It’s hard to believe it’s already two thirds of the way through September but here we are. The air is cooler, the birds are gathering to migrate, and the flowers are giving up their blooms.
We went for a walk around Hathaway’s Pond this morning to see what we could see. I took along my lightweight travel bag, a big old plastic bag I’ve used for years, and a pair of garden shears. My goal was to clip some plants and leaves along the way to bring back to my studio to draw and paint, having just completed five days of John Muir Laws‘s Wild Wonder Nature Journal Conference. Although I’ve kept a nature journal for many years, I admit I’d been slacking so this was the incentive I needed to get back to it.
The water level at the pond was exceptionally low and I found many wildflowers around the edge. Most are common, some are even invasive, but I clipped them anyway, to look up, draw and paint. I’m far from a botanist so I’m always learning new plants. I looked everything up but I may be wrong so feel free to correct me.
Here’s what I brought back after an hour or so of wandering
I put everything that needed water in a jar of water and the other things back in the bag until I was ready to work with them. I drew in ink and then added watercolor.
Pondside plants, Mary Richmond’s nature journal, Cape CodWoodland plants, Mary Richmond’s nature journal, Cape CodRandom finds on the woodland floor, Mary Richmond’s nature journal, Cape Cod
I spent most of the day on this project–collecting, sorting, looking things up, sketching, painting. I often don’t have that sort of time but when I do it always enriches me. It’s good to slow down, take note, appreciate the small things we see around us but tend to take for granted.
Every now and then I head out for a walk thinking I’ll look for a certain thing but I end up finding something even more magical than what I was originally looking for.
In this case, I’d heard about a very visible nest of green herons not far from where I live. So of course I got up super early and went to see what I could see. It took only a minute to find them because mom or dad was sitting right out in plain sight in the morning light. The first picture shows the adult plus two babies behind it. There wasn’t another soul around, just the birds and me.
Look at the second picture to see how many baby green herons you can see. Check out those ginormous feet and bills and big yellow eyes! Green herons are quite common but because they are small and so well camouflaged many people have never seen one. I’m betting most people won’t see this nest because they don’t know what to look for. It’s pretty well hidden. Both adults watch over the nest and the young. The other parent was probably away gathering food. Young herons are fed by the parent regurgitating food, such as fish, right into their crops.
I hung around for a while watching them as the sun went in and out and as the shadows shifted I heard a loud squawk and saw that the adult bird was very agitated, chasing a large bird away from the nest. An immature black crowned night heron had interrupted the morning bliss for a minute but it soon landed on a half submerged log below the nest where it began to hunt for fish.
Night herons are much larger than green herons and are quite predatory. Was the immature bird after one of the nestlings? It may have just been a clumsy mistake. In any case, the parent green heron immediately quieted its young and promptly sat on them, covering them up and protecting them. The night heron was unimpressed and proceeded to catch and eat several small fish while I watched, right under the branch where the nest was.
It was joined by a brother or sister who was hunting under the overhanging greenery. It was a good game of peekaboo, as I’d see it one minute and completely lose sight of it the next.
There is a big meadow on this property and I hoped to catch some butterfly action so I headed in that direction before the heat got too intense. Like much of the rest of the world we are having a bit of a heat wave here. Staying cool was definitely on my mind.
The meadow is full of milkweed, goldenrod, chicory, Queen Anne’s lace, and all sorts of thistles and vetches. It’s full of bees, butterflies, and other insects I won’t even pretend to know or name. It’s also full of birds. Swallows and purple martins swoop and swirl overhead. Goldfinches fill the air with their twitters and calls. The bright yellow males move from blossom to blossom as the females settle in for a longer meal.
Male American goldfinchFemale American goldfinch feeding on thistle
Not only were goldfinches feeding like crazy but I kept hearing cedar waxwings. All of a sudden they were all around me, landing on top of goldenrod stalks, nibbling at the buds and new leaves. What a bonanza. They moved very quickly and were very aware of me so it was difficult to get a good shot that wasn’t blurry. This was the best one. Personally, I think they are one of the loveliest and beautiful of birds.
