We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
That's what our pal Roger's wife terms them. English Sparrow, aka House Sparrow, aka Dumpster Birds, were imported from England in the early 1800s to help clean the NYC streets of horse manure and other detritus.
Their population spread rapidly.
They are not sparrows, they are a sort of european finch. Like rats, they are highly adapted to live amongst civilization, and can never be found in woods or meadows but they like working barns.
This morning, I ripped up a large loaf of stale bread and tossed it in the driveway to do my version of Loaves and Fishes, without the fish. Within 15 minutes, the MacDonalds birds arrived. Their activity attracted a bunch of Grackles (native to North America), and then a handful of hungry Red Wing Blackbirds. A few chipmunks came out for breakfast, and finally a couple of Blue Jays. A Mourning Dove stopped by to have a taste. I fed multitudes. In 2 hours, it was all cleaned up.
Photo is a female. You can see that they have a finch bill, not a sparrow's.
Men, and some women, love these activities. I do not mean lawn-mowing, I mean meadow maintenance without grazing animals on the land. Yeah, ideally you want cattle. Have you even found a pile of snake eggs beneath a cow pie? I did, once.
In New England, we have become so accustomed to the pastoral sight of meadows and fields that we forget that they are not natural. These were created out of the wilderness with tremendous effort for grazing and farming. Neglect them for 5 years, and they will be beyond repair because nature wants them to become woodland again.
At the farm, we have had meadows suitable for haying or grazing, areas that require annual brushwacking (because more brush than grasses in those areas), and steeps that need scything or something similar.
These sorts of land maintenance are deeply satisfying and, with machines, deeply relaxing with a cold beer or three. No lifting, work gets done. Somebody observed that open field maintenance is like running one's hand over the curves of one's beloved.
Haying for real hay is tricky. Timing is everything. Around here, July for commercial haying. You need the hay to go to seed, and then you need to let it dry after cut before the baler. No rain. Stored wet hay can spontaneously combust in storage, or, at least, turn moldy. You know that already.
With the dairy business moving out of New England, and horses fewer and fewer, we had no market for hay. We switched to conservation mode which is a non-economic mode.
The non-economic conservation mode for open-space maintenance is based on the idea that meadow critters (meadow-nesting birds, rodents, snakes, etc) are pretty much done by late July. However, many wildflowers are at their best in July and August and the bugs and butterflies rely on them.
We recommend mowing/brushwacking non-commercial, ungrazed meadows once per year in early September or late August. Let the mowings lie. They will mostly disintegrate by April.
If you like walking paths, keep them mowed like lawns, about 8' wide paths so you can stroll around your grounds with a coffee or whisky and ceegar without getting soaked with dew or infested with ticks while bird-watching.
We had a wet meadow in a flood plain along our trout stream (with trout pool for swimming) where the grasses and sedges grew so thick that once/year was not manageable. We had to brushwack that 5 acres patch twice/year or the machine could not handle the density of the lush growth. I was sadly aware, though, that the wetland meadow critters (Wood Turtles, Leopard Frogs, snakes, toads, etc) did not appreciate that at all and I felt bad about damaging that habitat and sometimes killing them. I wonder if it might have been left well-enough alone, but it's just what we always did.
The article begins by discussing the transformation of NYC's Fresh Kills landfill (dump) back to a sort-of natural wetland. However, the author takes the opportunity to discuss modern ecological theory.
This has been a banner year for the Eastern Chipmunk around my place and everywhere I go. I love these little buggers.
Sure, they take bites of out my tomatoes (for the water, I suspect). I don't mind much. If you have stone walls, log piles, and brushy areas, they will build their tunnels. It seems like their main enemies are house cats, Black Snakes, and weasels. Since we have no roaming house cats these days (thank goodness), our friendly little chipmunks are having a good year.
At this time of year, there are plenty of young ones too. They are innocent, do not seem careful enough about life.
A friend of mine sits on his front porch in the evening with a whisky and a cigar, and feeds them his walnuts from his hand.
American Robin House Wren Cardinal Catbird Carolina Wren Chickadee Blue Jay Tufted Titmouse Screech Owl Song Sparrow Starling Purple Grackle Mourning Dove Downy Woodpecker Catbird No oriole this year - too bad. Love to see and hear them.
Lucky for us, no cats around to kill the songbirds. If I counted a half-mile further, list would be longer.
The birds that live on Earth today have all descended from dinosaurs, the creatures who dominated the planet for a couple of hundred million years, before an asteroid impact caused their extinction. It turns out birds at the time, better called avian dinosaurs, nearly got plucked too, with only those species that lived on the ground surviving the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction event...
