I spend many of my days walking off-trail, looking and listening, with a cheap digital camera strapped to my belt.
Here are some of the things I have seen.
I've set up this site to share these photos and my stories behind them with my friends, family, and whoever else finds their way here!
One of the first birds I met in the yard was the verdin (Auriparus flaviceps). Verdins are permanent (non-migratory) residents of the lower southwest United States and northern Mexico. They are generally found in desert washes, where shrubby thorn trees such as acacias, mesquites and palo verdes create suitable nest sites. It seems that verdins are also adapting to living within our residential communities, as well.
Yards which provide enough forage often support a resident family group of verdins. For a verdin, forage would mostly consist of insects. Here's a picture I took of the male verdin hunting for insects off the desert willow flowers. Insectivorous birds such as verdins, flycathers and warblers can be encouraged to visit a yard by avoiding the use of chemical insecticides to kill insects. Don't worry if you see insects flying around your landscape plants. Leave it to Nature's Pest Removers - insect-eating birds - to take care of the situation! You'll have a less-toxic yard, plus you'll be rewarded with bright avian visitors who will add color to the trees and shrubs and will provide you with lyrical songs!
The photo to the left is the male verdin scolding me when I got too close to one of his nests. Verdins can be territorial. We even consider our resident verdin to be the "guard dog" of our yard! When predatory animals such as roadrunners, neighbors' cats, or the local Cooper's hawk enter our yard, we often hear the "alarm" or "scold" call from the verdin. Links to some sites where you can listen to verdin calls are here and here. Usually I can't get a clear sight of this active little bird, but he was so focused on me, he let me take this picture. The shot to the right is often what I end with after several attempts to photograph this active little guy.
The photo to the right is a desert willow with a verdin nest constructed within its branches. You can click on the photo to get a better impression of the architectural marvel these little birds create! The verdin couple in our yard are often busy making different nests. Verdins construct several conspicuous nests throughout our yard. Verdins are the only birds in the New World that are part of the pendulous tit Family, which construct bag-shaped nests that hang from trees. Although verdins don't create such complex nests, they do perform an impressive architectural feat - they weave together tightly enclosed globular nests perched among the branches of shrubby trees and cacti. The photo to the left shows the female participating in the nest building process. Here, she hangs upside-down from the nest as she weaves a twig into the structure.
Spring-time with the verdins is one of my favorite times of year because I get to watch them feed the babies. This is a photo of poppa verdin feeding his baby (perched on a palo verde tree).
When my brother and I were young, he used say that he didn’t want to mow the lawn because he would rather encourage the growth of a Tallgrass Prairie Ecosystem instead. At the time, I rejected his idea and considered it to be a disguise for laziness (and an ecological impossibility, given that we lived in New Jersey!!). I actively lobbied to my mom that he continue to mow the grass (which he did).
Decades later, I’ve changed my mind. In fact, I’m encouraged, because his own children are adopting his lawn-less attitude and helping him make his garden grow even bigger!
My brother and I, like many people around the world, are changing our attitudes about yards. When I grew up, I lived in a neighborhood that emphasized “neat”: large, evenly mowed grass lawns, trimmed hedges, and absolutely NO WEEDS. I believe, in part, it was because many residents didn’t think they had the time. We were all busy suburbanites, leaving our homes to run off to work, school, sports activities and other social fun.
However, my attitude has shifted. Now, I consider my yard to be an integral part of my activities. Its how I relax, how I exercise and how I enjoy my life (as you read my blog, I think you’ll get a sense for that!). I’m now even working to make it a place where I get some of my organic food! As I shift my lifestyle to adopt more environmentally-friendly practices, I’ve also come to understand how taking time to garden in my yard helps the planet to flourish. In honor of National Pollinator Week (June 21-27), I’ve decided to share some photos of ways that we’ve landscaped our yard to encourage pollinators.
First - Why?? Why do we want pollinators in our yard?
So many reasons!! In fact, it took me years to get around to writing this blog entry just because I’m overwhelmed with trying to summarize all the ways that pollinators help me and all the reasons why I want to take action to help them…
… I realized I’d just have to start trying to get it all down, bit by bit. My “Pollinator Pages” series will be an ongoing effort to share my answers to this question.
