Somewhat of a surprise to the area, I think we may have had the most snow in the area, but everyone got wind. Our power was out for a few hours. It will be freezing temps for the next two days, too, so I put out some extra suet lumps stuck on the feeder, sunflower seeds and bread crumbs. Hard to find areas that aren’t inundated with snow, so mostly under bushes where birds like to feed anyway.
Ookow coming up now, the leaves spiky stalks of dark purple green. The deer sometimes eat their purple allium type flowers, once the leaves and then flower stalks reach about three feet high. We’ll just have to see if all the “deer fence”, the 18″ high nearly invisible segmented fencing I recently put up around a few vulnerable areas, will protect them and my other delicate plants from all the trampling the deer do.
Deer rant: Of course deer can “jump” the fence, but there’s not much reason to do any jumping, plus these are arranged in circles. They’re meant to divert the deer around, preferably back to the path. Good thing most plants were dormant when all that rutting was going on! (See previous entry from December).The ground was full of deep hoof holes, that’s one reason for the extra fence circles. I’m also not sure they would have completely respected the fence borders during the rutting, but we’ll see next year. So far after a month, no disturbance of the four fenced circles or new hoof holes within them. One fence has been undisturbed for three months. I also put 5 bronze metal cage cloches on a few new huckleberry and their plants that the deer ate down to the ground, to give them half a chance (the sixth one of the set helps keep the flickers out of the suet feeder, though the songbirds did need to learn how to use it).
We haven’t seen deer in the videos since November. We saw coyote prints all across the lower back yard just today after all the snow….too bad the camera batteries were out then, the coyotes hadn’t been seen on camera since late November. We were just wondering about it the other day, whether their routes into the ‘hood were cut off. Just in case, though, I need to remember to order some insect barrier to put over the young ash trees…..the bird netting holes are too large and it falls down, which won’t help protect the leaves from the deer at all. I need to look online and see what if anything exists between that size and mosquito netting.
Repurposed several photo frames from the last few decades to house new little photo-sized mosaics of birds. We don’t have much room for photo displays around here- they collect dust on countertops and then eventually sit in a drawer. I made four but only finished glueing three, since one needs some serious sanding to make it centered and is not that great. They are small, the wren is 2 1/2″ x 4″, the largest jay is 4 x 6″, the woodpecker in between. Anyway, here are the birds in all their glory: (looks like I need to clean a woodpecker tile)
ellensgarden.us 