Are there any wild Brookies (aka Speckled Trout) left in their homeland of eastern, mainly northeastern, North America? I mean by that is whether there are any wild-bred Brookies left.
I expect some arguments, but my guess is that, if there are any, they are very few and very local. Brookies are sensitive and delicate fish with exacting habitat requirements. They want cool or cold, well-oygenated water. If you want to fly fish for wild Brookies, Patagonia is the place to go. The transplants there have naturalized and done well.
Interesting facts about Brook Trout (beside the fast that they are actually Char, not trout) is that they do not normally inhabit "brooks." They are river (or lake) fish which only migrate to small brooks and streams in the fall to breed. And while adult Brookies will eat anything that moves or falls into the water, their preferred foods are minnows and crustaceans rather than bugs and flies.
In the northeast, adult wild Brookies lived in large, deep streams and smaller rivers like the upper Connecticut, the Housatonic, the upper Hudson, the Androscoggin, the Penobscot, the Saco, the Merrimack, the Delaware, etc. and in lakes like Champlain, Winnipesaukee, the Rangeley Lakes, the Finger Lakes, the Adirondack lakes, and even the eastern Great Lakes. Smaller, shallower waters get too warm for trout health. In fall, as the waters cooled and waters rose, they migrated up the drainages to breed - thus "Brook" Trout. (Natural History of the Brook Trout)
Overfishing, pollution, and dams pretty much destroyed the Brookie life cycle.
The result is that trout fishermen (meaning fly-fishermen) east of the Mississippi basically rely on stocked fish for recreation (as they do in most of the US). These are raised in hatcheries and typically released in early Spring into habitat in which they are likely to survive at least for a few months until the water temperatures warm and the health of the fish deteriorates. They may have better luck in larger waters but will have no homing instincts.
Even in the famous trout "streams" in Pennsylvania, you are catching hatchery fish, usually a mix of species including the Brown (originally from Europe) and Rainbow (native to the Western US). This spring, Pennsylvania stocked 3.5 million hatchery trout of mixed varieties to keep the anglers happy.
Fishing licenses pay for those fish. Adult hatchery trout can cost between $2-4 apiece depending on fish size and volume of the order, not including delivery.
I heard one calling yesterday from a brushy thicket near a marsh. First I thought Catbird, but not really a Catbird song. Then I thought Brown Thrasher, but the habitat was wrong and the song was too harsh.
It was a Chat, and I did get a fleeting glimpse of the yellow too.
They are not uncommon but usually only found by their voice during breeding season. Found breeding all over the US especially in brushy thickets in the sun.
They are thought to be an odd form of warbler. Song and other details at All About Birds.
North American Porcupines are not rare in the northeastern US woodlands. The topic comes up because Mrs. BD and I watched one on his tedious climb up a Hemlock tree last week in Mohonk. Lots of fun to see one of these goofy critters.
Not only are they slow and short-sighted, they also often fall out of trees.
They are mostly nocturnal, and I rarely see them. One nailed one of our dogs (lightly) years ago in the Berkshires. We pulled the quills out of his face. As with skunks, a dog only has to be taught once.
They are the smallest of our warblers, but their call (at the link) is distinctive even if you can't see them foraging high in the forest canopy.
A factoid about these birds is that they breed in southern forests (in Spanish moss nests) and in northern forests (where conifers have Old Man's Beard lichen), but pass over a band across the middle of the US where there are neither of those tree parasites.
In warbler migration season (right now, in the US) you will quite likely hear one in the woods in the morning.
I wish my memory for warbler songs were better. I forget them every time May comes along.
In the US and Canada during these weeks, go outside in the morning where there are brush areas and some tall Oak trees, and listen to the migrating warblers singing. Experts don't bother with binoculars. Warblers do not really warble, but they do sing.
The pigeon of cities and barns is actually the European Rock Dove. It's been introduced all around the world. In its natural wild state it was partial to cliffs and mountains so urban settings are comfortable for the species.
The Rock Dove has been domesticated and bred for thousands of years, so today there is much variety in feral pigeons. People raised them in dovecotes.
Perhaps the best use of pigeons is for shooting practice. I've done that. Good fun. Second best, raising them for squab. Squab is delicious. I recommend it if you can find it on a menu. A colleague of mine used to raise pigeons. He would serve rare squab breast on top of a sauteed squab liver, on a bed of lentils. Wonderful.
