Why maintain a backyard wildlife habitat?

because ...

Audubon, Part 2

A few weeks ago, I blogged about the start of our golf club's quest for Audubon certification as a wildlife habitat (It takes a village). I missed the second meeting, and just got the minutes. As I hoped, I'm working on the outreach subcommittee. I see another blog in my future!

Our initial brainstorming session a few weeks ago produced some wonderful ideas - outreach should be a slam dunk. Nice weather, nature, golf: what's not to like in a state with the 2nd highest number of golf courses in the country (after Hawaii, or so I'm told)?

Memories times two

This picture is from our home and habitat in Virginia. Although I'm happy with my move overall, I invested a lot of time and emotional energy in creating a habitat there, and it was hard to leave it behind. In addition, we have a sentimental attachment to this plant. Our pussywillow was rooted from one which my husband rooted as an elementary school project, then planted in his parents' backyard. We took a cutting from it and after several attempts, successfully rooted in in Virginia. I'm still trying to restart it here in Michigan.

Pussywillows are a member of the willow family. They thrive in wet soil and in soil with lots of clay and/or poor drainage (In Virginia, we had a high water table, being on the edge of the flood plain, and lots of clay). They are nonetheless drought resistant and hardy to zone 2.

The catkins appear in mid-to-late February, an early sign of spring, and provide early season food for migrating songbirds as well as resident birds and small mammals.

I'm looking forward to the day that the next generation of this plant successfully puts down roots in Michigan.

The value of snags

We have a dead tree in our backyard, right on the edge of the wetland. It's been there for at least 10 years, as long as the house has, because our next-door neighbor mentioned once that he had wanted to take it down when he moved in but his wife reminded him that it wasn't on their property. The previous owners of our house apparently liked the tree as well as I do, because they left it in place for the entire time they lived here.

It's a great perch for hawks and other birds to survey the surroundings, and it draws woodpeckers on a regular basis. I'm particular fond of woodpeckers, and feed them peanuts all winter. It's nice to have a natural source of food nearby to keep their interest over the summer. I had always wanted to have a snag in the yard in Virginia, but in that dense, semiurban environment, it wasn't practical. Here, it fits right in.

Niches :: Aftermath

More pictures and commentary after the flooding, Niches :: Aftermath, including a reasonable and balanced discussion of the effects of development upstream. I'm torn between concern for unintended side effects and a celebration of the resilience of mother earth.

Anyone interested in building a Google for backyard habitats?

A Google custom search engine (CSE) uses google technology to search a selected group of sites to return results more closely related to the actual information you're seeking. If you have established a google account, which includes gmail or Google Reader, you can use the same login to set up a CSE. In addition, you can make it a coop effort by allowing others to participate in building it.

So, here's my first effort:

Google Co-op - Custom Search Engine

It searches 17 sites, including NWF, eNature, and other national and local sites related to backyard habitats, native plants, wildlife, etc. Advantages? Use this to search for "mourning doves" and you shouldn't get hunting links in your results. Search for "bears" and not only will you skip the football team, your desired ursine results will not be on page 987 of 988.

Right now, this is in "alpha" - it works, but I set it up and turned it on in about 15 minutes max. I'd like to make it better, and also more widely available.

If you are interested in contributing to the content, comment below or email me via this blog. If you don't want to commit to an ongoing contribution, you can send suggestions of sites to include in the search, blog this post, add a link to the CSE to your blog or webpage, or just use it and give me feedback.

or not - that's feedback, too.

Rainy Night in Georgia

As witnessed by Wayne's posts Niches :: Portrait of a Rainy Day and Niches :: Portrait After the Rainy Day you can see there was quite a serious rain at Sparkleberry Springs.

Here in Michigan, we had typically erratic weather - at 8am it was snowing, at 9 it was raining, at 10 it was sunny and clear, at noon it was snowing again. We had another round of clouds then sunshine then snow in the afternoon. Despite the snow, it was overall warmer today and stayed above freezing all day, so most of what precipitated melted as it hit the ground, or shortly thereafter.

The melting snow, plus the rain and snow that fell created this out back:



And for any of you who may have thought yesterday's picture of the wetlands didn't look very wet, well, here's another view:

What I'm waiting for

In spring, this is what I see out my back windows.

Right now, it looks a lot like this, but coated in white everywhere. Earlier this winter, during the ice storms, it looked like a fairy tale come true, glistening in the sunlight.

The wetlands run across the entire width of our yard in the back. On the far side of them, the right hand side of the picture is a distant view of a golf course; the middle is a buffer of trees where we frequently see deer and other wildlife; and the left side is an open field - currently farmed, and I hope it remains that way as long as possible. You wouldn't think from this picture that we are in the middle of a typical suburban housing development, would you? But sure enough, we have a paved street out front, near neighbors on both sides, and a full complement of other houses and their occupants all up and down our street. That street is also part of a much larger housing development, in the middle of a golf course.

It's an odd area - you can go out one side of our neighborhood and drive through farm country, and out the other side and drive through endless auto dealers, strip malls, and fast food joints just like those which seem to be outside every city in the country. The next stop light past our turn, the paving ends and the dirt road begins. But go three miles in the opposite direction, and we're downtown.

Unfortunately, we're on a side of town that is growing rapidly. On my way to work (a roughly five-mile drive) I daily pass one former farm now under construction, and across the street there's a large "for sale" sign in another field. Despite all the talk about the housing glut in this area and the downturn in the economy, the building continues unabated. Like everyone else, I want to pull up the drawbridge now that I'm here.