The Hidden Life..., Part 6

(This is part of The Hidden Life of the Hideous Tree, a nine-part series about discovering nature in my front yard. View previous installments here. The entire project is also available with additional images as an e-book.)

Those who freak out about the rows and rows of sap wells forget that people are like sapsuckers. We drill into maple trees just so we have something to pour over pancakes. Maple trees survive us; most trees survive sapsuckers.

Sapsuckers are not murderers. They are farmers. And their harvest feeds the neighborhood.

The Hidden Life..., Part 5

(This is part of The Hidden Life of the Hideous Tree, a nine-part series about discovering nature in my front yard. View previous installments here. The entire project is also available with additional images as an e-book.)

Judging from the results of a Google search, most of the people who discover they’re living with a sapsucker do the same thing: Try to find ways to get rid of it. It’s an understandable reaction. As I was now seeing firsthand, the birds do extensive damage.

The Hidden Life..., Part 4

(This is part of The Hidden Life of the Hideous Tree, a nine-part series about discovering nature in my front yard. View previous installments here. The entire project is also available with additional images as an e-book.)

I didn’t see the woodpecker that day — I couldn’t see anything through the mess of branches — but I saw the evidence it left behind. From its handiwork, I could even identify it. It was a medium-sized woodpecker known as a red-breasted sapsucker.

The Hidden Life..., Part 3

(This is part of The Hidden Life of the Hideous Tree, a nine-part series about discovering nature in my front yard. View previous installments here. The entire project is also available with additional images as an e-book.)

I first noticed the tapping when I was concentrating on a hummingbird flitting around our flowering currants. They are plants that I brought to the property. They have a history in my family.

The Hidden Life..., Part 2

(This is part of The Hidden Life of the Hideous Tree, a nine-part series about discovering nature in my front yard. View previous installments here. The entire project is also available with additional images as an e-book.)

I’m a nature photographer. In a normal year, exotic travel is a critical part of the job, or so I tell myself. I’ve crawled inside the magma chamber of an extinct Icelandic volcano. I’ve sat on a beach in New Zealand at sunset as some of the world’s rarest penguins marched by. I’ve stood in the footsteps of the Impressionists to capture a modern take on the white cliffs that plunge into the English Channel.

The Hidden Life of the Hideous Tree

(This is the first installment of The Hidden Life of the Hideous Tree, a nine-part series about discovering nature in my front yard. Subsequent parts are available on the blog here, and the entire project with additional images is available as an e-book.)

It’s a tree only a bird could love. It wasn’t always this way.

The man who originally owned my house must have spent hundreds — if not thousands — of hours carefully sculpting the Wych elm he imported from Europe. He allowed a single column to grow to a height of about 10 feet, pruning any stray growth below the crown. Branches fanned out from the top, but he forced those to point back down to the ground.

The hummingbird calendar

I’ve been thinking about how over the past year it seems we’ve gone back in time. Like really far back.

I spent most of my time within just a few miles of my home. And there are many days I don’t leave at all. But what really struck me was how I now notice the passing of time.