2015: My (first) Butterfly Big Year in Review

One of many Peck's Skippers I saw this year; this one was at Stoneridge Pond near my house.

I had so much fun doing a butterfly Big Year this year! I was limited by budget and free time, of course, but managed to tie quite a bit of traveling into looking for new and unusual butterflies. I ended up seeing a grand total of 81 species, 28 of which were lifers for me! I didn't manage to reach my target of 100 total species, but still I feel pretty pleased.

This Mangrove Skipper was one of the tropical prizes I spotted during a quick trip to southern Florida.

I learned a lot about butterflying while trying to rack up as many species as I could. I found out how to use NABA's sightings page, both current sightings and archived sightings, to target my searches. I explored several parks for the first time, and also grew to understand better how to interpret field guides' notes about flight times.

I found this Eastern Pine Elfin at Calvert Cliffs State Park, on the same trip that we adopted a new kitten!

I met wonderful people along the way of course: scientists, both professional and amateur lepidopterists, park staff, and generally friendly folks. I also discovered that many of my friends were more interested in hearing about my butterfly hunts than I'd expected! That was a nice surprise. I found that having a specific goal really helped get me into the field more often.

Another tropical species was this Ruddy Daggerwing. So exciting to see it in real life, not just on the pages of my field guide.

There are several things I wish I'd done differently this year, though. For one thing, I still didn't get out as often as I should. I didn't take the ephemerality of butterfly flight seriously enough: it always seemed like there would be other chances (of course that didn't turn out to be the case).  Come to think of it, while doing the Big Year I really paid attention to the changes in species flying from week to week, so noticed when we were in between generations of several species more than I usually did.  That was pretty cool.

I also didn't decide to do a Big Year until after the early season was almost over, so missed my chances at many of the early specialties, like Falcate Orangetip. I know a lot more now about local colonies of some of the early species, which would have really helped me waste less time looking in the wrong places. Plus I should have started my planning long before flight season even began.

Even this fairly common Pearl Crescent was exciting to see as part of my growing year list.

So of course I think you can guess where I'm going with this: I'm already planning to do another Butterfly Big Year in 2016! Yep, it's addictive. I've already started plotting out my target parks for early species.

I'm hoping I can make it to 120 species this year, a pretty ambitious goal. Wish me luck! Maybe I'll even get down to southern Texas for the National Interpreter's Workshop in November, in which case I might even make it all the way to 200 species. No matter how many my final total, the search will be fun and I'll learn a lot.

This Atala was definitely the most exciting sighting I made all year. It was great to come back home and tell my friends at the Wings of Fancy live butterfly exhibit that I'd seen one in the wild, not just in captivity!

Don't toss those apple scraps-- make easy apple peel jelly!

 

Save the scraps and peels from making an apple pie, and turn them into a beautiful (and delicious) jelly

We always make apple pie at Thanksgiving. Usually my mom and I make a couple others as well: cherry, plus blueberry or peach. Apple is a given though, and for the past few years it's been my responsibility to peel and slice the apples. Seven or eight medium size apples go into the pie, and no matter how careful I am peeling and coring them, there's inevitably quite a bit of flesh that gets removed. 

I felt so guilty about discarding all this edible fruit.  I was sure there must be a way to make something out of the peels and cores, but had a hard time finding any suggestions. This year, though, I finally found a way to pull as much usefulness out of the peels as I could, courtesy of A Year Without Groceries: I made apple peel jelly!

I am amazed how simple the process was. You don't need to add any extra pectin, since there is so much pectin in the apples themselves. I have never made jelly or jam before, so was a little nervous about the process (especially with my family members all waiting to sample the results). It came out so well, though, I am considering making a big batch of apple butter or another pie when I get home, just to have peels to make more jelly!

Ingredients:

Apple peels and cores

Water

Lemon juice

Sugar

Cinnamon (optional)

Instructions:  

1. Put the apple peels and cores into a large pot, and fill with enough water to just see the water below the top peels.

I used a mix of apples in the pie and therefore in the jelly: Jonathan and Granny Smith. This jelly is very sweet so you probably want to include at least some tart apples.

 

2. Bring the water to boil and cook, uncovered, until the peels are quite soft. The water will turn a lovely shade of pink. 

We tossed the cooked peels outside for the birds and squirrels after straining the liquid. At home I would have added them to my compost pile.

 3. Now strain the liquid into another pot.  You want to use a fine-mesh strainer (not a colander) to make sure things like seeds don't end up in your jelly. Press the solids against the strainer to make sure all the juice is squeezed out. I'm pretty sure a bit of pulp made it through my strainer, but the jelly still turned out nice and clear.

You'll want a smaller pot for boiling down the liquid. It starts out looking fairly cloudy.

4. Measure how much liquid you have at this point. (I had 3 1/2 cups.) Add 1 TB lemon juice for every 2 cups liquid, and 3/4 C sugar for every cup of liquid.  I also added about 1/2 tsp cinnamon.

 Bring the liquid back to a boil. Watch closely; when it gets close to being done it starts to foam up. You don't want it to boil over!

