March Sadness

Enough already.

While the calendar admittedly says winter runs from December 22 (the winter solstice and shortest day of the year) to March 21 (the spring equinox when you can purportedly stand an egg on its end); the weather folks have a much more agreeable idea: ‘meteorological winter’ is the months of December, January and February. Meteorological spring begins March 1. Let the crocuses bloom!

For the past two years, New England has abided by the ‘meteorological’ calendar. In fact, winter – at least precipitation-wise – was almost a no-show. My snow blower was dutifully hauled out and placed its ‘ready for duty’ position at the front of the garage where it gathered cobwebs for three months. We never had enough snow to matter; and what fell, invariable melted in a few days. We had worse winters in Virginia.

The view, of lack of it, from the
screened porch during the blizzard.

While it isn’t the winter of 2014-2015 (120 inches of the white stuff; the last of which didn’t melt until mid-April), this winter has produced about 60 inches of snow. And, the temperatures in February were much below-average 20 out of 28 days. I was greeted on the first day of meteorological spring by two inches of fresh snow. I was welcomed this morning by temperatures in the low teens. As this is written, the outside mid-afternoon temperature is all the way up to 28, and the little weather widget in my computer says to expect one-to-two inches of snow tomorrow.

The snowblower on skis.

Admittedly, we did get some melting over the weekend. As readers of this blog know, for environmental reasons, we do not have an asphalt driveway. We want the precipitation that falls on the property to stay on the property; not go down a storm drain. The asterisk to this otherwise agreeable declaration of eco-friendly awareness is that snow blowers are designed for asphalt and concrete. Put one to work on a surface covered with pea gravel, oyster shells, or stone dust, and you will be rewarded with a spray out the chute of, yes, snow; but also, the aforementioned gravel, shells and dust. Which you will be picking out of your garden for the next four months.

Down to bare slate

My snowblower is mounted on short lengths of skis, elevating the machine’s maw about two inches above the surface. As a result, it leaves the gravel in place. It also leaves two inches of packed snow. On Sunday, it was warm enough to (almost) completely melt the snow on the driveway. This morning, the driveway was again coated in white. I shoveled the sidewalk down to bare slate. I just grumbled at the idea of hand-shoveling the driveway.

Medfield, which is southwest of Boston, had two big storms last month: 16 inches at the beginning of February and 24 inches in the Blizzard of ’26 on February 22 to 24. The snow from both storms is still there. If I go out the front door (I say ‘if’ because apparently it is against the law to use your front door in New England, though it is tacitly agreed you must shovel the sidewalk), I walk through a two-foot-wide trench that still has two feet on snow on either side – and this is after compaction.

The trench to the feeders

In fact, I have multiple trenches on the property; suitable for my own private re-enactment of the Battle of the Somme. There is one from the side door of the garage to the bird feeders 20 feet away. And, of course, the snow has to be dug away from the feeders so as to thwart our high-IQ squirrels that would otherwise leap from the top of the snowbank onto sunflower-seed heaven. There is a side spur that leads ten feet to our home’s generator because, if the power goes out and the generator goes on and finds its outlet vent is packed in snow, it will promptly shut itself down, negating the purpose of having spent $11,000 to have uninterrupted power during a storm.

Yet another trench leads from a corner of the driveway down four steps and ten feet to get to our composter bins (which also had to be dug out).  And a final trench leads from the garage side door twenty feet to the driveway because, if I am taking a bag of kitchen scraps to the composter, I don’t want to have to unnecessarily put up the garage door; allowing frigid air to further freeze the pot-bound shrubs and perennials huddled in a corner of the garage against the quasi-warm wall of the house.

Did I mention digging out the mailbox?

I am all too aware I am grousing about what are politely known as ‘first-world problems’. On Cape Cod, there are still 50,000 people without electricity more than a week after the last flakes fell. World Central Kitchen has set up food wagons in Yarmouth and Hyannis. I should count myself lucky and shut up.

But this is the winter of my discontent. It has gone on too long and was too ferocious to appreciate. My Wednesday walking group cancelled several weeks because of the cold or excess of snow (and on one memorable week, we walked through thigh-deep snow for 90 minutes before admitting defeat). And the seven-day forecast? Snow, rain, and overnight lows below freezing.

Basketball fans are getting amped for March Madness. Me?  It’s March sadness.

