First Junco...and Election Commentary

When I was in college, our campus newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel, always did an April Fool edition on April 1, filled with ridiculously impossible news stories. Things like America electing an African-American President, or the UNC football team having a winning season. So imagine my surprise when I opened the paper the other day and saw that Butch Davis, the UNC football coach, was having to deny rumors that he was being courted for the job at Tennessee....Nobody ever wants any of our coaches. So then I see on the front page that Barack Obama has won the election, including NC, and I figure it's gotta be April Fool's Day. I mean, come on. The learned governor of Alaska herself said that North Carolina was one of the "pro-American parts of the country..."

But if it's April Fool's Day, then what's that junco doing scratching around among the fallen leaves? And why are there two white-throated sparrows sitting on my fence? Those are November birds. You don't suppose that newspaper was real, do you? President Obama, okay, but Carolina ranked #17 with a 7-2 record???

Rose Breasted Grosbeak

Grosbeaks are rare visitors to my garden. This is only the third time I've seen one!
They spend the winter in Central and South America and the Caribbean, and summer up north. They are usually seen in Greensboro during their migration, although their summer range does extend into the NC mountains.

The photo below is for Iris at Greensboro Birds, who always likes to see different species hanging out together.

Hawk

This hawk was perched in a tree watching me work in the garden this afternoon. He was huge! Of course, I didn't have my camera, so I yanked off my muddy boots, ran in the house, crept back out so as not to disturb him, and just as I was putting the long lens on my camera, he glided off across the street into the neighbor's yard.

I don't like to just walk in peoples' backyards without permission, but my neighbors are nice, and I figured this was a special case, so I tracked the hawk over to where he was perched on a wire. He tolerated having his picture taken for a few moments...

Then soared away.

I'm not good at identifying raptors. I'm guessing this might be a juvenile Red-Tailed Hawk, based on his size and the dark wing tips. If you know a lot about hawks, please let me know what this beautiful creature is.

Creating Borders the Lazy Way

With my new border as finished as it is going to be until spring, I turned a critical eye today to the back border. Like the others, I created it a couple of years ago when I had no idea what I wanted to do there, and like the others, it turned out to be way too narrow.

I had mentioned this problem to the household management on numerous occasions before, and had secured permission to expand it to a width of about ten feet, and so I thought it best to get to work sooner rather than later. (This is sound advice anytime you have permission to do something that you want to do. Waiting is never to your advantage.)

I got the idea that, since I won't be planting anything there for at least a year, why not make the entire border into a giant compost pile, 60 feet long by 10 feet wide, and keep adding stuff to it over the next year? By the time I'm ready to plant, that soil ought to be so rich that I can just throw plants on top of it.

I put down some newspaper first, then covered it with sod dug up from the other border, and finally covered the whole thing with the leaves that I appropriated from my neighbors' curbs. Andy supervised the process.

See, if I were smart and patient, this is what I would have done from the beginning: mark out my beds and borders, pile compost on top of them, and let them sit for a year while I sat on the deck drinking tea and leafing through gardening books deciding what I wanted to plant and where.

In other news, remember those weigela that I rooted? I planted them today. Check out these roots! (This photo says more about the plant's adaptability than it does my skill at propagating.)

I saw a Baltimore Oriole at the feeder today. I was so surprised that for several minutes I couldn't think of the bird's name--all I could think was, "orange bird, orange bird." Orioles are uncommon in Greensboro, although I did have one visit the feeder last winter. Here's a photo from last year; it's not very good, but it just seems wrong to write about an oriole without posting a picture. Maybe I'll get a better one if he comes back!

Downy Woodpeckers

I caught this female Downy Woodpecker just as she was about to take off. I had no idea that the underside of their wings looked like that.

And here's the male, peeking out from behind the pole.

Goldfinches Ready for Winter

The leaves aren't the only things changing colors this time of year. Clockwise from top:
Goldfinch-Summer (Breeding) plumage
Goldfinch-October, beginning fall molt
Goldfinch-November (Winter) plumage

First Junco

Winter is coming. The first junco arrived in my garden today as I was setting out some butterfly bushes in my newly expanded butterfly garden. I didn't get a picture of him, but if you want to see what he looks like, check out Greensboro Birds. (Just once, I want to see a bird before Iris does!)

