Geek out with me about critters and plants on a mountaintop in Virginia. I’ll share what I’m learning as I try to bring native plants back on 200 acres of old farmland and tell stories from my encounters on the mountain.

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In this issue

• Signs of life: Inside the nest boxes

• Field notes: Butterflies & bugs

• Native plant takeover!

• A reader’s tick tips

• Recommended reading

• The Official Mountain Poodle

Signs of life

What have we here?

Last month, if you’ll recall, I was pretty sure that bluebirds were nesting in at least 3 of the 4 nest boxes we’d installed on the mountain. But how to be certain? Reader Bruce Jones wrote and told me it would be okay to open the side of the box and look at the nest. He does this routinely with his many, many boxes, where bluebirds, chickadees, and purple martins have been nesting. Last I heard, Bruce had counted 89 eggs and 113 young. Makes my 4 nest boxes seem rather meager. But anything is a start! He assured me I could peek into the nests, that my investigation wouldn't harm anyone, and the birds wouldn’t smell anything amiss.

I never really thought about it, but birds don’t have a sense of smell. Well, of course they don’t! Have you ever experienced the overwhelming smell of guano? They haven’t! Lucky birds.

I climbed my step ladder, carefully unscrewed the side wall of the nest box, and here’s what I found:

This is a bluebird nest. It appears to be made primarily of dried grasses:

And here are the bluebird eggs!

Two of the boxes held bluebird nests. But when I began to open my ladder at the third box, something circled my head menacingly. It wasn’t a bluebird. It also wasn’t a chickadee. It was a small bird with a forked tail—that told me it must be a species of swallow. I packed up my ladder and headed for the fourth nest box. This time, I met with no alarmed greeting. Here’s what I found in the last box:

Feathers, dried grass, and mosses—a very different composition from the bluebird’s structure.

Note the color of the eggs. This is also a larger clutch of eggs; there were 6:

As I walked off, the two bird parents showed up. I recognized that it was the same species that had warned me away from the third box. Its belly was white, and it had a dark mask and a dark ring around its neck, a dark cap, and a dark back. The cap, seen from a distance, was what had led me to guess earlier that it might be a chickadee. But the back and head weren’t black; they were an iridescent blue-green. In flight, the light glints off of the bird’s feathers and highlights its color. And then there was the forked tail. They were tree swallows. Now the pair was guarding the fourth nest box, one of them at the entrance, and the other keeping watch from the roof. Tree swallows are also a good bird to have around, even though they might compete with bluebirds for nest space. They eat a lot of insects, but this means, like so many other birds, they’re vulnerable to pesticides.

Tree swallows may have commandeered two nest boxed intended for bluebirds, but at least one pair of bluebirds took it in stride—instead, they made a nest inside an empty cavity reserved for a recessed light outside my house.

Native plant takeover!

When there aren’t enough native plants, we worry about them. But when one native plant seems to take over, we call it a “weed.” Those plants are not weeds, they just have an image problem. Like this plant here, the daisy fleabane (Erigeron annuus), which can grow up to 5 feet tall and whose flower resembles a tiny daisy. Because it’s good at growing and spreading in disturbed areas, it can keep invasive plants from taking over in those places—and I’m all for that. Daisy fleabane is native to North America, which means native insects find it useful—the lynx flower moth caterpillar eats its leaves. I bet there are more than a few of those hanging out in this field.

Last year, I wondered why I didn’t see as much milkweed as in previous years. I think it was because many of the meadows had become too shrubby. But we bush-hogged several of the fields this past winter, with the goal of encouraging more non-shrubby plants to grow. Well, I needn’t have been concerned about the milkweed: it’s back, baby. There are major milkweed patches all over the meadow. I hope I’ll be able to report seeing more monarchs this year, too. Monarchs have declined 90 percent in the past 20 to 30 years, because of pesticides and development, and milkweed is the only plant their caterpillars can eat, so it’s pretty important to me to keep it thriving here.

