Nest Building

It's fun to put out nesting material for all the birds building their nests now. Animal hair is one of their favorites; be sure not to use any from a pet that has recently been treated for fleas or ticks, though.

When my sister brushes her dogs, she tucks tufts of their fur into bushes and trees for birds to find. Baltimore orioles love using horse hair to weave their elaborate hanging nests.




Last year, I bought a woven twig ball filled with alpaca fiber and hung it out with my feeders. It was beautiful, and the birds loved it. The alpaca balls are available at allthingsalpacaonline.com.




Putting together nesting material can be as easy and inexpensive as cutting 2- to 3-inch pieces of yarn and string and setting them outside. I like putting them in suet cages. You can find them at wild bird stores, which sell little bags of feathers and hanging balls of nesting material, too. Pet stores and large home improvement stores also sell suet cages.




Dryer lint seems like it would be a great nesting material, but it's not. Soap and perfume may cling to it, and it crumbles and hardens when it gets wet. Shreds torn from fraying landscaping fabric can also be harmful to birds.




Providing safe nesting materials is a great way to attract more birds to your garden, and a fun way to involve kids in nature. Enjoy!

photos courtesy of (from top to bottom): miguelb., Jonathan Bliss, Maarten van Maanen, solar.empire, and Hans Splinter, via Flickr.

Red Maples in Bloom

How could I have been on earth this long and not noticed how stunning red maple trees are when they flower? I know to watch for them in fall, when they turn a brilliant red. But it took me until last week, when I was walking past one covered in small flowers, to see them in early spring.

In her book Seeing Trees, Nancy Ross Hugo suggests that these trees were named for their flowers, not their foliage. There are so many red maples in the eastern U.S., and they flower so young (when they are around 4 years old), that they're one of the few tree flowers close enough to the ground for us to see really well.




Most of the flowers you'll see will be male (like those above) because only female flowers produce the wonderful helicopter seeds that seem to be flying everywhere later in spring and early summer. Landscapers often don't want to deal with the mess. As any kid could tell you, they're missing out.




Red maples beat most other trees to the punch because they flower early, produce seeds quickly, and drop them early the same year. Other trees drop their seeds in the fall, where they won't have a chance to germinate until the following spring. Many of them are eaten over the winter by hungry critters.
So keep an eye out for these beauties. Once you see one blooming, you won't believe you never noticed it before.
photos courtesy of Anita363 (top) and BlueRidgeKitties on Flickr

Moss

Even though it's an early spring here in Wisconsin, most plants are still winter-brown. The moss under the pine trees, however, has already turned a vibrant green.

Mosses are fascinating plants. They've been around for half a billion years. I've heard them described as ancient, poor cousins to today's flowering plants. But David Haskell makes a different case for them in his new book, The Forest Unseen. He thinks they are perfectly adapted for their lifestyle.

They have no roots and no vascular system; they absorb the water and minerals they need directly through their leaves, which are only one cell thick and highly textured to catch and hold water. As soon as it rains in spring, they soak the water directly into their cells, which green up immediately and start producing food for the plant. The leaves hold five to ten times as much water on their surface as they do in their cells, so they help the forest retain water that otherwise would have run off and prevent erosion. Moss is as essential to the forest as the trees.

The next time you find a patch of moss, take some time to look at it through a magnifying glass, or the macro lens on your camera. Its intricate world is filled with beauty.

photo by Pictoscribe on Flickr

Birds in Winter

It's 10 degrees this morning, and soon the birds will arrive at the feeders. It amazes me that birds, who weigh so little, can tough out the winter here in Wisconsin. How do they survive?

Some birds grow extra feathers to keep them warm, doubling the amount they have in summer. Chickadees have about 2,000 feathers in winter. Other birds roost together in cavities or nest boxes to share warmth. Fluffing out their feathers allows them to trap air between them, keeping them even warmer.

When it gets close to zero, you may notice birds holding their feet up in their feathers to warm them. The way their feet are designed also helps them stay warm. Warm arterial blood descending from the heart meets a network of veins carrying chilled blood up from the feet. They are so close to each other that some of the warmth passes into the veins to warm the returning blood, while the rest keeps the feet warm.

Birds also shiver a lot in the winter. Stan Tekiela, a Minnesota naturalist, writes that shivering helps them produce heat at five times their basal rate, allowing birds to maintain a normal body temperature of 106-109 degrees when the air temperature drops to 70 degrees below zero.

