Bird Boxes

Another guest post from Tom today…

Having chickens and compost in our suburban setting has put us into a situation where we’re fending off varmints – specifically, rats. I’ve written about our rat trapping efforts before (see The RRZ and RRZ Part Two), and our rat situation is pretty cyclic – we start noticing evidence of them, I get a little more diligent about setting up the traps, we trap a few, and then the trapping slows down and we don’t see as much of them again.

We’ve got a variety of hawks and owls in the neighborhood, and while we’ve not necessarily seen them making off with any rats, we figure that they’re also helping to keep the rat population in check (one of the reasons we’ve stuck with snapping traps and not poison). I’m not sure where we heard this, but the phrase “you don’t have a rat problem, you’ve got an owl deficiency” has been in our heads, and so this winter I did some research into nesting boxes for owls.

You can find bird box plans all over the internet. My most trusted source of all things bird is the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. They’ve got a specific site, Nestwatch, that has instructions and plans for bird boxes for all kinds of species of birds. The information is excellent – in addition to plans, they’ve got advice on how high up to put a box, which direction to face it, whether a specific bird is going to nest in your area of the country (and when), etc. (Note: downloading specific plans requires you to enter an email address, which I always find a little concerning (please no newsletters!), but it’s been okay).

After quite a bit of looking and thinking and perseverating, I decided to start off small, making a couple of boxes for some of the smaller birds that frequent our yard. The Nestwatch site has a single plan for a series of smaller birds we see – Bewick’s wrens, nuthatches, chickadees, and the oak titmouse – with the only real difference being the size of the hole in the front. I found that I could make the whole box from a single piece of simple 5-foot 1”x6” cedar fence board. No real special tools required – I used a circular saw to make all the cuts, including the few angled ones. Total cost was maybe $10-20, and a couple of hours of effort. I think they turned out good:

The top is angled to let rain run off, and the gap on the side is intended to keep the box cool when the weather heats up. There’s a little hinged side that’s screwed in securely, but will allow for cleaning out the box at the end of the nesting season. You can’t see it from this picture, but the bottom has some small holes in the corners to let any water that gets inside to drain out.

With these smaller boxes proving that this kind of build is within my grasp, I set off to make a larger box for a western screech owl. This box was going to need to be bigger – about 12” wide, 9” deep, and 18” tall. After kicking around our local home supply store a bunch, thinking about how much I wanted to invest in this and what size boards I could fit in the car, I decided to try using that same 1”x6” cedar fence board, gluing them up to make boards of a sufficient width, This proved to be a little tricky – I wound up using a LOT of clamps, as well as some internal bracing to hold things together, but overall I think it turned out okay. I got the box put up in our catalpa tree yesterday before the rain started again:

Overall a pretty similar design - it’s just a box with an angled roof and a hinged side. It was a little tricky getting it put up in the tree - that branch looks vertical from our bedroom window but in fact curves quite a bit.

I have no real sense of whether we’ll be successful in hosting any bird families at all this spring. We’re set up for success – they’re in the right place, they’ve got the right dimensions – but you never know. We heard a great horned owl outside the house last night, and while they don’t use nest boxes (they tend to just take over someone else’s big stick nest), we feel like this was a good omen.

“But what about nest cameras?,” you ask. “Don’t you want to host the Poppy Corners owl box live stream?” Yes, gentle reader, you can be assured that I spent quite a bit of time looking into ways that we could get owl baby video online - the Nestwach site has a whole section on this. In the end, it seemed like a bit of a pricey proposition, and kind of a pain — running an ethernet cable out so that we could be assured of good connectivity, dealing with lighting and power, etc. If we do have owls set up shop, I’ll try to figure out a way to rig up our trail camera to get some pictures.

If you’re looking for a good weekend project, I’d encourage setting up some nest boxes!

Practicing 'Bird'-fullness

It’ll likely come as no surprise to you that I’ve been seeing a therapist to process the feelings I’m having about my child’s recent trauma and recovery. One of the assignments my therapist gave me this past week was to take ten minutes every day in the garden to sit and do nothing.

If you know me at all, you know that ‘do nothing’ is not a typical phrase in my vocabulary. I’m a do-er. Always have been. My body is rarely at rest. If I do happen to sit in the garden, my body may look relaxed, but my mind is racing - I notice everything that needs doing, I think about the work emails piling up in my inbox, I wonder about next week’s meal plan - basically anything to keep my mind busy. Of course, keeping the mind occupied with everyday ‘busyness’ means that it doesn’t have to deal with pesky emotions. Brilliant plan. Except that, of course, I do need to deal with those pesky emotions.

I decided that I can create a ten minute period in between letting the chickens out and taking Tom to BART. I have a cushy outdoor chair and a chunky knitted throw to keep me warm on chilly mornings. So I’ve been sitting there, trying to calm my mind and do nothing. If a thought comes in, I tell myself just to think about it later. I take deep breaths and I watch the sun rise and start to shine through the leaves.

