Apple Tree Watching

You can observe a lot by just watching.
              -- Yogi Berra

The squirrel walks through the long grass stealthily, gets close to the apple tree, then leaps to the main trunk. It is a small squirrel, so let us presume it is a female. She climbs up the trunk into thicker canopy until she appears on one of the smaller branches as she climbs to the top of the tree. She raises her head and sniffs as she seeks an apple.

(Margo D. Beller)

Nearby, a house wren sings, warning his mate of the potential danger. She is in the nest box hanging in this tree. On this cool, early morning she is sitting on eggs, fed occasionally by her mate. She's not going anywhere unless the squirrel shakes the branches and jostles the nest box while looking for apples. A flicker explores the nooks and crannies of the wooden flood wall at the edge of the yard, and a family of noisy titmice are in the oak trees, following a parent around and begging for food.

The squirrel, meanwhile, has gone up one branch, found nothing and then backtracked to climb another branch. Finally, again near the top, she snares a small apple and climbs down to eat it sitting in the crotch made by two thicker branches. 

2020 crop (Margo D. Beller)

She is hidden from most people (and predators) but I know where she is because I have been sitting in my chair in a corner of my patio and watching her progress. I know what will happen and I am not proved wrong. She finishes her breakfast and drops the core with just enough apple on it to draw the interest of a chipmunk, perhaps a bird, more likely a deer that passes through the yard later. 

That's why I go pick it up and toss it into a corner of the yard to keep deer out of this area so near to my plants.

Now, a second squirrel approaches and climbs. When it is up a ways I walk to the tree and look up. The squirrel freezes. We look at each other, then I step back and the second squirrel jumps down and rushes away. The first one, meanwhile, is so high up I have to walk back somewhat to see it. She seems to know I am not the type to climb trees. She will be looking in this tree a while because there are not many apples in it this year.

Unusual for an apple tree, mine produces fruit in late June going into July. If all things were "normal" the apples would get bigger, redder, sweeter and I'd have three weeks to go out at dawn and dusk to gather them before the squirrels and deer.

Plenty of blossoms earlier this year. (Margo D. Beller)

Last year, we had a bumper crop both of apples and squirrels, sometimes as many as six at a time in the tree, all dropping partially eaten apples.

But in this year of coronavirus, which has changed everything about life as we know it, the apple tree blossomed beautifully in spring but did not put out a lot of fruit. The coronavirus has nothing to do with it, but it seems apt that this year would turn out to be a bust year. 

Many trees go through booms and busts. In my yard that also includes oaks, elms and locusts. Last year was very good for oak acorns. They fell to the lawn continuously as the squirrels climbed along the branches. Some would sound like gunshots when they hit the metal porch roof. I left them alone for a while until I started putting out feeders again in the autumn and it was hard walking on the acorns (or their caps, once the nut was removed). I raked up as many as I could and put them into a corner of the yard behind the compost pile. They are still there.

What the squirrels are dropping nowadays.
(Margo D. Beller)

According to John C. Kricher and Gordon Morrison, authors of the "Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Forests," many types of trees in the temperate zone, which includes New Jersey, have "mast" years when seed production is higher than usual.

Why? "Masting is probably an adaptation to aid the trees in escaping the potential ravages of seed predators. By alternating between occasional bumper crops and more usual poor crops, trees conserve energy, enabling them in a given year to produce more seeds than all seed predators combined could ever hope to eat," they write.

So the apple tree might be taking a breather this year to protect itself.

Unfortunately, it is too easy to underestimate the importance of trees, their ability to clean the air and provide shade and food. About 36 million trees a year are cut down, according to one report. I know I see enough of that destruction in suburbia when a tree that took several decades to grow is taken down, hunk by hunk, in a day. (Was the tree sick, planted in the wrong place or just in the way? Who knows?)

