Tag Archives: urban ecology

how to get rid of robins???

Leave a reply

In my experience, robins can tear up grass, scatter mulch while foraging for food, and even eat fruit or crops from your garden. Moreover, their nests can harbor parasites and insects, which can put your family, pets, and home at risk. The smell of robin droppings can also be incredibly unpleasant, particularly if the birds manage to get inside your walls.

todayshomeowner.com

This left me speechless – It honestly never occurred to me that robins could have enemies. Could this person maybe be thinking of pigeons? Or is this person even a person? If this is an AI concluding that a harmless bird is a threat that needs to be gotten rid of, it may be a cautionary tale for other species, like ours.

March 2024 in Review

Leave a reply

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Ralph Nader says the civilian carnage in Gaza is an order of magnitude worse than even the Gaza authorities say it is. Which is almost unthinkably horrible if true, and makes the Israeli public statements about collateral damage seem even less credible. However even handed you try to be in considering this war could be a proportionate response to the original gruesome attack, it is getting harder.

Most hopeful story: Yes, there are some fun native (North American) wildflowers you can grow from bulbs. Let’s give the environmental and geopolitical doom and gloom a rest for a moment and cultivate our gardens.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I looked into Belarus, and now I am just a little bit less ignorant, which is nice.

native wildflowers from bulbs

Leave a reply

For something random and different (but hey, it’s meteorological spring right?), here are some wildflowers native to the U.S. that can be grown from bulbs.

  • Blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium atlanticum), native to eastern North America
  • Calochortus spp. lily, native to western NA
  • Dwarf-crested iris (Iris cristata), native to eastern NA
  • Fritillaria spp., native to western NA
  • large camas (Camassia leichtlinii), native to western NA
  • Nodding onion (Allium cernuum), native throughout US
  • Northern spiderlilly (Hymenocallis occidentalis var. occidentalis), southeastern US
  • Rain lily (Zephyranthes atamasca), southeastern US
  • trout lily (Erythronium americanum), central and eastern US
  • Turk’s cap lily (Lilium superbum), central and eastern US
  • Ookow (Dichelostemma congestum), western NA
  • Wood lily (Lilium philadelphicum), throughout NA

It’s nice to grow plants from seed for genetic variety, but bulbs certainly have their place. It’s good to know there are good native choices (well, I don’t know if these are choices down at my local Lowes/Home Depot, but they should be).

census reveals massive Philadelphia population loss – for pigeons

Leave a reply

The (paywalled) Philadelphia Inquirer reports on a citizen science bird count showing a massive drop in the pigeon population over the last few years. At the same time, raptor populations like red-tailed hawks and Peregrine falcons are up. There are reasons the data are uncertain, but this is still pretty cool.

I’ve had some memorable raptor sitings in Philly over the years. Recently, I heard a significant commotion and looked up to see a red-tailed hawk in a tree very close to my front door. This was early spring before there were leaves on the trees, so I imagine it had a good line of site to the ground. Mice and rats were the first prey species that popped into my mind, but yeah there are pigeons around too.

Peregrine falcons are not very shy in urban environments. I remember seeing one sitting on a street map above a busy street, next to a park that I know from personal experience is full of mice, rats, and pigeons.

Once I saw a falcon that had trapped a squirrel under a bench in Rittenhouse Square. Like I said, they are not shy around people, but when the park is busy they will tend to be hire up in the trees or on buildings. This was very early in the morning, and the falcon was just sitting there on the bench with the squirrel underneath. The squirrel would try to run out, and the falcon would swoop out and try to get its talons around the squirrel, and the squirrel would slip out and dart back under the bench. Falcons are big birds. I gave this one a respectful distance, but it took no notice of me whatsoever.