  

Lookin' Out My Back Door

 

We offer migrating birds free bed and
bath, plus all the seeds they can eat

This morning, four migrating bluebirds are luxuriously splashing about in a raised bowl in our back garden. When I went out to fetch the newspapers at dawn, I startled half a dozen finches pulling seeds from out of our Rudbeckia. And a colony of mourning doves has spread out along the ground in military fashion seeking insects, seeds, and any other edible that wasn’t there last night.

Welcome to the start of autumn at 26 Pine Street. In this, the sixth year of our grass-free, 95% native-plant garden, we are apparently well established as a five-star stopping point for migrating birds. We clean and re-fill the bird baths regularly and, while we acknowledge the Audubon Society’s warning not to put out seed feeders, we offer suet for woodpeckers and other avians with a need for a McDonald’s-style fat fix.

The Felcos have been put away for now in
order to give migrating birds seed heads from
our Rudbeckia and shasta daisies

What the birds want most of all are seeds, and we have those in abundance. All summer, our front garden was a riot of color from sweeps of native Agastache, shasta daisies, Lobelia cardinalis, Monarda, Liatris, and the aforementioned Rudbeckia. In late August, as the last of the flowers passed, we made the painful decision to keep our Felcos in the garden bag. Deadheading the beds would have given us a pleasant, uniform sea of green punctuated with the autumn-blooming phlox and oak-leaf Hydrangea. As the nearby photo shows, there’s a lot of brown in the front garden. The brown stuff is seed heads, which is why the birds are here in droves.

Our rear garden, with its mix of
shade-tolerant plants

The rear garden is another, more pleasant, matter. It is too shady for the sun-loving perennials that dominate the front of our property, so there is not a lot of past-blooming ‘stubble’. Instead, we have a hodgepodge* of ground covers, shade-tolerant perennials and shrubs, most of which flowered over the spring and summer. Now, the remaining seed heads are a bird buffet. The Ligularia ‘Othello’ has been a favorite, as well as the several dozen Astilbe that dot the landscape.

Cornus florida in bloom, early May

There is still one more scene to play out, and I look forward to it with special satisfaction. Cornus florida – the American dogwood – got a bad rap a few decades back for its supposed susceptibility to spot Anthracnose, a fungal disease that produces leaf spots and blotches. That reputation gave rise to a demand for Cornus kousa, an east Asian cousin. Subsequent research shows Anthracnose can be kept in check by the simple expedient of giving Cornus florida ample light and air. In other words, don’t stick it in a shady area hemmed in by other trees,

Cornus florida fruit is small and brightly
colored, versus Cornus kousa

The American and Asian dogwoods differ in one crucial area: the size of their fruit. As the nearby photo shows, Cornus florida produces a small, bright-red berry; Cornus kousa, a much larger, duller fruit with a thick skin.

The subtle difference came into play one late September afternoon two years ago when our pink-flowering American dogwood began shaking as though it was alive. I watched in fascination through my library window for a while, then went out for a closer inspection. There were roughly 50 birds in the tree, gorging on the dogwood berries. After an hour, the tree had been picked clean. I called friends with the Kousa variety and asked if they were sharing my experience. No, they said, their fruit had mostly fallen to the ground where it was rotting (and required periodic raking to prevent odor build-up).

Our neighbor's back lawn is all grass
(photo from Realtor.com)

I close with a photo of an across-and-down-the-street neighbor’s back yard. They’ve just put their home on the market and I scrolled through the listing photos. The first 35 showed a pleasant home – the interior professionally staged as is the custom now, to remove traces of individuality that might turn off a potential buyer. The final two stopped me in my tracks. They showed a back yard that is nothing but a perfect, green lawn surrounded by a white fence. There are no shrubs against that fence; no flowers or plantings of any kind.

It is, in its own way, staged to show an ideal safe, suburban yard where a child can play without fear of injury. It is also utterly sterile. I cannot imagine a passing flock of birds giving it a second glance.

Abigail

If we are truly stewards of the land, we ought to acknowledge that our property serves more than just a human audience. Our garden does that in spades – all the while giving the child in us (and, especially, our cat) hours of visual entertainment.

 * A partial list of the plants in the rear garden includes Actea, Astilbe, Asters, Aralia, Cimicifuga, Digitalis (foxglove), false strawberry, ferns, Heuchera, Hosta, Ligularia, Lobelia, Persecaria, Tiarella (foamflower), Vaccinium (blueberry), and Viburnum.

