Another Tree Problem

“Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.”
― Khalil Gibran, "Sand and Foam"

At this time of year things have settled somewhat in the yard. Catbirds fly around looking for food to feed their young. I am serenaded by one singing from my hedge, where I'm sure there is a nest. Less than 24 hours after the wren young left the box, a male wren, possibly a different bird, started singing its territorial song. It was not the only one. On my street alone I've heard three others, one of them two yards over. The male hasn't drawn a mate yet but he is fierce in protecting the nest box.

The dead part of the tree against the living rest
of the apple tree. (Margo D. Beller)

The fledged wren young were noisily following their parents in and around shrubs at the periphery of my yard for a couple of days but lately I have not heard them.

The gnats continue in ones and twos rather than a bagful, and I am still not sure how they are getting inside the enclosed porch. Every day I play whack-a-gnat. There is no longer anything on the porch that would allow them to eat or breed. If they are coming in through small spaces around the windows, I may have to turn to chemical warfare again.

Currently, however, my main attention is on the apple tree.

We had a lot of rain this spring, and the tree was full of blossoms, which meant it would be full of apples. Then, suddenly, one third of the tree died. This is an old tree. It has a hole in its trunk big enough for a chipmunk to hide in. It has a ring of little holes from a yellow-bellied sapsucker that visited a few years ago. And yet, the tree continued to bloom and produce apples.

Dogwood blossoms in 2016. (Margo D. Beller)

When half the dogwood tree died in 2023, I asked the yard man I was using at the time to bring his chainsaw. He cut the dead parts into stackable pieces. I waited to see what would happen. The next spring the dogwood not only lived, it put out flowers.

Last year, the problem was the tree-like house plant that was getting too unwieldy to transport in and out of the house. I agonized over whether to kill the plant, but when it began growing from the bottom my decision was made and I chopped down the top. The two parts growing from the bottom are healthy (see below) and, I hope, won't grow too much.

These are a little bigger now. (Margo D. Beller)

Now it is the apple tree's turn. 

There are no lack of sites on the internet explaining what can happen to an apple tree. Here's what Tree Fluent has to say: "Environmental changes can significantly impact apple trees. Temperature fluctuations, excessive rainfall, or drought conditions can lead to stress."

Well, that sums up life in my area in a nutshell. This week alone we started 20 degrees colder than average and expect to jump to 20 degrees hotter than average by the weekend. A major fire in the New Jersey Pine Barrens in April was finally put out with help from a series of heavy rain storms. But last summer was so dry we had drought emergencies that didn't end until last month.

What else could've affected the apple tree?

Couch to Homestead lists a variety of causes including over- or under-watering, the wrong growing environment, a lack of nutrients, pests and diseases. The diseases have such charming names as apple scab and fire blight. There are also various parts of the tree that can be prone to rot, starting with the roots.

Apples growing on the living two-thirds of the tree.
(Margo D. Beller)

I did not plant this tree. It is the last of five apple trees standing, four of which I've taken down and one taken down by stags rubbing velvet from their antlers too many times. I left this one tree because its apples taste good as apple sauce. (Unfortunately, the squirrels and the deer also like them.) These apples usually have more bad than good parts, requiring a lot of cutting to use. In summer the apple leaves seem to be the first to yellow and fall. I thought this was a natural thing. Now I am not so sure.

My remedy for this problem is to rent a chainsaw, cut down the dead wood and hope that allows the tree to recover and grow next spring. It worked for the dogwood. It worked for the big plant.

I haven't gotten around to doing it yet because it has been too wet, yet again. If this remedy doesn't work the tree, like the diseased ash tree we had to cut down years ago, is history. 

Aw, Gnats!, or When the Outside Comes In

A lot of people like summer. They want the heat, they want to wear as little in the way of clothes as possible and they want to go to the beach. They enjoy working in the garden, harvesting their vegetables and cutting flowers. 

I do that, too, but I do not like summer. I do not like heat and humidity, I stay covered to avoid skin cancer and, after once nearly drowning in a pond, I stay away from the water unless it is to stand on the shore and look for seabirds on or over it.

