Here birdie birdie birdie!

On Easter there was a big fire out at Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge, which my husband and I had spotted from near our house with some sense of alarm.  There was a terrific column of black smoke billowing into the sky, and ash from the fire allegedly drifted down in Skaneateles, which is more than fifteen miles from the Refuge. 

Reports from Montezuma in the days after the fire were pretty positive, though, and I was curious about how scorched the place looked.  It's also migration season, and there are always lots of great birds to be spotted there this time of year.  So, we drove to Montezuma on Sunday.

One of the first critters we spotted was an osprey sitting in its huge nest on top of the power lines right by the side of the road.

She's got a wicked hook on the end of that beak, no?  I wouldn't want to cross her.

Next we decided to drive the loop that goes through the Refuge.  Near the start of the loop are some bird houses, and I captured this little series involving a pair of tree swallows.  I so love the iridescent blue-green on their backs, and the perfect fan of wing in the third photo.

Sadly, not too many of the rest of my bird pictures turned out all that well.  I need a more powerful zoom to get the birds from such distances, along with a good tripod that mounts on the window of the car (visitors are not supposed to get out of their cars for most of the loop).

We did spot a few species of ducks that we see there every year, some of which we only ever spot at Montezuma in the spring.  My personal favorites are the northern shovelers, because I so love their silly flat spoon bills.  This shot, sadly, doesn't do the bill justice.  Notice how well camoflaged this flamboyant fellow's lady is, on the top right.

We also spotted buffleheads:

And we saw pintails, ring necked ducks with their delicate rings around their bills, redheads with copper heads glistening in the sun, and a whole host of other lovely ducks who stayed too far away to be photographed.

Of course, there were plenty of great blue herons, with all their silly wispy feathers blowing in the breeze:

Dozens of red-winged blackbirds were staked out along the loop, showing off their bright epaulets and being all territorial:

Unsurprisingly, there were lots of Canada geese hanging around, and they were remarkably tolerant of me and my camera.

They didn't even hiss at me.  It seems they are mighty used to the visitors.

The area of Montezuma NWF that burned covers something like 660 to 700 acres (reports vary), and is mostly just wetland reeds and cattails.  The peat that underlies the marsh did not catch on fire, which I understand the fire fighters were concerned about and which would have been a much bigger problem.

Last I heard, they still weren't sure what sparked the fire, and suspicion lay with a cigarette tossed from a vehicle, or even sparks from a dragging chain on the Thruway. 

Personally, I like big firefighting equipment, and found this thing rather cool:

I understand it's known as a "Marsh Master", and can carry water to a fire or pump water from the swamp for fire fighting. 

Officials from Montezuma said that, despite the fire, the wildlife was fine (although I'm sure more than a few insects got toasted).  There were reports that the nesting bald eagles were sitting in their nests as usual while the fire was happening, looking as stoic as ever while bits of ash accumulated on top of their heads. 

All in all, it will probably be good for the health of Montezuma to have had a little part of it burn. They do occasional controlled burns there anyway, to encourage the growth of beneficial plants and discourage invasive species.

After all, in nature there would be fires on occasion, sparked by lightning. It's only during relatively recent human history that wildfires are suppressed, usually out of a concern for human property.  Not allowing things to burn as they naturally would is an artificial interruption of the natural cycle of things, and of course increases the likelihood of all that accumulated dry material causing a massive raging fire.  Here's hoping that Easter fire does what it should, and makes the marsh healthier. 

What a treasure it is to have Montezuma only a twenty minute drive from my house.  I take it too much for granted.

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Garden growth, and some Anxiety

After we returned from our travels on Saturday and put away the groceries, I decided to do a little yard and garden inventory.

The first happy surprise was discovered by my husband:

Well, hello, babies! I thought we had killed off the ferns last year. Apparently not!

 

Fiddleheads are so dang cute!

The bleeding hearts are especially enchanting this early in the season, too.  Their leaves are almost silvery.

And the apple tree is starting to grow some baby leaves.

