Birdhousing perils

I put up this little birdhouse a year ago...

And when I opened it up to clean it a couple weeks ago, I discovered paper wasps had built a nest in it.

Luckily, paper wasps are not supposed to be aggressive and the queen should be hibernating somewhere else anyway...and the rest of the wasps should have expired by now...but I'm just going to wait for a really, really cold day to remove the nest because I don't want to risk getting stung. Paper wasps are not supposed to return to a used nest the following year so hopefully this spring, once that nest is removed, baby birds will be raised in that house, not baby wasps.

When I was building this particular birdhouse, I had a feeling that that vine running across the roof might be poison ivy so I just carefully worked around it, being very careful not to touch it.

I was hoping it was Virginia creeper but just in case it wasn't, there was no way I was going to touch it. Birds are completely fine rubbing themselves all over every part of the poison ivy plant without any of its effects. They are the ones that eat and disperse the berries (and they find them delicious). The urushiol oil in poison ivy only affects humans. Leaving the vine on the birdhouse would not be a problem for the birds....but it would for me if I touched it.

See this? Those are poison ivy berries. I'm getting pretty good at identifying the stuff since I blistered up so many times last year.

And see this? The red spot on my cheek that Starlinka is checking out (there's also a rash starting on the side of my face....and on my scalp!!!)? Oh, that's poison ivy that has made contact with me somehow. But how when I was so darn careful when I was building that birdhouse?

Well, that was an easy one to figure out...

Who else but Stella Rubella Fullahella, the bird who was into something she shouldn't and she wasn't going to tella.

I had stored the birdhouse in the back room thinking it was out of the way of anybody getting near it but just a couple of unsupervised minutes and Stella had managed to get into the back room to do her house inspection. How else can you explain the weird patches on my cheek, the side of my face, the top of my scalp? Those are all the places that that bird tends to be near when she sits on my shoulder. Oh.....Stella. So many levels of bad with that bird, such talent when it comes to evil.

Well, I got that birdhouse out of my house as soon as I could so I wouldn't continuously get reexposed to the poison ivy oil. Who knows where else Stella had been in those unsupervised few minutes...and what else she had rubbed that urushiol oil off onto...hopefully not absolutely everything. She does get around.

I hung the birdhouse near the road that lines my land in Kansas. If anyone sees the birdhouse and tries to take it down....well, they are in for a surprise because that urushiol oil stays active for at least 3 years. Good for some moral payback if the birdhouse disappears (although I really don't expect that kind of thing to happen) but bad for me because that oil should be all over my house if I know Stella. And it kind of was. I kept breaking out for weeks but eventually whatever Stella smeared around the house dissipated.

You would think that would be it for me and poison ivy for the year but the same thing almost happened again when I put up another birdhouse a week ago.

There were two vines climbing up that tree and without the leaves.....I didn't know if they were grape vines or poison ivy vines or what so I avoided getting near them. I didn't think that much about them until Mary got hold of them and started swinging away like Tarzan. If I didn't get a big case of poison ivy, there still was the possibility of me leaping off the ladder to avoid her and then falling into the creek below.

Surprisingly, we all survived getting that birdhouse up with no mishaps. Whew. I kept Mary and her possibly poisoned mouth away from me on the walk back, got in the car, locked the doors and took off....and so far, I have not broken out in any blisters or rashes.

That sky was beautiful but as I left, what with all my exposure to poison ivy and chiggers and ticks this past summer, I thought it also looked like a big collection of medical cotton balls and swabs.

But still, spectacularly beautiful.

Birdhousing

A year or so ago I started making birdhouses. I still have no idea where or what or when exactly I'm going to build my house on Aussie's Acers (how they spell "acre" on signs in the country) but in the meantime, I've been busy creating my future avian subdivision.

Once a house is built, it has to stay outside (or hidden somewhere indoors) until it moves to its final spot because Stella gets a little too dedicated and critical with her house inspection.

