Listen to the Mockingbird

If you want to know what kinds of birds are in a particular area, look for a mockingbird.

I say “look,” because you will recognize the gray thrush-like bird with the long tail with white edges and a white patch on each wing.

What you won’t recognize is its song. It doesn’t have one.

Found in all 50 US states, this bird takes the songs of other birds it hears, which is why it is a particularly good indicator of what’s around that particular patch. The mockingbird will repeat a call anywhere from two to 20 times before switching to another. It can literally sing for hours.

My father-in-law told me he was once entranced for 30 minutes by the repertoire of a gray bird on his roof, which I identified for him as a mockingbird. These birds make it easy for you to find them. They like to sit on a roof or high in a tree or on a structure next to something that will amplify his singing. I’ve seen them singing in a giant satellite dish and on a tall, bare tree that was close to a building, which provided an echo.

The bird is called the northern mockingbird but I can’t imagine why since all my associations with the bird are with the south. There’s the wonderful “To Kill a Mockingbird” - both the book and movie - which takes place in the south. It is the state bird of Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas, all once part of the Confederacy.

I have heard as many as six mockingbirds singing at the same time, at an apartment complex near the water in Jersey City. I have heard as many as three widely scattered around a parking lot. Usually you’ll hear a hissing as the singer chases an interloper out of his territory. About the only time I don’t see mockingbirds chase other mockingbirds away is when a male needs to find a female.

Mockingbirds aren’t intimidated by size either - my husband and I have seen them chase American crows, grackles and even redtailed hawks away from a nest or, when chasing off a robin, a bush filled with berries. (Like its cousins the robins and bluebirds, mockingbirds don’t come to feeders unless you are providing them fruit. But since they are so possessive I don’t bother.)

They will sing early in the morning and late into the evening, for long periods of time. In New York City I have heard them imitate car alarms pretty effectively.

I recorded one once in an Englewood Cliffs, N.J., parking lot not far from the Palisades and among the calls that I recognized were a blue jay, great crested flycatcher, robin, titmouse, gull, cardinal, carolina wren, red-winged blackbird, redbellied woodpecker and a white-breasted nuthatch - and that was just in 2 minutes, 28 seconds.

(Here is another mockingbird someone else recorded and posted on YouTube.)

For a bird with no song it shows up in a lot of songs. There’s lyricist Johnny Mercer of Savannah, Ga., who put the mockingbird in many of his songs including “Blues in the Night.”

There’s the folksong “Listen to the Mocking Bird.” (An alternate spelling. The song is from the mid-nineteenth century.)

There’s the familiar children’s lullaby that begins, "Hush, little baby, don't say a word, Mama's gonna buy you a mockingbird" - a song sampled by Eminem, of all people, in his sad song about the breakup of his family.

The lullaby was updated by Inez and Charlie Foxx in 1963 for their hit “Mockingbird,“ later covered by a lot of people including (as seen on YouTube) Dusty Springfield, Aretha Franklin, the cast of “Dumb and Dumber” and Carly Simon and her then-husband James Taylor.

There’s also another song of loss, by Rob Thomas, that goes: You and me tried everything/But still that mockingbird won't sing.

Must be pretty bad for Rob because the mockingbirds I’ve found have had no trouble singing.

What is it about the mockingbird that brings out the melancholy in some people? Perhaps it’s the constant melodic singing that makes people think of another constant that might be gone, like love?

Thankfully, the mockingbird’s song doesn’t have that effect on me.

Saying Goodby

By the time you read this I will have worked my last day for a media company in Bergen County. It was a freelance writing and editing job, and I had hoped my boss would get me hired on staff. He had thought that too, but instead the job has been eliminated. Or so I’m told. This place is consistent in its inconsistency.

Harold aloft,  April 30, 9:40 am

What I will miss most, besides the obvious paycheck and a lot of fine people, will be the birds.

On the morning of my last day at work, I went to Flat Rock Brook in Englewood, N.J., and had the best birding in years. I will miss this place, one of the last remaining areas of Palisades forest, high above the overdeveloped streets and ostentatious homes. There had been a thunderstorm overnight and the migrating birds were forced to interrupt their flight north to rest and feed at Flat Rock until conditions improved.

