The Robin

“The robin flew from his swinging spray of ivy on to the top of the wall and he opened his beak and sang a loud, lovely trill, merely to show off. Nothing in the world is quite as adorably lovely as a robin when he shows off - and they are nearly always doing it.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden 

One afternoon last week, when the temperature was unusually mild for mid-February and allowed me to wear a light coat instead of a parka, I was walking down my street and heard the "chuckle" of a robin overhead. I looked up. First a couple flew over, heading southeast. Then another few, then more. I started counting. I stopped at 25. Altogether it must've been 100 or so flying in small groups from the edge of the Central Park of Morris County.

November 2017 (Margo D. Beller)

Robins are considered a harbinger of spring, even though there are robins that will remain in the snowy, colder north as long as there are fruiting shrubs or the ground has thawed enough for them to pick at worms and insects.

The American robin is a thrush, like the hermit thrush, wood thrush and bluebird. Its cousins are the catbird and the mockingbird. Despite having the same name it is different from the European robin, which is more of a songbird. (The English colonists likely saw one and were reminded of the robins back home.)
  
I continued my walk and turned eastward. As I approached a large white pine girdled with English ivy (not poison ivy) several robins flew in and started thrashing around in what I guess was a feeding frenzy. What could they be finding, I wondered. I took a right and started southward toward my home and more robins, likely from the same flock that had passed over me earlier, were now heading back north, stopping at every holly or cedar they could find. Unlike the pines and spruces, ivy, holly and cedar have softer leaves. So these robins were going after - what? Likely seeds, fruits or insects that came out in the milder weather. 

Why the large flock? Safety in numbers. Grackles form large flocks in winter before pairing off to mate in the spring. Sometimes the large flocks include starlings, redwinged blackbirds and cowbirds. I never know when the flocks will invade my yard but when they come down it is to look under the leaf litter for insects or probe the soft ground or mob the bird feeders. Sometimes there are robins following along. Like the grackles, the robin's bill is more suited to pecking into soft ground than cracking a sunflower seed. Unlike the grackles they stay out of the feeders, which is why I don't mind seeing large flocks of this particular bird.

Robin in fruiting red cedar tree (Margo D. Beller)

Lately I've been seeing robins on my front lawn and those of my neighbors, with some grackles and starlings. On the day before our most recent snowstorm I drove down the driveway and found at least a dozen pecking into the grass.

In his book, "What the Robin Knows," author Jon Young says the robin is a "sentry" that can tell us about the health of our environment -- if we choose to slow down, listen and observe. When a human is respectful, the robin doesn't fly away (even if it does watch warily). So when I see several dozen robins feeding while walking down a street named for our first U.S. president, I stay away a respectful distance and watch and then, when I must move, I move slowly and make no threatening movements.

You can learn a lot watching a robin. Watching these robins I learned which fruiting shrubs I should consider for my yard to draw robins and other birds. I learned that owners of even the most manicured suburban lawn can't kill off all the bugs or poison the grass since otherwise the robins wouldn't be feeding. I've also learned that when you see a large flock of robins eating like there's no tomorrow, they might know more than you do about changing weather. Luckily for the robins there are shrubs where the fruits aren't palatable until after a few frosts.

The most important thing I've learned from the robin is that no matter how bad winter can be, spring is always around the corner.

Long Island, NY, November 2017 (Margo D. Beller)

 

Trench Warfare

It is the nature of Nature that when you have a mowed field, you have to keep it mowed or it will become overgrown. Then the trees will start growing and completely change the typography. There are people who want this. Second-growth forests, as this regrowth is called, are good for a variety of birds and animals.

Trench with sensitive ferns (Margo D. Beller)

But on a much smaller scale, in this case my yard, I need to get rid of a different type of forest.

I was out with the hose early one morning this week to water the plants and I could not help but notice that thanks to the September heat that has followed the unusually fall-like weather in August - a reversal of seasons - the weeds and grasses are growing by leaps and bounds, thinking it is spring. It is hard for one woman to keep up and it is times like these I wish I could clone my nieces and nephews.

