Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens
Healthy Gardens. Healthy Planet
Carol Duke is an artist and farmer, who has given much of the last thirty years to caring for her twenty-one acre hillside farm in Western Massachusetts. Her greatest joy in working with the land has been to see how her farm has become home to a diverse community of wildlife. Through her blog Flower Hill Farm, Carol shares the beauty of living closely with nature and how with careful consideration of conservation and only using organic practices, while being a steward to the land, one can create a true sanctuary for native flora and fauna. Her facebookand twitter pages are used mostly for action alerts to inspire activism towards protecting wild places and wildlife the world over. Flower Hill Farm has also become a Retreat for guests visiting the area from all over the world.
‘A Bestiary . . . Tales From A Wildlife Garden’ continues, as hundreds of migratory songbirds have returned to the northeast and Flower Hill Farm where they are busily finishing off nests and incubating their eggs. Songbirds or perching birds, more scientifically known as passerines, are of the order Passeriformes and make up more [...]
As spring finally unfolds here in Western Massachusetts, the final featured woodpecker of my ‘A Bestiary’ has just returned to Flower Hill Farm from his southeastern United States winter range. Northern Flickers Colaptes auratus, can be surprising and sometimes ruffle feathers of their fellow birds by not acting as a normal woodpecker should. I often see [...]
The downy white belly of a Downy Woodpecker, Picoides pubescens mirrors the white snowy landscape in our gardens and fields stretching down and deep into the forest on this chilly March morning. This third segment of Woodpeckers begins the sixteenth installment of A Bestiary, featuring two woodpeckers not often seen here at Flower Hill Farm. [...]
The second member of the Picidae family featured in ‘A Bestiary’ is the showy and industrious Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, Sphyrapicus varius. These brightly patterned woodpeckers are frequent visitors to the gardens here at Flower Hill Farm and are somewhat steward-like to a few of our apples, crabapples and hawthorns. The trees the sapsuckers adopt might be considered [...]
The avian slice of ‘A Bestiary’ continues with the Picidae family of woodpeckers . . . and where else to begin but with the most striking and strident of these birds . . . North America’s own . . . Pileated Woodpecker Dryocopus pileatus. Walking about in the gardens and fields one early spring morning, [...]
As chill settles in on this first day of winter, more anecdotal beastly tales unfold in my latest installment of ‘A Bestiary: Tales From a Wildlife Garden.’ Chance encounters with wildlife always strike me as quite remarkable . . . just being in the right place at the right moment and being in that moment [...]
A Bestiary continues . . . with the raptor of the dead . . . the utterly critical and graceful . . . even when teetering . . . Turkey Vulture. Dark as a moonless night this new world vulture . . . nature’s silent black knight, Cathartes aura, emanates mystery while evoking macabre images from [...]
As crisp autumn air sweeps trees free of leaves, that float and flutter like bright butterflies twirling and falling into heaps of leafy carpeting . . . ’A Bestiary . . . Tales from a Wildlife Garden’ continues with the princely Eastern Wild Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo silvestris.) Moving on from the class of Mammalia [...]
It is quiet this time of year and last nights cooler temperature has hushed the chorus of cicadas, crickets and tree frogs so that only the sun’s explosion of light and the tweets of soon to depart sibling Ruby-throated Hummingbirds break the silence of night. Migration of birds and butterflies are underway . . . [...]
It is that hour when the hilly horizon loses its glow, color falls away into dusky gray values, as Veerys, Hermit and Wood Thrushes usher in darker tones of early evening. There is a softness to this time of overlapping day and night offering just enough light to see a dark form up in one [...]
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