A Bestiary: Tales from a Wildlife Garden Still Grows

Synchronicity and the Scarlet Tanager 

It is happening over at my garden blog and Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens. 

A Bestiary ~ Warblers ~ Northern Parula

Over two years have passed since my monthly posts featuring Warblers began over at Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens.  The next to the last warbler in the series, and as always sighted in the gardens at Flower Hill Farm, is presented this month in 'A Bestiary — Tales from a Wildlife Garden.'  The Northern Parula perches in an old apple tree and darts about searching for insects inside flower buds as I capture photos.  If you would like to see more images and learn about these unique, small warblers please do visit — A Bestiary.

The feisty Redstart will be the last of this series of Warblers and then onto other songbirds that share this land and habitat. I so look forward to their return this spring.  It has been a joy to recall the numerous encounters I have had over the years through writing the Bestiary.  I hope to sight more species here this coming season. 

Perhaps you can match the names to the bouquet of birds above  — Yellow Warbler, Magnolia Warbler, Northern Parula, Common Yellowthroat, Chestnut Sided Warblers, Black-throated Blue Warbler, Black-throated Green Warbler, Palm Warbler, Black-and-white Warbler, Yellow-rumped Warbler, Nashville Warbler. There is a Redstart there too. 

I am still working hard on my new website, and missing posting here. I will hopefully have it going by April. 

A Bouquet of Warblers Continues In Plumule Expanse

December sighs and drops whiteness about the land. The last few weeks of 2013 are at hand.

Another month unfolds and now a landscape covered in downy snow and ice lies across these hills of Western Massachusetts.
I have a new installment of my 'A Bestiary . . . Tales from a Wildlife Garden' up over at Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens.

The Black-and-white Warbler joins the lively bouquet of warblers . . .  offering its striking plumage to the arrangement of songbirds. I hope you might click over and learn more about this unique new world warbler.

Vermilion Murmurs and Malus within a November Landscape

Cinnabar and Dragon blood come to mind when seeing the vibrant vermilion sprays of our middle garden Japanese Maple. Its blazing breath reaches over towards payne's gray shadows racing through the forested hills, we call Walnut Hill and High Ridge, creating a stunning contrast. Sturdy oaks still grasping their last burnt sienna leaves are nearly naked now. The Japanese Maple is as out of place in our landscape as an ancient Dracaena cinnabari might be, but it is a dormant dragon so lifting the spirit with its late and lasting fiery vibrance. 

Viburnums have yet to let go of their purple leaves.

Cotinus, without the smoke, adds to the last of early November's crimson garden palette. 

Another sleeping dragon rests just below the farmhouse in our weeping Cutleaf Japanese Maple.

Other reds in the gardens this November are juicy spheres by the hundreds . . . apples remaining on, or below, the apple trees. We have a variety of Malus senior citizens about the gardens and are thankful to those who planted the ever giving trees, one at least, over a century ago.

Sedum 'Autumn Joy' still wearing its burgundy tones before aforementioned century old apple tree. 

A stream of free falls given a good wash make yummy apple sauce. 

Weeping crabapple outside of the little studio offers a tangy feast for over wintering birds.

Our Metasequoia in the north field spreads out her russet plumes.

In the south field sumac brightens the fading countryside.

Meanwhile, as bold colors depart and cold, chilly air arrives, I have added another warbler to my 'A Bestiary. . . Tales From A Wildlife Garden' over at Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens. The stout little Black-throated Blue Warbler becomes the twenty-fourth beast . . . the seventh warbler . . .  joining the bubbly bouquet of songbirds.

A Bestiary . . . Tales from a Wildlife Garden ~ Featuring Warblers

Time does have a way of falling away from us . . . and so it goes that for nearly two years now I have been writing about the beasts that abide in our wildlife habitat. 'A Bestiary . . . Tales from a Wildlife Garden' is now featuring songbirds with warblers being the focus of my cursor. Warblers are truly delightful birds and come and go with the changing seasons . . . leaving us each late summer and fall only to return every spring . . . their departures and arrivals help us mark time . . . beginnings and endings of growing seasons.

I would be honored if you clicked and scrolled over to Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens to see more images and learn a bit about these brilliantly marked birds. There are twenty-three installments in all but you can pick and choose which you might like to visit. Before the birds I did write about the mammals that roam around and about our twenty-one acres of forest, fields and gardens . . . not lions, tigers and bears but you can awaken bobcat, opossum and bears if you like. 