As the liquid merrily boils away, you can see it starting to clarify already.

You have to boil the liquid for quite a while to reduce and concentrate it. I think my batch took about 40 minutes, but I forgot to check the time when I started, so I'm not sure exactly.  The temperature of the liquid has to get up to 220F and stay there for a while before it will jell. 

5. While the liquid is boiling, put some ice in a small bowl nearby and get a small spoon ready. Periodically scoop a small amount of the liquid with your spoon, then place the spoon on the ice to cool it rapidly. Once cool, tilt the spoon over the pot to see how runny it is. When you first start, it will be very runny. A little later it will start to get thick and syrupy but still pour off the spoon in an even stream. When the jelly is almost done it will be even thicker but still drip off the spoon. It's done when the chilled spoonful has solidified and doesn't form drips. 

You can see the level had reduced quite a bit by the time the liquid was ready to jell, and the color darkened and clarified.

 6. Now ladle the jelly into clean, sterilized jars. According to the original directions, you should put on sterilized lids and process in a water bath canner for ten minutes. I haven't yet overcome my anxiety about this step of canning, though, so I skipped it and am storing the jelly in the fridge.

I ended up with two small jars of jelly, plus a bit extra. Such a gorgeous color!

We tested the jelly by slathering it onto little baked scraps of leftover pie crust dough. Yum! The next morning we also had the apple peel jelly on toast and English muffins. 

Like I said, this was super easy to do. You get beautiful, delicious jelly from scraps that would otherwise be discarded. I hope you'll give it a try this winter, whether for your own household or as gifts for friends and family. Enjoy!

My Garden's A Mess-- I Like It That Way

This "untidy" wildlife garden provides important habitat for lots of small wild creatures.

My garden's a mess! Here's why that's ok.

Lots of garden books and websites talk about tidying your garden at the end of fall: cleaning up, removing dead and spent plants and debris, and so forth. I always used to feel guilty when I read those articles because I never got around to much outdoor tidying. But I've learned since then that you want to help wildlife it's actually important to leave quite a bit of deliberate mess in your winter garden. Hooray!

My garden beds are only ever tidy looking before anything has been planted there,
like these two new beds I added this fall.  They'll never be this "tidy" again.

What To Keep... and What to Discard

Of course it matters what you keep and what you don't. I'm not advocating complete garden anarchy here. You definitely want to clean up and discard any diseased plants, and you probably want to remove the more persistent weeds that are likely to survive through the winter. Otherwise you'll still have the same disease around in the spring, and those weeds will only be stronger for having slowly grown enormous root systems during the winter. Little devils!

You should, however, keep plenty of seedheads from your flowers so that winter birds can munch on them. My goldfinches love echinacea, for example. Also important are hollow plant stems. Many insects survive the winter by sheltering inside them, and birds like Carolina Wrens and Downy Woodpeckers love snacking on those little nuggets when they find them!

Plenty of seeds in this goldenrod for the finches, and I'm sure lots of tiny insects and spiders for wrens as well!

Leaf debris is important for your garden's health as well as the wildlife's. Not only will the leaves slowly decay over the winter, returning important nutrients to your soil, but many small creatures will shelter in them. Many moth species form their cocoons in the leaf litter, so if you're too assiduous in removing fallen leaves you might actually be removing your gorgeous moths as well!

Over the years plenty of fallen leaves have built up in this bed. I add to them by raking in leaves from my driveway or the road gutters. The natural mulch definitely helps my plants; I hope there are unseen creatures benefiting too.

Additions To the Messy Fall Garden: Structures and Shelters

I often also leave up some of the trellis structures I built, since many birds like to perch on them during the winter. My feeders get pretty crowded at times, and it's fun to see whole squadrons of finches and doves lined up on the fences and tomato frames waiting their turn. If you're participating in FeederWatch this season, like I wrote about here, you get to count all the birds attracted to your yard, whether they're actually on the feeder or just waiting. Bonus! If you didn't have any trellises in your summer garden, you could easily add some structures for the fall & winter.

This fence at the edge of my property is often full of sparrows waiting their turn at the feeder, or surveying the area before deciding it's safe enough to forage on the ground. You could provide similar benefits with something as simple as a twiggy branch or two stuck in the ground.

Some butterflies that overwinter as adults, like Commas and Question Marks, will shelter under loose bark to survive the cold. If your trellis was built from natural logs or branches, you might host a few butterflies too! Some wildlife gardeners also like to keep a loose brush pile to provide shelter in the wintertime. One of the most important things about building a brush pile for shelter is to make sure there are plenty of holes and access points for small creatures to enter. Chipmunks, shrews, insects, songbirds, and more might use your brush pile to escape cold, rain, and snow, as well as hide from their predators. In my wildlife garden beds I just leave lots of fallen leaves and debris for small creatures to use as shelter.

The tangles of sprawling wood aster provide plenty of cover for small sparrows, and also keep blooming quite late in the season, providing food for many honey bees and other insects.