One area around the side of the house was on the verge of being swallowed up by the ground ivy. Bad enough it is fighting the grass in front of the house for survival. It has also found some comfortable dwelling space under Spruce Bringsgreen, whose prickly foliage keeps me from going under it to yank out the mats of ivy anymore than once or twice a year.

A mat of ground ivy was removed, exposing the
sprinkler head. (Margo D. Beller)

But this side area has a number of sensitive ferns that have done very well this year for the first time in a very long while, and I did not want the ivy in it. So I had to dig a trench.

Specifically, I had to dig a trench border.  I had to go to the edge of the area where the big shrubs, called andromeda, were planted, put in the shovel (after loosening things with the garden fork) and pull up the dirt, angling it in such a way that the grass and ivy in the lawn could not cross. Plants won't grow in air, so the wider the trench, the better the chance of keeping unwanted plants, even lawn grass, out.

It should've been easy enough. I've dug these trenches before. The problem is, I last dug one 10 years or more ago, and unless you fix your handiwork every few years, rain and wind will inevitably fill in the trench and the weeds will cross back to where you don't want them.

My plan was to rise early and try to finish the work before the sun rose high enough to warm that particular area. However, several things went wrong. First, I could not get myself out of bed before dawn. Second, I forgot about the difficulties in putting a shovel into dirt that has rocks and miles of shrub and weed roots under it. Third, I forgot the hand-to-hand combat. It's not enough to dig the trench, you have to pull out the undesirables from the area you have "liberated." It is very much like war without the shooting. 

Good trenches make good neighbors.
(Margo D. Beller)

The finished product makes the garden bed look neat but my back and knees almost finished me off. My compost bucket was filled with huge mats of ground ivy, particularly from in front of the air conditioner platform. There were also crab grass, some wood sorrel and other plants I can't identify. I just hope I got it all and didn't harm the ferns or buried daffodils much from my labor.

My plan was to do another garden bed not complicated by deer netting but my aging body forced me to wait a day. I had to be content putting a month's worth of brush to the curb in several trips using a cart and a wheelbarrow. The next day it took another two hours to do this bed, which has even more roots and rocks to dig through. Somehow I survived.

And I'm still not done. No gardener ever is. There is one super-sized problem area in front of the house, bound by netting, poles and a small fence to keep deer and rabbits out of plants I never would've put in had I known better 20 years ago. It will take an hour just to take out all the netting and then there will be hours of work to dig the trench, pull the weeds and then, as long as I have the poles down, move around pots, cut back shrubs and put down mulch. My back aches at the thought.

The next frontier (Margo D. Beller)

Because this area is in the sun for most of the day I will need a cooler day, preferably cloudy, an October day that actually feels like October. I could do at least some of this with MH's help, even though doing anything in the yard aside from mowing the lawn fills him with apprehension. I don't blame him. Sometimes it is easier to just do things myself rather than bark orders to get things just so. 

I could hire someone but I like working in the garden, despite the pain. I can listen to a distant Carolina wren, one of my favorite birds. I can take care of everything at once and then, I hope, leave this area of the garden alone until spring starts things all over again. 

Mainly, doing this stuff allows me to check that I can still do it. As time has gone by I have been forced to give up many things, including long, rocky hikes up steep inclines. The garden, even digging a trench, is something I can still do. I garden, therefore I am. 

I am battling myself, too.

Leaves of Grass in a Sea of Green

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.
- Walt Whitman

It is once more Sunday morning and I am in my "corner office." There have been chickadees rather than goldfinches at the thistle sock and the light plays prettily on the medallion atop my feeder pole.

At close to 9 am, I hear, once more, the drone of a lawn mower, likely that of a homeowner rather than the big mowers used by a lawn service.

Backyard lawn, Aug, 13, 2017 (Margo D. Beller)

By our town's laws, 9 am is when mower and blower noise is deemed ok on a Sunday and so, once more, I am hearing one of the most recognizable sounds of summer along with slammed screen doors and the whirring of cicadas.

Lawns are the cornerstone of suburbia. Mowing the lawn is mentioned as a suburban rite in the song "Pleasant Valley Sunday" co-written by Carole King and her husband at the time. A neat and tidy sea of green, the lawn shows the world you know how to take care of your property and you are a person of substance. An untidy lawn brings you stares from the neighbors, comments from passersby and visits from deer that think you have provided a nice little meadow in which it can bed down.