I will start with my most-urgent reason for helping the pollinators >> because the birds, bees, moths, flies, bats, beetles, and all other critters that help plants to get pollinatedNEED OUR HELP!!! In part, this is because humans have covered a lot of ground with our buildings, roads, parking lots, and …
… lawns. Yes, lawns. Grass. That stuff I rolled around on as a kid and thought was so harmless.
Grass is nice! Don’t get me wrong. I love a nice spot of greenery to lay down and watch the clouds! An open space for a picnic or a fun sports game is a great thing. However - we humans are beginning to reconsider our level of responsibility to our pollinator friends, and deciding to start giving them back some much-needed space (and flowers). Of course, you don’t need a yard to help pollinators flourish. The Pollinator Partnership has created some recommendations to help protect pollinators.
What are the top elements for a good pollinator-friendly yard? I’ve been looking through a number of links (such as this, this and this), and I think I’ve captured the essential elements: forage, reproduction, shelter and water.
I have so many pretty pictures of the different types of flowers and pollinators in our yard, I’m just interspersing them throughout the entire page. It’s the only way I can get them all in here!!
This photo of the sphinx moth was difficult to take because they come out at dusk, when my camera has trouble getting high resolution shots. This was the best I could get.
How do we landscape our yard to help pollinators shelter and reproduce? We landscape for this simply by planting a mixture of native trees, shrubs, perennials and annuals; and by keeping “rookery sites” open for our native bees. Native plants need fewer input from gardeners, including less water subsidies to keep them alive (which equals lower bills!). In addition, because native plants are adapted to their region, and aren’t as susceptible disease or pests in the area, we don’t need to spray them with unhealthy chemicals (another major no-no for creating a pollinator-friendly yard).
As many of you who follow this blog might know, watching our hummingbirds nest has been great fun! Here’s a photo of a Costa’s hummingbird on a palo verde tree, getting ready to feed her hungry chick.
We help our native bees reproduce by keeping patches of soil and sand bare, so they can develop their rookery sites. Once we notice an area in the yard that the bees use, we let each other know not to dig that section of soil or to cover it with any compost. Can you see the holes in the soil? I count 6 of them. This area has been used by bees every single spring that I’ve lived in this yard (which is now 7 years). Here’s a photo of a bee exiting one of the holes. They are VERY cautious when entering and exiting the holes (this is when predators like lizards can eat them!), so getting a photo had been extremely difficult. I’ve taken about 50 shots of an empty hole. Thank goodness for digital cameras!!!
Bees such as carpenter bees use pieces of dead wood for their nesting sites, so we leave a couple stumps laying around the yard for them. This photo is a male carpenter bee investigating a rookery hole.
We don’t even get upset when the leaf-cutter bees use leaves of the plants in our yard for their nests. Some people might consider that the bee makes their gardens less attractive, but, I feel exactly the opposite - knowing that the tree is there to help the bees raise their offspring…
To me, THAT is a beautiful thing!!
Providing water is another extremely important subsidy that benefits the pollinators in our yard. A bird-bath helps the birds, but we also provide a separate source for our insect friends - see, bees are actually very shy, because, as it turns out, lots of animals want to eat them. For example, many birds are ‘insectivores’, which means they eat bees. In the photo to the right, you can see two honey bees drinking water from our pond. Upon a bit of searching, I finally found where the honey bees drink water - they sneak down between the reedy vegetation, where few predators can see them. In fact, it was tough to get my point-and-shoot camera to focus on the bees, what with all the vegetation surrounding them!
Yes, people have fears of being stung, but, with a little awareness, we can easily live together peacefully!
We've been enjoying some delicious yard-grown food - peas from the native blue palo verde trees (Parkinsonia floridum). 'Palo verde' means 'green stick' in Spanish, which refers to the fact that the young trunks and branches of palo verde trees are green with chlorophyll. This is a desert specialization amongst many plants to save water. In the desert, the theme is: If you can live without much water (and without losing water), you too, can have a go at it!
