign yard guests - no more of a problem than squirrels, with a similar likelihood of getting into attics or sheds or garages if I'm lazy enough or silly enough to leave openings for them to do so. And if I really cared about keeping them out of the bird seed, I would simply pole mount all of my platform feeders.

In fact, having read the list of their preferred foods, I strongly suspect that opossums provide me with a reasonable amount of pest control for the relatively minor cost of a bit of bird seed.

So, until and unless one really causes me a problem, I'm going to relax and enjoy this neighbor with whom I'm sharing the yard and gardens. Diversity, after all, is the spice of life!

Feathered Fun

2012-01-02T12:39:00.000-08:00

It's Monday, so I'm doing a FeederWatch count today, and I had a perfect example of why I like to participate in this project. This morning, for about an hour, there was a white-breasted nuthatch flitting between my feeder-trees out back. This is only the second time I've seen a white-breasted nuthatch in the yard since moving here 5 years ago. If I hadn't been doing a count, I'm quite sure that I would have missed it.

Since I had the camera out to photograph that bird, I decided to take pictures of a few other birds that were coming in this morning as well.

Most interesting is this female cardinal that I've been seeing this fall. Her plumage is distinctly brighter than most female cardinals, but not as bright as most males. The other bird on the feeder is a Harris sparrow.

Here is a typical female cardinal for comparison.

So my question is whether this is just a plumage variation? Or is this bird a hermaphrodite? Or is there some other abnormality occurring? Chances are that I'll never know, but it's interesting to speculate!

Another oddity that I've noticed this year is that I have a few white-crowned sparrows who seem to enjoy eating Niger thistle. Usually only goldfinch and house finch enjoy thistle seed, so it's rather odd to see a sparrow regularly perched and eating on these feeders.

No unusual issues for the rest of these feeder visitors, but they posed very nicely for me and the light was good, so I thought I'd share them with you. This is a mockingbird who's a regular visitor to the water bowl....

In mid December (on a count day, of course) I photographed this female yellow-bellied sapsucker who stopped in to sample the suet, much to the irritation of my usual starling,...

as well as this male spotted (western) towhee, who had a penchant for digging in this same spot for several weeks. I haven't seen him recently, though.

Beginning over Christmas break, it seemed like some of the birds started pairing up. I've seen only male red-bellied woodpeckers so far this year, only one tufted titmouse at a time, and the downy woodpeckers came in to feed separately. Today I've seen pairs of both the red-bellied woodpeckers and the downy woodpeckers, feeding in the courtyard at the same time. I've also seen two tufted titmice at a time, as well as two chickadees. It seems awfully early for courting behavior, but maybe they're living together for a while before committing to raising children together!

Before I know it, the red-winged blackbirds will be back in numbers and the early spring migrants will be headed north again. The turning of the seasons in all its predictability and magic.

Be the Change....

2012-01-01T09:16:00.000-08:00

As I ended 2011 and now as I start 2012, the wonderful quote, "Be the change you want to see in the world," keeps rattling around inside my head.

What changes do I want to see in the world at large? And what changes, specifically, in my world? How can I "be" those changes?

I started to write about the big issues: peace vs. war, looming weather crises, jobs, and so forth - but I found that, while I care deeply about such things, they are overwhelming. I want to make my own little corner of Earth more life-affirming. If we all did that, maybe some of the bigger problems would solve themselves.

So, in my own little corner, ...

I can start using recyclable bags regularly when I shop. I don't know WHY I have such a hard time with this one. It's such a simple thing. I must have a dozen of the suckers, but I can't seem to remember to bring them inside with me when I go into a store to save myself! I CAN do better on this one, and every bit of plastic that doesn't get used leaves our planet just a little bit healthier.

I'd love to see more real discussion among friends and neighbors and community members about what we value in life, about directions we'd like to see our lives and communities taking. What gives us pleasure? (The local park? A walking path? An internet connected coffee shop?) Is earning more money going to make us happier? What is a fair wage anyway? What's the attraction of reality TV shows and who watches them and why? How do you provide maximum personal freedom while maintaining strong community ties? (For that matter, which of the two is more important?) Maybe I can start a local discussion group, open to anyone who wants to join in, where we discuss topics beyond the latest football scores or "what I did on my summer vacation"?

I'd like less stuff to care for. Short of the house burning down, that means sorting through 35+ years of possessions and winnowing them out, getting rid of what we're not using. I can organize our things and release those that we no longer need so that other people can put them to better use. In the old business parlance, that's a win-win!

Well, I think I'll stop. One totally realistic goal. One necessary goal that's harder to accomplish. And one somewhat pie-in-the-sky goal. Enough for this year. (I do, after all, want some chance of personal success here!)

I hope that 2012 finds us on the path to peace and understanding. May it be a year rich in caring and love.

A Time to Look Both Ways, Backward and Forward, As We Cross Into 2012

2011-12-30T20:00:00.000-08:00

It's the time of year when it seems necessary to look back over the past year, and then right to look ahead towards the year to come. After reading multiple such posts on other blogs over the past few days, last night I gave into temptation and looked back in my own journal to remember 2011 in our yard and gardens in SW Sedgwick County, Kansas....

The first day over 100 degrees was....(drum roll, please!)...May 9th, when it reached 101 on our sheltered breezeway. (The average high temperature for that date in Wichita is 74 degrees.) This was definitely a harbinger of things to come.

We had 53 days over 100 during the year, breaking the all-time record here in the Wichita area.

In my journal, I started whining about unseasonable heat and the lack of rain back in April. Little did I realize what was in store for us over the next several months! By August, I'd quit complaining (for the most part) and start cheering on the 100 degree days. Heck, if we were going to suffer through the horrible heat, we might as well set a record! And we did. Several, in fact.

(According to The Wichita Eagle yesterday, Wichita also set a record this year for the widest range between high and low temperatures recorded here for any single year so far: 128 degrees.)

As far as the garden itself went.... We started cleaning and preparing the vegetable garden in February, then did our first seed planting in early March. Despite my weather whining in April, we had our best spring garden ever. We're still feasting on the broccoli and cauliflower that I harvested and froze from that spring bonanza.

The summer garden, though, was another story. I put in some ridiculously large number of tomato seedlings for the two of us (at least 16) and they all took hold nicely and looked great as of May 31st. I should have had tomatoes falling off the counter and rolling out the kitchen door. However, out of all of those plants, I got one regular size tomato and 3 cherry (grape) tomatoes in early July. The plants just didn't set fruit in the scorching heat that never seemed to quit. Despite the fact that I stopped watering sometime in mid July, most of the tomato plants survived the summer and started to set fruit again in the fall, but a fairly early frost literally froze our hopes on the vine. We just weren't meant to have tomatoes this year.

So most of our "gardening" this summer ended up being focused on plugging buffalo grass in an attempt to get some sort of decent lawn growing. (Just for the record, growing lawn grass is NOT really gardening in my book.) The plugs we put in during early July look like they've taken hold pretty well. The plugs we put in later look...pluggy, even now. We'll have to see how they look in April or May, as the buffalo grass greens up and starts growing again.

By the time fall got here, I didn't want to step outside to do more than push a camera shutter button. The thought of a fall garden was simply disgusting.

But it's been a couple months now. We've had a bit of rain. The heat of the summer is simply an unpleasant memory. I can finally start thinking about what I want to do as the weather warms up in a couple months. Hope, after all, springs eternal in a gardener's breast.

So, for next year???

1) I'm going to start lettuce seeds indoors, sometime in January, since I learned last year that if young lettuce seedlings experience temperatures below 50 degrees F., it encourages early bolting when hotter weather comes. Once the young seedlings have more than 3 or 4 leaves, low temperatures apparently don't have the same effect.

2) I AM going to be home in early April, when the asparagus starts coming up, and again in early June, when the peas start bearing, so they won't all go to waste in the compost pile like they did this year.

3) Any time now, we are going to put up the bluebird nest boxes that have been ripening quietly in the garage for over a year now. They'll do a lot more good out on fenceposts where the birds can actually use them!

4) If the weather gods are good to us and we have decent harvests, I am going to work harder at finding new recipes to utilize our home-grown produce. Then I'm going to actually try them out! The recipes I've got are good, but limited, and I know there are many more, wonderful ways to tantalize our taste buds as well as nourish our bodies.

5) I am going to do a better job of getting our beds well mulched, so that we're ready for the summer baking season ahead of time and don't, hopefully, have to try to play catch-up as much as we did this year. (I've already got the chopped leaf mulch piled and ready for deployment - its lack was our limiting factor this last spring.)

6) And I am going to continue keeping the garden journal that I started last spring and abandoned in June, when the weather was so discouraging that I didn't have the heart to go on. I used it to note tidbits from magazine articles, timing for plantings and harvestings, wish lists for purchases and projects, and all sorts of other fun stuff. While I only kept the journal up for 4 months, I'm finding lots of little notes in it that are getting my blood stirring as I think about getting started this spring!

And that's enough for now. The catalogs are coming in and the winter season of dreaming is upon us. Here's wishing all of us a healthy and happy year in 2012!

Blue's Diagnosis: Leiomyosarcoma

2011-12-21T08:24:00.000-08:00

Well, the pathology report came back yesterday. Blue's intestinal mass was diagnosed as leiomyosarcoma. The surgeon attempted to be upbeat, telling me that the margins were complete, so hopefully he got it all.

But in talking with Greg, he reminded me of the enlarged lymph nodes that were seen on ultrasound.... And it is a cancer known for metastasizing. (Another bit of somewhat good news, though: at least it wasn't in the liver.)

This is normally a cancer of older dogs. Median age at diagnosis is a bit over 10. Blue is 2 1/2. Does this mean that he's young and can fight it better? Or does this mean that it's a particularly aggressive variant of the disease? Only time will tell us, so all I can do is try to move this news to the back of my mind and enjoy our time with him, however short or long it may be. (Median survival appears to be 22 months after diagnosis.)

Ironically, in this case, it might almost be easier to have the mindset of a dog - and let the future take care of itself.

FeederWatch Time of Year

2011-12-18T10:09:00.000-08:00

It's the time of year when I switch from being unable to keep my eyes (and camera) off foliage, flowers, and insects to the time of year when I obsess over my bird feeders. Indeed, sometimes I think that I almost prefer wintertime, with its stark silhouettes of trees and bushes highlighted against sky or grasses, its long vistas, and the constant color and movement of the birds in and around our home, to the lusher, more overwhelming and stickier summertime.

Off and on for about 20 years, I have participated in Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Project FeederWatch. This is a citizen science project that relies on folks who feed birds in their yards to watch those feeders for two consecutive days every two weeks, then report back about what birds they are seeing and in what numbers. The Project FeederWatch folks then track large scale bird population patterns from year to year.

It's not a rigid thing to participate in observing your feeders for Project FeederWatch - you can miss weeks, if necessary, while you are away on vacation. You report the approximate amount of time that you watched during each watch period, so that if you're quite busy one morning, you simply note that you weren't able to put in any time watching at that time. Since your data is being combined with observations from many, many other bird feeders in your area, the individual variations in observation time cancel each other out. Best of all, in my opinion, you can now enter your data directly online - my weakest link was always the juncture between writing down my observations and getting them into the mail and back to Cornell.

Along with online data entry, FeederWatch now allows you to enter data for weekly observations, so I've taken to watching my feeders every Monday and Tuesday...when I'm home and have the time. It continually amazes me how much more I observe when I have a set time and a reason to keep my eyes turned feeder-ward.

One year I saw red crossbills in my yard for a day or two. These are northern birds whose uniquely shaped bills are used to pry open pine cones to eat the seeds. By watching my feeders, I'm much more aware of irruption years in the northern bird populations, years where weather conditions have decreased food supplies up north and pushed the resident birds there farther south than normal to forage for food during the winter.

A couple springs ago, a small flock of yellow-headed blackbirds stopped by for an afternoon's snack. I've seen these guys in large flocks at the big wetlands and reservoirs, but never in my "normal" landscape. I do, however, usually have a couple red-winged blackbird males that actually overwinter in the area, rather than flying further south and reappearing in the early spring. I'm not sure that I'd notice them without having them pulled in frequently to catch a quick meal.

So far this year, one of my more unusual feeder birds is a Bewick's wren who's been visiting regularly, although not daily. (Sorry for how blurry this and the next photo are - handheld, long lens, poor light!) This is a species I've seen before, but only once or twice in any year and only for a day or so at a time, foraging in my winter flower beds or around the deck during the fall.

Along with spotting occasional visitors to my feeders, I'm also much more likely to see the resident Cooper's hawk or sharp-shinned hawk swooping through when I'm watching my feeders purposefully. Sometimes I even get to see one of them feeding!

Occasionally I'll also see an abnormality among the common birds. I've seen birds with injuries that seem to have healed. More commonly, though, I see abnormal feather colorations. This red-winged blackbird's unusual necklace is a case in point.

Sometimes I get to see birds behaving badly, too! Here a starling and a red-bellied woodpecker face off about who has the right to feed on the suet, while a cardinal acts as impartial observer! (Conflict between these two species is actually pretty common during bad weather, at least at my feeders.)

Besides being more likely to observe more uncommon species of birds - or common birds that appear infrequently, unusual plumage or interesting behavior, I love the chorus of bird calls that I can hear faintly through the windows from all the birds attracted to my feeders. Even better is that same chorus heard loudly every time I step outdoors. Obviously the bird song isn't related to whether I participate in FeederWatch or not, but I do think it's more persistent and "multicultural" because of the feeders that I have up.

That said, I don't think that bird feeding really changes the species that winter around here. I do, however, think that it brings the birds closer to where I can observe them frequently and comfortably from inside, increasing their activity in and around the house itself.

All in all, participating in Project FeederWatch is a very satisfying wintertime activity for me. While I'm deepening my connection to my surroundings (and getting quite a bit of entertainment), I'm also getting the satisfaction of joining thousands of other bird feeders around the country to monitor certain bird populations around the country. It's a win-win-win situation for me!

Blue

2011-12-13T17:06:00.000-08:00

Just a little over a year ago, I brought home a 16 month old German shepherd male that I'd found through a classified ad in the paper. He was wild and undisciplined, the result of having spent most of his young life (and all of the last 4 months of it) in a kennel with little human or canine interaction.

Between Becker and Greg and me, we've absorbed Blue into our home and into our lives. (That's Blue on the left, Becker on the right. This photo was taken near the end of August.) Now it's hard to remember the wild thing that nearly pulled me off my feet during our first walk together, that tried his best to eat the cats during our first attempts to introduce them. He's still a hard-headed adolescent at times, but he's an integral part of our family pack. Like Becker, he almost feels like an extension of me as I go about my daily routine.

And he's not here tonight. He's in a kennel at the Wichita Emergency Veterinary Hospital with an IV in him, replacing fluids that he's lost over the last few days, awaiting exploratory surgery in the morning. On ultrasound this afternoon, they found a mass between his spleen and bladder, complete with (probable) enlarged lymph nodes in the area.

A few days ago, Blue started vomiting copiously. Huge amounts of slightly digested food. He continued drinking...but he continued vomiting too. My initial reaction that this was a normal stomach virus or a reaction to something he had eaten morphed into real worry by late yesterday. An obstructed bowel seemed probable, although he showed no sign of the pain that normally accompanies an intestinal blockage of that nature. This morning Blue and I were on the way to our vet as soon as I could get him in. Their x-rays were inconclusive, so they arranged for us to head to the local specialists for the ultrasound.

So tonight I wait. And worry....

As the World Turns....

2011-12-09T13:36:00.001-08:00

In the latest issue of onearth (Winter 2011/2012, p. 64), Jill Sisson Quinn began an essay with the the lines, "It was forbidden to say the sun was rising. Instead, advised leaders of the Earth Literacy workshop at Genesis Farm in Blairstown, New Jersey, say you are going to greet the sun as we, on Earth, turn toward it."

My first thought was, "How hokey! Give me a break. That sort of hair-splitting sounds so ridiculous."

But the concept stuck with me, and I've decided that it isn't so foolish at all.

To say that the sun rises and sets puts the sun moving relative to us humans, standing still here on Earth. It's really not that different from the ancient concept of Earth as the center of the universe. In fact, you could argue that "sunrise" and "sunset" are almost verbal anachronisms left over from that belief.

But to say that we, on Earth, are turning towards the sun in the morning and away from the sun in the evening? Not only is that more accurate scientifically, it sets up a totally different feeling of our place in the grand scheme of things. Come to think of it, this way of looking at the pattern of our days is fairly similar to the sun salutation more common in the Eastern cultures.

To describe the photo above as, "My spot on Earth turning away from the sun, turning towards the dark," gives me a frisson of discomfort. However, at the same time, thinking of the change from day to night in this way comforts me with a welcome feeling that I'm just a tiny part of a magnificent whole, a whole that functions perfectly well without any input from me. As Eliza Doolittle said to Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, "Without your twirling it, the Earth can spin! Without your pushing them, the clouds roll by!"

In the final analysis, maybe we do need to search for a new way of thinking and talking about the daily movements of the Earth relative to the sun. However, "My spot on Earth turning towards the sun, away from the night," and, "My spot on Earth turning away from the sun, towards the night," are horribly awkward and not likely to replace "sunrise" and "sunset" anytime soon. Maybe it's time to speak of "turning to the sun" each morning? and "turning away from the sun" each evening? A little humility never hurt anyone.

The Gifting Question

2011-12-08T11:19:00.001-08:00

Now that our children are fully launched into self-reliant adulthood (and there are no grandchildren on the horizon), we've started encountering a thorny question each year as we look towards Christmas - how should we handle giving each other gifts?

Our son, Sean, is an affirmed anti-materialist and flatly doesn't want "stuff". He is continually trying to pare down his possessions. He lives in a (series of) smallish apartment(s) in a big city and he prefers to be able to move between them with the least amount of hassle.

Jess, our daughter, loves gift-giving and receiving, loves to create beauty around herself, and finds her home a source of great comfort. Holidays are particularly special to her, and gift giving is an important part of the feeling of love and family at those times.

Greg's never been a big one for Christmas or Christmas gifts - his philosophy is that he likes to give gifts whenever he want to do so throughout the year, rather than at a culturally determined time of year.

And then there's me. I love Christmas cards - both sending and receiving them. I've moved so much throughout my life that Christmas cards are a wonderful way, at least once a year, to feel connected to friends and family that I rarely see anymore. And I love to give multiple small gifts - the sort that can really lift the spirit if you happen to hit upon a particularly lucky choice, but that leave neither giver nor receiver feeling bad if you totally miss the mark. The sort that can be re-gifted without angst, but hopefully will give the receiver enough pleasure and/or use that he/she wants to keep them. Most of the time, that's the sort of gift I'd rather receive, too.

(Anyone else sense a gender issue in my discussion here?! LOL!)

Sean has suggested, again, that we don't exchange gifts at all. Greg would happily go along with that. Both Jess and I would prefer to continue with the usual gift giving tradition. I've seriously debated just having Jess and I exchange gifts with each other, but that feels very Scrooge-ish.

It seems so ironic to have a tradition that is meant to bring nothing but joy and happiness causing such annual angst...but no one has ever said that the human heart is simple!

When all's said and done, I think Ranger may have the appropriate last laugh here - as he lounges next to his favorite indoor "chewy play-toy," the electric cords! I suspect we'll figure it all out somehow!