So whether you're a lazy gardener, a newbie gardener running out of time, or even an experienced gardener just starting to get into this whole gardening for wildlife thing, relax! The stuff you don't have time to clean up from your garden this fall is probably better off left in place. You can even build new structures to add to your garden's habitat, like creating special log piles to give wrens a cozy place to hide from predators, or adding stumps with loose bark to shelter butterflies and other bugs.

I hope you enjoy sharing your garden with wildlife this fall and winter. What else do you do in the cold weather to make a welcoming home for birds, bugs, and other beasties? Leave me a note in the comments so I can try it too!

Be a better gardener next year: how keeping a garden journal will improve your garden skills and results

I like to keep a garden journal. I note what I've planted, how it's doing, how long it took until seeds germinated and later bore fruit, and all kinds of other information. I also write about what I've been doing in the garden or what I've been thinking about the garden. It's a fun pasttime, but even more it's a great resource for me each year since I can look back on what worked and what didn't the previous year.

To get started, all you really need are a notebook, a pen, and of course your beverage of choice.

When should you start a garden journal?

If you've been thinking about starting your own garden journal,  fall is actually a great time to start. Of course you could begin a new garden journal any time of the year, but the reflection and contemplation I feel in fall is great for getting a journal (and a garden) going. You'll muse about what worked in the garden this year, or what you hope to have in a future garden, and lots of things in between.

You can also talk to other gardening friends (and bloggers like me!)  to find out what worked and didn't work for them. Was bacterial wilt a common problem in your area this summer? Did almost everybody's tomatoes take forever to start producing due to a long cold spring? These are good things to know for future planning, but also for what I like to call "CSI: garden edition." Why did my cucumber vines disintegrate in a matter of days when they should have kept producing for several more weeks? Was it something I did? Could I have prevented it?

I track anything that might become a problem, so I'll know when it started.

What to include in your garden journal

But I digress. My garden journal is somewhat random. I buy a pretty blank notebook at the bookstore, and write in it whenever the mood strikes me. You can be more or less haphazard than I am, but there are a few crucial pieces of information you must include in your journal to make it a resource that will help improve your garden:

• What you planted and when.
• How well the seeds germinated, and how long it took.
• Where you purchased the seeds/seedlings, and how much they cost.
• Any special care they needed (that you did or didn't give them), e.g. you had to constantly water them during a dry spell. This will help you decide if a specific plant might be worth growing again.
• How much supplies you bought this year. Tracking how many bags/ cubic feet/etc. of mulch, compost, etc. I bought last year is really helpful for me each spring when I have to figure out what's needed, and also helps with my budgeting.
• Any difficulties you encountered over the season, and of course anything you tried to overcome them, successfully or not.
• How well each crop did-- how long until you got the first harvest, and how well you feel the plants performed over the entire summer. Did you get enough beans? Were the tomatoes really late compared to what you expected? Did one variety of peppers resist whatever wiped out the other variety?

I  include sketches of my garden layout each year, to help with planning crop rotation.

How often to write in your garden journal

Honestly, you don't have to have a specific schedule for writing in a garden journal, just whenever you have something to contribute. In the spring I tend to write frequently, then not so much in the hot summer (saving most of my energy for weeding and/or harvesting!), for example.  I also like to use my garden journal in the wintertime for planning and dreaming. I brainstorm what veggies I want to grow, start thinking about what new ones I might try this year (since I like to always have an experimental crop or two), and so forth.

This was the year I let the dill take over my garden. Whoops!

Extras to include in your garden journal

Other things you might like to put in your garden journal include photographs, sketches of the layout or even of individual vegetables, empty seed packets, and so forth. You could have a garden journal that's really half scrapbook, half journal, if that's what you enjoy. I don't do much scrapbooking but I do include lots of hand-drawn sketches each year of my garden layout. I like to make sure I'm rotating crops properly so I need to remember where the tomatoes have been from year to year. For that matter, I often need help remembering what kind of sprout I'm looking for in each row in the spring! I know some folks put markers in their garden, but I don't bother. Instead I just consult my map.

This year's garden map. It went through several changes between planning and planting.

You might also like to track weather in your garden journal, especially if you can take the soil temperature. This might help later when you see that none of a certain seed germinated and you're trying to determine why-- maybe the soil was too cold or hot, or you'd had too much rain lately. You can also watch for any changes to weather averages over many years, and start to consider those when you're planning the next season. Are first frosts averaging sooner? Have several years in a row been much dryer than usual? I don't usually write frequently enough to make regular weather observations in my garden journal, but it does seem like a good idea to try.

Some gardeners like to track phenology in their garden journal, especially if they garden for wildlife instead of or in addition to growing crops for their own consumption. When did the monarch butterflies return? How late did they stick around in the fall? Did your redbud trees bloom earlier or later this year than last year? Phenology is a fun science of when events happen in nature. Don't overwhelm yourself, though-- if you're already super busy, you might find that sticking to just a few main questions is easier and more useful in your journal.

