Dear Birder,

I don't get questions from my readers, but if I did they might look like this:

Dear Birder:

My neighbor has spent the last week having some very tall, very old trees cut down in her backyard and one in her front yard. Why would someone want to take down so many trees at once?

Perplexed

My cut tree
(Margo D. Beller

Dear Perplexed:

There could be many reasons why. Perhaps these were ash trees infected with the emerald ash borer, the reason I had a dead tree removed earlier this month. Perhaps the homeowner was afraid a strong wind or snow storm would bring one or more of them down on the house. Perhaps the owner is putting in a swimming pool or a deluxe playset for the kids and the trees were in the way. Or the owner got tired of picking up fallen branches.

It is not YOUR backyard so ignore the devastation. Put up more feeders to attract the birds the cutting down has displaced.

Dear Birder:

My feeder has two sides but when certain birds come they fight each other over one side. Why can't they share the feeder?

Wondering

Dear Wondering:

Far be it from me to decipher the thinking of birds. You do not say what type(s) of bird. There are some that are more territorial than others. White-breasted nuthatches, for instance. They are small but feisty and if another one or even a larger bird of a different type tries to get to the feeder the first will chase off the second. I have found hummingbirds to be the same way when I hang a nectar feeder.

Nuthatch on the feeder
about to chase off a
titmouse. (Margo D. Beller)

Cardinals will spend more time chasing each other away than eating, unless it is a pair. A pair, during mating season, will sit on either side of my house-shaped feeder but another male or another female approaching will get chased off. So I can't tell you why your birds fight. Maybe hanging more feeders farther apart will help.

Dear Birder:

This year I have a lot of juncos coming to my seed feeders. Last year I had very few. Why do I get a lot some year and none at other times?

Watching

Dear Watching: 

I wonder about that myself. I think a lot depends on the wind and weather during the migration period. Maybe when the juncos were heading south from the breeding grounds to your yard (the males stay farther north than the females; in my yard I see only male juncos) the winds were favorable and there was a lot of food (such as from your feeders) to encourage juncos to stick around.

Junco (Margo D. Beller)

I have been seeing fewer cardinals and white-throated sparrows and more house finches, at least those few times during the workday when I can look outside. But as we used to say in Brooklyn, wait til next year.

Dear Birder:

How are Spruce and the apple tree doing? We haven't heard from them in a while.

A big fan

Dear Fan,

Earlier this month, when I was writing about the trees I had trimmed back or cut down, I wrote about the apple tree. She had not been pruned back in about a decade. I think she looks better now. Gone are the web of lower branches where I used to hang the house wren nest box. Gone are the very high branches where I'd leave the apples for the squirrels.

How the apple tree looks now
(Margo D. Beller)

However, she has not talked to me yet. It will be a few months before any apple blossoms appear, and with the blossoms will come fruit. The last time she was cut back (not as drastically as this time) she provided a lot of apples. This time, with fewer branches, I don't know. I hope she will talk to me.

As for Spruce, he is standing tall and looks very healthy. He provides winter roosting spots for juncos, chickadees and titmice. It is too early to know if a finch, for instance, will try to nest in him this year after I cut back the arborvitae, where I always seemed to disturb something when I opened the front door.

Spruce Bringsgreen
(Margo D. Beller)

I will pass along your good wishes. Maybe he will write another post for me soon.

Winter Starkness

I've written many times about my dislike of winter and how the cold and long darkness affect my spirits.

We have had no snow this year, which could be good
or bad. (Margo D. Beller)

This year has a different wrinkle. We have not had any measurable snow in my part of the world at all this winter. While family members in New Hampshire are wallowing in the white stuff, where I live can be summed up in two colors: gray and brown. Snow would throw a blanket of white on the scene, which would be good for the plants but bad for my back (shoveling) and wallet (hiring the plow guy).

Today, walking this cloudy, cold, damp morning along one of my favorite paths, it was all gray and brown. It is another in a series of unsunny days. Seeing one of the distant jays, cardinals and woodpeckers I could hear would've provided some color but not seeing them, or any other bird except Canada geese flying overhead, does not help my mood.

The trees look depressed. With the leaves long down you can see the branches broken by past storms. The paved path I walk is becoming more difficult because of frost heaves from our weeks of extreme cold followed by weeks of above-average temperature. The Whippany River looks as sluggish as I feel.

Some may say there is beauty in starkness. This is what I saw in my travels this morning.

