A number of years ago I noticed little wooden bird houses popping up in farmer’s fields in upstate New York. This was a part of a bluebird recovery effort. I was curious about this because I had never seen a bluebird and like to hear positive stories of human/animal interactions.

Last year when I visited the Berkshires, the neighbors next to my in-laws had several bluebird houses up in their backyard. They had several bluebird families living in them and I finally saw my first bluebird. If you have never seen one, you will be blown away at the beautiful shade of dark blue on their back feathers.

This year, my  in-law’s neighbor gave them a nest box and now they too have bluebirds in their yard. In fact, I saw more bluebirds than any other bird while I was there this past weekend. I tried to photograph them, but didn’t get very close. My best attempt is below, but here’s a site with a lot of information and photos.

If you live in New York State, you might be interested in the School Seedling Program offered by the Department of Environmental Conservation. All schools and school-sponsored organizations are eligible to receive 50 tree seedlings (for which you will need 1,800 square feet of space). If you have less space, you can get their Urban Wildlife Packet, which contains 30 seedlings for shrubs that are favorites of songbirds. You only need 900 square feet of space for the shrubs.

The seedlings must be used as part of an educational program and not just landscaping for the school. The deadline is March 31st. You can get the application and more information here.

Helping the environment for free? How could this get better?

When I went out to let the chickens out this  morning, even the worms felt that spring was in the air. In case you’ve never seen it, here is some worm lovin’. Don’t you just love their lack of commitment as they keep their heads (?) in their respective holes?

In case you haven’t noticed, I am very interested in native plants as an (easy) way to help out wildlife. There’s a really nice article in Oregon Live by Ruth Mullen about an exhibit at the Oregon Zoo. They have a “before” section which looks like the typical suburban lawn right next to an “after” section. The “after” section has native plants, a birdbath, a bugbath (itty bitty water source in a concave rock) and less lawn. The native section is teeming with wildlife compared to the sterile suburban lawn. Take a peek at the whole article here.

Here are some great links to give you tips on creating backyard habitats and landscaping to attract birds, butterflies, frogs (less mosquitoes!) and other animals.

Sign up for the 24th annual international coastal clean up here.

The temperature outside is unbearable, and I can’t remember the last time we had a decent rain. Besides watering your plants (sparingly!) put some water out for the thirsty birds. You can put together a simple birdbath for not a lot of money. Don’t worry about having mosquitoes breed in your birdbath. Mosquitoes need water that hangs around for at least 10 days. You will dump out the old water and add fresh water more often, so you won’t have that problem.

I had been looking around for a nice birdbath for my small Brooklyn garden without much luck. They were too expensive, too ornate or too big. Mostly it was the cost that deterred me. I was in a garden shop this Spring with Neil when we put together the idea for our birdbath. We have a large terra cotta flower pot that we turned upside down. On top of that we put a glazed dish. The dish is actually what you put under a flower pot to catch the water that flows out of the bottom. Nice garden supply centers can carry these in pretty large sizes for a decent price. I think this one was $20 or less. The terra cotta pot is fairly big, so the dish is stable on top of it. I like that it isn’t too high or large and fits into the garden in a very low-key, organic way. We have robins and catbirds coming into the yard to drink and bathe, which is a nice change from the sparrows that usually hang out with us.

Sideoats Grama Prairie Grass

By CALLIE WHITE

THE DAILY WORLD

OLYMPIA, Wash. — When the Nature Conservancy and The Evergreen State College needed a lot of labor for not a lot of money in order to help preserve a pristine piece of wetland, they ended up turning to Stafford Creek Prison, of all places.

It was quite a meeting, said Nalini Nadkarni, a professor at Evergreen.

“One of the things I see as a stereotype is that prisons are black holes for people, money, resources and effort,” Nadkarni said. Of course, as a scientist, she was used to being pegged with a stereotype herself, as the fuzzy-headed Ivory Tower academic pursuing arcane knowledge of little practical value.

Nadkarni’s pilot project has inmates cultivating endangered prairie grasses and so far, it’s been a success.

In a large greenhouse behind the prison’s campus, offenders plant individual seeds of showy fleabane in hundreds of yellow plastic tubes. Other species of grasses are already starting to grow in starter containers in the back of the greenhouse. Near where the prisoners work, a glassed-in beehive thrums with activity.

Volunteers collected the seeds by hand out in the field. Now, inmates are dusting them over lightly with soil.

“They’re so small,” inmate Toby Erhart said of the seeds, which he’s trying to put five to 10 of in each tube. Although the work is “tedious, at best,” he added that it’s a privilege to be outdoors.

Edward Turner, an inmate who says he was an organic farmer from Eastern Washington, said he was “from the old school hippies! In the days before it was popular.”

It was nothing new to Turner to plant seeds that would restore soils, but it was clear that it was a task he particularly enjoyed.

“This is real good for me,” Turner said. “We’re helping in some small way to make the planet a better place. It’s good to bring nature back.”

Once the grasses have sprouted and grown, they’ll be taken to Fort Lewis, where they’ll be planted in meadows that are used as artillery ranges.

“Artillery fields are the most pristine areas because nothing goes there,” said Rod Gilbert, a biologist at Ft. Lewis with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. The only creatures that dare to enter are birds, insects and small animals such as frogs and Mazama pocket gophers, he said.

Once the grass patches are established, they can be used for seed collection, so another round of propagation can begin.

Although it is hard to think of grasses as endangered species, it’s a fact, Gilbert said.

“Native Americans used to burn off the meadows with fire once a year,” he said. That both helped the grasses propagate and repressed tree seedlings. But the practice stopped when settlers came to the Oregon Territory and took the land as their own, causing forest to encroach on the grasslands, he said.