Trees - The Natural Playground

2011-12-08T09:13:00.000-08:00

I've been an absent blogger...and I apologize. Not surprisingly, I've got many, many photos to share...because I've been busy...and I haven't had time to blog. Funny how that works!

We got back a few days ago from a wonderful 10 day trip to the wilds of Florida's panhandle. While we were there, we stayed with Jess, our daughter, in her new house in Ft. Walton Beach, and also spent time in Pensacola visiting with my side of the family who were all gathered there for Thanksgiving and in Mobile with some of my good, good friends there.

Jess's new home was actually built several decades ago and the yard boasts quite a few large, picturesquely beautiful, sand live oak trees that corkscrew towards the sun in unusual and interesting patterns.

When the extended family came for a visit one day, it was truly amazing to see how quickly those trees attracted everyone - especially the children and the young at heart! I don't think the most expensive play equipment in the world would have attracted everyone as quickly and surely as these sand live oaks did!

From 7 to 17....

...from 5 to 47....

...from 30 to 57 - all the kids had to play!!!

And This Year's Survivors & Thrivers Are.....

2011-11-05T17:10:00.000-07:00

After a summer like this one, there are times when I am simply amazed that any plants survived. When I find plants that have thrived, they are true cause for celebration! This post is to honor those hardy plants that not only made it through the heat and drought with no special extra care, but those that have bloomed boldly and/or look particularly healthy as we head into the unknown winter.

In the pasture/restoring prairie areas and draw, I first want to give a shout out to the common ragweed (Ambrosia artemesiifolia) and giant ragweed (Ambrosia trifida). The plants aren't as tall as usual, especially the giant ragweed, but they had many blooms and should be loaded with seeds - so important because of the high value of their seed as food for wildlife. (In the photo above, taken in early September, Greg is posing by the giant ragweed in the draw. Normally these plants would be well over his head - as high as 10-12 feet in some years. This year they barely reached his waist.) As harsh as the weather's been through the growing season, I'm so glad that there is at least some plentiful, healthy seed to help the wild animals make it through the winter.

Also out in the pasture/restoring prairie areas, the dotted gayfeather (Liatris punctata) was adorned with many flowers this September - we had more plants, each with more individual bloom spikes, than we've had yet since we lived here!

Not as showy, but still interesting, the false boneset (Brickellia eupatorioides) was also much more prevalent than I've seen it before. The flowers are small and off-white, looking quite a bit like little threads gathered together in a small pom-pom. It doesn't take them long to turn into seed heads, complete with white "feathers," forming larger, round puffs that absolutely shine in the light when backlit by the sun.

Another flower that wasn't wildly showy, but seemed more abundant than in most years, was the heath aster (Symphyotrichum ericoides). The plants and even the flowers seemed smaller than usual, but conversely the plants were more abundant. They formed small white drifts among the grasses that almost looked like light drifts of snow and fed small armies of insect pollinators during the heat of the day when little else was blooming.

Moving out of our yard and into the wider landscape, the sunflowers (Helianthus spp.) were amazing this year. Maybe it was just that so many of the other plants were brown and dry and/or stunted, but the sunflowers seemed to glow even more brightly and golden than in most years. I'm planning on gathering seeds (tomorrow?) to increase the number of sunflowers on our property. They are simply too pretty and too hardy not to establish decent colonies on our property.

In the garden, of course, the aromatic asters (Symphyotrichum oblongifolium) have been astounding, as were the Wichita Mountains goldenrod (Solidago 'Wichita Mountains'). The sand love grass (Eragrostis trichodes) has loved the summer this year, too. (In fact, if anyone would like a seedling or two or ten of the latter, I have plenty to pass around!)

Most of the other natives are doing fine. The rose verbena (Verbena canadensis) required a little extra water during the worst of the heat and drought, as did the summer phlox (Phlox paniculata), but both appear to have survived without any serious problem. Next year, of course, I'll be able to tell a little more certainly about survival rates, but I have reasonable confidence that my prairie flowers will, for the most part, be fine.

It certainly hasn't been the prettiest year in the garden or on the prairie, but there's always next year!

Unsettling Questions This Fall

2011-11-04T07:06:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling unsettled and on edge these days. The horrible, blast furnace heat of the summer is gone, but the drought remains. I don't know how best to handle putting my gardens to bed for the winter...or what dreams for next spring and summer are rational to indulge in.

Do I mulch over bare, dry ground? Or do I wait until we get a decent rain before mulching, so I lock in moisture, not dry soil? But if I wait, when will we finally get a good rain?

Maybe I should water well, then mulch? But my experience is that you can NEVER water enough to equal even a moderate rain. And our water is very hard, well water.

On the other hand, bare soil gets even drier, exposing the plant roots to more extremes of temperature, too.... What to do? And when to do it?

Then there's one of our cats, Ranger, a neutered black male. The first winter we had him (and after we finally let him become an indoor/outdoor cat, succumbing to his powerful need to be outside, hunting), I wrote posts about his attempts to hunt birds. He was so patently unequal to the task that it was comical.

Ranger is 2 1/2 years older now, and he has become a hunter extraordinaire, definitely living up to his namesake from Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series. I put out my winter feeders about 2 weeks ago, in preparation for participating in the Cornell FeederWatch program this winter. In that 2 weeks time, he has caught, killed and mostly eaten at least 6 birds - all of them "good" birds. No house sparrows or starlings for this guy. On the worst day, he killed 2 in one day, a male cardinal and a Harris sparrow.

This photo shows Ranger, on the right, and Bella guarding the hummingbird feeder earlier this summer. Bella goes out, but she's not the one bringing the dead or almost dead birds back to the kitchen door on an almost daily basis.

Should I take my feeders down and consider my FeederWatch fee a donation to Cornell Lab of Ornithology? Or should I take a more Darwinian attitude: the fittest will survive? The feeders are all out in the open, so the birds have a fighting chance to see Ranger coming. By providing seed to augment the natural feed around, am I strengthening them...or just luring them in to become cat food?

(I've even put out the word that he would be available to someone who needs a barn cat - he's great at catching rodents, too - but there have been no takers.)

It's a tough autumn for me. I read others' garden posts about how much better their gardens are doing after the summer heat is gone and I'm glad for them, but the drought is still crippling us here. There have been no fall roses, no fall catmint, my hostas are gone....

Then I shake myself. The aromatic asters are lush and have lasted for weeks, despite the heat and drought. The Wichita Mountains goldenrod was spectacular. The gaillardia is vivid. The roses may not be blooming, but they look reasonably healthy. This weather is, after all, why I concentrate on prairie natives.

No matter what this winter and next spring bring, this past year has shaped my gardens significantly. That, however, is the challenge of gardening. This, too, shall pass. I hope.

Meanwhile.... Any suggestions about my mulching dilemma? Or the ongoing case of Ranger vs. the birds? I would greatly appreciate any words of wisdom!

Ephemeral - A Year in Review

2011-11-01T17:08:00.000-07:00

[I've never done this before, but the word intrigued me, so I'm giving it a try. Garden Walk, Garden Talk has a Word 4 Wednesday in Photos challenge, and the word this week is "ephemeral." I came across the challenge in Gardens Eye View on Monday. Here goes....]

Ephemeral. Fleeting. Impermanent. Passing. Transitory. A Year in Review....

A dragonfly lived here....

A cottonwood leaf returned to the soil that nourished its growth....

Movement patterns were momentarily mapped in the water....

Blooms rapidly changed to seed (false boneset)....

For a brief moment, the sideoats grama blooms gleamed....

A baby (leaf miner) grew, highlighted in graphic form....

Golden blooms burst forth for a night and part of a day (on Missouri evening primrose)....

A yellow jacket comb melted back into the grassland it came from....

Frost created hieroglyphics on a wooden step one morning....

Birds left traces of their passage in the snow....

Winter sunlight, through lace, shone bravely on the wall....

How swiftly the year passed - ephemeral moments leaving long-lasting memories for the future.

Aromatic Aster - The Most Popular Plant in the Fall (Butterfly Edition)

2011-10-30T17:37:00.000-07:00

Two frosts now, but my aromatic asters are still going strong. (I LOVE native plants!!!)

I've been taking photos of many of the insects that have been visiting these asters over the last couple weeks. I'd love to say that this is a true cross-section of all insects that have been using the asters, but I've definitely been attracted to the prettier ones, had more luck photographing some of the less wary ones, and generally not paid much attention to the tiny ones. So, all in all, it's a pretty biased sample. That said, here goes.... (Speaking of "pretty ones," I thought that I'd start with the butterflies I've seen.)

I figured that I couldn't go wrong starting with everybody's favorite butterfly, the monarch. I haven't seen huge numbers of monarchs at any one time on the asters, but I've seen them come through, one at a time, almost daily. I even saw one as late as Friday! (Most of the monarchs came through a month ago now, though.)

As I mentioned a few days ago in an earlier post, I've also seen a new-to-me butterfly on the asters this fall, the western pygmy-blue. I've just seen the one individual on one day, although I've kept my eyes open for others every day since then. (A perfect example of the concept that, "the more you get outside and look, the more you'll see.")

Most folks will probably recognize this butterfly too - the painted lady. In past years, I've had up to a dozen or more painted ladies feeding at any one time on the aromatic asters. This fall their numbers seem to be much lower. There's almost always one in the garden, but I've never seen more than 2 at one time. On the plus side, I've been seeing lots of honey bees! (Note the honeybee, almost side by side with the painted lady in this photo.)

According to A Photographic Field Guide to the Butterflies in the Kansas City Region, a new field guide that I'm finding very useful, the painted lady is the most widely distributed butterfly in the world!

Another showy butterfly that I've enjoyed seeing regularly on the asters this fall is the common buckeye. Like the painted lady, buckeyes are a butterfly species that moves in and out of our area, generally moving northward in the spring and southward in the fall. In fact, they are unable to successfully overwinter in this area, so any we see here in south central Kansas are considered immigrants rather than residents.

Something else I find interesting about common buckeyes is that the underside of the wings is colored differently in fall individuals than in the spring individuals! The fall individuals, like the one shown here, have a distinct reddish tinge to the underside of the hind wing, while earlier individuals show almost no red tint at all.

In fact, different coloring in the spring and fall individuals of butterfly species turns out to be relatively common. The dainty sulfur, which I'm seeing more frequently this fall than ever before, is another of the seasonally patterned species and is the smallest of the sulfurs we'll see in this area. The darker color on the underside of its wings (dusty greenish-brown compared to bright yellow) allows fall individuals to absorb heat from the sunlight more efficiently than those that live earlier in the summer. Dainty sulfurs, too, are immigrant butterflies here; they are unable to successfully overwinter in our area.

I haven't seen any hairstreaks on my aromatic asters at home, but on my mother's in west Wichita, I found this gray hairstreak busily feeding away. These resident butterflies are generalists, even in the larval stages, and are thus very widely distributed across North America.

The upper surface of a hairstreak is very different looking from the underside, a not uncommon butterfly characteristic. In this case, to tell male from female, you have to see the upper surface of the abdomen, which has orange in a male and is gray in a female. This individual, therefore, appears to be female.

This pearl crescent is another generalist that is fairly widely distributed across the country. A resident butterfly, these guys actually overwinter in caterpillar form! (It amazes me that a caterpillar could survive the winters here.)

The last butterfly in my aster lineup this fall is the orange sulfur. This female is in flight and is therefore rather blurry, but you can still see her spotted "cloudy" wing margins and orangish yellow coloring. (The coloring on the male of this species actually has a UV component, which helps the females choose the right male compared to the similar, non-UV-reflecting clouded sulfur. We, of course, can't see that!)

As a further note about this last photo, the awkwardness of butterflies photographed in flight always seems odd to me, compared with their gracefulness and beauty when seen with the "naked" eye. Seen in stop-motion, flight actually looks like quite a chore for them.

The butterflies are actually a relatively minor component of the insect population flitting from flower to flower among the asters this fall, but they certainly capture my eye. Next on my aster-visitor recording session will be the pollinator workhorses, the bees.

What Do You Do To Care for Nature? I Leaf Rustle!

2011-10-28T11:49:00.000-07:00

Last night I attended a focus group about climate change, presented by a group based at K-State. We had a great moderator, a retired political science professor, which was a good thing, because this is a topic that has a great propensity to get testy.

The point of the focus group wasn't to decide if climate change was occurring or not (although it was very hard to stay away from that argument!), but rather to brainstorm ways that folks could be educated about climate change.

One of the ideas that came up over and over again was how important it was for people to learn about small, doable, inexpensive or free, ideas - things they could do without feeling like they had to completely change or rearrange their lives. Things they could do without spending a lot of money, too.

Another point that came up was how almost everyone lit up over the idea of wildlife and nature. There was basically no disagreement that helping nature was a positive thing to do.

It struck me this morning that many, many people - whether they "believe in" climate change or not - already do things to help care for nature. So I thought it might be interesting to share some of those ideas, looking for ideas that we can "steal" from each other to make the world a little healthier for us as well as for animals.

I'll start the ball (hopefully) rolling: I pick up bags of leaves left out for the trash and bring them home to make mulch for my flowerbeds. By doing this, I hope to keep some trash out of the landfill and to make the soil in my beds moister and healthier. It's also essentially free! And the flowerbeds look really nice with a fresh layer of chopped leaf mulch on them.

So that's my first idea. What do YOU do???

My Not-So-Big [Bird] Year

2011-10-23T18:33:00.000-07:00

In honor of The Big Year, a surprisingly good movie that Greg and I went to see last Friday, I thought I'd post a few bird shots from 2011.

This is my most recent bird photo, taken this morning when a hungry white-crowned sparrow forgot that I was less than 10' away and flew in to grab a bite while I was photographing insects on the aromatic asters. White-crowned sparrows are only here during the colder months - the way this guy was eating, he was a new arrival needing to fill up after a long migration.

These next two are from our recent trip to the east coast, both taken at a beach in Acadia National Park. The first one is of a semipalmated sandpiper....

and the second one is of a semipalmated plover. Greg took both of these shots! And although the photos were taken in Maine, these two species migrate through Kansas as well.

The next photo is of a highly irritated Carolina wren who was indignant at my lengthier-than-usual trespass into his/her territory while I was trying to photograph a ground-nesting wasp in the front garden on August 1st.. He/she had babies to feed!

While we were on the spring garden tour on May 21, I noticed this pair of turkeys who seemed really curious about all the fuss and bother going on in their normal feeding grounds.

Photographed in our front yard on April 16th, the male red-winged blackbird at the top of this next picture wasn't satisfied with just red and gold wing epaulets - he was sporting a light gold and pink necklace as well! His more normally clad relative is at the bottom of the picture.

And, lest we forget that seasons change dramatically in Kansas, here is a photo of a female red-bellied woodpecker on the leeward side of a tree trunk last February, taking shelter from the bitterly cold wind.

If these photos intrigued you at all, be sure to see The Big Year. It's a fun movie with appealing human-interest story lines and some pretty decent shots of scenery and birds around the country. Who knows? Maybe you'll decide that birding isn't so odd after all, and feel inspired to do a little binocular time yourself!

The Aster and the Pollinators - A Love Story for All Time

2011-10-23T10:50:00.000-07:00

This time of year gives me a smile on my face and a warm, buzzy feeling - make that a warm, buzzy sound in my ears - every time I step out the front door during the day. The aromatic asters are in full bloom and, when the sun is shining, you can hear the contented sound of bees and flies from across the yard. The view above, taken today, is looking across my very summer-tattered front garden; most of the aromatic asters that you see blooming here are (probably) Radon's Favorite or seedlings.

If I walk near one of the lavender-coated mounds, a cloud of insects briefly swirls up into the air, before settling back down to the serious business of feeding on nectar and pollen.

Combined with a bright blue sky and a light breeze, it feels like my own little piece of heaven here on Earth.

Aromatic aster (Symphyotrichum oblongifolium) is native to Kansas, although the varieties that I have planted in my front garden are, I believe, from Texas (Radon's Favorite), Texas via southwestern Pennsylvania (October Sky) and ?South Dakota? (Dream of Beauty). Be that as it may, they are all thriving and providing a wonderful fall feast for the local insect tribe.

At about 12" tall and shown above, on September 26th, Dream of Beauty is the shortest of the 3 varieties that I have, blooming the earliest for me. Instead of the purplish-blue (or lavender) of the other varieties, its flowers are actually a very pretty, light pink. These finished blooming 2-3 weeks ago now. They are my newest aromatic aster additions, having just been planted within the last 18 months. I bought them from High Country Gardens. (It amazes me that the newest little one, planted just this spring, survived the summer and actually BLOOMED this fall!)

At about 2' tall, October Sky is supposed to be the next tallest variety. Truthfully, I lost the labels to my October Sky and Radon's Favorite aromatic asters within a year of planting them, so I'm just guessing about which is which in my garden, based solely on height. Other than height, the plants and blossoms of these 2 varieties look identical to me. My 2' tall aromatic asters, which are therefore presumably October Sky, are just beginning to come into bloom now.

Radon's Favorite is the tallest variety I have planted, reaching about 2 1/2' tall. Time-wise, they seem to be blooming "in the middle" this year, after the shorter Dream of Beauty but before the 2' tall October Sky. That is, of course, assuming that the tallest aromatic asters I have in the garden are actually Radon's Favorite!

Here is a photo of aromatic aster in front of Wichita Mountains goldenrod, taken about a week ago. The lighting isn't very good, but it's one of my favorite plant combinations for both color and form. Last year, with a lot more water during the early part of the summer, the Wichita Mountains goldenrod was a little floppy and developed rust. This year, as dry as it's been, they are much more upright and their foliage is clean.

All of my aromatic asters survived this blistering hot, dry summer with almost no supplemental water. A few of them received a little extra water as we tried to establish the buffalo grass, but I never had to water any bed because these guys looked stressed.

If I faced the old conundrum of taking only one species of plant to a desert island, aromatic aster would be one of the finalists for me...but even as I write that, I realize what a stupid concept that would be. If I were stranded on a desert island, I'd want to try to figure out what was native there and garden with it!

So scratch that idea and just know that, if you garden anywhere this plant is native, I would HIGHLY recommend it for color, pollinator attraction, hardiness and just plain beauty. Give it a try, if you haven't already.

A Dainty Blue

2011-10-22T15:48:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I pulled one of my "see-if-I-can-photograph-all-the-various-insects-that-are-feeding-at-my-aromatic-asters" marathons. I'll be sharing quite a few of those with you over the next couple posts (Yeah! for native plants!!!), but I wanted to post this one right away.

This is the western pygmy-blue butterfly - the first one I've seen in my yard. (In truth, it's the first one that I've ever seen where I paid enough attention to it to identify it.) There are apparently 2 pygmy-blues, an eastern and a western species. They are the smallest North American butterflies! Note that the aromatic aster blossoms are generally about 1 1/4" in diameter, from petal tip to petal tip....

In this second photo, you can see a little bit of the underside of the wings, which looks very different from the topside, but is quite pretty in a more understated sort of way. The blurry thing to the right of the pygmy-blue is a honeybee on a nearby bloom.

According to Kaufman's butterfly guide, the western pygmy-blues are common in salt marshes, desert salt flats, and disturbed alkaline areas. We are a little east of their normal range, which corresponds fairly well with the dryer regions of the southwest - I guess our summer from hell made them feel right at home.