Everything I Thought I Knew About Feeding Birds Was Wrong

I really hate it when my cherished illusions are shattered.  Having a car would finally make me popular with girls.  The Beatles would get back to together – with or without Ringo.  It always snowed Christmas Eve in New England.  All proved wrong, some painfully so.

Our feeder visitors include a 
mated pair of northern cardinals

Now, I’ve just learned everything I thought I knew about feeding birds was hooey.  It turns out they don’t need us.  We’ve spent a fortune on suet, seed, and squirrel baffles for naught.

The authority of this truth is a gentleman named Christopher Leahy, whose credentials are hard to dismiss.  He is the Gerard Bertrand Chair of Natural History and Field Ornithology (emeritus) at Mass Audubon.  His means of disabusing me of my sense of noblesse oblige toward the avian community is an article in the winter edition of ‘Native Plant News’, published by the Native Plant Trust.

Ounce for ounce, hummingbirds are
the nastiest creatures on earth

Betty and I have two near-year-round feeding stations on our property.  From May to September, we limit ourselves to a pair of hummingbird feeders.  We have learned from having those feeders that hummingbirds are the nastiest, most territorial and, ounce-for-ounce, lethal creatures on earth; but that is a different story.  Come winter, we pull out all the stops with two sunflower seed feeders and two suet cages.  Both stations are protected by squirrel-proof baffles, and I will admit that my enjoyment of watching rodents with bushy tails spend hours trying to defeat our defenses runs a close second to that of watching birds alight and partake of our largesse.

A flicker can consume a suet cake
in an afternoon

Mr. Leahy wastes no time in puncturing my ‘good human deed’ balloon.  “Many, if not most people who feed birds do so under the impression that they are providing necessary sustenance, without which many birds would perish, especially during our harsh northern winters,” he writes.  Then adds, “This is simply untrue.”

It turns out birds feed themselves perfectly well without our help.  Evolution has provided them with ‘an exquisitely sensitive metabolism’ and a ‘highly effective insulation system’ to find all the food they need.  It takes a Field Ornithologist to write a put-down like that.

So, the idea of ‘the hungry bird’ is just a myth, born in the mid-19^th Century when human ignorance, greed, and depredation (those are Mr. Leahy’s highly accurate words) were causing many bird species to be hunted to the point of extinction.  One solution was to create bird sanctuaries as safe havens.  Another was to import plants that grew quickly, had thick foliage, and produced lots of fruit.  The first idea yielded the Aubudon Society and its many sanctuaries, which also became educational centers.  The latter yielded such unloved additions to our landscapes as oriental bittersweet, Japanese barberry, and burning bush.

We have transformed our 
property into a bird-friendly site

Today, 55 million Americans annually purchase 3 billion pounds of seed, suet, mealworms and such; not to mention spending $800 million on feeders, poles, and baffles.  It is all for our own human enjoyment.  We have set up the equivalent of fly-through McDonalds in our back yards that make it easy for birds to get exactly the same stuff they would have found on their own.  Actually, I’m not so certain of that.  This afternoon, I watched a flicker consume the better part of a suet cake at one sitting.  Where, exactly, is there suet in January?  Maybe I don’t want to know the answer.

Mr. Leahy offers an ecological alternative to feeders: turning your property into a bird-friendly habitat. I’m pleased to report we check nearly all of his boxes.  His suggestions:

This ilex verticulata provides 
winter food for many birds

*  Kill your lawn or let it go to seed.  Instead of a lawn, we have native ground covers and wildflowers.

*  Leave an area of rank grasses and wildflowers.  The back border of our property is a continuous ribbon of wildflowers, and we leave the seed heads up specifically to feed the birds.
*  Don’t over-prune trees or, better yet, don’t prune them at all.  We started with a sterile half-acre of pines, with nothing on the forest floor except burning bush and swallowwort.  We now have a dozen specimen trees – all natives – but none are as yet remotely mature.  However, an additional acre of our property is untouched, mature oaks and pines.
*  Leave dead trees standing and, when they fall, leave them on the ground.  Check and double check.  We will admit, however, to ‘rearranging’ fallen trees to look more artistic.
*  Retain areas of heavy brush.  The wetlands behind our home do just that.
*  Encourage insects with appropriate plantings.  Most of our front garden is a pollinator paradise.
*  Plant native fruit-bearing shrubs and eliminate invasive species.  Double check.
Avoid garden chemicals.  Check.
*  Keep your cats indoors.  No feline member of our family has ever been allowed to run free outdoors.

