Our Yard – June 2017

There were a lot of rainy days in May and June – so far – has been relatively cool here in Maryland. The plants seem to be thrilled. I’ve already trimmed the bush beside our garage and it already needs to be trimmed again. My husband parks his car on that side of the garage and is keen for me to do the job ASAP.

The milkweed in the front flowerbed looks great – and there don’t appear to be any more caterpillars on it. Pooh!

I might cut down the plants toward the front of the bed so that the ‘predator’ lights will be more visible to the deer. So far the gizmo has kept them from eating the day lily buds.

The trees are still getting a lot of new leaves. The new maple leaves start out tinged with red.

The tulip poplar leaves are miniature (somewhat streamlined) versions of the larger leaves. Most of the flowers are fading now and the seed mods are forming.

Our oak tree is trimmed up so high (it’s close to the street and the country trimmed it high enough that fire trucks would not be damaged if they needed to come down our street) that I decided to take a picture of a leave that had fallen. The tree has grown a lot since we moved into our house 20 years ago and I like the shade it provides to the front of the house on summer mornings.

Glowing Tulip Poplar Flowers

The tulip poplars in the forest behind our house are blooming.

On a sunny day last week, I walk our closer to the trees at mid-day and took zoomed pictures looking up in the tree. Because the sun was almost directly overhead the flowers seemed to catch the light and glowed among the greenery of the tree’s leaves.

The shape of the flowers is very tulip-like but the coloring is quite different. The inside of the flower is different too.

I think these are my favorite pictures to date of this tree in the springtime.

Zooming – April 2017

What a difference between March and April! The collection of zoomed images this month is dominated by flowers: Tulips with sunshine through their petals and patterned centers,

Wild flowers on the forest floor,

And trees with flowers like Dogwoods,

Tulip poplars, and

Carnation tree (a type of cherry) petals carpeting the sidewalk after a rain (when it dried out, a little boy on a walk with his mom had great fun scooping up the petals and throwing them in the air like confetti!).

Of course, there were a few other scenes where the zoom on my camera was appreciated: Canadian geese on an island in Centennial Lake (Do you see the one asleep on the nest keeping the eggs warm?),

The occasional early insect,

And the quivering of the water in the overflowing bird bath during a light rain (taken from my open front door so that I wasn’t out in the rain).

Photographs through my Office Window – March 2017

I travelled enough during March that I missed seeing some birds that visited our backyard. I did see a Northern Flicker that seemed very interested in the area where a large branch was torn from a forest tree behind our house…probably insects there.

The crows come to inspect the debris in the gutter of our neighbor’s house. There are plenty of tulip poplar seeds still flying from the trees.

The blue jays are frequent visitors. This one is fluffed against the cold.

The juncos are still around and chase other birds away from our feeder. They’ll be leaving to head north soon. This one was in the maple tree…on a cold day.

The doves were around to get a drink of water from our heated bird bath…this one flue up to the roof of our covered deck afterward.

The most exciting visitor was the pileated woodpecker. My husband saw the bird first – in our sycamore…and then it flew to a pine. It inspected all the pots on a neighbor’s deck then flew to the roof of our covered deck.

I managed to photograph a squirrel in the sycamore just before it made the leap to our deck. It gets a drink at the heated bird bath and sometimes tries to get seed from our feeder (but has not succeeded in dumping the feeder yet!).

And then there was the landscape pictures of our backyard: highlighted tracks (human) through the snow and

The forest on a foggy day (yesterday).

Two Big Trees

Last week on a misty morning, I heard the noise of chain saws and heavy equipment coming from the back of a neighbor’s house. By the time I got out on my deck to look, one of the uppermost branches had be cut off and was being lowered to the ground. It was a very tall tulip poplar that was at the edge of the forest and evidently had moved around a lot during the last wind storm – enough to cause the homeowner to decide it need to come down before it fell on the house.

I went upstairs to my office to get a better vantage point. Yes – there is a reflection that gets in the right side of the images…but I decided to document the process from my office. The crew had a truck with a tall boom. A person was on the controls for the truck and a person was up in the tree….and another man went up to attach ropes to the next branch to be cut so that it could be lowered slowly to the ground.

Another big branch – being lowered to the ground.

And the person going up to attach the rope to the next branch (he looked like he enjoyed the job!).

The branch comes down. Notice the rope that is holding it up…and will allow for it to be gently lowered to the pile.

And now the big trunk begins to come down. Note that the tree is not hollow or rotten. Tulip poplars are notorious for toppling in strong winds…and evidently they don’t have to be sickly for it to happen.

And then I realized that they were cutting down two trees instead of one. Here is the last cut to take the second tree down and

The big trunk being gently lifted to added to the pile.

Then it was all about clean up. It took about 7 hours of work for the crew to get the 2 trees down (and one branch that was rotting from another tree) and everything cleaned up.

I felt depressed that two trees at the edge of our forest were gone…but no one wants a tree to fall on their house.

A Little March Snow

I’d taken pictures for a second post about signs of spring in our yard….but then I woke up to snow! I got a picture at first light since I was sure it would melt away quickly. There were already deer tracks through our back yard.

As it got a little lighter, the snow on the pines and back into the forest gave the scene from my office window a new look.

There was a robin that kept moving around in the red maple that is blooming.

The tulip poplar seed pods from last summer are mostly empty of seeds at this point; they make a little basket for snow accumulation.

The miniature daffodils in the front yard are blooming and they caught the snow as well. They handle it better than the larger and taller flowers that sometimes bend to the ground with heavy snow. These daffodils are progeny of bulbs that my mother-in-law bought for us over 25 years ago and I’m always thrilled that they are so durable through the snow.

Disappointment at Conowingo

The weather was a little warmer than usual when we made our trek to Conowingo last week. The weather turned out to be the best part. The eagles must have finished their breakfast by the time we got there and were not very active; this was the best picture I got – from all the way across the river. You can tell that those rocks are favorite perches (all the ‘white’).

The black vultures were not very photogenic either. The big grouping that usually eyeballs cars going over the dam from a fence only numbered three birds. The others must have been out and about – maybe at some substantial carrion site.

At first I thought the cormorants would redeem the trip. There were at least two of them and they were within photographic range. But then I realized that the reason they were staying in one location was a tangled (and trashed) fishing lure rather than a fish (you can see it (light green) and the line that evidently snagged it to the rocky bottom in the middle picture below).

There were a few gulls about. I tried taking pictures of them as they landed or flew up from the water. The one with the orange spot on the bill is a Herring Gull. The other one could be a Ring-billed Gull since the beak looks like it has black instead of orange toward the end.

There were two Canadian Geese in the shallows on the other side of the dam abutment – almost out of camera range.

The same was true for a flock of pigeons. They usual are on the dam structure but they must have been startled by something because a large number left the dam at the same time and moved to the rocks.

On a botanical note – the Princess tree buds still look the same as they did last time we were at Conowingo. The buds on the tulip poplars (at the end of the twigs) seem to be getting larger.

On the way home, I took a picture of the mounds of salt along I-95 near the tunnel (through a dirty window). Generally the salt piles are significantly reduced by this time of year….but not this season. I wonder what will happen to it since the salt storage buildings are probably already full.

Zooming – February 2017

As I was creating the zoomed images into collages, I was drawn to color in my February collection of photographs.

• Witch Hazel
• Peacock feathers
• Blue jays
• Flickers
• Skunk cabbage
• The light blue of dove eyelids
• Sunflowers

Enjoy the zoomed images from February!