A few weeks ago, I found a dead rat while removing English ivy at Meadowbrook Playfield Park and it had clearly died from internal bleeding. It had eaten the poison bait in one of the many black plastic boxes that have been placed all around the Meadowbrook Community Center and Pool building. When I saw this, I became concerned about the birds and animals that might eat this rat, or part of it, any time after it had eaten the poison, because the secondary poison dose could slowly kill the bird/animal or negatively impact reproduction and survival of offspring.

This NE part of the city still has many big native trees and some small natural areas that are under restoration and because of this, we have a couple bald eagles, coyotes and racoons in our neighborhood and all of them eat rats. The danger for the eagles is that they will scavenge food and eat dead things, like a recently poisoned rat, plus feed them to their chicks. Urban coyotes and racoons eat rats, dead or alive. Parks like Meadowbrook are used as off-leash walking areas for family dogs and the pet owner cannot always see what their dog is doing or even stop them from gobbling down a poisoned rodent.

Just recently my husband and I went to an “Owl Prowl” evening offered by the Seward Park Audubon. It was a very interesting educational evening and we found out that rats can make up a big part of an owl family’s diet. Volume 3 of the “Wild Hope” magazine has an article called “Do No Harm” by Janet McGarry about the Hungry Owl Project (HOP) ( http://www.hungryowl.org/ ). The article is worth a read and the website is worth a visit. One of the quotes from the article is “A family of barn owls in a four-month breeding cycle can eradicate 3,000 rodents.” Wow.

That is way more than five poison boxes can kill in a four-month period. It seems obvious which would be better at rat control – owls! The danger for owls is that they will attack and eat a recently poisoned rodent that hasn’t died and is still moving around while the slow death by internal bleeding is in process which can take several days.

The Forest Stewards who work in the Seattle Parks try to be sensitive to bird and wildlife reproduction so that we don’t inadvertently clear nesting cover and expose this year’s baby birds and critters to predation. The timing for clearing Himalayan blackberry, for example, is for minimizing reproductive harm; we cut canes in the fall and winter when the nesting is over or has not begun, the lack of cane thickets disallows nesting and the roots can be dug up later without concerns for nesting disruption.

I think that we can reduce the harm that is caused by rat poison boxes with a harm reduction approach like replacing poison boxes with boxes that allow mechanical rat traps. These would require more monitoring but maybe that would add a job or two for checking and emptying the traps or with a digital approach, a battery-operated signal would request rat box emptying, similar to a security system notification.

It might be more effective and useful to add owls, owl habitat and owl boxes that would help control rats instead of the steady introduction of poisons into our struggling wildlife food chains and habitats. We might want to encourage and protect other more natural methods of rat control too like existing coyotes and racoons instead of exposing them to secondary poisoning. I would like to see a more effective and less harmful strategy for rat population control than the poison boxes.

Another website weighing in on the issue:  http://www.barnowltrust.org.uk/hazards-solutions/rodenticides/

A couple days ago my recently retired husband called me to the kitchen window to see a Pileated Woodpecker spiral up the big Western Red-cedar tree that stands sentinel in front of our house just a few feet west of our driveway. We watched while it did ascending surveys on three cedars and picked for bugs along the edges of vertical bark strips. It hunted bugs for a couple minutes then flew off with the distinctive “rowing wingbeat” pattern described in “Sibley” (“The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America” by David Allen Sibley). I saw one some years ago (2009) on the same tree as I worked in the yard and was so surprised that I froze in place hoping that it would stay and let me watch it for a while. These are such big striking colored birds and their witnessed visits so rare and brief that any sighting is big drama for “Life in the Yard”. No matter how long any bird might stay in my field of vision, it is never long enough and it makes the value of its visit all the more appreciated.

The welcoming early mark of spring for me is always the delicate lacey blooming of the Indian Plum as it appears in the understory at the same time as sightings of hummingbirds so that these little flowers provide the hummers with water and fast food in the flower nectar. This shrub is also called Osoberry (Oemleria cerasiformis) and it has male and female flowers on separate plants so to get the little plum fruit the male and female plants have to be visited by a pollinator that moves the pollen from the male plant flowers to the female plant flowers. The little hummingbirds and early bumble bees provide this pollinating service while they forage for food and the successful fruit is evidence of how early our native pollinators start work every year, well before the imported agricultural pollinators. Now, when the Osoberry leaves are just starting to emerge, the three leaves remind me of a fleur-de-lis and that it is time to plan some Zydeco/Cajun dancing to shake off winter chill.

