Nature Ideas, Tips & Guides

I MET JACK THE DEMON CAT on September 11, 2001; he was here in the driveway, a stray who’d apparently chosen me, when I arrived from Manhattan late that morning. This year, September 11 was marked by flocks and flocks and flocks of raucous birds flying overhead, a winged migration of dramatic proportion that had me sitting outside listening, and watching (and Jack going mad inside, where he belongs, watching me watch).Imagine how frustrated Jack was when the black-throated blue warbler (below) stunned himself on the glint of the glass porch door. I gently righted him, and then we sat awhile together, talking softly, until he was ready to continue on, Jack staring in disbelief from indoors, where I hold him hostage to protect my avian friends.But our

THE ACTIVE SEASON ENDS AS IT BEGAN: with splashes of gold, as if to warm and reassure me. No, there are no Narcissus or winter aconite, like at the other end when things wake up (remember the gold springtime slideshow?), but even the humblest plants like Rosa rugosa (above) try to perk me up with last-ditch positive notes (my 2010 season-ending fall gold slideshow covers that).

I HAVE LITTLE (NOTHING?) GOOD TO SAY about woodchucks, Marmota monax, even on their namesake Groundhog Day today. The only American animal with a holiday named for it simply makes me crazy by using my garden as a banquet table in any year he manages to get a foothold. My favorite nature writer, John Burroughs (1837-1921), didn’t have much use for the beasts, either—though he did name one of his Catskill Mountain houses Woodchuck Lodge.

I sat in wait, determined to find out. The answer was a bit of a surprise:It was a blue jay. And a few feet away, watching from a branch as the first bird chipped paint off a column on the porch, three companions cheered her on, as if awaiting their turns at bat.But why? Maybe Google will know.Though the original articles it refers to—from “Bird Watcher’s Digest” and Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s former me

Truth be told, I also went out to mow for hours at a time, though I haven’t mastered taking photos of myself doing that yet as proof.  And then there were the last big pots to haul into the cellar during that freakish snow last Wednesday, but trust me: You don’t want to see how I looked that day. Ugh. Instead I tried to capture a few of the better moments.Start the slideshow by clicking on the first thumbnail, then toggle between slides using the arrow beside the captions. Enjoy.CategoriesslideshowsTagsmargaret roach garden

I spoke about some notable natives with my friend Andy Brand of Broken Arrow Nursery, with whom I often hosting half-day workshops in my Hudson Valley, New York, garden, when we focus on upping the beneficial wildlife quotient in your own backyard with better plants and better practices. Andy has been one of the experts I’ve pestered for ideas as I’ve been doing that in my own garden in recent years to good effect.Andy is manager of Connecticut-based Broken Arrow, and he’s a serious amateur naturalist, and founder of the Connecticut state butterfly association. (That’s a photo by Andy of a red-banded hairstreak on a Clethra blossom, top of page.) Learn where many familia

I’d never actually seen a wood frog of this size (about 2-1/2 inches long) or coloration. They range from tans and browns to rusty like this and apparently also grays and greens. I was thrown off or distracted by the coppery color; none of the specimens pictured in my many amphibian books showed this hue. And then I got it: the mask, the black mask. The wood frog is referred to as wearing a robber’s mask, and in fact the vivid black marking extends from the typanum (the stretched membrane the frog hears with) right down and onto the front legs.I said “he” at first guess because the frog was on the move, not near a watery breeding area, perhaps in pursuit of that special someone as the very cold-tolerant wood frogs are inclined to be even in March. I also said it because he was so brightly colored, but it turns out that females, though typically larger than males, display a reddish hue during breeding season. The paunch should have tipped me off: eggs inside, so a female.We sat together for a good 15 minutes, du

I ALMOST LOST MY COLONY of Angelica gigas this last non-winter and dry spring/summer, but various species of bees and wasps and other insects are very glad I didn’t. The Korean angelica, a biennial with unearthly wine-colored flowerheads, is just one of the primary pit stops abuzz right now in the late-summer garden–and many of them are in the family that’s variously called Umbelliferae or Apiaceae.