This pond formed by overwash on the other side
of the trail was frozen a few
weeks ago. Now it sits, slowly seeping
into the ground.

Trees fell into the Whippany River
in 2021. I guess they were left
by the park people because they
don't completely block the river's flow.

Whippany River seen from the path

The starkness of broken trees

Walking the path, surveying the tangle
of plants that will bloom again
in the spring

Among the few bits of color are the brown leaves
of the beech trees.

An Inconvenient Tree

The apple tree needed to be pruned. That much I knew. Its branches had grown long and tall and at least one high branch would drop its fruit behind the deer netting on the other side of the walkway. (I hope she forgives me.)

Overgrown apple tree, 2022 (Margo D. Beller)

The pear tree also needed pruning, to at least slow down the squirrels climbing to the roof of the screened porch. I did some pruning but there was one area I could not reach unless I stood on the very top of the ladder, and I was not going to do that even with my trusty spotter standing below. 

Pruned apple tree, 2023
(Margo D. Beller)

The arborvitae to the side of the front door had also gotten too big. At one time I kept it pruned back but what with illness and age I stopped and so it grew as high as my second-floor office window. House sparrows would fight each other noisily in it outside my open window. Every so often I scared a cardinal or other bird out of it when checking the mailbox after dark. In winter it would bow low under the weight of the snow.

Overgrown arborvitae, 2022
(Margo D. Beller)

All these trees needing work was expected. The dead ash tree was not.

Shortened arborvitae, 2023
(Margo D. Beller)

I didn't even know it was an ash until the tree guy came to give me an estimate. He took one look and said it was a dead ash. The tree trunk was light brown and it was full of small holes I hadn't noticed before. When the leaves had come down a few months ago I thought the branches at the top didn't look healthy. I should've known something was up when a redbellied woodpecker started whacking at the tree trunk during the summer, no doubt smelling all the treats inside.

Overgrown pear tree, 2022
(Margo D. Beller)

The ash stood near the property line with one of my neighbors, who had some of her trees cut down in November. She had left me a note, telling me the tree "near the pines" was "full of bugs." She offered to pay for cutting it down. Eventually I figured out the "pines" meant the yew hedge and the tree she meant was the one I had called the "weed tree" for decades.

Pruned pear tree, 2023
(Margo D. Beller)

Why did the tree suddenly die? It was a victim of the emerald ash borer, native to Russia, Asia, Japan and South Korea. The first one came to the U.S. in a shipment from Asia in 2002. It was first sighted in Michigan. Now, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, it has been reported in 36 states including New Jersey, where I live.

Ash borer infestation was the reason my county's park people chopped down a lot of infested ash trees growing on either side of one of my favorite hiking trails in the winter of 2018, leaving the fallen trees until the next spring. It was a horrific sight seeing all those dead or dying trees. And now my yard was similarly affected.

I've never liked this tree and I'd often thought about having it cut down. In the early years of my living here it would send up daughter trees from a root under the yew hedge, which meant I had to crawl under the hedge to cut them down. Its roots then switched direction and started coming to the surface next to and then through my ornamental grass garden, forcing me to walk carefully to avoid tripping when I did yard work. The roots even broke a sprinkler pipe next to one of the plants. (Luckily there was no leak and the pipe was fixed the next spring before the sprinkler was turned on.) Unlike the nearby cherry tree, the ash did not provide fruit but strings of seeds that fell in clusters. 

Open sky where the ash used to be, 2023
(Margo D. Beller)

I did not take my neighbor up on her kind offer. Instead, I called my own tree guy because, as I said, I had other trees that needed trimming anyway and I wanted to be sure any tree removal wouldn't affect the nearby plants. According to the guy who gave me the estimate, I have no other ash trees (or at least no trees that looked sick). 

It took a tad over a month from the time I signed the contract before the work could be done, today. Four trucks arrived at 7:30 a.m. and it was all over less than 90 minutes later. 

Looking out the back door, the first thing I noticed was the sky, a big hole where the tree used to be. I have written before about the "hole in the sky" created when a neighbor across the street took down a lot of trees. Whenever trees are cut the noise of saws and stump grinding bothers me, particularly if the tree being taken down appeared to me to be perfectly healthy but in the "wrong" place. An inconvenient tree. I'd shut the windows and try to block out the noise somehow, which was particularly aggravating when I was trying to work. I thought of the disruption to the birds and hoped no nests were destroyed in the process.