Now for the part of the story that involves some Major Anxiety on my part.  We put up a new birdhouse for chickadees last weekend.  We'd had chickadees nesting in an old birdhouse in that same spot the past two springs, but last year the old birdhouse self destructed at the end of the summer.  So, we went out and bought a house that's specifically designed for chickadees and put it up.  They thought it was lovely to have a new apartment, apparently, since the day after we put it up a pair of chickadees started going in and out.

I hadn't seen them for a day or two, though, so I decided to sneak a peek see if they were actually building a nest in there.  I opened up the side of the house a teensie bit.  Nestled in the bottom of the house was a sweet little pile of moss with little tufts of fluffy stuff on top.  I leaned in closer.  What was that fluffy pink stuff on top?  It sort of looks like cotton candy, but not quite...

Egad!  My chickadees found some fiberglass insulation somewhere and are using that as nesting material! Criminy - I really don't know what chickadee hosting etiquette calls for under these circumstances. Fiberglass insulation cannot possibly make healthy nesting material for naked little baby chickadees.  Ouch!  I broke some major taboos and actually picked some of the fiberglass material out of the nest and disposed of it.  I promptly brought out a collection of fluffy alternatives, including dryer lint, dog fur, and fuzzy yarn, all being things I've had chickadees use for nests in the past.

I don't want to keep disturbing the chickadees so don't want to open the box again, but yikes!  I sincerely hope they either a) decided I was too much of a threat and built a new nest out of something other than fiberglass elsewhere, or b) decided to pile a bunch of non-fiberglass fluff on top of that horrid itchy stuff. I shall have to watch over the next few days to see if they are still going in and out, preparing to lay some eggs in there.  Should I just have left them alone?  Removed the nest entirely?  I haven't the foggiest idea.

Note to self:  make sure fiberglass insulation is never exposed where critters can find it.  We had trouble when we first moved in with some naked feral cats who were getting into the basement through a small opening that was lined with fiberglass insulation.  It turns out that having fiberglass embedded in their skin causes cats to lose their fur.  Go figure.  We closed that space up long ago, though, and I'm not aware of any fiberglass insulation on our property that's exposed.  I shall have to do an inventory to confirm.  Somewhere in the neighborhood, though, there's still some enticing fuzzy Pink Panther fiberglass insulation available for the birds.  Ugh.

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Too blue to be true

This past weekend was decidedly colder than some we've experienced lately, especially if one was exposed to the wind.  The sun was delicious, though, so Saturday afternoon we spent a few minutes along the Erie Canal trail just to see what was greening.

It turned out there was a lot of fresh glowing green.  It's amazing just how fast everything turns all different shades of green in the spring.  I particularly love how the trees get all spotty when their new leaves start to emerge.

The fresh bright buds against the sky made the sky seem an unbelievable shade of blue.

The colors were so bright they were almost neon in places.  Whenever the colors are that intense, I always think that if I painted a painting using those colors, people would think it was too bright to look real.  Sunsets often have that effect, but new growth and blue April sky can apparently be too intense to seem real, too.

Moss on the top of a post, outlined against the sky:

Since the wind was mighty cold but the sun so hot it was quickly thawing the frozen groceries in the car, we didn't linger long along the trail.  However, we did spot one odd thing that I cannot for the life of me explain:

The other side of it:

You can click on the photos to enlarge them.  It looked like perhaps a pellet of some kind?  It was super lightweight and stuck together into a tight little dry ball with some kind of saliva or mucus that dried clear and shiny.  It was composed largely of iridescent beetle wings.  There was some fuzzy stuff that looked like it might have been fur stuck in there, too, although it could have been some kind of plant matter.  I wished, not for the first time, that I had a good macro lens for the camera so I could show off its detail better.  It's on my (rather long) wish list.  I should have adjusted the aperture on the camera to get more of it in focus, but didn't think to do so until after I was home and downloaded the photos.

Any of my faithful readers have any ideas?