Cedar waxwing on goldenrod
The morning had barely begun and I felt like I’d been surrounded by magic. I came to see one thing but was rewarded with so much more.
Being out in nature is always reward enough in itself for me. I’m never sure what I will see, hear, smell, or experience but it’s always something memorable. When one allows oneself to be happy in a meadow surrounded by butterflies, birds, and blossoms, one doesn’t really need much more to feel content and satisfied.
There’s magic all around us every day. We just have to remember to slow down, look, and listen to find it.
Ah, May….It came in like winter and is heading out almost like spring. Must be Cape Cod. This sure has been a rough spring weather-wise but those warm, lovely days? Can’t be beat and maybe we think that because they’ve been so rare.
Beach walks have been brisk right up through this week. Winds have been steady and some days so much sand has been blowing that it’s been difficult to walk without getting sand blasted. Some days, however, have been just perfect. Terns are here, piping plovers and willets are nesting and ospreys are calling overhead. Doesn’t get much better than that. This weekend marks the beginning of the summer season here so solitary walks will be more difficult to pull off over the next few months.
You may have noticed lots of fluffy white flowered shrubs along the beach and even along the median strips on the highways here. These are the famous beach plums blossoming. Jam makers note these locations for future plum picking.
Many people confuse the beach plums with the fat orange and red rose hips of the Rosa rugosa, commonly called the beach rose. These are just coming into flower and by late summer the hips will be all over. They are also edible thought not as sought after as their purple plum cousins.
Earlier this month I participated in Mass Audubon’s Birdathon. My youngest grandson came along for the full 24 hours of birding and proved himself to be a wonderful bird spotter. The Birdathon is one of Mass Audubon’s biggest fundraisers and our team aimed to raise a certain amount of money. If you’d like to contribute, donations are being accepted up to June 1.
About 6 weeks ago I decided to join a #100dayproject in which you pledge to do something for 100 days and post it to Instagram or Facebook or whatever. I decided to sketch something in nature every day for 100 days. Although I regularly sketch, I don’t think I’ve ever worried about doing it daily. I’m on day 53 as of today and have been faithful to the challenge. It’s been a blast. And, my little sketchbook is a diary of sorts of spring waking up on the Cape. If you are interested in keeping a nature sketchbook, I’ll be offering an online class this summer. You can email me at capecodartandnature at gmail dot com for more info (I can’t add email links here for some reason.)
It’s been a long, hard haul, pulling spring into shore here on Cape Cod. Our springs are always fugitive things, playing hide and seek with us for months, but this year was especially brutal with March bringing a quartet of high level storms.
Today is May 2, however, and spring is springing up all over. Mayflowers are in bloom in many of our scrub woodlands. Look for them on sunny sides of paths. They love disturbed areas.
Fiddler crabs are enjoying the sunny, warm weather as well. Look for them in tidal areas near salt marshes. Often you will see the telltale holes but no crabs. That’s because they hear you coming. Try standing still where your shadow is not cast over their holes. In a few minutes they will usually re-emerge and go about their business. Don’t move or talk, though, or they’ll scurry back to safety.
Over the past week or so, the weather has been wet, foggy, cold, hot, sunny, cloudy, stormy and sublime. Sometimes all in the same day! Bad weather does make for good sky photos….
There’s nothing like a calm, beautiful morning at the beach, though. The photo below is from this morning’s walk at Kalmus Beach. Piping plovers were flirting, gulls were catching spider crabs and the sweet song of a horned lark warbled out of the dunes.
I’ve also been spending a lot of time walking in the woods. This week I’ve been in the woods in Hyannis, Barnstable and Mashpee. Lots of birds, including towhees, pine warblers, chipping sparrows, woodpeckers, red breasted nuthatches and a broad winged hawk in Mashpee. A red shouldered hawk at Long Pasture in Barnstable.
On the home front, the orioles, catbirds and hummingbirds have arrived so put out those feeders for these hungry migrants. Stay tuned for the amazing warbler show which will be busting out on Cape Cod in the next few weeks.
