Garden Variety Lifelong Learning

The busy never stops in our yard this time of year. On the one hand is the weeding, mowing, and watering. On the other hand is the photographing. I take a lot of pictures as the local wildlife starts coming in to enjoy the garden. Lately, a hummingbird moth and a hummingbird have come around to sample the bee balm blooms. It's frustrating and shows me how much I don't know about photography. And the hummingbird harasses me by hovering in front of me, daring me to get a good shot. Every time she returns I experiment with my camera. Lesson one: make sure the battery is charged. Here is a sample of my work from the past four days. Click on the picture to enlarge.

The moth was easier since I could get closer

I have a birdwatching setting. It works except the wings can disappear in the blur of flight

Similar issues with the moth's wings

Getting better. Nothing like a full charge on your battery!

I can almost see the wing. Almost.

Luckily, even hummingbirds need to rest

She stretched and flew off again

Day 4, I learn about the shutter speed setting

I hope to continue improving as long as she comes to my yard. And as long as I can hold out against the mosquitoes.

Seasonal Changes

I think spring is finally starting to stick. We had a flush of crocuses in the yard that lasted about a day before a deer came and ate the largest bunches.

The pussywillow is coming to the end of its bloom. Snow delayed it twice. This is a valuable first food for the bees. I was happy to catch a few in action.

The goldfinches are throwing off their winter feathers. Their showy, bright yellow plumage is a welcome bit of sunshine at the feeders.

When my children were little, it was my greatest pleasure to take them out in the early days of spring to look for the signs that winter was almost over: tree buds, red-winged blackbirds and grackles, first flowers, early insects, spring peepers and birds singing. All tell the story of the season and the promise of life's renewal.

May you enjoy the longer days in the northern hemisphere.

Cold Weather Learning

This morning there was a layer of snow over the front yard. The cold was biting, but it made for a beautiful scene.

There are so many things to do in snow and cold weather. In the past, we've spent short spurts outside in subzero temperatures to do experiments. We toss hot water into the air to make instant snow. We bring out the soap bubbles and watch them freeze and drop. I couldn't find my bubbles this time, but I did notice some tracks in the snow.

Looks like a raccoon walked by last night. That's my boot print next to it.The smaller prints are from the sparrows that came to the feeders this morning.

White Throated Sparrow

There were also several juncos about.

This one is sitting on our rhododendron. Did you know you can tell how cold it is by looking at rhododendron leaves? The tighter they curl into tubes, the colder it is. It was 1 degree this morning with the wind chill. I'm surprised the bush wasn't shivering. At this point, my fingers were feeling frostbitten, so I moved inside to continue taking pictures through the window. They don't come out as clear, but you need to make some sacrifices for warmth.

Chickadee by the feeder

A Cardinal right before he carried this peanut away

Red-Bellied Woodpecker watching a House Sparrow land on the suet feeder

I hope you spent some time outdoors today!

The Kitten

Back at the end of August, a kitten showed up in our yard.

She was a little ball of feral fluff. Take a step or two toward her and off she ran. But she always came back. We never saw a mother cat nearby, so we figured she was on her own.

My youngest decided to try to tame her. She researched different methods of taming ferals and used her knowledge from watching Jackson Galaxy's "My Cat from Hell" on Animal Planet. Because this was a kitten, we knew we had better chances for success, but that didn't make the experience any less difficult. My daughter spent days just trying to get the kitten familiar with her. She put out food and tried to sit a little closer each time. She talked to the kitten. She tossed acorns to her when the kitten was playful. There were many setbacks. I described the experience like the plot of the movie 50 First Dates, where the main character is dating a woman suffering from short term memory loss. For a while it seemed like every time my daughter went out, she had to reintroduce herself to the kitten.

But each time it was a little easier.

And then...

The power of chicken snacks

Success! The kitten started responding to her and taking food from her hand. She became much more playful. She even started to let my daughter pet her.

This pumpkin stem from last Halloween became a favorite toy

As the weather got cooler and wetter, I led her to the playhouse in the backyard so she would have shelter. She settled in nicely.

 

 

Bonus: I got the playhouse cleaned out!