And yet, nothing is abused more than a lawn.

It is watered, by rain and sprinkler, sometimes daily. Then the mower - whether homeowner or service - cuts it down weekly, whether it needs cutting or not, to within an inch of its life. Then the mowed, cropped grass goes brown in the summer heat, prompting the homeowner to use the sprinkler, sometimes daily, prompting the grass to go green and grow, which brings the mower, etc., etc.

First 2017 mowing - note the ground ivy flowers
(Margo D. Beller)

There comes a point each summer when MH and I watch the service working on the lawn across the street and one or the other will mutter, "He's mowing dust."

MH, for assorted reasons, likes to go out every other week to mow, or he may leave it a tad longer. When he does mow the lawn, it is a higher cut than mowers on the neighbors' lawns. The grass cuttings are not put in a pail for the town to turn into compost for sale but left to nourish the lawn. The longer cut protects the grass' roots from the summer heat. So our lawn looks a bit greener.

Yes, that has brought deer but deer pass through anyway. We find evidence that they have visited, including the areas where they have bedded down. Without a high fence, that will continue.

Another thing we do not do is spray chemicals on the lawn to keep it green and perfect. We feed the grass in spring and fall because, after all, lawn grass is a plant as much as anything in a pot. But our lawn is not perfect. In the front yard it is fighting an invasion of ground ivy, one of my least favorite weeds. In back I sometimes find trees and wild rose growing where the seeds have landed and taken root.

There are also bugs, and that brings ground birds that eat them: flickers, robins, grackles, catbirds, Carolina and house wrens, chipping sparrows and, just today, an infrequent visitor, a phoebe diving for insects from my apple tree. There is no reason to use chemicals when the birds are just as effective.

We are not perfect either. When there has been no rain for a while and the grass becomes crunchy, MH will look at me and ask about putting on the sprinkler system. At which point it is programmed to go on during the wee hours of the morning, when the water will be absorbed and not dried away by the sun.

You would think this is a no-brainer. And yet I see plenty of my neighbors, even the ones who mow their own lawns and do not bag their clippings, using their sprinklers in the middle of the day when the grass is getting the full effect of the sun. Waste of water and their money.

Lawn care is a big business. There are plenty of books and websites on the topic such as this one. Much of the information is put out there by people who want you to hire their lawn service or buy their chemicals and other products. There are even scientific studies on lawns. According to a recent Op-Ed in the New York Times, mowed grass is the nation's largest irrigated crop. Between the lawns and the sod farms I can believe it.

American toad, backyard, July 2014 (RE Berg-Andersson)

Those times I mow our lawn I re-acquaint myself with its quirks. I pay attention to which areas get more sun than others, which are wetter. I have spooked up American toads with the mower and once, unfortunately, gave a young rabbit a scar on its ear when I went over a nest in a lawn depression. In spring, the lawn in front is filled with the tall purple flowers of the ground ivy, the only time it looks pretty. Then comes the yellow dandelions, which we try to dig out before the uglier seed heads rise.

As a former neighbor once said, as long as it's green I don't care.

It is unfortunate that more towns like mine do not encourage creating small grasslands where manicured lawns now sit. Grasslands bring different types of plants, insects and birds to an area. They are more interesting, less sterile. Certain birds -- grasshopper sparrows, for instance -- and insects such as monarch butterflies are endangered because more farms and their grasslands are being "developed" into suburban housing developments with, of course, a huge ocean of lawn.

Monarch butterfly, Griggstown Grasslands, Aug. 2011 (Margo D. Beller)

So I can look at a long, sweeping, immaculately mowed, green, unweedy lawn and envy the homeowner his or her money paying the lawn service that would spare MH and me a lot of physical pain if we used it. But I do not covet that lawn.

Raking It In

“Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.” 
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

The other week we were driving home from a family gathering in New Hampshire. We made a stop at one of New Hampshire's waysides to use the bathroom and stretch our legs. The trees were full of colorful leaves, just past peak in this region of the U.S.

