Fall has come upon us in full force. We started the previous week with Monday's high just over 80 F. And the rest of week we barely got over 60 F with overnight lows in the 40s.
It rained almost every day. And until this morning, skies have been gray.
Next week's forecast is looking to continue the trend.
Fall things are happening. The neighbors' Maples are dropping leaves and yellow is creeping in where green once was. Squirrels carrying acorns and walnuts hop across the lawn, digging holes to bury their nuts for the winter.
So yesterday, I started cutting back some of the wildflowers. This is really an act of practicality. Ideally, I'd probably leave them all up until spring. This would allow them to seed themselves better. And leaving them up would give insects a place to overwinter. But real life is often far from ideal.
Cutting everything, given the number of flowers and flowerbeds, takes time. A few years ago, I waited until Spring, and it took 3 full days in the yard to get everything cut back and cleaned up. And of course the number of flowers has increased. So weighting a full time job, 2 kids and fall's limited sunlight, I now cut back some of the plants in the fall.
The garden path which I put in last Spring is now visible again. It had been totally covered by the surrounding Milkweed this summer. And Creeping Charlie successfully grew into mats across the sandstone path.
I try to leave as much Coneflower as possible. It's an excellent food source for the Chickadees and Goldfinches. I stayed small, sort of balled up, and close to ground. I heard the Goldfinches peeping around me while cut the plants back, each time I stood to stretch my back out; their party would scatter.
The tops of the Coneflower are brown or black at this point. The seeds are fresh for the eating. The dark balls of seeds have been picked over already in some spots, looking more like mohawks. As the flowers dry up for the fall / winter, the American Goldfinches descend them in bunches.
Only once did I rise quickly in surprise, scaring the finches off some distance.
As I was pulling out a mat of Creeping Charlie, a smaller, grayer neighbor skittered across my boot. Looking like two circular lumps of dark gray fur, I knew exactly what it was, but it's unexpected arrival and proximity caused me to step back out of crouched position quickly. The Northern Short Tailed Shrew scurried under an old log in the garden and disappeared.
Not the first time I've encountered a shrew in the yard this year. While weeding out a flower bed a month or so ago, I had a similar experience. Shrews are not rodents, but my experience with small mammals like Eastern Chipmunks in the garden is that they run away from humans. Perhaps on account of their poor eyesight, startled shrews seem to make a run for it right over my feet.
Shrews are a welcome sight in my garden as they like moles are excellent bug eaters and will prey on other critters such as mice and voles. The shrew has a unique tool for hunting; unlike other mammals, the shrew is venomous, and despite being small it's able to paralyze or kill it's prey. I take the shrews as a sign that the yard is healthy. If they are here then there is enough prey for them to make a living which means the yard is biodiverse.
American Goldfinch eating seed tops in our garden.
Old picture of a shrew eating safflower seed at our townhouse circa 10-ish years ago
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