Many plants achieve this by downsizing and/or eliminating their leaves (leaves are the location of the most water loss - transpiration - in plants). The photo on the right is a Mexican palo verde (Parkinsonia aculeata), which has highly-reduced leaves. I can only see a couple in this picture. The long green parts are the leaf stalks, NOT leaves. This adaptation creates a problem - leaves are usually where the woody plants house their chlorophyll, the "energy factory" of plants (and why we eat them, too). To solve this energy issue, plants which minimize their leaves (like palo verdes) retain chlorophyll in their branches and trunks (like 'herbaceous' plants, which usually live only a year or two). Palo verdes do not create trunks with dark, corky bark as quickly as other trees. They do, eventually, form non-chlorophyllous bark; but after several years of growth.
In California, we can't grow as many palo verde species as our Arizona friends, and, as native endemics, they only occur in the Sonoran Desert, in the southeast corner of the state. The trees in our yard were nursery purchases and we water them (infrequently).
The palo verde has evolved in the lineage of the Legume family, a group of plants renowned for their edibility and nutritional content. A near relative of the palo verde, the mesquite, is famous for its many uses.
Although I found this listing of the uses of the blue palo verde by native tribes (fyi, the peas of the Mexican palo verde do NOT taste very good... too bitter), the common-knowledge of their edibility amongst naturalists is not widespread. I did find a nice blog entry about palo verde peas here.We believe this is because the seeds are mostly (easily) edible only during the very short time period when they are green on the tree, like the picture to the left. In my experience, this lasts a couple weeks during early/mid June. Pods that are getting to be too old are shown in the picture to the right. If you aren't poking around the desert during the specific weeks the peas are ripe - and its HOT at that time! - then you'll miss them...
... unless, like us, you've planted them in your yard (and water them)!
Legumes are also well know for being a popular host plant for bees. We have many different
natives, of varying sizes, who flock to our palo verdes during the several weeks (in May) that they are in bloom.
In the end, I'd say I harvested over 10 cups (~2500 ml) of peas from the 10 trees in our yard! That's post-shucking! The picture to the right is the post-picking, pre-shucking shot of many of the pods I gathered. The next step was removing the peas from the pods (the pods are bitter and fibrous. Not tasty at all). Most of the peas have been frozen. I'll add a few to different dishes - beans, eggs, soup, veggie steams, etc. We've got some that are fresh in the fridge, and I'm adding them to salads, or just snacking on them raw. Yum!!!
Welcome back to our ongoing stories of the California Quail (Callipepla californica) who live in our neighborhood! Last year, we got to meet Super Mom. Well, there's a new Super in the yard, and that is: Super Dad! One of the first families to hatch-out this year was a huge group of (we think we counted) 20 chicks. A week or so after we first spotted them, I began to notice that I didn't see an adult female.
Our first question was, "Did a predator (such as a neighbor's cat or dog, a Cooper's hawk, or even a bobcat) get her?"
That seemed unlikely because the babies were still all present and unharmed (as far as we could count - its not easy to get an accurate count! The quail babies move en masse, with a sort of "flow" that makes it hard to discern one baby from the other). Usually, a predator would target the babies, which are easier prey. This did not make the "predator theory" very plausible.
We decided that she must have become gravid again, and went to lay more eggs (with another male). We have many male quail in the yard, fighting daily over the females, so this explanation made the most sense.
Overall, Super Dad has done a GREAT job! He keeps the babies moving through the yard, a behavior that most likely prevents predators from reliably finding where the vulnerable babies may be. The babies themselves have adapted well, and form a tight-knit group that follows Dad when on the move, and lays together in a cohesive unit when he's allowing them to rest. The picture on the right is Super Dad assembling the babies in a safe group near the edge of tree cover, but still in the warm sun. As you can see in the photo to the left, the babies are quite content to just lay down, preen themselves, and wait for the next command to move.
And I'll leave you with my final picture: here he is!! Super Dad!!!
With the babes content in the sun, Dad gets the good perch, calls out some territorial "chucks" and watches over his chicks. What a guy! To hear examples of his territorial call, click on this link, and scroll down to the "male aggressive call". This is also the sound the males make when the fight over the females during mating season.