A woman was standing nearby with her dog, which strained to come to me. I walked over and pet it. The woman and I talked. She was in awe of the colorful leaves because where she lives, in Arizona, you don't see fall foliage like that. "Someday I have to bring my grandchildren here so they can see this," she told me as MH walked back to the car. She bade me farewell and walked with her dog to her waiting husband sitting in their van.

(Margo D. Beller)

I thought of that woman as I was raking today. I'd like to have a backyard of cactus.

Autumn leaves are beautiful but they are dying. As the days shorten and the weather turns cold, the trees start sending precious life fluids down to their roots. The green leaves start to turn color and drop to the ground. Some days the leaves fall like rain.

Which is why today I was outside in the early morning cold with my rake, tarp and blower.

I find blowers to be a necessary evil. I have "earmuffs," which look like old headphones, to protect my ears when I use our blower, which is electric-powered and relatively quiet compared with the big leaf blowers and hurricane fans used by the lawn services. I wear them even when I rake, to block out the noise of the neighbors in our bit of suburbia, who in their lawn lust want every last speck of leaf removed.

This was the second Saturday this season I've gone out to rake. MH joined me an hour in last week and we kept banging into each other until we developed an unspoken plan involving raking (him) and blowing (me) and putting tarpfuls of leaves at the curb (both of us).

Less than 24 hours later, a storm blew through with wind and rain, bringing down more leaves and covering our lawn. You'd never know we'd been out there. Just like Sisyphus, we'd have to do it again.

Before the fall - 8 a.m., Nov. 6, 2016 (Margo D. Beller)

This time, after a bad night's sleep, I went out early. I used the rake to pull leaves away from edges and the patio, then pushed them on the tarp. I dragged the tarp around the house to fill it with leaves and then dump it at the curb. Across the road one of my neighbors' lawn guy was unloading his equipment. He looked at me and I half-feared and half-hoped he'd ask me if I needed any help. But he didn't. He went on with his work and I went back to fill another tarpful.

My neighbor with this lawn service used to do it himself, until he had a heart attack. I can understand his hiring someone. There will surely come a time when MH, with his aching knees, and I, with various back problems, won't be able to do this ourselves anymore. Our nephew and nephew-in-law are landscapers, but they live in other states. We have no children or grandchildren to help us. For now, we do it.

Whether I use the rake or the blower, the birds are not happy when I come close to the feeders or the water dishes. The chickadees, titmice and white-breasted nuthatch fly in, grab and go when they think I'm not looking or am far enough away. The house finches, jays and house sparrows stay away. They know I will come after them if they stay too long at the feeders. Left unchecked, they'll just sit and eat until there is no more seed, to the detriment of other birds.

White-breasted nuthatch above, titmouse below. (Margo D. Beller)

But once I get far enough away, they are right back at it.

Raking is a quiet activity. It is a thoughtful activity. Unlike sitting and staring into a computer, raking allows me to concentrate on doing something physical and tangible - getting leaves on a tarp - instead of worrying about the usual intangible things such as whether I still have a job or if I can pay the bills this month. In its way, it is as restful as meditating.

When my arms started to ache, I put on my earmuffs and used my blower to create piles. I do this to give me something of substance to put on the tarp. Blowing leaves to the curb is a waste of time, energy and electricity, although those with those gas-belching fans that roar like a jet engine don't share my concerns.

Sure, they were done in 20 minutes as opposed to the several hours I took. But little by little I filled and moved the tarp, then dumped it, until I had gotten the entire backyard done, by which time MH had come out and started raking the front. I felt very accomplished and rather energized, surprisingly so.

There are times I am depressed. This seems to happen a lot at this time of year. The end of the year is near and the November in my soul, triggered by the same lack of light and cold that bring down the leaves, prompts "what's the point" moments.

I sit and wonder:  What's the point of cleaning the house when it's only going to get dusty again? What's the point of getting dressed when I work at home and don't want to see anyone? What's the point of raking when more leaves are going to come down?

What's the point of living when you're going to die anyway?

When I get to that point, I have to take myself outside. As I rake in the cold, feeling the breeze and seeing the birds flitting about in the now-bare trees, I calm down. We live to push that boulder to the top of the hill, even when it falls down and we have to push it up again.

So I go out with my rake and tend to my little plot in the universe.

