Garden Update and Outdoor Hour #18 Pollen

This week has been a very busy week outdoors. We are busy tending the garden which mostly means watering and weeding.

I don't mind watering but weeding is endless and frustrating. I have been getting up early to get outdoors before the heat but the job never seems to end. :) My son has lots of herbs in his garden as usual and he loves to trim a little to add to each meal. He has oregano, basil, chives, cilantro, and dill growing. Herbs are so easy for a beginning gardener and they stick around from year to year so you don't need to replant them.

All of our climbers are waking up and the bean poles are getting entangled with green bean vines.

The morning glories are starting to climb up too and I think I am going to have to add some string to my poles soon. The grapes are growing like crazy on the trellis and I can just imagine all the sweet little grapes we will be eating in a month or so. I plant eating grapes and not wine grapes so we can enjoy the fruits as we spend time in the yard. We have one vine that grows next to the pool deck and I love to take a swim and then enjoy a few grapes.

The garden is really growing now that the afternoon temperatures are hitting up in the 90's.

We have baby zucchini.

Here is our first tomato of the year.

I even have okra sprouting up for the first time. I love okra and a few batches over the summer will make me happy.

The sunflowers are starting to look like sunflowers and thanks to the birds and the birdfeeders, I have volunteer sunflowers that planted themselves in the oddest places in the yard. I am letting them go for now and we shall see what happens.

Now for our pollen assignment. We looked carefully for some insects on our garden plants and we were not disappointed. We saw an earwig, some ants, a grasshopper, and we heard lots of bees thanks to the lavender that is blooming like crazy.

Here is a blossom on our trumpet vine that the hummingbirds love but in this particular bloom you will see ants if you look carefully. If I were an ant, I would love to crawl into a trumpet vine blossom. :)

These are something new in the garden and I can't remember quite what they are but aren't they pretty? They are so buttery yellow and the pollen is easy to spot.

This is what happens when you leave a bag of walnuts on your back deck overnight. Some critter came and decided to have a nut-fest and leave behind all the shells. We are not sure but we think it may have been a raccoon. I am not exaggerating when I say that they ate half a grocery sack full of walnuts in one night. Oh well, I wasn't in the mood to crack nuts anyway. :)

That is just a glimpse into our week this week. We had an afternoon hike at the San Francisco Bay last Thursday but I didn't get that many photos. We were at a wildlife refuge right on the bay and it was a fantastic place to explore. We will be going back with our binoculars and field guides again soon.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Birdwatching 101 Attracting Birds To Your Yard

How do you attract birds to your yard for birdwatching? We love to watch birds and do so on a regular basis without ever leaving our backyard. We can watch from our window or our deck and see usually around 4-5 different kinds of birds each day. At sometimes of the year, we have a lot more than that and it is exciting to see a new kind in the feeders.

Here are some ideas to attract birds to your yard.

• Try a variety of birdfeeders. We made most of ours from scraps around the house and my boys love to hammer a nail and saw boards so this is a great project with a little supervision.
• We have some that are called platform feeders. The birds actually land on the feeder and eat from the seed in the tray. We have scrub jays (blue jays), tit mouses, towhees, dark eyed juncos, and house sparrows in these feeders.

• The second kind of feeders are the hopper kind of feeders where the bird lands on the perches and eat from holes in the sides of the feeders. Birds like house finches, goldfinches, and house sparrows like these types of feeders.

• Now for the more "natural" way to attract birds to your yard. We have chosen some plants for our garden area that seem to attract birds...especially hummingbirds. We planted butterfly bushes and trumpet vines on our arbor to attract butterflies but they seem to attract more hummingbirds. I am not complaining because they are beautiful and I say the more the merrier.

We have several varieties of sunflowers in our garden.....both planted with seed and those that came up from our feeder spillage. The yellow finches seem to like to eat the whole leaf of the the sunflower leaving just a little skeleton for us to look at.