Meanwhile, those that need acorns (or apples) to survive, breed and feed young (squirrels, jays and other birds) are going to have a harder time of it this year, as will the raptors that feed on those animals. When snowy owls or rough-legged hawks can't find their favorite small mammals in their northern breeding territories because the population has "crashed," they fly farther south to find food. That is known as an irruption year. Smaller birds that depend on cone and other seed crops can have irruption years, too, including both types of crossbills, pine grosbeaks and redpolls, to the delight of the bird-watching community. 

Gone for now, but it - or a descendant - will be back next year. (Margo D. Beller_

But that's winter. Right now, in June, I was only able to pick 10 apples this year, but I am happy to be relieved of the annual routine of chasing off deer, picking up chewed apples, trying to find apples I could use and then the long process of cutting off the bad stuff and making apple sauce with the rest. As for the squirrels, they have turned their attention to getting other things to eat, including gathering oak acorns. What is falling so far this year are shrunken and not nearly big enough to feed them, much less a family.  

Most happily, this year I won't be going around the tree smacking ripe apples with an extension pole and agitating the house wrens in the nest box. Once the squirrels get the last few apples from the very top of the tree (where I couldn't get at them anyway), that's it until next year. And next year the nest box is going into another tree.

My Friend, Mr. Slither

First appearance of Mr. Slither.
(Margo D. Beller)

When the Cooper's hawks abandoned the nest they had worked on for weeks in an oak tree just off my backyard, I was relieved a predator was gone so the birds could continue to visit my feeders. But I was also disappointed. I had hoped the hawks might've indulged in some chipmunk dining. These rodents dig everywhere and regularly ravage my plantings. 

But it turns out this year Mother Nature provided me with some relief - a garter snake, so named because tits striping makes it resemble stocking garters. 

MH likes to joke about the first time I, a city kid, encountered one of these harmless snakes found all over the eastern U.S. We were hiking in the woods and I thought I was about to step over a stick. The stick moved. Snakes were not something I grew up with in Brooklyn, NY, Snakes were dangerous, one bite and you're a gonner. But MH knew these snakes from the NJ suburbs when one would occasionally come into his basement bedroom. Harmless, he assured me, not like NJ's timber rattlesnakes or copperheads.

Second appearance, photographed from inside looking down.
(Margo D. Beller)

Since then, I've looked upon garter snakes as a friend, not a foe. I've even rescued one caught in the deer netting. I got my gloves and scissors, carefully cut it out of the netting, grabbed it by the middle (while not poisonous, these snakes still bite) and put it in the lawn to cut away as much of the netting from its middle as possible. So I guess I've earned the right to call myself a snake handler. I walked to my front door and the snake moved off.

Except for the occasional garter snake I've encountered in my walks, I hadn't seen one until recently. I soon learned Mr. Slither had had an immediate effect on the chipmunks.

Not only did the chipmunk backfill its tunnel, it even
added a small rock. (Margo D. Beller)

One warm late afternoon I opened the front door to check the mailbox and there, on the paving blocks, lay a garter snake basking in the sun. Being a reptile, it can't regulate its body heat as well as we mammals so it found a place to warm itself. Where it sat happened to be near the opening of a known chipmunk tunnel.

We have pavers lining our front walkway. Long ago MH attempted a project and then could not get all the blocks back in as they were. There were some gaps where there were no pavers. Last year an enterprising chipmunk realized it had found a way to tunnel into one of my netted garden plots, ideal because the netting keeps out most predators like hawks. I would fill in the tunnel, the chipmunk would dig it out again. This went on for some time. Finally, I just left it. It didn't impede anyone coming into or out of the house but I would think of ways to get rid of the chipmunks, some involving dynamite.

The other day I came outside and discovered the hole had been filled in, and not by me.

Snake hiding place (Margo D. Beller)

I can guess why. Mr. Slither was still around. 

He showed up in a different garden plot, which I discovered only by accident when I bent down to pull out some weeds. I went inside to look down on it through the window. The snake was fascinating to watch. The tongue would flick, its head would bob, its body would undulate and it would move. It tested whether it could get out of the area if necessary, then rested. I let it be and at dusk it had left to find shelter for the night.

