My andromeda shrub has not seen a lot of snow this year, so it was a delight last Friday when I got a chance to photograph the andromeda in snow. In the spring, the andromeda shrub produces these pretty wedding bell-like flowers. A robin once laid her eggs in my andromeda shrub.
We have gotten little snow this past winter – lots of threats and warnings, but no school has been cancelled due to snowstorms. I love photographing snow scenes, but New Jersey only gives me infrequent opportunities. I grew up in the Boston area, and they got much more snow this past winter. Anyone remember the blizzard of 1978?
The cardinals were content to visit our backyard once again and enjoy the bird feeder and branches.
This shot of the female cardinal shows a lot of her red – unlike her male partner, she is mostly brown, but when you get closer, you can see the pretty bits of red. I think it’s quite lovely.
One can see the reds of female cardinal here – love those streaks of red amongst the brown.
I enjoyed this description of the northern cardinal from Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology:
The male Northern Cardinal is perhaps responsible for getting more people to open up a field guide than any other bird. They’re a perfect combination of familiarity, conspicuousness, and style: a shade of red you can’t take your eyes off. Even the brown females sport a sharp crest and warm red accents. Cardinals don’t migrate and they don’t molt into a dull plumage, so they’re still breathtaking in winter’s snowy backyards. In summer, their sweet whistles are one of the first sounds of the morning.
I do find my cardinals tend to visit in the cold. I don’t see them in the summer.
I got some nice shots of a female cardinal visiting in our backyard. You can even see her feathers.
This is a close-up detail of her feathers.
Hello, Mrs. Cardinal! What a fine bright red beak you have.
Is this the same female cardinal? She looks a little different than the one shown above.
Mr. Cardinal was a bit further off, hiding in the lower branches of a neighbor’s bush.
On a different topic, I put some scallion ends in water in my kitchen. Truthfully, I forgot about them; oh, my, I see they really have grown! I did change the water at least once. I think you are supposed to change the water every other day.
For more Nature Notes, visit:
Friday afternoon right before candlelighting and who comes to visit but three deer? One quickly hopped the fence when he saw us, but the one in the front had a staring contest with my husband and then with me. The deer finally jumped over the fence to depart when I danced back and forth with my camera. My husband said it looked the deer might pounce on us.
Elsewhere in the Blogosphere
I am pleased to announce that I will be part of a tour of Sydney Taylor Book Awards. See the schedule:
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2013
Ann Redisch Stampler, author of The Wooden Sword
Sydney Taylor Honor Award winner in the Older Readers Category
At Shelf-Employed
Carol Liddiment, illustrator of The Wooden Sword
Sydney Taylor Honor Award winner in the Older Readers Category
At Ann Koffsky’s Blog
Doreen Rappaport, author of Beyond Courage: The Untold Story of Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust
Sydney Taylor Honor Award in the Teen Readers Category
At Bildungsroman
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2013
Linda Glaser, author of Hannah’s Way
Sydney Taylor Book Award winner in the Younger Readers Category
At This Messy Life
Adam Gustavson, illustrator of Hannah’s Way
Sydney Taylor Book Award winner in the Younger Readers Category
At Here in HP
Louise Borden, author of His Name was Raoul Wallenberg
Sydney Taylor Book Award winner in the Older Readers Category
At Randomly Reading
Deborah Heiligman, author of Intentions
Sydney Taylor Book Award winner in the Teen Readers Category
At The Fourth Musketeer
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2013
Sheri Sinykin, author of Zayde Comes to Live
Sydney Taylor Honor Award in the Younger Readers Category
At Read, Write, Repeat
Kristina Swarner, illustrator of Zayde Comes to Live
Sydney Taylor Honor Award in the Younger Readers Category
At Writing & Illustrating
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2013
Linda Leopold Strauss, author of The Elijah Door
Sydney Taylor Honor Award in the Younger Readers Category
At Pen and Prose
Alexi Natchev, illustrator of The Elijah Door
Sydney Taylor Honor Award in the Younger Readers Category
At Madelyn Rosenberg’s Virtual Living Room
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2013
Blog Tour Wrap-Up at The Whole Megillah
About the Tour: The Sydney Taylor Book Award will be celebrating and showcasing its 2013 gold and silver medalists and a few selected Notables with a Blog Tour, February 11-15, 2013! Interviews with winning authors and illustrators will appear on a wide variety of Jewish and kidlit blogs. For those of you who have not yet experienced a Blog Tour, it’s basically a virtual book tour. Instead of going to a library or bookstore to see an author or illustrator speak, you go to a website on or after the advertised date to read an author’s or illustrator’s interview.