In the late winter and early spring I also use my journal to do price comparisons between different seed catalogs, so I can stick to my budget. Sometimes the same variety is in multiple catalogs but for different prices and/or different packet sizes. Other times I can compare different varieties: I can make lists of each one's touted benefits, both from the catalog description and any gardener reviews I can find online. This fall, on the other hand, I was able to jump on a last-minute seed sale that offered both free shipping and reduced-price seeds, because I knew I was unlikely to find better prices elsewhere. Yippee! I'm pretty sure the grower was offering those seeds at a discount only because they're remnants of 2015 seeds, but I also know from doing my own germination tests of four-year-old seeds that these should be fine for growing next year.

Some of my favorite seed catalogs.

Other ways to make your journal a helpful tool

I don't know about you, but I have a really hard time remembering from one summer to the next how well something did, or exactly when I started my tomato seeds inside. Keeping a garden journal means I don't have to do the same calculations every winter, and also means I don't miss the start date because I waited too long to even think about it. For that matter, if for several years I ended up not being able to plant outside for a few weeks longer than I'd intended, but the crops grew just fine, that's great knowledge to have! So would be knowing that even a couple weeks' tardiness means the lettuce won't grow big enough before it gets too hot outside.

Organizing your garden journal

Since I use a blank book for my garden journal, I always leave room at the top of each entry to go back and write quick bullet lists of essential information. That way I can skim through previous entries to find certain information without having to read every single one. It's also essential to date each entry, by the way. I tried making my own index at the back of a journal one year, so I could quickly look up when I wrote about the peas sprouting, for example. The problem with the back index was that I quickly ran out of space. Maybe next time I start a new volume I'll make an index for just keywords and page numbers (or dates), so all the times I wrote about the peas can be grouped together, as will all the times I wrote about any seed sprouting. That might work better.

If you enjoy using "to-do" lists, your garden journal would be a great place to copy your lists of garden tasks each day/week/month/season. This could be a helpful reminder from year to year what's been done and what still needs to be done. If you're anything like me and often don't get to the bottom of a to-do list, it can also help you remember the following day/week/whatever that you should add that back to your list.  Most of my daily to-do lists are made on the back of scrap paper or junk mail envelopes, which makes it easy to carry around with me during the day but also makes it easy to misplace.

This year I made a set of to-do lists so I wouldn't forget anything. It really helped, even when I missed my goal date by a few weeks.

Essentials to remember for garden journaling

• Writing in your garden journal should be enjoyable. Remember to write about triumphs as well as failures!
• Your garden journal will be potentially useful as a whole, but each individual entry doesn't need to seem useful at first. Just write about what's been happening in the garden when you feel like it.
• Reread your previous entries each year (or more often) to see how you might grow as a gardener. Maybe after the pain has subsided from all your tomatoes dying prematurely, you'll be able to see what you could have done better.
• Let your garden journal grow with you-- you can add or omit sections from year to year as needed. Keep reading about garden techniques and try new things. Talk to other gardeners too, whether online or in your own neighborhood. Soon I'll post some ideas for helpful resources for both planning and evaluating your garden, so stay tuned for that.

Do you keep a garden journal? What are the most useful aspects of a journal for your garden? Let me know in the comments if I missed anything you find essential.

Easy Cuban(ish) Black Beans in the Crockpot-- great for after hiking!

Delicious black bean stew with andouille sausage, perfect for a chilly evening

This weekend we had our first real fall weather. You know the kind I mean-- a nice chill in the air, crunchy leaves under your feet, sparkling clear sunshine slicing through air that is blessedly free of summer's steamy haze. A perfect day to go hiking, in fact!

And one of the best parts of going hiking is when you come home ravenous after a day of exploring the woods, climbing mountains, or strolling the shores of your favorite lake with friends or family. You open the door and are greeted by incredible smells of the stew that's been bubbling away in your crockpot while you were gone. Yum! I love my crockpot all year round, but it's just so incredibly satisfying this time of year.

Today I'm sharing with you one of my favorite recipes for an autumn post-hike meal: a Cuban-ish Black Bean Stew, heavily adapted from Better Homes & Gardens' Biggest Book of Slow Cooker Recipes. It's very flexible, you can add a different kind of sausage, extra sweet peppers, a different amount of spice, and so forth. I love topping it with chopped fresh tomatoes or a really good fresh salsa, and some grated cheese, as well as an extra squeeze of lime at the table.

I love it when I have the time to brown the sausage and onions before adding them to the crockpot. But sometimes I just run out of time. That's what happened yesterday-- I barely scraped the ingredients together before dashing out the door to drive to work. So while it simmered all day, my brilliant husband minced up a few herbs and veggies from our flagging fall garden-- one carrot, a few radishes, and several sprigs of dill and basil. These added lovely new layers of flavor to the stew, and I'm eagerly anticipating leftovers tonight. Feel free to go wild with improvisations on this one, and let me know in the comments what you try!

The uncooked ingredients before I added chicken broth. I wish you could smell the pungent lime zest, garlic, cumin, and hot pepper! The lime really gives a nice tropical boost to this stew.