Did you ever see a show called “Sunrise Earth?” When the kids were little, we used to put it on every morning while we were eating breakfast, getting dressed, etc. Each episode showed, over the course of 30 minutes, a sunrise somewhere on earth. It was slow, it was silent (except for nature sounds), and it was beautiful.

What I realized this past week is that I have my own personal sunrise earth right outside my back door.

We’ve had a bird feeder hanging on the chicken coop for years, and it’s been a constant source of pleasure for us to see who’s visiting or living in our yard. Because of the feeder, and our water fountain, birds know that they’ll have a regular supply of food and drink here, and so we tend to have a great variety of visitors. Watching the morning activity is basically just pure joy. The trees are full of birds; there’s birds on the feeder and below the feeder; there’s birds on the fountain and birds on the twinkly-light wires. And the conversation! Chattering, calling, singing - the sky is full of music.

Since it’s hard for me to do absolutely nothing, I have been opening the ‘Merlin’ app on my phone and setting it to record the birdsong. Over the course of ten minutes, it ‘hears’ about 15 different birds. Every morning there’s the regular customers: finches, titmice, chickadees, sparrows, crows, jays, doves, and woodpeckers. But some mornings the app will record a cedar waxwing, or a western bluebird, or a warbler, or a vireo. This is very exciting!

In this way, I am able to practice mindfulness (‘bird’-fulness!) without letting other thoughts intrude into my head. It’s a tool to get me to the place my therapist was aiming for - a place where my body and mind are both calm and relaxed, so that I can let go of some of the anxiety, worry, grief and fear that I’ve been experiencing since we’ve returned home from Georgia. It’s yet another way my garden is providing for me; it’s giving me a place to learn a new skill, one that will have positive repercussions for the rest of my life.

Summer in December

Here’s a happy honeybee aiming towards a fully-opened sunflower on the first day of December in my garden. It’s been chilly at night, but the daytime has been beautiful and warm and in the 70s. Yes, this is unusual. Yes, this concerns me. But I must confess it also delights me. I am enjoying the summer blooms in my garden, and the warm afternoon temperatures which are perfect for walking. I think it’s important that we remember to be present, whatever the moment gives us. I can be worried about our place on this planet and happy to bask in the afternoon’s slanted glow. Environmental work can be draining, so let’s take the joy where we can.

The cover crops in my garden also include, at the moment, cosmos. And borage, cilantro, buckwheat. I used our homemade compost to top off these beds, and the seeds that didn’t die in that pile have germinated and are flowering freely. It’s all good. A cover crop can be any crop, and it’s all improving the soil.

A side benefit to these sunflowers growing this time of year is that the goldfinches leave them alone. In summer, my sunflowers are always decimated, the leaves eaten down to the veins. This means the plant can’t photosynthesize and can’t bloom properly. Why don’t the goldfinches do this in winter? It could be that they don’t need greens this time of year, requiring only protein and fat to prepare their bodies for laying eggs. It could also be that most have migrated for the season, and the ones I see around the bird feeder are too few to do much damage.

Hey, maybe I’ll only grow sunflowers in the autumn and winter from now on.

Happy December, everyone.

Pine Siskins and Bird Feeders

We’ve had this bird feeder in active use for a couple of years now; Tom made a place for it to hang on the corner of the chicken coop, so that any fallen seed would get eaten by our chickens rather than sprouting and making more work for me. We have just been delighted by the activity that the feeder has brought to our yard. At dawn, when I go outside to let the chickens out of their run, I also fill the feeder. All the neighborhood birds are in the nearby oak and pine trees, waiting for me. They watch me fill the feeder, and then they descend, even though I am right there working in the chicken coop. I guess they are used to me now!

There seems to be a hierarchy of birds in the order they feed; the house finches are often first, followed by the goldfinches, and then later on I notice chickadees and titmice getting taking a turn. Often times, a row of birds will sit on the fence that borders the chicken run. They chatter and sing and it’s a wonderful sound throughout the morning. The feeder is usually empty by early afternoon, with a stray bird visiting to get the last few seeds.

All of the sparrows, the migratory golden-crowned, white-crowned, and song sparrows, tend to forage on the fallen seeds below, ducking and weaving around the chickens. This morning I noticed a Bewick’s wren (usually an insect-eater) at the feeder. We’ve also had pine siskins in droves all winter. They are harder to spot because they look a lot like finches, and in fact, they are in the finch family.

