Dear Birder,

I don't get questions from my readers, but if I did they might look like this:

Dear Birder:

My neighbor has spent the last week having some very tall, very old trees cut down in her backyard and one in her front yard. Why would someone want to take down so many trees at once?

Perplexed

My cut tree
(Margo D. Beller

Dear Perplexed:

There could be many reasons why. Perhaps these were ash trees infected with the emerald ash borer, the reason I had a dead tree removed earlier this month. Perhaps the homeowner was afraid a strong wind or snow storm would bring one or more of them down on the house. Perhaps the owner is putting in a swimming pool or a deluxe playset for the kids and the trees were in the way. Or the owner got tired of picking up fallen branches.

It is not YOUR backyard so ignore the devastation. Put up more feeders to attract the birds the cutting down has displaced.

Dear Birder:

My feeder has two sides but when certain birds come they fight each other over one side. Why can't they share the feeder?

Wondering

Dear Wondering:

Far be it from me to decipher the thinking of birds. You do not say what type(s) of bird. There are some that are more territorial than others. White-breasted nuthatches, for instance. They are small but feisty and if another one or even a larger bird of a different type tries to get to the feeder the first will chase off the second. I have found hummingbirds to be the same way when I hang a nectar feeder.

Nuthatch on the feeder
about to chase off a
titmouse. (Margo D. Beller)

Cardinals will spend more time chasing each other away than eating, unless it is a pair. A pair, during mating season, will sit on either side of my house-shaped feeder but another male or another female approaching will get chased off. So I can't tell you why your birds fight. Maybe hanging more feeders farther apart will help.

Dear Birder:

This year I have a lot of juncos coming to my seed feeders. Last year I had very few. Why do I get a lot some year and none at other times?

Watching

Dear Watching: 

I wonder about that myself. I think a lot depends on the wind and weather during the migration period. Maybe when the juncos were heading south from the breeding grounds to your yard (the males stay farther north than the females; in my yard I see only male juncos) the winds were favorable and there was a lot of food (such as from your feeders) to encourage juncos to stick around.

Junco (Margo D. Beller)

I have been seeing fewer cardinals and white-throated sparrows and more house finches, at least those few times during the workday when I can look outside. But as we used to say in Brooklyn, wait til next year.

Dear Birder:

How are Spruce and the apple tree doing? We haven't heard from them in a while.

A big fan

Dear Fan,

Earlier this month, when I was writing about the trees I had trimmed back or cut down, I wrote about the apple tree. She had not been pruned back in about a decade. I think she looks better now. Gone are the web of lower branches where I used to hang the house wren nest box. Gone are the very high branches where I'd leave the apples for the squirrels.

How the apple tree looks now
(Margo D. Beller)

However, she has not talked to me yet. It will be a few months before any apple blossoms appear, and with the blossoms will come fruit. The last time she was cut back (not as drastically as this time) she provided a lot of apples. This time, with fewer branches, I don't know. I hope she will talk to me.

As for Spruce, he is standing tall and looks very healthy. He provides winter roosting spots for juncos, chickadees and titmice. It is too early to know if a finch, for instance, will try to nest in him this year after I cut back the arborvitae, where I always seemed to disturb something when I opened the front door.

Spruce Bringsgreen
(Margo D. Beller)

I will pass along your good wishes. Maybe he will write another post for me soon.

Winter Starkness

I've written many times about my dislike of winter and how the cold and long darkness affect my spirits.

We have had no snow this year, which could be good
or bad. (Margo D. Beller)

This year has a different wrinkle. We have not had any measurable snow in my part of the world at all this winter. While family members in New Hampshire are wallowing in the white stuff, where I live can be summed up in two colors: gray and brown. Snow would throw a blanket of white on the scene, which would be good for the plants but bad for my back (shoveling) and wallet (hiring the plow guy).

Today, walking this cloudy, cold, damp morning along one of my favorite paths, it was all gray and brown. It is another in a series of unsunny days. Seeing one of the distant jays, cardinals and woodpeckers I could hear would've provided some color but not seeing them, or any other bird except Canada geese flying overhead, does not help my mood.

The trees look depressed. With the leaves long down you can see the branches broken by past storms. The paved path I walk is becoming more difficult because of frost heaves from our weeks of extreme cold followed by weeks of above-average temperature. The Whippany River looks as sluggish as I feel.

Some may say there is beauty in starkness. This is what I saw in my travels this morning.

This pond formed by overwash on the other side
of the trail was frozen a few
weeks ago. Now it sits, slowly seeping
into the ground.

Trees fell into the Whippany River
in 2021. I guess they were left
by the park people because they
don't completely block the river's flow.

Whippany River seen from the path

The starkness of broken trees

Walking the path, surveying the tangle
of plants that will bloom again
in the spring

Among the few bits of color are the brown leaves
of the beech trees.

An Inconvenient Tree

The apple tree needed to be pruned. That much I knew. Its branches had grown long and tall and at least one high branch would drop its fruit behind the deer netting on the other side of the walkway. (I hope she forgives me.)

