Around the House

Over the last few years In Forest and Field has featured four photo-a-day-for-a-year projects. They’ve been interesting and fun and readers of the blog seem to enjoy them. I’ve thought about doing another such project but needed more of a challenge. So I’ve decided to undertake a fifth project, this one featuring the natural world within 200 feet of our back door.

The environment within that 2.88 acres consists of lawn, flower gardens featuring annual and perennial flowers, shrubs both native and non-native, an apple tree, shade trees and relatively undisturbed woodland that developed after a pasture was abandoned about 100 years ago. That woodland adjoins thousands of acres of forest most of which, although it’s been repeatedly logged, has been forest for thousands of years.

This project will be broken into four segments based on the meteorological seasons, so the first will be for the winter (December, January and February) and will be posted in early March. If there’s an interesting photo to be had for each day of the winter, the rest of the year should be easy.

As an introduction, let me introduce you to life at our little pond: About 20 feet from the back of our house, at the base of a fairly steep bank, there’s a short wall separating lawn from bank. Many years ago I constructed a small pond behind that wall; small it is, about two feet by four feet with a maximum depth of 18 inches. In the water grows a dwarf fragrant water lily, a few fish swim to devour mosquito larvae, red-spotted newts rise for a breath of air, green frogs devour insects and bask on the wall. The pond is directly outside the kitchen window from which we can watch some of the goings-on.

Sometimes I’ve taken camera in hand to photograph critters at the pond –

A camera trap has occasionally been placed to capture videos of visitors to the pond. Those visitors have varied in size and may come night or day. Here are videos from the camera trap –

Some of the visitors are residents, some are just moving through and we or the camera trap have certainly missed seeing others. Water is a magnet for wildlife, it was well worth taking shovel in hand all those years ago.

I'll begin taking a photo a day of the plants, animals and other features of this world to be seen within 200 feet of the back door on December 1 – watch for the results in this space in early March.  

By the way – NO, we're not afraid of the black bears that occasionally visit nor do we feed them which is both foolish and illegal.