I walked my usual route and heard towhee and scared up a black-throated blue warbler with a grub in its beak. I continued up the hill to a meadow and was surrounded by birdsong, so much I had to listen hard to distinguish the myrtles, the black-throated green warbler and the parula. In the trees, with my binoculars, I found magnolia warbler, scarlet tanager, warbling vireo,common yellow-throat, black and white warbler. Thanks to this fallout I was seeing two weeks of birds in an hour. Magic. I was late to work but I didn't care.

I will miss the robins that decided the rhododendron in the enclosed courtyard of my now-former office was a fine place to put a nest. I found it by accident when I took a break and watched as a male robin chased a female and mated with her, then she - holding nest material in her beak all the while - went behind that particular plant. I went inside and, sure enough, from behind the glass I could see her snug in her nest. 

Maud on the nest, April. 30, 9:40am

The other morning I looked out and the female was picking up scraps dropped by sloppy diners. In the nest were four blue eggs, robin’s egg blue eggs. Unless you see these jewels you don’t appreciate why the color was given that name. I am sorry I won’t be able to watch the eggs hatch and see the parents take care of them.

I will also miss the fall migration when almost every day one or more raptors used the warm, thermal winds off the Palisades to stay aloft and used the Hudson River as a highway pointing south. Accipiters, falcons, vultures, buteos. When I left my previous job in midtown Manhattan one guy I know told me I’d enjoy birding the Palisades, and he was right.

I will even miss the noisy, silly killdeers that call as they fly over the parking lot of my office. Last year the pair raised two chicks but this year they have been faced with several calamities - one chick fell down into a sewer, too far for me to reach it even if I could lift up the heavy metal grate. (I only know this happened because the adults and a second chick were noisily fluttering around the grate and I came over and looked down. I felt helpless.)

Killdeer on the parking lot.

A few days later the adults were flying over the lot, alarmed, and I did not see the other chick. Did it fall down the sewer, too? Or was it hit by a car? Or was it snatched up by a predator?

Which leads me to Harold and Maud. I’ll miss them the most. It was a thrill finding the redtail hawk nest and I was enjoying watching one flying around hunting while the other sat on the eggs, which must've hatched by now.

As time has gone on the trees have leafed out and it has gotten harder to find the nest, even for me. This is as it should be. This hawk nest should not be disturbed. But I did want to see the young, see Harold and Maud taking turns going out to catch some food and feed them.

Well, being an optimist at heart, I know the nice thing about birding is you can always find something good anywhere, and I will have more time - when I'm not job hunting - to explore areas closer to home or to drive to new areas and see what’s in the trees.

Suddenly...

Suddenly, the wind is blowing out of the south.

Suddenly, bare trees have foliage, sprouting bright new red flowers or yellow skeins of seeds or green leaves. Even the larches, the only conifer that sheds its needles and goes bare in fall, look alive again as I hike through Greystone.

Carolina wrens will sing just about any time of the
day or year.

Suddenly, there is bird song, usually in the early morning but frequently all day. The carolina wren likes to sing anytime, and so do the titmouse, the white-breasted nuthatch and the cardinal. I go on my early morning walks into Greystone and find these birds plus robins, chipping sparrows, bluebirds, white-throated sparrows, mockingbirds and redwinged blackbirds. Even the fish crows are doing their croaking song. Vultures circle over my head and rise as the sun warms the air.

This is the most wonderful time of year for me. Every day there’s something new. One day the phoebes show up to build their nest under the bridge over a brook. Another day a female hooded merganser comes to a Greystone pond, joining the wood ducks and mallards. A lovely, trilling and unfamiliar song turns out to be a rubycrowned kinglet.

Suddenly, there are birds on nests. Harold and Maud, the redtails, are taking turns sitting on their eggs as the trees leaf out and make it harder to see the nest. A robin is suddenly seen sitting snugly on her little nest on a lower branch of a tree. A Canada goose is sits still on her nest on the side of a pond, a good place, undisturbed by people (although vulnerable to animal predators) but easy for someone who knows where it is to see her.