After we left the canal path to drive the rest of the way home, I made my husband pull over next to a bit of swamp so I could take some more photos.  The colors were just as magnificent in the swamp, with the water reflecting that unbelievably blue sky.

Last year's cattails were glowing in the sun:

There wasn't as much green in the swamp as there was along the trail, but just above the water tiny new cattails were starting to emerge:

If you look carefully, you can see a Canada goose sticking her neck out standing on a log in the center of this one:

We had to watch carefully for a few minutes before we could find the source of the echoing tapping sound emanating from a patch of cattails.  The culprit?  A downy woodpecker, pecking on one of the hollow reeds:

Have I mentioned my abiding love of swamps?  I especially adore them this time of year, when the frogs are gregarious and the mosquitoes few and far between.  I always find myself wanting a pair of waders when I look at a swamp like this - standing on its edge just isn't quite close enough.

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Tree Troubles

When we bought our house, we knew that we had some not-so-healthy trees in our backyard.  At the moment we have 3 sugar maples, 1 GIANT spruce, 1 apple and 1 pear.  The spruce and apple are so-so health wise, and one of the sugar maples is doing fairly well.  However, 1 of the sugar maples is exceedingly unhealthy, 1 is somewhat unhealthy, and the pear is on its last legs. 

Looking up into my beloved spruce:

We took some of the dead branches off one of the sugar maples when we first moved in because it happened to stand waving all those dead branches right over our driveway.  I'd prefer not to have to find out whether our homeowners or our auto insurance would cover the damage if our tree squished our car.  Although we bought ourselves some time trimming off dead branches, it's time for the whole tree to come down.

My husband has a client who is a certified arborist, and runs a business doctoring and removing trees.  He's very knowledgeable, and at least thus far seems competent.  I know a number of people who have had bad experiences with tree removal companies, so I'm pretty picky about who I am willing to hire to cut down trees in my yard.  This fella meets all my requirements of bonding and insurance and all that jazz, and also generally seems to have some pretty high standards.  Don't tell him this, but I'll probably pay him whatever he wants to charge us for removing that tree.  The other tree removal companies we've talked to sounded pretty shady (pardon the pun!).

In the background is the one healthy sugar maple, though you can't tell since this was taken in the spring before it got leaves:

The poor pear tree we can cut down ourselves with little more than one swing of the axe, though we're getting a quote for removal of that second maple, too.  It's probably cheaper to do it all at once, but I suspect it will be a little while before I can afford to have that one cut down.  If that tree falls it may squish our barn, which wouldn't be good, although might be better than squishing the car.  Come to think of it, though, if it hit the barn hard enough it would also squish my husband's beloved classic 1983 Mazda RX7 that is in the midst of being restored.  That would be bad.  But, insurance money for the barn might permit us to put in a more useable garage instead.  I'd hate to see the old barn squished, though - call me sentimental.  Thankfully, barring a massive and catastrophic storm, I think that second maple is a long way from the falling and squishing stage.

The happy news?  We have something to plant to replace one of the sugar maples.  A few years back my husband and I found a kit for growing a baby elm tree.  My father always loved elm trees, so on a whim we picked it up for him.  This particular little seed came from a tree that was naturally resistant to Dutch elm disease.  My father diligently followed all the instructions for how to get the baby tree to grow from a seed, and while I don't know the details, I think it involved a stint in the freezer and whole bunch of random soil/water/light manipulations.  Clearly he did something right, as it's now a healthy growing tree, and is getting too big for Dad's yard.

As soon as that maple comes down, we're going to try to dig up the baby elm from Dad's yard, wrap its substantial baby elm root ball in burlap, transport it to our yard, dig another massive hole, and put it in.  I hope we manage to do it properly.  If we wait much longer, even the three of us won't be able to manage getting a root ball that big out of the ground, and rumor has it that spring is the best time to transplant trees.

Surely, this is a saga that will be continued.  Probably with photos.  Hopefully they will be photos of a happy little transplanted elm and a chopped up maple, and not of downed power lines or huge divots out of my yard or anything else bad.  To be continued...

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