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.

Will the Real Marsh Marigold Please Stand Up--a Confusion of Yellows

A lot of people call this flower "marsh marigold". It's not. Notice the leaves stay close to the ground, and the small flowers have many petals. This plant is actually Lesser Celandine, a pretty but highly invasive exotic plant that will spread across lawns and coat floodplains in what looks like green pavement. I found this one specimen in my yard, and because there was only one, I was able to dig it up, hopefully before any seeds were produced, put it in a plastic bag, and threw it in the trash, not the compost.

(Update: Most homeowners don't notice lesser celandine, also called fig buttercup or Ficaria verna, until there are too many to dig. Digging also requires getting every last tuber in the roots. Oftentimes, the only practical option is to use a targeted dose of herbicide. Though herbicides are demonized due to their overuse in agriculture, the selective use of low-toxicity herbicides is an important part of invasive species control, just as low-toxicity medicines are selectively used in medicine. I use a 2% wetland-safe version of glyphosate, which can be bought from companies other than Monsanto.)

The real marsh marigold, shown here, is a native with five-petaled flowers, stands more upright, and is so rare that I've only seen it growing wild once in my life. These particular plants are in my backyard, purchased from Pinelands Nursery in Columbus, NJ. I also planted some at the Princeton High School Ecolab Wetland that are in full bloom right now.

The flower and leaf of marsh marigold (Caltha palustris) are on the left, with lesser celandaine (Ranunculus ficaria) on the right.

Dandelions blooming now can make it harder to tell if you have lesser celandine in your yard.

Adding to the confusion of yellow this time of year is the Celandine Poppy (Stylophorum diphyllum), a native in the poppy family that was common in the University of Michigan arboretum, but seldom seen elsewhere. A friend in Princeton gave me some, and it has seeded into the flower bed of my backyard. Like the marsh marigold, its rareness in the field bears no relation to its willingness to grow when planted in the backyard.

Fill-a-Pot Sunchokes

Yet again I forgot to harvest the sunchokes sooner, but even though they've sprouted they seem worth the harvest.

And what a harvest it is. Because this beautiful, ten foot high native sunflower with tasty tubers spreads underground so aggressively, I planted it last year in large plastic tubs. The plants were unfazed by the confinement, and produced an incredible quantity of tubers,

which when separated from the dirt and hosed off still filled the tub a third full.

Some of the harvest was immediately sliced up, coated with olive oil, and roasted on a grill, garnering lots of positive response at the dinner table.

What started as two tubers--bought at the Whole Earth Center, planted in the tub and placed in a sunny spot--turned into a harvest of 75 tubers that will keep well in the frig. They can be eaten raw, with or without the skin, or cooked in various ways. Recipes are easy to find on the web.

Limb Shadow

Even deciduous trees cast significant shade in the winter, as this red oak shadow shows.

Kentucky Coffee trees--whose pods of coffee bean-sized seeds may have once catered to the culinary needs of now extinct megafauna--have a slimmer profile, due to their strategy of manufacturing very large leaves (3 feet long and 2 feet wide) rather than the more normal approach of growing lots of fine twigs to hold smaller leaves.

This species also loses its leaves sooner in the fall, and buds out later in the spring (in the photo, the Norway Maple on the left has already started to leaf out). The combination of this coarse twig structure and extended period of nakedness (thus the Latin name, Gymnocladus) make it a good candidate for planting on the south side of houses that use passive solar heating.

Giving Names to Clouds of Color

Spring can be seen as a slow-motion version of the Santa Claus-shaped lights a neighbor had this past December, which changed color every few seconds, cycling through seven or eight colors before beginning again. Each kind of plant advertises itself through color for a week or two before stepping back into the obscurity of the green chorus. This Magnolia (presumably "x soulangeana") at Westminster Choir College is busy proclaiming MAGNOLIA!! in the full-throated fashion of an operatic voice drifting across the lawn from a nearby practice room.

Other major color-producers in the area are this trio of forsythia, flowering quince and some exotic cherry.

Forsythia gets a bad rap sometimes, but at least it doesn't invade natural areas, and it can be more or less graceful according to how it is trimmed. I like the way it gives the two bins in this "Recycling Gothic" photo a sense of place.

More of an enjoyable challenge for naming, often while driving or biking through town, are the comparatively subtle clouds of color that drift through the spring season--early stirrings in a long dormant forest. Garlands of weeping willow weep for the downed trees in the hidden valley just up from Faculty Road.