A Visit From Mr. Toad

I had an unexpected visitor today, Independence Day, and he showed up in an unexpected way.

As I wrote last time, once in a while it's a real education to look down instead of up when you are outdoors. There are snakes, dragonflies and, depending on the habitat, frogs and toads. As a birdwatcher, I usually ignore these creatures when I am out hiking, but thanks to MH's enthusiasm and pictures I have been making an effort to study other winged wonders and more terrestrial animals.

Today's lesson was literally in my own backyard.

Over the years MH and I have spooked American toads from the long grass in the backyard as we used the mower, so we know they are around -- at least in those lawns, like ours, where pesticides are not used and the grass is allowed to stay a little longer to protect the roots from summer's heat.

American toad, July 4, 2014 (R.E.Berg-Andersson)

Yes, there is a price to pay for that lush, uniform, green lawn. Chemicals don't discriminate between grubs and beneficial insects or the toads that feed on them. Lawn services, when not cutting the grass down to the nibs whether it needs it or not and disturbing the morning peace with their gas-powered equipment, dump chemicals to kill the weeds and grubs that could mar that uniform appearance. The homeowner then waters - and waters - the grass, only to have the lawn service whack it down again a few days later.

It gives the homeowner something to look at with pride, a vast sea of green -- or a kind of moat that, to some, separates you (at least psychologically) from your neighbors.

But we who keep the grass longer and who let the clippings fall where they may to decay and nourish the lawn, have greener grass and don't need chemicals aside from the occasional dose of grass food. That means bees at the clover, for instance, or the occasional toad in the grass.

And yet, my visitor was not found on the lawn but in my composter.

I'm guessing Mr. Toad -- the name of one of my favorite characters from one of my favorite books, "The Wind in the Willows" --  was looking for a cool, relatively dry place to get out of the heat, humidity and intense thunderstorms that have been plaguing New Jersey this week.

The weather has been so hot, so humid, so abnormal to me that when I could get outside to look at my garden (only early in the day) I discovered mid- and late-summer plants all getting ready to bloom at the same time! Same with my early- and mid-season peppers.

In a life that seems to be getting faster all the time these heightened conditions - this global warming, if you will - is speeding up summer, too.

So if you are a toad and you are faced with heat and too much water to survive, what do you do? You take shelter. And thanks to my having moved what had been in my composter to my corner compost pile for the summer, the composter was lighter than usual and Mr. Toad (I'm guessing) squeezed through the tiny space created by the composter not sitting completely flat on the patio tiles -- all the more remarkable because this was the largest toad I've ever seen, in my yard or in the wild.

So today, doing chores on my day off, I was moving things around on the patio, including the composter. And out popped Mr. Toad.

He was not happy. He hopped into a corner, where MH took his picture. He sat there a long time. Every so often I would come out and he'd be in the same place but had shifted his position. Finally, I came out and he was gone...but not too far. It looked like he was trying to get back under the composter!

I tried to pick him up with my shovel but he hopped away and finally went behind the deer netting and into my back shade garden. He'll be OK there although I doubt he'll stay long. No animal wants to be stuck behind deer netting. His instinct will be to hide beneath the composter again or move back to the yard and be further away from where I might find him...at least until the next time MH or I mow the grass.

Come winter, when I stop walking across the yard to my corner compost pile and use the closer patio composter, I will lift it up first to make sure Mr. Toad has moved on.

Good, Bad and Raking

Robert Frost wrote, with irony, in a poem that "good fences makes good neighbors."

In my part of town, where we are not supposed to fence the front of our properties to retain something of a "park-like setting," autumn creates an opportunity to remember just where one property starts and another ends.

The leaves fall and you will see one house with an immaculate lawn. The service has come through, many people with lawn blowers and hurricane fans putting leaves to the curb, more or less; or perhaps mowing the grass, mulching the leaves, sucking them into the bag, which is emptied at the curb. The service goes right up to the property line.

One side, pristine green. The other side, my lawn.

Good raking makes good neighbors.

My husband does one final lawn cut, crunching up the first round of fallen leaves to allow them to work into the lawn. After that, we'll be out with our rakes, blower and tarps for the next few weeks, until the town stops collecting what we put out front.

