Animals Snacking On Your Tulips Will Turn Up Their Noses At Daffodils

Tue., June 22, 1999

By Susan English susane@spokesman.com

Some gardeners will go to impressive lengths to protect their tulips from squirrels and deer.

Both animals consider tulip bulbs to be treats and deer like nothing better than to cruise through the garden and pluck the tulip flowers off the stems like they are hors d’oeuvres.

Some gardeners just give up on tulips and stick with daffodils, the bulbs of which are poisonous and generally safe from four-legged foragers.

Some persistent gardeners, though, have been sprinkling red pepper powder or flakes over the flowers and ground to discourage deer and squirrels. Please don’t. The Netherlands Flower Bulb Information Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., has received reports that the animals have been known to hurt themselves trying to get the pepper out of their eyes.

* Online bird watching: Many of the warblers and finches we see twittering about our back yards in early spring have headed to nesting grounds.

That doesn’t mean you can’t keep an eye on them, though. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University maintains a Web site that tracks the migration of songbirds as well as hummingbirds and hawks.

Right now, the focus is on the birds which migrate through the Eastern United States, but that’s just because that’s where most of the volunteers who report the information live.

As more West Coast birders report in, we can track our birds more closely, too. To take a look at the site, which has plenty of other avian info, point your browser to http://birdsource.cornell.edu.

* Fast fact: The air temperature controls the rate of a cricket’s chirps. Just count the chirps for 15 seconds, add 40 to that number and you have the current air temperature.

* Backyard journal: The mother coyote with a den nearby returned happy from an early morning hunt. Oblivious to anyone watching, she trotted down the road, through the garden and orchard and into the woods with a fat marmot hanging limp from either side of her muzzle. Food chain in action.

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