"I think that door needs to be a little wider..."

Here's an example of what results when the housing inspector starts remodeling...

Anyway, the first birdhouse went up about a year ago...

And when I went to check on it last week...

I found out that Stella was right.

That door apparently did need to be widened.

First Gardening Casualty of the Year

Although it's not quite 2012 yet (still have an hour to go...).

I was checking on things on my land in Kansas a couple days ago and noticed that a tree I had planted earlier in the year, a tree that I carried gallons of water up a hill twice a week for the whole summer, was....gone.

Oh wait, there it is, flat on the ground.

It's not like there aren't thousands, thousands of other trees to choose from, big and little.

My pretty little "Cherokee Princess" dogwood was no more because of one bad bunny, or some other little varmint with overactive chewing equipment which gnawed around the trunk and then down into the roots.

I had this awful feeling that other things had happened while I was away (it had only been two weeks!). And.......they had. I had planted three little shortleaf pines (Pinus echinata) in a row and it was a regular Goldilocks situation with the three of them. One was left alone. One had a little bit of its side branches removed. And then there was one that had been sliced in two, totally destroyed.

The top was discarded and left on the ground.

The bottom was discarded in a sense too...because it had not been eaten either. Just a casual chew...for no reason. I don't think pines recover when their main leader is broken so that poor little tree is a goner. Bad deer. Bad, bad, bad deer.

However, the thimbleweeds (Anemone virginiana) I planted were doing just fine.

Even the ones that grow there naturally were untouched.

The Blackhaw Viburnum fruits from early November...

...were still there in late December.

Wahoo seeds? Nobody seemed to like them either.

Odd thing. I plant for wildlife but when the wrong wildlife gets in there and chomps them down, I get a bit peeved. I guess it's because those deer and bunnies are so darn thorough when they take things down, literally.

Another mystery was what was going on with the tomato cages I had used to mark other things I had planted in the woods. Nearly all of them had been pulled up and tossed. What the heck? Not sure who to blame on that one...bad raccoons or bad dogs who were not paying attention to where they were running.

Oh well, I had enough of brown plants, both living and not so much living, but all of that was forgotten on the drive home because things became extraordinarily colorful at sunset.

And to punctuate the prettiness, a check mark (not quite a "v") of geese flew across the pink spotted sky.

It's not the dramatic sunset you see in the southwest or the dramatic ones you see at a coast but what was happening behind me while I was driving away still had a lot of drama for a sunset happening on the "plains."

While I was taking pictures, an approaching car stopped because they felt compelled to watch the beautiful sunset too.

Even the place that Rex calls "the messy house" because of all the abandoned cars and trailers surrounding it, looked beautiful.

Not sure where I'm going with this but it did fortify me. If I can garden with turtles, I can garden with other animals that are compelled to take things down. They might have teeth but when I return, I will have chicken wire.

The Tree That Ate Dogs...

At the end of October (near Halloween), I took a day off from work because I knew it was going to be an absolutely gorgeous day...and it was. The temperature was in the 80s, the sun was out, the sky was blue, and despite the lack of rain in months, the trees were at their peak for fall color.

I took a full day off from work because I wanted to get the rest of my potted plants in the ground before the first frost and that day seemed like it would be the perfect day to get a lot done. The thing is, no matter how fast I try to dig those plants in, I only manage to get in two at any given time. Two! Probably because my process involves some staring time, time spent imagining the best place possible for each shrub. However, once I start digging, those plans change because I either find an enormous tree root or solid rock beneath just one inch of soil and so....I move to another area where once again I spend some time staring and imagining. Bo and Tilly eventually get bored with me staring into space and tend to walk off with my digging equipment when any one tool is not in my hands. Then it's off to the car to see if I brought a spare spade or whatever because I almost never find those spades or gloves or small rakes or a new set of Felco pruners (!!!!) again. I just know that getting plants planted takes time but I had an entire day and I knew my obstacles.

