In 2016 I’m doing a 365 Nature project. Each day of the year I will post something here about nature. It may be any format, a photo, video, audio, sketch or entry from my nature journal. It could be a written piece. Each day I will connect to nature in some way and share it here by the end of that day. You can keep up-to-date by subscribing to the RSS feed or be notified by email. See all the 365 Nature posts.
June is also 30 Days Wild and I’m participating again this year.
Next door to our backyard a Serviceberry tree is proving fruit for the birds. I watched Robins flocking to the tree on Day 170 and over the last two days I’ve tried to get some shots of them eating the berries. It’s a tricky task because while the Robins are normally very tolerant of our presence, especially while I’m gardening and digging up worms, they are much less so in the Serviceberry tree. If they see me they will feed on the other side of the tree or just grab a berry and fly away. From some of my shots, I’ve noticed the tongue of Robins helping get the berries down and it’s a very bizarre tongue. It looks like it’s bent in half, pushing the berry back into the mouth, but it has two inward-facing hooks that hold the berry on the tongue. Very peculiar.
While I was watching the birds late yesterday afternoon, I noticed quite a bit of bee activity along our fence. I watched the tiny solitary bees and found they were going in and out of small holes in the fence, holes left when I removed giant staples which were holding up a privacy screen. It’s amazing that my action of removing that screen created nesting cavities for solitary bees. It highlights just how much our actions, intentional or otherwise, impact the wildlife we live with.
