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This weekend we went to a native plant nursery. Now that we have a nice patio in the backyard we are planning to plant some natives along the alley to add a little privacy. So we went to just look and find some options to accomplish that when we're ready to plant. We were on bikes and so not prepared to buy anything substantial. We did end up with a few native ground cover plants and took home a couple seed packets. They had a very cool little free library but instead of books it is for native seeds to share!
I also found a tree that I've been looking for and I want to plant in our yard somewhere. I've always been a big fan of the Yaupon Holly. It is a holly native to our area and is the only plant native to North America that contains caffeine. There is a "weeping" variety of Yaupon that looks a bit like a Weeping Willow but you can dry the leaves and make a caffeinated tea out of it. How cool is that!
The other thing we bought was field guides for identifying birds and butterflies in our area. So we spent quite a while yesterday sitting on the patio birdwatching. Not just watching but also listening. A few weeks ago I noticed a new app available on fdroid called whoBIRD. It uses an open dataset from the BirdNET project and your smartphone mic to identify birds by their calls. The field guide and whoBIRD make a nice combo to be more confident in correctly IDing the birds you see. I believe there are other "fancier" apps that do the same thing but whoBIRD gets bonus points from me for being on fdroid and working offline.
I had seen a woodpecker in the neighbor's huge Pecan tree before but now discovered that it is actually a pair of Red-bellied Woodpeckers that live in a hole in the tree! Another cool discovery is a male and female pair of American Kestrels that have been hanging out in the trees in the back corner of our yard. They showed up this morning eating little snakes they had caught for breakfast!
It is interesting with the whoBIRD app when you catch a new bird call but can't spot it visually. This morning we heard a Merlin which is a small northern hemisphere falcon but never saw it.
The whole family is enjoying the birdwatching quite a bit. The first thing my oldest child asked me when they woke up this morning was if we could watch for birds again as soon as they got home from school. So I guess we have a new hobby!