In late January, we had two separate instances of a solitary pine siskin resting in our pots. Both times, the birds looked cold - feathers puffed up, a slight shivering or shaking in their bodies, breathing hard, and not at all afraid of us coming close. We thought they were baby birds fledging and did not want to intervene. The bird above looked especially cold, and both Tom and I went by it at separate times, wondering if we should move it into the sun. But we each decided, individually, to leave it alone. It was right by our back door so we were going past it all day. Eventually, Tom went out to check on it and found it dead. We were both so mad at ourselves at the time because we could have easily moved it into the sun. We thought it was our fault that the bird had died. Sometimes it’s hard to know what to do when you see an animal in distress.

But, it turns out, this was part of a much bigger problem that neither of us knew about until this past week. Apparently, there has been a Salmonella outbreak here this winter, which is affecting all members of the finch family, but especially pine siskins. Bird feeders and common gathering areas are to blame. The bacteria gets into the feces of the birds, and can then be spread easily near where the birds congregate. The advice from the California Department of Fish and Game is to take down any bird feeders and allow the congregation to stop. I want to comply, but there are an awful lot of birds who depend on our feeder right now, and I’m not sure taking it down is in their best interest.

So yesterday, I went to our local nature store (East Bay Nature), the place where I get my seed mix for the feeder, and asked the owner (Joanie Smith) what she thought. She said this information is not new, the disease and decline of finches has been going on for quite some time (and in fact we never get American goldfinches anymore like we used to, but that’s a discussion for another time and is related to climate change). However she feels that it’s not a good idea to take down the feeder now, since the pine siskins are migratory and are leaving for their summer breeding grounds (Canada), and there are so many other birds who are depending on the seed now.

Speaking of the migration of siskins, this year has seen an especially large one, called an irruption. What’s especially notable about this year’s irruption is that the birds migrated at night. Migration at night is a process that is still not fully understood; a study published in PNAS a couple of years ago found that migratory birds have something in their eyes called cyrptochromes which have evolved a mechanism which enhances their ability to respond to light, which enables them to sense and respond to magnetic fields. Pretty cool.

You might be wondering, as I have been, if any of these infected droppings have affected our chickens. The thing is, chickens live with Salmonella all the time, as we humans do. Our systems are usually able to handle and process and remove any of this bacteria from our systems. My flock seems healthy and well, laying eggs like crazy, eating and moving about as normal, so I do not think they are ill. Meanwhile we are still eating their eggs regularly. It’s also likely that, since we haven’t seen a sick or dead bird for over a month, this disease has passed on and away from here. However I will take precautions: I will be extra diligent about cleaning the bird feeder for a while, and we will cook all eggs before we eat them.

Several Items of Interest

Our weather has finally turned, if only temporarily, and the smoke in the sky has (blessedly) lessened. It is such a treat to get outdoors, to hike and to garden! I will never be complacent about clear air again. Today I plan to get the winter garlic and spinach seeds in the ground. I am woefully behind in these tasks. I must admit that the school workload this fall is much heavier than it ever has been before and I am struggling to get through it all! Meanwhile, I am in the process of rethinking my entire garden space, which is a huge project to contemplate and will have to be done in fits and starts. I very much feel an urgency to plant for the future, which will likely be as hot and as smoky as it has been this summer, and at least as dry. This will require me to rethink my plant choices and, in fact, the entire layout of my garden.

I’ve been interested to read several good articles about plant life and fire. The first is from the University of California Botanical Garden in Berkeley.

Here’s the relevant info, though I think it’s worth reading the entire article: “While there are much data pointing to the beneficial effects of fires on plants, especially in regard to acting as an environmental cue for seed germination and in seed dispersal, in general, as for humans, smoke and ash are detrimental to plants. Chemically, more than 100 different compounds have been identified in smoke, including toxic levels of nitrous oxide, sulfur dioxide and ozone. Short-term exposure to smoke (as little as 20 minutes) has been reported to reduce photosynthesis by as much as 50%, as a consequence of both the destruction of chlorophyll, the light-capturing green pigment, and in impeding the movement of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the plant through leaf pores (stomata)” (Dr. Lew Feldman, garden director, UC Berkeley Botanical Garden). He goes on to say that ash may have a beneficial impact on our soil, at least in small quantities, but that it might acidify it slightly. This made me think of how people used to spread their fireplace ashes over the garden to enrich the soil. That usually happened in the fallow season to prepare for the next crop, though. I’m sure we’ll begin to see some studies that help us understand how smoke and ash affect our gardens in the coming years.

image credit: UCANR

The Master Gardeners (also a UC program around here) sent out an interesting email which said, “In our summer issue, featuring Firescaping, we emphasized how ALL plants can burn under the right conditions. California natives are no exception. As a matter of fact some of them are quite flammable. Proper selection and maintenance are key! Considering the current devastating wildfires and extremely unhealthy air stretching over our western states, we'd like to revisit some important features of fire-resistant plants. Look for the following characteristics:

• store water in leaves or stems

• produce very little dead or fine material

• possess extensive, deep root systems for controlling erosion

• maintain high moisture content with limited watering

• grow slowly and need little maintenance

• low growing in form

• contain low levels of volatile oils or resins

• open & loose branching habit with a low volume of total vegetation.”