WE DO THIS ON FACEBOOK DAILY: I read something that grabs my attention, and pass it on. Easy: I just insert a link and a comment, click, go. But I realize only about 8,000 so far of you “like” the A Way to Garden Facebook page (care to join us there?), and that I must make an effort to share my random “bookmarks” more regularly with the wider group. And so…

Green frogs (Rana clamitans) live an estimated maximum of six years in the wild, reaching sexual maturity in their third year and maximum size at age 4 or 5. In May through August in my climate, females lay 1,000 to 7,000 eggs on the surface of the pools while being held in the romantic frog embrace called amplexus, with the male fertilizing the eggs as he grabs onto her. The males get dressed up in yellow mating-season colors; the female doesn’t don a cute new outfit, so maybe this amplexus thing is all about the guys, who knows?So in the season of free love, what’s all the fighting about? World domination, apparently, or at least domination of my little world here. In green frog culture, the lead male calls in the females with his booming voice, which many amphibian guides liken to a loose banjo string being plucked.The so-called satellite male, Number 2 in the frogfight slideshow below, is an opportunist, waiting and hoping that Mr. Big’s vo

Besides drowning Japanese beetles in bowls of soapy water, I have my eye on some rabbits who seem to be working their way through the place. Wish my neighbor, Herb, who has a knack for trapping every manner of thing, hadn’t gone to Maine for the summer. Herb? Oh, Herb?With the Japanese beetles, I’m long past the beetle-bag phase of my gardening career. I think that those l

THANKS TO SO MANY OF YOU who have emailed or otherwise been in touch asking about how we fared here with Tropical Storm Irene. I measured more than 7.5 inches of rain in my gauges from middle of the night Saturday through Sunday afternoon; up to 10 had been forecast.

THE BUDDHA BUDDIES AND I REMAIN up to our necks in wintry mess, with more to come.

I’VE BEEN TAKING WALKS lately, relishing the extended fall I know can’t last, enjoying the press of sole to soil before it gets slippery out there—before it’s winter. A handsome stand of mushrooms has been catching my eye the last few weeks, and you know me: always curious.

In the fall of 2016, Dr. Connally won a $1.6 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control to fund a four-year study, in coordination with the University of Rhode Island, to gauge the effectiveness of various tick control methods in the areas around people’s homes. She’ll tell us more about the angles being pursued, and also about self-care topics, from treated clothing to the use of topical repellents and more.Read along as you listen to the Dec. 11, 2017 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).backyard tick research, with dr. neeta connallyQ. A little context first: You’re in the Northeast, where a lot of the cases of Lyme in the United States occur, but there are multiple tick species around the nation. You

THERE’S A FIRST TIME for everything, and this is the first time that I’ve ever grabbed a photo from the internet and posted about it. Blame my holiday-unwind mindset or the fact that I spend way too much time online now with the birth of The Sister Project, whatever.

Charley Eiseman and Noah Charney’s 2010 book is full of photos of all the oddball things you see outside (if you stop long enough to notice!): egg cases and cocoons and all kinds of webs; folded and curled-up leaves as if something’s hidden inside (it is!); and all manner of bumps, lumps, notches, and holes in foliage, bark, you name it. Even tiny previously unexplained pattern in the sand…and soil…a.k.a. tracks and signs of insects.“I’ve always been interested in everything around me,” says Charley, whose Master’s degree is from the University of Vermont’s field naturalist program. “Then someone gave me a digital camera right after I graduated from college, so I started paying closer attention to the little things.  And then I started wishing I had a field guide to tell me what all these signs left by insects and other invertebrates were—but it just didn’t seem to exist.”Charley and Noah took it upon themselves to create that guide, in “Tracks and Sign of Insect

CEDAR APPLE RUST is having a banner year here. So what do you do when you live with warring roommates? In the case of the back-and-forth rounds of battle between the towering Eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana) in my front yard and all apples and apple relatives around the place, nothing.Well, I do watch in fascination, especially at the stage of cedar apple rust above (a few weeks ago), when orange, almost gelatinous “telial horns” are developing where the cedar galls were last fall and winter. I don’t intervene, despite the havoc this fungus causes, particularly foliar damage and defoliation of apple relatives (the reason my shadbush, or Amelanchier, and my oldest of apples lose their leaves so early each year; the reason I don’t even try to grow hawthorns).Quince, crabapple and pear are some of the other plants similarly affected.

