Goat Frat Party

We came home this afternoon to a goat frat party in progress.  Our goats are obsessed with rabbit food and they are pretty determined to get it.  We have "goat-proofed" our rabbit hutch so our bunny can eat his food in peace.  But even though we have staked it to the ground and sealed all entrances except for a small rabbit sized hole, our clever, food-driven goats managed to overturn the rabbit hutch and open the top!!  I have to give them credit for this one though.  Clearly they worked together, each of them bringing their specific goat talents to this job.  Our rabbit looked a little bewildered at what had befallen his house!  

Nest update Part 2

So here goes, the tragic side of the Nest Update as promised.  It does not have a happy ending--best to get that detail out of the way.  The whole Update was about life and death, and of course I decided to start with life in the "Nest Update Part 1".  I have been dragging my feet on writing this Part 2 because it is about death.  And of course I am dragging my feet--who wants to dwell on the dark side of gardening?  We all love to focus our energy on the life part.  The unfurling of leaves in the springtime, the ripening of flower buds, the baby birds in the nest...Spring is so full of life that it is easy to overlook the small deaths that happen in this energy burst of a time period.  But death happens in the garden, even in the Spring.

It's taken me many years to get comfortable with this fact of life--it is a reality that us gardeners have to grow into.  And sadly, I have to claim some garden deaths of my own.  I have killed many plants in the garden--especially in my early days of gardening.  I have planted things in the wrong place, killed because of over watering or underwatering, killed because of neglect--Truly I have killed more plants than I like to admit. But I am not alone in my mistakes.  My neighbor and I each have beds we refer to as Morgue Beds.  Both of our Morgue Beds are situated close to cedar trees, which are notoriously difficult to plant under.  Through the years, we have each experimented with plants that were supposed to live in that tough situation, and after much trial and error, we've found plants that do live there; namely, ferns, salal and other native plants.  But on that long tragic road of experimenting, we thought at one point that we should just start digging holes and planting $10 dollar bills.  The cost would be the same and we wouldn't have had to endure the plant deaths.

I'm also responsible for killing aphids, slugs, leaf hoppers, and flea beetles.  I'm not always very good at killing these pests, but certain infestations require some control on my part.  Especially when it comes to my vegetable crops.  I'm growing my produce for US to eat--not the flea beetles!  So, all of this is just to show that I too have killed in the garden.  Death and life live together always.  And our world is a consumer world--eat or be eaten.  Is it good for me to rejoice at the death of a slug?  I don't know, but I have done that very thing when it comes to saving a plant.  I guess if the slug were the hero of the story I would be rooting for the slug, but I can't remember ever doing that.

Sometimes it is hard to figure out who is the hero of the story.  I love Eagles and I love Great Blue Herons.  We used to have one of the largest heron rookeries not far from our house.  They flew over us on their daily commute to their fishing grounds and we loved watching them soar over us--out in the morning and back home in the evening.  But two years ago, the eagles built nests not far from us and for some reason decided that baby herons were something for them to eat.  People watched helplessly as eagles flew to the heron rookery and would take two and three baby herons at a time.  The heron parents were also helpless to stop the eagles.  The eagles ate every heron baby in the rookery.  And the rookery is empty now--we have no more herons flying over us and I don't know where they have relocated.  I see eagles now and have mixed feelings for them.  Who is the hero in that story?

And in our small part of nature, we've had a similar story.  One of the nests in the garden was filled with baby chickadees.  Chickadee babies are very noisy and we were enjoying listening to the chirps of the chicks and watching the mom and dad try to feed the hungry babies--a seemingly endless job!  A few days ago Brian noticed a squirrel climbing on the bird house where the baby chickadees were nesting.  The mom and dad chickadees were taking turns dive-bombing him, trying to get him away from their nest of babies.  Brian saw all of this and decided to try and help the frantic parents.  He threw a couple of rocks at the squirrel, scared him away, and then went about his day.  He told me about this and though I wondered why the squirrel was hanging around the nest, I didn't think the birds were in mortal danger either.  We sort of figured squirrels as being vegetarian, not carnivorous and certainly not murderous.  I went up to the garden later that evening and it was disturbingly quiet.  There were no baby bird sounds, and no parents.  I went closer and what I saw was not good.

The entrance to the bird house was chewed up and it looked like the work of a rodent. I don't want to falsely accuse the squirrel of bird murder if that is not true, but the circumstantial evidence is piled high.  If I were a jury I would vote the squirrel guilty of chickadee-a-cide.  Either way, even if the squirrel didn't do it, something went in there and ate all of the baby birds.  There isn't one left.  The parents have gone too--all their work for nothing.  And we are left with a bird house that looks more like a murder scene.

We have another chickadee nest in another part of the garden, but I had grown attached to this particular nest.  The parents were working so hard to feed these babies and I felt a connection to their efforts.  After all, we are raising little ones too and working very hard at the job!  I feel sad for the birds even though I know that this is all part of garden life.  In this little patch of earth that I call my own, I see daily life and death dramas.  Plants, animals and insects are all in the process of being born, reproducing and dying.  Sometimes they live long lives, sometimes short lives, but their lives are important to the garden's life all the same.  And all of the creatures have to eat to live.  It is a complicated pattern and when I see the big picture I understand that it is all necessary.  But that doesn't mean that I don't have a gut reaction of sadness about those baby chickadees.  I am growing in my ability to accept the Death part of the garden, but my empty bird house is a reminder to me that garden life can be dark and tragic.  Do I accept it all?  Still working on that...

Nest Update Part 1

This is the first of a two part post on what is happening with the "nest event" that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.  We've always had a lot of birds in our garden, but this year the birds decided to build their nests very close to the house.  We have a robin's nest right by our front door--a very busy place for baby birds--and nests on the gate posts that lead into our fenced vegetable garden.  So it has felt a bit like Wild Animal Kingdom around here.  And we have found that the process has been exciting, funny and tragic to watch.  In other words, it's life.

The nest by our front door has been the most fun to watch.  It is built in the branches of the evergreen clematis under our front porch, and it's high enough that we can walk underneath it.  The nest is also just three feet from the front door, and a similar distance from my desk window.  I have had a bird's eye view (pun intended!) of the action. 

I've watched the mama build the nest and I've watched her sit on the eggs.  And I had seen her bring worms to the nest, but had yet to hear her babies.  Now, given the "splat" that has graced our front step, I'm certain the babes have arrived.  I was prepared for the bird poo, and just figured we would be washing our front deck a lot--but only for the couple of weeks or so that it took to get the birds grown and out of the nest.  Never did I imagine such a thing as projectile pooping!  This picture is to give you an idea of what my window looks like right now.  Only it is much worse than it looks.  The deck below is just plain foul.  Having changed my share of diapers, I get the mess-potential, but the amount of bird poo is astounding!

On the other hand, it is has been both entertaining and educational to watch this mother bird go back and forth all day.  Today as I watched her bring her hard-won worms, I saw three little heads with mouths open pop up from the nest.  I've tried to get pictures of them but no luck thus far.  They are cute in the way that all baby creatures are cute, even though they are fairly featherless and their mouths are way too big for their bodies.  This mother robin has so far been successful in bringing three more robins into the world and even with the all of the bird poo on our deck and window, I feel privileged to be a part of it. 

However, I must warn you now that my next post will not have quite the happy update.  The girls do not think I should write about our tragedy, but I feel I must.  After all, nature has a dark, edgy side to it, and both the good and bad, the happy and tragic are necessary for the balance.  Stay tuned for Nest Update Part 2, "Do squirrels really eat baby birds?!?!?"