By our northeast corner post:
Here it is again, two weeks later:
Nature
Cherokee Princess
Cherokee Princess, a flowering dogwood cultivar.
Said to be the industry standard for white blooms. Ours are more cream than white. We have many wild dogwoods, but none are blooming yet. This one came from a nursery a few years ago, replacing the gorgeous weeping cherry felled on this spot by the snow. (But a week later they seemed white enough. Below I added a few more pictures taken Saturday 16 April, just as the rain began.)
Wikipedia reference: Cornus florida
Northern Magnolias
At home, about 8am Saturday, 9 April 2011, after a cold, drizzy night at the end of a week with both warm and cool days, some strong wind, and at least one brief spell of heavy rain. (Through the winter, we have to surround these trees with 5′ wire fencing to save their large, fuzzy buds from the deer.)
Below, a few shots of the same from Monday afternoon this week.
Here’s a reference to Gardening-Guy.com, on what looks like the same plant.
Bluebird box: no luck yet
March 27 through April 2, 2011 — 54 pictures in 54 seconds, with the Wildview camera pointed at the bluebird box. Although I saw a chickadee exit the box last weekend, I definitely saw a bluebird peering into the box yesterday, with a partner on a twig nearby. So why didn’t the camera see them?
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TntOoHk8Qys
| Evidently the camera needs to be on a pole almost adjacent to the nesting box. A 150% enlargement from one of the chickadee shots: |  |
Our first daffodil
After four inches of rain in as many days, today we see our first daffodil blooms — tiny daffodils of the kind the cancer society used to sell us each spring. Only about 3″ tall — compare to the size of the acorn nearby.
Heather
Our heather, in bloom for about a week now — under an oak canopy as specified by Wikipedia.
Still no luck with the owl box
Still no luck with the owl box, nor with the Wildview camera, really. I removed the second squirrel nest and installed fresh bedding of a few wood chips, leaves, etc. And since the camera had this time failed to get a single shot of the squirrel coming and going, I moved it to a tree five feet closer, even though it’s now going to be pointing close to the setting sun.
Here’s the Wildview camera:
Squatters in the owl box
Too windy to put up the ladder today, but maybe tomorrow I’ll again evict the squirrels who have been filling Sandy’s owl box with twigs. (Photographed on maximum zoom with the Kodak Z740, from the front porch, about 200′ from the nesting box.)
Sunny and bright . . .
. . . but the pond’s still frozen after several weeks.
Sandy’s Barred Owl Nesting Box: status
Still no owl pictures to show. I got out the big ladder this afternoon for a visit to the Wildcam camera on the tree opposite Sandy’s barred owl nesting box.
Retrieved 36 images from the SD memory card and replaced the four C cells (two corroded). Camera was displaying the low-battery indicator, but the correct date. The images were dated January 8-21, 2011. As you can see above, from the location of the camera I could see twigs and even green leaves in the opening of the nesting box. We’ve read that barred owls do not add materials to a nesting place — but sometimes squirrels render an owl box uninhabitable to owls by filling it with debris. I moved the ladder from the camera to the nesting box and knocked on the door, but heard no response, and so began reaching in and removing a quantity of twigs. A grey furry blur flew out so fast that I couldn’t really know it was a squirrel until it hit the forest floor 15 feet below. I realized there was another one in there too, so opened the trap door rather than insert my hand again. Number two disappeared just as fast, with no apparent injury from the fall.
Here’s a video clip from the six color photos dated January 8th. The four-second pause on each corresponds to the camera’s four-second pause between each shot. Warning: there’s not much to see here: Squirrels briefly visible, coming or going
Conclusions:
1. Clearly at 15 feet distant, the camera is too far away from the nesting box. There is a tree five feet closer, but it would have the camera pointing west instead of north.
2. The camera’s infra-red functionality seems inadequate for the current 15-foot distance. The early morning and late afternoon shots in black-and-white aren’t of much use.
2. The camera’s motion-detector seems to be tripped by the motion of the trees in the wind. (When we trained the camera last fall on bird feeders hung from wires, we got many pictures of swinging but unattended feeders.)
About the nesting box itself, see Projects, above.