Instead of skipping Nature Notes yet one more time because I have no new photos or observations to add (I did see a hawk on Sunday flying over our home, to add one new comment), I decided to post a photo from last summer in three different ways.
It can seem like a different photo if you crop it differently.
This is probably the one most people would pick … and indeed, I posted a similar version of this butterfly photo last summer.
For more Nature Notes, visit Rambling Woods:
Little did I know early last summer when I purchased pink verbena because I wanted some color in my front yard that the verbena would survive frost, snow, a hurricane and live longer than the mums, the snap dragons or the nasturtium.
The verbena looks handsome among the fall leaves – those orangey brown pine-like leaves are from our bald cypress tree.
Truly the only pink in our front yard now is from the verbena – mostly brown, some green, and these dots of verbena pink.
In other nature in my yard news, I got a photo of a female and male cardinal together. They often travel together, but I don’t usually see them this close.
And I got a close shot of the cardinal – he looks like a proud guy, or maybe he has just eaten a lot of the black sunflower seeds in our bird feeder.
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A tufted titmouse enjoyed the bird feeder I refilled two days after Hurricane Sandy came and went. I am rather burnt out of talking about post-storm problems, but in quick summary, most of Highland Park now has its power restored. We had wonderful utility workers from Florida who did much of the fixing (PSE&G was maxed out – I understand nearby Edison had workers from Ontario, Canada). So thank you, Florida and Canada. A few homes reportedly did not yet have power, but they’ve been promised fixing by today. We shall see. Meanwhile, back to the birds.
I was pleased to photograph a bird new to me – thank you, Michelle, for identifying the tufted titmouse.
I’ve been seeing more blue jays recently than I have in the past. No signs of cardinals right now.
Help yourself, Mr. Blue Jay.
I will try my best to continue filling my bird feeder through the winter.
Before Hurricane Sandy storm hit hard
Here is my street last Monday, as Hurricane Sandy had begun to blow its winds but still hadn’t damaged Highland Park, NJ. Note the tall maple tree on the left. Little did I know that this series would be the last time I would record that tree in an upright position. You can see photos of the maple tree on past blog posts.
You can see the skies are gray, and all is wet, but unless you listened to the news you would have no inkling this was the beginning of a devastating storm. And behind the car on the left you can see the full grace of the tree that would soon be no more.
I like taking photos of the foliage each fall. This one of the block before the storm will have to do. See, at this point we were hoping that the storm wouldn’t be a big deal after all. Well, you can’t be right all the time.
I wasn’t the only one outside at this point. You can see one of my neighbors crossing the street in the far left of this shot.
At the other end of my block, all looks peaceful, right? Currently, four days later, there are still down live wires in front of the house with the white fence. It is difficult to enter our block by car, because we have live wires at both ends. Hope they fix it soon. The PSE&G truck just sat there in front of the live wires today.
During the Storm
The night of the storm, Monday night from about 4 pm to 11 pm, was really, really scary. If you weren’t scared, then you were a master of denial, which can be quite helpful at times like these. I was watching this tree in my neighbor’s backyard (see the tree above in photo day after storm that is now broken off and leaning) sway back and forth, back and forth. I decided it was less scary to watch the swaying tree than to look at pictures of the devastated Jersey Shore on my computer. We still had power at that point, but we lost it a bit before 9 pm.
