Hawk Homage

I write today in awe of one of nature's most finely-tuned predators, the Red-Tailed Hawk, Buteo jamaicensis, ubiquitous on the Kansas prairie and deadly in that realm.   It may have been first described to the Western world from sightings in Jamaica, hence the species name, but it does pretty well on mainland North America.  The photo at the right, of a watchful Red-Tail, ensconced on my cotton-less and currently leaf-less Cottonwood, was taken yesterday evening from my bathroom window, a mere 50 feet from the silent vigil.  The Cottonwoods in my yard are the tallest trees available for a circle of approximately 60 acres, and they are finally large enough to serve as aerial perches for surveillance and attack.  When I took the picture, the coyotes were beginning to howl from the bottoms and the hawk kept looking that way at each new howl, distracted from its concentration on the grass just below it.

We work, the Red-Tailed Hawk and I, with the common goal of population control of the prairie mice and pack rats, although our motives are vastly different.  She aims to feed, herself or her family, on the wholly scrumptious intestines of any little ball of rodent flesh she catches.  My intent is to protect the landscaping from damage, the house from infestation, and my family from disease (i.e. scary things such as Hantavirus).  I only wish she would rid me of the adult rabbit that is currently occupying my front garden beds. I see a brazen lagomorphic lout every morning;  as I open the door and flip on the outside lights to let Bella out, it runs across the front sidewalk, not 6 feet away.  Every morning.  I just know that if I don't get rid of it, I will soon find that the Burning Bushs' have been chewed down to kindling. I know that Red-Tails do feast on rabbits, but it is hard for me to believe they regularly make off with adult rabbits.  In that regard, I have hope for the Great Horned Owl that I hear hooting every few nights.   I suppose it is past time to set out the humane rabbit trap and relocate Mr. Cottontail far away.

As a soft human, I can only marvel at the sharp eyesight and patience of this common prairie denizen.  Sitting in a tree, or soaring in circles above the tallgrass prairie, they can spy the slightest movement, the most furtive rodent slinking, and pounce in an instant on prey.  I have the privilege to observe the moment of capture several times a year, so common is the occurrence here, but I'm always left breathless and stunned by the speed of the stealthy diving swoop. I'd love to show you a picture, but I'm sure that I would spend endless weeks in the grass, camera in hand, before I would ever get that lucky.   Just as recently as early September, however, when I was mowing some of the prairie grass to benefit the donkeys, a hawk audaciously grabbed a pack rat from right in front of the moving tractor.  Was it a Red-Tail?  I wish I could tell you.  There was a blur, a thump audible even over the tractor engine, and a large bird lifted off from the ground, a struggling pack rat clenched in its talons. 

I cheered the hawk, blessed the wonder of the moment, and kept on mowing.  I hope it ate well that night.

Witch Hazel Whitewash

As ProfessorRoush looked out his bedroom window two weeks ago, he spied yellow; yellow where it shouldn't be yellow.  In the garden, something was blooming in late fall!  Something that shouldn't have been blooming!  On closer examination, it turned out to be his witch hazel, purchased as Hamamelis × intermedia 'Jelena' and planted in 2008, profusely and vibrantly blooming its overhyped head off.

But, it wasn't, actually.  It wasn't his 'Jelena', because ProfessorRoush has to face the fact that he doesn't have a 'Jelena'.  'Jelena' should bloom in the spring.  'Jelena' should bloom in various shades of red-orange to yellow.  'Jelena' should have better fall foliage color than my obviously mislabeled 'not-Jelena'.  

I'm finally sure that I was sold a proverbial pig-in-a-poke, a witch hazel whitewash, as it were.  I've long suspected it;  the sporadic bloom, seeming to occur in fall or early winter, although sometimes it held off till February.  Plain fall foliage that turns tan and drops fairly quickly, and a slow growth rate.  The discordant fact that no one else seems to be able to grow witch hazel in this area.  Several of my garden visitors have inquired of it, and then proclaimed my green thumb at getting it to grow in these alkaline, dry soils.  Mine never thrived, but it lived, suffered through long summers of drought, and grew a little each year.  And those chrome yellow blooms, which didn't show nearly the length and visibility they were supposed to, in disappointing contrast to rave reports from plantsmen. 

It's now clear that I was sold, at a premium price, the common witchhazel, Hamamelis virginiana, or some variant thereof.  I'm going to have to find a way to live with that, to live with the knowledge of yet another mislabeled imposter in my garden.  I've accumulated a few over the years, wrong-labeled roses I can't identify, cultivars of perennials that were sold as something else.  How often, how curious, that the mislabeled plant lives and thrives while the cherished named cultivars perish.  I'm  suspicious that horticultural stores have a way of growing what is easy and then just responding to consumer demand.  "You want a 'Jelena' Witch Hazel?  Sure, we've got those, just give me a minute to type up a plant tag for these unlabeled shrubs over here."  One wonders, one worries, right up until the plant finally matures and shows its true, completely yellow colors, in the wrong season, no less.  And then one has to live with the imposter, right there, in the midst of a dry brown garden, blooming yellow with carefree abandon.  I suppose I can let this one pass.   It does, after all, contrast nicely with the blue Kansas sky.