A fungal gnat that crawled through the screen but
could not get through the glass on the back door.
(Margo D. Beller)

Also, I don't like most insects, especially the biting kind. When I went to Troy Meadows the other week, during the waning spring migration time, I was set upon by black flies as I tried to step carefully around lakes of muddy water in the middle of the main, unpaved road. This week was no better at Great Swamp, when I took a friend there on her day off. When we weren't roasting in the sun we were waving away insects in the shade.

And I'm not even talking about mosquitos, the unofficial state bird of New Jersey. After all the rain we've had the mosquito eggs should be hatching just about now and the young will be hungry. 

But what I especially do not like is when certain insects make their way onto my enclosed porch, where I sit in my chair with my coffee and enjoy the breeze (including from a fan) without worrying about being bitten - unless something gets inside.

Mosquitos that get in are caught and killed. Large flies are shown an open door and encouraged to leave. Spiders are left alone because their webs catch the smaller bugs. Lady bugs are put outside where they can eat the aphids that bother some of my flowers. But the black blister beetle, which unlike the many other types of beetles in this state I find on the porch, are removed in one way or another. No-see-ums? Well, there's not much I can do about them except keep the fan blowing on me.

And then there are the fungal gnats.

Until last August I had never heard of these flying pests. They don't bite but they do lay eggs - a lot of eggs. I would catch a gnat and put it outside. Then I'd find more. Finally, I discovered an infestation of gnats in the bag of sunflower seeds I'd been using when I had feeders out. This caused a lot of bother. I stopped releasing the gnats and turned to smashing them. I dumped soil out of the plants I had put on the porch for the summer and repotted them before taking them into the house. (I did not do this for one unwieldy plant I put outside, then took inside, then had to decide whether to kill it, then cut it down after it put out new growth from the bottom.)

Going to extremes last year.
(Margo D. Beller)

Finally, I turned to chemical warfare. That did the trick, but I could not sit on the porch for a week.

So imagine my dismay when, a day after putting my plants on the porch earlier this month, when it was finally warm enough to do so, I started finding gnats again. How were they getting in?

When I had bought fresh bird seed I had also bought a pail with a lid that locks, so they weren't coming from there. Any pot that had even a trace of soil in it was in a corner of the porch under a tarp. Could they be squeezing through the mesh screens where I had windows open? That was likely. I closed all the windows and took the plants back into the house after spraying them with a solution to kill any possible eggs.

There is not much more I can do now except to kill what I can reach or hope they get stuck in a spider web. 

Last year's spiders helping me out with the gnats.
(Margo D. Beller)

Why are the gnats trying to come onto the porch, months ahead of when they infested my porch last year? Are they trying to get away from hungry birds like the house wrens? Has it been too hot or too wet for them this year? Is it global warming? We're not even in the heat of July yet.

When we had an infestation of carpenter ants in our bathroom in 2022, which I wrote about in September, that had been a particularly dry season and the ants were looking for water. This year we've had plenty of water, maybe too much so, and twice I've caught an ant in the bathroom. My husband has put out poisoned bait and we've had no problems since then.

With the plants safely inside I didn't feel the need to nuke the porch again. But when one of the gnats somehow came inside the house and into my den the other night I went nuclear, making sure the den doors were closed so I could kill it before it could go to where I keep the plants. I thought I was successful but a night later what I hope was the same one flew across the room, attracted by the lights. This one I know I caught, with a well-aimed paperback book. But I'll be spraying the plants and using yellow sticky tape for the rest of the summer.

How did the gnat, or gnats, get into the house? Probably hitched a ride on me. I'll have to be vigilant about that now, too.

The Dangers of Youth

"The energy of youth is infectious, but its inexperience is dangerous."

-- Charles de Gaulle

As every parent knows, there are many dangers out there. You give birth, you feed your young, you keep them clean and you try to protect them from predators as best you can. But in the end there is only so much you can do to prepare them for leaving the nest. The young will have to learn to fend for themselves and, with luck, survive to create a new generation.

This is true for all creatures, including birds.

Parent feeding young (This and other pictures from 2020.)
(Margo D. Beller)

The other day, from my porch, I saw two male house sparrows attacking the house wren nest box hanging in my dogwood tree. Had the opening been large enough, one or the other would've gone in, dragged out the wrenlets, killed them and taken over the box. Why there were two males instead of a male and a female, as I saw a few weeks ago, I don't know.