The other morning I watched a Cooper’s hawk break branches and take them to the top of a spruce over a busy street. Cooper's are agile flyers, able to hunt birds in deep woods, so this one could easily make its way through the branches to its nest and disappear into the evergreen foliage.  When the young are born and need feeding the other birds will have to watch out.

Suddenly, just as the trees are covered in seeds and the leaves obscure the branches, the warblers show up.

This pine warbler was singing, making it easy to find
despite the bad light and how high it sat.

Of course they do. If there is anything more aggravating than a warbler WAY UP THERE in the leafy treetops with the sun behind it, making a silhouette of its identifying pattern, I don't know it. They can literally be a pain in the neck.

I don’t know why it is many birders tend to go nuts when it comes to warblers. Maybe it is because when they come through seeking them among the leaves makes it almost a game. Maybe it is because there are so many different types to find. Maybe it's the sheer joy of suddenly realizing by that certain leaf movement that something is up there, something new and different that you don't see every day.

For me it is because in spring the warbler males are in their bright breeding colors and singing, so even if you can’t see it, you can identify it if you know the song.

It took until early April before my husband and I found palm and pine warblers - the early ones - along with some myrtle warblers that didn't mind New Jersey's relatively warm winter and cold, windy spring. They were all looking for insects in trees along the Passaic River. It was weeks later that I heard a prairie warbler and saw a black and white warbler - one of the few with no yellow in it - in a Bergen County park. I feel as though I'm way behind on my warblers.

At Garrett Mountain, which towers over the gritty city of Paterson, warbler seekers have already found hooded warbler and Louisiana waterthrush along with the myrtles, pines and palms. Garrett is one of those places known as a migrant “trap,” an area of natural habitat surrounded by an urban area. Birds tired after a night of flying with the south tailwind need a place to feed and rest, and that bit of green in a built-up area looks very appealing.

Central Park in New York City is probably the best known migrant trap, but anywhere you have a park or at least some greenery you will find a migrant. Even the enclosed courtyard of my office building, in the middle of a glass box, has had birds fly in for a day or two.

You never know what you’ll see, and it’s the prospect of something new that makes one willing to get out of bed in the dark and walk for miles hoping to see a bit of movement, hear a tiny chip call, something that will draw you to a bird you’ve never seen before or haven’t seen for years

It’s nuts, but it’s a lot of fun and it’s why you’ll see me out there absurdly early in the morning at this time of year.

Harold and Maud

When Pale Male, the redtailed hawk made famous in story and song, chose to put a nest on the side of a ritzy Fifth Avenue apartment building on Manhattan island, he made it very easy on birders.

The nest is high on the building and not obscured by trees. It is easily seen by binoculars or scope - or even by eye, if you know where to look - from a bench near the Hans Christian Andersen statue on the east side of Central Park, near the Conservatory Water where kids race model boats.

At this time of year, when Pale Male and his female of the moment - he's lost a few mates over the years - are trying to create or are raising the next generation, the bench draws a big crowd. Those afar can follow their exploits via a number of websites including that of Marie Winn, who wrote the book on Pale Male.

In the wild, redtails and other hawks are not usually so accommodating. The idea is to hide the nest from predators, including people whose idea of a good time is shooting raptors with guns or, in the case of one unfortunate turkey vulture I and others saw flying in central New Jersey, an arrow.

But sometimes the hawks will show you where the nest is, inadvertently, and it is up to those of us given this gift to protect it.

Look closely to see the redtailed hawk on the nest.

That’s why I’m not going to tell you where Harold and Maud (named for the 1971 movie, but without the e in her name) put their nest in Englewood Cliffs, NJ.

I do a lot of walking on my lunch break out of a desire to be outside and exercising in daylight after hours behind the computer in a windowless pit of a room. Before my part of the company moved to the pit, our desks were in a sunnier locale and every so often I would see a redtailed hawk fly over the parking lot in back, sometimes perching in a tree close by.