Audubon native garden designs

Leave a reply

For people like me with limited artistic sense (visual anyway, and you don’t want me to dance in public, although I was once upon a time a well-trained and active musician), these visual garden designs from Audubon are helpful. Basically, you put the tall plants and flowers in the middle and shorter ones more toward the edges, I think, and then you can consider colors and timing of the flowers. Easy to think about, harder to do.

identifying birds by their songs

Leave a reply

This is pretty cool – basically, something called “Haikubox” is a microphone that records bird songs around your house and sends them to a computer at Cornell, which identifies them and sends them back to an app on your phone that tells you what is going on. My immediate reaction was do I really need to buy this high tech microphone? Couldn’t I just make recordings with whatever I have lying around and send those to the computer? And yes, there is an app for that too called “Merlin Bird ID”. I guess the advantage of buying the hardware is that it is always on and processing and transmitting the recordings without extra effort from you.

Ticks – they suck!

Leave a reply

Yes, I know that was quite possibly the worst pun ever. But they really are disgusting, even for those of us who basically like bugs.

Particularly disgusting are types that can form such large clusters that they can bleed a large mammal to death, like a cow or even a moose. They cause many more cases of disease in the U.S. than mosquitoes. The lone star tick can cause a person to develop an allergy to red meat, which is just bizarre. We’ve become kind of desensitized to Lyme disease, but it can be quite dangerous – on a personal note, a cousin of mine who lives in western Pennsylvania was hospitalized with a serious heart condition in the summer of 2020, and it turned out to be Lyme disease – quickly and correctly diagnosed and treated by the way, and he is now fine. I guess that is one up side of it being so common and widespread – even during the height of Covid-19 in 2020 when someone came into an emergency room with Covid-like symptoms, it was correctly tested for, diagnosed, and treated.

My cousin thinks he acquired Lyme disease in his yard, and according to Vox, this is a more common way to acquire it than hiking in the woods. So you can’t avoid it by just staying out of the woods.

The Vox article says scientists are pretty sure habitat fragmentation plays a role – deer and mice love lots of fragments and edge habitat, and meanwhile their predators do not, and people generally do not want the predators among them.

And finally, the article says the jury is out on how climate change is affecting ticks, but their ranges are generally expanding and milder winters are probably playing a role.

Ticks have made nature less fun, and that is what sucks most of all, if you ask me.

city biodiversity

Leave a reply

This paper in Urban Forestry and Urban Greening suggests three ways to increase biodiversity in cities.

Consideration of the three key factors influencing biodiversity identified here (grassland extent, land-use in the surroundings, and management intensity) would provide the optimal options for maintaining city biodiversity. Protecting current urban grasslands from development and restricting construction in their surroundings, restoring city wilderness areas using urban spatial planning, and setting up butterfly-friendly management regimes (e.g., mowing in mosaic) could all be future options to help enhance biodiversity in cities.

Urban Forestry and Urban Greening

These sound like measures the average U.S. homeowner’s association will gleefully embrace (#irony).

Opossums

Leave a reply

I like the little guys. They are not “immune” to rabies or Lyme disease, as some have claimed, but they seem to get these diseases fairly rarely. They can carry fleas and ticks because…they’re animals. Although one study suggested they like to eat a lot of ticks, other studies have failed to confirm this unfortunately. This article cites a number of good things about them, and then seems to reach an illogical conclusion that they are nonetheless pests. I don’t quite get it – yes, they have sharp teeth and might use them if they are really cornered, or if a house pet that doesn’t know any better attacks them. That’s about it.

While it’s true that opossums eat ticks, thereby potentially preventing some spread of Lyme disease, their good characteristics may be overhyped by some social media users. Opossum-control mechanisms vary by state, but most pest control experts recommend treating their removal in the same way as one would treat raccoons or skunks. After determining that an opossum has moved in, experts say to make the surroundings less appealing to them by cleaning up overgrown shrubbery and trees that they may use to hide in, clean up fallen fruit, and hide garbage cans, pet food containers, or other food sources. Secure home areas so that they cannot hide out under stairways or other nooks and crannies.

Snopes

This sounds like a pretty good prescription to remove wildlife habitat in general on your property. Anything that is not mown turf grass with maybe the occasional well-mulched tree is “overgrown” in the eyes of some (not mine).