That got me wondering - was the area under the bay window, which is filled with years' worth of leaves I can't really get to without great effort, a suitable home? 

I didn't see the snake for a while after that. But this week, getting ready to come back into the house after a bit of garden cleanup, I saw movement in the leaves just off my front door, near the bay window overhang. I thought it was a chipmunk, but the snake quietly slithered away to the area under the window.

I am guessing that with a known predator in the area, the chipmunk abandoned the tunnel, or at least backfilled that entrance to keep the snake from sliding in for a meal. (This garter snake is not that big. Garter snakes, such as the one I cut out of the deer netting, can grow much larger.)

Snakes can be helpful in the garden. Besides scaring away the chipmunks they can eat many of the insects that harm plants. And it's a really cool-looking creature. As long as Mr. Slither stays outside, we can co-exist.

Garter snakes can get quite large but the one in my yard is not as big as this
one I saw sunning itself on a nature center boardwalk. (Margo D. Beller)

Of course, there is always the chance Mr. Slither is really Ms. Slither and suddenly 20 to 40 baby garter snakes (or perhaps more) will appear in and around the garden. That would definitely be too much of a good thing.

Family Time Anew

It is a damp but cool morning in the backyard, the summer heat and humidity temporarily bearable. The house wren is sitting on her nest in the box, her head visible in the opening. It must be very warm in that little wooden box, most of it taken up by the nest and, I am guessing, the eggs she protects.

(Margo D. Beller)

This is not the first time we've watched each other. Many early mornings I step out on my patio and she watches me as her mate sings from a nearby tree, either warning her of my presence or warning me to stay away. I am not going to bother her, I'm not even going to take her picture. I've waited a longer time than usual this season for a wren pair to use the box.

But she may come to trust me because I've been chasing squirrels out of the apple tree where the nest box hangs. The apples are getting bigger and I've already had to clean up after the squirrels before the deer come by to finish eating the dropped apples. The squirrels shake the branches so violently the wren flees the box. But she returns once the squirrels are gone and I go back to the porch to watch her through the door.

It's family time again in my yard.

In the next yard a family of robins follow a parent, calling loudly as he or she feeds each one. In the bushes in one corner of the yard, the catbird brood is following their parents. In the early morning I can still hear birds singing or calling - chipping sparrow, cardinal, several types of woodpecker, fish crow - but the calls are shorter because they don't want to give away where their nests are located.

Great egret from another year's a shore visit.
(RE Berg-Anderson)

These babies will grow up fast, so fast the adults might create another brood this season, either with each other or other mates depending on the type of bird.

Land birds are what I know best, but I've also seen the reports from down the shore where herons, egrets and other water birds are raising their young. Because they are more visible I would love to travel and see them, as I do every year, but this year we are still in the coronavirus pandemic even though conditions are slowly easing so we could travel and perhaps find an open rest area.

But not just yet.

A weed I can live with - wild strawberries
in the backyard, a summer treat. (Margo D. Beller)

So unless I can get myself out of the house early on a summer morning (for the coolness, the birdsong and to get back before I must go to work), I depend on the yard birds to keep me connected to nature. With the foliage out, most of the time I have to bird by ear anyway when I am in the woods. That's another reason shore birding - despite the green flies and other annoying insects - would be a fine alternative.

In the meantime, I watch the house wrens. They don't know today is Father's Day. I have sent messages to several fathers I know, one of them a first-time father, and think of my own father and father-in-law who are no longer with us.

Pepper Update

The heat sometimes numbs my brain, or perhaps it's aging, but now I am down to four pepper seedlings from nine. How did that happen?

First, I put out the pots and forgot to put down mulch to keep the soil moist and cool so the plants wouldn't dry out. I lost four of the five that way. Then I overcompensated with the watering, which killed off one more.