Reminding all of their ongoing success at sprouting up in backyards, Norway maples make clouds of pea-green,

as if spring rains had caused the ample color of the crossing guards' new jackets to leach  into nearby trees.

Other clouds of subtle color--spicebush's yellow, red maple's red--greet us in spring with a pleasing and missed familiarity, like the schoolkid parents first met at daily elementary school pickups, but now seen only at an occasional middle school concert.

Even a lawn offers clouds of color, in this case a highly edible cloud of violet (Viola sp.) flowers.

Ash Trees In and Around Mexico City

Ash trees deserve more respect. Around Princeton, one sees so many unimpressive ones growing in crowded, second growth woods that it's easy to forget that they can rival the size of the largest oaks and tulip poplars. Princeton has a few impressive specimens, on campus and in front of the Nassau Club.

In the vicinity of Mexico City (this being a post that lingered in the draft folder after our family trip down there last month), the Mexican ash tree (Fraxinus uhdei) doesn't appear to have much competition from other stately species. Whether towering over a plaza in front of a church in Coyoacan,

or seeming to erupt out of a sea of concrete, they seem unfazed by the tread of humanity.

If the canopy is too far up to confirm their identity, there are usually some sprouts from the base showing the characteristic compound leaves and opposite branching.

In better cared for neighborhoods, the base of the trunks get adorned with Schefleras and other plants we otherwise encounter only in living rooms and atriums.

This one's shade was particularly appreciated as a place to rest, part way up the mountain that was at one time the largest pyramid in America, in Cholula, near Mexico City.

Near Cholula is a town called Tonantzintla, where I took the kids in search of the hillside where I spent a few treasured days as a boy, riding burros with my brother during one of my father's observing runs. The telescope is still there, though not much used due to the light pollution from Puebla, and I think this must be what's left of the hillside.

The observatory grounds protect more than a vestige of my childhood world. Under these trees we were surprised by a variety of birdsongs heard nowhere else on our trip. In the photo, a resident mourning dove takes flight.

Metaphor Camp

Recent rains swelled our backyard miniponds, making a mini-heaven for the resident duck brigade. During the dry spell, they had wandered about the dessicated landscape as if transported to the moon. That's Daisy (a Pekin), Molly (a runner duck), Ronnie and Swee' Pea (male and female mallards).

Sometime I would like to conduct a Metaphor summer camp, in which the happy campers sit on the fence inbetween balancing acts and periods of toeing the line. They will learn what it really feels like to have a long row to hoe, or to herd cats, or, lacking cats in sufficient number, then how to save nine by stitching in time.

If they balk, then the resident fowl can show them how to take to a task like ducks to water, and shed life's setbacks like water off a duck's back.

And when they've thoroughly mastered their metaphors, they will leave camp at the end of the week

with their ducks all in a row.

Fragrant Honeysuckle (Lonicera fragrantissima)

One shrub that speaks louder through its fragrance than its bloom is fragrant (or "winter") honeysuckle. Unlike other honeysuckle shrubs from Asia, which bloom later, I've never seen this one spread into natural areas.

The fragrance is such that a large shrub in full bloom can stop you in your tracks from 50 feet away. If you've never seen it, ask the local bumblebees and honeybees if one's growing in your neighborhood, or keep an eye out for small white flowers, and follow your nose.

A row of them grows along the nature trail loop next to the towpath, west of Harrison Street.

Lawn Blotch

As master golfers stride the perfectly groomed grounds of Augusta National this weekend, showing their mastery over a landscape that's kept in a perpetual state of arrested development, let us glance out the window for a moment at the less applauded realities of the suburban lawn. In the Masters tournament, only the hazards--the trees and shrubs--are allowed to reach maturity. For the golfer, any encounter with interesting plants is a sign of trouble. And in the yard, the main threat to calm conformity is the plant that seeks to lead a full life, by flowering and maturing its seed. (Full disclosure: I lettered in golf in high school, spent part of a summer mowing fairways, and probably developed a keen eye for plants while searching for lost balls in the nearby corn fields and the very rough rough of our neighborhood's rough-hewn golf course.)

The grasslike imposter dotting the lawn in the first photo is Star of Bethlehem, which will later have a pretty white flower but tends to spread. It's in the lily family, is native to eastern Europe and the Middle East, and spreads to natural areas as well as across lawns.

Here's wild garlic, showing vertical aspirations far beyond the surrounding grass.