"What We Did On Our [October] Vacation"

2011-10-18T15:58:00.000-07:00

We toddled off to Boston about 2 weeks ago for a long overdue visit with our son, Sean. I was finishing David Abram's interesting book, Becoming Animal, at the time and I fully expected to feel a little "out of place" when we first landed...but, truthfully, I didn't.

After we'd been there for a few days, I started noticing things that surprised me. We walked a lot and used public transportation almost exclusively while we were in Boston itself. I loved it (despite my bad knees). In fact, by the 4th or 5th day, my knees were doing somewhat better, which seemed counter-intuitive since the pain is caused, at least in part, from disappearing cartilage. I noticed, too, that the people who walked and used public transportation seemed to have a much lower incidence of obesity than is standard for our country. (It was actually a rather glaring difference.)

Locally sourced foods were rather easy to find in the restaurants - many restaurants even listed "their" local farms by name. The selections in these restaurants were always fresh and delicious and often served in unusual ways.

Sunday brunch at Henrietta's Table in Harvard Square, a gustatory extravaganza that Sean was eager for us to experience, was particularly spectacular. I have to say that getting the chance to sample all of the local foods was really exciting and enjoyable, as I only know one restaurant here in the Wichita area that works with local foods (Lotus Leaf in Delano - which is excellent, by the way).

On the natural front, though, things were a little less rosy. I didn't hear the wind rustling the leaves in the trees there, and it's a constant accompaniment to life here. I missed it. There were few birds around and even fewer bird songs...and I didn't see any bird feeders set up at all. At one point near the Boston Museum of Science, we heard a mockingbird in a small group of Bradford pears and stopped to try to see it, but it had hidden itself craftily out of sight. Yes, Boston is a city, but it still seemed light on bird life in comparison to other cities I've visited. Maybe it was just the season.

There were more honeylocusts being used as street trees than I expected. Somehow I think of this species as a plains tree rather than as an eastern deciduous woodland tree. Occasionally the honeylocusts were used particular effectively. This photo is of an allee of honeylocusts leading from Harvard Square down to the riverside park. I'd never thought of using them in this manner, but it created a distinct sense-of-place with a pleasant, lacy effect...if not the gravitas that I might have expected for a path coming off of Harvard Square!

We were able to make it a little ways up the coast of Maine during the middle of the week while Sean was working. The Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge called to us and we enjoyed the opportunity to learn a bit about how the salt marshes along the coast work, as well as enjoying some very pretty fall foliage (photo above). The office had binoculars and a bird guide available to borrow, so I was even able to do a little birding. It was early afternoon, which is hardly a grandly productive time to bird, but I managed to see several fun species: a male black-throated blue warbler (the first I've seen in a long time!), a small flotilla of green-winged teal, and several white-throated sparrows.

Although this last has little to do with nature, we stopped for the night in Camden, Maine, and went down to the harbor to look around. Both of us were rather amazed and amused at the way they now winterize some of the boats, including fairly large sailing vessels - they shrinkwrap them! One had been completed and 2 more were in the process of being "put to bed" in this way. I can only imagine the comments that the ghosts of sailors past are making!

Although I'll spare you further descriptions, we had many other interesting and enjoyable experiences while we were there - a great tour guide on the Freedom Trail, lunch at the Green Dragon pub where the Sons of Liberty often met, the chance to see an excellent exhibit on Pompeii at the Science Museum, and, of course (and foremost!), the chance to enjoy a wonderful visit with Sean and Tina. All in all, a great getaway.

Marching for A Principle

2011-10-16T10:41:00.000-07:00

I did something last weekend that I never dreamed I would ever do: I marched in a protest.

We were in Boston, visiting Sean, and we decided to go to the Boston Commons on Monday, Columbus Day, to see what the Occupy Boston rally was doing. It seemed so appropriate - we had just walked the Freedom Trail a few days before and we were going to get a chance to see freedom of speech in action...and on the Boston Commons, no less! This first photo shows people beginning to gather on the Commons for the march.

This was primarily a day for students to protest, but others were joining in too. As a true grass-roots movement, the messages were mixed and most were not professionally choreographed. Signs were on everything from cloth banners to posterboard to scraps of recycled cardboard. Some were well done, most were emotionally hand-lettered, only a few were distracting and definitely just attention seeking. The sign below captured the mood quite well.

Although the topics ranged from wanting better support for education... to anger at the bank bailouts...

to the need for decent health- care... to pleas for more jobs, most signs were (in one way or another) firmly against any more money being concentrated in the hands of a few rich people at the expense of the vast majority of Americans. Only a couple anti-capitalists or anarchists seemed to be in attendance; definitely a relatively minor note overall.

There were student groups from several of the big universities attending - this group from Tufts, for example, marched in together, proudly proclaiming their school affiliation. Several other similar groups did the same, but I didn't get a chance to see their signs. Sean had heard that Harvard, MIT, Boston University, and others were all sending contingents.

There were teachers' groups there too, like this one from Cambridge. Greg even noticed a cluster of medical students!

As you would expect from academics, some of the signs were more textbook chart or English paper quote than rabble-rousing rhetoric. (Note the citations at the bottom of the charts!)

Those of you who knew me long ago will realize that I'm generally not a very public-protest sort of person. Those of you who know me now will realize that I sympathize much more with the Occupy Boston marchers than with the uber-rich who are currently controlling our country for their own benefit. Those two sides of my personality were definitely vying for supremacy as we watched the marchers gather and I began to think about joining in the march.

Ultimately, though, I simply decided that if a principle was worth believing in, it was worth standing up for - so Greg and I joined the marchers as we walked from the Boston Commons, through the narrow city streets, and down to Dewey Square. Many folks stood along the sidewalks or at the windows above and watched as we went by. Quite a lot of them took photos. A few gave us a thumbs' up sign or a victory "V". Some watched impassively. Greg only saw one old man who gave a thumbs' down signal, and I didn't see anyone who was overtly negative.

Did the march cause any particular change? Probably not. But I'm glad I was there, and I'm glad I decided to march along. Democracy only works if citizens get involved. When we convince ourselves we're "too good" for politics, I'm more and more convinced that we give away control of our country's destiny into the hands of those who will mine it for their own personal gain. And that's not something I want to sit quietly by and let happen.

Fairy Handkerchiefs and Funnel Web Spiders

2011-10-04T15:11:00.000-07:00

Sharon Lovejoy's grandmother called spiderwebs in the grass, highlighted with dew, "fairy handkerchiefs" - I love that image! I've been seeing a few fairy handkerchiefs around the place myself lately.

Have you ever noticed sheets of spider web, usually near or on the ground, with sort of a tunnel or hole formed in the middle or off to one side? These are the webs of funnel web spiders - an appropriately, if not imaginatively, named family. For years I've seen the webs, which are rather intriguing, but I don't remember ever seeing the spiders. Funnel web spiders tend to be nocturnal, hiding deep in their tunnel during the day or anytime they are threatened.

Recently, however, I've been honored to see funnel web spiders in their webs twice, and both times I was able to photograph them. This photo came out the best....

In this genus, Agelenopsis, the spider builds the heavy, bottom "sheet" with its tunnel, then makes a lighter weight layer above the main web. Insects or other spiders don't see the top layer and hit it accidentally, getting knocked down onto the main web where they get tangled for just long enough for the funnel web spider to spring out and nab 'em.

As I did research for this post, I found numerous links to the "deadly Sydney funnel web spiders". It turns out that there is a completely unrelated group of spiders in Australia that also builds a funnel shaped web and are also called funnel web spiders. Unlike our western hemisphere funnel web spiders, the Australian ones are evidently quite poisonous. Unfortunately, they are also considered lots more "exciting" than our native nice guys, so they get more press and the majority of the sites I first found were referencing this totally different group.

Thankfully, our funnel web spiders are a peaceful lot, much preferring to hide when threatened. If you handle them, they can give you a painful bite, but they do not have the deadly venom of the Australian group. So - word to the wise - I wouldn't recommend trying to pick one up!

Meanwhile, enjoy any "fairy handkerchiefs" that you come across this fall - and be sure to look and see if you can see their occupant.

Beauty in the Mundane

2011-10-04T14:43:00.000-07:00

As I did my walkabout this morning, I saw this pattern and found it absolutely beautiful: almost a Celtic knot in form.

It reminds me of the quote attributed to Confucius, "Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it."

Anyone care to hazard a guess as to what you're seeing here?

Texture and Tiny-ness in an Aster

2011-10-04T14:21:00.000-07:00

If a newly planted perennial made it through this summer in my garden, you can be sure that it's a tough cookie. And, believe it or not, I actually did have a couple that survived, despite the heat and drought. (To be bluntly honest, I also had quite a few that didn't!)

One new variety that I am particularly excited about is Snow Flurry heath aster (Aster ericoides 'Snow Flurry'), which I purchased from High Country Gardens. This is one of the daintiest little plants that I have seen in a prairie garden, but unquestionably it's one of the hardiest too. Here it is, up close and personal, in front of a rose verbena that is reblooming a bit this fall.

When I widen the photo out just a bit, I've got a rather pretty little vignette, with a small sand lovegrass that seeded itself into this corner, the rose verbena carpeting a fair amount of ground, and the Snow Flurry aster lightening the front edge with its pure white, dainty flowers. I especially like the contrast in leaf size that the Snow Flurry aster provides - so many prairie natives are simply "medium" in leaf texture.

The Snow Flurry aster is actually much smaller in scale than I expected, based on its description in the catalog, so I'll be curious to see what it does in less drastic years. For now, however, I'm enchanted, and I fully intend to order a few more to try in other spots throughout my beds.

Learning Another Beneficial

2011-09-27T20:18:00.000-07:00

I rather like this photo for a couple reasons.

First, it's a great example of mimicry. The insect on the left is a goldenrod soldier beetle. Note the banding on its abdomen? That sort of banding is mimicking the banding on bees and wasps - this species of beetle is essentially trying to puff itself off as bigger and badder than it really is!

Secondly, the insect to the right in this photo is a fivebanded tiphiid wasp. Kind of a funny looking thing, isn't it? I've seen them many times, but hadn't looked them up to hang a name on them until tonight. When I did, I learned that tiphiid wasps are nectar feeders as adults, but they parasitize the small white grubs of scarabaeid beetles (aka June bugs) as larvae.

So, the more tiphiid wasps I see, the fewer white grubs I should have in my lawn! I love learning this stuff! Best of all, I love learning this stuff right in my own backyard!

The End of Summer

2011-09-27T19:56:00.000-07:00

Cutleaf Ironplant?

2011-09-27T16:02:00.000-07:00

Sunday afternoon was so beautiful that I talked Greg into taking a small drive along some back country roads south of us, looking for wildflowers that I could re-visit later in the fall to collect seed. My favorite find was this mile-long road, absolutely lined with Maximilian sunflower and goldenrod. This is what I wish all of the Kansas roadsides looked like!

We actually found more plants blooming than I expected: annual sunflower (of course), plains sunflower, the Maximilian sunflower listed above, Jerusalem artichoke, downy goldenrod, several other goldenrods, a Eupatorium, and this mystery plant, a small, yellow aster-looking mound.

Here is a closer view of the flowers.

I have scoured my field guides and done some web research, and I think this is cutleaf ironplant, aka lacy tansyaster, aka spiny goldenweed, aka spiny goldenaster. Ironically, it has almost as many scientific names: Happlopappus spinulosus, Machaeranthera pinnatifida, and Xanthisma spinulosum. Also ironically, I cannot figure out which one is the most accepted currently! I don't think I've ever run across a situation like this before.

Since I cannot find any real negatives to this plant and I thought it was quite pretty along the roadside, I think I will try starting some of it from seed and see how it does in my garden. It tops out at about 15", which could make it an ideal garden plant. It's found in dry situations and is quite drought tolerant, too - a real plus these days!

If anyone thinks this is something else, or knows something negative about cutleaf ironplant, please let me know. Otherwise, I hope to be reporting back to you about how it's doing this time next year!

Johnson Grass War, Round 2

2011-09-26T19:13:00.000-07:00

One of the "gifts" left to us by the previous owners of the house is a mess of Johnson grass where the old lagoon used to be. I can only suppose that it came in with a load or two of "topsoil" when the lagoon was filled in...about a year before we bought the house.

Greg's been spraying the Johnson grass regularly with Round-up over the last 4 years, but it hasn't seemed to have much effect. This year he didn't get around to spraying it at all...but it's the one area where the drought and the grasshoppers actually helped us a bit: the drought kept the Johnson grass from growing wildly, and the grasshoppers seemed to love the newly developing flower/seed heads.

After 4 years, there's still about the same square footage covered by the Johnson grass as when we moved in, but the overall area it's in has spread outwards. The grass is no longer a solid mass; it's more scattered about. New clumps are developing out in the prairie grasses nearby, and I am bound and determined to halt the spread of this obnoxious invader before it moves any further.

So, with nicer weather, I've decided to try a different tack. A lower tech, lower cost, higher personal investment sort of way, compared to Round-Up. Yesterday I took a large black plastic bag, a pair of gloves and a pair of clippers, and I started to attack the mess using good, old fashioned methods: by deadheading (and throwing away the seedheads) to remove as many seeds as possible, followed by pulling out or cutting off as much of the biomass as possible.

A couple hours sufficed to let me deadhead all but about 2 dozen plants near the center of the old lagoon. (We've made a burn pile there, so some of the seed heads are currently inaccessible without clambering up on top of a tottering pile of branches and dried weeds.) It took almost 2 full bags to hold all of the seed heads. At least those puppies won't be starting new infestations next spring!

Today I started pulling out some of the plants. I've filled a wheelbarrow with stalks and as much of their root system as I could get...but I've only managed to pull out an estimated 5% of the Johnson grass so far. Every little bit I can get rid of gets me a little bit closer to my goal of eradicating this junk from our yard. I know that I'm not getting all of the root system, and therefore I know that the Johnson grass will return. However, I'm hoping that I'm weakening it overall and it will return with less vigor. At which point I'll attack it again. I strongly suspect that I'll be reporting about this battle for several years to come!

Happily Sharing Your Garden With Wildlife

2011-09-25T13:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of giving a talk at the Kansas State Extension Master Gardener conference. The title of my presentation was "Happily Sharing Your Garden With Wildlife." A couple of the attendees requested a copy of the "morals" that I listed as a part of that presentation. Since I hadn't made that list into a handout, I promised to post it here so that they could download it, or refer back to it, whenever they wanted it. Thank you all, for being interested in having the list to refer back to!

So, here is the list of "morals" I put together to help you happily share your garden with wildlife....

Moral #1: Don't be too quick to judge an unknown [such as an insect or an egg mass] as a problem. Take time to observe and learn.

When I found an egg mass like the one to the right one February morning, I was tempted to scrape it off the tree branch right away. I was convinced that any mass of eggs like this would be plant-eaters and therefore probably destructive in my yard or garden. Instead of doing that, though, I went back inside and searched on the web, trying to identify the eggs. I was able to do just that, and I learned that these are eggs from the wheel bug, an excellent insect predator. If I had destroyed the mass (and the others I found throughout the winter) I would have had many fewer predators in the yard...and many more pest insects.

Moral #2: Don't be too quick to reach for the insecticide, even when something does seem problematic.

The wasp to the right is a cutworm wasp. She's one of the solitary, ground nesting wasps that also pollinates flowers as she feeds on their nectar. The males of many solitary wasp species hatch out first and then guard the area where their natal burrow was to be the first to mate with the newly emerging females. Males don't lay eggs and therefore they have no stingers, but they look scary and often buzz human "intruders." The females are capable of stinging, but generally won't unless they are directly handled or otherwise really interfered with. Cicada killer wasps are another of the solitary ground wasps who follow this life cycle pattern.

Moral #3: While planting and designing, plan for some insect damage. Learn to tolerate the occasional "ugly."

To the left is a photo of a New England aster infested with lace bugs. The photo was taken on June 3, but I didn't spray or do take any action at all (except to snap a photo), assuming that nature would take care of the problem. Sure enough, when I looked carefully, I saw ladybug larvae and young wheel bugs, both predators. To the right is the same plant on June 23, 20 days later. It wasn't necessary for me to take any action - the wheel bugs and ladybug larvae handled the lace bugs better than I or any insecticide could have.

Moral #4: Native plants belong. They not only thrive themselves, they allow many animals to thrive along with them. Blooming and fruiting cycles are coordinated with native animal life cycles. This helps keep local ecosystems - and our gardens - healthy and alive.

Above is a group of wheel bug nymphs hatching from their egg cluster on the underside of a honeylocust branch. The hatch of these young predators appears to be timed to coincide with the blooming of the honeylocust (Gleditsia triacanthos) and therefore with the corresponding influx of pollinators that will serve as food for them.

Moral #5: Beneficial isn't always (the most) beautiful.

To the left is a smooth milkweed (Asclepias sullivantii) with a monarch caterpillar feeding on it. The plant is definitely looking much the worse for wear, but it hasn't really been damaged at all, and as soon as this caterpillar pupates, a new monarch butterfly will have joined the world.

Other milkweeds besides the butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa) are wonderful monarch plants, even if they aren't as showing as their lovely, orange-flowered relative.

Moral #6: Wildflowers are generally native perennials - although they may be "out of place" where they are growing. Obnoxious weeds, though, are usually exotic invasives that create problems and take up a lot of space while providing few or no benefits.

To the right is a common milkweed in full bloom (Asclepias syriacus) with many different skippers and even a fly feeding on it. Common milkweed is a great example of a wildflower, a native perennial, that is sometimes considered growing "out of place" but is never an obnoxious problem in the landscape. Bindweed is an example of an obnoxious weed. Native to Europe and Asia, it takes over large areas and provides little or no benefit to local communities of animals.

A Gift Twice Over - A Dying Wren Leads to Sheltering Monarchs

2011-09-14T17:57:00.000-07:00

Ranger, our black cat, came running up to the open kitchen door tonight, carrying something in his mouth. Greg and I scrambled to intercept before he dropped his (potentially alive) probable mouse inside the house. Yes, sadly we have experience in these matters. Unfortunately, we didn't succeed in cornering him until he was under one of the kitchen chairs.

At which point he dropped the (still alive) house wren that he was carrying.

Expecting it to shudder and die at any moment, I gently picked up the little bird and cradled it in my hand. I could feel it breathing, but it didn't struggle.

Without any expectation of the injured bird surviving, I carried it out to the draw, leaving all of the dogs and cats back at the house. I laid it gently in a clump of grass near a tangle of vines where I've seen wrens many times before. If it had to die, at least it would die in its natural surroundings.

As I walked back towards the house in the twilight, I noticed several monarchs fluttering around one of the willow branches, swaying in the wind about 10' above my head. Lazily watching them, I noticed a couple more in the same area of the tree. Looking more closely now, I saw a small cluster of about 10 gathered together, settling in for the night.

After running back to the house for the camera, I followed a few more monarchs to a second, slightly larger cluster. Every time another individual joined them, many would open their wings as if in welcome, then close their wings and almost disappear into the darkening silhouettes of the willow leaves.

Following his natural instincts, Ranger brought us a tragic gift tonight, but in trying to return that gift to its natural place, I received another gift of grace in sharing the evening ritual of the monarchs. Nature, in both its beauty and its harshness.

