Last night on Twitter, Mr. Neil posted a photo alerting me that the house wrens in the squirrel proof feeder hatched. Look at those little naked chicks, they look fresh from the shell! Look at the wee little toes! It looks like three of them have hatched and last I checked, there were four eggs. [ Read More ]
When I can’t fill the feeders at Mr. Neil’s house, the groundskeeper named Hans usually does the honors. He does an admirable job but he has a ton of things to do like maintaining trails and keeping the grass and weeds trimmed around the beehives. And now that we have 8 beehives, let’s bow our [ Read More ]
Hello all, NBB here. Sharon’s a bit swamped with deadlines, so she’s asked me to fill in with a blog post about all the exciting things that are happening in the birding world. But since I avoid knowing anything about the birding world with great vigor, I instead present you with Birds Wearing Hats. Hilarious, [ Read More ]
Twice a year I have some bird banding friends come out to Mr. Neil’s place to band the birds around the yard–once in spring and once in fall. On Saturday my buddies Roger (aka MNBirdNerd) and Amber (aka AvianImages) set up mists nets to collect data and got a GREAT cross section of spring bird [ Read More ]
Ah, Saturday started out so promising! We had spring bird banding planned at Mr. Neil’s, I found out that my nephew has an exhibit at the Louvre (yeah, baby, that Louvre and it’s part of an app that’s really cool called Augmented Reality Wallpaper), Non Birding Bill was frying up some maple bacon to get [ Read More ]
Oh my, how things have changed for me and my perspective of beekeeping! Our first year was a panic, but now it’s a fun chore that I look forward to in spring. I can almost do it without the guide, but I like to consult it before we put in our bees to ensure that [ Read More ]
We have had the pleasure of finding some of the tastiest (and easiest as well as “safest”) edible fungus on Mr. Neil’s property in warm weather including Hen of the Woods, Chicken of the Woods and Giant Puffball. We’ve seen morels here and there but because they tend to come out during spring bird migration, [ Read More ]
I mentioned earlier that the wildflowers seemed to be going gangbusters this year around our bee yard–perhaps it’s a matter of me exploring an area around our bee yard that I usually do not get around to visiting? They are in an area outside of Mr. Neil’s property–across the creek as it were. Hans (the [ Read More ]
I headed out yesterday with Lorraine to do some serious wildflower walking (what the heck has happened to me, I’m interested in wildflowers now) near our beeyard. Before Lorraine arrived, I headed down in the woods to see if I could figure out what birds were setting up territory where–I like to get know the [ Read More ]
This spring has been spectacular for wildflowers and the woods around the beehives are covered in them. We’ve planted some natives and a two years ago, I bought some clearance large-flowered trillium to add in. I was inspired to encourage more near Mr. Neil’s house because you can find a few small patches of trillium [ Read More ]