We also have a fig tree in our yard and the scrub jays love to sit and peck at the fruit for an evening meal. They make a big mess but I'm glad someone is eating the figs. :)

So hopefully that gives you at least an idea of how to attract some birds to your own yard so that you can enjoy birdwatching from your window or backyard.


You may also be interested in visiting my page on feeding birds in winter....which would also apply at other times of the year as well: How To Feed Birds

Western Scrub Jays

(you can click on any of the photos to make them larger)

During this morning's outdoor walk I had fun watching a pair of Western scrub jays in our backyard. The first one was making a big squawking scene in the top of the liquid amber tree. In the photo above he is posing for me in the sunlight.

Here is the other jay in the pine tree just waiting for the first jay to stop making such a big fuss. They both wanted to get to the birdfeeders but my cat was roaming the yard in search of a good place to take a bath in the sun. Here is where she settled on....the roof of our bbq.
She didn't stay there long with the birds swooping around her. The jays are not in the least bit afraid of her...they are rather large aggressive birds and can defend themselves very well. I'm not sure why all of a sudden she thinks that she needs to be up high but we are enjoying her climbing adventures.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Silly Mammal or Cat in the What?

You have heard of Cat in the Hat. How about Cat in the Birdfeeder? Do you think she really thought they wouldn't notice her *in* the feeder?

Silly mammal tricks.

On page 266 of the Handbook of Nature Study, the author gives us a list of writing assignments relating to cats we can suggest to our children. The one that I think fits this photo is, "The Things Which My Pet Cat Does".

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

A Morning at the Birdfeeder

(house finch)

Just a few photos from this morning at the birdfeeders. It is a bright sunny day, at least at the moment.

(lesser goldfinches)

We have had house finches, dark-eyed juncos, scrub jays, lesser goldfinches, house sparrows, and a few titmouses visiting so far.

Have a great weekend.
Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Looking for Mammal Prints and A New Bird

We have had our eye out for critter prints but the only one we have seen that has been clear enough to really recognize is this dog print along our walking trail. We are not giving up though, the winter is still young.

From the Handbook of Nature Study, page 254:
"The dog's feet are much more heavily padded than those of the cat, because in running he must not stop to save his feet. Hounds often return from a chase with bleeding feet, despite the heavy pads, but the wounds are usually cuts between the toes. The claws are heavy and are not retractile; thus, they afford a protection to the feet when running, and they are also used for digging out game which burrows into the ground. They are not used for grasping prey like those of the cat and are used only incidentally in fighting, while the cat's claws are the most important weapons in her armory."

The Handbook of Nature Study has many suggestions for observations of dogs. The section starts on page 254 and ends on page 260.

The most exciting news is that our birdfeeders have been very busy. We even identified a new bird. It was the Cassin's finch. It looks very much like the purple finch but the coloring on the head is much more pronounced. I also found a great new bird identification site that not only is an online field guide, it also has a button to hear the bird songs online. Eureka! I have wanted to start to learn to identify birds by their songs so this is perfect.

Whatbird.com

Click on the image to make it larger!

Have you ever seen a guard llama? We were out on a new section of our local walking trail and this is the scene that we observed. My son told me that he had seen on a nature show that a llama will actually guard a herd of sheep. I had never heard of this before so I had to come home and research it. He was right! Here is an article that I found on this subject.
Guard Llamas
You learn something new every day.

There is no information in the Handbook of Nature Study on llamas...not surprised at that. There is a section starting on page 270 that talks about sheep.

From page 273:
"The dog is the ancient enemy of sheep: and even now, after hundreds of years of domestication, some of our dogs will revert to savagery and chase and kill sheep.....The collie, or sheep dog, has been bred so many years as the special caretaker of sheep, that a beautiful relationship has been established between these dogs and their flocks."

Well, that sort of catches you up with our nature study for the past week or two. We are still busy catching up on our drawings in our nature journals for animals we have seen. It is a really good activity for these long, cold afternoons.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom