Milkweed Buds, Another Try at Bat Fly Out, A Tidbit From Stella on Pale Male's Fledgling Bugsy and Last But Not Least...SO YOU THINK YOU WANT A PARROT!

The mature Common Milkweed I transplanted is coming along.  See the coming blossoms center?  Also a couple of interesting insects...

So far so good.  Which is more than I can see for my efforts to catch the small bat colony which resides somewhere on or in my house at fly out.

 Not a bat in sight though I thought I was watching all the time...okay most of the time, as I got an important text, perhaps at the exact moment I should have been watching. 

 This is the area under the eaves that the other bats appeared to be coming from on Little Brown Bat fly out night.  It is in inky darkness at fly out time so I just periodically and blindly took a picture, and later brought up the image in the photo program with hope to have caught something...which I didn't...yet anyway.

And a very nice tidbit from Central Park Hawk Watcher Stella Hamilton.  Bugsy the fledgling of Pale Male and Octavia, who was notorious for eating bugs earlier in his fledglinghood actually brought down a squirrel today on her own!  Squirrels being no easy prey as they have extremely tough, hard to puncture skin and very sharp teeth.  Bugsy as it turns out is quite precocious.

AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST...
SO...YOU THINK YOU WANT A PARROT?

Yes Ladies and Gentleman Quicksilver the African Grey Parrot ran amuck while I napped having inadvertently fallen asleep with the parrot at large in the house.

In the past this hasn't been a problem as Silver didn't, for whatever reason, go into the kitchen on his own.  Well this day he obviously did and when he heard my footsteps approaching from the other side of the house, I heard a little parrot voice saying, "I'm sorry.  I'm sorry."

At the sound, I was filled with dread.  It has to be something really egregious before Silver apologizes before I even appear on the scene.

Note the pile of lime jello on the stove top and a smaller pile of lemon on the counter.  Silver was standing between them apologizing with bits of teabag clinging to his chest.  The dog was snacking on the coffee cake on the floor and Squirrel the Cat was sitting on the counter, left, hoping for Silver to dispense something he'd like very soon.

Therefore think very carefully about your patience level and how much you can take before the lifelong decision of a very smart feathered friend who cannot help but open the cupboard when you're distracted,  chunk things out and chew them.

But as the pet is a parrot, at least he apologized...in English.

Happy Hawking!
Donegal Browne

Syracuse Peregrine Eyass and Figuring Out the Milkweed Mysteries

 Just in from longtime raptor watcher Mitch Nusbaum...

  Barb, the first Peregrine eyass in Syracuse, NY in 4 years!

Asclepias syriaca, Common Milkweed

When I realized that NONE of the hundreds of milkweed seeds that had overwintered naturally and I had collected and planted had come up... none, zero, ziltch, and weren't going to come up, ( I thought), I put the word out that I was looking for milkweed plants.  A local farm wife who digs out mature milkweed from between the rows of her garden plot every year said, if I'd come dig them out they were mine.

The first mystery, if she dug the mature plants out every year, why were mature plants appearing every Spring instead of  seedlings?

  I stuck that question in the "For Investigation" section of my brain,  threw a spade and and a square camp shovel in the car and took off for the farm.

And indeed Mrs. Albright, in her late 80's, had a garden full of mature Common Milkweed. Facinating.  (By the way, she never digs all of them out she likes Monarchs too, but does want to have room for her tomato plants as well.)

Her husband showed up with an ancient tiling shovel, and we all went to work.

The answer to the mature plant mystery became clear before long.  A milkweed plant has a long vertical stem/root underground which connects to a horizontal root which is connected to numerous other vertical stem/roots to any number of what looks like individual plants above ground.  And that vertical stem appears to be evolutionarily built to very easily break off the major horizontal root which leaves the major root deep in the ground for mature plants to grow out of next year.

Therefore I had many plants with vertical roots and only a few with a piece of the horizontal root connected to it.

I went home immediately but by the time I got there, the milkweed had lost their turger pressure and had turned into very limp things.  CRAP!

I put them into the ground immediately and drenched the ground with water.  They came back but I had to water them religiously for days and many leaves turned yellow first. 

The plants with a portion of horizontal root did better at the beginning than those with only a vertical root but the plants that did best were those in which a portion of the horizontal root had two or three connecting vertical roots.  I should have realized then  that Milkweed loves company.

