Now that Thanksgiving is over, Christmas decorations will be everywhere. Actually, they’ve already been all over the place for a few weeks and some of them will probably be around until the end of January.
All the nighttime lights and daytime inflatable Santa Clauses make this a nice time of year. But it’ll be several months before we once again see attractive outdoor landscapes, blooming flowers, or fresh vegetable gardens. But all the 2026 nursery catalogs coming in the mail will make you dream about what spring may bring.
Every year as I look at the different catalogs, I wonder how there can be so many different tomatoes. One catalog that just arrived has 12 pages of them. And every year I tell myself I’m going to grow black tomatoes, but I never do.
Recently, David and I went down to the central Bucks County area and the rose bushes there were still covered with flowers. But even the extremely hardy Knock Out roses will lose their blooms when the cold weather arrives, and it’s time.
We need cold winter weather in this part of the country to keep native trees, shrubs, and other plants healthy. Even daffodils, which aren’t natives, need more than 12 weeks of cold to break their dormancy so they’ll bloom.
That day David made the mistake of taking me into an art gallery because it had an exhibition of bird paintings. And now as I’m writing this, I’m constantly glancing over at a beautiful new painting of a hummingbird.
Last week I wrote about a juvenile male rufous hummingbird that Sandy Lockerman, a bander from Harrisburg, caught and banded about a mile from our property. And I listed the six hummingbird species that have been documented in the state. In more than 15 years, Sandy has banded 219 vagrant western hummingbirds in 45 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties.
However, I purposely left out a seventh species because it was so bizarre that it will probably never be seen in the Northeast again. Back in April of 2013 a Bahama woodstar showed up at a feeder near Lancaster, although at first its proper identity wasn’t known. This species had only sporadically been seen in Florida and even there it was extremely rare.
All the birders who first went to see their first hummingbird of the season put it down as a hybrid of some sort. But when it was identified as a Bahama woodstar people came from as far away as California only to be disappointed because it didn’t stay around.
The cold weather should bring some unusual northern bird species to sunflower feeders. Because of a below-normal mast supply farther north, evening grosbeaks and other species are regularly being spotted flying over Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
One day this past week I went over to the hawk watch at Merrill Creek because it will soon be over for the year. We didn’t have many migrant birds that day due to cloudy warm weather, but both seeing and hearing an evening grosbeak made the day worthwhile.
On the way home from New Jersey that day I saw many hornet nests in trees. But they are empty, and next year’s new ones will be in different locations.
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