Instead of a lawn, wildflowers

I do wonder about one thing Mr. Leahy does not touch on:  by feeding the birds in winter, are we ‘training’ them to come looking for insects on our property the rest of the year?  Our evidence is only anecdotal, but we see and hear a lot of birds in the non-feeding months.  I like to think they think we have a nice place to hang out.

Like a Hawk

The problem with wildlife is that the creatures in your garden haven’t seen all those Walt Disney movies and so they don’t know how they’re supposed to behave.  It isn’t just that they don’t spontaneously break out into cute songs.  It’s that they behave like, well, animals.

Take our birdfeeders.  Back in November, we purchased a twin-hooked steel pole, an Audubon-approved feeder, a 50-pound bag of sunflower seeds, a suet cage, and a six-pack of suet cakes.  We placed the pole out behind our house and almost immediately were inundated with birds.  And, not just any birds.  We had chickadees, house wrens, flickers, downy woodpeckers, and orioles.  We were stewards of the land.

We felt so good about the first pole that we acquired a second one and mounted a worm feeder atop it, then stocked the feeder with freeze-dried meal worms (who knew?) to attract yet other bird species.  That was followed in short order by a third pole with still another seed feeder and suet cage.

The enemy

Then, two things happened.  First, squirrels discovered the feeders.  We would see them during the day, sitting around in the trees, smoking little cigarettes, shooting craps and listening to gangsta rap, waiting for us to turn out the lights in the house.  Late at night they would then quickly scale the poles, knock much the seed out of the feeders, and gorge themselves until dawn.  Come daylight, we would find empty feeders and obese squirrels. 

Worse, one squirrel crew set about chewing off the bottommost two perches.  One morning we discovered they had very nearly succeeded in chewing through the connecting pins that held the bottom of the feeder together.  One more pin and there would have a glorious avalanche of seed that would have found a place in the lore of the Grand Council of Squirrels.  That feeder is now held together with steel-infused strapping tape.

Squirrels tried to gnaw out
the bottom of the feeder

We reminded ourselves that we had put up bird feeders.  Not squirrel feeders.  We began greasing the poles and took pleasure at watching squirrels take flying leaps onto the poles, only to slide ignominiously down to the ground; the seed safe from their gluttonous grasp.

But then, without notice, the second thing happened: the birds disappeared.  We tried to tell ourselves that our neighbors must have put up newer, better feeders; possibly with live music and a cappuccino machine.  It made no sense that we would be so readily abandoned.

One afternoon two weeks ago, we were chatting with our across-the-street neighbor.  Her two boys have a seasonal ice rink in their front yard and can skate on it for hours.  But, our neighbor said, sometimes the boys put down their hockey sticks in fascination just to watch and admire the hawk.

“What hawk?” we asked.

Yep, there's a hawks nest

Our neighbor obligingly pointed to a sixty-foot-tall pine at the front of our property and move her finger up the tree trunk.  There, fifty feet up in the air, was a massive aerie.  From it, a hawk could gaze up and down the street looking for unsuspecting mice and moles.  And, by turning its head just a little to the right, it could monitor the comings and goings at our feeders.

Hawks are carnivores. It is well known that hawks eat small mammals such as mice, rats, voles and other rodents. Less well known is that hawks – and especially red-tailed hawks like the one we had seen numerous times in the wetlands behind our home – also eat smaller birds, frogs and reptiles.  (When a two-foot-long garter snake disappeared from our garden, Betty did not go looking for a culprit.)

When a bird is snatched from a feeder by a hawk, the other birds scatter and look for less vulnerable feeding spots.  After a period of time, they’ll return to the scene of the abduction.  It’s a cycle that will repeat itself as long as supplemental feeding is needed.

'Our' red-tailed hawk

What’s a steward of the land to do?  It is not that we placed the feeders in too exposed an area.  The tree canopy is less that twenty feet away and birds perch within a few seconds flight from the feeders.  But hawks are excellent hunters, and they are silent and swift. We’ll leave the feeders in place until our over-wintering avian friends no longer have use for them.  As for the hawk, it’s part of nature.  Hawks got to hunt.

But the squirrels?  Let them order take-out pizza or whatever those Disney rodents live on.  I’m going to keep greasing those poles.