Cuban(ish) Black Bean Stew With Andouille for the crockpot

Ingredients:

1 pkg Andouille sausage (or another kind of smoked sausage), sliced in half-moons
1.5 cups to 1 lb dry black beans (the original recipe calls for only 1.5 cups, but I sometimes dump in the whole pound package. Depends on how much I want to make.)
3.5 cups home-made chicken or turkey broth (or use storebought low-sodium chicken broth, two 14.5-oz cans is about the right amount)
1 medium to large onion, chopped
1 sweet red pepper, chopped
1 to 3 small fresh hot peppers, minced (I grow a small but pungent hot yellow heirloom pepper, and usually use three including their seeds. If you want less fire, use fewer peppers and/or remove the seeds and white pith from the hot peppers.)
4 cloves garlic, minced (if you use bottled garlic from the store, this is about 2 tsp worth.)
zest of one lime, shredded (I do this on a microplane zester that lets me get almost all of the zest without a single skinned knuckle. If you want, save the lime to squeeze on each serving, later)
2 tsp ground cumin
0.75 tsp salt
0.25 tsp freshly ground black pepper
2 bay leaves
Optional: fresh or frozen cooking greens (kale, collards, spinach, turnip, etc.)

Instructions:

1. Rinse your dry beans thoroughly until the water runs clear. While doing so, pick out and discard any misshaped beans or pebbles that might have snuck in.
2. Put the beans in a large bowl with enough cold water to cover the beans by at least an inch or two. Let sit overnight, covered with a towel to keep out dust.
3. In the morning, drain the beans and rinse once more.
4. Put the beans in a slow cooker, at least 3.5-4 quart size or bigger.
5. Brown the sausage in a large frying pan over medium-high heat. Once the sausage is browned on all sides, scrape it into the slow cooker on top of the beans.
6. Return the pan to the heat and add the onion and sweet pepper. Saute until the onion is golden. This step is important so the vegetables pick up the flavorful fond (browned bits) from the bottom of the pan. Use a wooden spatula to scrape up the fond if you need. You can also add a dash of the broth to the pan if you need help loosening some of the fond.
7. Pour the cooked vegetables into the crockpot with your beans and sausage.
8. Add the minced hot peppers, garlic, cumin, lime zest, bay leaves, and salt & pepper. Pour the broth over all.
9. Cover and cook on the low setting for 10 to 12 hours.
10. If you happen to have any fresh or frozen cooking greens like kale or collards, toss them in for the last half hour or so of cooking for a great nutritious boost.  At the moment I have a ton of frozen kale in my freezer from the summer, so that's what I usually do. If your family doesn't like cooked greens, just skip this step. The day I made the batch shown in these photos, I had meant to add greens but it smelled so good when I came home I just couldn't wait that long to eat. :-)

As any bean stew should be, this is also good over rice, or you can just eat it with toppings like you would chili-- chopped fresh tomatoes, salsa fresca, grated cheese, even corn chips. I bet it would be good with fresh bread too, to sop up any extra broth!

I hope you enjoy my take on black bean stew, and have a great time hiking this fall.

Notes:
If you use the smaller amount of dried beans, you'll have a more soupy consistency to the stew; if you use the whole package it will be much thicker. I like it both ways, myself.

As happened to me, if you're really in a rush in the morning, (or just want to minimize dishes to wash), you can skip the browning steps and just dump everything into the crockpot together. It's so wonderful with that deep browned level of flavor, though, you should try doing it at least once. If you can plan ahead, you might even brown the sausage and onions the night before!

A Cup of Coffee and Citizen Science: how to make a difference during breakfast

If you're looking for ways to bring more nature into your everyday life, getting involved with a citizen science project is a great way to do that. Citizen science is where ordinary folks help on a genuine scientific investigation, usually by contributing their observations and/or labors to a growing bank of information. Naturalists and other scientists can use this huge amount of data to see broad trends and changes occur that they might not have seen otherwise, since it's pretty expensive to travel all over the country observing birds or butterflies or whatever the subject may be.

Thus anybody can actually contribute in a small way to scientific discoveries, which I think is pretty cool. Plus observing nature is fun just on its own! Having a framework like a specific project and goal helps keep me motivated and focused, so I thought it might do the same for others. One of my favorite citizen science projects is Feederwatch.

Basics of participating in Feederwatch

Feederwatch is run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and works like this: backyard birders observe their bird feeders from November through March and report how the birds they see each week. You don't have to watch and count every day, either, just two consecutive days each week. Pretty simple! You do have to pay a fee to join the project, $18 if you're not already a member of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. If that's out of your reach, don't despair! I have a few cost-saving ideas for you in my Tips and Tricks section at the end of this post.

I wish I saw this Rose-breasted Grosbeak during count season! Sorry for the picture quality, it was taken through our very old windows.

How I like to count birds

I like to do my counting in the early mornings while I'm sipping my coffee. It's very peaceful watching the chaos of hungry birds swirl through my yard. I print out tally sheets at the beginning of each Feederwatch season so I just make hash marks as I see birds, rather than having to write out the names by longhand. Most years I've printed new pages each week so I end up with a thick binder of observation charts at the end of the season.

Another way you could do this would be to print a single chart, get a plastic page protector, and then do the hash marks in dry-erase marker each week so you can then erase them and start fresh after you've reported your data. You could even do it all electronically, on a tablet or something. I admit I'm more old-school and still like tally sheets.