The labels below reveal the names of the six different warblers framed within this collage . . . perhaps you can match them up. Their little lives here at Flower Hill Farm so enrich my life and I do feel their absence both in the silence of songs and the stillness within the branches of trees and shrubberies. Revisiting our encounters through writing the Bestiary is a joyous way of recalling all of the remarkable wildlife I am so blessed to share this land with. There are more warblers, other songbirds then hummingbirds to write about before I move on to other beasties . . . like butterflies and bees.

Hot Colors of Cool August Butterflies and a Bestiary of Birds

What is normal or average anymore? It seems that days are spread out more like a delicately hand-stitched quilt laying loosely across a large bed . . . not in triangles or squares but in free-form patterns that hardly relate to one another except in hues. Vivid colors, with a play of values, fills the eyes and dreams of those that slip beneath basted layers of wrinkled cloth . . .  pieces torn and recombined.

Such are our New England August days, once felt to be the warmest of the summer. Somehow the year has been taken apart and reset with September's cooler temperatures now placed where August's heat used to be. Memories of summer ways, warm fronts, cold fronts and days get reshuffled into another sort of design.

Climate change is not simply hot and cold, wet and dry . . . sadly we must visualize another sort of quilt made of ancient dead organisms, fossil fuels, dirty values and sooty tints pieced in carbon footprints across an unimaginative covering that is choking, liquefying and slowly reshaping shorelines and beloved landscapes over the huge berth of our earth.

The little glass globe, that we all love to handle and shake, in order to see clean snow falling over a quaint home, has cracked in large proportions never to be repaired. A nightmare creeps in between the fragments of fabric presenting a globe where pesticide and other unimaginable poisons fall as deadly flakes into a world where all life is sickened. As we place the fragile memory of a child's more beautiful dream back in a protected case and slide back under what we believe to be a safe and cozy blanket, we fail to see how it too is becoming unraveled while we kick away the cover of truth too often and go about our usual "Oh Well, What Can I Do?" ways.

It is in the little things we do everyday, in our pennies we fail to count, where we might see a change. Collectively, in our right minds, with our voices and dollars demanding a greener world; where families are not displaced, wooly, white bears may safely stand and butterflies continue to fly, we may yet save the fine flora and fauna that we are so intricately a part of.

This morning when I woke, I thought to just write whatever came out of me for an hour and so the paragraphs above appeared. You may skip them and simply join me in this landscape I call home, where our native Joe-Pye Weed stretches towards Walnut Hill and the sky above.

Where Red-spotted Admirals extract vital life-enhancing nectar.

Tiny colorful American Coppers pollinate marjoram.

A more muted beauty with great eyes . . . Common Wood Nymph sipping marjoram. 

A garden falls over into itself.

Yesterday, for a split moment at least, I was excited to think I eyed a Monarch butterfly. Alas, the Monarch was but a Viceroy. Though a beauty in its own right, this butterfly is not one I can raise and observe its metamorphosis. It is a joy I have had for thirty years and the absence of Monarch butterflies in our gardens this year and across parts of the country is greatly felt. Pesticides from GMO's is greatly to blame.

Daylilies are fading but there are still some to delight certain butterflies. Hydrangeas in the middle garden are still offering beauty and nectar too.

A Spicebush Swallowtail wearing pollen dust enjoys a dip and sip from deep within the well of this flower and soon flies on to another. I am exhibiting two separate blooms visited by two different butterflies captured weeks apart. I do not know of spicebush growing here . . . perhaps a neighbor grows it or there is another plant, growing on our land or nearby, that this butterfly has decided to use as a host plant.

Even a teeny Delaware Skipper is attracted to the flavor of daylily and casts its proboscis towards the Hemerocallis reservoir of sweetness.

I should love to see from the compound eyes of a butterfly, for a day or five, when the birds are otherwhere and otherwise occupied.

Surely, seeing the world of colors, as this Greater Spangled Fritillary does, could inspire.

The daughter of Zeus may well exchange a glance from within a human eye and morph back into herself within this Aphrodite Fritillary butterfly. Perhaps by seeing our worlds from within other's eyes we may all grow more wise.

For a bird's-eye-view I have taken to writing about warblers and if you might enjoy seeing and learning more about these marvelous feathered friends of our gardens, forest and fields, why not take a click over to Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens to view various installments of my 'A Bestiary: Tales from a Wildlife Garden.'

May your days be filled with butterflies and birds . . . I would love to hear of your Monarch butterfly sightings, if you are of time and mind to share.