Fall and Early Winter, 2023

Here's one more post wrapping up sights around our property in 2023! These past few months have been decently busy, including a good amount of traveling (sights from which I hope to share in a blog post sometime soon). But there were also plenty of interesting goings-on in our yard, meadow, and woods during this time, including our first ever glimpse of a Black Bear on the evening of November 5! We heard a strange clanging sound outside, and we turned on the floodlight to see a bear bending the bird feeder pole to the ground! The bear ran off quickly, so I don't have any pictures to share from that encounter, but yeah, now we can definitely add Black Bear to our list of yard mammals. Here's a bunch of other sights that do come with pictures, starting back in early September.

On September 4, I was admiring the array of colorful wildflowers on a slope near one of our sheds -- I didn't plant or maintain any of this, so I'm especially impressed with these balanced swathes of blooming goldenrod, Spotted Jewelweed, and a wild sunflower that I'm pretty sure is Thin-leaved Sunflower (Helianthus decapetalus):

Here's a closer view on September 8 of one of these brilliant sunflower blooms:

And here's a Spotted Jewelweed flower with a visiting bee, who accessed this flower by crawling behind that large lower lip:

Also in the above picture are the jewelweed's seedpods -- touching those pods and deploying their exploding mechanisms is one of my great joys of the summer and fall. :)

On September 11, this awkwardly patchy Gray Catbird was foraging for Pokeweed berries:

And another Gray Catbird was gulping down Gray Dogwood berries on September 23:

I'm not sure who eats these brilliant red Jack-in-the-Pulpit berries -- this big cluster was in the woods on September 23:

This juvenile Cedar Waxwing on October 1, though, was also visiting our yard to eat Pokeweed berries:

I'm really grateful that our property came with such an ample native berry supply in the summer and fall, to keep the birds hanging around!

By October 1, the Virginia Creeper vines that cover many of the Black Cherry trees on the edge of our woods had become a brilliant red -- this is one of my favorite sights here in early fall, and I can't help sharing a couple of pictures:

I love how the Virginia Creeper's leaves make a solid red core around these upper branches, and the Black Cherry's own leaves make a still-green cloud around that:

A little further along the meadow's edge on October 1, golden Wild Grape leaves intertwined with sumac leaves that revealed their silvery undersides in the wind -- so many festive colors:

We put up a large bat box in our yard in 2020, and toward the end of the summer this year we finally saw our first small signs of some visiting bats! By October 5, there was a definite smattering of droppings on the ground around the bat box's pole -- certainly not enough to indicate a colony, but I guess we had a few bats staying with us this year:

October 17 was a great day for some bird portraits in the afternoon fall sun. This Tufted Titmouse gave me a wonderfully close view as it perched on our deck railing:

And then the same or another titmouse looked especially handsome against a backdrop of late-fall meadow colors:

Likewise, if not more so, for this gorgeous Blue Jay:

I was happy to get some brief glimpses of the Ruby-crowned Kinglets that were moving through the yard:

This picture even includes a tiny bit of this bird's usually hidden ruby crown:

On the night of October 28, I tried for a picture of the full moon (not my usual type of subject!), and I was pleasantly surprised at how well this worked out -- wow, the moon is amazing:

Apparently I took very few pictures in November! We had our first sticking snow on November 1 (only a day after our first frost), and I was amazed that the Coral Honeysuckle kept blooming late enough into the year to have its flowers covered with snow:

And here's a Black-capped Chickadee checking out our roof on November 4:

On the afternoon of December 4, a fantastic rainbow appeared over our meadow:

On December 12, this Dark-eyed Junco let me approach fairly close, as long as it stayed mostly hidden in its tangle of branches and vines:

A Pileated Woodpecker came to our suet feeder for a few days in December, which was an unusual and wonderful treat. Here's this too-big bird on December 14:

And again on December 15 -- I love those pointy tail feathers (sorry about the weird coloring in these pictures; the woodpecker insisted on visiting in the morning during very poor light, and I got some strange effects when I lightened and processed these pictures):

For a size comparison, here's a Downy Woodpecker on the same feeder on December 20:

While I walked around outside on December 20, I kept seeing Downy Woodpeckers all over the place, actually. I guess this was a good day for these littlest (and cutest) of our woodpeckers! This Downy Woodpecker was working on our Shagbark Hickory tree:

Another Downy Woodpecker was hammering into the round galls on goldenrod stems in the meadow, getting at the larvae inside:

What a cool foraging strategy -- go get that bug, little woodpecker:

In the woods, Downy Woodpeckers were working over various dead trees, stark black-and-white creatures on multicolored wooden surfaces:

Also on December 20 (what an active day!), I got to see this White-breasted Nuthatch foraging among bark crevices in the woods:

This Black-capped Chickadee showing its beautifully patterned back and wings:

And this Dark-eyed Junco perched among the Redbud tree's bare branches:

And now 2023 is coming to a close, and that means a whole new year is next! I'm excited to see what sights 2024 brings, both familiar and new.

