Back to the Rake

Once upon a time, my husband (MH) and I bought a house in suburban New Jersey. He was going to take care of the lawn, I was going to take care of the flowers.

Over the years I learned about what plants deer will destroy and the importance of fencing. He learned you had to do the first mowing before the ground ivy got too thick and bloomed.

What deer can do to a canna, even in a cage.
(Margo D. Beller)

But then a strange thing happened: We got older. Now we watch how we walk to avoid falling and hold onto the staircase railing going up or down stairs. Now, despite my exercising, I must warm up before lifting heavy items such as the canna pots I have in a cage to protect them from deer. MH realized his knees had gotten so bad he could no longer do the mowing (though he'll still walk around with the seed spreader twice a year). I found I couldn't help him with the mowing either due to various ailments.

So we had to do like our younger neighbors and hire someone to do the lawn work. (Other chores we hire out now are gutter cleaning, house washing and shoveling the driveway after a snow storm.) However, unlike our neighbors we wanted someone to come only when we asked because I did not want a weekly bill for mowing dirt in the middle of summer. 

So first we used "a guy" we were recommended who did lawn work on the side from his regular job. Then he recommended "another guy" to replace him after two years. Then the "other guy" went on disability from his regular job. Last year I called a new, small service I'd seen around the neighborhood and got exactly what I didn't want - someone coming every week. Worse, we had to be home to pay in cash.

MH mowing the ground ivy in 2017
(Margo D. Beller)

This year, I called a local service that has done business in my town for years - as it happens it is the same company that plows us in winter - and the owner was OK with coming only when I called.

That took care of this year's mowing. Now it was time to take on the falling leaves and, worse, black locust pods. I've written a lot over the years here about the "joy" of raking pods and leaves. MH and I used to do it, but, again, we got older and lifting that heavily laden tarp became extremely difficult.

So as I saw this year's leaves pile up in the back and the pods drop in the front I was enjoying the idea of doing nothing thanks to the service.

Wrong.

It wasn't their fault. The two guys who came created quite a leaf pile for our town's public works guys to remove. MH and I had gone to lunch as they were starting the job. When we came back they were gone but there were a lot of pods on the lawn. Had they not done the front yard?

Well, yes they had. There were pods in the leaf pile, I saw. But I did not want to see pods when I had expected a green lawn. So, back to the rake.

I remembered I enjoyed going out early in the morning and using my quiet rake to pull pods towards me and push them down to the curb. I enjoyed listening to the birds and the satisfied feeling of a job well done. And so, for the millionth time, as I raked I cursed out the person on my town's shade tree commission who thought planting black locusts along my street was a good idea.

[There are male and female trees. The females have the pods. I am lucky that my property has three male and the one female. Other neighbors on this street have more female trees, and so more pods.]

I was making good progress even as the wind blew some of the piled leaves back on the lawn and more pods fell from the tree, mocking my effort. I realized these pods I was now raking had fallen between the time the lawn service left and we returned home. I expect tomorrow the lawn will look like I'd never gone outside. 

This year's leaf pile. Note the pods already on the lawn since
I raked. (Margo D. Beller)

Mind you, this female locust tree lost a big hunk during this year's July 4 windstorm, bringing down a ton of green pods. But the tree's remaining branches made more. [At least my tree didn't take out power lines, like one of my neighbor's trees, which put us in the dark for three days and destroyed a car parked on the other side of the street.]

Maybe I focus too much on getting the pods off the lawn. But at least I can still wield a rake when I must.

Colors in My Yard

I was admiring the increasing red in the dogwood's leaves after putting out the seed and suet feeders for the chickadees, white-breasted nuthatches and other birds one recent cold morning. Like the other trees in my front and back yards, at this time of year the dogwood's flowers and fruits are long gone, so the tree is moving energy down to its roots for the winter. 

Viburnum berries (Margo D. Beller)

As the chlorophyll that makes the leaves green shifts, the leaves are going red. The same thing is happening with my azaleas, the red maple and the red oak. Meanwhile, the elms are going yellow while the white oak leaves are shifting to gold and then brown.