Wow! It’s been awhile since I wrote a blog post. I’m busy on Facebook and Instagram (just search for Cape Cod Art and Nature) these days but would like to get back to posting here as well.
It’s been an interesting spring so far. Spring, you say? What spring? It’s been a non spring, actually! One of my recent columns talks about this and you can read it here.
I’ve joined a #100dayproject challenge this year and have been updating my sketchbook daily. I’ve always kept a sketchbook journal but it hasn’t really been daily, except in small spurts. I try to draw on location out in the field but to be honest, it’s been too cold to paint out there. I add the color with watercolor in my studio. On rainy days I’ve used things like shells and feathers from my collections.
On one rainy and blustery day I sat in a beach parking lot and drew these flirting laughing gulls. Lichens are always interesting and challenging to draw. I often add notes, thoughts, questions to my pages. I also list the birds I see or hear. I’ll be offering an online nature journal class that will start in the next few weeks. No experience is necessary, just a willingness to get outside and observe. If you would like to be added to my email list please let me know at capecodartandnature@gmail.com For some reason wordpress doesn’t allow email links in posts so I apologize for the extra step. Just copy and paste in your email bar.
I’m heading off to a writer’s conference this weekend. And yes, I finished my middle grade novel for kids. I’m hoping to find an agent. More on the book soon. Until then, enjoy what could be spring weather this weekend!
Every winter we get a few birds hanging around our area that are fairly rare but which appear as singletons with some regularity. For example, harlequin ducks, beautiful birds from the far north that usually winter off the rocky Maine coast, can be seen off the Cape in several locations almost every winter. There may be one or two that spend a good part of the winter by the canal jetty each winter and there always seems to be at least one seen at Nauset or Coast Guard Beach. I have seen them in both locations each winter for at least 10 years but just the one or two.
King eiders are another northern duck that seems to make a yearly appearance here on the Cape in the winter. Most often seen with the flocks of eider ducks in or around the Cape Cod Canal one can sometimes be seen off the outer Cape beaches or off Sandy Neck, which may be the same one seen by the canal. That’s a king eider smack in the center, hanging out with his common eider buddies.
Some years I spy one but for the last few years when a king eider has been reported at the canal I have missed it. This year reports have been coming in over the last few weeks that a very accommodating king eider drake was being seen daily by the herring run on the Wareham side of the canal. The weather was rough and I was busy and I enjoyed everyone else’s photos. Until yesterday. Yesterday we were heading to New Bedford so we had a chance to stop and see the bird.
As everyone else had mentioned, it was indeed, right there and easy to spot. I do not have a fancy camera so you can see how close the bird was. If you’re so inclined, go see it. One of these days it will leave but for now it seems quite content to hang out eating shellfish and crustaceans which are abundant in the canal, especially along the rocky jetties.
Way back in the day before the Europeans came to Cape Cod, the entire peninsula was covered with hard wood forests. Sassafras, hickory, beech, oak, maple and more were everywhere. So were the tall and stately white pines. The dirt was dark and loamy, rich with nutrients.
And then, the wood hungry people chopped down all the trees. All the trees. By the time Thoreau walked our shores in the mid 1800s there wasn’t a tree in the landscape, noted in his book, Cape Cod.
With the trees went the soil, leaving sand and in some areas, clay, behind.
Today our woodlands are full of oak and pitch pine. Pitch pine was planted in the 1800s to try and stop the eroding of the soil. Pitch pine is fast growing and tough. If you’ve been to Cape Cod you have seen pitch pine. It is now ubiquitous here.
