Photo by D. Sillman
Audio – spring in the neighborhood
Walking around our neighborhood, Deborah and I have been seeing lots of very familiar signs of spring! Daffodils are blooming (although there are nowhere near as many as we used to see back in Pennsylvania), and there is a single red maple just down the block that is covered with bright red flowers. That maple reminds us of the long, steep hillsides in Pennsylvania that turned red in the spring from the flowers on the incredibly abundant red maples that grew there!
Only one yard in our neighborhood has any hyacinths blooming, but their hyacinth bed is glorious with a wide array of colors. The “hyacinth house” also is also the house on the block with the most abundant daffodils and several “TBA” shoots coming up in a set of very well-tended, rock bordered flower beds. They also have a greenhouse in their backyard! On our morning dog walk, we had a very brief chat with the owner/gardener of this house. He indicated that some later blooming daffodils are going to have flowers the size of volley balls! Izzy was barking too loudly at the gentlemen to continue the conversation, but we’ll have to keep an eye on this yard!
Alyssum. Photo by D. Sillman
Yard hedges (privet?) up and down the street are starting to leaf out, and great clumps of basket-of-gold (Alyssum (or, maybe, to be taxonomically up to date, Aurinia) are growing and starting to flower. Henbit (which looks a lot like and is closely related to deadnettle (it is sometimes called “henbit deadnettle”)) is also blooming. Privet, basket-of-gold and henbit are all exotic, invasive plants, although the basket-of-gold and henbit (along with all of the other deadnettle species) are recognized as important, early
Henbit. Photo by D. Sillman
spring pollen and nectar sources! That all three of these plants are growing here in our arid environment almost as robustly as they were back in very wet Pennsylvania is reflective of their physiological tenacity and ability to adapt to a wide range of conditions.
Dandelions. Photo by D. Sillman
Dandelions are also blooming on the edges of many lawns. Many would consider this to be bad news, but I have always liked these little yellow flowers (although they are also an exotic species, they are not considered to be invasive)! We haven’t seen any colt’s foot (another familiar exotic species) in bloom, though. Colt’s foot, with its dandelion-like flower, is one of the earliest flowering spring plants and was one of our important “signs of spring” back in Pennsylvania. One patch of dandelions that I thought was colt’s foot turned out to have tiny, but very dandelion-like, leaves tucked in under the flowers (colt’s foot produces its flowers before it grows its eponymous, “hoof-shaped” leaves). Also, one of the big blasts of yellow of the Pennsylvania spring is nowhere to be seen here in Northern Colorado: we haven’t seen any forsythia in the neighborhood or out on the local trails!
Photo by D. Sillman
There are more and more robins hopping around on the lawns up and down the street. They seem to seek out the green patches of lawn to explore for earthworms. Most of the yards are still winter brown, but a few have had sufficient snow melt to refresh the dormant grasses. A couple of our more insane neighbors have even started watering their lawns! They must hate small, monthly water bills, or maybe they are eager to start mowing again! I saw one robin pull a long, nightcrawler out of a green patch in my back yard! I was very surprised to see an earthworm that large out in that dry soil! I am making sure that my birdbath is full of fresh water. The robins hop up on it for quick drinks as they pass through the yard.
Collared doves have been cooing and shrieking from their perches atop the utility poles, and northern flickers are still calling from and banging away on a number of roofs and chimney guards up and down the street. There have also been flocks of Brewer’s blackbirds mostly keeping to the more distant trees at the edge of the neighborhood. Yesterday on our morning walk, we noticed two piles of “blackbird food” (a pile of small-kibble dog food and a pile of blueberries) in the yard of the house that just happens to have the tree full of blackbirds! There are also small clusters of blue jays (five or six individuals) raising great noises from trees all up and down the street. The other morning a group of blue jays were exceptionally loud and agitated. As I watched them a northern harrier swooped over the top of their tree. The jays flew off after her making even a greater din than before.
Photo by D. Sillman
A few days ago, I was working in the front yard (planting my new yuccas and prickly pear cactuses) and returned to the garage for another pair of work gloves (cactus needles!!). When I turned to go back out to the driveway, a small rabbit (the dwarf form of the eastern cottontail that I have written about before) was sitting on the driveway right at the edge of the garage door. He was just looking at me! I said “hello” and we passed a pleasant minute or so just staring at each other (rabbits don’t say very much). He had probably been checking out the new plantings in the yard in order to plan his spring/summer dinner menus. Our next door neighbor told me that there used to be rabbits everywhere on the block, but then the great horned owl moved in and thinned them out considerably. I hope that the great horned owl keeps an eye (or two) on my garden this summer!
The chickadees and the red-breasted nuthatches have been flying up to my windows to peck at the window frames and at the siding of the house. Every once and a while they scare up a sluggish white butterfly or house fly that had been overwintering in one of the surface crevices. At least the northern flickers, who are probably looking for this same insect prey up on my neighbor’s roof, aren’t banging away on my outside walls! The chickadees and nuthatches are very quiet when they hunt!
Photo by D. Sillman
The fox squirrels have been enjoying my black oil sunflower seeds all fall and winter. There are now three “regulars” who visit our backyard and the feeder every day. Occasionally a fourth shows up, but the other three act very aggressively toward him and chase him away. One thing I have noticed about these fox squirrels, in great contrast to the gray squirrels that I fed so luxuriously back in Pennsylvania, is that these Colorado squirrels don’t get up into the birdbath to get drinks of water! The Pennsylvania squirrels were very frequent birdbath users, and, sometimes, piled into the dish of the bath in such numbers that they toppled the entire apparatus over!
I wondered if the fox squirrels are too large and heavy to make the jump up into the birdbath, or if they are so adapted to the dry conditions here on the plains that they just don’t drink liquid water. Many desert mammals generate their own water from the metabolism of dietary carbohydrates, proteins and lipids. Could these fat, clumsy fox squirrels be “desert adapted?”
A few days ago, though, after a sustained and very rare rain shower, I watched two of the backyard squirrels climb out the edge of my neighbor’s flat-roofed garage and dunk their heads into the clogged gutter. They drank deeply and stayed there for quite a while taking their fill of the gutter water. Maybe I should throw some pine needles and leaves in my birdbath to make its water more attractive to them?
Happy Spring!!
.