This also helps me with my plan as I move forward with new garden design. Many home owners around here have basically given up on their gardens, and either “landscape” with rocks or mulch, or just leave dead grass in their expansive front yards. I think we can figure something better out. I have always had multiple goals for our garden: it must feed us, feed the ecosystem, regenerate the soil, conserve resources, and look pretty. The list hasn’t changed, but I now want to add “future climate friendly” as well.

While working on a paper a couple of days ago, my attention wandered to a squirrel in our front garden. The squirrels (mostly fox squirrels) are very active this time of year, collecting the enormous acorns from our valley oak tree, and burying them mostly in my pots of bulbs, which is very annoying. One particular squirrel has figured out a path from our fence to our gate to our roof, and s/he goes back and forth constantly. I was watching her when suddenly she dropped down flat onto her belly on the fence. I was worried that she was sick or dying, but when I looked it up, it turns out this is a defensive posture. According to Geography Realm, “the act of lying flat hides the lighter colored belly of a squirrel. The fur color on the outer side of a squirrel evolved to help the squirrel blend in with its environment…  the posture of lying flat on a surface also helps to protect the vital organs of a squirrel should it be attacked.” We have several kinds of flying predators around here, day and night, so I wonder if the squirrel saw a hawk and immediately dropped? She stayed there for about ten minutes, and then went back to her usual pattern of roof-gate-fence. There is another squirrel who tends to hang out in the back garden, who is missing a foot. I’m hoping these are all signs that the predators are becoming more numerous in our yard. We often hear owls at night, quite close, and since we have a perennial family of rats living in the compost, we are hoping that their numbers are being thinned by them. We can use all the help we can get!

I heard a sparrow in the garden yesterday, which made me realize that I hadn’t heard one in quite a while. That led me to wonder if sparrows migrate.

image credit: UC Santa Cruz

Well, it turns out, they do. Here in central/northern California, the year-round temperature is fairly mild, so we don’t often think about things migrating. It doesn’t seem as neccessary as it would from say, Michigan to Florida. But there are lots of things that migrate to escape colder temperatures, or to find food, or to breed in different places. It turns out that golden-crowned sparrows (like the one pictured above) spend winters in the Bay Area, and head north to Alaska to breed in the spring and summer. According to study published by PRBO, “Each bird, which weighs approximately 30 grams, migrated from 1600 to 2400 miles one-way to their breeding grounds. Their individual breeding locations spanned approximately 750 miles along the coast of Alaska, and their north migration averaged only 29 days while southbound migration averaged nearly twice that (53 days).” This kind of distance blows my mind. White-crowned sparrows (also commonly seen and heard in my garden in the wintertime) also make this kind of migration each year. “Breeders in mountains mostly migrate to wintering grounds in lowland southern California and south into Mexico, departing in September and returning in April and May. Coastal breeders mostly present year-round; not migratory (Mewaldt et al. 1968). Other individuals winter elsewhere in California lowlands and foothills and migrate to Canada and Alaska in April and May; often return to same wintering sites the following September or October (Mewaldt 1976). In montane habitats, fairly widespread in fall, but descend below heavy snows for winter and spring (Grinnell and Miller 1944)” (CA Dep’t of Fish and Wildlife). So do song sparrows. “Song Sparrows are resident throughout much of their range, although the northernmost populations are migratory. Resident populations extend as far north as coastal Alaska. The wintering range stretches across the southern United States and dips into northern Mexico. Birds at high altitudes may also descend into the lowlands during the winter” (Birdweb).

I’m glad to have the sparrows back in residence! They contribute beautiful songs during the dawn chorus, and I enjoy the music.

Lastly, have you seen the new David Attenborough documentary? I found it very compelling. What a career this man has had, and what amazing things he has seen! I love that he considers this documentary his “witness statement.” It is not an easy thing to watch, as he lays both history and the future of the environment out in plain language. But I believe that we, too, are witnesses. And as such, we cannot turn away from this. It enrages me that the political debates include few questions about climate, and are often phrased “do you believe?” or “what will you eliminate?” Let’s get past all that. Let’s start asking, “what is your plan to DO? how will that look? how will we all be included?“ Let’s be honest about what it will cost. The truth is, it will cost us everything; it will be enormously expensive, far more than Covid has been. But it must be done. I would encourage everyone to start accepting and facing what’s to come, and vote accordingly (though I will readily concede that from a climate perspective, there is no perfect candidate; so ask yourself, which candidate will get us further faster?).

On that note, I’m off to plant garlic. What’s happening in your garden this weekend?