Today, on the New Year's Day (observed) holiday, when I was not working, the noise still agitated me, even though this was MY tree work being done and there are no birds nesting at this time of year to disrupt (tho' I'm sure they avoided the feeders while the work was going on). Here I was, doing the same thing I'd look down on my neighbors for doing. I know it was a dead tree but maybe they looked at the ash and thought it healthy and sniffed, "Another inconvenient tree."

Lesson learned.

Stump, 2023
(Margo D. Beller)

Now, the cut apple and pear look neater. The last time the apple was trimmed it produced a bumper crop the next spring. The pear tree only sets flowers on old wood, so I'm hoping this cuts back on fruit. (It was to get a pear that a heavy bear once tried to climb that tree, only to break two-thirds of its lower branches.) Even the arborvitae doesn't look as bad as I feared.

As for the ash, I left the stump. Pulling it would've upended the nearby lilacs, cherry tree and plants in the ornamental grass garden. Eventually the roots will die and decompose. I tried to count the tree rings but got as far as 40 before stopping. The ash tree could've been planted when the house was built in 1964 or it might've been one of the lucky trees that survived when the meadow was cleared to build the houses on my suburban street.

Well, thanks to an invasive little insect from the other side of the world, its luck ran out. 

A View From the Bridge

I went for a walk yesterday, enjoying the sunshine and the cold air before today's expected snow. I have had a very bad cold for the past two weeks and this was one of the few times I wanted to walk and make sure my legs still worked. Still, I didn't want to go too far, so I went up my street and around to a brook the officials call the "north branch of the Whippany River," tho' that river is some distance away.

It is calming to look at this brook from this bridge. In early spring there is usually a pair of phoebes flying to and fro with nest materials. Later in the spring they do the same with insects to feed their young. The nest is always built under a structure, in this case the bridge.

Pileated woodpecker (RE Berg-Anderson)

I have seen other birds from this bridge, from the large great blue heron to a tiny winter wren, from a noisy great crested flycatcher to quiet wood ducks. But at this time of year most of these birds are not here.

However, a knocking above me caused me to look up. There was a pileated woodpicker.

No matter how often I see one of these crow-sized birds with their large, red crests I am impressed. This one was whacking into a dead tree, its usual habit as it searches for its favorite meal, carpenter ants. After a minute of this it flew across the road to another dead tree, the white patches on its black wings pleasingly visible. 

It proceeded to whack at this tree a good, long time. I am sure the people driving by me as I stood on the road shoulder were wondering what I was looking at for so long, presuming they even noticed me. Most of the time I feel invisible when I walk outside, rarely running into neighbors, rarely getting so much as a hello when I walk in my town's streets. It is the times, I guess. I prefer the solitude.

So I watched the woodpecker and every so often the sun would show the red "moustache." So this was a male (except for that sign, the male and female are identical). As I watched I wondered if it was excavating a nest. According to my Stokes Field Guide, pileateds put their nest in dead trees, way up high. The opening is about 3 inches across, which seems very small for what looks like a large bird. But the eggs rest as much as two feet into the tree. That means the woodpecker would have to be hammering for an awfully long time.

Male pileated (RE Berg-Andersson)

During the summer, when I had the invasion of carpenter ants, I thought how nice it would've been to have a pileated woodpecker hanging around the bathroom. Of course, that would've been ridiculous. For one thing it's a wild bird, not a pet. For another, it would've spent its time hammering large holes in the walls where the two colonies were nesting. 

As i watched, every so often the bird would pull its head back and it seemed to be having an ant snack. Finally, I turned to go. Then I looked back again. The bird was gone. This has happened to me before when I've watched a hawk in a tree. It seems to freeze and we watch each other as I stand below. Then, the second I turn away it silently flies off.

At some point I'll go back and see if the pileated was excavating a nest or having a three-course dinner. I won't be surprised if my watching spooked it off. But there are plenty of other pileateds and dead wood is hard to find in the suburbs.

I'm No Expert

There are as many opinions as there are experts.

 -- U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt 

Among my friends I am the bird expert. Some even refer to me as the "Bird Lady" (including my husband). When they see a bird they don't recognize they call or send me an email about it. My response is usually the same. If they don't tell me what color or size the bird is I ask about it. Then I get more specific. Where were you when you saw it? What was the bird doing? Was it on the ground or in a tree or flying? Did it make a sound? What did it sound like? Was it bigger than a robin or smaller?