The Fall Fanfare Begins

2011-09-14T12:33:00.000-07:00

"I think it annoys God if you walk by the color purple in a field and don't notice." (Alice Walker, in The Color Purple)

How could you walk by a dotted gayfeather (Liatris punctata) in full bloom and not take notice?

We've had a horrible summer here - temperatures in the 100's for 53 days, little rain, everything is crispy dry, most plants are trying to decide if they're going to try to hang on or just give up the fight...and here is this beautiful dotted gayfeather, blooming lushly, as if in the middle of Plant Heaven.

I can't help it - my spirits rise when I see the dotted gayfeathers blooming now on my morning walkabouts.

It was seeing these beautiful prairie plants at the end of our first summer here that made me think perhaps we had a bit of unplowed prairie hidden within the overgrazed pasture out back. I only saw a few that first year - one reasonable patch and one other small clump. Now, 4 years later, even after this summer, I have 3 large patches, a couple smaller ones, and a few scattered individuals here and there. It's not happening rapidly, but it feels like the prairie is beginning to return.

The bittersweet part of seeing the dotted gayfeathers bloom is that I know it's the beginning of the final fall floral fanfare. Missouri goldenrod and annual sunflowers are also blooming now. The Canadian goldenrod is starting. Soon the other goldenrods and sunflowers will be joining in and the asters along with them. For a couple glorious weeks, the roadsides and gardens will be full of gold and purple and white - a final celebration of color before the muted colors of cold weather take hold.

Feast on the rich color! Fill up on the bright orange of monarchs nectaring on their way south! Delight in the clear blue of the fall skies! The bountiful fall banquet is beginning!

The Turtle Project

2011-09-11T15:29:00.000-07:00

Since box turtle patterns are said to be as unique as fingerprints, I've decided to see how many different individual box turtles I can identify on our 10 acres.

My memory is that they range over about 5 acres and they are not strongly territorial, so more than one can be ranging over the same territory or overlapping it significantly.

To help me in identifying and remembering them, especially while I'm out walking and away from the computer, I'm breaking my normal rule of thumb and personalizing them with names, where those names make sense. Here are a couple males that I've tagged so far....

Sam Spade is named for the spade-like mark on the back of his shell, an enlargement of the dorsal line there. He's a big, colorful male that I've seen twice - in about the same 50' area - in the last couple weeks.

Don Quixote is named for the wounds on the back of his shell. He's smaller and not very colorful - at first I mistook him for a female, since his legs show little coloring. I'm guessing that the scars are from a run-in with a lawnmower. I found him last Thursday morning, down on the path in the draw.

The third male that I've found hasn't been named yet, as I haven't noticed anything strongly unique about him yet. He's very colorful and good sized, with less marking overall than the other two. I last saw him about a month ago.

Interestingly, all 3 of these males (and several females) have been in the Cedar Grove/Draw area. How far away will they travel from this central location? Will there be a seasonal pattern to their travel? Has the drought changed their patterns this year? Will I see the same individuals from year to year? Lots of fun questions to answer!

Desperate for Water?

2011-09-03T17:36:00.000-07:00

I saw this pair of blue skimmers on our back deck this afternoon. They flew in and the female acted like she was laying eggs in the crack, then moved the tip of her abdomen to each side of the crack for a bit, then put it back down into the crack. (At which point I woke up enough to realize I wanted a photo and grabbed my camera.) She didn't repeat the side to side exploration of the deck boards with her abdomen, but the pair stayed in this position for 5 minutes or so before flying off.

It looked for all the world like she was laying eggs in the crack of the deck. There's not much water around, but is it really this bad?

These Hands....

2011-09-01T09:44:00.000-07:00

(Thanks to dejavaboom at Musement Park for this idea!)

are worn and wrinkled, with age spots on their backs

eagerly and surely help me carry out projects

held newborn babies close to nurse

get dirty digging in the soil

hold the broom to sweep out the debris

gently soothed a fevered brow

wield knives to surgically slice tomatoes and onions

type thoughts quickly on a keyboard

drum nervously on tabletops

clutch the steering wheel tightly in a downpour

carefully press a mango to judge its ripeness

pushed a needle in and out, forming colorful patterns on cloth

scrubbed pots and toilets and children and dogs

danced over piano keys making music

applaud the impressive work of others

learned to shoot a pistol

get cramped writing long and rambling journal entries

carefully plant tiny seeds in rich soil

precisely folded gum wrappers to make zigzagged necklaces and bracelets

turn pages to transport me to different worlds

held another's hands for comfort

strongly pull weeds up by the roots

slice open boxes with a scissor blade

dial the phone to share news

push a shutter button, capturing a moment

threw rocks for hopscotch and skipping

painstakingly packed away a beloved shell collection

picked up wiggly puppies to cuddle and weigh

stir the pot with wooden spoons

neatly stack plates in yet another cupboard

sort through piles to organize and put away

firm the soil around fresh transplants

sifted through the sand on many beaches

stroke a furry face to share love

kneaded bread dough

exchanged greetings with senators and kindergarteners

straightened the feathers of a dead bird

gather flowers to share with others

hold the cards surely and confidently

clasp a pen to write letters and recipes and essays

gathered up small children to sooth their hurts

pointed out the possibilities

held the map to navigate unknown places

wave goodbye.

Buffalo Grass Update

2011-08-31T12:52:00.000-07:00

We finished plugging the 27 flats (70 plugs apiece) of buffalo grass last weekend. I can't believe we did the WHOLE thing!

Anyway, here is the back courtyard area that we finished about a month ago. (If you check out the link, you'll see what it looked like then.) For the most part, the plugs have taken well and are beginning to expand outward a bit.

And here is the front yard, freshly plugged.

It's probably going to look a little odd for at least a year or two until we switch it entirely to buffalo grass. Right now we've left the fescue that's surviving and just plugged in around it. Since fescue and buffalo grass are worse than apples and oranges in terms of similarity, I don't imagine that it's going to be the most glamorous lawn in Sedgwick County, but hopefully it will hold the soil and be moderately green.

DROUGHT

2011-08-30T08:21:00.000-07:00

There's no way to pretty it up out here. It's hot. And it's Dry. (Yes, that's with a capital D.)

Last Friday I decided to take a closeup of one of the many cracks in the soil out in the Back 5. The phone is just for scale.

Yesterday I grabbed one of the orange flags that I mark plants with, using it to measure the depth of a few of the cracks that I found during my walk. When I got back to the house, I measured the wire "stem" - it was 20" long. Results: Out of 6 large cracks that I measured, 3 of them swallowed my wire stem and I couldn't feel any bottom, 1 crack was about 16" deep, and the final 2 were about 12" deep.

So 50% of my (admittedly small sample size of) soil cracks were over 20" deep.

At least the water will be able to get to the subsoil rapidly, if and when we ever get some rain.

My tallgrass (Indian grass and big bluestem) is about knee height. Here's a photo of Blue sitting by one of the solitary clumps a couple weeks ago. The clump looks much worse than that now. (The orange flag is like the one I used to measure the depth of the soil cracks.)

The giant ragweed, normally well above my head, is currently waist high, on average, even in the draw. It has started to bloom, so it probably won't be getting any taller this year.

On the plus side, the false boneset (Brickellia eupatorioides) has started to bloom. I have more of it than I've ever seen out back before. I can't tell whether false boneset is a wind pollinated or an insect pollinated species - I've never seen any insects on it, but the bloom is certainly showier than, say, ragweed, which is a typical wind-pollinated flower.

Reading up a bit on false boneset, I noted that its taproot is known to grow to 16' deep. Putting down deep roots makes all the difference in the world when dealing with the vicissitudes of life, especially on the prairie.

We did get our first rain in almost 2 weeks last night: less than 0.05" in the rain gauge. (That's less than 1/20th of an inch, for those who may need the decimal translated.) My shoes were barely damp as I walked around this morning. We're due to be back up to 100 and above for the next 4 days too.

Forgive me while I say, once again, that I'm SOO glad I'm not a settler or subsistence farmer these days. I also have to express my gratitude for air conditioners. Life would be miserable here without them. Even with them, this year has become an endurance contest for gardeners.

Remembering - Journal entries from 2005

2011-08-28T07:55:00.000-07:00

I happened to look back to 2005 when I wrote in my journal last night and realized that 6 years ago, while we were living in Mobile, AL, we were preparing for Katrina during these last days of August. Here's the sequence....

Wednesday, August 24: After several quiet weeks, another tropical storm has blown up - Katrina, SE of Miami. Let the fun begin.

Thursday, August 25: Katrina strengthened to a hurricane & hit Miami this evening. It's due along the Fla. panhandle by Monday. Hopefully it will miss us. .... I can't sleep.

Friday, August 26: Katrina up to Cat. 2, but still moving WSW; we're east of the central line of the cone.

Saturday, August 27: The entire day revolved around waiting to see what Katrina would do. I planted a few plants, brought in some unneeded items from the yard, got Annie's [our faithful, old German Shepherd, who was failing badly at this time] med refills, bought dog food...and watched TV. It looks like she's turning NW at last - New Orleans is the current target.

Sunday, August 28: Up by 6 a.m. to get ready for Katrina. She's strengthened to a Cat. 4 with 175 mph winds headed straight for New Orleans. Emptied the yard, put up plywood, emptied the frig. Left about 2:20 p.m. and took Hwy. 45 up into Tennessee, then 412 & on into Sean's. Got in about 2:30 a.m. with all animals. [Sean lived just east of St. Louis at this point, but was in DC for TDY with work. We caravanned, Greg driving the truck with the 2 (outside) hunting dogs in the back, me driving the Camry with Annie, Shiner (our old English setter house dog) and the 2 cats in the back. Greg had to leave as soon as Katrina was out of the Mobile area to get back to his duty station with the Coast Guard. The temperatures were in the upper 90's, with high humidity, during the day.]

Monday, August 29: Shiner woke me early & the day was filled with worry about the dogs and worry about the house. Early reports (8:30 a.m.) said the storm had dumped 36" of rain in Mobile already, so I was sure the house had flooded. Mobile was majorly hit (the eye went in about Biloxi/Gulfport) - 10' surge flooding downtown, multiple tornadoes, the rain & major wind. This evening we talked to [a friend who lived a street over] & he kindly checked out the house - said we'd lost major parts of the live oak out front & one of the big red oaks out back, as well as some shingles, but overall came out okay. ... I'm exhausted. And it's time to have Annie put to sleep; her hind legs are almost totally gone now.

Tuesday, August 30: After some frantic discussion, we decided that Greg should head back alone with Lefty & Misty [the outside dogs]. I spent the day trying to figure out the safest routes for him, reading papers, and talking to [family] on the phone. The water has continued to rise in New Orleans & now the entire city is basically flooded. Biloxi & Gulfport suffered devastating losses & rearrangements. The Coast Guards' been doing nonstop rescues. Greg's truck broke down 25 miles south of Birmingham about 5:30 p.m. AAA came abt. 2 hours later & towed him to Montgomery. He's in a hotel tonight.

Wednesday, August 31: ... Greg got the truck fixed and was on the road by 11 a.m. He got into Mobile abt. 2 p.m. & home by 2:45 or so. A section of fence was down; otherwise yard was as described. ... Increased looting in New Orleans. Greg was relieved to finally get to work.

Thursday, September 1: [The "check engine" light had come on in my car on the drive up from Mobile, so I spent the morning having the repair shop figure out what was wrong. The catalytic converter was shot. I wasn't sure whether to stay at Sean's - who was in D.C. - or go on to Wichita to my folks', or go back to Mobile.] ... No electricity yet at home. Some stations are running out of gas. This feels like a nightmarish alternative universe.

Friday, September 2: Well, I'm finally down to quiet days. ... Have decided to stay here to save gas. .... [Greg was basically working & living at the CG base from this point on for many days, just going home to check on the dogs.]

Saturday, September 3: [Quiet day alone for me.] Electricity on at home.

Sunday, September 4: [Quiet day alone for me.] Annie's hips are getting worse again.

Monday, September 5: Sean got home a little after 10 p.m. - tired but it's great to see him. [I had finally been able to talk with one of my good friends from Mobile that day, to see how others had fared with the storm.]

I stayed for a couple more days at Sean's. He was gone at work from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. during the day, but we got to visit in the evenings. On Thursday of that week, I drove to Topeka/Holton, dropped the animals off at a kennel, and attended the wedding of Sean's best friend, Nathan and his wife Laura, that weekend in Lawrence. Greg flew in to Kansas City on Friday night. Sean and Jess came in for the wedding, too. Greg and I stayed around the Holton area on Sunday to socialize, then we drove back to Sean's on Monday and on to Mobile on Tuesday, getting home around 6 p.m. My only comment upon getting home was, "House & yard as described." We spent the next several days cleaning up the yard, taking down the plywood, cleaning out the frig, having the air conditioners repaired (and then replaced because they couldn't be properly repaired). Five days later we had to have Annie, our sweet German Shepherd, put to sleep.

Ironically, the day we got back to Mobile after Katrina was the same day that, the year before (2004), it was obvious that Ivan was headed our way. We stayed in Mobile for Ivan - which we decided, in retrospect, was really stupid, after spending a LONG night sheltering in a small bathroom and under the dining room table as the winds seemed to be trying to blow our home apart. Even if it seemed cowardly, we decided that, in the future, we would evacuate for hurricanes.

My heart goes out to any who find themselves in for a much worse storm than they expected with Irene. I hope that, whatever property may be damaged, the people are able to keep themselves safe.

Bits and Pieces, Including a Wing and a Prayer

2011-08-26T09:06:00.000-07:00

I can't say there's any theme to today's post, just a series of photos showing things that captured my interest this morning....

While we don't have many cattle egrets stopping in our yard, we do have a lot flying overhead on their way to the horse pasture next door. This summer I've particularly noticed a fair number of single feathers, one or two or three each day, that seem to have drifted down from their passage. When I see one, it reminds me of a "prayer bush" that I saw in a National Geographic article once - individual feathers tied to a shrub, each one symbolic of a wish or a prayer.

The Letterman's ironweed (Vernonia lettermannii) is starting to bloom in my front garden. I've really come to like this plant: its finely textured leaves add a nice filler throughout the summer and fall, it's absolutely no care, and the deep purple blooms completely cover the top of the plant when it's in full bloom. Technically it is native south of here, in Oklahoma and Arkansas, but it's doing fantastically, so maybe I'm just helping it accommodate to the changing rainfall patterns of global warming.

While most of our native Baldwin's ironweed (Vernonia baldwinii) has gone to seed already, I found this one bloom still brightening a rather shady glade down near the draw.

Not too far away was this little understory plant whose identity I have no clue about. What caught my eye, though, were the patterns made on its leaves by leaf miners. These are known as "serpentine" leaf miner patterns, but I don't know much beyond that. Leaf miners can be larvae of moths, flies, sawflies, beetles or wasps. In the case of serpentine leaf miners, you can see how the larva developed, from the narrow little beginning of the pattern to the big broad end, where the larva pupated and emerged as an adult. Leaf miners do not hurt the plant. (On the close-up, look at how the little larva paralleled the edge of leaf, really adding to the lace-like effect of its pattern.)

Below is a closeup of one of the few species of butterflies I'm seeing around the property right now. It's a common buckeye, here shown resting in a red cedar tree. Males can apparently be quite territorial; I commonly see these butterflies near the draw with its trees and relatively lush vegetation. The larvae eat plantain, Ruellia, and members of the snapdragon family. Apparently the spring and summer forms of this butterfly look a bit different from the fall form. I'm going to have to see if I can compare them next year.

My last intriguing find for the day is this little wasp that I noticed feeding diligently on the seedhead of white prairie-clover (Dalea candida). I think it may be a potter wasp, but I'm not at all sure. I may post this to BugGuide to get a firmer identification. I also have no idea what it was looking for/eating on this seedhead, but I assume it was finding something that it liked.

Nothing earth-shattering today, but I can almost always find something that sparks my interest and curiosity. And, as my husband likes to say, any day in which I learn something new is a good day!

Serendipity and Clouded Crimsons

2011-08-24T09:29:00.000-07:00

Other than the fact that the temperature was already up to 80 and the wind was blowing quite a bit (making it hard to take closeups of insects on waving plant stems), this morning's walk was full of interesting sights.

This has been such a hard summer that a lot of plants are blooming "out of season". I noticed a series of Bradford pears, for example, blooming in a road median just a couple days ago. Here at home, the green antelopehorn (Asclepias viridis) have been putting out blossoms. Normally they bloom in May. The grass seed heads that you see airily clustering around the blooms are sand lovegrass (Eragrostis trichodes).

The Missouri goldenrod (Solidago missouriensis) is beginning to bloom - the first of my "wild" species of goldenrod each year. I rather like this juxtaposition of goldenrod intermingled with white sage (Artemisia ludoviciana) leaves.

The most interesting find of the morning was this velvetleaf gaura (Gaura mollis), loaded with caterpillars. I didn't recognize the caterpillars but, looking them up once I got back to the house, I learned they are clouded crimsons. Isn't that a wonderful name? The adults are actually moths, colored pink, deep magenta, tan and cream. I actually think the caterpillars look rather similar to monarchs, but they are smaller, skinnier, and don't have the black "horns". Clouded crimson larvae are specific to gaura species and gaura is even in their scientific name, Schinia gaurae. (Note to self: See there ARE annuals that are very worth having around!)

To tell the truth, I really like velvetleaf gaura. It's too gangly for a cultivated garden bed, but in a "wild" area it's great. The flowers are small and rather uninteresting, but I love the texture of its leaves. The plant is very well named and it looks quite pretty early in the season, when the leaves are still forming a basal rosette.

Sometimes when I take a photo, I discover things in it later that I didn't notice while I was taking it. This picture is one of those. I took it to record one of the 5 caterpillars I noticed on the gaura. When I uploaded it and looked more closely, I found the largest of the clouded crimson caterpillars in the screen and in focus too, as well as a tiny caterpillar right beside the "main" subject, 2 more caterpillars up to the far left upper corner, and a true bug (Hemipteran) of some sort in the top center of the photo. Unfortunately, that last guy is too out of focus to identify it more than that. Serendipitous!

The last find of the morning is the blooms on the side-oats grama (Bouteloua curtipendula). They may be small, but they sure pack a punch of color!

It Never Gets Old

2011-08-23T11:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday it was dripping just a bit of rain when I decided to walk the dogs, so I left my camera inside. Of course, that was when I saw the newly emerged monarch in the Cedar Grove! So I rushed back to the house, got the camera and was able to snap this photo to share with you....

I'm so glad that he (she?) waited patiently so that I could take the picture. I'm quite sure that this is the caterpillar I saw about 2 weeks ago. My only regret is that I didn't look harder for the chrysalis, as it was hanging from the milkweed leaf in plain sight.

Somehow the drop of rain hanging on the bottom of the empty chrysalis brings a poignant pang to my heart every time I look at it! The miracle of new life never gets old.

On this same patch of milkweed, I've seen 3 more milkweed caterpillars since that first one disappeared to pupate. They've all disappeared now (presumably doing their own metamorphoses) and I've lost track of which plant the first one was on, so I don't know if he moved to a different individual plant to pupate, or if he's on the same plant that he fed on as a caterpillar. Obviously somebody's been eating this plant!

