How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.
– Annie Dillard
I live in a neighborhood in NE Austin, TX named University Hills, sitting in the Texas Ecoregion called the Blackland Prairie. My habitat sits nicely square on the N-S-E-W quadrant, where I can step out of my front door and see the Big Dipper and N. Star square on, on certain nights of the year. This means also that the backyard is a sunshiny south-facing place and the setting sun can blaze the western half with a vengeance, come summer.
I have lived on my quarter-acre ‘homestead’ with my lovely wife going on 12 years now, and I am a native-yardscape enthusiast. The Grow Green guide, published and free from the City of Austin, is my landscape bible.
I take daily walks on a route that slides by Dottie Jordan park and enjoy seeing the neighborhood cycles and changes in an ecological way. I am not far from the city center – this is no dreamy forest, mind you – but I’ll take what I can get.
I count good days on a scale of how many resident Cooper’s Hawks I see each day: “It’s a two hawk kind of day!” ergo, it’ll be a good day.
Habitat 78723 