The viburnum leaves are green but the plant is covered in red berries. Maybe the birds are waiting for the fruit to be sweetened by frost. The old apple tree has already lost its leaves but the nearby cherry leaves, like those of the locusts in the front, have turned a brownish yellow.

The elm is taller than the oak, whose branches I
must look through to see the yellow leaves at the top.
(Margo D. Beller)

The blue spruce, however, is an evergreen and so does not change color. I wish it good morning as the wind blows more leaves from the trees to the lawn and I hear the sound of distant leaf blowers. "I'm glad you hosed the plants the other day," Spruce said. "I was starting to get rather thirsty."

As I write we're in our second week of clear, autumnal weather - cold to start, then warming quickly because there are no clouds blocking the sun. It is also very dry. If this weather was during high summer we'd hear about drought warnings daily. But now most plants are finished growing so the concern doesn't seem to be as dire - at least not yet. 

Still, the soil gets dry. I haven't had the sprinkler turned off yet so the lawn gets watered every so often. With all the plants I've already cut back I'm not as good about using the hose on them, but I do occasionally. I keep hoping we'll get some rain, but that's not forecast for anytime soon.

At some point the lawn service we now use will deal with the leaves and the blasted locust pods. For now, it is a treat to walk around the yard and take in all the colors still in the trees.

The reddening dogwood leaves (Margo D. Beller)

At this time of year the ornamental grasses bloom. Later,
under the right conditions, the leaves will go gold.
(Margo D. Beller)

Spruce in his unchanging finery
(Margo D. Beller)

Coming to a Feeder Near Me

Things have changed a great deal since I last wrote.

The heat and humidity seemed to disappear once my husband (MH) and I returned from a mid-September trip to the Finger Lakes region of New York. Suddenly it was cooler, leaves were starting to turn color and the number of migrating birds was increasing to the point where I put aside my qualms about being bitten by hungry mosquitoes, flies and other insects to go out into the field.

Labor Day. Feeder photographed from inside my enclosed porch.
(Margo D. Beller)

And, I put up the house feeder. In the past I have put it up on Labor Day but this year on that day it was still warmer than I would've liked. Still, I wanted to see what would come for a sunflower seed.

It took only a couple of days before the first white-breasted nuthatches appeared, a male and a female. At this time of year I can't really call them a mated pair because we were past the time when there would be a nest full of young to feed. Except for mating season male nuthatches are quick to chase away any other nuthatches from the feeder, and this was no exception. The male would be on one side, the female on the other. Both took a seed and flew in different directions to find a place where it could pound the seed open.

After the nuthatches came tufted titmice, anywhere from two to four. These backyard birds call to each other. The titmice and the nuthatches were the first to return after we came back from our trip and I went back to putting the feeder out.

Soon after these birds were joined by a black-capped chickadee or two. Then the cardinals I've heard at dawn came by. Lately the feeder has hosted a redbellied woodpecker, downy woodpecker, jays, house sparrows, house finches and the occasional goldfinch. Mourning doves and the squirrels stay beneath the feeder to pick up what is dropped.

Fall birding is very different from spring birding. In spring the trees have barely leafed out and what migrants show up are in bright breeding colors and singing warning songs while finding food or setting territories to breed. In fall the trees are fully leafed out. The birds have no need for bright colors to attract a mate or singing to defend territory. The chips, tiks and other little sounds I may or may not be hearing through my tinnitus all sound the same to me, presuming I can even hear them.

In fall I am more dependent on my Merlin app hearing what I can't, identifying what I can't or confirming what I can. But another fall challenge is the later daylight - 7 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time currently is around when the sun rises. Those days when I could rise at 5 and be in the field at 6 before rush hour traffic are long gone. Now I have to make my way around school buses and more cars with the kids or going to work.

White-breasted nuthatch. The black on the top of the head
shows this is a male. The female has gray on her head. (Margo D. Beller)

And the bugs are still around. I wear gloves, I turn up my collar and I wear a head covering but the bugs find my face and neck rather appealing, particularly when I stop to look up at a tree to see any slight movement that could be a bird. The Deet, I discovered, did not deter the pests (it is probably too old) but it made me smell bad.

