posts tagged with 'wildlife'
skunked
This morning I was still upstairs when I heard Leah open the door to the porch and the dogs rush out. A few moments later there was one short sharp bark, and then immediately after it an immediately identifiable smell started drifting thought the open window. Yes, for the first time in a good while the dogs had been sprayed by a skunk. Luckily for everyone involved it wasn't too bad: they must have been spared a direct hit. They smelled bad when they came back in (right away!) but not unbearably horrid; we didn't even bathe them, Leah just got some supposed odor-neutralizing spray and doused them with it. We don't know how much it actually did, but we were able to survive the day in the house with the pups, and that's what counts. It's just as well we didn't have to get them in the tub, since getting sprayed was traumatic enough! They didn't even want breakfast; each of them just found a spot to curl up and they pretty much didn't move until mid afternoon. By this evening they were back to their regular selves—but, I hope, a little bit wiser!
mean deer
I love lilies, and they provide most of the color for the front of our house in July. Or at least they're supposed to. For the past two years deer have stopped by for a visit just before each variety is about to bloom and neatly nibbled off all of the buds. So no color this year. And I want to divide the lilies, but I can't even remember which variety is which if I never seem them bloom! Argh...
fly season
With summer comes bugs. It's been so dry for the last few weeks that there are barely any mosquitos, but other bugs are out in force. I was delighted the other day to see the first fireflies in the bushes round the edges of our yard: even as old as I am they're still magical. We experience the magic more later in the summer—right now we all hope to be in bed by the time they start lighting things up—but it's still a wonderful sign of summer that they're out.
Less wonderful is the sudden appearance of the deer flies in many of the woods where we like to walk. I don't know if there are ever baby deer flies, but starting at the end of last week the world seems full of hungry adult specimens. Happily, while I used to be very nervous of them—we've had some terrifying encounters with aggressive swarms on Cape Cod—I've now discovered the secret method for walking in deer fly territory without being bothered: wear a hat. And maybe a shirt with a higher collar. For me, at least, that's all that it takes. They always go for the head, which means that without a hat even when they're not biting me they're driving me crazy by bouncing off my hair. I hardly notice them when I'm wearing a cap. Too bad for the dogs though: the flies are driving them to distraction. The other day I tried to take a picture of them rolling and snapping at the cloud all around them:
you can't see the flies in this picture, but Scout knew they were there
A lot of people freak out about bugs. I for sure know folks who hesitate to venture off the sidewalks for fear of ticks, and of course you see plenty of those little signs showing that a yard has been poisoned by Mosquito Squad. Bedford sprays wetland areas a couple times of year to control mosquitos, in hopes of preventing mosquito-borne diseases. At least that's the official justification; it could just be that people don't like mosquitos. I'll definitely slap a mosquito if it's nearby, and I totally understand the public health concerns around EEE outbreaks (thank goodness we don't have malaria to worry about!) but I wish we could find more targeted solutions so we could chill on the spraying. That spray kills the fireflies too!
that answers that question
A couple weeks ago the dogs got sprayed by a skunk. They were sad puppies, and Leah was sad too because she had to be in the car with them for the whole drive home, and then give them a bath (I was no help at all because this was the early morning walk and I was still in bed). As people—including me—heard the story of their adventure, the natural response was, "I wonder if they learned their lesson?" This morning we have the answer, and it's no. At daybreak, back for another walk at the same place they got skunked before, they had another encounter—with the same results. And another stinky trip home, and another bath. In Dog Man: For Whom the Ball Rolls baths are the consequence Lil Petey uses to help Dog Man learn to ignore balls and squirrels, but it takes hundreds, if not thousands, of repetitions; we don't have that kind of shampoo budget.
That's not to say there were no lessons learned: Leah won't be going back to Foss Farm any time soon!
butterfly garden
Years ago I vowed to do my part to grow milkweed for the monarch butterflies. But we didn't stop there! We also have all kinds of butterfly-friendly flowers for the adults to sip on and water for them to drink. So every year we can count on enjoying having them around the place. But this year is something else! In our backyard and along the driveway they're always there—at any moment you can look out and see one. Or more than one: the other day I think I counted eight just in a little patch of our backyard! I tried to get a picture with all of them but they wouldn't sit still and pose, so this is just a sample of the monarch excitement we've been witnessing.
there's actually two in this picture if you look closely
I have no idea what's led to the jump in their numbers. I've been joking that we've singlehandedly reversed their population decline, but that's probably not it. Maybe they're attracted by all the weed flowers we have growing in the lawn, because the lawn mower isn't working? Or maybe we've just reached a critical mass of butterfly bush, tall phlox, and zinnias, and are attracting all the monarchs in Bedford. Sorry to everybody else in that case... but you're welcome to stop by for a viewing!
in which animals continue to target my gardens
I love lilies, but today all of the beautiful blooms I noticed in people's yards all over town made me feel sad. Why? Because this morning I discovered that, overnight, a deer had eaten off all the buds from the two lily plants in the position of honor in front of the house. We have others—the ones in the backyard along the fence are blooming beautifully—but nobody but us gets to see them! I want to make our house beautiful for passers-by! Seeing everyone else's beauty today—it's a great year for lilies, absent deer predation—made me wonder why the critters are targeting my yard in particular. How does everyone else grow anything?! What am I doing wrong? At least the rabbits took a break from nibbling the petunias for a day or two, so there's a little color out front... Man, who knew gardening was such a stressful hobby!
