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