As I write we're having one of those "taste of fall" days when the high temperature didn't make it to 60 degrees F. There are more overnight temperatures in the 40s. Soon they will be in the 30s. Unlike MH's NH family we have yet to have our first frost but I've already brought my porch plants inside - checking them for insects first - and will soon have to put the baffle on the other feeder pole and put out more seed and suet. 

Migration will end soon. The leaf blowers have already been noisily out in force. I cut back the last spent plants in my garden and soon the canna pots will be brought inside. I'm already seeing myself dividing plants and turning compost next spring. 

I hope the garden survives winter. I hope the same for myself. 

Still Bugged

I'm bugged about a lot of things. My sagging skin. My thinning hair. My inability to pedal the exercycle for 30 minutes. The new month's bills that come in just as I've paid the old ones. My neighbors' lawn mowers or lawn services making a lot of noise in the early morning when I seek quiet on my porch.

Right now I'm really bugged about bugs.

Back in 2018 I wrote a post about bugs. It started, "If there is one thing I dislike more in summer than heat, humidity, weeds and deer, it is insects."

That hasn't changed. That post talks about all the insects, the importance of them in the cycle of life and how we must dress to deal with them.

What I didn't discuss was DEET. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 

DEET (chemical name, N,N-diethyl-meta-toluamide) is the active ingredient in many repellent products. It is widely used to repel biting pests such as mosquitoes and ticks. Every year, an estimated one-third of the U.S. population use DEET to protect them from mosquito-borne illnesses like West Nile Virus, the Zika virus or malaria and tick-borne illnesses like Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

Products containing DEET currently are available to the public in a variety of liquids, lotions, sprays, and impregnated materials (e.g., towelettes, roll on). Formulations registered for direct application to human skin contain from 5 to 99% DEET. Except for a few veterinary uses, DEET is registered for use by consumers, and it is not used on food.

Recent haiku: 

Here I sit,

Home from my birding.

Smelling of DEET.

At this time of year, besides the heat and humidity, it is more difficult for me to find any interesting birds, aside from the types of birds I'm likely to find in my backyard all year. In August the foliage is denser than in spring, the migrant birds less brightly colored and they are not singing territorial or nesting songs. When I go into the field in the days after one of the many global-warming-enhanced torrential downpours, I must look up in the treetops to see if anything is flying around.

That exposes the area of my neck under my chin to hungry flies, gnats and mosquitoes. And they've been biting.

So now I spray DEET on the backs of my hands and rub the smelly liquid on my neck, face and ears. It is very effective. The bugs don't bite. But they don't go away either, they hover and try to find a vulnerable area, like the deer that found a weakness in my fencing and took a few bites out of one of my sedum plants a few weeks ago.

The DEET smell stays with me when I drive home and I must wash it off, unless I plan on going out again to bird, so I add more.

98% DEET. I don't mess around when it comes to protection.
(Margo D. Beller)

The areas by standing water, of which there is a lot on both sides of the paths I walk after a major rain, are mosquito breeding grounds. They are bad, and so are other areas in the woods. Out in the sun, on a paved sidewalk, they are not so bad. But then I am in the sun, and on a humid day the combination is deadly.

DEET is found in a number of spray and liquid products under a variety of names including Off! and Repel, exactly why you would want to buy a chemical like this.

Says the Cleveland Clinic: 

Some people experience rashes or irritated skin after using DEET. It can also irritate your eyes if sprayed too close to your peepers.

More alarming, there have been rare reports of seizures associated with DEET. But according to the National Pesticide Information Center, most of those cases followed people drinking products with DEET or otherwise using them in ways that don’t follow recommended guidelines.

But overall, reactions are few and far between given the hundreds of millions of users.

I would not be stupid enough to drink DEET but I do know about the eye irritation.

At least this year I have not had an infestation of fungal gnats, carpenter ants or drain flies anywhere in the house or on the enclosed porch, at least not yet.

