Backyard Bird List Hits 50

Yesterday afternoon was a wonderful time for bird watching in the Miles backyard. The pine siskins hung out all afternoon, mixing it up with the house finches. I counted 7 siskins at one point. One of our favorite sparrows, White-Crowned, put in an appearance for the first time this spring, a black-capped chickadee came by to visit, the first we've seen in months. And, most fun of all, a white-breasted nuthatch chose to visit our peanut feeder when I was sitting about 8 feet away reading a book. I didn't have the camera so I couldn't get a picture but it is the first white-breasted nuthatch we've seen in our yard. And that brings our backyard bird list to 50. Here is a picture I took yesterday of a white-crowned sparrow.


Our first Peony blossom opened this morning. We have nine large peony bushes in our front yard, a mixture of white, pink, and a reddish-purple. We'll have huge peony bouquets for the next few weeks and our house will be redolent with their fragrance.

Back from Arizona

Questions have been raised, both on and off my blog, as to why it has been so long since my last post. A major reason is that I took a trip to Arizona last week to do some astronomy with friends in the Saguaro Astronomy Club. We observed from a site in the Sonora Desert. It was a great week! I put 3,029 miles on the RV. Lots of pictures in my Picasa album from the trip.

A Decent Nobody, with Warts

A few months ago a friend who also has hackberry trees in her yard asked me if the leaves on our hackberry trees develop “warts” too. They do, indeed. I have been meaning to investigate this situation and on a recent visit to the Kansas City public library came across The Urban Tree Guide: An Uncommon Field Guide for City and Town by Arthur Plotnik, a Chicago author widely known for a book titled The Elements of Editing after Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Plotnik has also published a book, rather waggishly titled Spunk and Bite, which is a guide to lively writing. I haven’t had the pleasure to read that, yet, but if Plotnik’s tree guide is any indication, Spunk and Bite should be a lot of fun. He also maintains a blog (which he refers to as a “snog”) named The Lubricated Snoot. The illustrations in his tree guide are provided by Plotnik’s wife, Chicago artist and teacher Mary Phelan.


As the title suggests, the book concentrates on trees one might find in urban areas, covering more than 200 species. In addition to helpful identification tips, latin names, common names, and other such info, each entry includes a detailed essay relating interesting information, a sort of character dossier, about each tree.

But I was uninspired by tree-identification field guides. Most lacked heartfelt descriptions and none focused on trees in the city. They offered brief descriptive data — leaf and twig morphology (form, measurements), sub varieties, and zonal habitat. Enough to guide field trippers, perhaps, but not to reveal a tree’s personality. (p. 5)

Plotnik’s hackberry entry is titled “A Decent Nobody, with Warts.” The Latin for common hackberry (what I believe we have in our yard and shown in the first image included with this post) is Family: Ulmaceae (Elm); Genus: Celtis (hackberry); Celtis occidentalis (Common Hackberry).

Hackberry leaves often host eraser-size “nipple galls,” the dwellings of minute jumping lice. Located on the underside of the leaf, the hard and well-sealed galls take on amusing shapes, like cartoon fireplugs or baby bottle nipples.

Naming them lice sounds pretty scary, I have to say. We see swarms of these critters in the spring and fall. I previously thought they were miniature leaf-hoppers. Plotnik has done his homework, though. Lice, indeed. In fact, jumping plant lice or hackberry psyllids, described in detail on this Ohio State University fact sheet. Elly and I don’t spray insecticides to control them (perish the thought!) and simply put up with the nuisance in the spring and fall, periodically vacuuming them up from door and window sills with my shop vac. Here is a close-up image of one of the nipple galls I found on a hackberry leaf lying in our yard. Each gall includes a single psyllid. The adult insect is tiny, about 1/8-inch in length, and is said to resemble a miniature cicada. I’ll have to use a hand lens on one to see if I agree with that description.


Here are hackberries on the tree. A number of the galls can also be seen. The tree leaves look quite eaten up, diseased even. This is natural and does not indicate any problem with the health of the tree. In fact, a book I was reading about organic landscaping recently (don’t have the title too hand, my apologizes) stated that using ornamental plants which are “naturally resistant” to insect damage actually harms local biospheres by reducing insect populations which are critical to birds and other wildlife. This is one of the big objections to non-native plants, which are often introduced for the very reason which makes them harmful: the fact that native insects have evolved to eat native plants. This hadn’t occurred to me, but it makes total sense.


Mature hackberry trees have a sort of weird, warty bark (consistent with the warty leaves, though, in no way related to the pysllids). Here is a closeup of the bark on one of ours.


