Frog in swimming pool

One of my backyard visitors this year is what appears to be a juvenile bullfrog. I read that, although they live near ponds or other bodies of water, they can hop as much as six miles in a week when they travel from pond to pond. They go on the move during warm, rainy weather (like we had just before the frog showed up in my pool), and they look for smaller bodies of water during their travels.

As I mentioned, the frog showed up in my pool, and that can be problematic. I've read about a lot of people who have had to fish dead frogs out of the pool or skimmer, not because the chlorinated water is bad for them, but because they couldn't get out and they drowned. There are even special floats that can be purchased just to be used as "frog stairs" out of the pool.

We have several Solar Sun Rings in our pool, which the frog treats like giant lily pads. When I first found him, I kept fishing him out, but it appears he's in no danger of being trapped since he can easily move on and off the rings, which can float near enough to the edge for him to jump out.



Frogs are carnivorous, and as such, are a good addition to an organic garden since they eat insects. According to Wikipedia, bull frogs will eat just about anything else they can fit down their throat, including rodents and other frogs, so if you deliberately build a pond and stock it with tadpoles, don't mix bullfrogs with other frogs or you'll just end up with a bunch of really fat bullfrogs.

I don't have a pond in my yard, so I filled a couple of shallow, black plastic tub with rain water and set them in a shady part of my yard, where plenty of ground cover will hide Jeremiah from the occasional hawk and/or other creature that might find him tasty. When we want to swim or clean the pool, we fish him out and plop him in the tubs, and occasionally I find him hiding in one of his own accord.

I figure he won't stick around long, since I don't really have a permanent water fixture (other than a pool) for him to stay in, and we don't have a ready supply of lady frogs for him to chill with. But I've been enjoying his visit!

Wormzilla

Whenever I work out in the yard, I usually take a camera. You never know what you'll find! I have a couple of very large Devil's Backbone (a/k/a Redbird Cactus) plants that came with us from Texas 2.5 years ago, and the poor things have been in the same pots since then (I'm really terrible with houseplants!). When transplanting one into a larger pot today, I found a worm as long as my hand!



It's not unusual for me to find worms in houseplants. Back in Texas, we had a couple of really good potting soils to choose from. Rabbit Hill Farm had a wonderful potting mix, which often carried worm cocoons because of the worm castings, and Lady Bug Brand also had good potting mix. But it's been more than three years since those poor plants have had an infusion of new soil. Hats off to the giant worm for surviving that type of neglect!

Take care of the birds

Birds are an important part of an organic garden. If you have made a commitment to not use chemical sprays to kill bugs, then you can no doubt appreciate the birds that eat insects in your garden. Not only do they provide a valuable service, but the birds are enjoyable to watch and listen to (especially if you have indoor cats!).

It may seem that feeding birdseed would make birds less likely to eat insects, but in reality what you're doing is providing an inviting place for the birds to live. A steady supply of seed will encourage them to nest in your yard because food is plentiful, and most of the birds that are attracted to your feeder eat at least some insects as part of their diet.

If you have large windows in your house, bird strikes may be a big issue. Often the reflection in the window looks like more sky, and when birds fly into the window full force they can get badly hurt, even killed.

Bird splat on one of the back doors

Some birds, like sparrows, are more prone to fly into your windows in spring when they're nesting and feeling particularly territorial. They see their reflection in the window and try to protect their little place in the world.

However, I've had a particularly bad time with doves hitting our windows this fall. I think it has more to do with the position of the sun and the lack of leaves on the trees than anything else: due to the reflections they just plain don't see the glass and think they're flying into blue sky. We have a couple feeders in the tree outside our kitchen window (Cat TV), and as a result we have a LOT of doves.



It got so bad last weekend -- 5 strikes before noon last Saturday -- that we ended up putting large masking tape X's on the kitchen windows in hopes that the tape would break up the reflection and keep them from flying into the windows. Masking tape does work moderately well. After applying the tape, we had one or two doves hit the window over the last week but not nearly at the rate they did before. So this weekend we went looking for a more appealing solution: something tmore effective while at the same time better looking (I'm just glad the kitchen faces the back yard!).