Being close to the Palisades, the majestic cliffs along the west shore of the Hudson River north of the George Washington Bridge, there is always a good chance of seeing turkey vultures, redtails and peregrine falcons. During fall migration last year there were bald eagles, sharp-shinned and cooper’s hawks and the occasional osprey and great blue heron. All of them were following the Hudson south, using the warm air off the cliffs to stay aloft.

But there is a local raptor population, too. On a recent break I was heading across the parking lot to the back door when a redtail flew over my head and perched on the end of the building. Having only my cellphone camera, I tried to get closer for a picture. Just as I was about in the right place another redtail flew into a tree across the lot and this one flew over and they mated for a few seconds, then flew off separately.

I wonder if there’s a nest somewhere close by, I thought.

I put it out of my mind until a week later when I was on another walk across the lot and a redtail flew over. That made me wonder where the nest was.

There are limited choices thanks to being such a built-up area where trees are cut down in favor of bigger houses, highways and office parks and what's left over has to be "preserved." There's a small bit of woods to the north, a smaller bit of woods to the west and the woods left as a border on either side of the Palisades Interstate Parkway, which was built atop the cliffs and runs into New York. To the south you’re heading to the busy Englewood Cliffs-Fort Lee-George Washington Bridge area.

For some reason, intuition perhaps?, I started looking at the trees to the west, from a corporate parking lot. Just as I found a suitable candidate the female hawk landed in it, the male landed on her, they noisily mated for a few seconds and then the male flew to the tree next to me and preened over my head!

It is an amazingly public nest but the public doesn’t notice. The next day I looked at the nest from another vantage point on a street and watched as people biked, walked or jogged under it, not noticing the nest or the hawks flying around. Most people don’t. If they see something they may briefly wonder what it is and then go back to their own earthbound lives.

One of the hawks circled high overhead, then swooped down and landed in a tree not particularly close to the nest. I knew it could see me - redtails have excellent vision, much better than humans, to snag squirrels and other things on the ground from a high perch - and wasn’t going to tip me off to the nest. So I walked on and made my way down the street and came back to my original vantage point in the parking lot. I noted the best place to stand, knowing I would later be taking some pictures, including the one above, with my telephoto lens.

Each day I have stopped to look for a few minutes during my break, staying just long enough to find the nest and see what's happening. Each time one of the redtails has been in the nest, which means there are eggs to keep warm. Hunkered down in the nest I can't tell if it's Harold or Maud because they take turns incubating and it is only when they fly that you see the female is bigger than the male to accommodate those eggs she'll be laying.

I don’t know if I will be able to see the miracle of several redtailed hawk chicks peering over the edge of the nest or watch them fledge. At some point the trees will leaf out and obscure them.

I can only hope the nest isn’t blown down, the tree isn’t cut down or the chicks don’t fall down. I hope I am not noticed in my vigil in these days when standing with binoculars in a parking lot is looked on with suspicion by Security. In any event I don't stay long. I don't trust people when it comes to nature. Most are too selfish, too inclined to do what they want, when they want and not give a damn about the consequences to others. That behavior runs the gamut from sterile landscape plantings to cutting down healthy but apparently inconvenient trees to overdoing the pesticides to putting the cat out at night.

It's not like Pale Male up there on his building ledge with his loyal, devoted fan club. Still, I find the experience of watching Harold and Maud just as thrilling.

Tick, Tick, Tick

I was probably the only person in the greater New York City area who was not happy to have May in March. I look all around me and see more evidence of a world out of ecological balance, and I wonder what will be coming.

While all the dry heat has kept the grass short, it went brown. That didn’t stop the lawn services from getting in, blowing out the debris and filling the air with their gas fumes. My crocuses bloomed and busted in what seemed like a day and a half, and now my daffodils have opened at once, weeks early for some, instead of at the more usual, gradual pace.

Forsythia was one of the many shrubs flowering early.

The trees and shrubs have started to flower, leaving my husband and me with watery, itchy eyes from the pollen. Allergists are saying this will be a long, bad allergy season and I feel sorry for those who have even worse problems than MH and I have.

What is this obsession people of all ages seem to have with endless summer? Why do they want to wear tank tops, shorts and flip-flops at any slight rise in temperature?