Downy woodpecker, smaller than a hairy, with
dainty bill. (Margo D. Beller)

From the answers I get I run through my head whether I've seen or heard anything similar. If I recognize it from my many, many years of bird watching, I respond with the answer. If not, I start looking in my various field guides, including those by David Allen Sibley (birds of the entire U.S., with his excellent drawings), Richard Crossley (birds of the eastern U.S., with his pictures where he has juxtaposed dozens of shots on a background of habitat) or, if I'm really stumped, Roger Tory Peterson's guide to eastern birds (the 1947 edition; there are many newer editions, but the 1947 is considered by birders to be the best of them). There are others I can consult but these three are the ones I use first.

Then I provide the answer to my friends and continue my reputation as the resident bird expert.

But, truth be told, there is a great deal I still don't know or understand. I know just enough about bird anatomy to get by. MH and I go out in the field and every so often I see a bird I don't recognize, or hear an unfamiliar call. I quickly note the field markings in my notebook, or create a kind of schematic diagram of the call. Then, once home, I pull out the field guides and/or start listening to the CDs of bird songs. And yet, there are times I still can't identify the bird.

I still don't know what this bird is, tho' it may be an immature starling.
I saw it at a grassland park in NJ. (Margo D. Beller)

I do know why birds migrate (to find food and/or a mate and form a nest to create young), although I don't know why certain birds, when finished breeding in the arctic tundra, fly farther south for the winter than others (including the red knot and the blackpoll warbler). Or why the white-throated sparrow only flies as far south as my yard for the winter.

I have much improved my identification skills over the years, but it took me a decade to see a bird on my house feeder and know whether it is a male house finch (red head, weak chin, a common feeder bird) or a male purple finch (raspberry-colored head, slightly larger, purple "eyebrow," an uncommon feeder bird). It helps if a female is nearby because the brownish female purple finch has a bold white eyebrow. The female house finch doesn't.

Female purple finch with her distinctive
eyebrow. (Margo D. Beller)

It also took a very long time - longer than one would think for an "expert" - to know the difference between a downy woodpecker and a hairy woodpecker. The hairy is obviously larger but if one is making its way up a tree that isn't immediately apparent.

You could look at the white outer tail feathers and see if there are spots (downy) or not (hairy), which to me are not that easy to see, even with binoculars. Their calls are similar, tho the hairy's call seems to me slightly higher in pitch and a bit more throaty. (That took a while to learn, too.) A downy would fly to the suet feeder and its bill would seem longer and I'd wonder if it was a hairy. But then a hairy would come to the suet and I'd know it by its size and a bill as long as its head. Eventually that bill, and the bird's size against the feeder, helped me learn the difference.

Still, there are some things that are beyond me.

For instance, how do the birds determine who goes first at the feeder? I understand why something small like a titmouse would take off if a much larger (and ferocious) jay swooped in, but why would one titmice fly to the top of the feeder and wait for another to take a seed before hopping down and taking its own? 

Male junco, one of Deborah Whittaker's
favorite subjects. (Margo D. Beller)

That leads to another question: How do birds tell each other apart? How does the titmouse at the feeder know when another titmouse approaching the feeder is not from its family group and thus chases it away? More important, how does one titmouse know another titmouse is of the opposite sex? There is nothing to tell a male titmouse from a female titmouse, from my perspective (the same is true of other birds including their cousin the blackcapped chickadees and the house wrens that visit the nest box every year). They are the same color, the same shape, the same size. And yet they must know or else we wouldn't have titmice every year.

I recently read a book, "The Secret Perfume of Birds: Uncovering the Science of Avian Scent" (by Deborah J. Whittaker) that provided some answers. From her experiments (particularly with the common winter visitor to my yard, the junco) she learned birds give off chemical signals that influence choices on mates, where to build a nest, when to fight and when to fly off. Her research found those chemicals are produced by bacteria that manufacture scents in the oil that birds stroke on their feathers when preening, or cleaning dirt out of their feathers. 

Titmouse. I have no idea if this is a male
or a female. (Margo D. Beller)

Whittaker spent years doing experiments to find this out. This was not something she could learn by sitting on her back porch watching the feeder birds, wondering about all sorts of things as I do.

Still, I am considered the "expert," even after I tell my friends they can find their answers themselves by searching on the internet or in a field guide (we frequently give pocket-sized guides as gifts). It is easier to just ask me.