WHAT DO YOU SEE WHEN YOU LOOK AT A FLOWER? Is the image altered by your particular point of view–whether that of an artist, scientist, or honeybee? I think it helps to be one part of each (which to me is what it means to be a gardener–to witness nature from all those perspectives at once, no?). The latest video by Canadian filmmaker Reid Gower overlays the words of the late Nobel physicist Richard Feynman with images of immeasurable beauty, and touches on those questions and more.

That’s what I have learned so far from the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology’s Animal Diversity Web, another of my favorite hunting grounds for information about the natural world’s creatures. Their portrait of the Eastern Red-Backed Salamander explains that this species respires through its moist skin–meaning dry times are hard times–and cannot tolerate extreme acid conditions (such as a pH of about 3.7 or lower).No wonder these slender little salamanders are always tucked in under my pots, since they are a favorite food of various mammals, snakes and even some birds. Hideouts! Everybody has to eat something, so as for what they eat themselves: Snails are on the diet, apparently (along with various insects, mites and spiders, worms, millipedes and more), so I wonder how long the new relationship depicted above in my photo would have lasted.“They forage by thrusting out their tongue in a quick, forward motion and cap

IWAS MINDING MY OWN BUSINESS HERE WHEN THIS SHOWED UP. And it continues to show up.

I HAD A GARDEN-VISITING ‘OPEN DAY’ here of the human variety on the weekend, but every day I have visitors who fly in or hop in or slither in at will, without tickets or any other formalities. August is abuzz with visitors, including seven or eight Great Spangled Fritillary butterflies (above), who have been enjoying a patch of Verbena bonariensis every sunny afternoon the last week or so. Look who else is in evidence lately:

I AM ALWAYS RELIEVED TO SEE THE WINTER ACONITE, Eranthis hyemalis, welcome the honeybees in early spring; happy for both of these harbingers to be with me once again. The sunny-yellow Eranthis flowers (like the gradually opening hellebores nearby, with their even-larger nectaries) are real bee magnets.

Even the genus of the cowbird’s Latin name, Molothrus ater, probably deriving from the Greek molobros for “greedy fellow,” implies a bad reputation. Older sources say it also means vagabond, tramp or even parasite, and cowbirds are brood parasites—that is, laying their eggs in another species’ nest and not providing parental care. (Those are heavily speckled cowbird eggs in a house finch nest up top.)That we put our human values on cowbirds for leaving their children behind reminded me of something from a class on bird behavior:With that in mind, I confessed to BirdNote consulting scientist Dennis Paulson (also an expert on dragonflies, remember?) that I actually like cowbirds. I enjoyed the first male I’d seen in months, strutting his stuff here last week, like the male

Ten size-XL paw prints adorned the back porch; on the front welcome mat was deposited some apparently undesirable reject from the compost pile–not tasty enough, I guess. Feeding the birds? Not me, at least not right now. Project Feeder Watch, a bird-counting program with Cornell Lab of Ornithology that I look forward to each year (as you can read here), starts Saturday, but I think I’ll skip a week or two before I put out any more feeders. Extra-warm weather has at least one of the local bears on an extended feeding frenzy; the birds will have to be patient. After all, look what happened to the iron pole holding up the one feeder I

LET’S RAISE A GLASS TODAY TO RELOCATED GROUNDHOGS, toasting the ones we managed somehow to outsmart. That’s one such captive in the garbage can, above—remember?—about to be literally driven away from the garden (by a licensed nuisance-wildlife handler, since regular citizens are forbidden to relocate animals by law here).