It was a welcoming sight last week when we were surveying our yard for planning spring tasks and we saw the fast moving silhouette of a hummingbird. The tiny body was just a dark oval spot and the wings were fuzzy suggestions with the afternoon sun reflecting off of and back lighting the blurring movement of the hummer’s rapid wingbeats. Early spring last year, in the same area of our yard, there was a little female hummer eating aphids off of a Honeysuckle and I saw a lot of her for most of the spring and summer eating tiny bugs & flies and visiting blooms of various native shrubs. A little male, Calliope, I think, spent some time last year aggressively defending space around our west neighbor’s sugar water feeder. It made me think about artificial wildlife conflict we humans can create and cock fighting at the scale of hummingbirds that is so entertaining for some to watch. Today I saw, for the first time, a humming bird collecting Cody down from the underside of the Cody down basket. The little Chickadees have been regular visitors for the years it has been up, but this is the first I have seen a hummer collect from it.

I surprised a bumble bee this morning when I turned over a clump of kinnikinnick flowers to look at the tiny opening of the little pink edged blooms. I was pondering the question of what creature could be pollinating these early tough-to-access flowers on these so-low-to-the-ground plants and was answered by the annoyed buzzing of an escaping bumble. Every year the pollinating efforts are wildly successful as is evidenced by the masses of little red berries all over the kinnikinnick that slowly get eaten by wildlife in the fall and winter. So, my question has been partly answered and I still need to watch for which of our native bumblebees is/are doing the hard work with such successful results.

This was a garbage day which requires the mundane task of collecting all the garbage, recycling and composting to get everything out in the bins at street side before the noisy trucks come to pick up our household refuse. I stepped out the back door with my hands full, trying not to get my clothes dirty, when I heard the full chaotic sounds of dozens of birds. I stopped and craned my neck to see if I could tell who was here on this sunny winter morning. They are mostly oblivious to my presence as they inhabit a larger more complex plane of existence, being able to fly through the air, they exploit the vertical without machines. I am so jealous.
Several Juncos were flitting around. I think a pair of them has a habitual nest spot in the front yard, because when I do yard work there, during nesting season, they scold and follow me till I leave the space they have claimed and use so much more productively than I. A flock of chickadees with their little fat light colored bellies are flying from tree to tree in a noisy mass. I heard Flickers make their single tone call, then saw a flash of under wing orange as one landed high up on the side of a weathered utility pole. That pole is so worn and craggy that it is not safe to climb any more, but it is plain wood and has no creosote treatment so it substitutes as a tree snag and might support a few bugs for Flickers to eat. I have seen Flickers on this pole many times in the past and there is a hole toward the top that I like to think might serve as a nest hole. The Flicker this morning “walked” a few feet up the pole, each time pulling its head and body close to the pole as it repositioned its feet up, then pulled its body up and away as it moved up a few inches at a time, keeping an eye out for bugs while it climbed.
My favorites, the Stellar Jays, are definitely back. They make such a unique sound that cannot be mistaken for any other bird. When I hear them, I always think of my childhood experiences of camping at Ohanapacosh on Mt. Rainier, where the “Camp Robbers” would tear apart any food related item that was left unguarded. The huge Mt. Rainier Ravens would stand aloof in a close tree, talk to each other and bob their heads up and down, but the Stellar Jays were very brash about landing right on the tables, turning their heads to look at us with one eye expecting us to share and showing off the exquisite blue of their feathers up close.
This garbage day was the type of cold but sunny winter day that is a hopeful pleasure this time of year because our short & gray Northwest winter days can get so dreary. Dawn is earlier, spring feels soon and this was a noisy glorious morning of birds and brilliant sun to make my heart swell and break with gratitude. As I stood taking in these sights and sounds that so clearly express the beauty of life, I was abruptly overwhelmed with the heartbreaking sadness for the impending death of a friend and the devastating impending loss to be felt by family and friends. My two opposite emotional sensations felt so acutely connected; the amazing fullness of life and the tragic loss of it.

The Towhees, in the front yard, have been successful so far in raising a chick this summer. I have been hearing a buzzy trilling sound in the morning and evenings. Birds make such amazing sounds it is impossible to translate to human language and almost silly to try to sound it out linguistically. That being stated, it sounds a bit like: Twzreeee. It is very regular, evenly spaced and coming from the southwest area of the yard, so while I was puttering, enjoying the cool evening air and the buzzy trilling against the background of ambient suburban noise, I heard a rustling on the ground in an area that has a protective covering of native trailing black berry. I looked closer and saw the silhouette of a chubby sparrow scurry out of sight and seconds later a Towhee landed and scurried after the little shadow. I thought it must be a Towhee chick and its mother and was able to clearly see them both the following evening; the chick’s coloring is more like a streaky brown sparrow and it does not look like a strong flier yet. The mother has the typical dusky marking of the adult female Towhee. 