In the backyard we have the maples, elms, apple, pear and oaks shedding leaves. In the front, however, we have black locusts.

I don't know who decided many decades ago to line my street with black locusts. That man or woman could've picked the Bradford pears. These stately trees line my downtown street and perhaps yours. They bloom wonderfully in spring, the leaves turn red in fall and they produce ornamental fruit the birds eat.

Black locusts are not so nice. Their roots push up the curb and the street. The little yellow leaves fall early in autumn and get everywhere, at which point they are tracked into home and garage. The stems also fall and mat on the grass. There are male and female trees, and if you are one of those "lucky" enough to have a female tree, as I am, you have  LOTS of long black pods that must be swept off the lawn or you'll have a forest instead of a park-like setting.

So as I am raking the pods down to the curb every year, I wonder if the person who decided on locusts has a few in his or her front yard and is also raking pods. I would like to meet that person, ask, "Why locusts?" (which are no longer planted in my town because of the damage they cause) and, if I'm in the wrong mood, punch him or her in the nose.

It is literally and figuratively a pain to do this every year, but there is some good that comes from all this raking. I am out of the house, using my arms and legs in much more (to me) useful exercise than lifting weights or riding a stationary bicycle. I am reacquainting myself with my lawn - I can see where the ground ivy is taking over, where the skunks and squirrels have been digging, where MH is going to need to put down more grass seed. I prefer this to paying a lawn service that mows every week whether the lawn needs it or not.

brown creeper

Raking also allows me to hear the birds. As I work, I hear the Canada geese. I look up and see about 10 flying generally north. However, I know these are not migrants. They would be heading south at this time of year, would be in a much larger group and be much higher in the sky. Still, I enjoy watching geese as they fly.
 
One year, resting from my labors, I looked up to find a brown creeper making its way up one of the locust trees, probing the crevices of its bark with its long, thin bill. Unlike the nuthatch, which climbs up and down trees with abandon, the creeper only goes up. Once at the top, it flies to the bottom of the next tree and works its way up again.

This morning as I was raking there were bluebirds - a rare pleasure - and a Carolina wren singing nearby, reminding me that soon I must bring in my plants and put out my feeders.

Winter will be here soon enough. Even with the cold and the darkness at 5pm, I welcome the respite from the garden chores.

Especially the raking.

Drills and Drumming

If there is one thing my husband reminds me every year it is that where we live in northern New Jersey is much more quiet than where we lived in Queens, NY. 

Many was the night we heard blaring radios, people in different languages shouting at each other and the occasional gunshot. 

I grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., land of car alarms, ambulance sirens and kids playing all over the street. As I was one of those kids the noise didn't bother me, it was just there. In Queens I wasn't bothered most of the time but when the fireworks would start going off in June I would get pissed off and then the gunshots would scare me.

Eventually, we left for the safer, quieter suburbs where we would have space. That is why, the longer I've lived here, what noise I hear now seems louder, piercing and unexpected.

In late February I would leave the house for my morning walk and I'd hear drumming, the sound of a male woodpecker - usually a downy but possibly any of the six types that would be around northern New Jersey - striking a tree branch to announce its availability to the opposite sex and/or defend its chosen territory.

Downy woodpecker, the smallest type in New Jersey.

That sound I don't mind.

I'm learning to tolerate the noise of barking dogs left outside on mild days and small children playing in their yards.

But with the warming temperatures at the end of March, the home projects have returned.

As I sit in my office trying to work there is hammering, sawing, drilling and other ungodly machine screeching as people add on to their houses, repair their roofs, rip up the blacktop for paving stones on their driveways.

They call this "improvement."

The borough is putting in a much-needed sidewalk on the next street, and that has meant cutting down trees and grinding the stumps, sounds I hate to hear because it means fewer trees for the birds. When they start building the sidewalks, the noise will get worse.

But it will eventually end, and since I want a sidewalk I can put up with it, albeit with difficulty.

What I can't put up with is the infernal racket of the lawn services.

I can tolerate my husband pushing our little Toro over our 0.4 acre or those neighbors, even the ones with the big lawn tractors, who do it themselves. 