This will be the first large-scale restoration project launched from a prison on the West Coast, Gilbert said.

“We’re totally psyched about it,” he added.

This is not the first partnership between the Corrections Department and the Nature Conservancy. Cedar Creek Corrections Center ran a program breeding endangered frogs. One of the offenders who worked on the project became part of the scientific team that published articles in scientific journals about their discoveries, Nadkarni said.

It’s exciting to see the critical thinking and observational skills of scientists develop in inmates, she added.

“For scientists like me, I think it’s important to talk to people beyond academia,” Nadkarni said. “We need to transmit our way of understanding the world.”

The project, which is funded by federal dollars, just couldn’t have been feasible outside of the prison, said Jeff Muse, Evergreen’s sustainable prisons project manager. It takes too much labor, which is extremely expensive on the outside. Offenders make about 45 cents an hour.

More than their wages, the prisoners not only learn the skills of cultivating plants, they learn they can use that skill outside of landscaping and gardening, Muse said.

“It’s green-collar education,” he said.

But Muse, like Nadkarni, sees the program in a much broader light. Making an institution compensate in some way for its use of environmental resources makes a much larger impact than just hoping everyone tries to cut down on creating trash and buys fluorescent lights. He likened institutions such as hospitals, prisons and schools to cargo ships, which don’t turn on a dime, but do gather steam as they head in a new direction.

Julie Vanneste, the Department of Correction’s sustainability coordinator, said Washington is a model state when it comes to sustainability, and Stafford Creek is its model prison for sustainability.

Muse pointed out that sustainability is often cast as a concern of yuppies. He shares Nadkarni’s misson to spread the scientific word to everyone. Global climate change and the rapid loss of species to overdevelopment will ultimately affect everyone, he said. As a scientist, however, he said he realizes the programs may sound great, but he’s hoping to back them up with studies to find out how effective they are.

“None of this will matter unless we figure out how it works or why it works,” Muse said.

Stafford Creek’s sustainability programs don’t start and end with field grasses. The prison composts its food waste and grows its own fruits and vegetables. It has a comprehensive recycling program. And it repurposes old bikes to give to charity.

Reusing and fixing old things isn’t just a skill for the prison, it’s a skill that can start a business. Muse brought Eli Reich, a former Seattle bike messenger who founded Alchemy Goods when he started selling bags made out of old inner tubes, to talk to the inmates about his business. Muse said offenders could do the same once they got out of prison.

“We want them to take what is useless and make it useful,” Muse said.

The same could be said, to a degree, about the inmates. Dan Pacholke, former Stafford Creek superintendent and current facilities administrator for Western Washington, said 97 percent of the state’s 16,000 offenders are headed for release someday, and they need to come out better than they went in. And doing science, which gets inmates to use critical thinking skills and creates a sense of social engagement, is one way to do that.

“I’d like to see science projects in every prison in the state,” Pacholke said.

Increasing urban sprawl is creating more homes for people by taking away habitats for wildlife, forcing nature’s creatures to become vagabonds on the move or leaving them homeless on the streets.

In fact, according to The Biodiversity Project, a leading environmental advocacy group dedicated to conservation initiatives, one million acres of open space, including parks, farms and natural areas are lost to sprawl each year.

However, others are fighting to reverse this damage from development by providing food, water and shelter for evicted animals, transforming their own backyards into wildlife sanctuaries.

Detroit Lakes resident, Liz Ballard, lives in town not far from Highway 10. Entering her yard from the paved sidewalk one stets through an arch of native vines into a haven of ferns and wildflowers with birds chirping, bees buzzing and chipmunks running across the visitors’ feet.

Though Ballard said that she started her gardens when she moved into town for her own benefit as well — to use as an escape from the city.

“I’ve always been a country girl,” Ballard said. “I missed seeing the animals.”

National Wildlife Federation Ambassador for the Wildlife Habitat Program and sustainable garden landscaper, Mat Paulson, said that the trend of natural gardening is increasing in northern Minnesota as homeowners learn more about the many benefits.

Sustainable gardening attracts wildlife and also helps the environment reducing dependency on pesticides, improving air and soil quality and cutting down energy use on regular garden maintenance. Con

Paulson also said that natural gardening is beneficial for your pocketbook. As native plants and shrubs are already tolerant of Minnesota weather conditions, less care and cash needs to be placed towards watering and expensive fertilizers.

According to the National Wildlife Federation, attracting wildlife is a simple accomplishment:

• Food — This may include providing bushes with berries, flowers with nectar and pollen or supplemental bird, squirrel, and butterfly feeders.

• Water — There needs to be presence of standing water that wildlife can access for drinking and bathing. This can include seasonal pools, birdbaths, rain gardens or ponds.

• Cover — Wildlife need shelter from bad weather conditions and predators such as wooded areas, bramble patches, rock piles and roosting boxes.

• Places to raise young — Wildlife also requires special areas to bear young. Some examples include mature trees, dead trees, dense shrubs and nesting boxes.

Providing these habitat conditions will make your home a portal to the great outdoors. To learn more about sustainable gardening to attract wildlife, obtaining your backyard wildlife habitat certification and listen to Mat Paulson speak, attend the “Creating a Wild Backyard” workshop at Tamarac National Wildlife Refuge at 2 p.m. on July 12 at the visitors center.

Call 718-287-3400 x 102 for reservations. $30 per person (cash only).

Selected summer Thursdays,  6:30 p.m.

If you miss the one tonight, there will be others on:

July 2, 9, 30,
August 6, 13, 20, 27