When I see people blithely walking or running through a known mosquito area while wearing shorts, open shoes and nothing on their arms, while I have on a shirt or jacket with the collar up, my hat pulled down, my light gloves on and my stink of DEET, I think, "Better you than me." But they keep moving while I stand and scan, a perfect target.

Adrift in the Dog Days

The "dog days of summer" refers to the hottest, most miserable part of the summer, when the high heat is matched by the high humidity. You can't cool off. You can't breathe. If you are my age you find yourself going out in the early morning and then being stuck inside by mid-afternoon.

The Old Farmer's Almanac says: "The Dog Days of Summer run from July 3 to August 11 each year. Far more than a modern saying, the phrase comes from ancient skywatchers who noticed that the brightest star, Sirius, rose with the Sun during this period."

(Sorry, Old Farmer. In this global-warming world we're now in it would be great if the bad weather ended today, Aug. 11. But the forecasts I've seen say otherwise.) 

Old-school birding (RE Berg-Andersson)

Back to the almanac: "The term “Dog Days” has been used for millennia to describe the hottest, most sweltering weeks of the Northern Hemisphere summer. Ancient peoples linked it with both astronomy and folklore, often viewing it as a time of drought, disease, or unrest."

I am certainly unrested. I can't sleep at night when it isn't cool but I hate running the whole-house air conditioner for just one bedroom at night. So I sleep, wake, turn, sleep, wake, etc.

Many birders follow the beachgoers "down the shore" because shore birds are at the ocean-facing shore or in protected places such as the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge. (I live too far from the shore but when I need to see water I much prefer going to the bay where the Delaware River on NJ's western shore empties. Plenty of birds over the bay's calmer waters and not so many people.)

Birds are only starting to head south in August. I see reports of many types of warblers and flycatchers in New York's Central Park, for instance. In my backyard the robins and grackles continue to eat the ripe cherries from my tree. A flicker or two pokes at the ground for insects. I have not seen or heard catbird in weeks and the house wrens are a distant memory.

Today, already tired out from our trip to the supermarket to fill our larder - and how expensive food has become! - I finish what library books I have and try to do something useful. I've been rearranging closets and dresser drawers but today that is done. So what do I do now?

I write a blog post about the odds and ends I've been collecting since the last post.

I found two pictures from January, when we got the most snow in years. When you are hit with so much snow you think of the spring, when the trees leaf out and the birds fly through. But now, when it is too hot and humid, I look at the picture with a longing for cold, forgetting how miserable it is to be buried in snow.

January, when the plow guys cleared the driveway and the yew hedge
was completely bent over. At this moment I miss the cold.
(Margo D. Beller)

I hung my hummingbird feeder out again, hoping for visitors. Ever since I took in the wren box I have not been out on the porch as much so I don't know if any hummers have come. It's been ten years since I've seen hummers battling over the food. This year's flowers bloomed and busted early thanks to a ton of rain and high heat. At Great Swamp recently I watched as four hummers - including one adult male - battled and occasionally fed at the two feeders out. I watched wistfully.

One thing I won't be doing is installing an app that would allow me to get a ping on my phone every time something like a hummingbird came to the feeder so I could watch, the same way people with doorbell cameras do.

This product - and there are many because feeding birds at home and watching them is a huge industry supporting everyone from nonprofit NJ Audubon to commercial chain Wild Birds Unlimited - is an app from some company called BirdWeather. I saw it on my Facebook feed because I put up bird-related comments, as well as my latest blog post, there. This app is everything I can't stand about the new technology - aside from Merlin, which I eventually downloaded to use because of my deteriorating hearing. 

The birding groups love this. Anything to get people interested in birding and either become members of their groups, or buy their products, or donate, or provide data in the name of Citizen Science is great, even if it means promoting an app where you never have to break a sweat walking outside your door. To me this is not birding, it is another form of watching TV. Instead of walking in nature, you're glued to your phone. 

Here is what the app promises. I have no idea what PUC stands for. My comments are in brackets.