If you're lucky, maybe you'll see an unusual leucistic bird like this white one I nicknamed the Ghost Finch!

Collecting Data

Here's the tally sheet I created for my watch days. It includes my most common feeder birds with extra room to write in new species at the bottom, and lots of room for hash marks beside each species. Of course you can make your own tally sheet that fits your local birds. If you live on the east coast of the U.S., though, this list should be enough to get you started.

I find it's really important to report your data promptly, rather than wait until the end of the season to report it. Two years in a row I did Feederwatch but never got around to reporting my data. Whoops! It was still fun. So maybe the clipboard and page protector would be a better motivator for reporting in that case, since you'd have to report the data before you erase it for the next week. A page protector would save a lot of paper, too.

Of course if you attract small birds you might get their predators too. Here's a young Cooper's Hawk staring intently at my suet feeder, as if to say, "If I wait here long enough maybe my dinner will show up!"

For Feederwatch, you'll also need to report basic weather conditions as well as bird totals: max and min temp, any precipitation, percentage of the ground covered by snow, and so forth. Weather Underground provides a historical record that's searchable by date, including temps, wind, and precipitation in case you forgot to note it when you were watching the birds.

Equipment you'll need to participate in Feederwatch

Inside:

• bird book(s) 
• binoculars 
• tally sheet (and page protector if you choose)
•  pen and clipboard
• A comfy vantage spot near a window so you can see as much of the yard as possible.

 Outside:

• bird feeders 
• bird seed 
• suet cakes (if you have a suet feeder)
• optional other bird-attracting structures and/or plantings, such as
• an evergreen shrub for cover 
• a bird bath to provide water 
• a fruit-bearing tree for fruit-eating birds

I usually attach extra branches from our Christmas tree above the feeders to keep some of the snow off them. Waste not, want not!

Tips and Tricks for Feederwatch

• As I mentioned, the annual fee to participate in Feederwatch is $18. For that you get a poster of common feeder birds, a kit to help you tally birds, and of course access to all of the data entered plus the annual summary report.  If you can't afford the fee, however, you might ask your favorite nature center if they would like to participate. Then you (and maybe some of the staff) could count there. I have even seen some nature centers make a fun weekly program out of this. It's great for beginning birders and for families just getting into birdwatching.
• If you've never fed birds before, the Feederwatch web site has lots of helpful suggestions for what and where to feed them, as well as what else you might provide for the birds (water, shelter, etc.). Check to see if a nearby store specializes in birdfeeders as well, such as Wild Bird Centers (a large chain in the US and Canada), or a local independent store like my favorite One Good Tern in Alexandria, VA. They'll not only have the supplies you need, but probably can offer helpful advice for getting started. 
• Other ways to control your costs:
• Does your neighbor feed the birds already? If so, maybe he or she would be willing to partner with you, or at least let you watch the birds in his or her yard.
• Even if your local nature center doesn't participate in the Feederwatch project, if they already put out seed for the birds you could still head over there each week to observe. They might even appreciate your data at the end of the year so they know more about what kind of birds use the feeders! 
• Do please make sure to support the nature center in any way you can if you do this: participating in volunteer clean-up days there, spreading the word about them to all of your friends and neighbors, and so forth. Maybe they even need a volunteer to fill the feeders each morning! It would be nice to offer.
• Different kinds of seed may attract different kinds of birds. A large variety of birds enjoy black-oil sunflower seeds, though, so that's a good kind to start with. Suet feeders are very popular too.
• If it gets below freezing in your area, a heated bird bath would be very popular for thirsty birds. 
• Be patient if you've never had feeders in your yard before, it may take the birds a few weeks to find the lovely buffet you're providing.
• If you can, offer more than just food in your yard. Fresh water is very important, especially in the winter when a lot of natural sources might freeze. Also birds will appreciate shelter and a variety of places to perch near the feeder while they wait their turn. 
• You could even reuse your Christmas tree or other leafy decorations when you're done with them-- prop the tree securely against your mailbox, for example; or wire evergreen branches like pine and holly above the feeder like I did in the photo above, so they shelter the feeder from snow and rain.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology also runs All About Birds, which provides lots of great info about birds you might see, including how to decide between certain tricky birds like purple and house finches, or Cooper's and Sharp-shinned Hawks.  Even if you don't participate in Feederwatch I highly recommend checking out their website.

The best bird I've had during count season so far was this Pine Warbler. It stuck around for several days this January enjoying my suet feeder. I hope it comes back this year!

Enjoy watching and counting your backyard birds! I'd love to hear your comments about the experience. What's the best bird you've seen in your yard so far?

Beware, though, birdwatching can be addictive! :-) So can helping with citizen science projects. I love feeling like I'm contributing something meaningful to the world, don't you?

Linking up with Saturday's Critters

Best Harvest Bread Recipe (surprise) from the bread machine

For me, the fall equinox is a time of balance, of gathering in, of warm colors and rich textures. I think of deep, rich scents like baking bread, fallen leaves, and chicken roasting and sizzling in the oven. It's a warm, nurturing time to spend with friends and family, to anticipate snuggling in front of a fire with my beloved husband and cats (even if the weather isn't quite cool enough for a fire yet).