Nesting Sunday

Last Sunday, ProfessorRoush was really wanting to rest and read, but the outside weather was so temperate (55ºF) and sunny that I just couldn't make myself stay put indoors.  I also knew that if I stalled cleaning out the bluebird houses any longer, it would only lead to the task being critical later when the temperatures were 20ºF and a blizzard was forming.  If you're responsible for a trail, you can't just let it go.  The bluebird houses need occasional repair and removing the old nests decreases parasite and disease incidence.  And I needed a walk, so the Bluebird Trail was calling out to me from the brown prairie. "Come out, Come out.  I need your care."  Perhaps, ProfessorRoush was just, himself, nesting for winter.



I always gain a nice warm fuzzy feeling as I find all those nests where happy little bluebirds and various other species have raised a family under my roof(s).  When you are walking a trail of houses, you can easily tell the ones that hold bluebird nests because their nests are thin and haphazardly constructed, usually of soft prairie grass, as pictured in the top photo.  Other birds, usually wrens, sometimes nest in my boxes, and those nests are formed of coarser twigs like the one at the left.  They are also loaded much higher, sometimes stuffing the box to the top except for the opening entrance.   This year, of my 19 self-designed, NABS-approved nesting boxes scattered over the edges of 20 acres with another 80 acres around them, I counted 10 bluebird nests, 6 wren nests, and 3 empties.  The empties were all houses laying on the ground where the donkeys had rubbed them off the posts.  Donkeys seem to have something against random bird houses around their pastures. 

Walking the perimeter of my land is always educational as well.  I was surprised to notice this small nest within a dried up Babtisia australis (Blue Wild Indigo) floating around the pasture.  These prairie legumes bloom early in spring and normally grow perhaps 2.5 feet tall and round alone or in clumps over the prairie.  In the fall, they dry up, break off, and blow all over the prairie like tumbleweeds, clogging fences and flower beds and becoming perfect tinder for prairie fires.  I've never known that they might serve as shrub hosts for low nesting birds, but here is the proof, a deep little cup formed within what was once thick green foliage. 




You can see, in the closeup at left, the careful construction and perfect form of the nest.  It seems a little big for hummingbird, but whatever was here was a pretty small little guy/girl.  I would put odds on it being a Dickcissel nest, since that species is ubiquitous on the prairie and nests on the ground or in low prairie shrubs.  Whoever the architect was, I hope it was a safe home, because birds and the prairie are meant to be together.

Round One; Advantage Me

ProfessorRoush has been busy and neglected his blog, but not particularly his garden.  It was a long, hot autumn, and I'm still diligently digging out Rose Rosette victims, which I can do in absent-minded fashion only while admiring how the grasses have bloomed.

I've put my garden away for winter, for the most part, and I'm looking forward to a long winter's rest.  One of my last chores, last weekend, was to replace a broken end-post on my vegetable garden's electric fence.  My rejuvenated strawberry patch has flourished this year and, last week, it occurred to me how delicious that tender green patch of strawberry leaves looked next to all the browned grass in the acres and acres around it.  Remembering the last time the patch looked so good, and remembering that the deer had, within weeks, chomped it down to the ground and destroyed the next season's strawberries, I resolved to immediately beef up my large-furry-rat defenses.

So I replaced the end post last week and fixed the electric fence where deer had already been through it, noting that its 10 year old charger was on its last legs. 














Lo and behold, I checked it again yesterday and discovered that the fence was again wrecked.  And, if you look closely at the picture at the right, you'll see that the varmints had eaten about half the leaves off, leaving naked stems, but thankfully they haven't yet eaten the crowns.











So yesterday, I replaced the charger with this brand-new, souped up charger pictured on the left, repaired the fence again, added a second line of twine strings to deter their attack, and baited the trap with the aluminum foil strips coated with peanut butter (see below).











My fiendish plan is for the deer to lick the peanut butter and get nasty shocks on their innocent little velvety tongues, providing a peanut-ty Pavlovian proselytism for their education.  I don't know how else to keep them away, short of chaining the intrepid Bella in the garden every night.

And yet this first morning, when I rose, I spotted the lone doe pictured at the top, from my kitchen window.   She meandered across the garden, joined two others in transit, and all proceeded to walk to the garden and stare at the new setup, the lush smorgasboard just beyond their reach.  Finally one reached up to the peanut butter, and then another, both reacting only slightly and then dejectedly moving away.  I suppose I won the first round, but I'm disappointed that they didn't get knocked off their feet and make a more hasty retreat.  More twine?  More fence?  Somehow, 25 quarts of homegrown strawberries at $4 a quart replacement value still seems worth it, don't you agree?   All this wire and plastic, though, isn't helping my carbon footprint.  Maybe it would be wiser to persuade my neighbor to take down his deer feeder.  Or to fill it with moldy corn.