Most birdwatching takes time, patience, and a whole lot of expertise. PUC takes about 30 seconds to set up, and does everything else for you. [So you can be a complete idiot and still call yourself a birder.]

Just plug it in, open the BirdWeather app, and walk away. [Forget waking at dawn, walking in an area with your binoculars and actually using your eyes, ears and brain to find birds passing through.]

From that moment on PUC is listening around the clock, identifying every species by sound, logging every detection with the time and date, and building a live picture of the wildlife in your garden. No cameras. No binoculars. No manual effort. No technical knowledge required. [In other words, birding for idiots.]

Hundreds of BirdWeather users have discovered species they never knew existed in their garden, just by plugging in and letting PUC do the work.
Nature was always this active around you. Now you'll finally know it.

Sorry, but you'd "know it" if you got off your keister, went outside and listened.

Even during the Dog Days.

*******

Update: Here's another app I won't be using.

Introducing the Chirpful Smart Bird Feeder! A smarter, more connected way to enjoy backyard birding.

With Chirpful you can:
- Watch birds live right from your phone in 4k
- Capture and download photos and videos of every bird visit
- Get real-time notifications
- Identify over 10,000 species of birds
1.5L easy refill capacity means more time for birdwatching!

Bird feeding meets smart technology. Enjoy interactive, up-close birdwatching experience from anywhere!  [ I don't want a bird feeder that is smarter than I am.]

Again At Midsummer

Nearly a year ago I wrote a post about what was going on in my yard. In many ways things are the same and things are different this year.

Cherries in various stages of ripeness (Margo D. Beller)

After the house wren family dispersed, I waited to see if another wren would use the nest box. It took five days - not one like last year - for a male to investigate and start singing around my yard. But nothing much happened. No female showed up. Several times the wren would fly to the box but then would leave.

Finally, I investigated. I found the opening to the box was plugged with nesting material for a house sparrow. Neither the nest nor the sparrow would be able to fit through the small opening so the bird gave up. I knew it was a house sparrow because of the nest material. House wrens use twigs. According to the bird experts at Cornell, house sparrows use "coarse dried vegetation, often stuffed into the hole until it’s nearly filled. The birds then use finer material, including feathers, string, and paper, for the lining." They also steal other birds' nests for their own.

I pulled the mess out of the opening but by then it was too late. It takes many weeks for a wren to find a mate, for her to sit on the eggs and raise the young. Southbound migration is only a month or so away. I've heard no  house wren song in my yard, tho' I've heard them elsewhere. I'll take the nest box down soon.

One of many robins in the cherry tree (Margo D. Beller)

Last year the apple tree did not lose its leaves for some time. This year its yellowed leaves are scattered below. The last apple was taken by a squirrel near the middle of June, nearly a month earlier than in the past. The tree survived its surgery but has been hit, as has the rest of my garden, with high winds, searing heat, thick humidity, the occasional flooding downpour and, now, wildfire smoke. Unlike me, it was not affected by the nearly three days we were without power over the July 4 weekend because of hurricane-force winds and hours of rain. Global warming? You be the judge.

The heat and humidity has kept me from doing much in the way of gardening, and the weeds have been taking advantage. But also taking advantage is a cherry tree at the edge of my yard.

I didn't plant this tree. I don't know if a previous owner did or if it sprang up from a dropped seed. This tree's growth was blocked for years by a nearby apple tree and the giant ash tree, both of which I cut down for different reasons. Once those trees were gone the cherry tree got plenty of light and so jumped in height and spread out. This year it was covered in flowers and now is covered in cherries. These are small and sour (yes, I tried a few) and the families of grackles, robins, catbirds and other fruit-eating birds love them.

The cherry tree trunk is the smaller one to the left.
(Margo D. Beller)

The nearby viburnum's berries are currently green but will, I hope, soon turn red. So will the dogwood's fruit. The privet shrubs will soon have their own berries. All of these will feed the birds as they get ready to head south for the winter.

