Naturally
It was on the beautiful side of a beautiful day. Birds gave voice to the trees and grasses, making the plants sing.
Barn swallows demonstrated their mastery of the air. I watched as a goldfinch landed on the stem of a puffball of a dandelion. Birds are a wonderful way to look at the world.
A kingbird chased a turkey vulture away; the tenacity of the smaller bird made up for the difference in weight class.
The birdbath was as busy as a free carnival. It’s low-budget bird feeding without the feeding.
A male house wren chased another male that had been sunbathing on the roof of a nest box. After the victory, the angry little wren burst into song, still hoping a female might cause him to pull down the vacancy sign. He took additional time to roust a least flycatcher and a chipmunk that had gotten too close for the wren’s comfort.
A few rock doves were feeding on the ground at the end of a cornfield. Akbar the Great might sound like a pro wrestler, but he was the ruler of the Mughal Empire in the 16th Century, and Akbar kept over 20,000 pigeons. Pigeon flying was a popular sport at the Mughal court.
I see staghorn and smooth sumac. Staghorn sumac has hair-like growths on its twigs, like velvet on antlers. Smooth sumac doesn’t have that. Both grow in wooded edges and roadsides where they can get enough sunlight. Clusters of greenish-yellow flowers form compact groups of hairy red fruits, which birds eat, particularly during the winter.
I found a spot where a woodchuck had been digging. It made me wonder. How much ground could a groundhog hog if a groundhog could hog ground?
After 10 on the night of July 4, I went for a walk. There were fireflies, fireworks, lightning, thunder and the odd sounds of screech owls. It was a fine walk.
iNaturalist
Based on citizen science data from Minnesota’s iNaturalist portal, the top 10 most recorded species are the common eastern bumble bee, white-tailed deer, common milkweed, American robin, monarch butterfly, mallard, wild bergamot, blue jay, common garter snake and northern cardinal.
Q&A
“How can I tell if a baby bunny is independent and not in need of saving?” You can tell if an eastern cottontail rabbit is old enough to be on its own if it is roughly the size of a softball, has its eyes open, its ears upright, and is fully furred.
“What bird is pooping in our swimming pool?” Our yards are perfect grackle nesting habitat. Grackles drop droppings on birdbaths, swimming pools, tennis courts, trampolines, wet pavement and shiny cars. It’s innate behavior. We all have a set of rules we live by. Nestling grackles leave their fecal matter, mostly white, in tiny fecal sacs. That’s right, tiny sandwich bags of poop without a zip lock. They do that because it’s difficult to find grackle-sized diapers. A caring parent wants to hide the nest from predators, so it grabs a fecal sac in its bill and drops it into water, thereby destroying the evidence. Then it flies off to buy breath mints and mouthwash. One year, grackles thought our garage door was Lake Superior. They bombarded the door with unerring accuracy. There was an abundance of grackle poop, as a diet of caterpillars and beetles rushes through a birdling’s system. There may have been a gob of it, but I’m not sure how much a gob is. It wasn’t a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” or Wile E. Coyote being humiliated by the Road Runner once again. A truce was imminent. The nestlings would move out and head to Grackle State College soon. A friend told me he’d put a plastic owl out hoping it would discourage grackle bombing visits. The grackles targeted it, and the owl was whitewashed. I didn’t become exorcised by the birds’ remarkable marksmanship. They weren’t threatening me. I didn’t wake up with a plastic owl’s severed head in my bed. Your car has likely been pooped on. A car is a porta–potty for grackles. It’s a good idea to get the droppings off your vehicle promptly. A body shop guy said WD-40 is good for removing avian exhaust from a car’s exterior.
Thanks for stopping by
“I’ve long maintained that the American lawn is one of the greatest mass brainwashings of all time. How we all voluntarily signed up to spend untold hours growing and cutting a nonnative monoculture of green which we lace with poisons to kill plants and insects never ceases to amaze.”—Bill Heavey, editor-at-large for Field & Stream.
“And the fox said to the little prince: men have forgotten this truth, but you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”—Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
Do good.
©️Al Batt 2026
A sideshow barker at a county fair of my youth might have yelled, “Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls! Gather ’round and feast your eyes on the greatest mystery of the modern age! For just one thin dollar—a single Washington—you can pass beneath the velvet curtain and witness sights that boggle the mind and stagger the imagination! The world’s largest mosquito.” This is no gargantuan skeeter. It’s a harmless crane fly. Photo by Al Batt.
A birdhouse gourd.