Almost all our woodlands are pretty monotonous. Pitch pine and oak….and in many areas the taller, wilier oak is winning. Pitch pines top out at about 50 feet. Oaks grow much taller. Every year the pines drop cones full of seeds and from those sprout little trees like this one. Some will prosper and grow. Many will not. Much of what is now woodland on the Cape was once used as farmland. Many trees were cut again to clear land and it is not unusual to find trees with two trunk in these areas. Both trunks grew from sprouts from the stump, left to rot.American holly trees can be found in many of our woodlands. Some areas were actually cultivated for holly and are known as holly reservations, showcasing many varieties, such as Ashumet in Hatchville and Ryder Conservation area in Sandwich. Other woodlands have many accidentals, planted by birds which ate the seeds and then pooped them out.Some areas, especially in Mashpee, still have some very old, very tall white pines. In recent years I’ve been noticing white pines sneaking back into other areas as well, such as this area in Hyannis around Hathaway’s Pond. White pines grow fast and get very tall, out pacing the pitch pines so it will be interesting to see how this develops, if I live that long.I ‘ll be posting more about local trees and flowers as spring unfolds so stay tuned!
I’m trying to get back into posting regularly here so thanks for stopping by and reading. This past winter wasn’t so terrible, especially compared to last winter but it did throw us an icy little curve ball this week here on the Cape.
Yep, it snowed. And hailed. And rained. And snowed some more, leaving a nice, crusty, icy covering on everything. All my poor daffodils suffered, lying their little yellow heads right down on the ground.
Outside my kitchen window the grackles ruled. At least 50 flew in to take advantage of free seed and what a noisy, bickering bunch they were. Grackles are sort of like that large group of teenagers that rumbles through the neighborhood. They’re rude, they’re loud and yet, they have a certain shine to them that makes me smile in spite of myself.
The morning between storms was cold but still. The beach was a hundred shades of gray and the gulls were, too.
Soon, the wind would pick up and more snow would blow in but in the meantime the mergansers were flirting it up.
And then, it all melted and the sun returned. I saw my first mayflower in bloom.
And a swan upon her nest.
And like this lady mallard I knew that spring was really there in the wings, just waiting to return to the main stage.
came all the newly fledged orioles, one after another. My feeder is so busy with young Baltimore orioles these days that they are hanging around in the nearby bushes bickering until they can take a turn. There are half a dozen adult orioles as well, leading me to believe I have at least 3 nests represented. One group has 3, another 2 and one male oriole brings one lone youngster every day….
These youngsters are not brightly colored like their parents yet, allowing them to be well camouflaged as they flit about from tree to tree, bush to bush. They are foraging for insects as well as enjoying the grape jelly and oranges. Some of them are having a bit of a struggle with balance still and they often go bottoms up! Check out that lemon yellow tail on the underside!
This threesome has grown a lot over the week but the first day they arrived they were very unsure about how to get to the feeder so they just waited for dad to show them how it is done. Dad was not feeding them at this time so they begged from each other…sorry for the blurry photo but it does tell the tale…
Also this week I’ve had some other visitors to the oriole feeder.
Check out that dull brown coloration when the wings are folded. Great camouflage! But look what happens when the butterfly opens its wings….
It is hard to see the full coloration on the inside in this photo but I got good looks, if not good photos, of this little guy and I believe it to be what is called a question mark butterfly. That really is its name, by the way, and they are not uncommon here at this time of year.
I’ve had other butterflies visit the feeder as well but none as cooperative as this one when it came to posing for the camera.
I also have catbirds visiting this feeder but so far I have only succeeded in capturing a gray blur….
This has been a tough winter for many of our feathered friends. Copious amounts of snow have made it difficult to find natural food and many birds that don’t usually visit feeders have been coming around, hoping for some nutritious handouts to tide them over.
For the first time in my yard I have had a hermit thrush. Hermit thrushes do over winter here on the Cape in small numbers but in 30 years I have never had one in the yard until now.
Another bird that we have all summer but not usually at a feeder in the winter is the gray catbird and yet one showed up about two weeks ago and visits the suet feeder daily.
This isn’t a great shot but check out that rusty red under the tail feathers!
Another unusual visitor has been this northern mockingbird. Again, a bird that we know is around even in the winter but which usually stays far away from the feeders.
And then there is the visitor to the feeders none of the other birds like to think about but hey, it’s been a tough winter and even the Cooper’s hawks are hungry…
Many people have been spotting unusual birds in their yards this winter. What have you been seeing?