But when the paid crews come in they bring huge, powerful machines making incredibly annoying noise, which means on a nice day I am rushing to close the window and put my headphones on the radio to try and block it out.

And different houses have different services that come on different days.

I don't know which I hate more, the mowers or the leaf blowers with their whiny arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr to get every last bit of nongrass debris off the lawn.

I know, I know, like the birds these guys gotta eat and they wait all winter for the first hint of warmth that allows them to hire seasonal workers and get some contract business on the account books. And there are homeowners who have waited all winter, put up with the house (only 4 bedrooms for 6 people? the nerve!) and now want to bulk up and spruce up the place to raise the property values so when the economy really improves they can sell the house for something better.

Besides, says MH, would you prefer living in the city with the salsa music blaring from the cars double-parked in front of the corner bodega and the gunshots? 

No, I don't. But I would also prefer people realize that cutting their lawns within an inch of their lives every single week and then watering them when the summer sun inevitably turns them brown is a waste of energy and resources, including water and their money. 

And that a pristine, weed-free, bug-free, worm-free, bird-free, uniform lawn is not a REAL lawn and far from natural. It's advertising that says, look at me, I have the perfect lawn. I'm better than you.

I am aware I am being unrealistic, and I can understand why I see people with earbuds stuck in wherever they go, including when they are driving, to block out the noises and distractions and provide the perfect soundtrack to their world.

That, in part, is why I go into the woods and listen to the birds. But I refuse to blare music into my ears all day from now until winter to disassociate myself from the world. 

I don't want to miss the birds singing and drumming away. They don't seem put off by man's inhumanity to nature. I must try and follow their example.

A Plague of Locusts

I have several neighbors - you probably do, too - who can’t go a week without mowing the lawn. One in particular has a lawn service that comes every Tuesday morning.

As the summer heat has continued it has taken the lawn service less and less time to cut what must now be 1/100th of an inch of new growth each week.

What is it about the suburban man and lawn care? Another neighbor goes out with a small mower to do edges, then an edger to go around trees, then his big riding mower to get everything else. Each week he puts out two to five buckets of what I would use as compost for my pile for someone else to pick up, leaving behind stinking garbage cans.

I don’t see the point of watering to make grass grow and then mowing to make it so short the summer sun makes it go dormant - not dead - and brown.

Most of the rest of us on the street, whether we do the lawn ourselves or hire a service, have not been so fanatical. For instance, we do not go out every week but let the grass grow so it can protect its own roots from the summer heat.

There are a few of us with underground sprinklers, and you can tell who uses them even during a drought - especially during a drought - because their grass is thick and green while the rest of us have grass in various stages of brown crispiness.

This neighbor with the lawn service has a mainly brown lawn, too, with one significant exception.

A small forest of green locust trees.

The locust seedlings are the brighter green plants on this lawn.

Whoever thought the black locust would be a wonderful shade tree for my street 30+ years ago doesn’t have the misfortune of having a female tree, the one that grows the long seed pods that liberally litter the lawn nearly every year.

I have one such female tree. My neighbor does not. Even so, he has been agitating to have the two male locust trees cut down for years. Within the last year the town finally took them down. My neighbor was quick to seed the uprooted space and create a lawn. He even went out to water it.

Normally my town would’ve put in two replacement trees of a type whose roots don’t push up the pavement. It has not done so in this case, either because there were no funds or because at some point a sidewalk may go in and the trees would have to be uprooted anyway.

Or maybe my neighbor just paid a “fine” and made the problem go away.

Locust trees, however, are as tenacious as weeds. The town periodically goes through and trims back branches and within a year you can see little branches growing back. With the trees gone and the grass cut to within a millimeter of its life in summer, there are perfect conditions for tenacious things other than grass to spring up.

So now his lawn is covered with locust trees saplings.

The lawn service cuts them back but I don’t see my neighbor out with a spade to dig them up, as I do when I find one or two growing.

I expect there will be a point when he will have the lawn dug up and sod put down, likely over a sprinkler system that can keep the grass thick and green and surviving until the weekly decapitation by the lawn service. If he has the money to throw around on this, more power to him.

I, however, think it is a waste of time, energy and resources, and the only one who benefits is the lawn company.