 The next step would be the hardest. I didn't want to take her into our house without having a vet check her first. We didn't want to expose our other cats to anything. We made an appointment and the morning of the check up we tried to get her into the pet carrier. An hour and several scratches later, I made a new appointment for the following week. We had much better luck the second time. I didn't feed her until we were ready to leave and put the food as far back as possible in the carrier. She was difficult with the doctor at first, but once she calmed down she was a model patient. She got vaccinations and had blood tests and was checked for parasites and worms. We took her home and brought her directly indoors, separating her from the other cats.

Suddenly the carrier is not a bad thing.

We brought all of the toys and other "scent soakers" in so she would have everything familiar with her.

She quickly adapted to indoor life. And my daughter got a good lesson in how high maintenance a baby is. After late nights with an energetic kitten, she is done with being a mother. (Health education: Parenting 101 check!)

At this writing, the kitten has been inside for two weeks and shows no sign of wanting to return to the outside. The only issue is that she did test positive for FIV (Feline AIDS), but our vet assured us that as long as she is not a biter, the other cats will be fine. Not that I could abandon her at this point. When you open your heart to an animal, they do a good job of curling up inside and making you wonder how you lived without them.

Routine Time Together

There is one chipmunk who is always first to our feeders. I often find him sitting on the side stoop as I come around the house to put out seed. He's become braver over the past few months. He used to run when I looked at him. Now I have to avoid stepping on him because he will rush over before I finish filling the last feeder. I started tossing peanuts to him.

I call him Spot because of that little mark on his nose. (Note: Spot might be a girl, I can't tell)

Just like the blue jays that call to each other when I come out of the house with my cup full of seeds, Spot has figured out how to get first crack at the food. He watches and learns. 

Other animals have also learned. I didn't get a photo, but yesterday a squirrel climbed up to our window to peer in. I was late bringing out food. I never put food on the sill or anywhere near it, but the squirrel figured out that I usually go in this place. Maybe it saw me inside, eating breakfast, and wanted to make sure I knew there was no seed.

Whether I have adapted to their habits or they have adapted to mine, or somewhere in between, these animals and I have learned from being around each other. Life has a rhythm in our daily routines and we follow that rhythm.

I look at the routines of our family life. They can be more chaotic now. We have a jumble of clashing schedules and summer schedules are worse. As children become young adults, it gets difficult to find those moments of routine, of coziness together, of play. They become so much more important because they are rarer. So we adapt. For us, time together includes occasional evenings watching cartoons or a movie, Sundays at church, possibly followed by a visit to the bookstore with grandparents, and even those fleeting moments when we are all in the car together, discussing something we heard or saw.  There is a rhythm to life in our time together. These moments are the greatest opportunity for growth and learning. We learn a great deal from simply being with each other.

What I Know and What I Thought I Knew

I try to always practice what I post, especially when it comes to learning. I truly believe that learning is not restricted to the halls of academia, that it is a lifelong process. I also believe that we always must be willing to learn new things, even if that contradicts what we thought we knew. Keeping an open mind allows us to grow and change across our entire life.

Adapting your thinking to new information can be difficult. Everyone has at least one subject that they think they are an expert on. But admitting you were wrong about something teaches our children that we all make mistakes and we can move forward from those mistakes. For example, I've been a backyard bird watcher for at least 15 years. I thought I was at least well versed in identifying my frequent visitors. Imagine my surprise when I realized that some of the birds I identified as downy woodpeckers were actually hairy woodpeckers. In all my years watching, I had never seen both at the feeders at once, so I assumed they were the same bird. Seeing them together, it was so obvious. The hairy woodpecker is bigger, about the size of the red-bellied woodpecker. Its beak is longer. The downy is smaller, closer to sparrow size, with a shorter beak. I felt embarrassed to misidentify such a common bird, but I was also excited to realize there was another species of woodpecker at my feeders. Ever since I realized it, I've pointed out the differences to my family any time I see one or the other. I am not one to let embarrassment get in the way of showing off the beautiful birds in my yard.

Downy woodpecker and her fledgling from June 2015. It's still hard to tell without seeing the beak, but the black barring on the white tailfeathers is more common with downy woodpeckers.

Learning should always take precedence over pride. Let your children see you are not afraid of making mistakes. Recognizing and understanding our mistakes is one of the best ways to remember our lessons.

The "I should really post some photos" Post

Mom wants pictures. She doesn't use Facebook. So here is a visual recap of some of our activities.

