They are about ready to fledge. Not far from us a couple of houses are under siege. A pair of red-tailed hawks build a nest in a tree right next to the deck. Not only does the deck get pretty messy, the owners of the house cannot use it, their next door neighbor had a vegetable garden and can't tend it and if they go out the front door, they have to defend themselves with rakes or anything else long, in order to get to the mailbox. They had the problem last year, were allowed to take down the nest after the chicks had left, but they rebuilt this year. They were advised to take down the tree. The owls have left the nest, the loon in Minnesota is still sitting on her eggs and the storks in Germany lost the last baby to hatch, but four was a bit much to raise, even three are hard to feed. A couple of Blue Jays think I am their foster mother and beg every time I go out. Young squirrels were also told to stay here and since 3 days a racoon spends his days sleeping in the big oak. Not to forget the Cardinal who sits twice a day on a dogwood branch next to the backdoor and sings for his peanut. How am I supposed to get any work done?

Hi, I am new here! A friend gave me an old (1975-1988) MTD-Montgomery Ward Lawn tractor, which looks a little like the old world war II tow motors used by the airports from the rear. Kinda Cute! I am restoring it and improving it. One of the mods made include old/new Bolens headlights and Peterson clearence/tail/turn/marker signals. The Briggs and Stratton 195707(8 hp) engine I am building up from a new short block. I have used a 10 to 16 amp stator and matching regulator. I understand that I may get only 10 amps out of the system because of flywheel magnets. I made sheelt metal brackets to hold the tail lights painted to tractor color. I used four Peterson clearence lamps that are sold as lawn and garden tail lights, they have 193 bulbs, 2 each lite. Each lamp uses .33 amps. I have mounted an amber unit, back to back, with a red unit on sheet metal and wired each side, one to the other. This will give me amber facing front and red to rear. This makes a total of eight lamps, a total of 2.64 amps. The Bolens headlights each use 2.1 amps, for a total of 6.84 amps. This should give me enough charging power for the battery. This tractor did not have lights when I got it. I had to make sheet metal brackets for the all the lights. I cut holes in the grile and in the bracket I made for the headlights. I had neatly cut the welds that held the hood and grile togather and purchased some hood supports on Ebay to hold the grile to the frame. Ebay has realy helped. The hood now rotates up from the grile. This little tractor is very small, less than 28 inches wide, with larger rear wheels(8 inch rims, 16-6.50x 8). With re-enforced frame, with small 3 point hitch, this tractor will be able to get through small gates, and can be carried in my small pickup. I intend to make or adapt small implements for the tractor. This is a fun project, I intend to use. Thanks for your time, Walt_2007.

There many ways to plan a woodland garden, but here's an easy one. A lot depends on how much shade you want to create. Planting towering fast growing trees will mean fairly heavy shade in a few years and limit your future pallette to the dense shade growers, That's still a big pallette, but you want to be sure that is what you want because it is a big investment of time and money. Or do you want to do a more part shade woodland garden, with more small trees and shrubs rather than tall trees with big canopies. The next questions is how wide do you want your woodland to be? Then mark the ultimate borders of that area. Next lay out your paths, even if it will be years before all of the paths will be enclosed in the woodland. You can do this with spray paint or flour on the ground or with hoses or on graph paper. Leave a "clearing" if you want to put a seating area in. Now you have the map to begin your landscape planning. You need to decide how "wild" or how "landscaped" a look you want. In a more planned looking woodland, treat each curve of your path as a bed. If you have the space outside the canopy of dense shade created by the oaks, you may want to start with some woodland edge small trees as anchors : redbuds and dogwoods are typical. Add some lower growing shrubs around them like daphne, all spice, summer sweet, osmanthus. In front of those go the perennials. Hundreds of choices there. The nice thing is you now have a master plan and can do a "bed" at a time. If this is a bigger project plan than you have room or effort for, Just consider the oaks as the anchors of two island beds that you connect with a path. Put the tall shrubs either directly around the oaks and then fill in between the shrubs with woodland perennials. Don't forget a few spring ephemerals that will bloom before the oaks leaf out. One thing to keep in mind for a more wild look, don't repeat plants in a pattern. Do one mass and move on to another type of plant letting the edges overlap and intermix. Sorry to run off at the mouth and I'm not sure if I'm telling you stuff you already know or helping to at least focus your thoughts. I'm currently recreating a very narrow woodland edge with a fern walk punctuated with accuba shrubs and some variated solomons seal and a bunch of spring wildflowers I rescued from a builder's clearing. Even though its only 6 feet wide, I still have a curving path done in 2 1/2 foot wide stepping stones. That gave me a placement for the ferns to begin with. Specimen or frangrant plants go right at the end of a curve so a walker is going almost righttowards them.

The only thing with Crossley's Raptor guide is that, for relative beginners, it's photograph overload. Turn to any particular page and one could quickly feel overwhelmed by intricate plumage differences that ultimately jumble together to form one big complex hawk in your memory. Kind of like a library without a card catalog. There's very little you can do other than commit some field marks, flight styles, and behavior to memory. Or, just get good pictures and ask me. :-) Although there are times I have trouble IDing a hawk myself. Depends on how good of a look I can get. I think what else may be helpful is to always know what you might be likely to see in your area. In CT, your Red-taileds are going to be easterns. They pretty much all look the same. You probably have many year-round Red-tailed residents and the guy you photographed up there probably has a mate on a nest right now. A nesting (adult) pair of Red-taileds have the rufous tails. A juvenile (last year's brood) bird will lack a rufous tail and will show brown and white tail bands instead. A clean, lightly marked underside is more indicative of an adult- juvies have more brown markings and look streaky underneath. Some adults are heavily marked too though! Adult Red-taileds will also show a thin dark rim around the back of the underwing. You can see that on the bird you photographed. I recommend Dunne/Sibley/Sutton 'Hawks in Flight, 2nd Edition'. I have to say that I bought the Crossley guide for pleasure rather than purpose. I love the photos! But when I first sat down with it, I could already score very high on the "quizzes" he embedded within it. So, I learned my skills elsewhere. Hawks in Flight was a huge help with that.