My Menagerie

 Sometimes, I wonder what I'm running here on the prairie;  a garden or a zoo?  Just one of my game cameras took over a thousand "snaps" in the past two months.  I'll give you a brief sampling to show you the drama you're probably missing in your own garden, and in the spirit of true suspense, I'll save the most exciting until the last.

Of course, many of the pictures are of ProfessorRoush and deer; of the beautiful Bella sniffing the ground (upper right) and minding anything but her own business, and of the goofy neighbor's dog who uses my yard as a personal toilet (left) almost every day.

I seem to have gained a red squirrel here, frantically gathering pecans and acorns in my yard.  I've never had a squirrel live here before but he's somewhere out there because I had hundreds of pictures of him in this bunch.  I'll have to figure out which tree he's nesting in.

Birds are plentiful in the pictures, including this bluebird sweeping in for a landing and the red house finch, below, who is taking a break in the shade.  There are also pictures of other finches, meadowlarks, and sparrows temporarily on the ground here.

And the smaller wildlife is well represented.  I'll spare you the pictures of the mouse and the chipmunk and the rabbits and the raccoon who come in for candid closeups once in a while.

Nightlife?  Oh, there's plenty around.  It abounds, around, you might say.  I could do without this striped skunk (Mephitis mephitis), even if it is just passing through, and then there is this creature below skulking through the night, which I think is a gray fox (Urocyon
cinereoargenteus).  I saw him much better just this morning at dawn, crossing the yard heading for the hills to my west.  He's been in other views on both cameras periodically all summer.

You wouldn't think that a stationery camera snapping pictures based on motion would be good for anything but occasional still shots, and yet this one captured, at one point, the drama present in most  every garden.  I'll show you the full capture of these pictures, because the time stamps are important.  Here, at 12:13:24 pm on 10/02/2020, is my red squirrel, lower right corner, out playing in the grass as it has a hundred times before:

And then at 12:16:31, we see this hawk sweep in, a fraction of an inch from grabbing the squirrel that is diving for the goldenrod and safety at the edge of the bed.  Are we witnessing the fury of nature?

At 12:16:32, there's the hawk, sitting in the grass.  What does he have clutched in those talons?  Have I seen the last of my red squirrel? 

I only had to wait until the next picture; 12:19:49, and the red squirrel is back out again, doing it's squirrley-things.  I think I'd have waited a little longer, myself, to be sure the hawk was gone.

I apologize about the picture-heavy post, but it is the best glimpse of life out there in the garden that I can give you.  Please try not to spend the next week wondering, as I will, if the squirrel made it to winter and what else may be sneaking around out there in the garden.  

Obsessive Compulsive Weeding

 There is no rest for the weary or the wicked here in Kansas.  We have had a solid freeze and everything is dry and brown.  Everything, that is, except for these thistles, who have germinated along my roadfront sometime after my last pass through with Roundup.  These thistles who are thriving despite the cool nights, frosts, and downright hard freezes.  I would love to know the exact identity of this thistle of steel, this defy-er of death, whether it be a Spiny Sowthistle (Sonchus asper), Tall Thistle (Cirsium altissimum), Wavy-Leaf Thistle (Cirsium undulatum) or some other thistley interloper, but I'm not about to wait to see it flower to help me identify it.  

I try to keep my roadsides free of weeds, a little obsessive-compulsive gardening that I blame on the majority German portion of my genetic pool.  You can see then, how these little green mounds along the road would vex me, laughing at me every morning on my way to work and giggling behind my Jeep as I return each evening.  If there is one bright side to the dreaded seasonal time-change, it's that I seldom come home in daylight anymore so I was spared the sight of these over the last week.  I was right, you know, in my 2017 post announcing my candidacy for the Presidency based on a campaign promise to abolish the time change.  Based on the results this week, I'd have swept the field in a landslide. 

I'll be spared the sight of these thistles for the winter now, because they are no more.  They may survive snow squalls and nights in the low 20's, but they can't survive this gardener.  This morning I chopped them off, sprayed the stems with 2-4-D, and watched them blow away in the blustery wind.  I suppose Euell Gibbons would claim they are edible and have suggested putting them in my salad, but I know better.  "Edible", in Euell's 1960's back-to-nature context,  does not mean they taste good, it means that you are unlikely to keel over with your face in your plate during dinner.

In the meantime, as you can see from the cloudy skies above my backyard, I'll spend today fighting the winds and hoping for glimpses of sunshine.  I've already mowed down the tall grasses in the back yard and I have hope that the amber and purple smoke trees can hold on to their colorful leaves just a few more weeks.  I might also drive into town and back a few times, just to revel in the clean roadsides and follow the corpses of thistles as they blow across the prairie grass.  What a great fall day here on the prairie!

Houses on Halloween

It was way too pretty a sunny Saturday, yesterday, to spend indoors.  A long week and things that needed doing indoors were conniving to keep ProfessorRoush inside, but around 2:00 the call of the sunshine just grew too strong.  Surely, there must be something to do outside?

