Brookside Serendipity

When I walk around Brookside Gardens – I savor the little serendipities of even a familiar place. This week I made an effort to photograph some of those surprises: a yellow petal that had landed on a very green leaf,

A turkey tail shelf function on an otherwise smooth stump,

Sunflowers in the children’s garden (I imagine this is a photo stop for many groups of children; I was too early for them although there was a mother reading a nature book to a young child at one of the tables in the children’s area),

A hat on a rock (there were a lot of volunteer sin the garden but nowhere near the hat),

A chipmunk that sat still long enough for a portrait,

A bald cypress knee in the plantings just outside the conservatory (the tree is on the other side of the sidewalk and there are no knees closer to the tree).

One of the reasons, I like natural areas – including gardens – is there is always something new….something not quite anticipated.

Chipmunk in the Garden

A week or so ago, before my new camera arrived, I was out taking pictures of insects in the garden are at the front of my house. I heard rustling in the bushes. I wondered if it was the lizard I had seen on my front porch. More rustling. I decided it was something a little bigger than the lizard. I continued taking pictures and listening to the sounds of the front flower bed. Then I looked down at the tubing we attached to the outlet from our sump pump to drain the water further away from the house ---- a chipmunk was staring up at me. The zoomed setting was perfect for getting a quick picture!

Now that I think about it – I wonder if the tubing is still attached to the sump pump. It seems to be a highway for the chipmunk these days so there must be an opening on an end close to the house where the animal enters the tube.

Ten Days of Little Celebrations – September 2016

This September includes some unique ‘little celebrations.’ Two of them occurred in Florida.

OSIRIS REx successful launch. This was only my second time to see a launch (Kennedy Space Center/Cape Canaveral). I can’t imagine that every launch I attend will not make it to the celebration list!

Pelicans. I don’t remember every seeing American white pelicans before…or if I did I didn’t realize what I was seeing. They were the highpoint of the drive around Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge for me.

Happy ‘what if’ thoughts. Both my daughter and son-in-law are close to finishing their graduate work and looking at post docs. September was the first month that there seemed to be a potential ‘what next’ and we all spun all kinds of ‘what if’ scenarios. The celebration will get bigger when we actually settle on a plan – which might not finalize until early spring 2017.

There were things that were not entirely unique – but not things that happen frequently either:

4 hikes with three and four year old children. I was very excited and keyed up while I hiked with each of the groups (about 10 children and 4 adults in each group) talking about trees in the fall and seeds. I celebrated when they were done (I was exhausted) but even more than I’d managed to connect. It was probably my best grandmother-in-training experience to date!

Stream assessment with high schoolers. Putting on boots…checking water quality…identifying macroinvertebrates….with high schoolers that are interested in what they are finding --- celebrating the fall day in the stream as much as I did.

Hummingbird moth. I’m not sure why – but I don’t see hummingbird moths all that frequently. I didn’t see one at all last year. And then there was one at Brookside earlier this month. Celebration (and lots of pictures).

Chipmunk in the garden. I heard some rustling noise in the dried leaves under then bushes then looked around….and saw the chipmunk looking up at me from the end of the drain tube from the sump pump. Yes – chipmunks are rodents…but they are the cutest ones as far as I’m concerned and I celebrate that they survive in my front flower bed.

And then there are the normal things that happen frequently enough…but that I still celebrate when they do:

A rainy day after a long string of hot and dry days. All the plants seem to be celebrating too.

Abundant fall veggies. I celebrate the amount – the colors – the flavors. The harvest time is a special kind of celebration.

Celebration being home. Every time I am away for a few days…or even a week…I celebrate returning. The ‘no place like home’ sentiment rings true for me.

Chipmunks around our House

There are more chipmunks around our house this year than I can remember. I think their base is under our deck but they make their way all around the house and up onto the deck as well. They used to come up to get seed when we put it in a bowl but now that we have stopped putting out seed for the summer, they still come to sample the plants in the pots. They enjoy themselves, even if there is a cat on the screen deck watching them! They don’t scamper away until we open a door to walk out to the deck ourselves.

They are equally confident in the front garden. I photographed one standing very still under the hose reel. As long as I didn’t move…neither did he.

I don’t mind having the chipmunks around. They are small and I enjoy watching them….and remembering the description I heard in a lecture years ago that they have ‘Oreo markings’ on each side.

Photographs through a Window – June 2016

The wildlife has been active at the bird feeder and bath on or deck this month. The squirrels empty the seed bowl so quickly that I am not filling it very often. They still come to sniff around periodically – looking for the small windfall from the birds dropping seeds to the deck as the feed at the squirrel-proof hanging feeder.