I don't know if I should consider that a sign of respect or laziness. At least we still keep in touch. 

Ant-mageddon

If an object A exerts a force on object B, then object B must exert a force of equal magnitude and opposite direction back on object A.

-- Newton's Third Law of Physics

If something happens, there is an unintended consequence.

-- Margo's corollary

Until we finally got some relief in the form of showers and some cooler air, it had been so very, very dry in August. What rain we got prompted the dogwood to put out some fresh leaves, but for the most part the tree is dry, brown and forlorn. What birds came into the yard - including, briefly, a hummingbird -- came to the water dish to drink before flying off to forage.

Then, with a turn of the calendar page, cooler air came with winds out of the north. Overnight, birds that were scrounging for whatever they could eat took off to the south and wetter, greener pastures. Fall migration has begun.

Meanwhile, our house got carpenter ants.

Carpenter ant (Pixabay)

According to the Orkin pest control people, there are 24 types of carpenter ants ranging in size between 6 millimeters and 20 mm. They are not like termites that eat wood and weaken structures. These ants are so named because after mating (and the male dies): 

"The queen typically seeks a small crack in a wooden structure. She then closes herself inside that chamber, and lays the first batch of eggs. She remains inside the chamber until her first batch of eggs becomes adult workers. During this time, the queen uses her stored fat reserves and wing muscles for nourishment.

"The queen provides food for the young by means of her salivary glands until they become workers capable of foraging. The queen looks after her first brood, and, once grown, that first brood of adult workers takes care of subsequent broods."

That includes tunneling out more wood to expand the colony. 

So when it got dry and the ground got hard somehow -- squeezing through a window screen? hitching a ride on my jacket? -- two queens got into the house, converged on the small bathroom off our bedroom and started creating colonies. 

I was slow to notice this. I would see one ant, grab it in a tissue and throw it out the bathroom window. If it was in the sink, I washed it down the drain. But then I saw a couple, got one and saw the other run behind the sink. Another time I turned on the water and two ants came out of the overflow hole.

(Muero/Wikimedia Commons)

I told my husband (MH). He went out and bought ant traps baited with poison. It didn't seem to slow them down. I told him I thought the ants were in the bathroom because they wanted liquid. He went back to the store and bought liquid-baited traps - sugar water with poison. The ants lap it up, take it back to the colony and regurgitate it to feed the queen and the young. When the queen and young die, the colony falls apart (the workers eventually die of the poison, too).

I base the rest of this tale on what MH told me because I refused to go into that bathroom until the colony was dead, and that took almost two weeks.

He put out the liquid bait and when he next checked he saw dozens of ants lapping it up ("like crack," he said) and following the scent trails of other workers back to their queen. I had thought there was only one colony, behind the sink. No. He said there were bigger carpenter ants climbing up the bathroom wall and going into a hole created when I put in a new towel rod in a slightly higher position. I hadn't plugged the old hole. Now there was a colony of who knew how many ants swarming behind the bathroom wall.

Dozens of ants.

MH, with his scientific bent, would check on the situation twice a day and report on what he thought was a fascinating situation. I made him keep the door closed and blocked the area at the bottom with a towel. Thankfully, he didn't film Ant-mageddon.

After about 10 days he said he thought things were done. Still, I was slow to return to using that bathroom. However, when I did finally go back and turned on the light I found a mess caused by sloppy, sugar-crazed ants that made things sticky everywhere. The next weekend I plugged up the hole and scrubbed both the wall and the floor (the traps were removed but put back after the floor dried). 

As invasions go, it could've been worse. It could've been hornets (we've had them nesting behind the bathroom window sill) or wasps (which have been found in the attic) or cockroaches (never, thankfully). We even once had a winter invasion of the smaller pavement ants. 

As long as houses are built in former forests or on former meadows and river valleys, there are going to be insect invasions. And as long as something -- global warming perhaps? -- creates heat and, in my area, drought, there will be creatures great and small doing what they must to survive, including coming into houses.

I am still finding carpenter ants, but they are in ones, not dozens. At least for now.

Dark in August

 If a story is in you, it has to come out.

-- William Faulkner, author of "Light in August"

August is not my favorite month. 

I've written of this before. I still feel the need to complain, especially this year when we are going through a prolonged drought (after a year of too much rain) and the garden I've worked so hard to make beautiful is suffering. (It does not help when the leaders of this country can't come to anything resembling agreement on climate change, much less any other issue.) 