But not the one that happened that day. I had planted a ninebark (Physocarpus opulifolius 'Diablo') the day before and while I was checking on it, the dogs checked out a hole at the bottom of a nearby sycamore.

It wasn't that big of a hole but Tilly was compelled to stick her nose in it as far as it could go, and then she started to furiously dig so she could get in even further.

We all watched her rotate herself around like she was a drill bit and just like that, she was gone!

Once Tilly was inside, the other dogs felt they needed to get in there too.

Bella was next in line and although she is bigger than Tilly, she was pulled into the hole even faster than Tilly. In just a few seconds...

...Bella was gone too.

Mary was ready to get herself inside the tree too but I pushed her aside to see just where the heck those other two dogs went. I didn't want to see another dog disappear in the tree when the other two had still not come out! But I could not see them when I looked in the hole, I could not see them when I looked down thinking there might be a tunnel under the tree, I even took a look behind the tree to see if they had come out the other side. Nope. No dogs. Those dogs were somewhere in Narnia and I thought I better distract the other two by getting them away from that tree while Tilly and Bella figured out that maybe they should turn around and come back out.

I set off for the woods to dig in a spicebush with Bo and Mary right behind me.

Bo can be one of my favorite garden helpers because it doesn't take him long to go from this...

...to this.

I got that one shrub in pretty fast and managed to find all my digging tools when I was done too. I felt pretty good about that and felt hopeful that Tilly and Bella had probably made it out of the tree. Mary and Bo followed me out of the woods and down the hill but when we got to the sycamore, Tilly was at the base of the tree with just her head sticking out from the hole. I heard Bella's whimpering...from somewhere inside the tree at my height! Tilly was 10% out and stuck and Bella was 100% stuck folded up in some odd position behind but intertwined with Tilly. Tilly was the first one in but now the first one almost out. I don't know how they found a way to switch directions in there because obviously that hollow area was narrow. Digging a bigger hole to get Tilly out didn't work, holding a biscuit in front of Tilly didn't work, pulling on her legs didn't work. Mary and Bo even tried to help by barking and crying and inside the tree, the same thing was going on but not as robustly. It was awful.

I walked across the street to talk to their owner because I was clueless as to what to do. By the time I got there and told him the story about his dogs being stuck inside a tree, he pointed to the road and started to laugh and said, "You mean that dog over there?" And there was Tilly racing across the street to get to us.

But Bella was not behind her.

I said I'd be back if I couldn't convince Bella to come out and then told the dogs "C'mon!" and walked back across the street with the three Pied Piperettes while their owner watched me and his dogs, probably thinking..."cityfolk."

The dogs and I found the most mournful looking dog peering out from that hole in the tree. We all tried to coach her out but Bella just cried and cried. This was getting all of us upset so we walked across the street again, me and my borrowed three dogs, to let their owner know that Bella was seriously stuck. And when I returned, Bella had finally gotten herself out and was trotting up the driveway, a little gimpy but at least she was out.

Whew! Big relief for me and all involved but how many plants did I get in that entire day? One. Just one. This hollow tree business could be a new thing to add to my list of obstacles in getting things done so I put a large rock in the hollow at the base of the tree, leaving enough room for whatever was up there to get out and not enough room for any of those dogs to get back in...because they tried!!!!! After all of that, Bella and Tilly still had an urgent need to get back in there!

A couple days later I drove back to Kansas and stuck my camera inside the tree, hoping nothing with teeth would be near my hand, and took a photo with my flash. The photo showed nothing but hollowness. I have no idea what delicious smelling stinky fidgety thing is up there and I do not have the focused curiousity that those dogs have to get my answer.

I'm just happy I didn't have to title this post with the Halloween style title....."The Tree That Ate Dogs." That title at the beginning of this post is just a partial title. The full title should be "The Tree That Ate Dogs...and then Spat Them Out." A happy ending in one short title for one long post and one long day.