Chase made a costume to wear at the Renaissance Faire when he went with his friends. He pounded out the chestplate himself.

Before she went back to University, Marina and I set up a fall display at the library. She only had time to make three squirrels a bird and some books, so I put the rest together. I plan to add pumpkins soon to take it through Thanksgiving.

 

 We had many animal visitors to the yard this summer and early autumn. The toad above was under the hydrangea bush by the door.  Below, an oddly marked grackle came visiting a few times. I named it Spot.












After several blurs and missed opportunities, I got a photo of our backyard hummingbird. She hangs around the yard during the summer, and even buzzed my ear when I invaded her territory one morning to fill our small birdbath/fountain.

We finally had a Monarch butterfly in our yard. It's worrying how few butterflies and bees we've seen this year. Please, if you garden, try to avoid pesticides and herbicides. They are really hurting the beneficial insect population and their food plants.

 We visited an orchard recently, on our way to drop off supplies to Marina. She asked us to take some reference photos for her (It's an artist thing. We are always supplying her with reference photos), so Sierra brought her camera and while I picked out apples (no time to pick them ourselves), she snapped some photos of the orchard residents.

That's all for now. I have to say, I really miss my old camera. I can't take as good shots of insects and moons with my daughters' cameras. My supermoon photos were shiny blurs on black. I think Sierra misses the camera too. She could do a lot with it that her small camera can't.

Active Education

Here are some of the activities that have kept me busy lately:

• Books! I finished reading Lockwood & Co. by Jonathan Stroud (writer of the Bartimeus series). I then handed Stroud's book to Sierra and she finished it in two days. Imagine a teenage Sherlock Holmes with his own Ghostbusters agency and you have this book. Except with scarier bits. I also read The Giver by Lois Lowry. Lowry's book is about a boy living in a dystopian society where there is no choice. I would call it a junior 1984. I considered letting Sierra read it, but some of the subject matter is intense. 
• Sewing. I found this pattern for a Minecraft Creeper doll, thanks to Once Upon a Family. Sierra loves Minecraft, so we decided to try to make it. Let me just say right now that I am sewing machine challenged. Helping Sierra make this was a "blind leading the blind" situation. I think her skills have improved as we pieced this together. Mine have not. I kept having issues of the thread getting stuck and pulling out of the needle. We broke two threaders (my sewing machine is not self-threading) and Sierra became my threader after that. She gained lots of experience threading the machine as I lost the thread regularly. I did about half of the cutting and sewing for her, usually when she started getting bored. It's almost together now. We just need to sew on the legs.
• Yardwork. The weather has started to warm, at least enough for the crocuses to put in an appearance. We had so much snow this year that it compacted the leaves. I needed to gently lift my leaf mulch away from the shoots where they couldn't spear through. And then the flowers started blooming. And then deer started eating them. Or was it the squirrels? Maybe both. I pointed out deer tracks and scat to Sierra and we talked about how the deer usually shear off the vegetation while the squirrels pluck the flower blooms. I did manage to get a few pictures before the carnage.
  
  Next year, I might leave the leaf litter alone. Maybe the deer won't eat what they can't see.
• Nature. We visited Cranberry Lake Preserve to see if anything was wriggling in the vernal pools. Unfortunately, the day we picked was cold. We heard plenty of spring peepers, but nothing was visible in the water. The nature center has several animals. One of the latest is a hedgehog. Sierra took photos of her. The hedgehog growls a lot, so the curator is thinking of naming her Monster. Have you ever felt a hedgehog? They are as prickly as they look. I poked myself trying to remove a scrap of wood shaving from her head.
  
  

• Testing. Blah. But it's time to prove to our district that Sierra is surviving her unconventional education.

That's it for now. I hope life slows down soon, but since we are heading into Easter and then birthday month, I doubt a slow down will come any time soon!

February Wildlife Watching

The downy woodpecker turns his head as I photograph him.

A wren and sparrow wait for an opening on the suet feeder.

There was some displeasure about having to share the feeders

.

The mockingbird cheered up when I gave him some apples.

Even a nor'easter can't stop a squirrel from raiding the feeders.

The best way to watch wildlife.

Frosted Feathers

It's been cold around here.

Really cold.

But one nice thing about the cold is that we have more visits to our feeders.

And fantastic views from the windows.