Feeders, birdhouses, and the small patch of ground you can watch change through the year.
The wrens picked the hose reel. This is not a thing I would have predicted, in part because the hose reel is one of the few human-made objects in the yard I use regularly, and in part because there are at least three nest...
The bluebird box has been on the back fence for two years now, and last spring a pair finally used it. The story of how that happened is the story of how nest boxes work in general, which is that they often do not,...
I stopped cleaning the yard in March about four years ago. I do not mean I stopped pulling weeds or mowing the grass once it started growing. I mean I stopped the early spring rake-out, the one where you cut back the perennials, clear...
The cardinal returned to his branch this week. I should be careful with that sentence, because cardinals do not really go away. The male in our yard has been here all winter, working the feeder, sleeping somewhere in the hedge, calling intermittently. What I...
Suet is the unromantic backbone of a winter yard. It looks ugly in the package. It smells faintly of nothing you want to be smelling. It comes in a hard cake that you wedge into a wire cage and hang from a branch and...
I bought the heated birdbath two winters ago, the year of the long cold snap, when the regular birdbath had frozen so solid that the ice had cracked the basin and I was going to have to replace it anyway. I had resisted the...
The juncos came back this week. I noticed them on Sunday morning, working the ground beneath the platform feeder in their tidy, head-down way, gray hoods and white bellies and the small tail flashes that give them away when they fly. There were five...
Cold weather thins out natural food and brings more birds to the yard. Here is what actually keeps them coming back.
Seed brings in the birds that eat seed. Water brings in nearly everything. A few notes on getting it right.