Filling a Day of Social Distance – 4/26/2020 – Through the Window
/Continuing the blog post series prompted by COVID-19….
Here are the unique activities for yesterday:
Registering for virtual events. Just as I was beginning to miss birding festivals and the annual Master Naturalist training day – offerings of virtual alternatives appeared in my inbox! The registration was minimal, and I don’t have to be anxious about what the pandemic situation will be in late May and June. They are both on my calendar!
A birding festival. New Jersey Audubon has re-imaged their Cape May Spring Festival to a virtual event on May 23rd and 24th. My husband and I will enjoy the new (safer this year) form of the festival and hope to go back to Cape May next spring to enjoy the outdoors and birds like we did in 2019.
A climate change education conference. The Mid-Atlantic Climate Change Education Conference is also going virtual (June 29-30).
Surveying the yard. (Happened on the 25th…but I didn’t have time to write about it then). The weather was dry and in the 60s – a good day to get out and do some yard work. I used the electric hedge trimmers and worked on the bushes in front of the house for about an hour….and then walked around for some nature photography: there are 2 iris buds! Once they start opening, I plan to cut the stem to enjoy inside…avoid the trauma of having the deer eat them.
There was also a small weed blooming in the flower bed…which I left.
There are so many tulip poplar seeds flying around – inevitably, some of them produce seedlings. Repeated mowing handles the ones in the yard but the ones in the flowerbeds must be pulled. They make awesome specimens for the tree module of pre-school field trips…which are not happening this year; they make the point very well about how much of the tree is underground! These ‘baby trees’ went back to the brush pile after I photographed them.
Some reddish clover like plants are growing in the grass and moss on the shady hillside to the north of our house.
Near the steps down from our deck – some evidence of a bird’s demise. I hope it wasn’t the phoebe that was a frequent morning visitor to our sycamore.
Under the deck, the Christmas fern is full of fiddleheads – new spring growth.
I did an ‘intimate landscape’ picture of moss (dead and alive) and violet leaves.
The photography was a great finale for my yard work.
Watching a crew take down a dead pine tree in our neighbor’s yard. The tree was obviously ailing last summer and the few needles still on its branches were dry and brown. It’s good to have is down before it fell during wet and windy weather…maybe smashing into a house or fence or storage shed.
Links to my previous “filling a day of social distance” posts here.
And now for the monthly ‘through the office window’ post…I was at home for the whole month so there were a lot of photographs taken through my office window to choose from. Birds were the primary subjects: Carolina chickadee, brown-headed cowbird, dark-eyed junco, Carolina wren, common grackle, cardinal, American goldfinch, house sparrow, red-belled woodpecker, eastern phoebe, mourning dove, house finch, rose-breasted grosbeak, downy woodpecker, and chipping sparrow.
The red maple’s samaras ripened over the course of the month. Click on the middle picture below to ID the bird munching on the seeds.
And there was one sunset picture in the mix. Overall - it was a good month for photographs through the window!
