On the Trail




 

 

An act of avian intervention

There are two pernicious insects that have disfigured my rural Agoura garden for years. One is an outright bully, picking on poor little petunias. The other has grandiose notions, attacking massive sycamores.

This year, petunias were to be the stars of my budget-constrained garden. Teensy starter plants yielded gorgeous nonstop blossoms in every shade of pink and purple.

Then the dreaded petunia budworm arrived. Overnight, my vivid, thriving spectacle was history.

The budworm is the voracious larva of a small, plain white butterfly. As its name suggests, the budworm infests petunias. It grows chubby as it feeds. For a creature half an inch long, the budworm deposits conspicuous, copious droppings. My petunia pots appeared as if a crazed chef had attacked with a pepper mill.

Nearby, the nefarious sycamore borer has been doing dastardly things to the mature, towering sycamores in my front yard. They deposit frass, a mixture of insect excrement and plant matter, in mounds resem- bling russet snowdrifts.

Both bug species sneered at the chemical applications I tried. Picking the creatures off the plants by hand would be effective if I had 10,000 years to focus exclusively on this task.

Successful solutions evaded me. I could only rue my losses.

Then one afternoon as I was typing on my laptop at a table near the most afflicted sycamore, a sociable male flycatcher, a Say’s phoebe, landed on the table.

It was a day of torrid heat. The bird held its mouth wide open as if panting. I moved my pup’s water bowl to within easy reach. With gusto, the bird sipped and bathed.

We met again as I pruned my ravaged petunias. The phoebe was peering at me from a branch. In its bill wriggled a plump petunia budworm.

“Help yourself, please!” I told the bird.

The phoebe and its mate began to glut themselves on the budworm bounty. Within a week of this act of avian intervention, the petunias began showing signs of recovery.

I sensed by their constant quest for food that the phoebes had a nest in the area with hatchlings to feed.

They shocked me by tackling the borers next. As I pecked at my keyboard, they probed the sycamore’s damaged bark.

Showers of annihilated borer larva began to swell around the tree’s base, soon swept away by the pair of flycatchers.

The Say’s phoebe is named to honor Thomas Say, who followed the adventurous career path of his famous uncle, William Bartram, one of the foremost naturalists of the 18th century.

But how does a modern-day human honor such useful birds for restoring beauty and vigor to a modest yet cherished garden?

I can only hope the flycatchers’ offspring will grow to be as strong as sycamores and stick around for generations to come.


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