I like the chipmunks better and cheer when they find the seed first when I fill the bowl. I think the chipmunks have their home under our deck since I see them in that area almost every time I am in the back yard.

The gold finches made a few appearances.

But the house finches are the frequent visitors

As are the chipping sharrows.

I had to be quick to catch the Carolina Wren. This was one was looking for nesting materials so there may be a second brood starting.

There was an occasional white breasted nuthatch on the roof and at the feeder. They are easy to identify at the feeder because they almost always are head down – not on the usually perch.

Not filling the bowl means that the cardinals and the mourning doves don’t get seed as much either since they are too big for the feeder. That caused a particular problem for the cardinal parents. Their baby was very demanding. The male brought it to the deck under the feeder first.

He was looking frazzled from the constant begging by the time they flew away.

The female brought the young bird as well.

The chick was as big as the parents – looked bigger with the fluffiness of the down that had not been quite replaced with ‘grown up’ feathers.

Finally – the young bird appeared on his own under the feeder just yesterday. Do you think it is a male of female? It will become recognizable in the coming weeks. I’ll include the follow up pictures of the bird next month – assuming the young bird keeps coming to our deck.

Camping 35+ Years Ago

Back in the late 70s and early 80s, most of the vacations we took involved camping. It was a way to travel inexpensively and we enjoyed National Parks and Forests. One of the first places we camped was at Mesa Verde National Park – driving from where we lived near Dallas all the way across the panhandle of Texas and Colorado to get there. We borrowed a relatively large tent and purchased a Coleman stove and lantern…some ice chests. My husband took one campsite documenting picture on that trip. I was only in it for scale! Surprisingly – we still have and use the green ice chest seen in the picture.

We bought a smaller tent that took a lot less space for subsequent trips. There was an annual fall foliage trip to southeastern Oklahoma (Ouachita National Forest). On one such trip there were 3 couples. Our new 2-person tent is the one in the middle.

We made trip to Colorado the next summer with the smaller tent. The space we saved by having a smaller tent was taken up with the addition of a lawn chair. We still had the Coleman stove but often cooked our meal over a camp fire in a ring of stones. By that time, we had our own grill to put over the fire that we also packed with our camping gear.

The chipmunks were interested in everything going on in the campsite. We were glad we had not left the bag of M&Ms open! This picture also reminds me that we were still using borrowed sleeping backs (the red, yellow and brown colors behind the rodent).

The spring before we moved to the Washington DC area, we made a trip to the Grand Canyon with friends. We camped the night before we hiked down to the plateau. I vividly remember my legs being very sore before we even got back to the top and realizing that my hiking boots were not as broken in as I thought they were (raw ankles). Standing in the camp shower (coin operated) felt so good and I used up all the change I’d taken with me! We were all feeling even more sore the next day – no additional long hikes for that vacation. The blue ice chest in the picture is still something we have and use; our choices of ice chests have proved to be very durable. The blue car with the trunk open is a 1983 Honda Accord that we had just purchased; we owned it until the early 1990s.

Between that time period and now we have not done much camping. We’ve recently bought a new large tent and two air mattresses. The motivation is not so much to save money but to be able to stay at Dark Sky sites for Star Parties. The camping equipment can only take about half the cargo space because a telescope has to come too!

The best of the rest of Brookside

There was a lot more than fiddleheads, azaleas and goslings at Brookside Gardens last week….so this post is a ‘best of the rest’ from my collection of pictures.

The Red Buckeye near the conservatory parking lot was blooming.

I’d never looked at the flower up close before. I looked it up and discovered that it is closely related to the horse chestnut.

The jack-in-the-pulpits were coming up. These are flowers that one has to be looking for to spot although these striped ones are pretty distinctive.

Many times the leaves and the flowers are almost the same color.

The dogwoods were blooming too. Depending where they are in the garden they can be still green in the center

Or already yellow.

And there are some that are very different – from Asia rather than our native variety of dogwood.

There as a chipmunk sorting through the debris in a concrete culvert – finding seeds.

The area of the gardens that has been ‘under construction’ for the past few years was open and there were yellow irises around the pond,

A newly planted magnolia with large leaves and mature blooms, and

A robust stand of horsetails.

I noticed a bench that evidently is not used often ... judging from the plants growing around it.

I’d never noticed how the bark of this Hawthorne wrinkled as the branches flared out from the trunk!

Even the pines have interesting features in the spring.

It’s a great time of year to take a closer look at the garden!