While they are lying on the grass working on their tans the water table beneath is going down. Without a significant rain, and soon, there will be drought restrictions before summer. I’ve been to several marshes recently that are bone dry, and that has a profound effect on the flora and fauna.

What a relief it wasn’t like last winter, someone told me recently. Well, all that snow, while a pain in the back to shovel, was providing a nice blanket for the lawn and, more important, was melting and keeping it watered. We had no water restrictions last year and many of my neighbors took advantage to run their sprinklers at all times of the day - including in the midday sun - in their lust for a green lawn that they encouraged to grow so they could have it cut every week, then water again to keep it green.

What are they going to do this year?

Even I got caught up in it. When the daffodils started coming up I had to fight through the netting and remove the winter debris I’d left when we had the Halloween snowstorm. After a winter of indolence suddenly I had the urge to put seeds into pots. Now I have five lettuce seedlings I have to put someplace outside behind netting. Luckily, lettuce likes cold weather. Not so the tomato and pepper seedlings slowly coming up that I can‘t put outside yet so they are crowding the window sill. The potted annuals I brought in to keep growing over the winter are now overgrowing. My canna started growing in its pot during the winter - when it should have been resting - despite not getting a bit of water from me. My rosemary is practically begging me to put it outside.

I’m not ready for this yet!

Delicate magnolia blossoms are already falling on the lawns.

Here’s another problem I have with this unnatural warming: By the time the tropical migrants get up here from Central and South America, all the trees will have leafed out and it will be nearly impossible to see the birds. Worse, how will the early summer affect their ability to find food? Many of the flowers and fruits may already be gone when they come north.

And some of the migrants coming from the U.S. south are already passing into this area even as the winter birds - the juncos and white-throated sparrows - continue to hang around the feeders.

I was at Great Swamp the other day, looking for early migrants. I was lucky enough to find some of them: pine warbler, field sparrow, phoebe. I also, despite my best efforts to prevent this, found a tick as I was getting ready to shower that night. (If I was a better journalist I’d have taken a picture to show you but the impulse to throw it in the sink and wash it down the drain was more immediate. So this picture will have to do.)

A birder I met at the Swamp said with all the warmth and dryness this will be a long, bad year for ticks, and he has already gone places elsewhere in New Jersey where he’s found 30 on his leg after hiking on a trail (rather than crashing into the woods as, unfortunately, a lot of birders do). Ticks are one of the many reasons I get the deer off my property as quickly as possible. But now I must worry that I could get one or more from any of the places where I go birding thanks to the mild winter and warm spring.

Sigh.

Well, to paraphrase Mark Twain, if you don’t like the weather in New Jersey, wait a few minutes.

Instead of coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb, March came in like May and is, according to the forecast, going out like February - windy and cold.

In the long run it may not mean much, but for now I can’t wait.

Soiled, but Saved

This is a story about an act of stupidity, an act of kindness and some harlequin ducks. To protect the identity of the stupid, we'll call the protagonist ME.

After a winter waiting for the snow that never arrived ME decided she had to go to Barnegat Light, the northernmost point of Long Beach Island, down the Jersey shore.

It is a long ride down from where ME lives, but the back roads she and her husband take goes through the Pinelands, and the bracing air and bright light off the ocean makes it an enjoyable trip.

Harlequin ducks. Even the plainer
females are striking.

ME and her husband had never been to Barnegat in March, usually breaking up winter's monotony in January or February. The aim is to see what winter ducks and shorebirds will be on the sides of the jetty or in the inlet between Long Beach Island and Island Beach state park. This trip was also the first where the tide was low, so low the barnacles on the rocks were exposed and thousands of gulls were attacking them or each other, in the water and in the air.

Beyond the paved promenade was the jetty of huge, flattened rocks and several people were already walking on it toward the end where, in the past, eiders have hung out along with mergansers, longtailed ducks, purple sandpipers, ruddy turnstones and the ducks that make Barnegat famous, the harlequin.

The harlequin is, to me, the most beautiful duck around, particularly the male. But even the duller female is striking. (The only ducks that come close, in my view, are the male and female wood duck.) They are the reason why ME and her husband came.