I'm pretty sure this guy will be heading south on the monarch migration. My thoughts and hopes will be flying south with him. I hope he makes it safely!

"Timex" Plants in My Yard

2011-08-21T12:08:00.000-07:00

It seems like a good time to take stock of what's actually "taking a licking and keeping on ticking," to paraphrase the old Timex commercial.

Most of my prairie natives will be surviving this summer, even without my having watered much, if at all. The natives may not be looking great right now and most certainly aren't putting forth much effort at blooming, but they are living. With our only water source being a single well, I've been very cautious about overtaxing it with a lot of extraneous watering.

Accidentally choosing this summer to try to establish new lawns of buffalo grass has meant that almost the only landscape watering I've done has been geared towards keeping the buffalo grass alive and healthy.

So with my 2 primary water goals being to keep our well producing and to get the buffalo grass established, I'd have to say it's been a successful droughty summer, all things considered.

Two days ago, I walked around the yard and snapped a few photos of the few plants that are looking halfway decent and/or blooming, despite the summer's challenges.

In the wild areas (which got no extra water at all, of course), the Baldwin's ironweed (Vernonia baldwinii ) put on a reasonable show a couple weeks ago but has finished now, while the snow-on-the-mountain (Euphorbia marginata) is in full bloom right now.

It looks like we'll have a great year for dotted gayfeather (Liatris punctata), based on the number of bloom spikes I see growing up, but none have opened yet.

In the managed flower beds, rose verbena (Verbena canadensis) has a small cluster of blooms and the (new to me this year) heart-leaf skullcap (Scutellaria ovata) is still sporadically blooming but isn't looking particularly showy right now. The aromatic aster (Symphyotrichum oblongifolium) looks lush and gorgeous (although it's also too early for it to be blooming), but the New England aster varieties (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae) look as bad or worse than normal, with brown "legs" almost all the way up to their developing flower buds. I think it's time to pull them out and replace them with other plants whose foliage won't be such a huge detraction.

Gaillardia has a few sporadic blooms. The plants might bloom better if I'd deadhead them, but I prefer to leave the developing seed heads on for the birds...plus it's simply been way too hot to bother with a slow-gardening task like deadheading.

A pleasant surprise for me this summer has been the mealy cup sage (Salvia farinacea). This is a perennial further south, but acts as an annual here. After its carefree performance this year, I'm going to be planting it much more widely throughout the beds. I'm generally not much for annuals, but this one has won a piece of my heart!

The fameflower (Phemeranthus calycinus) is another superb performer this summer. While the mealy cup sage has probably been watered a bit here and there as I tried to keep the nearby lawn from totally dying, the fameflower has gotten absolutely no supplemental water; still it has a cloud of pinky-purple blooms swaying a foot above its succulent foliage every afternoon.

Surprisingly, this brown-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia triloba) that survived my purge of its brethren this spring looks pretty darn good. Like the mealy cup sage, it has received a little incidental watering since it's next to the lawn, but it looks lots better than I would have ever anticipated.

Tucked back in next to Wichita Mountains goldenrod (Solidago sphacelata 'Wichita Mountains'), which actually looks like it'll be gorgeous in bloom, is a small clump of prairie onion (Allium stellatum). It's far from a showy plant, being much too small and too sparsely planted in my beds to stand out, but it's valiantly blooming despite the weather.

The final plant that is currently blooming with a reasonable number of blossoms is that old classic, summer phlox (Phlox paniculata). I have deep watered these clumps with a slow trickle a couple times this summer, so it hasn't been as carefree as the rest of the current bloomers, but I just couldn't bear to lose it. As it is, I didn't water enough to keep it in full bloom, so it hasn't been attracting as many pollinators as usual. (Sorry for the less than optimal photo.)

Speaking of which, there aren't many pollinators anywhere in my yard these days. I'm starting to see a few monarchs and I saw one dainty sulfur the other day, but that's been about it for butterflies. Solitary bees and honeybees haven't been any more plentiful. On the other hand, grasshoppers, cicadas and solitary wasps have been amazingly plentiful, and dragonflies are busily patrolling the skies as well.

It's a year to document the survivors and the non-survivors, so I need to get my garden journal back out and get busy. The summer has been such a bummer as far as gardening goes that I haven't added to it since June sometime, but that's not really the way a garden journal should be working...or so I've been told!

I'll add more flower photos as the goldenrod, dotted gayfeather and asters start sharing their beauty this fall. Not surprisingly, I'm looking forward to seeing their cheerful, abundant faces even more than usual.

20/20 Retroscope

2011-08-21T10:08:00.000-07:00

In hindsight, we probably shouldn't have burned this year. Of course, it's always easy to look backwards after events and, knowing what came later, pontificate on what you should have done. But that niggling feeling in my gut is saying that the Back 5 would be healthier this year if we hadn't.

Why?

Simply because much of the ground has been left bare in the burned area this summer and that feels unhealthy to me. There is NO duff, because nothing's growing very luxuriantly. The cracks in the ground are wider and, presumably, deeper than on the unburned side. The vegetation that is growing doesn't seem quite as tall or full.

To give you a sense of what I'm talking about, here is a bird's eye view of an average area on the path through the unburned area:

Compare that with a bird's eye view of an average area on the path through the burned area:

I'm trying to wrack my brains and figure out if there are any positives to having burned in what has turned out to be a major drought year.

#1: With this much open ground, it may be easier for seeds to get established. The problem is that few plants are blooming and seeding at all, though. Not to mention the fact that the seeds that come in are as likely (or likelier?) to be invasive weeds as to be desirable forbs or grasses.

#2: Perhaps the undesirables are being set back even more than the prairie natives that are, theoretically at least, hardy in such situations. At this point, this theory is a hope, probably bordering on complete wishful thinking.

#3: Which leads me to the one unmitigated positive that I can see about having burned this year, such as it is: I've got my own little unintentional experiment set up.

One way or the other, only time will tell the lasting effects that this heat and drought will have. I would sure like to get over the dry stage of this weather and be able to start evaluating it's effects, though!

Using My Time Wisely

2011-08-18T11:53:00.000-07:00

Whenever I've been blogging a lot, I start to feel guilty. You see, most of my blog posts are built upon taking my camera out and walking around the yard slowly to see what catches my eye, photographing whatever something(s) that may be, bringing the pictures back inside and uploading them, then sorting through them, categorizing them, editing them as necessary...and THEN beginning to write.

I'm not a speedy writer. Sometimes I spend as much or more time researching a topic as I do writing about it. Or I'll remember a "perfect" example to illustrate my topic, but have to search back through years of photos to find the one I'm thinking about. I almost always revise each post a couple times, trying to get the words to flow smoothly and to truly get across what I'm intending them to say.

Once I add the photos and publish the blog post, I try to take the time to view it as others will be seeing it, then edit, as necessary.

This all takes time. Time that I'm not using to garden, to do housework, get groceries, plan meals, pay bills, or to do any of the other myriad of tasks that need to be done to keep our home running smoothly. Naturally, if I've been blogging quite a bit, the house and yard start getting a big ragged. And I start feeling a big ragged...and guilty.

Which leads me to my perennial internal question: What is the best way to use my time? The older I get, the more I realize that our time on Earth is limited. Should I be blogging about the wondrous, and the mundane, world of nature? Or should I be keeping my house spotless and the chores done? Should I be taking the time to walk around the yard with the camera? Or should I be making sure that I get the birthday cards out on time, the social obligations are met, the volunteer hours put in? Should I be in a career, hopefully earning lots of money and respect? Or should I be blogging, volunteering, making dinner and doing laundry - none of which put a red cent into our pocketbooks? I wish I was organized enough and efficient enough to do it all...but the sad fact is that I'm not. Something always seems to get dropped, and it always feels like it's an incredibly important something that I shouldn't have lost sight of.

I wish I was as secure in my understanding of this issue as Robert Michael Pyle when he wrote:

"I have never suffered a crisis about what time well spent means for me. I've never regretted a minute spent out-of-doors with my eyes open. Reading a heartfelt novel, story, poem, essay, or letter has never caused me to feel I was injuring eternity, though many Christmas letters, e-mails, newspapers, and magazines are another matter. Dancing is always time well used; so is birdwatching, and listening to the blues in all their various manifestations, from Bach to Brahms to Bartok, Bobby Burns to Bobby Zimmerman to B. B. King. Love, family, friends, and good cats. The night. Walking by day with my butterfly net. Hiking any trail, exploring small roads that may go nowhere. Conversation and meditation make for moments no more squandered than taking a memorable beer in a satisfying setting, whether it be the Free Press Pub in Cambridge or my old chair surrounded by books and warmed by the woodstove at home."
(p. 105-106, Walking the High Ridge: Life As Field Trip)

Everything that Pyle mentions in that list resonates with me (although I'd change the list of favorite music!). But, but, but.....

This quote, attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson (but actually written by Bessie Anderson Stanley), has often soothed my unease when I start thinking too hard about the roads not taken....

"To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."

I'll probably be pondering choices until the day I die! Meanwhile, the laundry is calling and the paper stacks have been reproducing themselves on the kitchen counter, so I'd better get back to "the real world." Who knows? Maybe inspiration will strike as I fold the socks!

Sometimes "Goodliness" is Messy

2011-08-18T08:38:00.000-07:00

How many of us were raised on the phrase, "Cleanliness is next to Godliness"? It seems almost like a Rule of Life sometimes, a quick and easy way to judge people and their places: "I was SO impressed at their office! It was so new and clean, and they were dressed so professionally! He's obviously a good _______." or "She's such a good mother - her house is always spotless!" or (conversely) "Their yard is never mowed regularly and they have dandelions in it! I am SO glad they are not my neighbors!"

However, as anyone who has ever raised kids will tell you, sometimes real life is Messy, with a capital M. And sometimes "cleanliness" isn't good, it's sterile and lifeless. Like the insane urge to keep our homes so overclean that increasing numbers of children are getting asthma and related disorders - their bodies' immune systems don't have any external factors to fight, so they start attacking themselves.

Too many people have come to expect that nature should always be clean and beautiful too. We groom our gardens within an inch of their lives, spraying pesticides and herbicides to keep off the bugs and keep out the "weeds". Seriously, "-cide" is the Latin root for "kill" - how healthy is it, really, to slather all these killers around our homes and yards? This quest for perfection is a poster child for deadly beauty, as far as I'm concerned.

I've been thinking about all this lately as I've happily noted a couple monarch caterpillars on some of the milkweed plants in the Cedar Grove. To begin with, many forms of milkweed are rather gangly and, if they're not in bloom, they are frankly not the most attractive plant in the area. But they are ALL excellent nurseries for monarchs.

The first time I noted this baby monarch, he was busily reshaping the milkweed leaf he was on...but overall he hadn't affected the plant's appearance.

The next time I saw him, the poor milkweed plant he was living on looked terrible. There was frass (read "caterpillar poop") piled up in the axils of the leaves, while the leaves themselves looked torn and ragged. In a manicured garden, the tendency would be to cut this eyesore back so that it would regrow, looking all nice and pretty...and sterile again.

The next time I walked by, the caterpillar wasn't to be found anywhere. Presumably he'd wandered off to pupate...and a new monarch was forming to join the southward migration this fall.

How many caterpillars (read "baby butterflies and moths") get killed just so that we can keep the foliage in our gardens foliage looking "perfect"? We might be aware enough to notice monarch caterpillars on our butterfly milkweed and let it be, but do we purposely add other, less showy, milkweeds to our planting beds? How about leaving the checkerspot butterfly caterpillars on this young Echinacea? or the variegated fritillary caterpillar on this pansy? Since I almost succumbed to the temptation to spray and/or pick off and drown both, I have to assume that many gardeners would have felt obliged to pull out the big guns for the "health" of their gardens. Without any intervention on my part, though, both plants went on to put out new leaves and look marvelous, their ugly time resulting in"flying flowers" that helped in pollination and that provided food for other species.

I have to believe that, if there is a Supreme Being who created the world and all that's in it (including humans), this Supreme Being is much more pleased with us when we learn to live in harmony with the other inhabitants of this splendid world. I certainly know that I'm happier and more at peace, even if my garden wouldn't always win the "Prettiest Garden on the Block" award.

Prairie as Home Ground

2011-08-15T17:19:00.000-07:00

Greg was born here in prairie country. I adopted it later in my life, after our marriage and after learning about some of the prairie's complexity and subtleties. When Greg retired from Public Health, it seemed natural to come back to this countryside that had been our longest lasting home.

Every once in a while, I read a book that reaffirms our home connection to the prairie lands. I just finished one such book today: Grass Roots: The Universe of Home by Paul Gruchow.

Grass Roots is a series of essays about the prairie, about Gruchow's history growing up within its boundaries, and about the reciprocal relationship between the prairie and the people who inhabit it. Ranging from personal stories of his childhood to descriptions of plants and animals to pointed (sometimes grouchy) commentary, he speaks of the education of our children, the pros and cons of the government's agricultural policies, and what it means to be home somewhere, especially home on the prairie.

Many years ago, I started underlining, starring and commenting in books I owned. To some extent, I judge the value of the book by the amount of personal ink marking its pages. Flipping through Grass Roots, it's obvious that I found a lot to think about as I read it. I'll close this brief review with a few quotes that may help give the flavor of this interesting and thought-provoking book.

"A home, like a garden, exists as much in time as in space. A home is the place in the present where one's past and one's future come together, the crossroads between history and heaven." p.4

"To inhabit a place means literally to have made it a habit, to have made it the custom and ordinary practice of our lives, to have learned how to wear a place like a familiar garment, like the garments of sanctity that nuns once wore. The word habit, in its now-dim original form, meant to own. We own places not because we possess the deeds to them, but because they have entered the continuum of our lives." p. 6 [My highlighting.]

"[The prairie] teaches us that grandeur can be wide as well as tall." p.77

"Young prairie plants put down deep roots first; only when these have been established do the plants invest much energy in growth above ground. They teach us that the work that matters doesn't always show." p. 77

"After our move we were not lonely because we were poor or because we lived in a house without books. We were lonely because we no longer lived in a community." p. 86

"Can you, I asked those students, imagine a satisfactory love relationship with someone whose name you do not know? I can't. It is perhaps the quintessentially human characteristic that we cannot know or love what we have not named. Names are the passwords to our hearts, and it is there, in the end, that we will find the room for a whole world." p. 130

"Ironically, even the weeds that plague our imported crops have been imported. When we came here, we packed up even our troubles and brought them along." p. 136

Your Own, Safe, Natural Playground, or Creating Tomorrow's Nature Nostalgia

2011-08-12T08:10:00.000-07:00

So, my last post was a nostalgic look at some of the ways I enjoyed the natural world as a child. Which was a fun romp for me, but maybe not so much fun for others. I think that "Guess you had to be there!" may be appropriate.

My point in thinking about those days, though, was to mentally move myself into thinking about how we can adapt the current reality to help today's kids have their own natural adventures.

So, let me start with today's current reality, as I understand it.

1. There is little free access to natural areas for most kids. If there are natural areas nearby, most parents are not comfortable with the kids being there unless there is a trustworthy adult along.

The photo below, actually of a local 5 year old high school "landscape," shows the current "classic" type of landscape available for kids to play in, complete with lots of well manicured lawn and a few young trees, carefully spaced far apart. There's absolutely no place for imaginary adventures nor are there even interesting things to observe.

2. Most families have both parents working to make ends meet. This cuts down significantly on the time that either parent can spend with their kids simply exploring outside, including going to those natural areas. This also means that no one has the time to fiddle extravagantly with a garden. Each weekend the yard care agenda is: mow, blow, and get back inside to the sports on TV as soon as possible.

3. Most yards are relatively barren...and boring: a lawn (see the photo above, because everyone has to have a lawn) which is kept mowed and treated with weed-control chemicals, so the neighbors won't get upset. If the kids are lucky, there's some sort of swing set or play equipment in the backyard. A tree or two is generally planted in the middle of the lawn, but it is pruned quite high up to allow easy mowing of the lawn underneath it. Any shrubs are usually foundation plantings, growing 3 feet or so from the foundation of the house. To add insult to injury, these foundation shrubs are often (prickly) evergreens so that the yard won't look "bare" in winter. Any insect seen, with a few exceptions such as ladybugs or monarch butterflies, is assumed to be a problem and becomes a reason to treat the lawn with insect-control chemicals.

So, given this trio of constraints, what can a parent do to encourage their child to interact with nature on his or her own? (Note: I am aware here that I am talking to/about people who own their own home, complete with a yard...or those who are lucky enough to rent a home where the landlord doesn't mind the tenants working in the yard, as long as they take care of it.)

Our society is what it is, so we need to accept that there are few natural areas where the kids can safely roam without our supervision. Nothing much an individual family can do about #1.

Economic realities are what they are as well, which means time constraints are what they are. BUT, there is a block of time already built in on a weekly basis for lawn mowing.... Could we do something a little different with part of that time? #2 has a small bit of possibility within it.

How we design and plant our yards, #3, has some distinct possibilities for individual change though. It doesn't take much to trigger a child's imagination. Here are a few basic ideas to transform your yard from boring to your own safe, natural playground.

How about converting one back corner of the yard to a shrub bed? The idea is to put in a couple big shrubs or small trees in a pattern that will create a central space, somewhat hidden, to become a secret fort or hideaway. Circles, if big enough, work well, but even 3 shrubs planted about 6-8' apart can be sufficient. I've seen this done very successfully here in Wichita with 'Little King' river birch, and I remember using cubbyholes in the landscape like this throughout my childhood. The trick is to trigger the child's sense of enclosure without completely screening them from Mom & Dad's watchful eyes. The photo above begins to capture the concept if you imagine finding a "secret space" between the big spireas and the side of the garage, although this bed was not designed with children in mind. (My dogs love that secret space, though!) Be careful not to choose prickly shrubs.

Plant a small tree or two (or even a big tree or two) on which you leave low branches, so that it becomes a climbing tree. Or plant a clump of trees to form a magic room. The redbud, pictured above, would be a great climbing tree if it were situated in a more child-friendly setting. Amur maples, too, can be encouraged to have open, child-friendly branching patterns. Black willows are good clambering trees, with fast growth and trunks that often become relatively horizontal with age. A standard apple tree is a classic climbing tree that also has flowers and fruit in season. (Just be sure, if there are junipers or redcedars around, to pick one resistant to cedar-apple rust.) Bradford pear, however, would not work well, as the branching pattern doesn't lend itself to climbing.

This clump of cottonwoods, if it were in a more private backyard setting, could provide hours of imagination-fueled play for kids.... And it's no more problem to mow around this group of trees than to mow around a single tree.

Make a small garden bed where you and your kids can plant a few vegetables and a few flowers. For starters, in this area you can....

...make a teepee of bamboo or straight dead branches, then grow pole beans on each leg of the teepee. If you leave one or two branches out on one side, this becomes a playhouse for the kids to use.

...plant sunflowers - big ones - that the kids can keep track of over the summer. Leave the flower heads on after they finish blooming. The seeds will develop (in cool geometric spacing) and goldfinch will come pick them clean over the winter.

...plant 4 o-clocks. These hardy, colorful flowers produce the coolest little seeds that look like small, black grenades.

Even more classic flower gardens can provide excitement for kids and adults alike. Here is a white lined sphinx moth nectaring at summer phlox blooms just 2 feet from our front porch. Watching a moth like this guy, it's hard to tell him apart from a hummingbird!

