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Large pink flower stands out from dark green foliage. Peony blossom has dense, crepe-paper-like petals that form a soft ball atop a short stalk.

Protection Racket: Peonies

Once when I was about eleven, my friend and I were walking to Mass at St. Mary’s Catholic Church when we realized we had forgotten our chapel veils. These circles of lace were mandatory as head coverings for girls at Mass. What to do? We spied some flowers growing next to the sidewalk and picked […]

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A songbird perches on top of a post, facing the camera. American redstart has a black head and mainly black body, with bright yellow and white patches on his underside, wings and tail.

Warblers: American Redstart

May is the busiest month for spring migration. Here on Owl Acres, we’ve been keeping track of our visitors using the Cornell Lab’s Merlin ID. Each morning I stand on the deck overlooking the back yard and woods and let Merlin capture the soundscape and name the birds. A second session from the front porch […]

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Dense clusters of tiny white flowers with yellow centers (several hundred individual blossoms) adorn the end of a green leafy twig. Hundreds such twigs on this one shrub, make many thousands of flowers, each a potential fruit. Not all flowers will succeed to produce choke cherries, but for now they all provide an abundance of nectar and pollen for spring insects, especially clouds of tiny bees.

By Any Other Name: Chokecherry

A chokecherry by any other name would taste as bad. And it has many other names, including: bird cherry, chuckleyplum, sloe tree, bitterberry, jamcherry, chokeberry, cabinetcherry, rum chokecherry, whisky chokecherry and black or red chokecherry. It also borrows location names like eastern, western, Virginia, and California chokecherry. And then there’s the scientific name Prunus virginiana. […]

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Tender leaves and a lavender flower cluster of Virginia Waterleaf crowd up against red siding of the shop building on Owl Acres.

Virginia Waterleaf

We were out in the yard, inspecting the blossoms on the apple and cherry trees, when sprays of little lavender flowers caught our attention. A patch of Virginia waterleaf (Hydrophyllum virginianum) was growing next to the shop. The plants were about a foot tall with long, deeply lobed leaves. Clusters of flowers hung at the […]

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Small songbird with brown and tan stripe markings, perches on a twig. Bird’s wings and tail are folded and it is seen in profile, facing to the right. Small black eye and tan, cone-shaped beak. Only the bird is in focus and the background is a blurred green color. The subject and composition of this photo have earned it “Featured” status on Wikimedia, among thousands of images on the site. Example of an unusually high-quality image, we thought it was “just right” for this article.

Lessons Learned: Song Sparrow

Most every morning now that it’s spring, I’ve been taking my Merlin ID app out to a couple places around the yard to see who’s out there. Migration has begun for some birds, and Merlin, created by Cornell Labs, is good at capturing and identifying their songs. One recent new arrival is the song sparrow […]

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