We got about 8 inches of snow in the latest storm, so now I’m wondering what the snowdrops that were blooming before it snowed will look like when it melts. I can already see that the yellow winter aconite blossoms under a big viburnum in the front yard that are surrounded by snow appear unaffected by it.
Before it snowed, a few purple hellebore flowers were also opening up, but I’m guessing they haven’t fared very well. I planted all three of these species years before I began planting all native perennials. And I admit that I still like seeing their small blossoms in the dead of winter when everything else is bare and brown.
However, Pat Sutton, a well-known educator and naturalist from Cape May, New Jersey, wouldn’t approve of planting these species. For more than 30 years, she’s rightly been a proponent of using all native plants. And recently she talked about two guide books on landscaping with just native plants that are available from the Native Plant Society of New Jersey. One covers the southern part of the state and the other one deals with the northern part.
It was really cold the morning I wrote this column, and bird activity was high. Most interesting was a small hyperactive adult male ruby-crowned kinglet that kept coming back to natural beef suet in the front yard. Its red crest was showing even though more often than not it’s kept hidden.
Ruby-crowned kinglets don’t nest in Pennsylvania, at least not to current knowledge. In the winter they migrate down into the Northeast from further north, and usually go further south than where I live. But this one’s been around all winter.
While I was watching the kinglet, a purple finch, another bird not normally seen in our area, came into a feeder of black oil sunflowers. This species nests in Pennsylvania, but not this far south. Perhaps, though, someone doing the third Pennsylvania atlas project for breeding birds that just began its five-year run will find one nesting around here.
The late Roger Tory Peterson described adult male purple finches as looking like they were dipped in raspberry juice. The females, however, are basically brown and white. In our geographical area house finches are common, but their color is reddish, not purplish.
Later that morning I went out to look at animal tracks in the snow. But, while there were lots of them, many were hard to recognize because the melting snow compacted over and around them. Of course I assume though that most of them were from white-tailed deer, some of which had gathered together at the warm water in the heated bird baths.
The big open fields across the road were full of tracks, some of which most likely were made by coyotes. These grayish predators, a very small percentage of which are melanistic or black, are all over both Pennsylvania and New Jersey. And they’re in suburban communities where they’re not expected.
Coyotes, in fact, have expanded to the point where they’re all over the country. Recently on a show that David was watching, the sportscaster said that his plane in the Atlanta airport couldn’t take off on time because there were coyotes on the runway.
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