Lazydaisy. the nest on the NU site is located to the best of my knowledge in British Columbia Canada. This nest is on private property and this pair has been nesting in this spot for a few years now. The owner of the property had to get permission to install the cameras because eagles are so protected they did not want to intefere with the mating/nesting/hatching/raising process of the eagles. The owner of the property had started this out on his own and had gotten such a large demande from the public to be able to view the eagles that he asked for assistance and Nothern Utilities stepped in to help out. The feed is live 24/7 and this nest has 3 eaglettes. I was only seeing one, but this morning I say the other one and he/she is much smaller than his/her brother or sister. I am happy to see that both has made it this far. Louise

I can't agree, depending on what it is you're asking...... All of my friends, above, have recommended KBG, because you have insisted that you want a lawn. You don't. A lawn is something (for the purposes of this discussion) that one of the ladies of the church might walk on, if she steps off of the sidewalk, on her way to the front door. Oh, my! You want something else entirely. You want something that will withstand kids. Thank you for not saying 'active kids', because if it were active kids, geeze, it would be an even worse situation. Then you mention a dog. That makes it worse. Actually, you mention 'dogs', plural, which makes it even worse than that. Thank you, for not saying 'and by the way, the kids interact with the dogs', because then you'd have about the worst situation possible. Unless you were to add "and after that, the dogs interact with the kids, and then the kids do their best to get even, and before you know it, everybody's chasing each other, and things can get a little crazy around here...." Geeze, thanks for not adding all of that. You are going to want to look up 'athletic field', or look up 'golf course', but you are surely not going to want to look up 'lawn'. (Church lady. Steps off of sidewalk. Forget it). When a two hundred pound guy grabs another two hundred pound guy, and drags him around in the dirt, on Sundays, in front of a crowd, and somebody applauds, and all these guys are running up and down the field, and they're knocking each other over, it's a little tough on the groundskeeper, and he's got to get it all repaired, by six days from today. Or a golf course, where these guys are swiping those clubs, and a little patch (called a 'divot' gets whooshed out of there, and there's a bare spot, two hundred times a day, and the groundskeeper has to make that bare spot repair itself, quickly, it's a little difficult. But one can change the line of approach to the fairway, and while the left side is repairing, we'll all play on the right side. But yes, it's a little difficult, to make it work. Those patches of grass (on both 'athletic fields' and 'golf courses'), difficult as they are, can repair themselves, because those patches get a little rest. A little break. A little down time. But not your place, babe. Nope. Is it three dogs and two kids, or is it three kids, and two dogs? No down time. No rest. Your magic word for today is "fertilizer". You might toss in 'water'. But the point is, you can't just add KBG to the yard, and figure you've got it knocked. You don't, and never will. KBG will repair itself, grow, spread out, rejuvenate, if it has a lot of fertilizer, and that does not mean a little bit of fertilizer. You could go over there, and ask the athletic field guys, or ask the golf course guys, for advice, but after you say 'three dogs and two kids', they're liable to be asking YOU for advice. Your place will have much more wear and tear than theirs will. They will be very interested in how you solve your problems, and theirs will be rather small, in comparison. You get the point: after some wear, the lawn needs the gumption to recuperate. It needs to have the energy, the FERTILIZER, to make that happen, and happen quickly, because more wear and tear is going to happen, coming right up, thank you, and even MORE is going to happen, right after that. So yes, you need KBG: it will repair itself, it will spread out, it's durable. But you need even more, FERTILIZER, to keep all of that happening, non-stop. Just like a sod farm: those guys take bare ground, every year, and from seed manage to fertilize, and the shoots grow into a dark green carpet of healthy lawn. It's the fertilizer, it's not the choice of seed. Lots of fertilizer. Light doses, fairly frequently applied. Grow, baby, grow. Non stop. You need three parts fertilizer, to one part Kentucky Blue Grass. Maybe four parts fertilizer, to one part Kentucky Blue Grass. Keep it growing, non stop, because that patch of ground is not going to get any rest. And go ahead, go over there to the golf course....you can say, with admiration, 'two hundred golfers, with a thousand spectators, and a week later, it looks this good?'.....I got news for you: that guy is going to look at you, with admiration, and he's going to say "Did you say three dogs, and two kids, or did you say three kids, and two dogs?" Good luck with it.

This is a new reply to an old post, but there are native live oaks in the area roughly between Ft. Worth, Abilene, and Wichita Falls, Texas that should work beautifully in your area. For some reason, nobody has developed commercial cultivars from this area. Live oaks, especially along the northern margin of their range, can vary in their characteristics. The ideal would be one with dense foliage that stays dark green all winter on a non-stoloniferous tree that branches With strong crotch angles. For commercial growers, it would probably require two trips to western North Texas—one in February/March to identify trees with the right characteristics, and once again in September/October to collect acorns. Maybe ten years of field trials would be in order after that. Of course this would be more of a long-range project than collecting an annual or perennial, but it could fundamentally change the landscape in Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Eastern Seaboard up to Philadelphia or maybe New York.

Now that a few days have passed I have had a chance to get out and see some of the damage. It makes me even more impressed with that nest!! There is a brick house about three miles from here, and in a direct line from where I was hunkered down, and the entire front porch, including part of the garage and roof, is just peeled away--gone. Nearly every fencerow running north to south has the larger trees snapped off in a neat line, all laying to the east/northeast. I learned that we had a series of very intense microbursts, with some packing sustained winds of 70-90 MPH. A few weeks back we had a similar round of storms, and a boy in a town near here was out the next morning and found a cancelled check that had been blown in from a city in Missouri, over 100 miles from here. He and his folks tracked down the people and told them about it, and they had lost everything but their lives in a tornado. Amazing. And I think if my house ever gets wiped out like that, I will rebuild, with large sticks and in a large tree. Makes me wonder...at the worst of the storm, do the parents try their best to stay over the eggs and protect them or do they just have to flee and save themselves??