Another Wishing (the earth) Well in the Neighborhood

Posts on a blog and letters to the editor are released into the community to an uncertain fate. Will they lodge in anyone's mind, to any effect? Irrefutable evidence came last weekend when Peter and Suzanne, neighbors around the corner, stopped by to ask about the Wishing (the earth) Well placed in our front yard next to the sidewalk. What to do with the oak leaves, which seem not to decompose at all when left on the ground. I explained the logic of the dual purpose leaf corral--a circle within a circle, with the inner circle being a central, critter-proof cylinder into which food scraps can be put, disguised by the surrounding leaves.

Peter thought about what fencing he had left over from other projects, went to the local hardware to buy stakes, and later the same day sent me a photo of their new leaf corral next to the back fence. Instead of wire fencing for the leaf-containing outer ring, it uses plastic, which is probably cheaper and appears to hold its shape just fine. Given how ideas tend to incubate for long periods, this quick turn around, from idea to reality in a couple hours, was truly refreshing.

Another neat feature in Peter and Suzanne's yard is a mini minipond, fed by sump pump water that is pumped into the small cisterns next to the house, then gravity fed to the little pond. A pink flamingo stands guard, perhaps to intimidate any great blue heron that might stop by. The screens are there to catch any heavy snow we might get this winter, and they may help discourage the raccoons and fox from stealing goldfish.

With the solar panels mounted on their roof, that means they're utilizing the sun that shines on their house, the sump pump water that comes from underground, and the leaves that fall from the trees. It all makes life, and the yard, a lot more interesting.

Ducklings Coming?

One reason my younger daughter was eager to get home from a trip has to do with a certain female mallard named Swee' Pea, who decided a couple weeks ago that it was a good time to make a nest in the chicken/duck coop. She sits there for long periods, taking periodic breaks to get water and food. The contents of the nest are kept warm during these breaks by a blanket of down.

Before leaving, my daughter shined a light through one of the eggs and detected motion in what looked like a reddish cloud in the egg. She left clear instructions, just in case our friends who took care of the ducks while we were gone didn't notice the well-disguised nest.

"DO NOT DISTURB ME AND MY EGGS"

The sign clearly worked, because Swee' Pea and eggs were safe and sound when we returned. At this point, the ducklings are moving about in the eggs, their motions detectable by 13 year olds but not yet by adults. Though this is largely a take-things-as-they-come approach to having birds in the backyards, there are questions to ask and decisions to be made. If we actually do end up with ducklings, do we separate them from Swee' Pea and raise them in a bathtub in the house? Or do we separate off a portion of the coop for her to raise them? How will the other birds behave around the ducklings? Will the male, Ronnie, play any role? I'm interested to see if the mother will promptly march the newborns off to the nearest minipond, to get acquainted with the joys of water.

An Exhibit of Nature's Etchings

(Preface: 2018 was a special winter in our backyard, due to the remarkable patterns and rich colors that appeared in our "fillable, spillable" minipond.) 

Our backyard artist in residence program has been going very well this winter. The artist, content to remain outdoors without lodging, has been working long hours, often overnight and in freezing temperatures, using nothing more than rainwater and a few leaves to achieve remarkable effects.

I did my best to capture the work, and give it adequate framing.

Asked how she achieved her unusual effects, and if these etchings, so different from her past works, represented a new direction in her art, she shrugged and said nothing,

then showed me a composition with etchings superimposed on what appeared to be a large bubble.

Some were more subtle than others, relying on rich undertones.

Wondering if the etching style was unique to the fillable-spillable miniponds that catch rainwater from the roof, I went to the other miniponds in the yard, created years back by digging down into dense clay. Here there were etchings as well, in a multimedia context using leaves.

Impressed, I suggested we host an exhibition, but there was no time to plan, or send out invitations. Nature, ever the restless artist, had already moved on, with rain and then snow in the forecast for overnight.

When Snowmen Take Over the World

When snowmen take over the world, they will lounge comfortably on the patio in snow-cushioned chairs, munching on snowburgers.

