Signs of Seasons Changing
… and meet Bernie the Scarecrow - A Listening Life
Having got the ball rolling over the summer with twice weekly publication of this newsletter it will henceforth appear more usually about once a week, generally on Sundays. Thanks for your continued support.
Today is Canadian Thanksgiving
In keeping with the wildlife theme that is central to our posts, here is the first photographed Dark-eyed Junco of the season … he must have been as surprised as we are to find temperatures in the twenties on his arrival. temperatures which are running at an almost unbelievable 12C or more above seasonal average for these dates. Not normal at all for this date, though things should start to be getting cooler, a bit wetter, over the weekend. We have recently also seen the arrival from the north of White-throated Sparrows, while the Hummingbirds seem to have finally departed for the south in recent days. Leaves on the trees are colouring and starting to fall into the garden pond whence they have to be removed a couple of times a day. The seasons are finally changing over.
The Dark-eyed Junco (Junco hyemalis) is an interesting bird. It’s really a “sparrow” that breeds to the north - at ;east the form we see here goes - and then comes south as winter approaches to spend the cold months around where we live in fields and gardens where is makes a good living waiting for spring. Juncos can be found in different forms travelling from east to west, some so different you might think them to not be the same species. The one we have here in Quebec is the “Slaty-backed” form with a mostly grey body and wings and a white belly. Like the other Junco forms they all have white outer tail feathers that flash as they fly away so they are easy to identify quickly.
These birds forage on the ground and prefer coniferous or mixed forests. They eat mainly insects and seeds. In winter at least they tend to move around in small flocks.
Going west there is the Oregon form with a dark brown “hood”, light brown back, Buffy sides and white belly. In Despite differences in appearance, juncos all have pretty much the same diet, nesting habits & behaviours and can interbreed in places where their ranges overlap. In the Rocky Mountains you might find the Pink-sided form with a grey head, brown back and pinky-grey flanks. Down in the south-western USA is the Red-backed form while Juncos may also be encountered as the Grey-headed and the White-winged forms while in the Yukon and British Columbia there is the Cismontanus subspecies, other like our Slaty-backed but with a dark brown hood. Confusing to identify but all really nice birds and in fact one the most widespread and common birds on the continent. Some of the more southern forms are permanent residents in their areas and move only locally, often up and down mountain slopes, as cold weather arrives.
Juncos are primarily seed-eaters, especially in winter, consuming the seeds of grass, weeds such as ragweed and chickweed, and trees including hemlock and birch. They’ll eat the seeds of flowers left standing in the garden, such as zinnias and cosmos and that’s where we can help them by leaving garden seed heads standing in the winter months rather than tidying gardens as so many insist on doing. During the breeding season, they also consume insects and caterpillars, which they need to raise their young.
If you do have Juncos coming to your garden, or encounter them nearby in open woodland and parks, it is worth pausing to observe their behaviour. If pressed then they will take food from feeders but they are really a ground feeding species, and so more often they will be observed below the feeders searching for dropped seed. Any dropped seed - they have catholic tastes. If there has been a heavy snow fall then scattering some seeds on top of the snow will make life a little easier for them … also for squirrels.
The Katsura
Possibly getting on for 20 years ago we purchased from the Arboretum a small sapling Katsura tree (Cercidiphyllum japonicum) for the garden. Our gardening style was more conventional then. We even had a, whisper it quietly, a lawn! We were told the tree would be well behaved, which it is, and not too tall. Just what we wanted. Sadly the height restriction was something the tree was unaware of because it has grown and grown until it now between 30 and 40 feet high. There are dwarf varieties, but not this one. On the other hand it has a well-shaped conical form and stands out well against the dark conifers that we planted it in front of. It is emphatically not a native and while birds do perch in it that’s about the limit of its contribution to biodiversity.
What we love about it however is that in early fall it is one of the first trees to change colour and the conical gold against dark green really is a pleasure to be able to look out on. The picture below gives an indication of what I mean by colour and form - it has not quite reached “full gold” yet this year but there is a serious, blattering, rain storm forecast for tonight and tomorrow and that will almost certainly mean many leaves will be shed. Either way, even in a native wildlife garden there should be space for some exotic splendour.
Katsura trees are very long-lived trees so this is our gift to posterity. Specimens planted in Europe and North America 1800s are still alive and growing strong. A Katsura tree in South America is over 500 years old. Since it has few pests and strong resilience, it can probably live over 1,000 years.