One of my favorite new additions to the yard is the black-throated sparrow (Amphispiza bilineata) (BTSP) (it has a lovely song, which you can hear through a link on the Cornell Bird site (linked above), or by clicking here and here. I prefer the second links because they capture more of the lyricism than the Cornell clips. These sparrows in particular are bold, curious, and vocal. They're a great addition to the yard, because they enjoy hanging out "where the action is", usually in a shrub nearby where I'm working in the yard, often making their high-pitched twinkling calls and songs.
Sounds like the sparrows' population is in decline, mostly linked to hotter-burning fires in the Great Basin region and habitat conversion, which is too bad. Here's a nice little essay about the loss of BTSP due to suburbanization.
The BTSP prefers habitats with mature cacti and enough vegetation to provide their seed-based diet (they also eat insects, esp during breeding and nestling season). It was a nice "compliment" to the yard to have the BTSP choose to call it his territory and decide to breed here.
Seems its not as easy as just showing up - in the three years that a BTSP has called the yard his territory (I assume its the same male, but we can never be sure unless we banded him), there have been only 2 years where a mate has shown up and they've bred. In fact, this year, I wasn't even sure if a female sparrow was in the yard (in this species, the male and female have the same plumage, which means that, unless you see two sparrows hanging out togther, you don't know you have more than one). Then, I was looking out the back door, and, lo - I saw it!! The baby black-throated sparrow!! The pic to the left is the first one I was able to snap of the chick. You can see that it still has that big-billed baby look. There is no black throat and the white eyebrow is just begining to form. The chick has the characteristic brown speckling that many baby birds have - great camo in the nest, in shrubs, and on the ground!
The pic on the right was taken just a couple days later. The chick has already developed the characteristic white eyebrows. The black throat won't appear until the winter molt. To the left is one of the babies (there ended up being 2 this year!) begging in a shrub. I heard the typical BTSP chirping; but this time it was particularly high pitched. Chasing down the sound, I found the baby perched within the safety of the many-branched creosote bush shrub, loudly begging for food. It would also flutter its wings rapidly. The pic isn't in focus - my cheap point-and-shoot camera couldn't focus very well with all the random branches. An example of why the baby uses the shrub for cover!
I sure hope this successfull nesting event means more black-throated sparrows in our yard many years into the future!
She's back!! Yes, making a sooner-than expected visit to our yard was a top predator of our resident California quail (Callipepla californica)covies, a female Coopers hawk(Accipiter cooperii). Usually the coops are found in our town only in the cooler months of late fall, winter, and early spring. Otherwise, they live up in the higher elevations, within deciduous and coniferous forests. We very recently had a rare monsoon rainstorm; which brought a number of the mountain birds down to forage in our yard, including a brightly colored western tanager.
Hawks have what is know as reverse sexual dimorphism, where the female of the species is larger than the male. It is hypothesized that this has been an adaptation associated with diversification of feeding and prey-capturing. Females hunt for larger birds (such as mourning doves and quail) and males hunt for smaller prey (such as sparrows and larger songbirds). This means that it is usually the female coop who is a threat to the quail.
Coops are amazing hunters and are known for their comfort with running on the ground to pursue their prey. Here's another lady, last winter, who had chased some quail into the bushes (to the right). As you can see, she's looking into the bush, ready to chase. Don't worry, our little quail friends were safe!! (This time... actually, in the winter, the coopers hawk will hunt our yard up to 4 times a day!! I suspect its that often when her hunts are unsuccessful...) After I snapped the shot, the hubby (who was waiting for my Go) ran out and chased her away.
The presence of the Lady Coop strongly affects the covey behavior of the quail. Just before her arrival each fall, the quail have massed into one huge covey that wanders the neighborhood, relaxes in the shade, and call to one another across the acres. After a couple days of her incesent chasing, they break down into small, quiet groups that hug the shade, cautiously skurrying from shelter to shelter.