So ME started to climb through the fence blocking the paved walkway from the jetty and her notebook fell out of her pocket, between two rocks.

What made this so incredibly stupid was ME's pockets could be snapped shut but she hadn't done it.

ME was very lucky. First, it was low tide - at high tide the notebook would've been soaked and useless. There was two years worth of data on its pages, which would mean little to anyone other than ME.

The jetty from the beach side. The ducks would be
on the other side.

Second, she was unable to think anything other than "I WILL get that notebook." Failure was not an option.

And so I - er, ME - shimmied down between the two rocks and managed to get the notebook between her feet. The problem was being able to pull up the legs enough to get the notebook. This was not easy.

Meanwhile, ME had drawn a crowd. Her husband was horrified. He was afraid ME would get stuck.

He was justified in that fear. Several years ago a man wrote a post on the NJ bird list detailing how he had been on the jetty rocks, heading toward the end, when he slipped and fell headfirst between the rocks, unable to get to his phone and call for help. It had been a particularly bad weather day and it took a long time for someone to happen along who could call for assistance.

So there was ME, remembering that story, trying to pull up that notebook.

Here's where the kindness comes in: A man asked if "a skinny guy like me" could help ME. ME hauled herself out from between the rocks - again, not easy - and he was able to get low enough to reach forward and pluck the notebook from the deep!

Oystercatcher

ME thanked him profusely, thanked his wife, thanked perfect strangers for their support.

Her husband handed ME her binoculars and camera - which she had smartly, for once, removed - and asked what they should do now. ME decided she'd had enough of the rocks, let's walk on the beach to the end and then try to get back up and find the harlequins.

ME secretly despaired of finding the pretty ducks with all the gulls attacking the side of the jetty. With each step on the sand her legs hurt, there was a stitch in her side, and the boots, camera and binoculars started to feel like 100 pounds each.

ME was thinking, the hell with it, let's go home.

There are many good things about birding including being outside, stimulating the mind to figure out what you're hearing or seeing and, if lucky, joining with others in mutual exploration.

But there are bad things about birding. One is that you quickly realize when you are out of shape, out of breath and aging rapidly. There is also a great feeling of inadequacy some of us feel when we are in the field and have no idea what we're seeing, or have seen nothing only to see from the bird lists that others have found 15 things, including something you've always wanted to see, at the same place that day.

Seal, pulled out with the tide.

Land birds are more my thing, warblers and tanagers and hawks and nightjars. At the shore I can't tell a second-year herring gull  from a first-year greater black-back gull. A semipalmated sandpiper and a least sandpiper would have to be standing still next to each other for me to tell them apart. I like ruddy turnstones, however, because their orange legs and breast coloring make them stand out, and I do like the ducks that come to Barnegat in winter and the two types of loons - common and redthroated - that visit as well.

So ME was walking with her husband down the beach, the enormity of what could've gone very wrong going after her notebook just hitting her, making her swear that was it, she was NEVER going birding again, when another woman with binoculars walked past them in the other direction. "See much?" ME asked. "Some harlequins, some turnstones," she said.

After thanking her ME caught up with her husband, who had kept going. "They're here, despite the gulls," ME said. So they carefully went back up on the rocks and almost immediately ME found an oystercatcher, its orange bill making it stand out amid the gulls. In the water were the loons, the longtailed ducks, some common mergansers and, on rocks that had no barnacles and so no gulls bothering them, the harlequins.

Soiled, but saved.

And something else. Something big and gray came up on the water and ME looked through her binoculars and shouted "Seal!" while somehow getting the camera up and shooting two pictures before the seal went under.

"Good eye, lady," a man on the beach yelled at ME.

Well, yes. Thank you. It is sometimes better to be lucky than good.

And this day proved there was nobody luckier than ME.

(Early) Spring Cleaning

Meet the reason I have to
put up with fencing.

I don’t know about you but I am neither mentally or physically ready to start gardening.