Winter Solstice

Yesterday was the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. I made sure to spend some time outside yesterday to mark this event, but the weather was bitterly cold and overcast, perhaps suitably bleak given the day. Much better was today, the day after the solstice, when temperatures got into the 40s (F) and the sky was sunny and clear. From here on out, the light will be slowly returning, and being outside on this sun-filled day felt like a great way to celebrate that fact!

This is the first place I've lived where I've noticed such a vast difference in the sun's height between summer and winter. (And now that I think about it, I suppose this is the farthest north I've lived.) On summer days, the sun reaches almost directly overhead. Now, the sun barely gets above the trees. I took this picture in our meadow at around 12:30 today, and that's maximum sun for this time of year:

The sun lit up these fuzzy Virgin's Bower seedheads at the edge of the meadow:
 

A Common Raven called for several minutes from the ridge above our house and made a pass over the meadow. Common Ravens aren't actually all that common around here, and I feel very lucky that a pair of these birds seems to be year-round residents at this nearby ridge:
 

I watched some Black-capped Chickadees foraging among old seedheads on our Tulip Tree:

While a couple of noisy White-breasted Nuthatches worked over one of our old apple trees. Those rusty feathers under this bird's tail are one of my favorite things about White-breasted Nuthatches:

What a handsome bird you are, little nuthatch:

I'm hoping for more of these wonderfully sunny days in the wintry months to come, with the sun a bit higher in the sky each day!

From Brown to White

The landscape becomes so brown in late November. Although it's a mostly quiet and dormant time of the year, there are still plenty of interesting things to see. On November 25, I wandered in our meadow, admiring the wide variety of textures and shades-of-brown on the plentiful dried plant stems remaining after this year's growth. These arching goldenrod seedheads were especially fluffy and pretty:

And I love the mix of puffball seedheads and curly dried leaves on this aster:

Wider views of the undisturbed part of the meadow (the part that wasn't excavated and reseeded afterward) showed interesting patchworks of dried plants:

Red pedicels on Gray Dogwood (Cornus racemosa) shrubs at the edge of the meadow added some color among all the brown:

A few familiar winter-season birds were out and about as well. This Black-capped Chickadee was busy processing a sunflower seed and didn't seem to mind me standing nearby:

And a fluffy White-breasted Nuthatch worked its way along a tree trunk:

Hey, do you have a seed, too?

November 25th and 26th were relatively warm days, and I was surprised to see several moths -- which turned out to be Fall Cankerworm Moths (Alsophila pometaria) -- both during the day and at night under our porch light:

Here's another one of these moths that ended up in our house for a bit:

And after I saw my first wingless female moth earlier in the year, wouldn't you know it, female Fall Cankerworm Moths are wingless as well. (The moths in the above pictures are males.) Since that was the only species of moth I saw on those warm-weather days, I have to assume that this wingless moth on our porch on November 26 is a female of that species. Nature is so interesting and weird!

And speaking of insects, on November 25 I moved a log against our house's foundation and uncovered a pile of hibernating ladybugs; that's a lot of bugs, but given how many ladybugs we find in and around our house on warm days, I'm not particularly surprised to find this big of a group here:

On December 2, we got our first big snowstorm of the season. And it was a big storm, bringing a layer of ice followed by about a foot of thick, clinging snow overnight, and then more snow throughout the day. Most places around here closed that day -- including my work -- so I had some extra time in which to enjoy this transformation of the landscape into a world of white. The hillside across the valley from our house grew massive white structures (with pine trees somewhere underneath):

Here's a view along one edge of our property, with the old and nearly-collapsing shed surrounded by heavy snow:

The snow was so sticky -- and there was so little wind -- that it gained quite a bit of height even on narrow spots, and formed some interesting shapes. I especially like these fancy hats that developed on the Purple Coneflower seedheads:

Several birds were active throughout the snowy day, including this Northern Cardinal who was munching on Pokeweed berries:
 

Now that we're in December, I expect to see a lot of white landscapes for the next few months. It's definitely winter now!