A Creature of Light

Autumn is a time of long shadows.
(Margo D. Beller)

This year, we turned back the clock before going to sleep on Halloween night, a night where the moon was full for the second time in a month (a blue moon), three planets were easily seen (Jupiter, Saturn, Mars) and one could be seen with binoculars (Uranus). 

With the start of November 2020 we are on standard time. We get an extra hour to use. Many might not want more time in a terrible year of natural and man-made disasters. I know a few hardworking people who likely used the time for well-deserved sleep. I thought I would be doing the same after a lot of activity the day before. Instead, I used this gift of time to sit on the enclosed porch, watching the feeder birds and listening to the silence at first light.

I feel the lack of that extra sleep. Halloween started with temperatures in the upper 20s, our first hard frost of the year. As it happened, I had errands to run. In my travels I saw roofs, shrubs and lawns white with the frost. At home, as expected, the sub-freezing cold put an end to the coleus plants and the dahlias I had in pots in the front yard and dulled the foliage of the cannas. I also discovered at least one deer had, yet again, found a weakness in the deer netting and had gotten a head in to chew on what plants it could grab. 

So I spent much of the day lugging pots from outside to inside and repairing deer netting after I cut back enough of the plants in the front of this particular area to make it harder on the deer should they try again.

Dahlia tubers, 2020
(Margo D. Beller)

The cannas were moved to their winter home - the garage - and stored in a dark area once I cut off the foliage. The dahlias were moved to the enclosed porch where the plants were cut back and the tubers dug out of the pot so they could dry before being stored. The dead coleus plants were pulled, the pot moved to the porch and the four cuttings I had rooted were planted. The pot is now in the sunny front room until it is warm enough to go outside again next year. All the cut plant matter went into the compost pile.

By the time I finished all that and even some raking I was very sore and tired. Why push myself to finish that very day? Several reasons. Halloween was the first bright, sunny day in a long time and, while still cold, I was happy to be working in the sun. Also, rain was expected Sunday (it is raining now, as I write).

And it will be dark at 5 p.m., the down side of getting that extra light in the morning.

That is why I rose at 5:45 a.m. I can be exhausted, I can go to bed late but when light starts to creep into my room, I wake up. Just yesterday I would've seen this light at 6:45 a.m., and I am still adjusting to it being an hour earlier. But it was silent at 5:45 a.m. standard time, too early for many to walk or jog with or without dogs on a Sunday morning.

Female purple finch (Margo D. Beller)

The feeders went out at first light and were immediately visited by black-capped chickadees, tufted titmice and a visitor from the north, the purple finch. Unlike the more common house finch, these have a distinctive "eyebrow" - white for the brownish female, pinkish for the male. The purple finch isn't really all that purple, more like raspberry (which is how Roger Tory Peterson describes it in his field guide). 

These finches are irregular visitors, once a lot more common until the house finches started pushing them out of many areas, such as my part of suburbia. Maybe because they don't show up at my feeders as often, the other small birds, even the pugnacious white-breasted nuthatch, leaves them alone. Only when a large bird such as a jay comes at it will the purple finch move. It is a bit bigger and chunkier than the house finch and it has taken me many years to be able to know one when I see it. 

Autumn scene, Westbrook Preserve
West Milford, NJ, October 2020
(Margo D. Beller)

This year there have been many reports of other irregular visitors from the north - pine siskins (I had three the other week) and evening grosbeaks. The grosbeaks, like all the finches (house, purple, goldfinch and their larger cousin the cardinals), will sit and eat until all the seed is gone unless something forces them to leave. Now that the southbound autumn migration is over, for the most part, finding a bird that considers my part of the country warm enough to stay for the winter is thrilling.

The fact 2020 is looking like an "irruption" year should not have surprised me in this year of the coronavirus pandemic at a time when New England has already been hit with heavy snowfall, when we are learning the Greek alphabet thanks to a record number of named storms, when much of the west has seen a record number of wildfires. These birds are looking for food, just like the warblers and others that passed through New Jersey on their way south for the winter. Just as my apple tree produced fewer fruits and the locust tree produced fewer seed pods, the cone seed crop in Canada was poor this year. It has been that type of year.

Luckily for me, sitting in my coat with my steaming cup of coffee at first light, birds don't have to worry about travel restrictions.

Preparing for Winter, Part 2

If there is one thing I hate doing among all the things I must do before winter hits, raking is the worst. And the worst of the worst is raking black locust pods off my front lawn before they are chewed by deer and squirrels, the seeds scattered and a forest springs up.

Female locust tree, with pods. Oct. 2017 (Margo D. Beller)

I've written about raking before, how it is a way of communing quietly with nature as I listen to the early-morning calls of the birds, and how it is yet another way MH and I can work together as a team toward a common goal.

But every year, and we are talking about decades now, I take my rake to the thick mat of pods shaken down by the wind and curse out the person or persons on the Shade Tree Commission who thought black locusts would be a fine tree at the curb of my street.

They certainly can take the summer heat and car exhausts. But whoever put them in put them in haphazardly. I have learned you need male and female trees in order for pods to be created. On our property we have two males and one female, the female hanging over the driveway, which means if pods are down heavily here too they have to be broomed to the curb. I have done that twice today alone.

Some years, as with the apple tree, something happens with the atmospheric conditions and there are fewer pods to rake up. But this is not that year.

It could be worse. Several of my neighbors down the street have two female trees, with double the mess.

About a decade ago our town realized that when the locust roots spread, they push up streets and sidewalks. There was a move to remove these and replace them with walnuts. My politically connected former neighbor got one of those walnuts before the money ran out for the project. The walnut is the last tree to drop its thin leaves, usually all over my side of our common yard. In a few years, the mature tree will start forming fruits, which look like large green balls filled with the nut that only a squirrel can somehow saw open.

More mess.

Pods at the curb. Since this picture I added more
and the town came through to collect them. More to come.
2017 (Margo D. Beller)

Our town takes the pods along with the fallen leaves. MH did a close mowing, his last for the year, and that took care of the leaves but only temporarily. November is when most of our raking is done because the town will stop coming through in early December.

That is not all I do, of course. When a friend mailed up some bulbs of lilies and daffodils, they had to go into the ground. When the weather forecast showed a trend toward overnight temperatures in the 30s, I had to bring in my peppers, cannas and the tomato I potted after finding it near my compost pile. The dahlia was brought in, too.

And there was last week's chore of completely redoing my Bay Garden. Checking on things today I found a chipmunk did some small bit of digging, either to bury nuts for later or dig up past plantings. I can only do so much. The rabbit fencing is not small enough to deter a chipmunk but they will dig or jump over most barriers anyway. I have found plenty of small trees growing in my netted gardens where a chipmunk has been digging and forgotten what it has planted.

Lawn mowed, pods raked, Bay Garden plot redone, the pots
to the left brought inside. Ready for winter. (Margo D. Beller) 

In the coming weeks I will cut back watering all but two of the peppers and the tomato. These will come inside, to be protected from cold and lit by the bay window. The rest will be cut back and stored in the garage or taken from the pots and put into compost.

I know there are pots and garden plants that will have to be divided, but that will be for the spring. For now, knowing there is more raking to do soon, this labor has been more than enough.

Sometimes I worry what will happen when I am no longer able to do this work. That will be for another day, too.