Backyard and Beyond

There may still be openings in my Green-Wood Bugging Out Walk on Sunday. This is aimed for 5-12 year olds and their parents. Molly is leading a Meet Your Green Neighbors walk on the same day, but earlier, and aimed at adults.

Above is the first Bald-faced Hornet I’ve seen this year. She was scraping wood fiber off… one of those bee/wasp hotels of all things.

As with bird feeders and hummingbird feeders, I’ve grown less enamored of such bandaids as bee hotels on the ruins of biodiversity. Once again, it all sounds great: something anybody can do help the bees! Maybe, but you’re also be setting up a trap, calling in the parasites to a central location. Who’s doing the yearly cleaning? What about the majority of North American bees, who are ground nesters? Meanwhile, when people ask me about bird feeders in the city, I say the house sparrows and starlings are fine on their own. Such artificial feeding tends to encourage invasiveness. Elsewhere, bird seed in the dead of a snowy winter is probably ok, but really, what we need are more plants that aren’t mowed or deadheaded in the fall. Those are the seeds indigenous birds should be eating. Sugar water for hummingbirds has none of the nutrients the birds get in plant nectar, nor the bacteria that contribute to their biome. It’s literally junk food. But they fight to slurp it up! Sure, just like humans line up to stupefy themselves on corporate junk food.

(Why, yes, I am less pessimistic in front of an audience of 5-12s…)