And, finally, an image of Elly and myself, taken last Sunday. We spent most of the day in our backyard. The weather was delightful. Elly proofed galleys for the Nelson-Atkins Museum’s new handbook (managing one of the coolest museum stores in the country isn’t enough of a challenge by itself, apparently), and I spent my time reading and photographing our hackberry trees...

Spring Equinox

The 2008 Spring Equinox is today, March 20. I decided to sit out in the backyard with Samba on my lunchbreak so we both could enjoy the fresh air and sunshine (60 degrees!!). I noticed some crocus in full bloom in our neighbor’s backyard and took some pictures. Here are two of the images in honor of the equinox.

More About Cowbirds

Elly and I were watching the cowbirds yesterday morning, when she commented they must not be sexually dimorphic (which means that the sexes look different) because all the birds we saw looked the same. I said I thought they are dimorphic, so we checked Sibley which confirmed that they are. We took a closer look at the crown on the driveway. I counted over two dozen males and only three females.

I got out our Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior, to read up on cowbirds, which are part of the icterid family. The icterids also include Orioles and Blackbirds among others. Sibley devotes a lot of space to cowbird brood parasitism -- the fact that they don't make their own nests but rely entirely on laying their eggs in the nests of other birds. I didn't read the entire entry. Later in the day I called Mark McKellar at the Backyard Bird Center to ask him about why we saw so many male cowbirds and so few females. Mark is our "ultimate" birding authority when we can't figure out a birding question. A lot of other people's too. Anyway, Mark explained that male and female cowbirds migrate separately. The males generally migrate first, followed later by the females. I guess that is common among the icterids.

I took the above picture of a gorgeous buckeye butterfly yesterday afternoon. It was feeding on some beautiful purple flowers in our neighbor's front yard. I'm going to have to ask what sort of flowers they are. Along with the buckeye, dozens and dozens of bees were collecting pollen from them.

I also met my sister Karen at Browne's Irish Market for lunch yesterday. We have lived a few blocks from Browne's (a Kansas City landmark and institution) for 19 years and I had never visited it! They have all sorts of Irish-related merchandise and a deli. I had a BLT on whole wheat that was absolutely delicious. Karen and I have decided to make it our hangout when she visits KC.

She gave me a novel she had bought (The Art Thief by Noah Charney), saying it was one of the worst books she had ever started reading, she was furious with herself for wasting money on it, and just wanted it out of the house. I opened to the first page and read "It was almost as if she were waiting, hanging there, in the painted darkness" and burst out laughing. "Karen, the opening sentence is an indefinite-it construction!" (Sort of a major no-no in the writing business.) I promised to dispose of it properly. I plan to take it to Propsero's Books and ask them to burn it. Prospero's made international news (the London Times sent a reporter) when they started burning books customers wouldn't buy and charities wouldn't even take for free. You can read more about that on their website. They are only a few blocks from our neighborhood, too.

Here is one more picture of those purple flowers.

Wild Bunch

On a walk with Samba Saturday, I found some wild flowers in a field near our house. I didn't have my camera, so I picked a few sprigs to carry home with the purpose of identifying them. I felt a little guilty about picking them, but the field is not in a nature preserve or park and is mowed regularly. I rationalized they would probably be mowed down in a week or two anyway. I made a bouquet from them when we got home and have been surprised by how well they have fared. I didn't expect them to last more than a day, but they have gone for nearly a week. The center flower in this image is chicory.

I turned to my copy of Edgar Denison's Missouri Wildflowers, which sufficed to identify the brown-eyed susans and chicory, but wasn't much help with the other two. Naturally, I consulted the fount of all knowledge (Google) and found MissouriPlants.com, a terrific website. This enabled me to identify the remaining flowers: yellow ironweed and wild blue sage, which I particularly like.

David Smith's Zinnias

We have lived at our home in midtown Kansas City for 19 years, which is a long time compared with the average time people often stay in one house before moving. I have heard the average is 7 years. Our next door neighbors, the Smiths, however, moved into their house during the flood of 1951. Mr. Smith once told me they had to sneak in to see the house when they bought it because the neighborhood was under curfew. They lived there for 56 years.

They have been the best neighbors. It was a sad day when they moved out, though I don't think either Mr. or Mrs. Smith will miss all of the up keep these big old houses require, or walking up a long flight of stairs from the street. (The Smith's did not put in a driveway -- the neighborhood was built when most people rode the trolley.) Anyway, the neighborhood will never be the same.

Their son David, who for years did charitible work in South America, lived at home when he was in America and had a fondness for gardening. He did not always choose low maintenance plants, however, and Mr. Smith had a fondness for mowing them down, or having them mowed down, when David was out of the country.

David has planted zinnias for years and has often offered to give us cuttings so we could plant some in our yard too. They are certainly beautiful. I think we will find a place in our yard for some zinnias to honor the Smiths.