with the advent of spring came TONS of birds. with the big tree cut down, they were out of a space they'd been using for nesting. i guess they decided to get creative!
in addition to starlings nesting in our bathroom air vent, we noticed a problem with the winnebago one day...

upon closer inspection, what at first seemed like a weird mess in the radiator turned out to be a bird nest.

and it was FULL of baby birds!

i believe there were seven total, little baby wrens. the mom was busy in the backyard catching them bugs to eat, so i checked in on them every now and then to see how quick they were growing.

eventually they fledged, i found one of them in the crawl space step-down and helped him out. with no flight, there was no way he was gonna make it up out of a two foot deep hole.

this was the last time i saw the babies, before i knew it they had all fledged and the nest was empty. there are a bunch of wrens on the bird feeders these days!

so after we cut the tree down, we had a ton of carnage to deal with.

the whole yard was covered in branches and sticks and logs.

we started moving it all around, trying to consolidate all the big logs to one section of yard.

the small sticks and really rotting wood got taken to the dump.
while we were moving logs around, our Boston Terrier puppy started digging in a rotten section of one big log, and dug out a grub.

we ended up pulling a whole bunch of them out!

some of them were wrapped in dirt balls...
i decided to let them finish their transformation in the house...i took a huge storage jar and filled it with rotting wood and some loose soil, and put the grubs in it. i misted it every now and again with water, but mostly it sat on the mantle and i left it alone.
since i'd found the giant click beetle in the fallen logs, i was hoping i might end up with a bunch of those guys, but really i wasn't sure what they were going to be.
one morning i heard some noise coming from the jar and went to check it out.

we had beetles!
i wasn't sure what they were, but their body shape was much more scarab like than other beetles...i had a general idea of what family to start looking in.

after a few days, and consulting with the mom (she knows EVERYTHING!) i found that they were Hermit Beetles, a scarab family beetle that decomposes wood/plant matter, notorious for their grubs starting life in dirt balls! that explains the grubs in their casing!
i tossed em some apple slices to tide them over until the weekend, i wanted to release them back into the yard but i also wanted to take better pictures of them and time is tight during the weekdays.

i released them back into the huge rotting tree stump that remained after the arborists cut down the silver maple. hope to see them again sometime!

i bought a house this year, and was AMAZED at the amount of wildlife in the yard. after living downtown for years, it was a very welcome change.
some of the first signs were the incredibly high worm traffic...

early in the spring, after rains, the yard would be criss crossed with worm trails. exciting for our garden!
i decided to make a lil ol' blog to keep track of all the great bugs and wildlife i get to encounter.

when i moved in, first thing i noticed was the massive dying tree in the yard. it had tons of root rot and the base was destroyed. it was full of holes from woodpeckers and bugs.

it was still late winter/early spring, so there wasn't much bug life, but there were LOTS of birds. red headed woodpeckers, flickers, and wrens were always around. as things started to warm up, the bird traffic in the yard went crazy. we felt bad, but needed to cut down the tree.
it was looming over our garage and the neighbors phone lines, and was already cracking in half.

as the arborists were cutting, slices of logs revealed TONS of wood boring beetle paths.
i got excited, cause i love bess beetles, and i knew we'd probably be seeing em. in fact, when i first looked at the house, there was a dead bess beetle in the garage.

all the logs revealed some sort of rot.
after the tree was down and we were busily cleaning up debris, i found a giant click beetle...

it was a good sign of things to come!