Lots of reminders of death come to me in August, even in good garden years. My favorite grandmother and one of my good friends died in August. My mother, gone these many decades, was born in August. The days are becoming visibly shorter - by this time next week, the sun will set in my area before 8 p.m. Already the sun is rising later in the morning each day.

Flowers from my fading garden,
likely my last bouquet this year.
(Margo D. Beller)

August is when my family would take a vacation during a time when it seemed everyone was taking vacation, so my father could close his medical practice for two weeks. But we knew when we returned we'd have to start getting ready to go back to school after Labor Day, at the beginning of September. From there it would seem like no time at all before the end of the year and the need for a new calendar.

Drying dogwood leaves (Margo D. Beller)

At my age, August has become a time of suffering, particularly this year.

Last year at this time, my cancer treatment made me so sick I could barely function. There was also so much rain that even if I had been able to spray the weeds growing between the paving stones on my front walkway I could not. And so they grew, so thickly you could not see those stones.

Weeds between paving stones. At least
you can see the stones. (Margo D. Beller)

This year has been the complete opposite.

We have already suffered through several heatwaves. The last one was from late July into early August, then we got a few days off. Now another one has started. Worse, we have had no significant rain for some time. I gambled, based on last year, and did not have the sprinklers turned on. Now my grass, like most of my neighbors', is brown and dormant. The trees that would've also benefited from a deep lawn watering are showing the effect of the drought, and that makes me feel very bad. 

Drying butterfly bush leaves. (Margo D. Beller)

The apple and pear trees have been shedding leaves for weeks. Half the dogwood leaves are dried and brown, tho' still attached to the branches. There will be no red berries this year - putting out fruit takes too much energy. The viburnum did form berries but they are still green and the ripening seems to have stopped. Shrubs are wilting. The ferns have dried to a crisp. 

The heat has kept me inside most days, except for the early morning when I can sit on my porch and listen to the yard birds. As I've said before, they can do very well without my help (tho' I do provide a water dish) and, judging by the young I've seen and heard, have been very successful this year, despite the conditions.

Drying canna leaves. The plants should've
flowered by now. (Margo D. Beller)

Even the weeds have stopped growing, at least in those areas where I pulled them when we had a couple of cool mornings. However, in the areas behind the deer netting they are very much alive and in some places close to obscuring the perennials I have tried to water every so often. The butterfly bush has flowers but the leaves are showing brown. The cannas in their pots have brown edges on the foliage and have not flowered. (Plants in pots need more water than plants in the ground.)

The daisies bloomed nicely but now they
are ready to be cut back. (Margo D. Beller)

I know, this is not the first dry season we've had but it feels different. Some parts of my state have been inundated with rain. Mine has not. And most of the country is dealing with some level of drought as waterways dry up and fires rage, including in some of our most famous national parks. 

The world is warming by a few degrees each year. The summers are hotter and drier. While I complain in New Jersey, other areas in the western part of this country are being consumed by forest fires sparked by years of drought. (Meanwhile, others are literally drowning in rain.) 

The peppers are now doing well in the heat. 
So are the basils nearby. (Margo D. Beller)

So I get it. And even in my yard some things are doing well in the heat, as long as I water them. The bugs that beset my pepper plants are gone so the plants have recovered and are finally going to provide me with some vegetables. There have been no white flies this year so the basil plants are growing extremely well, the best since I started growing basil in pots. The many sedums I have growing - daughter plants that have been rooted from the original plant, all behind netting I reinforced to keep out the deer - are starting to put out flowers, right on schedule. (These plants are succulents, so they retain moisture.)

But those are the exceptions. Otherwise, I am surrounded by death and dying and I have resigned myself to waiting for the next cool morning to cut back the perennials and then hope conditions are better next year for them to grow and thrive. 

There are berries forming on the viburnum but
they are far from ripe. (Margo D. Beller)

That is the main reason why I dislike August. I can't stop it. 

August is inevitable. Its heat and humidity sap my strength. The weeds and dried-out plants make me feel I can't keep up with the needs of my garden. The song says, who'll stop the rain. I can't start it. The darker early mornings will return and make it harder to get up and do what needs to be done every day. Soon it will be winter and I can only hope we have some rain by then, and even some snow (but not too much, please).

Ultimately, August reminds me of my mortality.