Come and sit beside me
Back in the 2020 Covid lockdown we were aware that while a degree of isolation is fine with us, we are emphatically not party people, there were sorrowful souls wandering the world looking for a friendly face. For whatever reason, J sat up one day, a lightbulb lit up over her head and she declared that “What we need is a scarecrow called Bernie the Gardener”. Bernie would sit on the bench in our front garden under the massive birch tree, offering a bit of virus-free company and a shoulder to lean on from the seat next to him.
People walking up the street, socially distanced of course, noticed him under his tree. Occasionally, a hand was waved, a smile cracked and a head nodded. We sometimes saw squirrels on the seat beside him, once one audaciously sat on his head. We were confident that Bernie was fulfilling his purpose in life.
He seemed mostly impervious to rain and wind, though his boots filled with water that sometimes smelled like a stagnant pond. Months later, one of us approaching the front door would still double-take as we caught sight of the figure in the garden out of the corner of an eye. Then winter snows arrived, and he retreated indoors to hibernate in the garage – lying on the top of a stored kayak, dreaming dreams of happy days in the garden with the flowers and the bees and the evening sunshine. Sadly, he was then rather forgotten until spring of 2023 when he sat up one summer day declaring that he would rather like to enter the town Scarecrow Contest and would we help him prepare himself? Of course, how could we not? His boots were emptied and dried, he received a new skull behind his permanently smiling face (an old football), a new shirt and vest and to top it all, a bit of style with a yellow silk bandanna around his neck (subsequently stolen by squirrels to line their own nests) – rather like grandfather’s axe, he was renewed. Off to the show.
Bernie was pretty relaxed to find that he was not the winner. He did though have several conversations with small children, he greatly admired the vegetables in the Garden at Fritz, grown by volunteers for donations to local food banks (https://gardenatfritz.com ), he nodded politely to the town Mayor who was judging the entrants and mostly spent the afternoon relaxing in the sunshine in the company of other scarecrows, some of whom have stayed at the Garden at Fritz to oversee the very successful harvest.
For the rest of this summer he has sat calmly on a seat in our back garden surrounded by native flowers, bees, butterflies, many birds, and even more sunshine. The sort of things Bernie likes as much as we do. What a life, he would mutter to himself, What a happy chance it was that I could live in a garden like this where all is calm and the wildlife are polite … well, perhaps not the hooligan chipmunks, but you can’t have everything.
And then at a neighbourhood event a week ago, several people, quite out of the blue, enquired after him.“ Where’s Bernie?” After consulting with him later in the day, he opted to move back to the front garden bench until winter arrives and already he is being noticed and welcomed again (well, via Facebook posts) as an important member of the community. He is happy to listen to anyone’s stories and once more to share a seat on his bench with those who want to chat or just sit and watch the chipmunks anyway. He is becoming a useful contributor to the 1001 Species newsletter.
Country “Sports” …
“After each massacre, most of the dead pheasants, as there’s little demand for their meat, are dumped in “stink pits”, which also receive the corpses of the many species classified as vermin (“game” means animals you pay to kill, “vermin” are animals you pay other people to kill).”
Last Word on this …
Sorry to come back again to the quite unforgivable felling of the sycamore tree on Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England by some wretches. The wholthing has made me furious. There was an excellent article in the Guardian earlier in the week which included the following comments that speak to attitudes to the natural world that are all too common today. Note that this is not something unique to England, though as a member of the English diaspora, the fact that it is in England that this happened makes me especially sad, and even more angry.
A brief quote follows. The full article is at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/03/sycamore-gap-tree-grieve-chopped-down
The fate of the Sycamore Gap tree is tragically symbolic of a society that has become utterly disconnected from, and uninterested in, the natural and non-human world. There is a bitter irony to the fact that on the same day the tree was cut down, the National Trust unveiled its own grim news: a report on the state of nature in Britain. This showed our country as one of the most nature-depleted on the planet, with a 19% decline in the abundance of species studied since 1970, when things were – to put it mildly – already beyond bleak, after centuries of consistent degradation and persecution of nature and decades of the mass usage of insecticides such as DDTs in farming. It says something that this deeply troubling report garnered far fewer headlines than the sole act of vandalism at Sycamore Gap.
That whoever it was couldn’t see the beauty and magnificence of that sycamore framed in that ancient fold of hill is down to a long series of (events) that are deeper and more destructive than the actions of that one person.
Bernie does not understand how this sort of thing happens.