Fall Colors

The goldfinches are beginning their fall molt, when they lose the bright yellow feathers they've worn all summer, and get a new coat of muted brown.

My Autumn Blaze maple that I planted two autumns ago, is getting its fall colors too.

As are the dogwoods.

It's nice to see another color besides brown in the yard. Tomorrow will be our 30th consecutive day with no rain, and temperatures will be back in the 80s this week, 10-12 degrees higher than where they should be. I am so tired of spending every spare minute watering; I now understand people who buy condos because they don't want to deal with a yard. If Teresa would let me, I'd move downtown and do all my gardening in containers on the balcony.

Northern Flicker

I've been chasing this Flicker around for days, trying to get a good picture. There are two varieties of Flickers; the ones in the Eastern US are the "Yellow-Shafted" variety. (See the yellow feathers near the tail?)

Flickers are the only woodpeckers that feed primarily on the ground.

This one is a male; the female lacks the black "mustache" near the bill.

Three Birds

A Brown Thrasher eyes me warily from his perch in a tree...While his distant cousin, the Gray Catbird feasts on suet nuggets at the feeder. His cry, usually heard in the evening, really does sound like a cat. Notice the rust-colored patch beneath his tail.
A young Red-Bellied Woodpecker lurks in the dogwood tree. He takes seed from the feeder and hides it in the crevices of the bark.

Friday Conversation

Come on out on the deck; it's cooled off a good bit with that thunderstorm...that missed us. Somebody got some rain out of it, though. I'll pull up a chair--here, you can sit on the glider--and we'll talk gardening.

All those plants in pots over there? Stuff I bought or people gave me earlier this summer. Been too dry to plant anything, so I keep them all over there by the water spigot (we say "spicket" down here) so I can water them when I fill up the birdbath. What we need is a little hurricane to fill up the lakes and soak the ground.

Thanks. That bed does look good, doesn't it? The best-looking part of the garden this time of year and I can't take a bit of credit for it. Teresa did that. I told her she was planting the marigolds too close together, but now I don't think so. They love the heat. I remember when I was little we had a place at the beach, just a little trailer, and we had marigolds growing in a little bed there. Man, that was the life, to be eight years old, out of school, and at the beach.

Here come the cardinals to the bird feeder. They eat late. You'll see them out here just about dark, long after the other birds have gone to roost for the night. Let me go get some sunflower seed and refill that feeder...for the second time today! If I didn't get free birdseed where I work I don't know what I'd do. Even with that I had to buy 20 pounds of sunflower last week. You want a glass of tea while I'm up?

There's a bunch of feathers down there around the feeder. Looks like something got caught. No, I don't think Andy did it. Anything he catches, he brings to the door. I've learned to look before I take that first step out the back door, ever since I almost stepped on the remains of a freshly killed rabbit. He hasn't caught anything lately though. Those look like dove feathers on the ground; since there's no corpse, I'm going to guess that the hawk caught a meal. A Cooper's Hawk has been hanging out here lately, beautiful bird.

How much rain have we gotten? Well, around an inch and a half fell this past week, but before that, we probably got no more than an inch for all of June and July. You know how Southerners are about snow..everybody runs to the window to look at it, and you call your friends on the phone to see how much they got? Well, people act like that about rain now. Except that we don't rush to the grocery store for milk and bread like we do for snow.

This fall? I've got lots of plans. Teresa wants to make a "Charleston Garden" over next to the driveway. She calls it that because it'll be real narrow, like the gardens of those old homes along the Battery. I gave her a wrought iron fence for her birthday, and we're going to put it up there on the property line and plant some cleomes, foxgloves, clematis, beardtongue...I forget what all she wants to put in. The hardest part is going to be breaking up that dirt. Yeah, it's hard-packed clay, but that's not the worst of it; it's got a bunch of gravel, I guess from where they built the driveway. That'll be fun. It's going to be a "skinny garden," all right, if I can borrow that term from Gina.

