Gardening by Mistake

After having left the feeders empty all summer, I put food out about 2 weeks ago. Although the birds have visited the feeders since then, today it seems the entire neighborhood has stopped by. In the past hour I’ve had a feisty Carolina wren, a house wren, a male house finch and two of his chicks, a female cardinal and her female chick, a blue jay (juvenile, I believe), a male goldfinch, and a Carolina black-capped chickadee stop by. And a downy woodpecker was checking out the apples on the tree nearby.  And these are just the birds I know of!

Out in the garden, the dogwood shrub is hosting a great many birds who find its berries to be irresistible.

When I checked the yard, I found even more activity: a wren family, a robin family, a grackle family, and a brown thrasher were all busily moving around my back yard.

Update: not long after, a hummingbird dropped by the feeding station to check it out. I don’t have any hummingbird feeders. He investigated a tube feeder out there that has maroon perches. I was sorry I didn’t have something for him.

I’m trying for the first time a method I’d read about some time ago. With this method, you take a 2-liter bottle or a milk jug or whatever container you want, and you put a small hole in the bottom of it. Place it where you want to water and fill it with water. The water will slowly drip from the container. It will drip so slowly, in fact, that it has time to be fully absorbed into the soil, rather than running off it or being evaporated by the sun. This will provide a slow, deep watering for the spot you place it.

I started collecting rainwater this year. I’m too cheap to pay for an expensive rain barrel, and in my situation I couldn’t use the spiffy hose on one, anyway. So I have a large, and I do mean large, tub sitting under a spout. I probably collected 35 gallons in that. When I’m on top of it, I bail some of that into a second container that holds something like 17 gallons. In a good rain, I collect some significant water which I’ve been using to brew my AVCTs (chloramine free!) and to water plants. I need to use up today what I collected last Sunday because I have seen the very first mosquito larvae. As soon as I see them, I use up whatever water remains in the bin. It takes something like a week for the mosquito larvae to complete its cycle and become a mosquito, so by doing this I make sure I’m not raising mosquitoes.

I’ve got my first 6 gallon milk jugs out in the garden, dripping as I type. I learned something, though: only put one hole in the container. A smaller hole leads to a slower drip and a longer watering time. If you put two holes, even small holes, you’ve just lost your nice, slow drip. I’ve got one jug that way and that is how I discovered this. It will still do a good job watering, but it won’t be quite a good as the others. (Also, don’t let your husband use a pocketknife to make the holes because he think the slit will work just fine. It won’t! Use a small drill bit or an ice pick or something like this.) It will be interesting to see how long it takes for those gallon jugs to drip empty. Only some of my roses will get watered this way. I don’t have enough water for them all. Hopefully we’ll get rain soon and I’ll be able to re-charge my water bins and then another bed of roses will get a slow, deep watering between rains which don’t come often enough  this time of year when it’s blast-furnace hot.

Incidentally, you can use this same setup (a jug with a single small hole in it) to attract birds. Hang the dripping jug over a container that can collect the water. The sound of water will attract the birds. If you use a shallow container, the birds will likely bathe in it.

I’d never seen a flicker before this past winter when I started putting out lots of bird foods. We had a male and a female flicker visit us throughout the winter. Just recently I saw an adult flicker with a fledgling. They were on the driveway. The fledgling hopped around, seemingly randomly, while the parent worked its way along the edge of the grass; I saw it feeding the fledgling multiple times.

I’d like to think that my efforts at starling removal this past winter had a role to play in that fledgling flicker.

The house wrens have fledged and the nest box is now empty. I haven’t seen any signs of the little fledglings in the garden. I do hope they are there because they eat a tremendous amount of bugs. I’d love their free pest control!

I did bring the nest box in. This weekend we’ll clean it out before hanging it again, ready for a new family. I’m putting it in a different location this next time. I imagine I’ll end up with house wrens again—probably the same pair—but I’d like to try for a different kind of bird.