Pigeons are a favored food of Peregrine Falcons. They knock the stuffing out of them in the air, then catch them on their way down.
Jamie Oliver has a recipe for adult pigeon.Nobody wants to dine on a city pigeon, but I suspect country pigeons could be good.
- The Eastern Chipmunk supposedly hibernates, but I see them venture out on warmer winter days in the 40s (F). Their extensive burrows have bathrooms and food storage rooms. We have lots of them around probably because we have few big snakes here. Yes, they take bites out of my tomatoes but I like the little buggers.
- What is the home range of the Common Crow? It depends on whether they live in urban, suburban, agricultural, forest, or plains habitats. Crows are adaptive. According to one study, their home turf in urban areas can be under a half square mile, and in more open areas up to 15 square miles. Crow tribes' home turfs overlap somewhat, and many tribes often travel to share winter roosts.
When they want to, they will wander far from their home turf but might run into trouble from other Crow tribes defending their turf.
Over the years, the 800-acre Plum Island in the outer part of Long Island Sound has been the site of several forts, and in recent decades, the site of the federal Animal Disease Center.
The latter is moving to Kansas, and for ten years the feds have wanted to sell the mostly-wild island to the highest bidder (most likely developers). Perfect place for a high-end resort with a helicopter pad and a links golf course - but...
There are very few precious plots of undeveloped coastal land in southern New England, and most of those are so frequented by people that they are unsuited for nesting shorebirds or breeding seals, etc.
The feds just want the $, and NY State seems uninterested. My preference would for the island to become a NWR or something like that. Or for the Nature Conservancy to buy it (but they aren't buying much land outright any more).
My other choice would be for somebody conservation-minded to buy it as a private preserve as Louis Bacon did with Robin's Island and as Hank Paulson did with Little St Simon's Island in Georgia (11,000 acres, 32 guests). We love to visit LSS.
My Mom, who was a vigorous and athletic woman into her 80s and a big hiker, instructed me that the best way to observe nature was to find a good spot on the edge of a meadow, at the edge of a marsh, along a stone wall, in the woods at the edge of a ridge or hill, and to sit alone. Ideally, on an edge so there is a mixed habitat.
To sit in dull, non-synthetic clothing, and just to watch and look around for an hour in an relaxed, meditative, but alert state. For hunters, this is normal in a deer stand or in a duck blind, but it can be done without a firearm too.
Do not move much except to scratch your nose. Compose yourself. No camera, no binoculars, no firearm, no dog, no friend. An hour sitting quietly, especially at dawn or dusk, can be an education.
The pink of the Flamingo comes from the pink crustaceans it eats, but the red of the male Eastern Cardinal just comes from its regular foods - bugs and seeds.
I get a kick out of winter bird-feeding. It gives me an idea of what things are around, and it makes a winter garden lively and interesting.
One rule: If you start, you have to keep doing it through the winter. Like people, they will develop a dependency on your generosity, and can starve without it because they have not had to develop or find other resources.
The Southern Flying Squirrel is found throughout the eastern US and southeastern Canada. They inhabit good-sized mature deciduous woodlands.
Because they are entirely nocturnal, you probably don't know whether you have them around or not but if you are neither in, nor on the edge of a forest, you likely do not. Big eyes, to see in the dark.
Owls eat them.
Cute little buggers. They use their tails as rudders. I have never seen one in the wild. Have you?
Nature likes wildfires.Wildfire is natural, and many species benefit from it. It was great for the Indians - more deer, more elk, more bears, more buffalo, more beavers, more grouse. In fact, they liked to set fires themselves so there would be more game.
A so-called "climax forest" is just a forest waiting for the next disruption. In Ecology, it's termed "succession." In economics, it's called creative destruction.
That's what our pal Roger's wife terms them. English Sparrow, aka
This has been a banner year for the 
Are there any wild 
I heard one calling yesterday from a brushy thicket near a marsh. First I thought Catbird, but not really a Catbird song. Then I thought Brown Thrasher, but the habitat was wrong and the song was too harsh.
North American Porcupines are not rare in the northeastern US woodlands. The topic comes up because Mrs. BD and I watched one on his tedious climb up a Hemlock tree last week in Mohonk. Lots of fun to see one of these goofy critters.
They are the smallest of our warblers, but their call (at the link) is distinctive even if you can't see them foraging high in the forest canopy.
A
The pigeon of cities and barns is actually the European 
The pink of the Flamingo comes from the pink crustaceans it eats, but the red of the male Eastern Cardinal just comes from its regular foods - bugs and seeds.
The