wildlife

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Twas the Month Before Christmas

/ A. Swanson / 6 Comments

(or Hard Knocks from Not-Santa)

you can blame this little red squirrel (aka Not-Santa) who lives in the Black Hills for what follows— an inane taste of rhymey-ness. Apparently, he thinks it’s WAckY Wednesday…

Something’s clattering there, up on the roof shingle. November: no snowman, no Kristopher Kringle.

No child’s wishful gazing through frost on the pane. And jingles aren’t jangling to merry the game.

Boots of black or reindeer can’t account for this loud chatter. Curiosity beckons me to see what’s the matter.

Another loud noise as I open the door, step onto the deck. There’s no one around, only the sound peek! and the sound of a peck.

A pecker of wood hops up the side of a tree. Cocks its head sideways, stops and peers shyly at me.

I look to the sky. And, behold…what do I see? Industrious movement near the top of the tree.

A figure in red, not a shade fire engine-tinged; But the red of the rust on a pail or a hinge.

Instead of laughter behind a snowy white beard; There’s white on his face yes, but concealing a leer.

The creature’s tail is orange-red and jitters around. As he searches the treetops where treasure abounds.

Eyes gleam like the belt around Santa’s coat. Downy gray fur at the base of his throat.

The chuckling begins, not a bowl full of jelly. Revealing ill humor inside that round belly.

Tis not the season of giving or thanking, says he. No…it’s time for stashing and stowing frantically.

Human, get yourself gone, get out of the way.I needs enough cones to fill more than a sleigh.

Go rake some leaves, pull out thistles untidy. But leave me alone with this project…Alrighty?

One second more do I linger and wonder: When will he finish and stop this roof-thunder?

For two-thousand words I’m attempting to write. Today, not tomorrow I’ll finish this fight.

I linger and watch as he returns back to work. Scolding, tail twitching, to say “What a jerk!”

In contrast to him, my task isn’t survival. And honestly, Writing Muse needs a revival.

So I whistle to Timmy and up the hill we both trot; Uptightness untightening, mind no longer knotted in knots.

Mountain bluebirds flit, ringing sad-noted calls. Saying goodbye, goodbye, goodbye to you all.

And hello. Hello. Hello to mid-fall.

Thanks for reading. If you have a sec, I’d love to hear:

Are your squirrels (or other critters) acting squirrelly too?

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Advice from a Sequoia Tree: Top Ten Roots of Wisdom

/ A. Swanson / 2 Comments

Yes our planet is off-kilter…we’ve known it for years. 23.5 degrees, to be precise.

And with today’s proliferation of wars, global warming, chemicals, habitat destruction, etc., that surround us…it is obvious that living in such an unbalanced, frenzied manner is catching up to us.

As I visited Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks located in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, the trees spoke to me.

They said to have peace on this God-given planet, there are some things you must do:

10. Together you can stand strong. Be supportive of family, friends, and neighbors, including those who live across the globe from you.

9. Create your own habitat. Shelter your neighbors and friends with strong boughs of friendship.

Sequoia bark grows around eighteen inches thick and protects them from many wildfires.

8. Develop a thick skin. Prepare for the fires, droughts, sicknesses, and diseases attacking you way by eating well and taking good care of your body. Keep the big picture in mind by reading the Bible and attending worship; don’t waste your time responding to belittling attacks from others.

7. Stand for what you believe. You are planted where you are, so take root and grow strong.

6. Honor the sacredness of Mother Earth. She gives and gives and so should you.

5. Steward the earth with wise actions. Don’t throw away the things that are irreplaceable.

What’s left of a giant sequoia tree logged sometime around the end of the 19th century.

In the 1880’s through 1920’s, loggers cut the down the Sequoias thinking the trees would provide a goldmine of lumber. Instead, when these thousands of year old massifs fell, their brittle heavy wood would shatter. After harvest, much of the lumber obtained from them was suitable for such unremarkable items as house shingles, fence posts, and matchsticks.