Hang birdfeeders and keep them filled with black oil sunflower seed during the winter. Be sure to put them somewhere they can be easily seen from the house, preferably from the kitchen table. Keep binoculars and a guidebook nearby so the kids can learn to look up birds for themselves as they get older, as well as learn to handle binoculars. There are basic 'Birder' binoculars available for about $30 from online sources, so you don't have to be too paranoid about the kids occasionally dropping them.

Throughout your yard, use as few insecticides and herbicides as possible. Let the white clover and henbit and dandelions grow in the (back) lawn. Then, with your kids, watch for butterflies and bees nectaring at the flowers. Examine a dandelion seed head up close for its beautiful design, then huff and puff and blow the seeds away on their little white umbrellas. Show your child how to make a necklace or a crown out of white clover blossoms.

Save a few plastic peanut butter jars that you've washed out and show your kids how to use them to hunt for caterpillars and grasshoppers and fireflies. (Just be sure to teach them "catch & release" habits.) Watching a grasshopper in the jar, they can see its jaws move side to side; with the firefly, they can see what the insect really looks like, then watch its abdomen glow right in front of them. If the kids catch a moth or a butterfly, they can see the long "tongue" rolled up like a New Year's Eve noisemaker...or, as in the photo of the great spangled fritillary below, looking like a straw stuck into a source of nectar or water.

The ideas are endless and, since it's your (safe) backyard, you can let the kids play with no more supervision than normal. While they play, they'll be learning without even realizing it. If you keep your eyes open, you'll be learning too!

Think globally, act locally. By creating little nature sanctuaries in our yards, we can help keep our neighborhoods and towns be healthier and happier...and our world a lot greener.

Young Explorers: Just Memories or Still a Reality?

2011-08-10T11:33:00.000-07:00

Over the last several days, I've encountered a series of articles and quotes about children and nature. They've gotten me thinking about how I interacted with the natural world when I was a child....

My first conscious memory of enjoying the outdoors was when I was about 5. We lived in Alaska, where I distinctly remember picking blueberries by myself at the edge of the forest near the base housing complex. I also remember seeing bison and moose along the roads, and learning to shoot a bow and arrow...but the blueberry picking was an adventure, all by myself!

As I got a little older, my horizons broadened a bit and we also moved just outside of DC. In our typical Maryland suburban yard, I smile as I think of the young me making my own special place under the hanging branches of a sapling weeping birch that my parents had just planted. (There weren't enough branches to hide a bird, let alone a 9 year old, but it still felt special and secluded!)

During those same years, I actually spent most of my time playing down in the woods at the bottom of the hill we lived on. There was a creek running there, and on some days I looked for crayfish and tadpoles and minnows in the water, while on other days my imagination helped me become a pioneer explorer or a princess locked away in the (magic) holly grove. There were even a couple small islands in the creek that became enchanted hideaways. Holly, sassafras, huckleberries, tadpoles, toads and frogs, crayfish.... My play helped me learn a lot about the natural world too.

For several years during the middle of the summer, we drove to Flint, Michigan, where my father took over the practice of a friend of his for a month, while their family went on vacation. Their house backed up onto a large weedy field, and I would catch grasshoppers and fireflies and crickets and anything else I could get my hands on and/or jar around.

When I was 10, we moved again, this time to Massachusetts. Outdoor exploration continued, but we (my brother, our friends and I) added a new twist: there were a lot of toads in the area, so my friends and I would catch toads, keep them in the window wells, give them names, and "train" them to race in different track and field events in the sand box: long jump, high jump, distance race, sprint, etc. I kept elaborate records of which of my toads did the best in each event so that I could win more often, and we'd occasionally go on hunting expeditions to catch more toads.

I particularly remember overseeing my younger brother and his friend in overturning a big stump at the end of our driveway one day. Unbeknownst to us, there was a yellow jacket nest underneath it. I, being the overseer (and the oldest), ran away without getting stung. The others each got one or two stings apiece, which I consider an amazingly low number now, and toad hunting became spiced with a sense of danger after that.

Sometimes I went fishing off the dock in the little lake at the end of our street. Other times my best friend and I would sneak over to the nearby bait store and buy some candy, then walk down to the lake, sitting on a log along the path overlooking it while we ate our spoils and discussed what had happened at school that day.

It was about this time in my life that my Uncle Ted introduced me to My Family and Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell. I loved that book (and still do); here was somebody else who loved animals as much as I did! I dreamed of being able to capture animals and keep them in my room.

Right as I turned 12, we moved again. This time it was a real adventure: we moved to the Panama Canal Zone, driving through Mexico and Central America to get there, and my fantasies of a personal zoo got quite a workout. Shell collecting became my passion, along with beachcombing and exploring tidal pools. I never did catch any monkeys or owls, but I'd bring living creatures home from the beach and try to keep them alive in milk cartons cut out along one side, appropriately outfitted with salt water, sand and rocks. Somehow the animals always died, despite my best efforts. Still, I became deeply fascinated with crabs and hermit crabs, gastropods, cephalopods, and bivalves.

I still have my shell collection, safely packed away in 3 large moving boxes, with the shells themselves carefully organized by type and packed away in cigar boxes, stuffed with cotton to keep them from getting broken.

The outdoors was my playground throughout childhood and even into adolescence. I learned about the world around me, exercising my body, my mind, and my imagination. It was almost impossible to be bored...although I'm sure that I was gloriously dirty when I finally made it home many days.

Do any children still get this kind of freedom to learn about and explore the natural world any more? In our world of picture perfect lawns and neatly trimmed shrubs, is there anything for them to explore and learn from on their own? Was this sort of thing important to you, as a child?
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts...and your memories.

The Signs are Everywhere

2011-08-06T13:39:00.000-07:00

Here is a link to a site put up by the Union of Concerned Scientists called the Climate Hot Map. It's an interactive map that allows you to click on locations throughout the world where scientific evidence shows that climate change is already occurring.

The site also provides information about solutions to minimize the impact of climate change, so it's not all gloom and doom.

While you're at it, you might check out the home site for the Union of Concerned Scientists. Check out who they are, what their mission is, how and when they formed, and so forth. It's long past time for all of us to start paying attention to who've we set to guard the henhouse and why they want to guard it...so to speak.

The Great Experiment

2011-08-06T07:37:00.001-07:00

I want to blame the heat and drought this summer on global warming. But, in all good conscience, I can't. It's been this hot and dry here before. It will be again.

That said, it doesn't mean that global warming isn't occurring and that humans' release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere isn't a primary cause. But you can't look at the weather in any one location and conclude anything, one way or another. The concept is GLOBAL warming or CLIMATE change, not Kansas warming or weather change.

Naysayers point to local cold snaps and triumphantly screech, "See! There can't be any WARMING going on!" But that's no more valid than someone pointing to this summer's local heat and drought to prove that global warming is, indeed, occurring.

Can scientists predict exactly what's going to happen and when? No. The Earth is a very complex system that we, as humans, will probably never completely understand. Even powerful computers come up with different results, based on their programming and on the data fed into them.

As I understand it, though, there are some commonalities to all the models. The weather is going to become increasingly unpredictable compared to the recent historical record, swinging more wildly from highs to lows, tending towards drought or deluge, with little stable or moderate weather. Storms are predicted to be bigger. Droughts deeper. Floods more frequent. Some historically wet places will become dry. Some historically dry places may become wet. Ocean currents that have been stable for centuries may change course. Glaciers and ice caps will melt. Ocean levels will rise.

If the Gulf Stream ceases to flow (as some models have predicted), Europe will enter a deep freeze. Global warming will seem like The Big Freeze to folks there, if that occurs. This is GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE we're talking about, not local weather change.

Ice core samples from Greenland and other deep ice masses show that climate change, when it comes, is usually rapid. It's called "punctuated equilibrium": long periods of stability, interspersed with shot periods of rapid change.

Glaciers worldwide, as well as the polar ice caps, are melting. Now. Ice in the Arctic is at historic lows for this time of year...once again. The articles I've seen about this particular change tend to focus on the positive: better shipping channels to move goods around the world. The fabled "Northwest Passage" becoming reality. The polar bears, though, aren't having such a good time of it.

Do I have a crystal ball to predict the future? No. I just have probability based on trends from the past...and the current best understanding of about 95% of the scientific community. Those trends and that understanding tell me that we're performing a great big experiment on the only home we have...because it's too hard to voluntarily change our way of life.

So we'll wait until the Earth forces us to change it. And hope that we like what happens next.

A Mystery That's Likely to Remain Unsolved

2011-08-05T19:37:00.000-07:00

For about a week, we had a distinctive mini-volcano in the garden by our front steps. It was roughly 1" tall, with a hole the diameter of a pencil in the middle of it, and somewhat sheltered by a seedling aster. Every time I walked by, I glanced at it, checking inside the hole for any sign of activity.

And one morning, on my way back from getting the paper, I was rewarded by seeing the tunnel blocked by the large head of an insect. As soon as it saw me, it backed down the tunnel, so I grabbed my camera and waited a few feet away.

Pretty soon I was rewarded by the insect emerging from its tunnel. I managed to capture its head, but by the time I tried to get a second shot of the entire insect as it emerged, it had flown rapidly away. I did not get enough of a look at it to know whether it was a bee or a wasp, or even what the body color was.

I went out several times during the day and waited, trying to see my mystery volcano builder again, but she eluded me completely.

While I was waiting, though, the Carolina wrens who've been nesting on the breezeway decided that I was intruding intolerably on their territory. You haven't truly been read a riot act until you've had a Carolina wren upset with you!

One of the parent wrens became particularly bold, moving from the Bradford pear in the garden to behind the pots on the breezeway to the top of wicker chair just 10' away from me. I couldn't resist capturing the scolding that I was getting on camera.

(As a side note: In capturing this bird on camera, I have to ask if anyone else thinks its beak is somewhat malformed? It seems too long to me, especially the lower mandible.)

Two days later, the breezeway and the garden were both quieter. The wrens appeared to have fledged their young, and the volcano hole had been carefully plugged, reducing the size of the exterior cone significantly. After the rain 2 nights ago, you can't even tell there was ever a mini-volcano there.

One of these days, I'm going to take down the clay wren nest to see if the babies actually made it. One evening about a week before this incident, I had found 2 half-feathered baby wrens, obviously still too young to be out of the nest, on the breezeway floor. It was one of those desperately hot days and I figured the babies had tried to get some cooler air at the entrance to the nest and they'd fallen out. I got a ladder, put them back into the nest, and hoped for the best. Since the parents continued to defend the breezeway for over a week and I did not find any baby wren bodies, I have great hopes that at least one of them survived to fledge at the proper time.

So I will probably get an answer to the wren question, but the identity of the volcano-building bee/wasp is likely to remain a mystery. I plan to post the photo on BugGuide, but with just the somewhat blurry photo of the insect's face, I have little hope that anyone will be able to help me. If I do get an answer, I'll be sure to share it!

Twelve-Spotted Skimmer Redux

2011-08-05T15:36:00.000-07:00

A week or so ago, a female twelve-spotted skimmer (dragonfly) posed for a picture one morning while I was doing a walkabout. It took me a while to identify her because most of the photos I found were of male twelve-spotted skimmers and, in this species, there's a pretty significance difference between the two.

Yeah, yeah, I know.... There's a pretty big difference between males and females in general. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" "It takes a woman, all powdered and pink, to joyously clean out the drain in the sink." But dragonflies don't seem to have the trouble connecting that we humans do...

...even when their males and females look rather dissimilar. To refresh your memory, here is a female, again posing nicely for me.

Note her classy yellow racing stripe along the abdomen, the diagonal yellow beauty stripes along the sides of her thorax, the 12 crisp, dark brown spots evenly spaced out along her wings.

So who's this guy, "all powdered and blue"? It's the male twelve-spotted skimmer. Same diagonal yellow thorax stripes, same 12 crisp, dark brown wing spots, but now the abdomen is powdery blue and there are 8 matching bluish-white, rather cloudy spots added to the wings.

These were 2 of the 5 or more twelve-spotted skimmers I saw Wednesday morning (again, before the rain) at the back edge of the back 5, hunting around the mulberry tree. I can only hope that they eat grasshoppers!

Where these guys are finding water to emerge from is beyond me, but I'm glad that they are. I'm trying out different rain dances to encourage enough rain so that they have places to lay their eggs this year, too. A summer like this makes me keenly aware of the fragility of life: a month, maybe two, to find your partner, mate, and lay your eggs (in water) before you die. And if there's no water? You die anyway...and the next generation dies with you. It does us good to remember that farmers and ranchers aren't the only ones that this drought is spectacularly hard on.

In the Eye of the Beholder....

2011-08-05T14:13:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday morning, I took this quick snapshot of an ornate box turtle I saw in the cedar grove. The storms didn't come until that night, so it was still desperately dry. When conditions are that difficult, I do my best not to disturb my local land-mates any more than I have to, so I didn't pick this guy up or move in too close...and, at the time I took the photo, I couldn't tell whether this was a male or female, except that the red flush on the front leg made me strongly suspect that it was a male.

Imagine my delight when I downloaded the photos and saw this gorgeous red eye staring up at me! Definitely a male. He looks pretty fearsome, doesn't he?!

On Monday morning, I'd snapped a quick pair of photos of a different ornate box turtle out under the mulberry tree in the Back 5. They are not the best shots, but I was following my "don't disturb more than necessary" philosophy that day, too. I think this is a female, although I can't tell for sure since her head is pretty well hidden. What really struck me, though, was how differently the camera saw her shell patterns in the light of the sun and in the light of a passing shadow. I hadn't realized before how truly concealing the ornate box turtles' shell patterns are in sunlit grass. (The turtle didn't move at all between the two photos; only the lighting changed.)

The other fun realization these photographs have given me is that I can simply take pictures of each ornate box turtle I see on my perambulations and have a pretty good idea, eventually, of how many different individuals are living on our property. The shell patterns are distinctly and uniquely individual - so I won't even need to number them by crudely carving or painting in fingernail polish on their shells, as I've seen done in the past. Photography is great...and digital photography is even better!

Discovering a "New" Tree Species

2011-08-01T07:16:00.000-07:00

I have lived in Kansas, off and on, for many years. I know there is a wide variety of exotic species of trees that have been brought in for landscaping; some of those species have escaped into the wild where they might throw me for a loop. But I truly thought that I basically knew most of the native tree species...or at least knew OF them.

So I was amazed a year or so ago when I realized that there was a species of hackberry that grew in Kansas that I was simply unaware of. This doubly surprised me when I realized that I had seen this tree over and over and over again, but just hadn't recognized it as different from the normal hackberry of the area, Celtis occidentalis. I was triply surprised to realize that this species was growing on our little 10 acres, along with its relatives, hackberry and sugarberry (Celtis laevigata).

This "new discovery" of mine is the dwarf hackberry, Celtis tenuifolia. Here is a photo of one of the largest and most luxurious ones on our property, taken on June 22, before the worst of the heat and drought had taken hold. It doesn't look much different than this now.

I often see examples of this species in fence rows, where birds have kindly deposited the seeds along with a quick burst of fertilizer. I'd always assumed the specimens I was seeing were regular hackberries that were simply stunted because of where they happened to be growing.

Somehow I've overlooked the descriptions of this species in guidebooks, simply because I've never heard of it and therefore didn't expect to find it. It's certainly NOT an imposing giant of a tree, or a graceful form of a tree, or a conspicuously fruiting tree, or even a beautifully flowering tree. It's a gnarled, stunted, half-dead-looking survivor of a tree - it often looks like it should have given up a hundred times over but has held on despite everything the Plains' climate can throw at it.

There is nothing luxurious about this tree at all. It grows very slowly, almost seeming not to grow at all from year to year. Its leaves look chronically dusty, moth-eaten and malnourished. Its twigs and branches are short and look knotted or contorted. But the dwarf hackberry survives and, in its own way, it thrives. As it does, it provides food and shelter for the birds...and the occasional moment of humility to an amateur naturalist, who's learning how little she really knows as she learns more and more each day.

The Same...But Different

2011-07-29T09:24:00.000-07:00

Another walkabout with the boys this morning. Again the camera came with us. Again it's hot and dry and sunny today. We walked the same trail. Nothing seems to have changed from yesterday. And we saw lots of the same things....but it's as if different animals chose to let me get close to them today.

This time as we started out, I noticed the "A is for Abbott" logo that had formed itself in the draw sometime in the last couple of weeks. (Actually I noticed it yesterday, but ignored it because I was too busy looking at other things.) To my knowledge, this arrangement of windfall happened spontaneously, but it makes me smile when I pass by it.

About halfway around the Back 5, I saw this dragonfly perched on a bare branch. I stopped and took a photo from about 10' away, then inched forward and took another, inched forward again and took another.... By the time I was done, she had let me get about 4' away from her without flying. When she did finally spook, she came back almost immediately and let me take a couple more shots. Before I could try to go even closer, though, the dogs came over to see what I was doing. Needless to say, hanging around to let 2 German shepherds investigate her wasn't high on her priority list for the day.

I've identified my patient poser: she's a female 12-spotted skimmer, Libellula pulchella. The name, not surprisingly, comes from the 12 brown spots on the wings. Males, interestingly, have a series of cloudy white spots in between the brown spots that both sexes share and their abdomen gets covered with a waxy white coloration as they age. They almost look like a different dragonfly.

The skimmer was perched on a bare branch that is probably her hunting post. I don't know if dragonflies take grasshoppers but I'm hopeful, because close by her stakeout is a mulberry tree that has provided a great deal of fruit for birds and other critters this summer. Now, however, the grasshoppers have stripped the tree almost clean, even of leaves.

As I walked this morning, I ended up taking pictures of plants that grasshoppers had basically stripped but that I hadn't noticed before: mulberry, compass plant, Jerusalem artichokes, peony, cottonwood saplings...even the cattails were loaded with, and being eaten by, grasshoppers! It's impressive, actually. I showed a picture of the top of an 8' tall althea yesterday; today I chose to show a compass plant leaf. I actually took a photo of this same plant yesterday, from a bit farther away, and I could swear that the grasshoppers have visibly eaten away at it in less than 24 hours. Compass plant leaves are very rough and leathery - about as appetizing as eating prickly cardboard, I'd think - so it's surprising to see them enjoyed by grasshoppers this thoroughly.

As I got ready to go back inside, I stopped in the front yard to move a hose. Looking at a nearby green ash, I noticed a green cicada (Tibicen superbus) on the trunk, so I stepped under the canopy to photograph it. As I did with the dragonfly, I started from a fair distance away and moved in slowly. Again, my subject was mesmerized by my slow approach and posed patiently. With the "black shades" across the face between the eyes, this species reminds me of Geordie on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

On one of my last shots of the cicada, a velvet ant busily inserted herself into the picture before I noticed. She didn't pause, but scurried up the trunk, searching the tree for ??? She moved fast and it was hard to focus on her, but I watched her for several minutes. She walked up the trunk to the first branch, walked briskly out along the upper surface for the entire length of that branch, didn't find what she was looking for, came back to a junction in the branch, checked out out the fork not taken, still wasn't happy, came back to the trunk, chose the next branch, and kept going. I got sidetracked taking another photo or two and lost her in the canopy before too long, so I never did see if her search was successful or not.