Happy holiday weekend to all, and may your summer, and all your days, be filled with curiosities, too.(Click the first thumbnail to start the show, then toggle form slide to slide by using the arrows alongside each caption. Enjoy!)Categoriesbird sh-t frogboys jack the demon cat woo wooTagsfrogsMargaret Roach

In the Q&A that follows, Ellen’s answers contain green links to audio files from BirdNote’s archive that you won’t want to miss. A recap of earlier stories in our ongoing series is at the bottom of the page, along with information on how to get BirdNote daily–and if you want to give thanks to nonprofit BirdNote for all their wonderful avian “aha’s,” you can do so at this link.the turkey q&a with ellen blackstoneQ. Why isn’t the wild turkey our national bird? A. In 1784, that wise old Ben Franklin groused to his daughter, after the fact, about the choice of the bald eagle as our national symbol:“For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly. …Too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle

SPOTTED SPURGE, orEuphorbia maculata, is an annual that waits until the weather warms to really get going here in early summer, when its left-behind, prior-year seeds germinate. In my garden it loves the patio’s cozy cracks and crevices.Dig it, roots and all as soon as it shows up, but if you are inclined to getting dermatitis from the latex sap of euphorbias, be especially mindful and wear gloves. Always be careful with latex-filled plants not to touch your mouth or eyes, whether you have ever had a rash or not!  I use a hori-hori, or Japanese weeding knife, to get it out from between the pavers, but an old kitchen knife will do.The seeds need light to germinate, so a heavy layer of mulch would work to help stop this one—though not on my crack-and-crevice issue, of course. (Can you picture me spoonin

“They’re related to crows,” I said on the phone one morning to a friend, who was noting both the large numbers of Cyanocitta cristata this winter—and how much loud-mouth behavior that’s amounting to at his feeders.“Really?” he said, and then I thought what I often do when a “fact

On my radio show and podcast, we talked about why having extra-early and extra-later bloomers—from spicebush to Clethra to goldenrods and more—mean important insects and even birds will choose not just to stop by your garden, but call it home and raise a family.Read along as you listen to the May 11, 2015 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).read/listen: choosing native plants,a q&a with broken arrow’s andy brandQ. I know that when the subject of native plants is raised, peopl

THE TALLY IS COMPLETE, though I avoided facing it for nearly two weeks. My dear neighbor, Herb, with the smaller of his trusty chainsaws, did the deed: took down the disfigured or otherwise devastated woody plants that the freakish October 2011 snowstorm maimed. I walked around with him the other day, once I had gotten past the initial shock, and pointed: Take the left side of this; this one goes completely; remove the three broken stems from that one. And then I went out for the afternoon, returning only after all evidence was erased. (Wimpy, I know.) The body count:

Native bees species (like the mining bee above on the wildflower boneset) don’t get as much attention, and other insect pollinators even less, but without our wild pollinators we’d enjoy far less biodiversity, both in plants and animals—because they’re key to the food web, which would otherwise break down. To get to know some of these unsung heroes and the critical roles they play, I spoke with Heather Holm, author of the book “Pollinators of Native Plants,” which teaches us how to identify and attract and appreciate them in our gardens and beyond. (Enter to wi

Spring, and also fall, are perfect times to add some bird-friendly plantings, since many are woody plants, and also to provide for the most important thing off all: water. Big surprise–it’s all about keeping them fed, watered and sheltered in every season. Here are the essentials:1. water needed 12 months a yearWater is required 12 months a year, preferably moving water; curious birds cannot resist a drip or spillway, such as the little waterfalls in each of my two small garden pools. Even when those are shut down due

IT’S NO NEWS TO YOU THAT I’M A BIRD PERSON (and often described as “birdlike”); to me birds and gardening are inseparable notions. As close as I feel to my feathered companions, I can’t say I’ve ever been as intimate as zoologist Mark Carwardine in the video above. Unbelievable. More bits about birds from my recent travels around the digital realm:

FIRST, A LITTLE SCIENCE LESSON: Fungi don’t have chlorophyll, so they cannot make their own food (like plants do), nor can they ingest it (like animals), except through absorption from their surrounding environment. Most fungi are saprophytes, meaning they feed on dead or decaying material, like the leaf litter of the forest floor—or the debris in your compost heap. Their second critical role: Most of the plant kingdom depends on symbiotic fungi called mycorrhizae, which inhabit the plants’ roots, to live. (Thank you for patiently listening to that.)I MADE PIZZA THE OTHER DAY (no, not a mushroom pizza), something I do a lot from scratch, and when the yeast acted oddly I did what any 21st century human does: I looked for an explanation online. I still don’t know what caused my yeast to misbehave, but here’s what I learned: The kind of yeast you bake with (or make beer or champagne with) are unicellular fungi, technically sp