Bluebird houses

On Monday, January 30, our neighbor and bird expert Jim came over and set up three new bluebird houses at Habitat Home.  The houses are located in the savanna area along the northern path. Savanna areas are excellent habitat for other birds as well such as Blue Jays, Hawks, and Orioles to name a few.  These houses will have to be monitored to remove any house sparrow nests.  House sparrows will attack and kill both young and adult bluebirds and destroy their eggs. Another pest of the bluebirds are raccoons, snakes and opossums.  The white tubing should  prevent any of them from climbing the pole and getting into the boxes.  Yet another pest of bluebirds living in boxes is the blowfly.  Their larva will suck the blood of nestlings at night.  But a natural control of blowflies are parasitic wasps which will over winter in the boxes.  So it is a good idea to leave old nesting material in the boxes until just before the new breeding season begins.  Also bluebirds often roost in nest boxes in winter and the nesting material will add insulation.
We have not seen any bluebirds on these warm winter days but soon we will. Hopefully there will be nesting pairs in each of the boxes our expert bird neighbor installed here. Thanks Jim!

Blackout

Today (January 18 only), Habitat Home's header is blacked out in sympathy with the internet protests of the proposed SOPA/PIPA legislation in Congress. While not normally political in nature, Habitat Home is engaged in information exchange. We worry that any legislation which allows the creation of a federal framework for regulation and control (the real intent of this legislation, stated copyright/piracy feel-good intentions notwithstanding) with vague directives and likely no real oversight, is too dangerous for the future of unfettered information exchange in particular and digital innovation in general. Is it too paranoid to say that the futures of Habitat Home and its parent Blogger are at stake? It's less paranoid, and not unreasonable, to imagine that this legislation is designed to allow the federal government to create new winners and losers, seemingly its big business these days.

Learn about what's going on, and write your Congressional representatives.

Tractors

If you live in the country you need a tractor.  Here at Habitat Home it mows the savanna area every year, maintains the driveway, transports rocks, and enables us to be neighborly country folks.  Tractors are just the thing for towing city folk who end up in the ditch on their drive out to see beauty in a snowy countryside.

Beaver

I recently purchased this sign and thought it would be a cute addition to Habitat Home. While walking the trails this morning I spotted evidence of a beaver. I thought this little chopped down tree was interesting and a good example of what a beaver does.

But then as I walked further along the path, I came to this ....

The beaver or beavers are doing some damage here. Beavers are herbivores and will use just about any tree along our river corridor; willow, river birch, maple, cottonwood, sweet gum, black cherry, dogwood, and oak. The beaver is probably living in a burrow dug into the riverbank which is about 20 feet away. Beavers, the largest rodent in Illinois, were once almost extinct in Illinois. They were reintroduced in the 1930s and are now thriving. We could apply for a trapping permit as trapping is allowed from November through March. But we won't as it looks like we have lost the trees already. Maybe tonight we can watch him finishing the job!

Prairie Wedding Day Photos

October 29th was a BIG day for us at Habitat Home. It was wedding day! The ceremony was actually at our small rural church about 3 miles away, but it was a desire of the bride, our daughter, to have wedding photos taken in the prairie. Thankfully, it was a beautiful day and even more thanks to our wonderful farmer friend for providing tours about the property on his tractor-driven hayrack.

Sun Art

Something new for the little garden shed.

Woodchuck

We noticed this large Illinois herbivorous rodent, the woodchuck (Marmota monax) or groundhog, out sunning on our patio under the deck this afternoon. By the time I fetched the camera, he was hiding out under the stack of firewood behind the house, and attempts to get a closeup view resulted in a rather (for a woodchuck) quick escape (photo above). But we had a calming conversation with him for a while in the garden before he ambled off into the woods.

Habitat Home is a great place for woodchucks, although we rarely see them. They like forest edges but can be found in more open fields, stream banks, railroad embankments, and even residential areas. This little guy will probably start putting on some weight now in preparation for his true hibernation over winter. He will curl up in a burrow, body temperature dropping to 39°F and heart rate to 10 per minute; woodchucks rouse once in a while, and might even emerge briefly on warm winter days, but only rarely on February 2.