The naturalist in the yard

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, biology, naturalists, natural history, citizen science

I took this picture in 2010, the first year I participated in the Great Sunflower Project. It is a sweat bee of a species common in the mid-Atlantic area, gathering pollen from a Lemon Queen Sunflower, the flower designated in the Project for attracting pollinators, primarily native bees. For those who like to be involved with natural history in their own surroundings, GSP is one program that Thor Hanson recommends in Close to Home: The Wonders of Nature Just Outside Your Door.

According to directions, I planted sunflower seeds in early spring, and once the flowers began to bloom, I stood nearby for 15-30 minutes a few times weekly to record what I saw. The project organizers don't expect us backyard naturalists to identify the species of every bee. They supply a simple field guide to several broad types of common bees, and participants report how many of each type appears during each session of watching.

That year I saw very few honeybees, at least in the late summer when the sunflowers were blooming. But as summer cooled toward autumn, I saw a few more, not just on the sunflowers, including this one on a flower of garlic chive, near a smaller bee that I don't recognize (it is near upper left).

I participated in the project for several years, then stopped. Standing around on a hot August day is rather hard on me. But we have plenty of fare for pollinators in all seasons, as seen in the pair of pictures below:

On the left, three tiny bees (about 8mm) are picking over Sedum flowers that bloom in the spring next to our front walk. Oh the right is a flower bed with flowers for all seasons. A Hellebore is almost hidden beneath late-spring-blooming evening primroses. The Hellebore blooms from February until June. We have a few in other parts of the yard, to keep pollinators supplied while they await other kinds of flowers. In mid-June the Echinacea begin to bloom, and carry on for a month. Lavender and heather flower later, and several other flowering plants push the season almost to first snow. This garden is next to a crabapple tree, that flowers in mid-spring, and across the yard, an apple tree flowers in early spring.

One more creature we recently began to try to attract is the Monarch butterfly, with these milkweed plants. There is a schoolyard nearby that has a big patch of milkweed, but this is just the third year for us. We started with a single plant we grew from seeds we collected in the schoolyard. So far we haven't seen any butterflies, but these plants attract many more honeybees than I've seen in ten years or more. They also become infested with milkweed bugs. When they are very small, the little red nymphs must have honeydew like aphids do, because ants tend them.

Early in the book, Thor Hanson uses the term "backyard biology." Later he says it might be better to speak of "yard biology," though it is less euphonious, because nature doesn't just hide out behind our houses. It is all around us. The ten chapters (plus an Introduction and Conclusion) reveal the manifold riches of his own yard. Of course, he does live on an island in Washington state, with a yard that's bigger than average…multiple yards, from the sound of it. However, any of us, if we're willing to slow down and observe, can see a lot.

Thinking it over, we can gather quite a list of the variables that lead to quite a variety of creatures making themselves at home in any yard: variations of light and shade; warmth on cooler days and shelter on hotter days; foods that appeal to this or that sort of creature; shelter for the shy ones (such as little songbirds) and open spaces for the bold (rabbits, squirrels, and foxes; even deer when apples are falling).

I tend to favor insects because many of them ignore humans if we move gently and don't breathe on them. They're easier to photograph than birds. One acquaintance of the author uses a lighted sheet at night to attract moths, which he photographs obsessively. He has catalogued hundreds of species in his yard. One can do the same for beetles; many will also come to a lighted sheet. The beauty of a light trap is you don't have to catch and kill to identify most species (sometimes it's necessary, though).

Dr. Hanson speaks much of birds, and advises getting not just "a birdhouse" but a dozen or more, of various sizes, because there are many varieties of bird that prefer to nest in cavities. There just aren't enough abandoned woodpecker holes to go around. During my last few years at my company I was on a team that monitored birdhouses scattered around the property. All were sized for bluebirds, which also made them ideal for swallows (2 species), wrens (3 species) and chickadees. On occasion we would find a birdhouse in a more sheltered location that had been taken over by a pair of starlings, which are rather large; they had pecked the hole a lot bigger. At the end of the season we would take that birdhouse to the company shop to be fitted with a new door, this time with a metal collar in the hole! On another part of the property there were much larger boxes designed for wood ducks. My wife and I have talked it over a little. We may get (or make) a few birdhouses.

Another project recommended in the book is iNaturalist. It is a phone app, with an accompanying website, where I find it helpful when I want to edit an entry. TIP: The GPS on my phone is not as accurate as I'd like, so I go into the website later and edit the location if it is too far off. The minimum "native" accuracy of an iNaturalist geolocation is four meters. That's usually sufficient; for us Yanks, that comes to a radius of 13 feet. On the website, if you remember accurately where you were (it shows you a detailed aerial photo), you can enter a value as small as one meter.

Here I have focused on the "what we can do" suggestions. The book is also chock full of stories about various animals of all sizes found in the author's yard, or discussed by his friends and colleagues. Getting closer to what goes on outdoors is good for us. We need to slow down and, typically, just look and listen. It is good to recognize that we are part of nature.