Had I put mulch down earlier, this pepper
would have survived. (Margo D. Beller)

So now I have one growing pepper in one pot and three in the large pot. All have soil covered with old leaves and grass clippings from my compost pile and wood chips bought for a long-ago orchid. We finally had rain last night so the remaining plants are standing up and growing, so I am optimistic once again.

The two now-pepperless pots are back on the porch, waiting for me to put something in each. At some point I'll figure out what that will be, and this time I'll remember the mulch.

Peppers, Wrens and Stories for the Age of Coronavirus

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live" is how Joan Didion begins her essay "The White Album." During these months of staying home during the coronavirus pandemic, these are the stories I've told myself.

Someday I'll get a haircut.

Peppers in their protective cage, June 2020 (Margo D. Beller)

Someday I'll be able to go to my favorite restaurant and eat there.

Someday I will walk or buy groceries without a mask.

Someday I'll grow peppers.

The first three are obvious, the last one may be less so to you.

Every year I grow peppers in pots because I don't care to do the backbreaking labor to create a garden in a sunny spot of my backyard (to avoid the disapproval of some neighbors). Most years I buy my plants when MH and I and a couple of friends drive to a place in central NJ. Not this year. The place told us not to come but to order online. My friends did but I did not. Instead, I pulled out some of the many, many seeds I've kept from my peppers over the years. I put a few of my favorite type - a sweet frying pepper called Italia - in a pot on a sunny window sill in March. Several sprouted and grew. Then, they died because the weather took a chilly turn for the worse in April.

Apples in June 2020 (Margo D. Beller)

Undeterred, I threw more seeds into the pot and waited. This time as the seedlings grew the weather warmed because the sun was out more often. The seedlings grew bigger. I separated them into two larger pots. The seedlings grew bigger still.

This week, after waiting impatiently for mid-June's steamy weather to move out, I took the three biggest seedlings and put them in their own pots. Then I took the remaining peppers and put them in a very large pot to see what will happen. If the smaller ones die, so it goes. If they all grow, some will be removed to other pots. So-called experts say you thin out seedlings so only the strong survive. But after all the waiting and watching I hate to let those seedlings go. Besides, you never know if the larger, supposedly stronger, seedlings will die anyway.

Life is like that. Seemingly strong plants, like people, suddenly take sick and die. During this coronavirus pandemic the number of people dying has decreased but the dying continues so we can take nothing for granted, which is why I still wear a mask, eat at home and my hair looks as it did in my high school graduation picture.

My garden is growing, too. These are Stargazer
lilies. (Margo D. Beller)

The shock of transplanting and being moved into a sunnier spot than the indoor window sill had the plants wilting and I feared the worse. But they have since revived and I look forward to tending my vegetables along with the other plants growing and blooming in my garden.

Here is another story I told myself: Someday, a house wren and his mate will find the nest box in the apple tree and use it to raise young.

As with the peppers, that finally happened this month.

A house wren had been singing around the yard but not in the apple tree where I hang a nest box every year. At the end of May I was on the porch and saw a house wren investigating the box. A few days after that, I was mowing the lawn and stopped to rest in the back yard. As I sat I saw two wrens. One went inside the box, the other sang. I know the male brings the female over to potential nest sites and she chooses the one she wants, so I was optimistic. My box was picked and they've been hanging around ever since, the male singing every morning to proclaim my yard is his territory. By now the female should be on eggs.

So once again my yard is hosting a house wren pair and once again the fruit is starting to grow in the apple tree, which means the squirrels are once again climbing around and making a mess that will draw deer. But that is another story for this pandemic time. As with the peppers, I am hoping this one about the wrens turns out well.

Towards the center of this photo is this year's house wren. It was as
close as he would allow me to come. (Margo D. Beller)

“It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

The Early Birder

When it is hot and steamy, as it has been in my part of New Jersey this week, it is imperative to get out in the cooler early morning if you want to do anything, in my case look for birds.