This morning, a pair of Oregon Juncos are collecting Cody hair on the back patio; one hair at a time. The little female is intent and focused at jumping around and grabbing the next little hair she sees, but the male is just bouncing around close by; it appears the little male is keeping a look-out while the female is so busy. She looks as though she has a very large white mustache. I read at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology that they will raise 1-3 broods a season so although it might seem late in the year for nest building I guess it is still nesting time for these two. I think I read somewhere that humming birds will raise more than one brood a year, in different nests and even have over lapping times for their broods. What a tremendous amount of work. 

Little Mother is definitely gone, but her baby from last year, Junior, is still here bringing people food to the bird baths and I think she left two of this year’s babies behind too. I saw one following Junior around begging to be fed for a couple days and then I saw two very awkward young crows that seemed to be begging to be fed from no one in particular and they were not very good at walking or flying. They are staying very close together, foraging here in the yard and staying high in the cedar trees. I am assuming that Junior has taken on the job of feeding and teaching these siblings. I hope they make it; it is not a good start for these birds that would normally have a year or more of hanging out with mommy and learning what to do. Perhaps Junior will be a good substitute mommy. 

A pair of flickers took turns at the bird baths yesterday, first a very striking colored male and then the more subtlety marked female. The male has the red malars (bird cheeks) and also small red patches on either side of the nape of its neck, but not a full red crescent as shown in “The Sibley Field Guide To Birds of Western North America” by David Allen Sibley. These are very shy birds that I hear frequently and don’t see much, but lately I’ve seen them picking out the bugs in the rotting logs I have strewn about the yard. 

The Stellar Jays are here daily now searching the hazelnut tree for nuts that the squirrels missed. The jays pick a nut, take it to a rock or a stump and stab at it with their beak until they break it open. I read that Stellar Jays are one of the two birds that eat tent caterpillars. The tent caterpillar has very bristly hairs that are unpleasant to most birds and most birds cannot eat them, except one being the Stellar Jay that will find the chrysalis, break them open and eat the little pupating moth, in the same way they break open hazelnuts to eat the nut-meat inside. 

I am still working away at invasive alien plant removal at Meadowbrook Playfield forested area. It seems overwhelmingly daunting at times, especially when I see so many invasive alien plants in seed production in surrounding yards and unmaintained areas, but that is the horticultural Pandora’s Box we have now until we can change to a “first do no harm” approach to horticulture and gardening. 

Here is a little science entertainment I can recommend: A 4 Part Radio program called “The Age We Made” by Gaia Vince, broadcast on the BBC Nov. 2012, is available to listen to on her home page at her website – http://wanderingaia.com . They are very information dense 18 minute programs so you can’t really multitask while listening. I thought they were well worth the down time.

I have been doing battle with Scot’s/Scotch Broom in my Forest Steward assignment park the past few weeks, with this plant, as with almost all noxious weeds, it is a long, and possibly endless, war with strategies and plans of attack. This first effort is simply to stop the blooming shrubs from providing additional mature seeds to the already existing seed bank in the soil, the seed of this plant can stay viable in the soil for 5-60 years (one source said 80 years!). I have been able to devote a few hours a couple times a week and I think I made progress in my first engagement with the enemy. I read through the King County document on-line for Scotch-Broom-Control and modified my plan so that rather than cutting it close to the ground, I left enough to use a Weed Wrench in the future on the remaining trunk to remove the roots if possible. Some of the Scot’s/Scotch Broom shrubs are old with trunks 3 and 4 inches in diameter so I am not sure how these will respond to being cut down and they are too big for wrenching the roots out, but there are lots of trunks that are the right size for the Weed Wrench so I will have plenty on which to practice my technique. The next plants scheduled for my first attempt at removal are European Bittersweet, Holly, non-native thistles, Ivy, Laurel, Spurge Laurel, Yellow Flag Iris and so many others. The Knot Weed is too wide spread in the Meadowbrook area for volunteers to do the work and will need professionals with special equipment to do the work required to control it; very costly, I guess that is why the “NOX WEED” charge is on our Real Estate Tax bill.

The bird song that I hear during my hours in the park is very pleasant sound to hear while working and I have seen small muted colored female hummingbirds darting about after being alerted to their presence by the buzz-y snapping of their tail. I couldn’t tell what they were doing while I was busy with weed cutting, but I also saw the same type of hummer in the SPU retention pond area. Since our little Meadowbrook Pond was scheduled to be fenced off this week (and now is) I made a point to take a few extra walks through the paths around the pond to identify which native plants were blooming, getting ready to bloom and setting seed. I was excited to see the native Orange Honeysuckle Vine (Lonicera ciliosa) was threading its way through several plants in different areas and had healthy sturdy orange blooms pushed up above the support plant to wave in light breezes for the hummingbirds to find them. I was also excited to see another native honeysuckle plant blooming and setting seed in its little fruit and this was the Twinberry (Lonicera involucrata). This shrub has lovely small yellow bell shaped flowers in pairs along the underside of its branches. These turn into pairs of black round berries and then the bracts behind the berries turn dark red and are a very striking contrast to the surrounding greenery. The hummingbirds I saw were getting nectar from the flowers of both plants which provides both water and quick calories for these hot little birds; body temperature about 107 degrees F. They will eat the little soft bodied insects that are also attracted to the vegetation of these native plants and feed the insect slurry to their tiny chicks that need lots and lots of this insect soup to grow so fast that they fledge in about 19/20 days after hatching. The plants continue to pull up water and refill the flowers so the female hummingbird can return again and again for a drink of stock to make insect soup for their babies. That’s why.