But there they were, so here I went outside to clap my hands to chase them off. When they were gone I heard an angry chittering from the box and then one of the parent house wrens flew out - it had blocked the opening to protect its young. "You're welcome," I said as I walked away. Soon the parents went back to shuttling food to their young.

I did not immediately go back on the porch. I walked to the driveway because I heard the high-pitched screaming of a robin and I sensed something was wrong. Two birds were going at it across the street, or so I thought. I've seen robins fighting each other before in territorial disputes but this turned out to be different.

One of the birds, a young robin (the breast spotted rather than red), flew across the street to the bottom of my yew hedge and hid under one of the small, bare branches near the ground that stick out and prevent me from weeding in that area. The other bird flew at it and I knew by the fanned, striped tail it was no robin but a similarly sized male sharp-shinned hawk. It must've seen me standing there because after the one attempt it took off. Then the chickadees and titmice in the neighbor's walnut tree started their alarm calls. I walked around the hedge and there was the hawk. It was a brown juvenile. Had it been a gray adult that young robin would've been supper. I clapped my hands, the hawk flew off and the little birds went quiet.

(Margo D. Beller)

Hawks have to eat, too, I know, but not in my yard.

Which brings me back to the house wrens.

For the first time since I started writing about the house wren nest box (in 2011; unfortunately, the link no longer works), I happened to be on the porch and saw the young fledge.

I knew that time was coming soon. The young birds had gotten so big they were being fed by the parents from outside the box. It must've been very crowded and uncomfortable in that box, especially when the temperature soared into the upper 80 degrees F to 90 degrees this week. A parent would occasionally push the young aside to go inside the box to remove poop. When an adult was near I could hear the young begging for food. Lately, the head of a curious wrenlet had been coming partway through the box opening.

I watched this last part with trepidation. Years ago, when the nest box was in the apple tree, a wrenlet fell out of the box and was snatched up by a jay before I could get outside to rescue it. Jays, like their cousins the corvids (including crows and ravens) are among those that will eat young birds. So will squirrels, one of which I saw being harried all over the yard by an angry house wren parent.

So when I saw the little head looking so far out of the box I was concerned, especially when a male sparrow flew to the dogwood. 

I walked to the window and rapped on it. The house sparrow left. That was when I saw that along with the house wren looking out was another small house wren on top of the nest box.

Close to leaving.
(Margo D. Beller)

I had no camera with me. The best I could do was take a picture with my phone from the porch. (It was easier photographing the nest box from outside when it was in the apple tree, and the pictures for this post are from 2020, before I moved the box.) I wouldn't have dared missing anything for a camera anyway.

The first wrenlet flew to a higher branch of the dogwood. The second got closer and closer to leaving the box. A parent came to feed it, then the adult flew to base of the bushes on the other side of the flood wall. I could hear the male parent calling to the young. Finally, the second wrenlet left the box and jumped to a side branch, where it did a little climbing and pecked at leaves. It stumbled a bit but did not fall.

Then, a third head poked out of the box. 

One by one its siblings flew from the dogwood down behind the flood wall, where I'm sure at least one of the parents was waiting. The third one didn't bother jumping to a branch, it flew directly to where the others had gone. No doubt it was hungry and the male's calls told the three they had to fly out if they wanted to be fed.

Now the box is quiet, unless there is a second brood later in the summer. 

The wrens aren't the only young in the yard, of course. I've seen a male cardinal fly to the feeder pole with one of its young, which was the same size and brown like a female but without the red crest and beak. The scared chickadees and titmice were the first indication there were families in the vicinity of my yard since I stopped putting out bird food. 

Not the greatest picture but if you look close
you'll see one wren in the opening and
another atop the box. 2025
(Margo D. Beller)

And, of course, there are young deer. Earlier this week a doe was in the next yard with a tiny fawn drinking her milk. When the doe saw me standing in my yard and looking at them she led the tiny fawn away. For now my yard is safe from curious young nibbling at my plants, learning what tastes good.

Like the fawn, the young birds will be fed by their parents for a time and then will have to fend for themselves. Some, like the juvenile hawk, will need a lot of practice grabbing supper. Others, like the wrens, will be helping my yard by catching a ton of insects. But the young birds will also learn they must avoid predators to survive, and that includes other birds, cats, dogs and humans. 

They will travel with their parents for a time but eventually they will be on their own.