This was the first time that the juvenile quail who were born this season have met their most-feared predator... and they were definitely scared. I knew she was in the yard because I heard the adults make their alarm call for 30 minutes! See, I feel guilty now because I'm trying to learn the quail calls. There are many of them and some sound alike. The alarm call sounds oddly similar to the "lets eat" call... Took me a long time until I realized that something was up in teh yard. I look out the back door, and there she is, Lady Coop, just 20 feet from my face, waiting in a low branch for an unsuspecting victim to come eat the bird seed!!
Luckily, she was only present for a couple days this time. Then the summertime temps returned and Lady Coop must have high-tailed it back to the mountain! I wonder if she is one of our regular winter residents and knew exactly to come to our ash tree? I mean, she was perched 5 feet above the exact spot where we *always* throw out bird seed. How did she know that?
And, as a final parting shot, here's a picture of the super-family I mentioned before... As part of their daily wandering and circling through the yard, they regularly cross our "stream" (we dug the drainage, flood it with a hose, and planted native wetland vegetation). The quail moms especially love to take their chicks through the stream because the tall bunch grasses provide both cover and forage for her babies. Cute!
Does it sound glorious? (I've always wondered that!)
... isn't always a walk in the park. In fact, that's usually what field work is NOT. I thought I'd share with you a few fun photos taken over the years and over different terrain. One theme I'd like to express - always make the best of everything. And be prepared for the worst!
One of the favorite pastimes of field biologists is the pursuit of a good locality for writing field notes. A well-formed rock outcrop can make my day!! (If you note the wind-swept look of the trees above and the bandanna covering my face, you'll have to pretend to understand what the photo can not show - its really windy there. One of the benefits of laying low is being out of the wind... so a nice seat, low to the ground, is a great find!).
The desert presents its own set of challenges - paramount is the grabbing of any shade to be had. To ignore such an opportunity is to be lazy. And who wants to be lazy when it comes to comfort seeking?
And... lest you think we professionals never slip up... I've got the proof! Not to worry, we always carry a little shovel (and squares of wood AND metal plates called "Tow In A Box" AND tow straps. Yes, and we have used them all through the years!). This road was just graded, so when we pulled off on the side to check out some stuff... the car didn't have much luck with the soft, moist berm. We got outta that one fast.
Because I get paid to hike doesn't mean I'm always very graceful about it! Sometimes the best way to get down a steep, talus-ey outcrop is to use yer head. Which means using yer @ss!
By the way, the rock-hugging green and red plant behind me is the urn-flowered alum root (Heuchera elegans), a California rare plant. In part, it is because the plant grows in a very limited geographic location. In part - it doesn't get reported often since it grows on steep, talusey slopes - places were most people don't find themselves sliding around on their @sses...
Getting that perfect shot is not a glamorous job at all; but we gotta do what it takes!
(yes, I do realize this pic actually displays my @ss even more prominently than the previous...)
And never miss a photo opportunity with an old, rusted out car!
The photo to the left is the male verdin scolding me when I got too close to one of his nests. Verdins can be territorial. We even consider our resident verdin to be the "guard dog" of our yard! When predatory animals such as roadrunners, neighbors' cats, or the local Cooper's hawk enter our yard, we often hear the "alarm" or "scold" call from the verdin. Links to some sites where you can listen to verdin calls are here and here. Usually I can't get a clear sight of this active little bird, but he was so focused on me, he let me take this picture. The shot to the right is often what I end with after several attempts to photograph this active little guy.
The photo to the right is a desert willow with a verdin nest constructed within its branches. You can click on the photo to get a better impression of the architectural marvel these little birds create! The verdin couple in our yard are often busy making different nests. Verdins construct several conspicuous nests throughout our yard. Verdins are the only birds in the New World that are part of the pendulous tit Family, which construct bag-shaped nests that hang from trees. Although verdins don't create such complex nests, they do perform an impressive architectural feat - they weave together tightly enclosed globular nests perched among the branches of shrubby trees and cacti. The photo to the left shows the female participating in the nest building process. Here, she hangs upside-down from the nest as she weaves a twig into the structure.
who flock to our palo verdes during the several weeks (in May) that they are in bloom.
