Outdoor Adventures with Gary Lee - Vol. 282
It has been another wonderful week of nice fall weather with freezing temperatures almost every night and warm sunny days with some days reaching the 60’s. The leaves have now mostly fallen, and I can tell as I can see the streetlights from my bedroom window. The beech leaves were the last to come down this week and they sure do make a mess in my bird nets. These leaves are quite dry, and people should be careful with any outdoor fires as they can spread rapidly with the smallest amount of wind. There have been a few small fires locally and some bigger ones across the state. The couple of small rain and snow showers we had were quickly dried out by the sun and wind.
I plucked many wildflower seeds and scattered them in new places around the property. We’ll see what grows, and what doesn't take. The face of my pond dam is white with milkweed seeds that I collected in front of the house, and I also collected many butterfly weed flower seeds. I finally picked the pods as they are in the milkweed family and the pods would open and be gone before I caught them. Being in the milkweed family they are deer resistant. I did find some pods of swallow wort invasives also in the milkweed family up the road before they popped their seeds this year and sprayed the plants.
Another plant that I’ve found to be deer resistant is ligularia and some of its varieties mostly yellow flowers but nice foliage most of the growing year. I’ve had them at the Old Forge Library for several years and the deer have not touched them. They flower late in the year and produce thousands of seeds which have little umbrella kites to carry the seeds away after blooming. The variety that I have been growing has quite large red to purple leaves which get two feet tall before putting out flowers above the leaves. They look like a small bush, but they are flowers and they like shade. Everyone is always looking for flowers that grow in the shade so here is one to try and I think you will fall in love with them.
The bird world has been popping in and out in the last couple of weeks with sparrows, juncos, and other small songbirds moving south. I had a new bird at Eight Acre Wood last week and that was a Red Headed Woodpecker. It was a juvenile bird without the pretty colors of an adult, but it still counts. I had seen one in Ferd’s Bog several years back and one at the soccer field at North Street during a soccer game years ago also. These were both adults. Amy Sauer said she had seen one fly across the South Shore Road in the dip where Indian Brook crosses under the road while biking there. I first saw my bird chasing a Blue Jay and thought it was a small hawk, but the other jays stayed on the ground, so it wasn’t a hawk. It landed on a fence post, and I took its picture, seeing it being a woodpecker and a juvenile. I put up my net and caught a White Breasted Nuthatch and the Woodpecker went right into the net close to the calling nuthatch. I banded both and took a few photos. It stayed around for a few days feeding on the suet cakes before moving south on the night of the full moon. That same day I caught a male Hairy Woodpecker that I had banded on 10/15/2009 which made this bird fifteen years old, near the record longevity of this species of 15 years and 9 months of a captive bird.
I’ve been catching Saw Whet Owls every night for two weeks now with twenty-three in hand so far, two males and the rest females going by their wing chord and weight. I also got a banded owl that had been banded near Mackinaw City, Michigan on 3/22/2023.
Correction from last week the comet in our southwestern skies is the Tsuchinshan- Atlas Comet, not Halley’s Comet.
Big Game Hunting season is open and wearing an orange or pink vest and hat are mandatory, but that’s another story. See ya.
Photo Above: New red-headed woodpecker - juvenile
