Tag Archives: backyard wildlife

Growing Lettuce in My Backyard

photo of lettuce in my garden

I planted lettuce in my backyard for the first time this year. I have enjoyed growing food in my backyard for the last several years. First it is very convenient. I want something to eat I can just go grab it out of the garden. Also it is healthier that many of the other things I might snack on. In addition, you can save money by growing your own food. And it is good for the environment (granted individuals don’t have much of an impact, but millions of people growing some of their own food does – reducing the amount of food transportation on the environment).

Also, I just find it cool to grow food in my yard to feed myself.

I don’t use anything to fertilize the soil or pesticides or anything. I just plant and let it grow (sometimes I water the garden). I just have a compost pile that is mainly leaves that I stir into the garden soil. It has worked fine for years now. I will grow tomatoes, berries, peppers, beans, peas and cucumbers again this year.

Spring Tulips

photo of red and yellow tulips by John Hunter

Photo of red and yellow tulips in my yard. This is by far the most tulips that have flowered. The last several years I think there were 3-5 flowers. This year there are 20 in the front yard.

Getting Kids to Rediscover the Great Outdoors

photo of lantern tree

Back to nature: Getting kids to rediscover the great outdoors

Childhood is supposed to look like this, according to many children’s health experts and an increasing number of landscape architects and urban planners. Wading in puddles or streams, building hideouts, climbing trees or exploring a “secret” outdoor spot develops the senses, stimulates the imagination and releases pent-up energy. Studies show that “a dose of nature” can be more effective than a dose of medication in reducing the symptoms of attention deficit disorder (see sidebar). Obesity and depression are alleviated, too.

“Nature stimulates that sense of wonder,” says UW Health psychologist Katie Watermolen. “When kids are outside, they are less anxious, more creative, more relaxed. All that leads to improved mental health.”
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A 2007 report released by the American Academy of Pediatrics says free and unstructured play is healthy and, in fact, essential for helping children reach important social, emotional and cognitive developmental milestones as well as helping them manage stress and become resilient.

Great stuff. I agree. See photos of my hikes in national parks. The 2007 report doesn’t believe in free and open science though – outdated closed science journal rules apply. When will people lean – both that science should be open and nature is good for kids? Progress isn’t helped when the scientists working for public schools restrict their research by allowing journals to hide their research from the public.

Photo by John Hunter at Forest Glen Preserve, Illinois – Creative Commons Attribution.

The Evolution of House Cats

Photo shows Fritz the Cat – see photos Fritz took.

Scientific American has a long and interesting article on: The Evolution of House Cats

It is by turns aloof and affectionate, serene and savage, endearing and exasperating. Despite its mercurial nature, however, the house cat is the most popular pet in the world. A third of American households have feline members, and more than 600 million cats live among humans worldwide.
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Together the transport of cats to the island and the burial of the human with a cat indicate that people had a special, intentional relationship with cats nearly 10,000 years ago in the Middle East. This locale is consistent with the geographic origin we arrived at through our genetic analyses. It appears, then, that cats were being tamed just as humankind was establishing the first settlements in the part of the Middle East known as the Fertile Crescent.
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Over time, wildcats more tolerant of living in human-dominated environments began to proliferate in villages throughout the Fertile Crescent. Selection in this new niche would have been principally for tameness, but competition among cats would also have continued to influence their evolution and limit how pliant they became. Because these proto–domestic cats were undoubtedly mostly left to fend for themselves, their hunting and scavenging skills remained sharp. Even today most domesticated cats are free agents that can easily survive independently of humans, as evinced by the plethora of feral cats in cities, towns and countrysides the world over.
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So are today’s cats truly domesticated? Well, yes—but perhaps only just. Although they satisfy the criterion of tolerating people, most domestic cats are feral and do not rely on people to feed them or to find them mates. And whereas other domesticates, like dogs, look quite distinct from their wild ancestors, the average domestic cat largely retains the wild body plan. It does exhibit a few morphological differences, however—namely, slightly shorter legs, a smaller brain and, as Charles Darwin noted, a longer intestine, which may have been an adaptation to scavenging kitchen scraps.

Cats are Cool 🙂

The Great Sunflower Project

photo of sunflower (Helianthus Annuus Taiyo)

Sunflower photo from WikiMedia – Helianthus Annuus ‘Taiyo’

The Great Sunflower Project provides a way for you to engage in the ongoing study of bees and colony collapse disorder. The study uses the annual Lemon Queen sunflowers (Helianthus annuus), that can be grown in a pot on a deck or patio or in a garden (and they will send you seeds).

How do bees make fruits and vegetables?

Bees help flowers make seeds and fruits. Bees go to flowers in your garden to find pollen (the powder on the flower) and nectar which is a sweet liquid. Flowers are really just big signs advertising to bees that there is pollen or nectar available – though sometimes a flower will cheat and have nothing! The markings on a flower guide the bee right into where the pollen or nectar is.