Certainly not the lawn.

The Scientific Method

This is a picture of my husband as we were walking along a trail one recent winter. I know it wasn't last winter because after the October 30 storm we had no snow until spring.

MH is not a believer in chance. MH prefers to be prepared. Yes, he was a Boy Scout once.

He has more of a scientific bent. When we go birding he walks quickly. I, meanwhile, amble along, dealing with whatever Fate may throw at me.
 
I will stop at the smallest sound in case it's a new bird. He will keep walking. He will stop to photograph a snake, a butterfly or a dragonfly. I usually ignore anything that is not a bird and keep walking.

It is a difference in style and approach. He is more apt to pick up a dusty tome containing records of the earliest and latest a  rosebreasted grosbeak has been seen in New Jersey. He notes records precisely.

He knows that if we're lucky, rosebreasted grosbeaks will show up at our seed feeder in early May, around the time of our anniversary. He has a good idea of when the first junco appears for the winter and when it will leave in the spring.

I tend to stick to the here and now. I go, look and record, check in a bird guide to find out what I am seeing but I have little interest in the past unless I need the information for a precise reason. There are birders who compile lists on Excel spreadsheets. MH has given me books to record my sightings by date and location, but I prefer writing in narrative in a notebook, or in this blog.

Rosebreasted grosbeak

Between the two of us we are an ideal birder, one who has an appreciation for the here and now but who is also aware of the past, which allows us to realize how strange it is that an increasing number of bird types that would never have been considered anything other than a southern species are now much more commonly seen in the north. Redbellied woodpeckers. Carolina wrens. Yellow-throated warblers. Prothonotary warblers.

Birders get excited by this possibility of seeing a new or unusual bird in their familiar birding patches. The other weekend MH and I were birding along Old Mine Road - a popular place for those migrants that nest in elevated, forested land (it is part of Worthington State Forest, parallel to the Delaware River) - and we had stopped to look at a brook falling sharply downhill. I was hearing a hooded warbler - twee-tweeteo - when MH pulled up his camera and started "shooting" at something moving. It was calling and not singing but when it popped up it was most definitely a prothonotary. It is golden yellow and stockier than a yellow warbler and has silver-gray wings. Unfortunately, his pictures of it did not come out or I'd have included one here.

These birds are common in Florida but the first one MH and I ever saw was on a rock in Central Park, where the little guy made a lot of birders very excited. The next time I saw one of these was in the front garden of the New York Public Library, a little bird surrounded by big men with gun-like cameras. (That is where I took the cellphone picture below.)

So what should we make of this phenomenon? Just as the birds fleeing the Indonesian coast warned of the Christmas tsunami, to me the birds are warning us that global warming or climate change, which made our New Jersey winter mild and free of snow, is having an effect, thus making it possible for these birds to expand their range.

MH, the scientist, went to his records. It is true, he said, that birds have been known to show up early, according to what he's read in the records of John Bull, Whitmer Stone and Ludlow Griscom. However, he also keeps weather records and when he studies the annual Year in Weather published by the New York Times, we didn't have a single day in 2011 where it was colder than normal. In fact, we did have a lot of days warmer than normal.

Prothonotary warbler, NY Public Library

To him, it is evidence of global warming.

In this we agree.

As an observer, I find the trend frightening, and not just because I am not one of those who dreams of perpetual summer, wearing flip-flops and tank-tops all year and trips to the Jersey Shore. Warmer days means more power needed for air conditioners and more water for our plants and ourselves.

People act as though we have unlimited resources. We don't. After a particularly heavy rain this week one of my neighbors' automatic sprinklers went on. I guess he couldn't be bothered to put it on only when necessary. Like the lawn services, coming on their schedule, not when the lawns need cutting.

I have no answer for this. It is particularly depressing to try to explain these things to people and be considered an old crank. I hope the children of the world learn the importance of the environment and do a better job teaching their parents.

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A postscript:

The nest box in my backyard is finally in use. This afternoon I came out from the porch and saw one of the house wrens fly to the box opening. Cheeping ensued. At my appearance the neighbor's chained-up dog started barking and wouldn't stop until I went inside. This is the yin and yang of my life in the suburbs.