Baltimore oriole, Old Mine Road, 2020 (RE Berg-Andersson)

It was easier for me to do that in early May when the migrants were passing through, providing me with hope of finding birds I hadn't seen for a while or at all. At that point there were cold mornings and the leaves hadn't come out completely, making it easier for me to see anything moving in the trees.

Now, however, we are in June. The birds are sitting on eggs or raising families and keeping quiet. The leaves are out fully and to find birds I have to listen hard. It is more humid and the bugs are hungry.

There are more people birding now, according to the New York Times, which has published a number of articles recently by some experts telling city people now stuck at home because of the coronavirus about the birds they've been hearing and seeing. I have mixed feelings about all those potential new birders out in the field. On one hand, more noisy people in my way. On the other, maybe they'll keep their dogs leashed in natural areas and their children quiet and respectful. 

That was my hope at 10 a.m. on June 1 when a tired MH and I started our drive down Old Mine Road from its northern end in Sussex County, NJ, our first big road trip since the pandemic began. (It takes an hour to get there from our house and two hours for MH to get himself fully awake and ready to roll.)

Old Mine Road is an Important Birding Area because a large number of different types of birds come into this northern, elevated corner of the state to breed. Some of them are birds that are hard to find, including the threatened cerulean warbler, a sky blue and white bird with a buzzy call. A lot of birds call their territorial songs along this old mining road where there are abandoned structures (perfect nesting sites for wrens and phoebes), remnants of old villages and some private homes not part of the surrounding federal Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. The road was once much longer but now one end is at Route 206 in Sussex County, just before a toll bridge into Pennsylvania. The southern part of the road, in Warren County, goes through Worthington State Forest and ends near the last exit on Interstate 80 in New Jersey.

We come here once a year, the earlier the better to hear the bird chorus. We could not come here in mid-May because when the governor allowed state parks to reopen the crowds of housebound people yearning to get out were intense. So we waited until June 1, when I had taken some time off, the weather was relatively cool and dry and, I hoped, there'd be fewer people out on a weekday.

Redtail hawk over Old Mine Road, 2020
(RE Berg-Andersson)

It is frustrating, thrilling and ultimately tiring for me to be driving this road slowly and listening hard. Many of the birds are loud and easy to hear and identify - American redstart, ovenbird, red-eyed vireo. Some require me to stop and get out of the car to listen - the yellow-throated vireo or the scarlet tanager or the weesy-weesy call of the black and white warbler. We heard hooded warbler and Baltimore oriole, indigo bunting and Carolina wren. Many of the birds I find at home were also here, near the cleared land of former settlements - robins, catbirds, house wrens, chipping and song sparrows. I was amazed we ultimately heard or saw 50 types of birds.

But it could've been more, and that is frustrating. Some areas we were not going to hike into. Some birds are too quiet to hear from a moving car. Some stretches of the road had cars doing the 35 mph speed limit (or higher) while I was doing 20, forcing me to speed up to find a place where I could safely pull over. As time went on the birds went quiet as the car traffic increased. I never did hear a cerulean (although according to various bird reports from that day there could've been as many as five along the road).

This year's house wren, as close as I could get with my phone, 2020 (Margo D. Beller)

We spent five hours on the road. Once we got into the state park section the road condition deteriorated and going the mandatory 15 mph was not hard to do, unless you wanted to break an axle (which many drivers apparently wanted to do). This part of the road is where more birders tend to be, walking the road or in cars pulled off to the side. I was surprised to find the southernmost parking lot, where we'd planned to switch positions for the drive home, was jammed with cars. (It was even worse at the nearby visitor center lot at the Delaware Water Gap.) I was glad we had started from the other end but, as usual, I wished we could've started far earlier in the morning. The early birder gets the birds.

Now that it's hotter, I go out early but generally I am staying closer to home. It took longer than usual for a house wren pair to set up housekeeping in my nest box but one has finally come and the male is singing steadily in the apple tree, which is already filled with developing fruit.