Labor Day boating
After our vacation we took a day and a half off from adventuring, but today being Labor Day we just had to get out for some summer fun! Harvey and I took a dawn bike ride, but that doesn't count—we do that on regular days too. No, the true Labor Day excitement was found in a canoe trip on the Concord River.
what could be finer?
We could tell it was an appropriate way to observe the day because hundreds of other people had the same idea; it was easily the busiest day I've ever seen on the river. Cars were parked up and down the road by the ramp where we put in, and there were streams of boats coming from the rental place a little further on too. We had debated between putting in there versus the boat launch in Bedford, and I'm really glad we chose the upstream spot: the river in Concord is too shallow for powerboats, and I sure they were swarming downstream in Bedford and Billerica. Even a crowd of canoes and kayaks leaves plenty of space for other river users!
practically a traffic jam!
We were only out for about an hour and a half. We headed downstream first and stopped by at the Old North Bridge, which was crowded with a mix of boaters, cyclists, and people who just had to drive there (poor things). We walked around a bit but were disappointed to find the boathouse dock had been taken up—probably because the water was so low it would have been completely aground. So we reembarked and continued downstream, noting wildlife as we went. We tried to find exemplars of each type of animal, and were successful for most: insects (dragonflies were our favorite), amphibians (a frog), reptiles (many turtles), fish (um... fish), and birds (a great blue heron who was much less shy than we're used to). Unfortunately we didn't spot any muskrats, so our mammals category had to be filled by a gray squirrel.
posing for its glamor shot
Then we went back upstream with the intention of visiting our secret harbor at the confluence on the Sudbury and Assabet Rivers. Of course, with the water level so low the cleft in a rock that we had poked the boat into many times before was about three feet above the surface of the water, so that didn't work. Of course, that also meant that anyone who wanted to could just get out and walk, which was kind of fun.
can't do THAT in the spring!
We had thought of going up the Assabet a little ways too, but given that it didn't look to be deeper than 18 inches at any point we gave up that idea. Plus, Lijah was hungry. So we came home. We may not have had a cookout (that's on the schedule for tomorrow) but I think it's safe to say that Labor Day has been properly celebrated.
oh the disappointment
It's a good thing we picked up some farm produce the other day, since our own harvests have been a little problematic. The most stressful thing has been the the competition from animals—specifically squirrels. We've never had a problem with them before, but this year they're going crazy on our fruit especially. They ate all the strawberries, then almost all the blueberries, then all the pears, and now they're working on finishing up the unripe apples. It's especially disappointing because all those crops were looking great... but the squirrels keep getting the jump on us. The honeycrisp tree is breaking our heart: we must have had forty or fifty good-looking apples on there a week or two ago, less than a month from ripening, and then they started disappearing at a rate of about five a day. Now there's one left. Lijah is holding out hope that they'll leave it alone, but I don't think the odds are good. And now we got home today from a trip to the ocean to find that something has started in on the roma tomatoes. I don't know if I can cope with it all.
the return of the king
We spotted a monarch butterfly in our yard earlier this week: the first of the year. We're always happy to see them, and we do what we can to invite them in and make them feel welcome. There are butterfly-friendly flowers all over the yard, and they're especially concentrated in the side yard, where a discerning lepidopteran can find butterfly bush, tall phlox, beebalm, and, especially for those monarchs, plenty of milkweed. I took a look and I think I spotted a few eggs on the milkweed, so we'll have a hunt for caterpillars in a little while.
While I was sick the other day I read Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior, which I enjoyed even if a few things about it troubled me. Mainly how strongly its main themes were presented as moral lessons: that monarch butterflies are tremendously valuable both for their beauty and for their role as a proxy for wider environmental issues, which I agree with, and that you should leave your spouse if you're not totally in love with them, on which I have more nuanced opinions. Although maybe you shouldn't trust my review of the book since I was pretty loopy with fever when I pushed through the whole thing in basically one sitting (one "lying-in-bedding?"). But yes, monarchs. Yay monarchs!
a bird yesterday
Yesterday morning we noticed a striking bird on the top of the apple tree in our front yard. It was smooth and sleek and light brown, with a little crest on its head and black markings around its eyes that looked like super cool 80s wrap-around shades. It was the shades that made me want to look it up, and without a go-to birding resource we looked on the internet and found the All About Birds guide from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It took just a very few questions before our bird's identity was revealed: cedar waxwing. I still don't know very much about birds despite them begin all around us, so I was glad to find a resource for telling them apart. Of course then I wanted to go back and ID some other birds I've noticed over the last couple months, but I guess I didn't remember enough details because I wasn't able to pin them down. Also I had to register in order to do more searches, and then once I did the tool would load so I had to do the other searches in a private browsing window. I'll keep trying, but we could also always go back to the methods we've used in the past: texting our friends who own birding books.