Category Archives: Nature Study

Nature Study

Wild Monthly: Feeling Crabby?

The new issue of MacBeth Derham’s Wild Monthly is up! This month’s theme is crabs, a big favorite around here. Rose got a pair of hermit crabs for her birthday last summer. Scott and I had been planning the gift for months—she was pining for a pet. Imagine my horror, the day before her birthday, when I asked her what she’d like for her birthday dinner and she answered promptly: “Crab legs!”

The gruesome pet-and-platter combination didn’t seem to faze her a bit, however. At the birthday dinner, she happily wolfed down her crab legs while animatedly discussing names for her new, instantly beloved pets. (She finally settled on “Pagoo” and “Pagooess.”) She’s going to love exploring the links in this issue of Wild Monthly.

Here’s an excerpt:

Careful planning went into our honeymoon in Mexico. My husband and I wanted to spend time visiting Mayan ruins rather than partying in nightclubs in Cancun. We visited Coba, which boasts the tallest Mayan pyramid in the Yucatan, Nohoch Mul. We visited Tulum, the city by the sea, which boasts the “descending god” images that have delighted those interested in extraterrestrials and so-called “ancient astronauts.” We also visited a small area of ruins near Cancun called El Rey…

Read the rest!

Nature Study

Gardening Tip for the Lazy—I Mean Busy—Mother

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Maybe everybody else already knew about this brilliant method of creating a new flower bed, but it was new to me last year, and my friend Lisa, gardener extraordinaire, said she hadn’t heard of it either. If you want to make a flower bed somewhere on your lawn, but you don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to dig up the grass, here’s a neat trick. Use a garden hose to outline the bed, then lay down a thick layer of newspaper (five or six sheets thick) right on top of the grass. Cover the newspaper with mulch. Lots of mulch. If you do this in the fall, by spring the grass will have rotted away underneath the newspaper, and voila, you’ve got your nice new bed ready for planting.

So claims Mrs. Greenthumbs, and I took her at her word. Except it was spring, not fall. Last spring, I wanted to extend the flowerbed that runs along my front walk. It was a boring rectangle, and I like curves. We had a lot of mulch leftover from another project and a mountain of newspapers in the to-be-recycled section of our garage. I followed Mrs. Greenthumbs’s instructions and turned that severe rectangular bed into a graceful double curve.

Of course then I had a funny-looking contrast between the empty new curves and the original bed full of spring flowers. On a whim, I bought a flat of moss roses (portulaca, my favorite flower) and planted them in the new mulch area on top of the newspaper. I just scraped away the mulch in places, made little pockets of potting soil above the newspaper, and stuck a plant in each pocket. I wasn’t sure if it would work, but it did. The moss roses spread all over the new section of the bed. I was thrilled.

Portulaca isn’t hardy here, so I planted bulbs in the new sections of the bed very late last fall. This year you can’t tell where the original bed ends and the additions begin. It has blended into one cohesive bed. I dug into the mulch and found that both the newspaper and the grass beneath it have indeed rotted away. It’s just a flowerbed now.

“Just” a flowerbed. Now there’s an understatement. The girls and I spent our morning painting (very bad) watercolor pictures of the hyacinths and anemones that are blooming between the withered stems of last summer’s moss roses. What a universe there is in that little crescent of land. Last year’s news is nourishing earthworms and windflowers, which in turn are nourishing the imaginations of small children. Not to mention their mother.

Nature Study

Fair-Weather Mom

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NaturejournalI’m a wimp in the cold. Much as I respect the Charlotte Mason “get out for a walk every day, no matter what the weather” principle, I don’t live by it. No well-bundled foul-weather treks for me, invigorating though they might be. The children are encouraged to get outside for fresh air every day, but if they want my company, they have to settle for the sofa, the fireside, and a good book. Preferably one full of heroic wilderness adventures in the elements.

But as soon as the weather begins to turn, oh, I’m there. Just try and keep me inside. Housework? Pah! The floors can take care of themselves. The kids and I have paths to tread, shoes to muddy, trees to meet.

In addition to field guides and the indispensible Handbook of Nature Study by Anna Botsford Comstock, there are a few other books that leap off the shelves at me this time every year:

Wild Days by Karen Skidmore Rackliffe

Keeping a Nature Journal by Clare Walker Leslie and Charles E. Roth

Roots, Shoots, Buckets and Boots and Sunflower Houses by Sharon Lovejoy

Mrs. Greenthumbs by Cassandra Danz (for adults only)

Noah’s Garden and Planting Noah’s Garden by Sara Stein

Onward and Upward in the Garden by Katharine White (A collection of gardening essays by the wife of E.B. White).

These old friends keep us busy during the wet and chilly days of March. Come April, we’re outside living the adventure instead of reading about it. I am intrepid! I am daring! No breeze is too balmy, no creek too melodic, no backpack too full of snacks for this nature-loving mother.

That is, until the weather turns hot.

Nature Study, Poetry

Today, Some Trees

Beaverstump_5
Jane and I went on a “Tree Walk” at our favorite local nature center on Sunday afternoon. A botanist and a natural historian, a wonderful husband-and-wife team, led us through a quiet wood, identifying trees and waxing eloquent about turtles sunning themselves on a log. Jane took some great pictures. This one, portraying a beaver’s handiwork, is my favorite.

And this one reminded me of a John Ashbery poem.

Floatingtrees2_2

Some Trees
by John Ashbery

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Some comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Place in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

Nature Study

The Monarchs Are on the Move!

MonarchJourney North reports today that the monarch butterflies are beginning to leave their wintering ground in Mexico. Here they come!