Other birds take more extreme measures. As the temperature drops, they allow their body temperature to fall 10-12 degrees and enter torpor, a state in which they lose consciousness and can survive a temperature difference of 100 degrees between their bodies and the air. Hummingbirds, who migrate south for the winter, enter torpor at night to survive the cold at higher elevations. When morning arrives, they start shivering to raise their body temperature, and regain consciousness.

Birds must find food quickly on cold mornings to replenish the fat they lost the night before, or they will die. You can help them by putting out high-fat foods such as black oil sunflower seeds and suet. Making sure they have accessible food is especially important in snowstorms and blizzards. If you can, use something to block the snow and create a haven where they can come and eat.


photo by Yuri Timofeyev

Crazy Conifers

Lyman Glacier & Tamaracks, a photo by Marshmallow on Flickr.

This weekend a steady wind has blown many of the leaves off the trees. With any luck, though, the tamarack trees I visit on my walk around the lake will hold on to their gorgeous yellow needles a while longer.

Tamaracks, otherwise known as larches, are fascinating trees. They are the only deciduous conifers: their needles turn color in the fall, then drop off. They prefer the colder regions of the earth, including some states that hug the Canadian border. They look gorgeous when masses of them turn color, but they are also beautiful planted as specimen trees in yards, as they are here in Wisconsin.

Larches are members of the pine family, which usually holds onto its needles so that they can keep photosynthesizing all winter, helping them survive. Deciduous trees must expend a lot of energy creating new leaves each year. They make next year's leaves in the summer and early fall, when there is plenty of sunshine to give them the energy to do so, then store them in buds over the winter.

So how can a tamarack afford to put out new needles each spring? They do it sparingly, for one thing. Instead of sprouting as many needles as an evergreen, they put out tufts of needles at intervals along their branches, and single ones along new growth. That way, the needles don't shade each other, and they can maximize the amount of sunshine on each one.

So keep your eye out for naked pine trees this winter. The incredibly soft, light green needles they will sprout next year are one of the most beautiful sights of spring.

Operation Migration

Whooping Cranes on 2010_4x6, a photo by Operation Migration on Flickr.

Every year about this time, Operation Migration gathers the young whooping cranes it has raised and departs on an epic journey: a 1,200-mile trip from central Wisconsin to the west coast of Florida.

The young cranes have never made the trip, so they must be shown the way. To this end, they have been trained to follow an ultralight aircraft as if it were their parent. The goal of the yearly flights is to establish a viable population of whooping cranes that use this eastern migration route. All other whooping cranes migrate between Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, TX and Canada's Wood Buffalo National Park.

Whooping cranes were in danger of extinction in the 1940's, when there were just 15 of them left. By 1999, it was estimated that there were over 180. Operation Migration was founded because it was imperative to establish a separate crane population in case disease or weather threatened the western one. By 2006, there were 60 whooping cranes in the eastern group. The cranes return to Wisconsin on their own the following spring.

Operation Migration maintains a daily field journal during the migration so you can see their progress. Check out their website, www.operationmigration.org, and their photo stream on Flickr for more on this grand experiment.

Via Flickr:
Brooke Pennypacker leading 9 of the 11 juvenile Whooping Cranes in the Class of 2010 from LaSalle to Livingston County, IL
Credit: Veronica Anderton

Why Did The Woolly Bear Cross the Road?

Woolly bears are probably our most recognized caterpillar. They're an inch and a half long and covered with quarter-inch bristles. They're black on each end and reddish-brown in the middle. This time of year, you often see them racing across roads, sometimes in such numbers that it seems they're on suicide missions. What are they doing?

Woolly bears are the larvae of the Isabella tiger moth, a nondescript small brown moth. They can eat pretty much anything, including dandelions and grass. So they're not looking for food. They're searching for a good place to spend the winter. Insects can survive the winter in many different forms. In paper wasps, for example, only the queen of each colony and the eggs she carries live through the winter. All of the other paper wasps die. Many moths spend the winter in cocoons.

Woolly bears hibernate as caterpillars, curled under leaf litter or in any other protected spot they can find, such as your garage. In spring, they'll wake up and start eating again for a little while before forming a cocoon and turning into a moth. Now is a great time to pick them up and take a closer look. They won't hurt you; they'll just curl up in your hand. While you're at it, maybe you can help them across.