A Way to Garden with Margaret Roach - November 16, 2020 - Emma Greig on Feeder Birds
A flock of robins visited my garden recently for a three-day long field day. By the time they decamped, I was down about 40 mature winterberry holly shrubs-worth of fruit, but we had fun together while the frenzy lasted. I love feeding birds with help from the garden plants or with supplemental birdseed too. And I love keeping records of who visits when.
The annual winter-long citizen-science event called Project FeederWatch, from Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is just getting under way this week, as it does each November. So what better time to talk about just that: the best practices, and also what all the data is telling scientists and can tell you, too.
Dr. Emma Greig leads Project FeederWatch at Cornell, a citizen-science effort with more than 30 years of history and more than 20,000 participants in North America who don't just feed birds, but also share their observations. She joined me on the latest radio segment and podcast. [Carolina wren photo by Dan Pancamo, from Wikimedia.]
The latest crop of Urgent Garden Questions ranges from peonies that just didn’t bloom, to ants on peony buds and ants in flower pots,...
If I say: quick, name a holiday flower, you might first answer poinsettia. But the poinsettia wasn’t always synonymous with this time of year,...
Kevin West begins his newest book, called “The Cook’s Garden,” like this: “This is a book about flavor,” he writes. “It is a book...