4. Be generous and remember to care for those who are with us and those who will inherit the earth.

Sequoia cones retain their seeds for decades until a wildfire dries out the cone and it opens. Seeds need full sun and bare mineral soil to germinate and for seedlings to thrive.

3. Even though you haven’t seen it with your own eyes doesn’t mean the fantastic doesn’t exist.

Walking and wondering amongst the giants.

The Centennial sequoia tree was a 24-foot diameter tree that was cut down. Sixteen feet of its outer shell was transported and reassembled at an exhibit in Philadelphia. When visitors on the east coast saw this display, many thought it was a fake and called it a “California hoax”. On the positive side, this piece of wood inspired believers into trying to protect these giant trees, whose native range is found only on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada.

Lupines grow amidst the towering sequoias.

2. You are wonderfully made.

1. (#6 revisited) Nature gives selflessly to us, and let us do the same for her. Let your voice be hers. Join conservation groups who act on behalf of nature. Support leaders and treat this planet like the forever home it is…for the sake of nature, your children and friends, and…you.

If you are a private landowner, take a look and enrich your property to benefit the native ecology of your area. Green lawns might look neat and tidy, but they are ecological deserts; think about making them smaller and plant native perennials, trees, and shrubs in their place.

Have a great one!

Credit: https://www.nps.gov/seki/learn/nature/bigtrees.htm

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In the Blink of a Summer

/ A. Swanson / Leave a comment

Hello!

Looking back it’s been since April (gasp) that I’ve visited this site. Yes, before this summer started, I had suffered from delusions of using a few hours a day to finish editing my latest novel and I realized at the time that this feat would require dropping other writing projects if I wanted to get that done. No excuses, but since school’s out, time has been in hyper-speed mode and I’m just trying to hang on. If you’ve got school-aged kids, you probably know what I mean.

Don’t blink: July is almost over.

Summer vacation started out strangely…my kids had a snow day on the day before school let out (instead of using the day before, if my husband were writing this, he’d use the word “penultimate”—he loves that word). The day before! As I drove to the school to pick up my children on their last day of school, the neighborhood’s lawns were covered in snow.

The kids spent their first day of “summer break” building immense snowballs and watching as they rolled down the hill and smashed into smithereens.

Crazy.

Nature keeps a treasure chest whose delights appear in the most unexpected places and times.

I’ve lived in the Black Hills of South Dakota for eleven years now and I would tell you that, nope, we don’t have fireflies here. Maybe if you travel east, yes, but not here.

And then our family goes camping at a lake in Custer State Park.

This particular lake is located about eighteen miles from our house. A couple of years ago at this same campground, I’d thought I’d seen a yellow flash from a lightning bug as I took a stroll in the dark, but discounted it as my overactive imagination, as that particular insect only lit up once. No, on that particular long-ago night, I wasn’t able to satisfy my hunger and catch a second glimpse of the firefly smoldering like the emerging petals of a buttercup. By doing so would bring me back to summer days when we visited my grandparents’ house in Indiana,where we spent hours chasing after these small flying lanterns lighting up the humid dark sky.

And then, just last week, we visited that same campground.

Lo and behold—wouldn’t you know it?— the little buggers flashed us as we sat by the campfire roasting marshmallows. Their erratic, bright yellow beacons added even more cheer to an already glowing campfire and were a cogent reminder of how little I know about life, the universe, and everything (thank you, Douglas Adams). And my little part of the world.

Look at this: these birds aren’t native, but it was still quite astounding to see: I was preparing a cup of tea and noticed a pair of female peacocks as they wandered behind our house then continued up the hill as if they had important business to conduct.

The deer around our place may rival the number of people in China (a slight exaggeration), but, even with my cold, hard, gardener’s heart, seeing a fawn pant after his mother is still worth a few awwws.

I hope you are finding your own taste of nature to be incredible.

Thanks for reading, and have a good one.

(Blink blink!)