Overgrown apple tree, 2022 (Margo D. Beller)

The pear tree also needed pruning, to at least slow down the squirrels climbing to the roof of the screened porch. I did some pruning but there was one area I could not reach unless I stood on the very top of the ladder, and I was not going to do that even with my trusty spotter standing below. 

Pruned apple tree, 2023
(Margo D. Beller)

The arborvitae to the side of the front door had also gotten too big. At one time I kept it pruned back but what with illness and age I stopped and so it grew as high as my second-floor office window. House sparrows would fight each other noisily in it outside my open window. Every so often I scared a cardinal or other bird out of it when checking the mailbox after dark. In winter it would bow low under the weight of the snow.

Overgrown arborvitae, 2022
(Margo D. Beller)

All these trees needing work was expected. The dead ash tree was not.

Shortened arborvitae, 2023
(Margo D. Beller)

I didn't even know it was an ash until the tree guy came to give me an estimate. He took one look and said it was a dead ash. The tree trunk was light brown and it was full of small holes I hadn't noticed before. When the leaves had come down a few months ago I thought the branches at the top didn't look healthy. I should've known something was up when a redbellied woodpecker started whacking at the tree trunk during the summer, no doubt smelling all the treats inside.

Overgrown pear tree, 2022
(Margo D. Beller)

The ash stood near the property line with one of my neighbors, who had some of her trees cut down in November. She had left me a note, telling me the tree "near the pines" was "full of bugs." She offered to pay for cutting it down. Eventually I figured out the "pines" meant the yew hedge and the tree she meant was the one I had called the "weed tree" for decades.

Pruned pear tree, 2023
(Margo D. Beller)

Why did the tree suddenly die? It was a victim of the emerald ash borer, native to Russia, Asia, Japan and South Korea. The first one came to the U.S. in a shipment from Asia in 2002. It was first sighted in Michigan. Now, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, it has been reported in 36 states including New Jersey, where I live.

Ash borer infestation was the reason my county's park people chopped down a lot of infested ash trees growing on either side of one of my favorite hiking trails in the winter of 2018, leaving the fallen trees until the next spring. It was a horrific sight seeing all those dead or dying trees. And now my yard was similarly affected.

I've never liked this tree and I'd often thought about having it cut down. In the early years of my living here it would send up daughter trees from a root under the yew hedge, which meant I had to crawl under the hedge to cut them down. Its roots then switched direction and started coming to the surface next to and then through my ornamental grass garden, forcing me to walk carefully to avoid tripping when I did yard work. The roots even broke a sprinkler pipe next to one of the plants. (Luckily there was no leak and the pipe was fixed the next spring before the sprinkler was turned on.) Unlike the nearby cherry tree, the ash did not provide fruit but strings of seeds that fell in clusters. 

Open sky where the ash used to be, 2023
(Margo D. Beller)

I did not take my neighbor up on her kind offer. Instead, I called my own tree guy because, as I said, I had other trees that needed trimming anyway and I wanted to be sure any tree removal wouldn't affect the nearby plants. According to the guy who gave me the estimate, I have no other ash trees (or at least no trees that looked sick). 

It took a tad over a month from the time I signed the contract before the work could be done, today. Four trucks arrived at 7:30 a.m. and it was all over less than 90 minutes later. 

Looking out the back door, the first thing I noticed was the sky, a big hole where the tree used to be. I have written before about the "hole in the sky" created when a neighbor across the street took down a lot of trees. Whenever trees are cut the noise of saws and stump grinding bothers me, particularly if the tree being taken down appeared to me to be perfectly healthy but in the "wrong" place. An inconvenient tree. I'd shut the windows and try to block out the noise somehow, which was particularly aggravating when I was trying to work. I thought of the disruption to the birds and hoped no nests were destroyed in the process.

Today, on the New Year's Day (observed) holiday, when I was not working, the noise still agitated me, even though this was MY tree work being done and there are no birds nesting at this time of year to disrupt (tho' I'm sure they avoided the feeders while the work was going on). Here I was, doing the same thing I'd look down on my neighbors for doing. I know it was a dead tree but maybe they looked at the ash and thought it healthy and sniffed, "Another inconvenient tree."

Lesson learned.

Stump, 2023
(Margo D. Beller)

Now, the cut apple and pear look neater. The last time the apple was trimmed it produced a bumper crop the next spring. The pear tree only sets flowers on old wood, so I'm hoping this cuts back on fruit. (It was to get a pear that a heavy bear once tried to climb that tree, only to break two-thirds of its lower branches.) Even the arborvitae doesn't look as bad as I feared.

As for the ash, I left the stump. Pulling it would've upended the nearby lilacs, cherry tree and plants in the ornamental grass garden. Eventually the roots will die and decompose. I tried to count the tree rings but got as far as 40 before stopping. The ash tree could've been planted when the house was built in 1964 or it might've been one of the lucky trees that survived when the meadow was cleared to build the houses on my suburban street.

Well, thanks to an invasive little insect from the other side of the world, its luck ran out.