After Hurricane Sandy storm hit hard – the morning after – Hurricane Sandy Trees
I woke up the morning after the storm and went to explore. Uh, oh, the big tree a few doors down was no longer up. Luckily, it had hit only a lamppost and had injured no person nor any house.
Many were taking photos, including this young reporter who has just started her journalism career with her school newspaper. She is unsure whether she wants to focus on photography, drawing or writing for the newspaper. This photographing of the down tree is a good start.
Crews have finally begun to remove parts of the down tree – it is now cut into pieces, and one can pass through on one side of the road with a car.
We were lucky on our block about where the big tree fell. These homeowners were not so fortunate. This giant old tree hit wires and their house. I saw another house in Edison that had a corner of the house chopped off by a fallen tree.
Not to feel left out, North 8th had its own adventure with this giant tree. Looks like the tree barely missed the house (but I could be wrong about that).
Finally, here is why North Fifth still does not have power. The library, where many in our community would go when power goes down, is still closed. And my friends on North Fifth are cold, as are North Tenth, Dennison and a good part of the South side by South Adelaide. We had our power restored on Wednesday evening at about 6 pm – wow, was that a happy time for us.
Lessons Learned: Count Your Blessings
Thankful for my family. Thankful for no damage to our property. Thankful for fabulous, helpful, friendly neighbors. Thankful for smart phones existing and for car radios. And for heat in cars. And the fact that our stove burners worked even if our crockpots, rice cooker, warming tray, toaster, oven, dishwasher, washing machine, computers, lamps, coffee grinder and pencil sharpener did not (daughter asked, after we lost power: how will we sharpen pencils? I replied: we have some artsy pencil sharpeners upstairs that will work. We never did do any art work during the lack of power period).
The Jersey Shore communities are not so fortunate. More on this topic in a later post.
I plan to include this post in next week’s Nature Notes.
UPDATE: Part Two: Many Problems Post Hurricane Sandy (please read and share)
Mount Greylock in the Berkshires has a lot of goldenrod on top of the mountain. And many happy butterflies are enjoying themselves.
We also visited The Mount in the Berkshires, where Edith Wharton lived for a while with her husband (before she divorced him) and his dogs. There is a pet cemetery near the garden that has lots of tidy flowers, many of which are butterfly-friendly, like this butterfly bush. The Whartons allowed their dogs to sit at their fancy dining table along with distinguished guests (is that natural? as this is Nature Notes).
We saw this red mushroom besides the trail that we climbed to the top of Mount Greylock.
Way back in January, my daughter and I went for a walk on the Meadows trail near Donaldson Park. The trail was cleared back in 2006, and it is a nice stroll through the woods. I like this photo and wanted to share it; it looks a bit like the branches of the raspberry bushes in my backyard. It was a snow-less winter in New Jersey, and I think this photo reflects that sort of empty brownness that we had instead.
I haven’t been able to get into nature much recently myself (other than my yard), as I’ve been taking care of my father who is 82 and has needed a lot of help lately. We are working on getting him a new living situation. Balancing work and my regular family duties with this has taken a lot of my time and energy.
What kind of a bird has a speckled breast? I found out that some thrushes do, but this bird is a juvenile robin. Makes sense, since last summer I asked the same question about the speckled breast. Thanks, Michelle, for identifying my young robin.
Just last week I saw baby robins in a nest; when my daughter and I checked on Saturday, they were still in the nest, cawing away, and just a bit bigger. She counted four baby robins.
Do you know of a bird with speckled breast?
The photo shows a blue robin egg. Then the robin babies are born, and they depend on mama and papa robin. After a while, the baby robins get more feathers and fly off from the nest. A young robin is a bird with speckled breast. The mature robin has a red breast. I’ve seen robins with worms in their mouths. I’ve also seen them eating my raspberries.