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The Sky is Falling!

/ A. Swanson / 7 Comments
Male mountain bluebird

It’s spring in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and, as of today, April 3, the mountain bluebirds have been here for about three weeks. Their winter home is in the southernmost west states of the U.S. (California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas) plus northern Mexico. But if you didn’t know where they were coming from, you would think pieces of the sky were indeed falling, for these birds are colored the most brilliant blue imaginable.

Mountain bluebirds (along with gardeners and farmers) are the ultimate optimists. The day after I saw the first pair for the year, a blizzard struck the plains about an hour to the east of us.

No, in the Dakotas, winter doesn’t give up easily. Today, we awoke to an inch-and-a-half of the white stuff on the ground (a bit more is on the way). With a diet comprised mainly of insects and spiders, mountain bluebirds have their work cut out for them. What self-respecting spider, wasp, beetle, grasshopper, or caterpillar is going to be doing loop-the-loops in the air or taking an upside-down stroll on the underside of a leaf? (especially since the leaves here have yet to emerge).

Not one.

Yet, as you might imagine, there are still insects and spiders outside, but they aren’t nearly as accessible or in as large numbers observed in summertime.

Fortunately, mountain bluebirds have other places to look for six- and eight-legged prey. Currently, mountain bluebirds along our road spend a lot of time foraging in a large unmowed field where the dried stalks of grass and thatch provide shelter to over-wintering insects. Other places the birds may search include: tree cavities, under the eaves of buildings, in the leaf litter, or in galls. Other insects, like ants and termites (not really mountain bluebird food anyway), aren’t accessible, for they winter in the soil below the frost line; nor are the larvae of dragonflies and damselflies, who grow and thrive under winter’s blanket of frozen water.

A Hackberry tree (Celtis occidentalis) makes a great tree for songbirds and hummingbirds.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. When spiders and insects are scarce, mountain bluebirds will resort to hackberries, grapes, currants, dogwoods, elderberries, and dried fruits of other plants for food. I can attest to the value of hackberry trees to songbirds in early spring: just last week in Pierre, SD, the neighborhood’s hackberry trees were dripping with robins and cedar waxwings as they devoured the trees’ berries (When I spent time in west Texas, I observed a goshawk nesting atop a hackberry’s main trunk, while in the vicinity, a pair of Bell’s vireos and several hummingbirds built their nests in some other hackberry trees’ branchtips).

Warmer weather in South Dakota will eventually prevail. And with it will come other birds, adorned in the spectacular palettes only nature can conjure. I look forward to the day when I see the first western tanager of the season. Black and bright yellow feathers color the wings and breast of this bird, while the fire of a sunset blazes atop their throats and crowns.

When that highly anticipated moment finally arrives and I hear the tanager’s characteristic upward tik-tik-tik declaration in the canopy of a pine tree, I’ll be the first to say:

Male western tanager

The sun is falling!

Have a great one.

Credits:

https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Mountain_Bluebird/lifehistory

https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/mountain-bluebird

https://www.si.edu/spotlight/buginfo/winter

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Of Cracker Jack and Flying Prizes

/ A. Swanson / 2 Comments

As a child, every once in a great while, my parents would treat us kids with a box of Cracker Jack. For those of you not in the know, Cracker Jack is a type of caramel/molasses-coated popcorn, into which is added peanuts coated with a sweet glaze. Now, I must admit, I just remember the Surprise Inside…Guess What’s Inside? label in blue and white on the outside of the Cracker Jack box. I can’t really recall any of the prizes. But at the time, the best part was the moment when I discovered the prize amidst the mass of caramel corn crowding my fingers: a little red-and-white-striped package about the size of a postage stamp.

Having a bird feeder is a bit like indulging in that box of sweetness; when you look out the window on a dreary gray day and see an entire flock of goldfinches lighting up the entire tube, your eyes savor and absorb the wondrous sight. And, in the Black Hills, the other “caramel corn” commonly visiting the bird feeder include white and red-breasted nuthatches, pine siskins, chickadees, and dark-eyed juncos. You enjoy watching the “peanuts”: the occasional blue jay, gray jay, hairy or downy woodpeckers stopping by, causing the feeder to swing from side to side as they wolf down one sunflower seed after the next.