At fall equinox I can look back on a summer season that was filled with work and labor but that was also rich with rewards: delicious harvests, bags and jars of our own crops saved for the coming winter. I also like to make a point of noticing and honoring changes in the animals' seasons: to put out ample seed and suet and clean water for migrating songbirds, to make sure I'm leaving enough seedheads in my flower garden to feed the hungry finches and sparrows, and to listen for the calls and imagined whispers of both waterfowl and butterflies migrating overhead.

If the weather is good, I'll often spend the weekend nearest the equinox out in the garden, clearing leftover weeds, prepping the soil for the winter, or tending any lingering crops. This past weekend was pretty much all cold rain, so I didn't spend much time outside except for running out to fill the bird feeders. However, I still engaged in one of my favorite autumn equinox rituals: making homemade bread.

Most of the tools and ingredients you'll need for this recipe. Not shown: mixing bowls, olive oil, and the actual bread machine.

When I was younger and single, and had fewer demands on my time, I used to make all my bread by hand. I would spend hours painstakingly coaxing whole-wheat dough through multiple risings, long kneadings, and so forth to create chewy, lightly sweet loaves of whole wheat bread. I learned from a wonderful cookbook called The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book: A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking. These days, however, I don't have quite that much time to devote to a single recipe. The Laurel's kitchen technique depends on extra rising and long kneading in order to produce a tender, delicious loaf of bread from wholegrain flour.

This is the edition I have; I haven't yet read the newer edition that apparently includes a chapter on using bread machines. I love the friendly, nurturing style of this book, and highly recommend it.

Instead, I now make my almost-whole-wheat bread in, surprisingly enough, a bread machine. It still takes a long time but it's mostly hands-off. After trying many recipes I found in various bread machine books and online, I finally came up with my favorite variation. This recipe has one thing that most bread machine recipes skip: proofing the yeast. This helps fill my kitchen with that warm, welcoming scent of fresh bread, and also makes a tender loaf that won't crumble into a pile of crumbs when you try to spread a slice with butter. It's almost as good as real whole-wheat bread, and probably would be even better if you removed the dough from the machine after the final rise and baked it in the oven. I've never tried that, though, usually going the completely lazy route of letting the bread bake right in the machine. You could also add any of your favorite mix-ins for a nice harvest loaf: sunflower seeds, chopped walnuts, shredded Parmesean cheese, pepitas, sesame seeds...

As a gift to you all to celebrate the onset of fall, here's my favorite recipe for harvest bread made in the bread machine. It might seem like sacrilege to not make a harvest loaf by hand, but given a choice between a machine loaf of bread and none at all? I'll choose the bread every time. Enjoy!

The finished loaf, sliced to show you the gorgeous texture. I sliced it right away once I got the bread out of the pan, and we could barely restrain ourselves long enough to snap this photo before spreading butter on the hot bread and gobbling it up. 

Basic Harvest Bread from the Bread Machine

Ingredients:
1 C warm water (should feel hot to your fingers, about 110 degrees F)
3 level TB of dark honey (like clover or wildflower honey, not a delicate type)
2 1/4 tsp bread machine yeast

2 C whole wheat bread flour
1 C white flour
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/4 C extra-virgin olive oil
Mix-ins of your choice (optional): shelled sunflower seeds, pepitas, chopped nuts, shredded cheese, whatever you like.


Instructions:
1. Spray the paddle and inside of your bread machine's loaf pan with non-stick spray. (My bread machine is quite old and pretty scratched up, so I need to use spray to help the bread release after cooking. A new machine might not need this step.)
2. Add hot water to the pan. Sprinkle the yeast evenly over the surface of the water. Then pour in the honey so it stirs up the yeast and you end up with very little dry yeast grains floating on the surface.(note: I also spray the tablespoon with non-stick spray before measuring the honey.) If you need to stir the yeast into the water, do so gently with the measuring spoon; ideally though you won't need to because the action of the honey dribbling in will mix the yeast into the water for you.

Once the honey has mixed in with the yeast it should look like this. But over the next ten minutes, things will change quite a bit!

3. Set the pan gently aside somewhere for ten minutes while the yeast activates and foams up.

4. Meanwhile, combine the wheat flour, white flour, and salt in a mixing bowl.
5. After ten minutes the yeast mixture should be thickly foamy, and should smell delicious like fresh bread. It might even smell faintly fermented, this is ok. Don't let it go too long, though.

After ten minutes the yeast has foamed up quite a bit, looking thick and substantial on top of the water-honey mixture. Happy yeast is a good thing!

6. Pour the olive oil into the pan on top of the yeast mixture. I like to try and let it dribble down the top of the paddle, again because I have an old beat-up machine that likes to grab my fresh bread. If you have a newer machine I'm sure this detail isn't necessary.
7. Scoop the flour mixture gently into the pan. I sometimes smooth out the top of the flour with my fingers, or even draw a little symbol in it if I'm baking for someone or something special (like a heart if I'm baking a celebration loaf for my husband and me).