We ended up at WalMart, looking for those tacky beaded curtains. You know, the kind that, back in the old days, used to signal that something very naughty hid just beyond the doorway. I've seen them back in stores in the last couple of years, as pre-teens continue their worship of all things 70's.

We didn't find any beaded curtains (thank goodness, we were spared putting up anything in the color "princess purple" outside our house!), but the lady at the craft department pointed us to some by-the-yard gold garland that had become popular with people taking belly dance lessons (go figure!), but were now on clearance for $1/yard. So we decided to make our own.

I strung a few lengths of the garland on a wire, making a knot above each length to keep them spaced at about 10" apart. I purposely left the length a bit long, so the ends would drag on the ground. Although these will still move a bit in the wind, I want them to be heavy enough to more-or-less stay put.

Here's a photo of the finished project. I hope that the shiny disks will draw the birds' attention long enough for them to figure out there is a house there. If it works, I may try making some more bird-strike-avoiders out of beads.

Turkey!

When driving home from work I avoid the highway because it's pretty clogged up that time of day. Winding through one of the suburban neighborhoods on my way home the other day, I had to wait for a turkey to cross the road. Seriously!

I held up traffic a bit as I stopped my car in the middle of the road to snap some pics.

Black Rat Snake

One of my rules of blogging is to never post something that I'd be afraid for my parents, friends, or employers to see. I'm about to break that rule.

My mother doesn't yet know about this blog. It's bad enough that my little brother ratted me out about the worms in my kitchen. I showed them to my father last time they visited and he thinks it's cool, but I knew it would just ekel my mother. I'm afraid if she sees this photo she'll never come to visit again.



We've seen him before, but this time we got a better look since he was right outside our back door, and I think it's a Black Rat Snake rather than a Black Racer Snake. The main differences are: the Rat Snake is chunkier, shiner, slower, and less aggressive than the Racer. I believe the definitive proof would be if we could see the coloring on his underside, but I don't think either Doug or I are going to ask him to show us.

Natural Pest Control -- Slithery Edition

The moles (voles?) have been taking a toll on our lawn this year. Strange patterns are written all over in dead grass, where their tunnels have disturbed the roots enough to kill it. Since we're organic, we won't poison them. We don't like killing things anyway, which makes them hard to control.

Yesterday I found out that help is already on its way.



"Help," in this case, is in the form of a 3 to 4 foot long black snake. I didn't get a good enough look for positive identification. It's either a black rat snake or a black racer. In my book, a snake that size is "giant," especially when I almost stepped on him, and of course my first reaction was to scream. His response was to vibrate his tail really fast, mimicking a rattler (I've since read that is pretty common among non-venomous snakes). My second reaction was to bang frantically on the back door until my husband came out. I needed him out there not to protect me, but to keep an eye on where the snake went while I ran for my camera. The slithery one is living in a hole in the flower bed next to my kitchen window, and unfortunately was most of the way home before I had a chance to snap the pic.

When we bought this house a year and a half ago, the yard was beautifully kept but, like most suburban yards, it seemed so.... sterile. We didn't even have that many squirrels last summer. Not that we need a lot of squirrels! But with our previous yard we just grew used to having all sorts of animals around (eventually I even came face to face with the coyote that was sleeping in my compost pile!) and it made the view out the back window much more interesting.

In the time we've been here, though, we've been seeing steadily more wildlife, thanks no doubt to the bird feeders and the lack of poisons. In addition to the snake, another newcomer is a chipmunk we spotted this weekend on our back porch. In addition to the chipmunk and snake, here are the other creatures we've encountered out back:
- Lots of birds, most are common ones (sparrows, robbins, finches, starlings, etc.)
- Woodpeckers: downy and flicker
- An unidentified hawk or two
- An occasional owl passer-by (never to be seen, only heard)
- Raccoon
- Squirrels
- Rabbits (although none in the back yard this year... maybe because of the snake)
- Moles (or voles... I don't know how to tell the difference)
- Mice

Some of the critters are pests, but once you make your yard inviting to urban wildlife, you don't exactly get to choose which wildlife must remain on the other side of the fence. So we take the "bad" with the good. And it's always interesting to see what nature sends around when the "bad" starts to get out of hand.