Another mystery, though the milkweed seeds that were planted outside had come to zilch, or I thought they had, using seeds I had striated, put into damp sand in baggies in the refrigerator did germinate and come up in in seedling flats.  Shrug.

But the stems were so slight, and scrawny, (above, these seedlings planted in groups outside), they couldn't really stand up as a single plant but if more than one seed germinated in each of their  little dirt cubicles they did a little better.  Shrug. (At least at the time.) 

Betty Jo of California has been contributing to the blog for nigh on ten years.  She makes her living with plants, is an aficionado of Monarch Butterflies  and she has stepped up after reading last evenings Milkweed Musings to help us with the Growing Milkweed Mysteries.

Donna,

 I am sitting at my computer bawling--can't stop-- started
when I saw the 15% return of the Monarchs.  I already felt very
sentimental when I saw the painting on Stella's ceiling.  What a
wonderful brother. and she takes great pics with a cell phone!

Re the Monarch's--the terrible conditions in Texas are a big
factor--that is their first place to breed after migration.  I heard
last year that horrible winds stalled them in Texas as they were heading to Mexico  There was also no milkweed when they returned--terrible drought--fires and verge mowing (which they been doing since I was a child at least) and of course the war on milkweed by cattle ranchers.

Re: seeding--seed bombs!  I have had now 3 years of experience growing various kinds of milkweed and have come to several conclusions--don't know what Chip Taylor's people say but here's my experience:

Planted 5 different kinds of native seed--had to sratify -frig was half filled with bags of peat moss for months. The seeds which
germinated--some damped off (green house conditions not right?/. 

The "Showy Davis" a California native had great germination--but when the cotyledons appeared, (The cotyledon is a significant portion of the embryo in the seed of a plant.  When the seed germinates, the cotyledon usually becomes the embryonic first leaves of a seedling. DB) I looked under the trays which were on a wire table and the roots were already 4 inches long--difficult to transplant!
 
Many of the transplants lived but never grew. 

Tuberosa did grow but slowly--the seeds which blew around my yard and the Botanic garden where
I planted lots of purchased ones have germinated like crazy--but almost always under other plants!.  My neighbor planted seeds--didn't grow--but where my seeds blew into the protected entry way to her house they germinated and grew under gardenias and begonias!  They are huge and
beautiful. At the Botanic garden they are growing in the children's vegetable  garden under tomatoes and kale--everywhere!

But the important thing people need to know  if purchasing Milkweed plants is this:  Many big growers sell to big box stores--Home Depot and Lowes out here.  Here the main grower is a company  called Hines--the plants are poisoned!  I recently planted one and put 3 caterpillars on it because they were running out of food.  They were killed horribly! Hines swears they don't poison!  The key is, if the plant is perfect--no aphids, beetles or gnawed leaves it probably is poisoned! 

Locally we are working on this problem.

Did you hear about the woman who had a late female Monarch butterfly in her garden in the NorthEast--She knew it was too cold for "her" to migrate so she got SouthWest to fly her and the butterfly to San Antonio. Chip Taylor had to get permission from some branch of government for
her to do this!  Good publicity for South West!
 
Happy hawking--and yes for me anyway--Happy Monarching.  First thing I do everyday is look for caterpillars.
And I admit, I talk to them--they do not understand any English--whereas you talk to a creature who does! bjo

Betty Jo,

You have confirmed a suspicion I had about milkweed!  The milkweed I started in the house had such spindly stems they were nearly limp.  They'd been grown in full sun....hmm.  It got me thinking.  In a prairie or natural setting, seldom do seeds have a patch of totally open ground.  They germinate between other plants which may support them in some way or ways, at least in the case  of some milkweeds.  

The area in which I had broadcast the seeds I'd collected while doing prairie burns had been rotor-tilled first because I certainly wouldn't consider using Round Up which many prairie landscape people use for convenience.  And and also because some at least may actually believe that it always  becomes harmless by binding  with clay molecules.  Not always the case but that is a rant for another day.

Nothing came up....nothing came up for months. Well nothing in the "good" category anyway. At which point I stopped weeding the area.  
 Yesterday I discovered milkweed amongst the crabgrass. 

                    Can you see the milkweed seedling?

                                     See it now?
 But as crabgrass has those runners which crowd out everything else...or strangle or smother out other plants making a mono culture, I picked through the crabgrass and when I found more  milkweed, I cleared a small area of crabgrass which was beginning to smother it and I also put sticks in near the milkweed.  Partially to keep myself from walking on them, but also as a stand-in for the other plants which would normally be there in a natural area..  It may need some shading to keep from drying out or other symbiotic interaction as well, we'll see.                                         

                 And another one center.  To the right are tiny elm seedlings.