Having had their fill, they will venture out to mend snowfences,

practice up for the next game of snowlax,

take a dip in the snow-lined minipond, ever so briefly so as not to melt,

and, when there is sno more for a snowman to do, take a snooze and dream of snowstorms to come.

Ducks and Rain

The resident ducks have been talking about the great weather lately. While the human contingent complains of clouds and gloom, the ducks have been thriving in the backyard wetland paradise born of cool, rainy days.

The lawn is much more interesting when it's wet, as they probe with their broad beaks, perhaps filtering out choice bits of microflora and fauna.

They've voted their approval of a third, newly dug minipond, located in the "headwaters" of the backyard stream to catch runoff from the neighbor's yard. The dense clay keeps it filled for days, without a liner.

The mud at the edge of one of the older miniponds also appears to hold morsels of nutrition, unless they're just in to geophagy.

Though there may be some sophisticated filtering going on, their twin interests in mud and water make for a messier coop. It's necessary to change out the water in the coop more often than with chickens alone, as the ducks somehow manage to transfer dirt into the water tray.

At the same time, they spend considerable time keeping themselves clean. The beak that serves to explore mud also is used to toss water onto their backs as they bathe, at ease in their watery world bounded by Carex sedges and deertongue grass.

Note: How the ducks will affect our mosquito suppression techniques awaits to be seen. In the past, some combination of Mosquito Dunks and goldfish, along with natural predators like water striders, have kept mosquitoes from populating the ponds. The ducks' presence may affect the ability of water striders and goldfish to do their work. There's a lot of vigilance that comes with the pleasure of having a new creature feature in the backyard.

A Distinguished Backyard Thief

A typical backyard scene on an atypically warm December day. But wait what is that speck of gray near one of the mini-ponds?


I happened to look out the back window today just as a great blue heron swooped in to take a close look at my water features. After scrutinizing one for awhile, and finding it lacking in edible objects, the big bird strolled over to the other minipond and almost immediately plunged its long neck into the water. Its bill flashed orange as it emerged with lunch, in the form of the one goldfish it hadn't managed to get on its last observed visit two years prior.


Looks like it's time for a restocking program.

How To Recycle a Snapping Turtle

Will they take this curbside? Saturday, a few hours before the baby owl plopped down into our garden from above, our dog was heard barking persistently near the neighbor's fence. I thought it must be someone's cat or dog that had roused Leo to such passion, but no. The snapping turtle that had been showing up in our minipond periodically over the last couple years (see April 22 post) had apparently decided to move on up the valley and got stymied by the fence.

We decided to help it on its way, and so coaxed it into a recycling bin. Mr. Turtle headed first to the science teacher at Little Brook, who promised to release it the next day into a local waterway after a day's service in show and tell.

This here's turtle country! The view is downstream, where once a tributary of Harry's Brook flowed, before it got buried beneath houses. The largish snapping turtle had been making do with a pond that could get as small as three feet across and two feet deep in a summer drought.

Ducks in Snow

We didn't have tracks like these in the backyard last winter. What could they be?

No, not the robins, who paid a visit to the water tray the day before.

Not the wild turkey that surprised us with a visit last year.

Here they are. Not snowy owls or snowy egrets, but the great snow ducks of the notsonorth, heading for ...

minipond heaven, or at least haven, courtesy of the recent rains.

The ducks show far more courage than their coopmates, who are playing chicken in the warmest corner they can find.

A Thousand-Eyed Grackle

With the temperature reaching 74 on February 25, I looked out our back picture window to see that our usually peaceful backyard had come alive with motion. The lawn was astir with the hyper black-winged commotion of hundreds of grackles. Their iridescent necks flashed blues, greens and purples as each probed the ground for food, with not a second to lose. Five or six stalked about on the edge of the fillable-spillable minipond, angling for a sip of water. I grabbed a camera and crept towards the window, eager to document their spectacular numbers and energy. But even my barely perceptible movements were caught by one of a thousand eyes, and off they went in a flash, a winged unison where a moment before each had been absorbed in its own pursuit of food and water. They crowded the high branches of a nearby pin oak while somehow collectively plotting their next move. Had I seen 500 birds? Or had it been one bird with 500 mouths and 1000 wings?