It is hard to believe some birds are already migrating, such as male hummingbirds - which is why the trumpet vines and jewelweeds are flowering for them. At my house I've twice caught sight of a hummingbird investigating flowers but no birds have been inclined to use the feeder I have out, as far as I know.

There are plenty of birds that breed in my area, meaning their spring migration north stopped in my yard or in local parks that provided them with food, water and a protected place to breed. Hearing them singing or flying around gives me something to enjoy when I go out early in the morning nowadays. And there are plenty of fruiting and seeding plants out there - including weeds - that will feed those birds and the others later in the summer when it's time for them to leave.

So Many Babies

The catbird sat on the branch just below the wren nest box. It surveyed the ground below, looking for movement of a worm or insect. Then it flew down to nab its meal.

While it sat there, no house wren came out to chase it from the nest. For the first time in weeks the box was empty. 

Wren nest box, June 2026 (Margo D. Beller)

For the second straight year, after years of just missing, I saw the house wren chicks leave the nest and take their first wobbly flight to where a parent was no doubt calling for it. I was on my porch so I could not hear the parent, but I could see the three chicks as, one by one, they flew to the bare part of a dogwood branch. Each fluttered to keep its balance. One by one each moved to the leaves at the end of the branch and flew in the direction of the blue spruce's boughs.

This was a change. In past years, the wrens would fly in the other direction, to the shrubbery behind the flood wall. But this year a new neighbor had moved in and put up a wall so his dog could run in the yard. While he had put the fence well in from the property line to leave the trees and shrubs standing, the wall might've made the area too confining to the parents. So they led their young to Spruce, who had told me when the male first investigated the box in mid-April.

"They were here, Margo," he told me now, "but soon they all flew down to the ferns you have growing near me. I couldn't see them in the foliage. They might've flown behind your fencing."

This was on Tuesday, June 16, a week after my last post. In the interval the young had grown so big they could only be fed from outside the box. It was only a matter of time before they flew, I thought. And so, again, I was right.

I have not heard any of the wrens in the yard since then but there have been plenty of baby birds calling after their parents to be fed: cardinal, chipping sparrow, catbird, robin, starling, grackle, titmouse. But the yard is different without the sound of a singing house wren.

This fawn from several Junes ago was in the backyard,
under the apple tree and away from the street.
(Margo D. Beller)

Last year the box was empty only a day before another, or possibly the same, male claimed it and started singing. This year there have been no new takers as yet.

Meanwhile, in late May a doe appeared in the backyard nearly every morning, mainly eating weeds in that sheltered area behind the flood wall. I told my husband and MH's immediate comment was, "Is she pregnant?"

Memorial Day to early June seems to be the time when pregnant does give birth to one, two, sometimes three fawns. The fawns are hidden at first, spending their time sleeping like any newborn, surviving on mother's milk. We have found sleeping newborns in the yard in past years. So I understood his question. No, I said.

But I figured there was a fawn somewhere nearby. After a few weeks it would start following Mom around and supplement its milk diet with grass and plants. (A dangerous time for any unprotected plants as the young figures out what tastes good and what doesn't.)

The viburnum stands in front of the flood wall, with the fence
beyond. (Margo D. Beller)

So I was not surprised the other week when I found the fawn hunkered down in the area behind the flood wall. I couldn't see it from where I was sitting outside on the patio. But when first a chipmunk and then a squirrel climbed a tree and started their alarm calls, I went to see if a cat was hiding back there. Instead, there was the fawn. We stared at each other. When deer are small like this they look cute. It is when they grow and destroy my plants that I want to shoot them. (Same with baby Canada geese.)

Well, I said to it, at least your mother didn't leave you behind the deer netting where you'd make a mess trying to get out. (I now use an old garden hose to block the way in behind that fence.)

I moved and then the fawn bounded away in that herky-jerky way colts run, heading for Mom.

I figured Mom would not leave it there alone again and I was right. When I saw it behind the flood wall today, Mom was nearby, behind a privet bush. Both took off, going around the house next door, perhaps to the area where they'd have gone directly had the fence not been there. 

But they'll be back at some point. Whether house wrens are is another story.