Last year at this time, according to the garden diary I keep, we had just gotten rid of the last of the heavy pile of snow that had blanketed the yard all winter. I was newly unemployed and eager to get out and get the garden ready, to welcome spring and the warmth and pretend the snow had never happened, like a bad dream.

This year we haven’t had any sizable snow since Halloween. This has been good and bad. Good for me driving to work, bad for my plow guy having nothing to do. Good that I haven’t had to shovel. Bad that the lawn and yard plants did not get the moisture from any melting snow, just a few heavy rainstorms.

And yet, here are my crocuses in full bloom, several weeks early. Here are my daffodils coming up, a few even flowering, and here are the tulips and iris coming above ground. All were surrounded by last year's tree leaves and debris.

When I went outside this March morning, only planning on putting a now-spent snowdrop plant a friend had given me into the ground, I wound up, as usual, doing three more things I didn’t expect to do. The liriope, which blooms in the fall, had to be cut back or no one would be able to see the daffodils just coming up. There were swirls of early weeds that had to be removed so the snowdrop wouldn’t be overwhelmed. There were leaves to scoop up and put into compost.

And, of course, to get to these things I had to pull down the deer netting.

There is an art to gardening with deer netting, and someday I must think about what I have learned to do and not do and write it all down. I am sure I am not the only person who has had to garden this way in the suburbs. Had I known 15 years ago when I was putting in my garden what I know now, the garden would look very different. No azaleas. No tulips. No euonymous bushes. All are behind deer netting now as are the small yew bushes in back.

Little by little I put in “deer-resistant” plants but have learned from long and painful experience a hungry deer will take a bite out of just about anything. So almost everything is behind a net, except the large ornamental grasses, onions and daffodils that are unfenced in a plot in the back where I once had an apple tree.

The thin plastic poles I put in to hold up the doubled netting (because a deer can easily chew or put a hoof through one layer) have worked better than metal poles the deer could use to support its weight as it tried to get to the plants. But the plastic poles shred easily, catching the netting in the breaks. I discovered quite a few poles with this problem this particular morning, making a hard job harder.

Luckily, I was able to work in relative quiet. No dogs in the dog park at what was once Greystone. No neighbors’ dogs chained in the backyard barking to be let in or defending a territory five times bigger than you or I may think it should be. I could listen to the birds already singing their territorial songs including cardinals and chickadees and titmice.

I’m sorry but after a week in a noisy, crowded newsroom I enjoy quiet on the weekends. It is why I moved to the suburbs. (My husband likes to remind me the noise level in our old city apartment was far worse than anything the neighbor’s dog can do, and he‘s right. Car alarms and bullets are worse.)

Once I was done I felt a sense of accomplishment, as well as the pain in my knees and shoulders.

But I also saw there is so much more to do now that the mild winter has prompted premature growth.

My butterfly bush,
as it will look later
in Spring.

Soon the grow-through rings will have to be put around the plants that would otherwise flop over. Soon the butterfly bush will have to be cut back (half of it was already cut back in November after the Halloween storm when I anticipated another snowy winter - which didn’t happen this snow-free winter). Soon I’ll be fighting squirrels for the apples, putting up the house for the visiting wren and taking in the seed feeders.

There will be more daylight, more noise, more chores to do.

This is as it should be. I would rather be achy and active than one of those people whose idea of spending a weekend is in front of a videogame, or playing virtual sports rather than real ones. I also prefer landscaping that is creative and pretty and not just the same old ilex or barberry that can keep its shape and requires the homeowner to do nothing.

I see lots of that kind of landscaping in my town and when I drive through the streets of much wealthier Englewood Cliffs to get to work. The huge homes now there (where once there were smaller dwellings) take up almost all the lot and the front “yard” is cut through with a circular driveway, the better to park your Mercedes or Lexus or BMW and show everyone how well-off you are. The yard services show up every week, whether the little bits of lawn need it or not. Plants are replaced with the season and deer netting is not necessary.

Thus I can have a “care-free” and sterile garden where I never have to come outside or I can continue to plant my vegetables and different types of annuals and perennials, even if that means having to do so above, below or behind deer netting.

I guess you’ll be seeing me outside, achy knees and all.