Miniponds as Mosquito Traps

If you happen to have a small pond in your yard, without any fish to gobble up the mosquito larvae, it's time to do some low-calorie dunking of donuts. The active ingredient in these "mosquito dunks" is BTI, short for Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis, a natural bacteria that kills mosquito larvae that ingest it. You break off a chunk of the donut, according to the size of the pond, and the donut slowly releases the biological control into the standing water. They are available at local hardware stores, and are best applied to water before the mosquitoes show up, so the active ingredient has time to disperse into the water.

Though people tend to think any standing water breeds mosquitoes, a backyard minipond with this BTI applied essentially becomes a mosquito "trap", sabotaging the breeding efforts of whatever female mosquitoes visit the pond to lay eggs. This occurred to me about fifteen years ago, and I heard a similar contention expressed when I happened upon the radio program "You Bet Your Garden" a few weeks back.

There are other natural predators of mosquito larvae, such as predatory dragonfly larvae, water striders, and a couple types of soil fungi. These various controls may or may not be present, making for a lot of variation in which ponds will breed mosquitos.

The package gives the green light for putting these in animal watering troughs, which I'm taking to mean they're okay for our ducks' habitat. Dunking is recommended once every month or so during the growing season.

Chickens and Wildlife

Introduce poultry into your backyard, and you may find yourself starting to scan the treeline with something beyond mild curiosity. Chickens and ducks are just about the most edible pets you could ever own, as the local wildlife are well aware. Predators can come by land or by air, by night or by day.

Vigilance is key, as this Pekin duck well knows. Any time I see it tilt its head sideways, the better to train a keen eye on the sky above, I will follow its glance upward to find a hawk, vulture or plane passing over.

When our 12 year old finally talked us into getting chickens, and then ducks, I wondered how all the undomesticated nature we'd been cultivating in the backyard would react. Would the poultry intimidate the mourning doves that had hung out next to the minipond at various hours? Would the chickens chow down on beneficial insects as well as the ticks?

Though having these birds in the backyard may be reducing visits by wild birds, their presence has heightened our awareness of wildlife in other ways. Recently, noticing the Pekin duck training an eye skyward, we looked up to see the tiny speck of a hawk hovering high above. Suddenly, the hawk folded its wings and began a slanted, accelerating straight-line dive. As with lightening, we were relieved to see we weren't the targets. It disappeared into the trees several blocks over. None of this we would have seen if not for the duck's signal.

By Night
A year ago, we started with four chickens, and now have two. The first was lost during the one and only night we forgot to close them in the coop. It was very traumatic for my daughter, who had named all four and been giving them loving care. But she worked through the trauma and the sense of responsibility, and the next day was able to channel it into making a beautiful grave with the shape of a chicken fashioned out of bits of rock.

Raccoon or Fisher?
We thought a raccoon had likely done the deed, in part because I found the head of the chicken far from the body. But in ten years I've only seen one wayward raccoon in our yard, and my neighbor reported she had seen something that night that she thought moved more like a fisher than a raccoon. I associate fishers with large tracts of north woods, but an internet search yielded news of their return to New Jersey. They are large members of the weasel family and one of the few predators smart and agile enough to take on porcupines. Princeton's animal control officer, however, offered no encouragement to this speculation that fishers might be afoot in the area.

By Day
Having lost a chicken in the night, we thought they'd still be safe if allowed to run free in the yard by day. This illusion was shattered late in the fall, when lack of foliage had made the yard more exposed, by a Coopers hawk in a mid-afternoon attack. That, too, was traumatic, all the more so because it seemed to sentence the remaining chickens to perpetual confinement in the coop and a small fenced-in run. It didn't help to find a big red-tailed hawk perched fifteen feet above the coop one morning, patiently awaiting breakfast. Word had clearly gotten out.