Velvet ants are actually wingless female wasps and they will sting viciously if handled, despite their warm, fuzzy appearance. The males are winged, generally less hairy than their mates, and look like typical wasps. Apparently most velvet ants parasitize other wasps, including mud daubers, so maybe this female was looking for a wasp to paralyze and bring back to her nest. A couple years ago I noticed a velvet ant (different species) constructing a burrow in bare dirt in my garden, so I assume they provision their young with paralyzed prey in underground cells like the cicada killers do.

Each time I venture beyond the air conditioning these days, I'm beginning to feel pulled to take my camera outside with me. Who knows what I'll see next!

Morning Walkabout

2011-07-28T08:32:00.000-07:00

The boys and I went on an early morning walkabout today and, despite the drought, I decided to take my camera along. There wasn't anything particularly unusual or earth-shattering, but I still managed to document a bit of what we experienced....

It's been warm enough that I can't count on getting good bug shots either in the early morning or the late evening. However, shortly after we set out, this bush cicada posed prettily for me. Bush cicadas are among the largest of the cicada species in Kansas and prefer open country to trees. Most cicadas in this group are considered annual, but each individual actually lives for 2-3 years below ground as a nymph before emerging and molting into the adult, winged form.

Without a blind (and with 2 large, rambunctious German shepherds frolicking around me), it's hard to get close to birds on my walks, but I managed to get a shot this morning where you can at least identify this lark sparrow...if you squint and look hard enough! This bird is one of a family of lark sparrows raised in our back 5 acres this spring. In the spring, the parents stayed behind while the rest of the migration wave moved on. Eventually we saw the fledglings learning to fly and now the little family group flies confidently between our back acreage and the horse pasture next door.

Moving around to the front yard, this is what the combination of heat, drought and grasshoppers have done to my althea (Rose-of-Sharon) along the driveway. They are officially sticks, with grasshoppers adorning their branches instead of leaves. If you look closely, you can even see areas where the grasshoppers have begun stripping away the bark. Altheas are tough plants, so I'm trusting that these shrubs will survive even this assault, but if the drought goes on a lot longer, I may get proven wrong.

Passing by my pecan tree, I caught this grasshopper pair in an amorous moment - highlighting EXACTLY why I'm letting the black blister beetles go to town on my tomato plants this year.

In fact, I'm counting on this fat female to lay a bunch of eggs and take out some of the progeny of that romantic couple!

Even in the heat and drought, life goes on.

Fighting the Odds

2011-07-28T06:07:00.000-07:00

The courtyard lawn looked rough last fall - full of weeds, patchy, generally yucky. So Greg just decided to nuke it all and start fresh this year.

With our trip to England and Norway in September, we missed our opportunity to plant fescue last fall.

Between the weather and my trip to San Antonio this spring, we missed our opportunity to plant fescue this spring.

So when I saw the sale on Prestige buffalo grass at High Country Gardens this June, I decided that I ought to take advantage of it. Buffalo grass has to be established in the heat of the summer. Once established, it requires almost no watering or mowing. It's native here. This is a greener-than-usual strain of it. And it was on sale. It seemed like all the signals were saying "Go for it!" So I did.

And the grass came. All 27 flats of 70 plugs apiece came. Those of you who are friends on Facebook suffered through our planting of it (as far as it went). Planting entailed bending over (or kneeling, or sitting on my butt on the ground) in full sun, digging a hole, filling it with water, loosening up the roots of the plug, planting it, watering it again, and repeating....900+ times. That means we got about half of the plugs put in before we gave up and just started trying to keep it all alive.

Full summer is one thing. THIS summer is something else. But we're slowly seeing some progress. After 3 weeks now, the grass plugs we planted seem to have taken hold. They are beginning to grow and send out a few runners. They stay healthy green longer and require watering less often. I know there are a few plugs on the periphery that we'll have to replace, but the majority look like they're going to make it. It's our main success story in the garden for the summer. It may not be much - but I'll take it!

Quiet Elegance with 6 Legs

2011-07-27T17:39:00.000-07:00

If ever a moth could be considered classy, I have to admit that this guy would be in the running. He (she?) is an Achemon Sphinx (Eumorpha achemon) that I discovered hiding in my Ficus on the front porch the other day. Phlox are among the flowers they prefer for nectaring; so I assume it had been sampling mine and got tired enough to hole up for the day.

Look at the cool way the color shading on the rear margin of the front wing makes it look curled up, like a dried up leaf. (That seems pretty appropriate for this summer!) The hind wings have a great deal of pink on them, but I didn't want to disturb this one to try to get it to strut its stuff for the camera.

Before you get too irritated - I, too, had to look this moth up to identify it. I learned (not surprisingly) that Achemon sphinx is in the same family as the tomato hornworm, but that the larva of this moth feeds on Virginia creeper, grape, and other closely related vines, rather than on tomatoes. It is relatively rare to see the caterpillar, but apparently it looks very much like a typical hornworm, except that it loses its horn as it matures and develops a big eye spot on its hind end instead.

Now that I know they should be there, I'm going to be on the lookout for the caterpillars on the grape vines and Virginia creeper around the yard. I'd like to get a look at that eyespot in person! Meanwhile, I've learned about another fellow Earthling sharing our space. That's always a good thing.

Summer Time...But the Living Ain't Easy

2011-07-27T16:21:00.000-07:00

This is truly a long, hot summer. Today was the second time we've reached 111 in the last few weeks. We haven't had a really good rain in months. In fact, we feel lucky if we get enough rain to wash the dust off the leaves. The cracks in the soil are inches wide and gaping. Even my native perennials and grasses are struggling and I've resorted to deep watering a few to nurse them through the summer.

Farther away from the house, the prairie we're trying to restore is struggling too. It greened up nicely after the burn this spring and looked good until about a month ago, but now it's parched. The grasses should be almost up to the dogs' backs, but they are barely ankle height. The deer skull was almost completely hidden by vegetation in mid June; now it's almost as fully exposed as it was after the burn.

I saw a piece on TV a week or two ago asking for suggestions on how to visually show heat. It's hard. A picture of someone sweating? ...or of a dog panting? ...of a plant wilting? Somehow none of them can begin to convey the angst of the sapping heat and drought that has got us in its grip.

Grasshoppers seem to be doing phenomenally well, though, at least in my yard. And blister beetles. I've decided to nurse my tomato plants along just enough to keep the adult blister beetles fed, hoping that they'll lay lots of eggs and produce lots of baby blister beetles to eat all the gazillion grasshopper eggs we're going to have. (Every blister beetle eats about 21-27 grasshopper eggs as it grows to maturity. Doesn't that sound wonderful?!) With this heat, there's no way I'm going to get any tomatoes anyway, so at least the plants are providing us with some benefit!

The prairie is showing its severe side. I think often of what this sort of weather must have been like for the poor pioneers trying to keep themselves fed and watered without any of our modern conveniences. I feel grateful for our well and for our air conditioning every day. I know that this, too, shall pass, but some days I get a little shaky, wondering what would happen if it didn't...

Discoveries after the Burn

2011-03-20T10:34:00.000-07:00

It's been a good day - I've discovered a few things and, most importantly, learned something new.

I've been walking the burned area almost every day since we burned it, just open to whatever I might see. Here's what it looked like this morning....

You can see how quickly the grasses are coming up. It's only been 8 days since we burned and there was absolutely no green visible after the burn. You can also see last summer's path meandering through the burned area.

I mentioned a couple days ago that within a few days I was also able to see our paths from 2 summers ago, as well as the network of prairie vole trails. Here's a photo, taken while standing in the fire break, of last year's path (going off to the left from the firebreak) intercepted by the prior summer's path coming in from the right. If you look closely, you can see a fair number of prairie vole trails as well.

In the next photo, you can see a network of prairie vole trails and a mound that's greener than the surrounding area. That mound is the prairie vole colony itself. I believe that the mound is greener than the surrounding area because of extra nutrients brought up from the subsoil as the voles excavate their tunnels. Prairie vole "fertilization" in the area may play a role as well. Beyond the mound is another trace of our path from 2 summers ago.

As I walked our path a couple days ago, I found this prickly pear cactus immediately adjacent to the mowed area...yet I hadn't had a clue it was there until after the burn! That doesn't say good things about my observation skills, I guess, especially since I knew there was a prickly pear somewhere in the area - I'd seen it after our original burn.

Most interestingly, near two of the coyote digs I found wasp nest combs that can only be from yellowjacket colonies. The photo to the left shows a close-up of one of the charred combs; the one below shows the same comb in the bottom left corner and the colony it presumably was dug out of in the top right corner. So now I'm questioning whether the coyotes were digging for voles...or whether they were digging for yellowjacket nests. It's an interesting mystery to ponder (and do a bit of internet research on).

As I said, it's been an interesting and successful day already!

2011-03-16T08:12:00.000-07:00

Four days after the burn. 1/10" rain on the evening of the second day.

Becker, Blue and I just got back from our morning walk. Now that some of the ash overlay has blown off or been watered in, I can see many more vole trails. I can even see our mowed paths from two years ago! It's almost a bit frightening how long and how easily the prairie remembers our influence....

I'm already seeing a few spikes of green grass pushing up. While it stirs my winter-tired, spring-hungry heart to see them, I'm trying to keep my joy within bounds - it's probably brome, a cool season, non-native grass, that I'm seeing!

The burn seems to have attracted two species of birds to it, in particular. I saw 5 or 6 flickers foraging, as well as several killdeer. Found a couple flicker breast feathers on the ground, too. I'm not sure what that was all about, as I saw no signs of a body nearby. Maybe a squabble over some particularly tasty tidbit two birds had found at the same time.

Mama bluebird had a beak-full of dried grasses, perched in the top of an osage orange, so they've found some sort of nesting site already. Which reminds me that I need to get the new nesting boxes up.

On a related note, as I walked through the draw with the boys, I saw both hawks sitting side by side in the big cottonwood in our neighbor's pasture. One is much spookier than the other and flew off almost as soon as I saw them, but the other stayed put through our entire walk. I think that may be the female, as it seems a little larger than the other one. I hope so. Any day now, I hope to see her sitting solidly in the nest, keeping eggs warm!

After the Burn is Over, After the Flames are Gone....

2011-03-15T13:31:00.000-07:00

(You can sing the title to the tune of "After the Dance Is Over, After the Music's Done....")

Sunday, the day after we did the burn in the back 5 acres, I took The Boys for a walk and looked it over a little more closely. It's always fun to see what's revealed after a fire....

For the past week or so, there's been an elusive deer skull taunting the dogs as we walked out back. I first saw it in the neighbor's field when Becker and Blue just HAD to go over there to inspect it. There was a companion leg associated with it, which was almost more fascinating to the dogs than the skull. Perhaps that because the skull was covered with soil and looked like it had been partially buried. Both looked pretty "ripe", like they'd been aged quite thoroughly.

The next day when we walked, the skull and leg were magically in OUR field, about 50' from where they'd been lying the day before. There they stayed for 2 more days, then magically they moved again. This time the skull went south and the leg went east, instead of staying together. My dogs faithfully found them each time they moved. (I'm attributing this "magic movement" to coyotes, of course.) I don't mind if my local coyotes want to munch on decayed deer flesh, but I'm really not too keen on my dogs doing so; therefore, this daily deer skull hunt had really begun to get on my nerves.

After the burn, the deer skull stood out boldly. The leg was much less visible. I'm curious to see what happens to them now that they've been "purified" by fire, so I'm continuing to just let them be.

Another sight that I always look forward to seeing after a fire are the prairie vole colonies and their associated runways.

I don't know why these fascinate me so much - maybe because it reminds me of playing with Matchbox cars during childhood! The little roads run from vole town to vole town and I can just imagine the self important little beasts scurrying back and forth, visiting their neighbors, gossiping about the good vegetation finds they've made recently.

This winter I've noticed fairly large holes turning up occasionally in the back 5. A couple have been as big as 18" X 12" and up to 12" deep.

At first I thought that some animal must be beginning to dig itself a burrow, but they never got deepened after the first time I saw them. Finally I decided it was coyotes (again), digging out the prairie vole colonies for a late night snack.

Boy, do those scars show up boldly against the burn. (The cell phone in the hole is to give you a sense of scale.)

Greg wants to fill in the coyote digs because he (correctly) notes that they will be real ankle-turners otherwise. While I know he's right, there's the curious part of me that wants to watch them and see how they change over the upcoming months and years. What's going to grow on the mounds of soil thrown up? Will the holes fill back in by themselves? Will they become used by some other animal in some other way? (Maybe I'll leave just one or two...and flag them, so we don't injure ourselves....)

Do I get upset about all of these disruptions to my slowly thickening grasses and wildflowers? Heck, no. The prairie vole colonies bring water and air down into the soil...and probably a fair amount of vegetation and fertilizer too. Other animals, from insects to other mammals to snakes, will utilize the vole tunnels for shelter. The coyote digs provide a small area of open soil for seeds to colonize, where new plants can gain a foothold. It's all part of the natural prairie cycle, and I love seeing it play itself out in my big back yard.

Burn, Baby, Burn!

2011-03-13T19:25:00.000-07:00

Maintaining or restoring a prairie requires burning it periodically. Prairies evolved with fire, and nothing refreshes and nourishes a prairie like the occasional burn.

That said, it's been 3 years since we burned the back 5 acres, so we knew that it would be a good thing to burn at least part of it this spring. The first time we burned it, we burned the entire thing, but this time we wanted to leave part of it unburned to make sure that we left some of the insect life undisturbed. Prairies are mosaics of habitat; burning different areas during different years helps increase the diversity of plant and animal life within any given acreage.

Last time we burned, we didn't get the burn accomplished until early April. Some of the early wildflowers were up and blooming by that time, so the burn set them back for the year. In general, the later you burn in the spring, the more you will encourage the (warm season) grasses at the expense of wildflowers. Conversely, the earlier you burn, the more you will encourage wildflower growth. This time, I wanted to give the wildflowers the best start that I could, so we decided to burn as early as possible. That turned out to be yesterday.

Watching the weather obsessively all week, Saturday morning looked very promising for several reasons. The winds were supposed to average about 6 mph all day, with a little increase to 9 mph around noon. (Around here, for safety reasons, the powers-that-be require you to burn when the winds are between 5 and 15 mph - a potentially difficult window to hit in the perennially windy prairies.) The skies were due to be clear...and Greg would be home to lead the burn crew.

I was also able to find several Master Gardener friends willing to help us out: Sid, Ron, and Linda. Sid has burned his family land many times; Ron and Linda were new to the process but excited to learn about it, as they are restoring tall grasses to their property as well.

Greg and I prepared ahead of time. Greg had mowed the firebreaks several weeks ago. Early yesterday morning, we placed buckets of water with burlap sacks and towels scattered around the burn site, plus took out the rakes and flat shovels that we had gathered. Sid brought a sprayer for water, which we filled up and took with us, along with a couple other sprayers of our own. I highly recommend the sprayers!

By the time we had all gathered at 9 a.m., had a little caffeine and sugar fix from coffee and donuts, and then walked out to the back 5, the wind was steadily blowing at 11 mph with occasional gusts to 13 mph. Although the wind was pushing the upper limits of safety, the direction was perfect for this plot of ground, so we went ahead and started the burn. The photo above is of the section we chose to burn, right before we set the initial (backburn) fire.

To keep the fire under control, we set the backfire and slowly expanded it. (A backfire, for those who aren't familiar with burning, is a fire set at the edge of the burn parcel which is farthest from the direction the wind is blowing out of. This means that the fire has to burn against the wind to move, keeping it much slower and smaller than if it were moving with the wind. As the backfire burns, it creates a wider and wider firebreak along that edge.) With the wind shifting between the north, northeast and full east, we were very careful to backburn a large area before beginning to set the faster, scarier head fires that travel with the wind.

It was a challenge. I was SO glad that we had all 5 of us working, as the gusts were enough to push the fire into the closely mowed windbreaks and we had to stop those creeping flames before they crossed over into non-target areas. Once we got the backburn accomplished, though, it became much easier and faster. The second photo, above, shows the backfire, moving slowly against the wind. If you look really closely, you can see Sid to the left of the right-hand redcedar, keeping an eye on that edge of the burn. Overall, the burn took about 2 1/2 hours - slow, but a good, clean burn that did not cross the mowed firebreaks to make us test our backup firebreaks (the wheat field to the west and the overgrazed pasture to the south).

Here are 4 of the 5 prairie fire folks: Linda, Ron, Sid and Greg. We were tired and sooty but satisfied, with the grassland burned safely and well.

We're due to get rain tonight, then temperatures are predicted to be up into the 70's by the end of the week. I'm looking forward to a rapidly greening grassland and the first real chance to see if any of the overseeding that I've been doing is producing increased plant diversity.

Thanks again to Sid, Ron and Linda!!!

Etch-a-Sketch in Snow

2011-02-24T14:11:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it's hard to see grasses - even prairie grasses - as particularly important to wildlife. About 2 weeks ago, though, we got 9" of snow. I didn't get outside until a day or two later, but meanwhile the weather had stayed quite cold, preserving the telltale white blanket nicely.

I saw all kinds of tracks as I walked: coyote tracks, pheasant tracks, cat tracks, dog tracks, rabbit tracks. The photo above is of "tweety bird" tracks - sparrows? cardinals? goldfinch? - and it shows how carefully the bird(s) were hunting around the clumps of grass sticking up through the snow. If you look carefully, you can even see the wingprints of a bird as it was taking off, in the foreground, just left of center. The tracks create a record that even I, a rank novice at reading tracks, could understand. Sort of an Etch-a-Sketch in snow!

Exploring the Aftermath of the Storm

2011-02-02T08:13:00.000-08:00

Pristine snow just doesn't seem to happen in our yard. Two German shepherds take that on as their special project.

After two days of short or nonexistent walks, Becker and Blue were raring to go this morning. So I bundled up - even digging out a wool scarf to try to protect my face a bit - and off we went. I plodded. Becker alertly trotted. Blue galloped and twirled and raced and tossed his muzzle in the snow and begged Becker to play and galloped and twirled some more.

I think Blue would have been happy to stay out there all day.

In the Cedar Grove, it was interesting to see how each tuft of grass had created its own snowdrift, leaving the field looking rather like a collection of sand dunes seen from the sky.

Shortly after we entered the Back 5, I started to noticed the arcs in the snow, inscribed by the grasses and other plants as the wind moved them ceaselessly back and forth. There were long, gentle arcs from the tall grasses; short, fine arcs from the short grasses; complex parallel arcs from forbs; and occasionally there were combinations of all of the above.

Seeds remaining on the sideoats grama and other short grasses stood out boldly against the white.

I flushed a meadowlark sheltering in a bunch of grass. It was cold enough that he waited until I was about 5' away before he lost his nerve. If I'd known he was there, I wouldn't have disturbed him. The dogs flushed two more as we walked, and all of them let us get much closer than they normally would have.

Along the far edge of the Back 5, the western most point of our property, the drifts were deep enough that I couldn't see our mowed path anymore. I shortcut through the unmowed grasses to avoid them, the snow coming up midcalf. The drifts were easily 2-3' deep. According to the gauge on our back deck, we only received 3" of snow, but those grasses managed to catch the snow blowing off the wheat field to our west. The farmer's loss is my land's gain.