So when I came in and read your email, I was delighted.  In your experience milkweed seeds did the best in conjunction with other plants!  I was heading in the right direction.  Yes!

                                        A milkweed  hunt in progress.
Stay tuned!

Happy Hawking!
Donegal Browne

P.S. I have seen a single little brown bat out hunting my yard as the sun goes down for five days running.  I think our little buddy is just fine.

Isolde and Norman Do the Fire Escape, The Uncommonly Beautiful Common Milkweed and a Night Migration-Flying Before the Storm

Common Milkweed, Asclepias syriaca

Before we get to the Milkweed and all the rest, here's a last minute flash from Nara Milanich, whose fire escape hosts Isolde and Norman of Morningside Park and the St. John the Divine Cathedral Nest when the weather gets nippy and the wind blows just right.

FROM NARA--
They're baa-aaak

Isolde and Norman--our two feathered poltergeists--are back. One of them came by this weekend but we didn't notice till the morning and so it's unclear if s/he roosted for the night.

Tonight they are back roosting, just as the temperature has dipped. Both of them are perched on a railing of the fire escape, one right next to the other, literally two feet from the window (the rail extends out perpendicularly from the building facade, in between our two living room windows, so they are not directly in front of the window but to the side a bit). One is facing the window with an eye to what's going on inside, while the other sleeps soundly facing the other direction.

Last year they generally perched on separate fire escapes, especially to sleep, so this seems new. They both also seem to have more light belly feathers than I remember. Is this the hawk equivalent of parental gray hair?


Nara,

How terrific that your cold weather visitors are back! Thank you for letting me know.

They did perch further apart last year didn't they? Perhaps it has something to do with the wind direction or conceivably they've just gotten more comfortable as time has passed and the humans haven't done anything untoward.

Isolde and Norman sound like they are currently in a position taken by Pale Male and Lola during the day, most often in breeding season, when they sometimes companionably sit next to each other on the railing of the building we call Linda. That way they can watch each others back. We often used to joke that Lola was watching televison inside the apartment. But likely she was keeping an eye on the inhabitants as well as using the reflection of the window for a back view as well.

Pale Male and Lola most often seem to roost for the night in separate trees though in sight of each other. Every once and a while we'll discover them in the same tree. And to tell the truth they too may roost on fire escapes but we've just never caught them at it.

As to the lighter belly feathers, they've gone through a molt since you last saw them and for whatever reason a hawks coloration does shift somewhat with each molt. According to John Blakeman an older hawk will have lost most of the color in her belly band, but I doubt either Isolde and certainly not Norman is old enough for that to be happening yet. Pale Male might be but he never had much of a belly band in the first place as he's so light colored.

Thanks again for the update!


AND NOW BACK TO OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING--

The Milkweed follicles are bursting. (Look back up at the top photo as we've been talking about our favorite topic, hawks, for a reminder of what the Milkweed looks like currently.) What a strange and beautiful plant. Obviously the seeds are spread by the wind and as the seeds are substantial so are the wind catching fibers. They have a gorgeous sparkle in the sun, add that to large spherical umbels covered in dozens of flowers, I've never been able to understand the prejudice against them. Perhaps it has to do with their being a native plant and not an exotic. Besides, we'd not have Monarch Butterflies without them.

Here is a follicle that has only very recently burst. The long white flossy hairs and seeds are a packing marvel. The pod bursts due to the growth and ensuing pressure of the contents.

Then the contents dry in the sun and the breeze teases out the fibers until they take flight.



A number of follicles in various stages of the process.


Even the dried pods are beautiful.

Work on the nest has come to rather a standstill for the moment as the sparrows have moved into my pile of materials (left) for the winter. There must be fifty or so of them that roost there every night.

It was nearly 70 degrees today but as the evening began to come on water fowl took to the air from every direction with obvious intent.

Wisconsin is littered with bodies of water-lakes, ponds, rivers. And whatever the weather was today, the water birds know it's time to get out of town. Likely in another 24 hours we're going to have a plunge in temperature.

It is thought that one of the reasons that they migrate at night is to preserve their body moisture.

I went outside after full dark and could hear them calling to each other as the flew over heading for warmer climes by the light of a sliver of moon.

Donegal Browne