An Ethics Violation and a Shade Loving Plant

Birders phish. That's a generally accepted method of getting a bird that's nearby to show itself. When one quickly and quietly repeats the word phish, it sounds like the distress call of many birds. Other birds come to look and viola the warbler who has been hiding in the tree hops to the end of a branch to see what is going on.

However, the phish is at the top of the slippery slope. Whistling a bird's call isn't much different from a phish and works about as well, but most birders consider it a little unethical. Even more unethical is using a recorded bird call. The problem as I discovered yesterday is that recorded calls work. For an expert birder, the stalking of an uncommon bird is part of the thrill, and recorded calls are cheating. The real reason for avoiding recorded calls is that each time a bird responds to a call, he or she stops doing something else like eating or tending a nest. It takes a lot of energy to be a bird and responding to spurious challenges could wear a bird out or impact the young in the nest. So use of recorded calls is left to scientists working on research projects.

Yesterday I was at Sheep Pasture testing out some astronomy apps when I heard a bird calling. Now I'm terrible with identifying birds by song so I turned to one of my two birding apps to track down the bird. The bird sounded a little bit like a cardinal so I played the cardinal song a couple of times and almost immediately a female cardinal appeared to investigate followed quickly by the male.

OK, I wondered if that was coincidence so I moved from the foundation area down the hill to the Carriage House where people have been seeing a large hawk. I always tell them that it is a Red-shouldered Hawk, the areas second largest; but some believe the bird, which nests near the NRT's little pond, is a Red-tailed Hawk. I stood in front of the parking lot and played the call of the Red-shouldered Hawk about six times. Suddenly, the bird silently glided out of the trees and swooped over my head before landing nearby on a shed. Identification confirmed.

We should note that the recordings only work on nearby birds. Playing the flamingo calls had no effect;-)

Hosta is a popular plant for shade gardens, but there are other choices as well. One of my favorites is Lungwort often known by the prettier name Pulmonaria (just Latin for lungwort). Lungwort actually sounds good when compared to the German "Lungenkraut." Other English names are Joseph and Mary, Soldiers and Sailors, Spotted Dog, or Jerusalem Cowslip. The plant is a hardy perennial that has deep green foliage with pale green spots. In the days of sympathetic medicine, herb doctors thought that the leaves looked like diseased human lungs and used the plant as a cure for several respiratory  infections.

I grow the plant in a shady and sheltered location next to my back door. With our warm winter the distinctive leaves of the plant were still going strong near the end of December and were back by the end of February. Now the plant is in bloom with lovely small blue flowers that start as pretty pink buds. Lungwort actually has two types of flowers one with short stamens and long styles and the other just the opposite. I think in other plants that have this arrangement it is an attempt to mix self and cross pollination. For gardeners lungwort is usually propagated by dividing clumps of the plant which has a slowly spreading rhizome. Here's a picture of a variety that has bigger flowers than the plant in my backyard.