For the equinox I drew a spiral, thinking about how things are drawing inward as the days grow shorter.

8. Set the pan into your bread machine. Use the Basic or White Bread setting if you're completely cooking the bread in the machine. Press Start.

• Notes: Consult your bread machine instructions if you want to use the Dough setting; you'll probably need to shape the loaf after its final pulse in the machine, and then let it rise for 30 minutes in its pan before baking.
•  If you plan to add any mix-ins, your bread machine should signal when it's time (usually just before the final knead). Mine beeps, for example. Again, check the instructions which I hope you still have (or can download online).

Here's the bread as it came out of the pan. You can see where the crust ripped a bit; I had to run the bread knife carefully around the pan to loosen it even though I greased my pan at the beginning. Anybody know how to prevent this?

9. About three hours later, enjoy your delicious fresh bread! I often slice a piece off while it's still hot, just to do "quality control" and make sure it's good enough to serve to anybody else. :-) This bread is really good with butter melted on a slice still hot from baking, but also with cheese, hummus, peanut butter, or even nothing at all-- it's a little sweet from the honey. Victor and I alone finished this loaf in about two and a half days. Yum!

The crumb on this bread is nice and even, stretchy and chewy despite my not having kneaded it by hand even once. Pretty amazing. Still doesn't match bread made by hand, but it will do for now. I'm trying to learn to be satisfied with the product of the time and energy I have, not be dissatisfied because in a perfect world I could have done better.

I hope you have a lovely autumn, filled with all the goodness of the harvest. Let me know in the comments if you try any mix-ins with the basic recipe, and of course how you liked it!

Rainy Day Reading

IIt’s been raining all morning today as well as the last two days. In addition it's been cool outside, good soggy fall weather. It really makes me want to cuddle up with hot mulled cider and a small kitten to catch up on blog reading. :-) If you’re feeling the same way, here are a few of my favorite blogs you should go visit.

For gorgeous nature photos, check out Nick's Nature Pics-- A Field Naturalist's Photo Journal.

 For thorough and fascinating wildflower profiles as well as tales of raising rabbits and homesteading, check out Bluetooth Hollow.

For amazing close-up photos and natural histories of bugs in the U.K., check out BugBlog.

While you're reading and admiring these fabulous blogs, why not indulge in your favorite comfort food? Here are a few of my favorite easy meals or snacks for a chilly rainy day, that actually aren't all that bad for you (bonus!)--

1.       I like to microwave a mug of cider with a cinnamon stick in it, for instant mulled cider.
2.       Air-popped popcorn is really good drizzled with olive oil and dusted with plenty of Cajun spice and a bit of salt. 
3.       Cheesy grits with a dash of hot sauce and more Cajun spice.
4.       Stew that's been simmering all day in my slow cooker.
5.       Fresh warm homemade bread with butter. Here's my favorite bread recipe, for the bread machine no less! Can't be much easier than that.


Stay warm, all.

Leaf Template Craft-- with free printable!

Happy autumnal equinox, folks! Today I’m posting from the road, on my way home from a successful butterfly expedition (with side trip to Disney World) through North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. I’ll report on that soon, but today I have a craft to share with you.

Last year I wanted to start decorating our house for the season's change, but without spending too much money or going to excessive trouble. For the autumn, I decided to cut out some leaf shapes in dark reds, oranges, yellows and browns and tape them up in our windows and on our walls. Voila, easy seasonal decoration!

I wanted my leaves to be as accurate as possible (I do work at a public garden, after all). So I pulled out my favorite tree guide: The Tree Identification Book, by George W. D. Symonds. I found the pages with some of my favorite leaves and used their images to help me cut out leaves from colored cardstock. (I purchased cardstock from Michael’s for maybe 50 to 75 cents per sheet.) I cut them all freehand, rather than time-consuming tracing and transferring. That meant I had a lot of rejects, but several came out pretty well! It felt very creative and fulfilling. What helped was folding the cardstock in half  the long way, then cutting out the leaf so that the fold made a spine. Unfortunately, that meant all my leaves were symmetrical, unlike real leaves. But it reduced the complication of cutting the intricate outlines. I also cut out big and little acorns, often out of the scraps left after cutting the leaves.

But seeing as the equinox is today, if you haven’t made decorations yet you probably want something even less complicated than trying to cut out a free-hand leaf. So for you, my fine procrastinating friends, I’ve made printable outlines from my best examples, for you to use as guides. You could trace these if you wish, or print them directly on colored paper or cardstock, or simply print out one copy each and then use it as a template for cutting.

I labeled the individual leaves as to my best guess what leaf I was copying. (I don’t rmember specifically at this point, and didn’t label the leaves when I first made them.) The page with several smaller leaves includes two different acorns, a ginkgo leaf, a red oak, a white oak, and probably a chestnut oak. Of course leaves often vary considerably in the wild, so don’t worry about inaccuracy when you’re cutting them out. Individuality makes them more real!

Hope you make lovely fall decorations with these printables.  I would love to see photos of your projects if you use these templates. Post your photos in the comments. Happy autumn, everybody!