And then that moment of excitement when you find the prize…

This strikingly-colored junco (above)—a bird like no other

  • White-winged variety of dark-eyed junco: in the Black Hills, juncos with this coloration are common.

Most dark-eyed juncos in the Black Hills are soot-colored birds that look like their bellies are dipped in snow, their wings lightly sprinkled with snowflakes. The bird in the top photo, however, is a zebra of different stripes.

According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, there are fifteen described races of dark-eyed juncos. These birds come in many different variations of color, but the following five are some of the more distinguishable ones: slate-colored, white-winged, Oregon, pink-sided, and gray-headed. The Oregon subspecies of dark-eyed junco is the most common one with a truly black head (vs. dark gray or light gray), but its wings tend toward brown than gray (unlike the bird in the photo, which has gray feathers). Perhaps the bird in the photo is a hybrid between Oregon and another subspecies, and touched with leucism?

The online Merriam Webster Dictionary defines leucism as an abnormal condition of reduced pigmentation affecting various animals (such as birds, mammals, and reptiles) that is marked by overall pale color or patches of reduced coloring and is caused by a genetic mutation which inhibits melanin and other pigments from being deposited in feathers, hair, or skin.

If a bird is affected by leucism, it will usually have paler or white feathers than other birds of the same species. This bird in the photo has a variety of things going on…there are patches of white where the feathers should be gray, or possibly black, which would support the leucism idea, but the bird in the top photo has pure black feathers on its crown plus gray feathers on its sides (the widespread gray is uncharacteristic of the Oregon subspecies), which suggests a possibly a hybrid amongst one or more of the junco subspecies…?

No matter what its genetic makeup, this dark-eyed junco is certainly a beautiful creature, a prize well beyond what I could hope to find in any box of snacks.

Wishing you joy as you go through your day, that you may find a delightful Surprise Inside.

…Who knows what it will be?

References

Dunn, J.L., and Alderfer, J., 2011. National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America. National Geographic Society

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Dark-eyed_Junco/id

Merriam-Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/leucism

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Rocky Mountain Arsenal Wildlife Refuge: A Getaway for the Urban-Challenged

/ A. Swanson / Leave a comment

The holidays brought us to the Denver area, where we visited family and took time each day to escape going to the wilder parts of the city. One amazing place is the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, a nearly 16,000 acre oasis in the midst of suburbia, where you can mine the quiet places in your mind and be still.

View from floating boardwalk on Lake Mary, where abnormally warm December temps have kept the ice thin. Chunks of ice atop the glassy surface are attributable to recreational ice breaking (a fun activity for kids and those who are kids-at-heart).

Geriatric black-footed ferrets (previously used in a captive-breeding program) are on display near the refuge’s visitor center. Wild versions of these members of the weasel-family love feasting on black-tailed prairie dogs and reside in the tunnels and homes of their prey.

Bison behind glass.

An eleven-mile loop around the refuge allows you to get up close and personal (from the safety of your car) to a small herd of bison that call the refuge home. These powerful animals can run up to 35 miles an hour.

The Journey Begins

/ A. Swanson / Leave a comment

Thanks for joining me! My name is Anita Swanson, and I am a wildlife biologist who used to work in the field, but now I write novels and short stories about the connections between people and nature. Me and my family live in the Black Hills of South Dakota, a place, according to the natives, that doesn’t experience “real winter;” they are a hardy people, for in the ten-plus years we’ve lived here, October has been a month accompanied by a blizzard, nine-inch snowfalls, and subzero temps:  I’m thinking I don’t need to know what a “real winter” looks like…

“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” —Jane Goodall

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Monarch butterfly sipping nectar from a purple coneflower.