Ah, Bluebird house maintenance!  I'm a little early this year running my bluebird trail.  Normally, I'm doing this on a cold day in late November or early December, but I'll take the high 60's and sunshine anytime.  I skipped the bluebird trail last year entirely so it was doubly important that I get out there and clean house, so to speak, this year; clean house after house, after house and after house, twenty-four houses in all spread over my 20 acres and overlooking all the neighbors.  

I always start out loaded down with screwdrivers and wire and nails and wood screws and a hammer and wire cutters, because every year a house will need its roof repaired or the house need to be held tighter against a post.  I've learned, over the years, that paper wasps also like these boxes, some designs more than others (I think my newer house design had less paper wasps this year).  Bluebirds aren't harmed by the wasps but don't like to nest in houses with wasp nests, so I always carefully remove the wasp nests from every home.  I just read today that rubbing a bar of soap on the inner ceiling of the birdhouse will deter the wasps, so I'll have to try that next year. 

Some of my bluebird houses are getting quite old, showing gray weathered wood and splintered sides.  I believe I made the box above more than 10 years ago and from this closeup, you can see the patina and lichens it has accumulated, character and wisdom from the Kansas seasons.  It may look ancient and rundown, but it still housed a nest last year and that's what counts.  

Bluebirds aren't the most fantastic nest architects on the planet, a thin bed of grass is about all they place in the box, but it seems to do the trick.  I was really proud this year of the results of my NABS-approved Roush Bluebird Nestbox; twenty unmistakable bluebird nests, 20 nests in of 24 boxes, a personal best.  Or rather a personal best of my bluebird tenants.  I attribute the increased count to moving some of the boxes that previously attracted wrens to other areas away from the woods.  Two of the four remaining boxes had anemic nests that I didn't count, perhaps occupied a year ago, or perhaps there was trouble during the nest-building.  Who knows?  A snake reaching a box in the summer, a jilted male bluebird without a mate, or another bird attempting to move in.  Maybe next year, with the new porch and straightened shutters of my repairs, some poor lonely male bluebird will have a better chance to attract a mate.  Hope springs eternal in the rusty breast of a bluebird.
   

PS:  I found that the links to the Roush NABS-approved Bluebird Nestbox don't work in the original post as linked above, so I placed them on a separate page here in the blog.  Look at the top for the "Bluebird House/Presentations" tab!

Pleasing Prairie Fall

'Heritage'

Gracious, 4 weeks, almost 5 since ProfessorRoush blogged?  Yes, I've been busy, but it is not labor that has kept me from the blog.  I've simply lacked the muse, lacked the mood to just sit down and pour out my thoughts.  I haven't, however, been absent from the garden, a drained hose there, a peony support removed there, rain gauges put away (for the most part) and the last mowing done.  

Tomorrow, it's supposed to snow and freeze down into the teens, so the last delicate 'Heritage' rose above is blooming in vain, no pollinators around to attract, just Mrs. ProfessorRoush to please.  I'll bring it and others indoors today, a few last desperate moments in a vase to grace us before, as former Vice-President Biden called it this week, a "dark winter."

I'm thankful now, I am, for all the plants I have planted for fall accents over the years, and for the prairie itself.  My back yard is as alive with color in the fall as in the spring, although the tableau goes from pinks and yellows in spring to umbers and tans in fall.  Now, with any wet weather, the tall grass prairie lights up with red, grasses full of flame into winter.  Big bluestem and little bluestem lift up my landscape and carry the beauty of summer into winter.

In the center of the photograph above, and pictured closeup at left, you can see the yellow beacon of Amsonia hubrichtii, the 'Arkansas Blue Star'.  I planted it decades ago as a trial plant, a low-maintenance plant for the prairie, never realizing how many seasons of joy it will bring.  Small bright blue flowers in the summer, feathery trouble-free foliage for backdrop, and then this bright yellow ball into fall, shining as if it has stored the sunshine of summer and reflecting it back in the face of winter. Pest-free, the only trouble it has ever given me is it that it has a tendency to spread by seed, but it is easily recognized and eradicated wherever it pops up.

I've waited several years for this Black Gum tree, Nyssa sylvatica, to begin to grow and show the potential of its species.  From a $10, foot-tall seedling, it has made it in a dozen years into an 8 foot tall, drought-resistant sapling.  This year was the first chance I've gotten to see it turn red enough to pick out from across the garden, a mere promise of what I hope it will display in another dozen.  I've had to trim the lower branches to be able to mow around it, and I probably slowed the growth of the tree as I did so, but I'm willing to be patient for its full fall foliage impact even if it takes the rest of my lifetime.

That being said, I'm going to cut this blog short today:  I just noticed how small and vulnerable this trunk looks and I'm going to run out right now, into the cold damp morning, and get some fencing around it before the young bucks come around and rub the bark off.  If there is one thing a Kansas gardener learns, it's preemptive fencing!