Other than that, I'll probably add some plants to the Bottomlands over there. I'm focusing on plants with berries to attract birds; I've got a chokecherry and some arrowwood viburnums already; some wax myrtle might be good also, and maybe another pyracantha. (That "Mojave" in the corner has been fantastic; it's grown six feet in 2 years.)

I'm letting the vinca minor go wild in that bed. (I can't afford to mulch the whole place!) Vinca's a cool groundcover. People used to plant it over graves in their family cemeteries. I think it's pretty, old weathered gravestones sticking up out of that soft green foliage. Those quartz rocks are gravestones---animals that Andy has killed. Mostly rats, but unfortunately a few birds and the rabbit I told you about earlier. Some gardener decades from now is going to think we were conducting animal sacrifices back here. I think everything ought to have a decent grave--even the rat.

Slap! Mosquitoes bothering you? Me too. I reckon I need to go on inside. I want to read some more of Doug Marlette's novel, Magic Time. I hated to hear that he's gone. Funny guy, and a good, good writer. Check him out next time you're looking for something to read.

Nice talking with you. I'll take that glass in if you're finished. All right, well, come back again anytime. If you see something you want in the garden, let me know. I'll divide or move a lot of this stuff in the fall, and you're more than welcome to anything you see. Bye now.

Bluebird Fledglings and Dad

"OK kids...the way to find food is to sit up here on the fence and watch for insects, because that's the best meal. If you're in a hurry, though, there are always sunflower chips in the feeder. And don't worry about the guy with the camera; he's harmless...Hey Junior, are you listening? What did I just say?"

The Birds of the Air

There are people, I suppose, who can look at a bird without any sense of awe. I probably don't want to spend a lot of time in such company. Birds bring wonder and delight to the garden, and the wise gardener will take thought of how he can welcome them to his plot of land.

I love my birds. They watch me as I hew out a garden in what was, until very recently, a dismally monotonous spread of chemically-enhanced suburban lawn. I think they like the improvements I've made, and if they possess a capacity for gratitude, (and who is to say they don't?) they appreciate it. The towhees and brown thrashers scratch about in the mulched beds in search of insects; goldfinches cling to the coneflower stalks in fall to eat the seeds, and just this morning, I watched a robin building her nest in the branches of a dogwood. The baths and feeders, of course, are the prime attraction. Some therapist is going without a sailboat because I have birdfeeders.

Sometimes I wish I didn't love my birds quite so much. Like Sunday, when we heard a sickening thud against the living room window, and I went out to find a mourning dove lying on the pavement. She quivered once, then closed her eyes and died as I knelt beside her. And last year, when I came home to find that our cat had caught and killed a hummingbird, just a few days before she would have left to winter in the tropics. I buried them both in the garden, their graves marked with white quartz stones that I found in my digging.

Jesus said, "Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten in God's sight." It is worth reflecting on that line...not one of them is forgotten in God's sight. I'm always disgusted by pious people who claim to love God yet do not respect God's creatures.


Joel Gillespie, a thoughtful evangelical Christian blogger (and how refreshing it is to put those three adjectives together) writes:

All life created by God is worthy of a certain reverence. Even if we are allowed to eat of the meat of other creatures, it should not be done callously, and the beasts should not be treated contrary to their nature and good just to bring us marbled meat to grill on a fire. How we treat our fellow creatures matters.

I have known few people mean to animals who were not also mean to people.

It does not lessen us to look more highly upon our fellow creatures. They are smarter, more sensitive, and more amazing than we have yet to realize. One day we will feel great sorrow over how we have desecrated and disrespected these wonderful fellow creatures. We can start changing attitudes now. I hope that we do. (Read the full article)

For some superb bird photography, check out Greensboro Birds. Iris updates her blog almost every day with photos of birds taken around Lincoln Green Apartments and the Battleground. And if you wonder what kind of birds she's going to find at an apartment complex and a park, then you really need to take a look!