Discovering the world around me.
Entomologists catalog over a thousand species of ants that live in North America, many of which live in Iowa on Owl Acres. Each species has its own fascinating way of doing life. Let’s take another look at the ants that have been crawling all over the peonies. They are called winter ants or false honeypot […]
Continue reading Living Storage Tanks: Winter Ants
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 […]
Continue reading Protection Racket: Peonies
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 […]
Continue reading Warblers: American Redstart
At the time that Owl Acres was settled, a source of power beyond the physical manual strength of human beings, was needed to achieve the goal of hauling households across the prairie and then breaking the sod to create farms. The industrial revolution in the 1800s brought a new mindset to people who had hard […]
Continue reading Power on the Prairie Part 1: Oxen
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. […]
Continue reading By Any Other Name: Chokecherry
When I was a kid, we had a big lilac bush in the corner of the yard. You could crawl into that bush and hide. You could be just about guaranteed to get ticks in your hair if you did, though. Every spring around Mother’s Day, that bush would burst into purple booms that smelled […]
Continue reading The fragrance of Mother’s Day: Lilacs
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 […]
Continue reading Virginia Waterleaf
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 […]
Continue reading Lessons Learned: Song Sparrow
I like my coffee immediately upon consciousness in the morning. That requires a fast coffee maker, which we have. It maintains a reservoir of hot water at all times and is ready with no notice to produce coffee. Recently, after eleven years of exemplary service, that coffee maker sprung a leak. Water began to pool […]
Continue reading Questionable Identity: Thief or Pharoah Ants
Clancy, our golden retriever, loves to retrieve. He also loves to chew on beef bones. The other day he carried one of his bones with him when he went on a walk. Somewhere along the walk something else–probably a squirrel–grabbed his attention, and he dropped his bone. A few days later on the same walking […]
Continue reading Woodchuck, Whistle Pig, Ground Hog