Since then, however, we've slowly relaxed our vigilance and shifted back to letting them out during the day. A friend with chickens in Kingston said he decided that the happiness of his chickens exploring the yard is worth the risk of an attack, and he's never lost a chicken that way. We've gravitated towards that philosophy, despite an unnerving visit one day from a coopers hawk that brazenly perched on our fence, just forty feet from where we stood, to check out the scene. It flew away before I could take a photo, and hasn't come back.

A couple fish crows also took an interest for a day or two, lingering in the trees above, conversing, trying to make sense of our backyard poultry scene, seeming to look for an angle that would benefit them. Fish crows are the sort of crow that says "uh-uh" all summer, as if telling you that whatever idea you just had is a bunch of hooey.

A week later, still wishing for a photo of a Coopers Hawk, I saw one land on the Westminster Choir College driveway.

It was carrying a small bird, and posed long enough on the pavement for a bit of point-and-shoot documentation,

before flying off in the direction of the crossing guard.

By chance this photo caught the shift in perspective that comes from having chickens, from the urban environmentalist's cultivation and observation of a benign nature to more of a rural farmer's awareness of nature as both magnificent and threatening.

Communal Bath for Robins

Flocks of robins have been appreciating the backyard minipond the last couple days, arriving in flocks of 20 or so to splash in the shallow water. Their frenzied head-dipping is reminiscent of the movement of the birds on this toy, and wooden birds are much more cooperative in front of a camera.

While half of the flock is in the water, the other half remains perched in the overhanging branches, to keep a keen eye or two out for any approaching photographers. The old apple tree next to the pond, half of its branches dead, serves this function well. The human inclination is to trim trees up and remove all the dead branches, but the birds make it clear they like lots of perches of varied heights--the better to scope out the ground before dropping in.

Carnegie Ice Before the Snow

Though there are cross-over recreationists who love both skating and skiing, you know you're in the skating camp if an approaching snowstorm brings wistful thoughts of all that gorgeous Carnegie Lake ice about to get covered up.

It wasn't thick enough to skate on, but most of the lake was covered with a glistening smooth initial layer. The winter's brief history, about to be buried under two feet of snow, could be read in the rough ice that got blown into a southeast corner, on the left in the photo.

It told stories of how frozen waves formed, seeming to lap at the hibiscus-lined shore, like a Seward Johnson sculpture,

and of water's restless shifting from solid to liquid and back again, that gathered these chunks together for one in winter's long progression of still-lifes.

Our backyard minipond caught some runoff to make a miniature version of Carnegie Lake, with similar patterns of dark and light ice.

Nice to have H2O as the artist-in-residence in the backyard, with a new snow exhibit about to open, up and down the east coast.

To Walk a Duck

On January 25, the Princeton Public Library's Environmental Film Festival featured a DUCKumentary with spectacular footage of duck behavior, including a family of wood ducks as they travel through the seasons. 

Related to the above, ducks made a surprise entry into our lives this past fall, when our younger daughter began asking to get ducklings. We made what seemed like compelling arguments against. Winters are cold, ducks are messy, and then there's the question of longterm care. To all these concerns she offered answers gleaned from the internet. She broke down our resistance with her persistence, passion, and finally a sophisticated powerpoint presentation that seemed to come out of nowhere.

Youtube's surprisingly rich offering of poultry videos may also have inspired the request to take one of the ducks, which had grown quickly after emerging from the box they arrived in from California, on a nature walk.

This fleet-footed "runner duck" had no problem keeping up with us, and appreciated the occasional puddle we encountered in Herrontown Woods. I didn't even try to teach it the subtleties of winter-time tree identification. It seemed content just to explore on its own.

Happiness is a duck in the lap and a cell phone in the hand.

Despite having scaled the Princeton Ridge and scurried under and over countless fallen trees, the runner duck led the way back past the Veblen farmstead towards our car. Molly, as this runner duck is called, can be described as liking to take long walks in the woods, frolic in the backyard minipond when it's not frozen, and is considering a career in egg laying. Hopefully we didn't violate any leash laws.