Cool Site – The Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

I got to go to two classes last week. I attended a little four hour training class put on by Sasha Shaw and other King County Noxious Weed Control Program Folks. The class was in Kenmore and supplied the experts in the field with four hours of CEU Credits, but I attended for my never ending quest for knowledge. The website for the hard working and ever helpful Sasha Shaw troops is http://www.kingcounty.gov.weeds . You can look up some invasive alien plants there and get information on the best ways to get rid of them. The website also has a very good Native Plant section and it is well worth poking around and finding ways that it could be useful to you.

Scot’s Broom is making itself visible right now and it is a great time to lop it off close to the ground before it sets seed. This is a monoculture plant that crowds out all natives, and other plants, because it binds nitrogen to its roots and then the nitrogen is not available to other plants. It has no wildlife value because, like almost all alien plants, does not have insects, native insect herbivores, that eat it. So it does not contribute to the transfer of energy from the sun, to plant, to insect biomass, to baby birds and other critters; it is not part of our local ecosystem trophic energy transfer. You can web search trophic levels and get some great places to learn about trophic levels and ecological food web stuff.

The lack of tropic function in an ecosystem is why alien plants reduce wildlife, cause habitat destruction and eventual species extinctions. The wonderful book “Bringing Nature Home” by Professor Douglas Tallamy does an excellent job of explaining the process in a very readable style. You can web search his name or book to find him, plus his book is available at Seattle Public Library. If you have ever walked through a neighborhood that has lots of bird sounds and then noticed another neighborhood that has few bird sounds, that is very likely due to an absence of native insects due to an absence of native plants. I especially notice lots of birds in areas that have big native trees and that is because the big native trees support a huge amount of native insect biomass which is good food for healthy strong baby birds.

Sasha’s class was also useful to me because I attended an eight hour Forest Steward Class to help me get started in the Green Seattle Partnership Seattle Forest Steward Program. Yeah! The instructors packed lots of information into the day and I now have to really learn it all and use it for practical application to improve and maintain a little chunk of Seattle’s lovely green. Part of the training was a brief field trip to Seward Park where I saw a small Brown Creeper searching for insects on several Western Red-cedars; very fun to watch it walk up the trees trunks. Then the crowning delight of the day, was a Bald Eagle sitting in a nest with just its head visible above a jumble of twigs. Wow.

Life in the Yard is the lity at the end of Seattle hence seattlelity. I really love this yard I get to live in; it is as though we live in a tiny piece of Northwest forest. I can look out any window and see big red-cedars or native shrubs or both.
Each morning when I fetch the newspaper and breath in the fresh smells of this tiny forest, I hear birds of different species in addition to our resident family of crows – robins, flickers, song sparrows, chickadees and many I am unable to identify. The resident Eastern gray squirrels make little chirpy sounds too and they are really busy this time of year with chasing and mating and nesting; they are quite the entertainment for me and our adopted dog, Cody.
This wasn’t really a tiny forest when we bought this property and moved here in the summer of 1992. I have developed my knowledge about managing this yard and the things that grow here by submitting to the overwhelming presence of these amazing red-cedar trees. The things that were planted here were the standard popular alien landscaping plants and invasive alien volunteers, some of which had formed impenetrable thickets. There was a lawn here when we moved here but over time I realized how pointless it was to maintain a garden style so alien to our climate, ecology and the gifts that these trees give to this tiny footprint of forest floor. The added plus was that we got rid of the lawn mower and the annoying chore of weekly lawn mowing – ugh!
I have found amazing, delightful native plants that simply love to share this tiny forest with these big trees and the work required to maintain the yard is minimal and simple compared to what we used to do. I have gotten many wonderful plants from the excellent annual Snohomish Conservation District bare root native plant sale and from, my favorite native plant nursery, Tadpole Haven, which has occasional open house days to sell to the public. Tadpole Haven, recently got a big media plug from Cisco Morris and I was so thrilled to see them get that special attention because they provide such an important service of making good quality native plants available for ecosystem gardeners. The Washington Native Plant Society should be having their spring sale fund raiser soon, in early May, with details on their website.
The transition of this yard to a tiny piece of Northwest forest has given so much to the life in this yard.