Goldenrod: Fill Up the Feeders
Big winter storm! For once the weather hysterics were right, and we got a lot of snow, even more than they threatened. A winter wonderland which is great for kids (tough luck it’s on a Sunday, guys, could have been a snow day…). Great for skiiers. Great, in fact, for all snow lovers, including mice, red squirrels and meadow voles who can tunnel safely beneath the drifts and avoid predators. But deep snow is tough on some types of wildlife. If the seeds are all hidden underneath a blanket of white, what’s a bird to do? Looks like it’s shaping up to be a long cold...
Read MoreCattails: Winter Warmth
Cattails in a winter marsh, with a skim of ice on the water. This chilly picture seems to be the very essence of cold. But actually this is an image of potential warmth. You’ve seen cattail seed heads, I’m sure, when they’re just ripe–they look like a brown velvet hot dog impaled on a stick. Just one of those spikes can hold an unbelievable number of seeds–somewhere in the vicinity of a quarter of a million seeds on each stalk. Each individual seed is a tiny dot, almost invisible, attached to a little cluster of fluff, which acts as a parachute so the seeds can...
Read MoreThankful for Milkweed
Where are they? The monarch butterflies—where have they gone? Those big bright orange rainbows that flutter past every fall. Where did they go this year? They didn’t flutter past my house. I saw not one. Did you? What’s happening? I can hardly bear to say, it, but the monarchs are dwindling. Monarch populations hit historic–disastrous–lows this year. There are a lot of reasons for this—pesticides, bad weather, habitat loss. But a big reason is loss of milkweed. Milkweed. It’s the plant that monarchs need. The only plant they lay eggs on, the only plant the caterpillars will feed...
Read MoreDandelion: Up Against the Wall
Dandelions grow anywhere, it seems. That’s almost literally true. Dandelions can sprout in places that seem little short of miraculous, barren habitats where almost any other plant would throw in the towel. They seem to thrive in parking lots, sinking roots into rock-hard soil that’s driven over by cars, parked on by eighteen-wheeler trucks, and scraped and salted in wintertime. The tender green leaves shove their way through gravel and slice through layers of blacktop. Dandelions are found world-wide, spread across the planet on every continent except Antarctica, below sea level...
Read MoreQueen Anne’s Lace: Re-opening for Business
Queen Anne’s lace really stands out in a crowd when it’s in bloom. The big umbrella-shaped white flowers are hard to miss. But when fall comes, the plant closes up shop. The round flower head clenches itself up like a fist and forms a tight brown clump sometimes known as a “bird’s-nest.” It’s not a nest for birds, it’s more of a restaurant, since the birds come and check out the clumps for insects and spiders that might be hiding inside. Then, the amazing part–the Queen Anne’s lace flower, apparently dead, stiff and dried-up, re-opens. It...
Read MoreThe Dishevelled Cardinal
Thanks to Diane Hale Smith for this photo of a female cardinal having, as she put it, “a bad feather day.” Look at that beak–built like a nutcracker to crush the hard shells of sunflower seeds. Cardinals love feeders as much as we love watching them. Their bright red plumage seems made for inept birdwatchers like me who can never spot the little brown birds hiding high up in the branches. Cardinals don’t flee the snow and cold, they hang around all winter, brightening up the drabbest months. It’s hard to imagine this tiny morsel of a bird surviving subzero...
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