Read about the migration here.

Our milkweed plants are still in dormancy, here in central Virginia. Milkweed is the only host plant for monarch caterpillars, so if you want to attract the butterflies to your yard, be sure to plant some. ButterflyBushes.com is a good source.

Nature Study

She’s Back

It must be spring: Crazy Mama Bluebird has returned. There’s a bluebird house under our back deck, and we’ve had a nesting pair every spring since we moved here three years ago. They’re an amusing couple; the hardworking papa busies himself down below the deck, inspecting his house, while his mate spends her days attacking her own reflection in our windows. She darts forward, delivering sharp raps to the glass, over and over, as fierce as any warrior sparrow-queen in a Redwall book.

We’ve tried all the tricks recommended on the birding sites, like pictures of owls taped to the glass. She just finds a new window. Last spring she targeted the high window in our entryway, the one we can only reach by ladder. In the early mornings, she’d wake us up with her frantic, insistent drumroll on the glass. Scott would stagger into the hall and hurl rolled-up socks at the window to scare her away. By late March, when she finally retired to the nest her patient spouse had carefully arranged to her satisfaction, there were five pairs of socks sitting on the inaccessible windowsill next to the paper airplane my father (aka “Funny Grandpa”) landed there during his last visit.

Now she’s back. She reminds the girls of Ginger Pye, the puppy in Eleanor Estes’s book of the same name. For a time, Ginger is terrorized by a strange dog who stares out at him from a large pier-glass mirror. Yesterday we were talking about this book, discussing the part when Ginger is missing and his young owners, Rachel and Jerry, are seeking the identity of an Unsavory Character who had been lurking about their house. Before long, the reader has a pretty good idea who the dognapper is, but Jerry and Rachel haven’t a clue. They’re stalking an imaginary suspect whom they’ve pictured right down to his sinister mustache, while all the time the (mustache-less) truth is right in front of them. The girls and I talked about how this is a good example of dramatic irony.

They want to know if there is dramatic irony in the antics of fierce Mama Bluebird, since we know something she doesn’t know. That led me to ponder what our house must look like through her eyes—this mammoth structure full of hostile rivals, all darting beaks and fluttering wings. How brave she is, and how persevering! Imagine preparing to raise a family under such conditions! It’s no wonder she seems a little crazed at times.

Fun Learning Stuff, Nature Study

It’s Time to Journey North

Journey North is gearing up for the 2005 spring migration season. Check out this terrific website to learn about the migration patterns of everything from hummingbirds to gray whales. Jane, my resident butterfly enthusiast, is chomping at the bit to participate in this year’s Monarch migration watch. We’re getting our big wall map ready to start tracking the butterflies’ journey north from Mexico.

Their online Mystery Classes look like lots of fun, too. And they’re free!

Fun Learning Stuff, Nature Study

Owlin’ in the Woods

The new issue of MacBeth Derham’s excellent newsletter, WILD MONTHLY, is up on her website today. An excerpt:

“A group of students and I were once exploring some ruins. These were not ancient ruins, which are so often admired as monuments to the achievements of man, but recent ruins of maybe some 60 years, true monuments to the power of nature. These were still recognizably greenhouses, but the glass was long gone, and vines crawled up the sides and around the empty window frames. A single mature tree grew out of the middle of one of the long, low buildings, spreading its branches well beyond the limits of the former roof, while younger trees pushed their way through the floor, past potting tables, over long abandoned seedling trays, and reached for sunlight. The remains of the roofline dipped, mirroring the ground below… “

Read the rest!

Nature Study

Feederwatching

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There’s a redbellied woodpecker in the neighborhood who is very happy with my birthday present. Back in December, Scott bought me something I’d wanted for a long time: a heated deck-mounting bird bath. Because, yes, I am that big a geek.

He installed it on the back deck where I can see it from the family-room sofa. The suet feeder hangs from a hook nearby, and on the other side of the bird bath is the tube feeder with the fancy millet-sunflower-peanut mix that all the best birds go crazy for. At least, in theory they do. This year we’ve had mostly juncoes, mourning doves, and bluejays. A lone titmouse made several visits early in the season, and for a while two sociable cardinal couples dropped by every morning to gossip and munch on sunflower seeds, but I haven’t seen them since before Christmas. I’m hoping the bird bath will woo them back if the weather takes a downturn.

Mrs. Redbelly certainly displays an appreciation of the modern conveniences. Every morning, just about the time we’re finishing our breakfast, she arrives for hers. She dines on suet, refreshes with a few sips of water, and preens a while on the sun-drenched deck rail. It’s like her own personal spa.

The local mockingbird gets his kicks by harrassing her as she pops back to the suet feeder for another nibble, but Mrs. Redbelly isn’t easily cowed. She flaps at him and brandishes her rapier beak. He quickly retreats. Smugly, Mrs. Redbelly darts to the tube feeder for a peanut, showering a hail of millet seeds on the lawn below; then she returns to her sunny corner to watch the grateful juncoes feast in the grass.

Every year the kids and I count birds for Project Feederwatch. Mrs. Redbelly is the first woodpecker to visit our yard since we moved here three years ago, and it is with immense satisfaction that I click the “redbellied woodpecker” box when we enter our data each week. The official Feederwatching season lasts through April, but I hope Mrs. R. will continue her spa visits well into the spring. The mockingbird would be bored without her.

If you didn’t sign up for Project Feederwatch this year, you can still help count birds! The Great Backyard Bird Count is this weekend, February 18-21. Check it out at www.birdsource.org/gbbc.