I was surprised to discover Monday that the native red mulberry tree in our back yard is already loaded with ripe berries. And I do mean loaded. I should have known. I’ve heard an amazing volume of bird noises from that tree lately. I figured there was a particularly loud (read: grackle) nest there. Judging by the number of birds that flew away a few minutes ago when I let the dogs into the yard, that tree is the current hot spot for our part of the neighborhood. My kids always give the birds a good contest. Yesterday they must have collected 3 cups of mulberries. My son ate probably 3/4 of a cup right then. He loves them as much as the birds do. Fortunately, mulberries have a long season; they don’t all ripen at once. I need to keep a couple of the berries and see if I can grow another one or two. I’ve got mulberry tree sprouts all over, but I think they are the exotic mulberry and I don’t want to encourage those, just the native species.

The other day some noise prompted me to look out the window to the feeding station. I saw a male and a female cardinal, confronting each other:

I wish I had video of it because the pictures don’t do a good job of showing it. As you can see from the above picture, the female is not feeling friendly. The male was raised up and leaning forward and his feathers all flat and his mouth opening and closing threateningly. The picture can’t show that he held his wings close to his body but fluttering.  They were in this standoff for several long seconds and then, without any visible warning, the male cardinal launched himself at the female. She jumped out of his way and then they became a brief whirlwind of fighting activity. The camera was too slow to capture all of this.

I have no idea what prompted this. I’ve never seen anything like it before.

The other day I think I mentioned that a brown thrasher chased a dove away from a feeder and then helped himself to seed. I was surprised by that. I was surprised to see him quite aggressively run off the dove, and I was surprised that he then ate seed.

(With the same apology as with the grosbeak and oriole pictures, these were taken in a hurry through a screened window in need of cleaning. They are not as clear as I’d like).

I was also happy to see the dove sneak back once the thrasher was occupied on the other side of the feeder.

Brown thrasher sharing the feeder with the dove.

For years now, I’ve wondered what the tree growing between two of my rose beds is. This tree suckers from loooong near-surface roots. I find little hackberry sprouts coming up 20 feet away. When I tug on them, I can see that they are attached to a shallow root which seems to go on forever. Reminds me of bindweed in the way you can pull a root carefully and follow it along for many feet. Like bindweed, I’ve hated that tree with a passion.

Tonight, I finally identified it, which is good. What is not good is that after looking it up, I now know that it’s a native AND it’s a great tree for wildlife. Twenty-five birds use it as a source of food for fall and winter– a season when food is never plentiful.

Lady Bird Johnson’s Wildflower Center’s Native Plant Database says, “Hackberries are among the best food and shelter plants for wildlife. The fruit is relished by birds.” It also says Celtis occidentalis is a larval host and/or nectar source for:

• Wild Cherry Sphinx
• Tawny Emperor
• American Snout
• Question Mark
• Mourning Cloak

So, my fantasies of killing the tree and turning it into a snag covered with bittersweet or other native vines, will remain only a fantasy. Darn it!

In the space of about 5 minutes today I added two new birds to my list of those visiting my feeding station. I couldn’t believe it.

I’m not certain I have these identified correctly, so I’m hoping others can either confirm their identities or tell me the correct ones.

I want to say that I had very little time to get these pictures. They were taken, in haste, through a screened window which really needs to be cleaned.  That’s unfortunate. Maybe I’ll have another chance to take their pictures at a later time.

This bird is, I think, a Baltimore Oriole. He was here for only a second and didn’t move around for me to get views of him from all sides.

This bird is the one which really perplexes me. I believe it is the black-headed grosbeak but it has the chest markings of a rose-breasted grosbeak but the head markings of a black-headed. It has the coloring of the black-headed but we’re not in the black-headed grosbeak’s range. The color around its neck and breast is orange. The third picture shows it best and while blurry, it is accurate as to color. At best we’re in the “rare” sightings category. That alone should point to it being a rose-breasted. I sure hope someone can tell me what it is!

I got a picture of the wren entering the nest box: