Hummingbird and Butterfly Gardening: birds and flys, 1 by jackieshar

jackieshar wrote:
I live (retired from Dallas/FT Worth) in an isolated rural area on a 30 acre site , never previously developed with utilities or roads. A little valley with wildflower meadows and native texas/okla tall grass and cactus lands surrounded by native oak , elm, prickly ash,sumac, and red cedar. We carved out the middle for our home and landscaped the immediate surroundings and left the rest natural except for winding golf cart trails throughout the property. We dug 4 small ponds where I have water and bog plants that survive with little assistance. Dug 2 water wells because of the severe drought conditions here. Currently we are pumping water from our wells into the ponds and then pump out of the ponds into a sprinkler system, set up where we can water the cultivated areas, the rest have to survive as best they can under these conditions. I owned this property for 20 years , bought when Okla land was dirt cheap before the Casino came in and started developing this area...We had an 1100 sq ft modular home here where we weekended for years...now we use it as a guest house when the kids come up.........2 years ago this august we built our permanent home here.
It is not total isolation. 10 minutes to Gainesville or Marietta. 30 minutes to Ardmore, 45 to Denton or Sherman, and of course 80 miles to DFW where most of our adult children and grandchildren live. .anyway , sorry to bore you with the history........

I have birdfeeders all around the house they attract cardinal, titmouse, chicaddee,goldfinch, all kinds of woodpeckers, and seasonal friends during winter...housing is up for the purple martin....feeders up for the hummingbirds from april thru november..we see numerous variety of hawks and owl, and of course the country buzzards...we encourage the wildlife with squirrels and bunnys everywhere...See an occasional bobcat , they keep their distance....all food scraps are thrown out the door in the evenings and gone by morning.....I have 4 fox that come up to my porch every evening just after it is toooo darn dark to photograph them. Have several blue bird houses around the property , they nest 4 times a year and we see lots of them. Egrets, racoon,snakes, bull frog, snapping turtle, and the blue heron feed off the small fish, frogs, and crawfish in the ponds. Roadrunners with their babies in the springtime running the paths.

Neither the bluebird or the painted bunting eat from my oiled sunflower feeders, I understand they eat mostly ground insects....of which we have an abundance...the drought has been so bad the last 2 years that there is little water between here and the Red River 3 miles away. The buntings have always been here, we saw them in the brush only rarely, but this year they are are coming closer to the house because of the water. We used to have quail and a few wild turkey, don't see many of them anymore.
This year grasshoppers are eating away at my gardens. I don't use insecticides in order to conserve the beneficials and not to harm the birds and butterflys. I won't use manmade fertilizers. I don't want the chemical runoffs in my soil and ponds...the last few days I have been digging water lily to take to another pond that has more water..this smaller shallow one doesn't get supplied by the wells and is drying up. I dont want to lose some of my fancy waterlily I have collected over the years so I have been moving them to larger ponds and offering some for trade with DG members.......lots of work involved digging them from the muck and moving them.......wellll I guess I should have started this novel by saying "once upon a time'...sorry to drag on.....soooooooo many pictures I could send

The End

Jackie ;>)..........pictured the guesthouse