A flock of snow geese flew overhead - the first I've seen this year.

And watching the 3rd meadowlark, after the dogs had flushed it from its resting place, I managed to give myself a brief case of snow blindness. I guess that's what you'd call it. For a while I saw orange streaks across my vision...that faded to peach...and eventually to yellow. Finally I didn't notice them at all. By then I was back inside the house, immensely thankful for modern technology and the gentle warmth of central heating.

Coming Under the Influence of "The Spell of the Sensuous"

2010-11-23T14:17:00.000-08:00

I've been reading some thought-provoking books this fall, and none more so than the one I just finished, The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram.

This book hypothesizes how "civilized" humans became so divorced from the living world around us that many people can't fathom how its health matters to them at all. I've learned some really interesting things while read it. For example, Plato was one of the first humans to use the phonetic alphabet to write down his (and Socrates') ideas. Why didn't Socrates write things down himself? He was probably illiterate. At that point in time, the phonetic alphabet was new technology. Literally. Like all of the most influential new technologies, it changed the way we humans lived, even thought. All of those discussions about what truth, beauty and goodness are? This was the first time in history that those abstract concepts could be looked at and studied without referencing the specific circumstances they occurred under; the first time that you could go back to what you said the day (or week or month or year) before and refresh yourself and others on EXACTLY what you had spoken about.

Divorcing the abstract concept from the specific circumstances changed how we judged our actions and behaviors in very fundamental ways.

Being able to recite (read) the same story, in exactly the same words, day after day after year after year, concretized our experiences too. The stories became unchanging, compared to oral traditions where the filter of new experiences changes the stories every time they are told, even by the same storyteller. This, too, changed how we understood the world around us.

Starting with a research grant to study magic in indigenous cultures, Abram found that he lived in relationship with the surrounding environment differently when he was "home" in the United States than when he was overseas meeting and learning from other "less advanced" cultures, where ties were much closer to the natural world. He found that he missed the deep sense of connection that he felt in those other cultures, and so he set out to try to figure out what had changed in human society to cut us off from that sense of natural connection.

I certainly understand now why Abram was picked by Utne Reader as "[o]ne of the hundred visionaries who are changing the world." I've been interested in the environment and the human role within it for most of my life. This intriguing book literally has me changing my understanding of who and what I am, as well as changing my understanding of my relationship with the natural world around me. I truly can't think of too many books I've read in my life that I can say that about.

Numinous Mundane

2010-11-21T04:56:00.001-08:00

Sometimes there is incredible beauty in the mundane.

This morning I awoke at 5 a.m., thinking the dawn was beginning because of the light coming in through the bedroom window. As I slowly gained more awareness, I realized that the light was the glow of the full moon, shining with a luminous aura through the dewdrops caught on the screen of the window....

Compare and Contrast

2010-10-23T05:49:00.000-07:00

Two books have recently come into my life that make an interesting pair. I serendipitously read them back to back, which highlighted their interconnectedness.

The first, The Feminine Mystique, is Betty Friedan's classic from the 1960's about "the housewife syndrome." In it, Friedan highlighted the isolation and stagnation that was occurring in the lives of housewives as their husbands and children spent increasing amounts of time away from home and they themselves became little more than tools of consumption for the marketplace. The solution, to Friedan (and to entire generations of women), was to get out of the house, preferably with a career.

The second book, Radical Homemakers by Shannon Hayes, has just recently been published. Hayes's premise is that the two career family has us chasing our tails, having (or wanting) to purchase more and more to make our lives more efficient and more "meaningful," then needing to work more and/or work harder to make more money to pay for our purchases. This leaves us stressed out and overtired, with no time to enjoy the myriad of expensive things we've bought...or to simply enjoy each other and our homes. With our standard of living based on two salaries, it also leaves us as vulnerable or more vulnerable to economic chaos from unexpected job loss. Her solution is to return the family household to a unit of production, rather than solely of consumption, which requires commitment from all adults in the household and involves building community and interrelatedness. She herself has pursued this path, and she has researched 20 other "radical homemakers" from among the many who replied to her solicitation for guinea pigs when she began writing this book.

I read The Feminine Mystique first. As I worked my way through it, I kept thinking two things to myself: 1) "Why didn't I read this in college or in my 20's? I can so relate to these 1950's housewives! How sad is this that I've been so far behind in understanding what was happening to me?" and 2) "Friedan doesn't address childrearing and caretaking. Who's going to raise the children? Who's going to care for family members, both when they are sick and when they are well? Isn't there more to life than working?"

In the new introduction for her book, written by Betty Friedan in 1997, Friedan herself shares deep concerns over the fact that "two generations later" careers, both male and female, are still based on the model of the 1950's male with a stay-at-home wife to care for the home and children. So both working men and women are getting overworked and stressed out. Meanwhile, women are still getting paid less than 75% of what men earn for the same job, so employers are letting more men go and keeping the "cheaper" women. This is causing increased anger and hostility in men, who blame women in the workplace, rather than their employers, for their loss of money and prestige. Meanwhile, the ultra rich are getting richer and richer and nobody is really paying attention to that. It's much too easy to blame each other.

As I read Radical Homemakers, I kept thinking to myself, "Yes, this is what Greg and I were thinking over the years when we tried to produce some of our own food, keep our wants to a dull roar, and avoid getting too caught up in consumerism!" Hayes keeps in mind the lessons from The Feminine Mystique, warning of the absolute importance of interconnectedness and community building to help stave off the feeling of isolation. To keep radical homemakers mentally growing, she notes the requirement for self-learning that this path requires, since so many of these small-scale production skills are almost lost. She also touches upon the need to pursue personal and community interests, especially after radical homemaker has become comfortable with their productivity level.

As to why I was relating so strongly to "the housewife syndrome"? I think it was because of Greg's and my mobile lifestyle. Moving so often kept us from being able to develop the interconnectedness and sense of deep community that both supports and is a gift of the lifestyle. With Greg's job requiring long hours away from home, it was all too easy for me to get relatively isolated and lonely.

I find the radical homemakers' lifestyle very appealing...at least in theory! I am reminded of Greg's grandparents' life during the Depression in Oklahoma: they spent 10 years on a farm during the Dust Bowl. They were "dirt poor", but they raised 5 children and kept everyone fed and clothed without anyone having a paid job or being responsible to an employer. It was obviously hard work, and they chose to leave the farm when World War II gave them other options (and their children began leaving home), but they survived. In fact, their son doesn't even remember feeling particularly poor during those Depression years - "There were a lot of others worse off than we were."

I do some of the lifestyle already - I garden and can, at least a little. I prefer shopping at local businesses, antique shops and thrift stores to buying from big box stores. I watch little TV and pay even less attention to the ads. At least in part, our cars were chosen for their mileage, and they are far from new. I am not known for keeping up with the fashion industry. :-) There's obviously a lot more I (we) could do, but for now I'm grateful to know there are others who value some of the same things we value.

Serendipity shines again!

Just a Walk....

2010-10-21T11:08:00.000-07:00

With Becker having decided that we need to take a walk every morning, I've given in and also decided that it's a good idea, at least when I have the time. So he and I struck out this morning, just before noon, taking both my camera and my binoculars.

The last of the aromatic asters are in full bloom right now and they are absolutely bustling with butterflies, skippers, flies and bees. Everytime Becker or I or one of the cats gets near enough to brush part of the plant, clouds of insects briefly arise, then settle peacefully back down again.

Along the creek, the white of the poison ivy berries really stood out, highlighted by the sun against the dark green of the redcedars and the elm and hedge leaves. A few bright red leaves remained, demonstrating again how important it is to be careful about picking up leaves for their color in Kansas!

Speaking of redcedars, too, the blue of the "berries" on this heavily laden tree seemed to bring the blue of the sky down within touching distance for us Earth-bound mortals.

Before I headed out back to the pasture, I sat for a while on one of my stone benches and looked around to see what birds were active. A song sparrow, a flicker, some blue jays, and a couple cardinals were busy, as were a bunch of yellow-rumped warblers (fondly also known as butterbutts) flitting through the treetops. For a while I even got to watch through the binoculars as a butterbutt greedily chowed down on poison ivy berries. I wonder where those new plants will get deposited!

Finally making it out to the back 5, I had to stop several times along the path to de-seed my socks - the threeawn grass (Aristida sp.) has been giving me numerous demonstrations of how it likes to travel and burrow in through the action of its long awns. Here's a closeup of one of the seeds, half screwed into my sock....

...and here is a picture of one of the entire plants, corraled between my socked foot and my clogged foot. They're not very impressive plants and they are easy to overlook, at least if their seeds aren't ripe. The seeds can actually cause harm to the mouths of livestock through their burrowing activities. Threeawn grass is an annual that moves in to overgrazed pastures - I have much less of it than I used to, but it's far from gone.

On my way back to the house, I focused my binoculars on the first white-crowned sparrow I've seen this fall. (I've heard quite a few singing, "Old Sam Peabody-Peabody-Peabody," in the yard, so I knew they were back, but this was the first I'd seen.) I've started putting out my feeders, but I still have to get some fresh black oil sunflower seed and disinfect the platform feeders; then I'll be seeing these guys in the backyard, right off the deck.

It was a gorgeous day for a walk, so I'm glad that I listened to Becker's preferences. I'm sure he'll be happy to keep reminding me every morning now!

Blue Sky Birding

2010-10-20T10:24:00.000-07:00

Becker was anxious for a walk this morning, so I set aside the laundry basket and away we went. For the first time in quite a while, I took binoculars instead of a camera and I was rewarded with a rather respectable series of bird sightings.

The draw was especially active this morning. First of all I noticed a ruby-crowned kinglet, followed shortly by a yellow-rumped warbler and an orange-crowned warbler (or two or three). As I was following their fluttering from tree branch to tree branch, I noticed a big "something or other" fly in behind them - when I focused on the movement there, it turned out to be a pair of flickers.

Blue jays flew in and out several times, and I kept hearing cardinals peeping, but didn't actually see one until I was walking back to the house. Two other woodpeckers came by to say hello, a male red-bellied and a female downy. Several chickadees joined in the activity for a while...

...but the most interesting sighting was a hawk "doing lazy circles in the sky." As I watched it, I was positive that it was an accipiter - probably a Cooper's based on size - despite behavior that was unusual for the species. I looked for a white patch at the base of the tail and didn't see it, but I did note that the head seemed small in proportion to the body and the tail was fairly square with a wide terminal black band tipped with white and smaller bands towards the body.

Getting back to the kitchen and looking in my guidebook, I'm now thoroughly unsure of which of 3 species it was: the proportionate head size and tail shape was sharp-shinned hawk, the size and lack of white rump patch was Cooper's hawk, and the behavior and size was northern harrier. At this point, my best guess is harrier. Whatever it was, it was fun to watch, but I'll try not to pre-categorize next time!

Piggy-Back Maternity

2010-10-19T19:18:00.000-07:00

While out doing a bit of fall gardening yesterday morning, I stumbled across this awesome example of motherhood and was able to get her photo. This is a wolf spider, with her "clutch" of baby spiders (spiderlings) covering her abdomen. Mama's body was about 2" in length - she was a true "big mama"!

Wolf spiders are wonderful predators and great to have in your yard and garden. They primarily eat insects, which they often catch by active hunting, just like a wolf...which is how they got their name. They do not spin a web.

The female makes an egg sac which she carries around under her abdomen until the spiderlings develop. Then she opens the sac and the spiderlings climb out onto her abdomen, where they ride for a week or more. I love seeing a female wolf spider with her babies riding piggy back!

Because of their size, wolf spiders scare many people, but they are very beneficial and will only bite if picked up and handled. (Their bite is similar to a bee sting in pain intensity.) Wolf spiders move rapidly and are "dirt" colored, so they can actually be rather hard to see and even harder to catch. Rather than catch (or kill) a wolf spider, just smile when you see one and send a quick mental thank-you its way for the insect control it spends its life providing!

Dainty Sulfur Captured

2010-10-15T06:41:00.001-07:00

In an earlier post, I mentioned seeing a dainty sulfur butterfly but being unable to get a good photo. Well, last Saturday I was able to get a nice photo, at least of the underside of the wings. To give you a sense of scale, the aromatic aster that this little one was feeding at is about 1 1/4" in diameter.

Bumble Bee Confusion

2010-10-14T18:39:00.000-07:00

This is confusion on my part, not on the part of the bumble bees I've seen, who presumably are quite comfortable with their own personal identities.

I've seen several small bumble bees and occasional large bumble bees that all look very much alike - yellow hair on the front of their thorax, plus yellow hair on their abdomen, except for the last 2 segments, which are covered with black hair. Having searched through BugGuide.net, I'm quite sure that these are all American Bumble Bee (Bombus pensylvanicus). I'm guessing that the big ones are the queens and the small ones are the workers.

Then, just last Saturday, I saw this long individual, with the rear abdomen completely covered in yellow-brown hair. It looked like a different species to me, but after searching BugGuide.net and other identification sites, I've decided that it is the male American Bumble Bee.

Oh, and I thought this photo was interesting - I guess the wheel bug decided that the bumble bee was too big to tackle, because it did not attack despite obvious interest.

The Gluttony of Wheel Bugs

2010-10-14T18:13:00.000-07:00

The wheel bugs (Arilus cristatus) were out in force last Saturday, the last time I was taking photos of insects in the garden. While praying mantids have the reputation of being the fiercest predators you can have on your side, in my garden I have to give that accolade to the wheel bugs!

At one point I had 3 wheel bugs on one goldenrod plant, all easily visible in one camera view field! That shot isn't as good as these individual ones, though, all of them on that same goldenrod and within about 45 minutes....

Wheel bug 1 eating unknown moth or skipper, 1:35 p.m.....

Wheel bug 2 eating small bee, 2:07 p.m.....

Wheel bug 3 eating female sachem skipper, 2:11 p.m.....

(Note: Although I have labeled them wheel bug 1, wheel bug 2, and wheel bug 3, I have no idea if these were the same individual or different individuals. It was during this time span, though, that I saw all 3 wheel bugs at one time on the same goldenrod plant.)

Great Golden Digger Wasp

2010-10-10T08:00:00.000-07:00

I met a new yardmate yesterday - a great golden digger wasp (Sphex ichneumoneus). Isn't that a cool name? She (he?) was nectaring on my Wichita Mountains goldenrod - the overgrown stuff with the bad case of rust (that I presume developed after it spent most of the summer almost overwhelmed by seedling brown-eyed Susans). To give you perspective, this little black and red beauty is an inch long...at least! She totally ignored my attempts to get the camera close and closer as I took photos, so the nectar must have been pretty darn good and not have been too affected by the rust.

Doing my normal bit of research after finding a new species that I don't recognize, I learned that great golden digger wasps are closely related to the giant cicada killer wasps, with very similar habits. One big difference, though, is that their prey are grasshoppers - crickets, short-horned grasshoppers and long-horned grasshoppers.

Like the cicada killers, the females did a hole in the ground, then go in search of their prey. Finding it, they paralyze it and drag it back to their nest. Once they've stocked the nest adequately with (in this case) paralyzed grasshoppers, they lay an egg on each grasshopper and seal up the nest. The eggs hatch out shortly afterwards and the young wasp grubs eat the grasshoppers provided, staying in their snug earthy nests until the following summer, when the life cycle repeats.

These are not aggressive wasps - according to all the reading I've done, you basically have to handle them or step on them to get stung, and handling them doesn't guarantee a sting. If they do sting, however, the sting is very powerful, so it's wise to be a bit cautious around them. There are numerous reports of people coexisting quite peacefully with great golden digger wasps building nest holes in the ground right beside their patios or in their walkways.

The adults feed entirely on nectar and plant sap.

Birds can apparently be quite problematic, learning to harass the wasps and get them to drop their paralyzed grasshoppers, which the birds then snarf up.

Texas A & M has a great write-up on great golden digger wasps, including a fascinating account of some research performed on their seemingly thoughtful behavior in building and provisioning their nests.

I'm definitely glad to have this gentle giant sharing our yard and gardens, and I'll be keeping an eye out for them in the future.

Skippers Are Hard

2010-10-09T17:21:00.000-07:00

Skippers are hard. They are just plain hard.

First of all, the little dears often land with their wings folded into something called the "jet plane position," where the hind wings are held parallel to the surface they are resting on and the front wings are held perpendicular to it. This virtually guarantees that you can't see the front wings and the back wings at the same time, either on the top or the bottom wing surface, because they are facing in totally different directions.

Secondly, skippers are masters of three confusing color/pattern trends: 1) males and females of the same species often look somewhat different from each other, 2) there is a lot of color and pattern variability within each species, and 3) the species of skippers often look amazingly similar to each other.

Skippers are just plain hard.

Maybe I need to stop a minute and explain what a skipper is, for those of you who aren't familiar with them. Skippers are close cousins to the butterflies and moths; sometimes I think of them as an intermediate form between butterflies and moths. They are usually active during the day, they tend to be rather small, they tend to be fast fliers, and their colors tend to be orange to brown to tan, usually muddled looking with some sort of indistinct spotting. Because skipper bodies are stout and look hairy, while their wings often seem small in proportionate, they are not very graceful little insects and generally aren't considered "pretty." Interestingly, though, their eyes often seem extremely large and exceptionally black to me.

Skippers are just plain hard.

Because skippers are so hard and so often nondescript, I tend not to take a lot of photos of them. However, with my new determination to catalog the biodiversity of my little acreage, I didn't flinch on Thursday. Here are the skipper species that I've identified so far....

The easiest skipper to identify from Thursday's photo-shoot was the Common Checkered-Skipper (Pyrgus communis). (Why are so many of the butterflies and skippers that I'm finding called "common"?!) It's a very pretty little thing that conveniently holds its wings out while feeding, so I had no trouble seeing the pattern on the upper surface of its wings at all.

It almost looks like a small, stout butterfly. Common Checkered-Skippers use mallows as their larval food plants and are considered the most common and widespread skipper in all of North America. They are far from the most common skipper in my yard, but that certainly doesn't prove a thing. Common or not, their black & white checked pattern really appeals to me, and I love that touch of irridescent blue close to their body.

The next beauty contestant that I figured out was the Fiery Skipper (Hylephila phyleus), one of the orange, grass skippers. Fiery Skippers are fans of the jet-plane position while feeding, but I got a good enough photo to be fairly sure of my identification on this one. With the larval food plant listed as Bermuda grass and the depressingly large amount of Bermuda grass in my yard, my certainty level is pretty high.

This guy (above) is a male, based on the black "toothed," rear margin of the upper surface on his hind wing.

Evidently Bermuda grass was a brief theme in skipper identification for me; the next skipper I was able to identify was the Sachem (Atalopedes campestris), another orange, grass skipper whose caterpillars chow down on Bermuda grass, as well as on that gardening favorite, crab grass, and on other grasses.

Like the Fiery Skipper above, the Sachem in this photo, with its squarish black spot on the upper surface of the front wing, is a male. Note his long proboscis arching down to suck up the delicious aster nectar!

For the time being, these are the only skippers that I was able to identify from the photos that I took. I'm excited, though - I'm learning a bit more about a "new" group of living things, and that's always a fun proposition. I took a bunch of photos this afternoon of the butterflies, skippers and other insects feeding on the aromatic asters in the front gardens. I'm looking forward to seeing what images I was actually able to capture today!