All flowers have pollen. Bees gather pollen to feed their babies which start as eggs and then grow into larvae. It’s the larvae that eat the pollen. Bees use the nectar for energy. When a bee goes to a flower in your garden to get nectar or pollen, they usually pick up pollen from the male part of the flower which is called an anther. When they travel to the next flower looking for food, they move some of that pollen to the female part of the next plant which is called a stigma. Most flowers need pollen to make seeds and fruits.

After landing on the female part, the stigma, the pollen grows down the stigma until it finds an unfertilized seed which is called an ovary. Inside the ovary, a cell from the pollen joins up with cells from the ovary and a seed is born! For many of our garden plants, the only way for them to start a new plant is by growing from a seed Fruits are just the parts of the plants that have the seeds. Some fruits are what we think of as fruits when we are in the grocery store like apples and oranges. Other fruits are vegetables like tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers.

First Flowers of Spring

The first flowers of Spring in my yard.

Bug of the Week: Leaf-footed Bug

Photo of leaf-footed bug by Roberta

The Growing With Science Blog by Roberta, an entomologist, is full of interesting posts on bugs and more. For example – Bug of the Week: Leaf-footed Bug

We were doing a bit of yard work when we came across this leaf-footed bug. These insects get their name from the leaf-like flanges on their hind legs.Note the light-colored zig-zag marking across the middle of its back.

Leaf-footed bugs have sucking mouthparts and sometimes feed of fruit such as cactus fruit, oranges or peaches. Although we do have citrus, I think this one is a visitor from our neighbors’ yard. Our neighbors have a pomegranate bush. Pomegranates are one of the leaf-footed bugs’ favorite foods.

Like many of their relatives, these true bugs can give off an odor when handled.

🙂 I was adding in some related links and the first one, I was adding, Backyard Wildlife: Great Spreadwing Damselfly, Roberta had commented on to let me know it was a Great Spreadwing Damselfly. It is a small web.

Backyard Wildlife: Crows

bird dives at crow

Here is an action shot of a bird diving at a crow in my backyard, presumably to get the crow to leave. I noticed this for going on for several weeks (follow link for better view of the dive-bombing bird). The crow didn’t seem to mind too much most of the time.

I visited Madison this week and saw 4 wild turkeys wandering around in a residential area. I didn’t have my camera handy however, so I didn’t get a photo 🙁 It was a strange and cool site.

Crows Carry Cameras for Science:

The cameras look through the legs of the birds, transmitting what they record to a person holding a receiver several hundred meters away.
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To understand more about how and why the crows use tools, researchers need a lot of details about their lives in the wild
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Videos included footage of the crows using plant stems as tools to probe for food and even carrying a tool from one place to another. The images showed that birds on the ground pick up just 8 bits of food an hour.

Backyard Wildlife: Great Spreadwing Damselfly

photo of Dragonfly

If you know the what type of dragonfly is in the photo, please add a comment (update: a comment indicates it is not a dragonfly but a Great Spreadwing Archilestes grandis damselfly – I really enjoy getting feedback like this. It appears the most common way to differentiate the two is how the wings are at rest but the Spreadwing is an exception). I had a small preying mantis drop on my head, and then the ground, a month ago in my backyard. But when I got my digital camera I couldn’t find it again. The variety of insects you can see can be amazing, especially if you don’t use poisons and chemicals in your yard.

Photo by John Hunter, creative commons attribution license.

2 Mysterious Species in the UK

Plane Bug - UK

Mystery insect found in Museum garden

This mystery bug has not been seen in the UK before and has made the Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Garden its home. The tiny bug is baffling insect experts at the Museum who are still trying to identify the mystery newcomer. The almond-shaped bug is red and black and about the size of a grain of rice
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Experts checked the new bug with those in the Museum’s national insect collection of more than 28 million specimens. Amazingly, there is no exact match.
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The bug closely resembles the fairly rare species Arocatus roeselii, which is usually found in central Europe. However, the roeselii bugs are brighter red than this new bug and they are usually associated with alder trees rather than plane trees.

However, the National Museum in Prague discovered an exact match to the mystery bug in their collections – an insect that was found in Nice and is classified as Arocatus roeselii. ‘There are two possible explanations,’ explains Barclay. ‘That the bug is roeselii and by switching to feed on the plane trees it could suddenly become more abundant, successful and invasive. The other possibility is that the insect in our grounds may not be roeselii at all.’

The Museum is working with international colleagues to analyse the bug’s body shape, form and DNA to see whether it is a newly discovered species or if it is in fact Arocatus roeselii.

Here is a green bug from my trip to Clifton Gorge Nature Preserve that is probably easier to identify. Or how about this insect from the Forest Glen Preserve, Illinois. Or how about this one at Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey, in Kentucky.

Help us find out more about the mysterious alien “Ghost Slug”
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