Field notes

The birds & the bees? Don’t you mean the bugs & the butterflies?

Speaking of milkweed, there are a few other insects that can eat it without getting sick besides the monarch caterpillar, even though every part of the plant is toxic. One of these is the red milkweed beetle, a type of longhorn beetle (not to be confused with the milkweed bug, which is also red, but has a flat back). Most of these bugs and beetles are native, have been eating milkweed for years and won’t do appreciable harm to the plant. In other words, no need for pesticides. And spraying milkweed would also kill the monarchs. With the profusion of milkweed in the fields, there is a lot of this going on:

This time of year, I’m careful where I step, and not only because there are snakes in the meadow. Moving slowly around the meadow is the most rewarding way to explore it. Then I’m more likely to notice two butterflies the size of my fingernail mating on a blade of grass:

These are Eastern tailed blues. The difference in color is a trick of the light. From the top, their wings are medium blue with a black edge. But the underside of the wings can look pale blue or light tan, depending on where you’re standing and how the light falls.

Tick tips from a reader in Lyme country

After reading my thoughts on the white-footed mouse in the June issue, Claire W. in New Jersey wrote to me about a method she’d heard of that may help keep the tick population down. Tick Tubes! I didn’t know about these, but now I’d like to give them a try. In places where the mice are numerous, tick tubes are designed to kill black-legged ticks before they have a chance to bite a mouse and become infected with the Lyme parasite. The tubes consist of cotton stuffed into a cardboard (biodegradable) tube. The cotton is treated with permethrin. The mouse collects the treated cotton and takes it back to its den to use for nesting material. The permethrin gets rubbed all over the mouse’s fur, and then the pesticide kills the ticks when they try to bite.

Has anyone tried tick tubes? I imagine there are a lot of variables that will impact their success rate. I also can’t help wondering what happens to the raptors and other wildlife that eat the mice whose coats are covered with permethrin. A question for another day, and a reminder that it’s often hard to find a solution to a problem like this that won’t just lead to other problems.

What’s happening in your neck of the woods?

Tell me where you are and what you see growing or crawling or fluttering this month. Send me a photo, if you like.

What have you read or listened to lately? Write to me with your favorite nature-oriented books or podcasts and I might include them in my recommendations.

Recommended Reading

For inspiration

The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg follows the author’s work and observations as he cares for his farm in upstate New York, and reflects on his memories of rural Iowa, where he grew up, and his journeys out West. Klinkenborg, if you haven’t read him before, is a beautiful writer. The book was originally published in 2002, but I think it still holds up. (If you do any writing, professionally or not, I also recommend Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing.) The Rural Life is a compelling book about one man’s relationship with the land and the seasons. The LA Times compares Klinkenborg’s writing with E.B. White, and the New York Times Book Review says, “This "luminous, brilliant" meditation on life in the countryside will encourage you to see the natural world -- and our place in it -- anew.”

For fun and information

Guess who was interviewed for this piece about conservation groups and landowners and different approaches to ecological restoration? (Oh, yeah, there’s a photo of me standing in a meadow...) This was a two-part series; the first part focuses on what can be done to reverse the decline of grassland birds. The stories were written by Bob Hurley, and the photos are by Ireland Hayes.

 Cleo, Official Mountain Poodle

Cleo is looking rather concerned here, probably because she’s overdue for a haircut, and she knows what that means. Regular haircuts are imperative for mountain poodles, because otherwise they gather profuse plant materials and “store” them in their coats. Usually when someone says they have a “Velcro dog,” it means their dog always wants to stay by their side. When I say I have a Velcro dog, that is not what I mean.

In the next issue…

Keep an eye out for my August newsletter when I’ll have book news that I’m excited to share!

Bad Naturalist: One Woman’s Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop

Coming January 7, 2025 from Timber Press/Hachette Book Group

Subscribe here for more mountain discoveries, book news, and the requisite poodle photos…

Thanks for joining me on the mountain!

Until next month—

Paula W.