Blooming now, along with the dandelions, is Lesser Celandine. It shows up as one or two plants in a yard, then becomes more numerous each year until much of the lawn is displaced. Here's a new infestation, with maybe five plants or so. It would be easy at this point to dig it up, put the diggings in the trash (not the compost bin, where it will then be spread elsewhere), and avoid the takeover. But most people are seduced by its flowers when it first shows up, and don't grow alarmed by its aggressiveness until it's already become established.

Here's a more advanced example. You can type lesser celandine in the search box at the top of this webpage to see examples of it forming a green pavement in lowlands, apparently of no use to wildlife.

A related plant is Winter Aconite, which has dissected leaves and blooms much earlier in the spring. It spreads underground, but I've never seen it spread across lawns or invade natural areas. Both are non-native spring ephemerals that will turn brown in early summer.

Another spreader is Bermuda grass, which may originally have come from northern Africa and thereabouts. The photo contrasts Bermuda grass, which is a "warm season" grass that is still brown this time of year, with the "cool season" grasses such as fescue and ryegrass that are green in cool weather but suffer in the heat of summer. The owner of this lawn must have seeded a patch with Bermuda grass rather than the original cool season grasses.

The rhizomes/stolons/roots of Bermuda grass are so strong that they will spread into and break up asphalt over time. It is a very aggressive grass and hard to weed out of other plantings if it invades flower beds or natural areas.

This blotch-on-blotch effect of wild garlic sprouting up in Bermuda grass actually makes a nice contrast, though I'm not sure anyone would try to do it intentionally.

A modest proposal: One way to get rid of lawn blotch is to get rid of the lawn.

A Walk in Gulick Park

Thirty kids and adults, plus a dog or two, gathered on a beautiful spring afternoon this past Sunday for a walk through Gulick Park, a little known nature preserve in a part of Princeton out 27 that may once have been thought of as Kingston. The loop trail starts at the eastern deadend of Terhune Road, a road that changes name as it approaches Snowden Lane, then becomes a bike path before re-emerging as Terhune Road again over near Dodds Lane.

We found tadpoles in that there pond, which reportedly holds some water even in the drier depths of summer.

The paths through this lowland woods can be muddy after a rain, but had dried up nicely in preparation for our walk.

Some appeared skeptical as I, in my role as naturalist for the walk, demonstrated the craned-neck approach to identifying red maples, pointing towards their tiny red flowers high overhead. Other tree species spoke their names through their bark--the black "potato chip" bark of black cherry trees, the mottled, army fatigue bark of sycamores--or the downward slant of the many pin oaks' lower branches. The numerous eastern red cedars--the first trees to cast shade in the abandoned agricultural fields decades back--now hang on in the shade of the higher, deciduous trees that have since grown around them. A scattering of evergreen American hollies offered patches of green in a sea of winter's browns and grays.

Just to prove I wasn't pointing at phantoms, here's a closeup of the red maple flowers that give the high canopy of lowland woods a red tinge this time of year.

Ed Simon, who leads volunteer efforts to maintain the trails (no easy task given the tree-toppling storms of recent years), told stories of the park's past and present. Though he and others have removed most of the barbed wire from the woods, a few remnants still tell of a time when the Gulicks had a massive bull that would occasionally escape into the neighborhood.

The video camera on the right in the photo is being held by Kurt Tazelaar. He and Sally Curtis have been documenting many environmental events in town.

There was the requisite stream crossing to test our balance, beyond which we came upon the field of Christmas trees. It was interesting to hear that many of the spruce trees found in Princeton's parks, including those behind my house in Potts Park, got their start in this field. I pointed out the dried remains of purple-top grasses in the field, and the graceful broomsedge (actually a grass) that gives the field an attractive bronze hue.

Beyond this high fence is the land still owned by the Gulicks, whose family ownership extends back to Revolutionary War days. A part of their house facing Route 27 is said to extend back to the 1600s, when it served as an inn conveniently located halfway between Philadelphia and New York. Each 50 mile stretch was a days ride on horseback.

Near the fence was an impressive pile of firewood, which the Gulicks apparently sell as a means of satisfying the requirements of their farm easement.

Along the trails, where the sun gets in, are some fine stands of blackberry, with its ribbed stems, and wineberry, a non-native cane with fuzzy purplish stems that bear raspberry-like fruit. A number of hikers expressed interest in returning in summer for the harvest.

The walk was made possible through the organizational energies of Nicole Bergman. There's talk of an upcoming workday to clear some of the trails still blocked by fallen trees.