NC Integrative Women's Health

10/17/2026

Get To Know Your Garden- New Discoveries

10/16/2026

10/12/2026

Did a hawk just sweep past the feeder and send every bird flying? It may have been one of two hawks that look nearly alike, and the tail is the best place to start.

Project FeederWatch, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, puts the sharp-shinned hawk at about the size of a jay or dove, 10 to 14 inches long, with a small head and a square tail tip with prominent corners. The Cooper's hawk is about crow-sized, 14 to 20 inches, with a large head and a tail usually rounded at the tip.

Nicholas Lund, writing for Audubon, says the sharpie's small head barely projects beyond its wings in flight, while the Cooper's bigger head sticks out in front. 🍂

10/12/2026

Give them space - they live outside, their home.

Bare branches turn up a lot of nests this time of year, and plenty of them were never built by a bird.

Paper, mud, or silk tells you who made it.

The gray paper football is empty after a hard frost. The colony is done, and the nest isn't reused.

The mud tubes on the wall belong to a wasp that rarely stings. Inside, each tube is packed with spiders for the young.

The nest box stuffed with shredded bark in winter has a flying squirrel in it, or several.

🌿 Three worth acting on:

- A hole in the ground with steady wasp traffic — keep kids, pets, and the mower back until winter ends the colony. The gas can stays in the garage; it doesn't work and it ruins the ground
- Little pinecone bags on an evergreen — each female leaves a lot of eggs inside, so pick the bags off before spring and bin them. Dropped bags still hatch
- A big paper nest high in a tree in coastal Georgia or South Carolina, or near Charlotte — report it to the state agriculture office. An introduced yellow-legged hornet builds a look-alike there

Between leaf drop and spring, that's most of what the non-birds left behind. 🍂

10/12/2026

The deep hooting after dark in October is a great horned owl, and the reason is romance.

It's the biggest "eared" owl in the East — about the height of a house cat sitting up, with a wingspan wider than a person's arms. The horns aren't ears. They're feather tufts. The real ears are hidden in the sides of the face, one set a little higher than the other, so it can pinpoint a mouse under snow by sound alone.

🦉 Why it's hooting now

Great horned owls nest earlier than almost any bird in North America. The female lays in January or early February, sometimes with snow piling up on her back as she sits.

To be ready, pairs court in late fall. Two owls answering each other after dark — a deep hoo-h'HOO… hoo… hoo — is a duet. Strangely, the male's voice is the deeper one, even though the female is bigger.

🦨 What it eats

Almost anything it can carry: rabbits, rats, mice, geese, other owls — and skunks. It's one of the few predators that takes skunks, probably because its sense of smell is weak.

It settles in suburbs with big trees, open lawns, and plenty of rabbits. Many neighborhoods have a pair that's never been seen.

The young need months of lessons from their parents before they can live alone. That's why it all starts so early.

10/12/2026

Before the garden gets cut down this fall, look at the ends of the stems. Some of them are occupied.

Many native bees — small carpenter bees, mason bees, leafcutter bees — spend the winter inside hollow and pithy stems: bee balm, coneflower, Joe-Pye w**d, raspberry canes, goldenrod, sumac.

The mothers packed them with pollen over the summer and sealed in the next generation. Cut and bag those stems now, and the bees go out with the trash.

✂️ The fix, in two steps:

- This fall, leave the stalks standing. Cut nothing that doesn't have to go
- Next spring, once it's warm, cut the old stalks back to somewhere between eight and twenty-four inches and leave the stubble. The bees inside chew their way out, and new ones move into the cut stems to nest

Within a season, the new growth hides the stubble.

A messier fall bed, and more bees next year.

The stems look dead. They're full. 🐝

10/12/2026

10/02/2026

In a good year, a single mature oak drops more acorns in a few weeks than the whole neighborhood of wildlife can eat, and right now they're all trying.

That flood on your driveway isn't litter. It's the most important cash crop in the fall woods.

🌰 Who's cashing in:

- The blue jay is the banker — hauling acorns off and burying them by the thousands, and the ones it forgets grow into oaks. Jays have planted whole forests
- The gray squirrel does the same, one buried nut at a time, planting as it forgets
- The white-tailed deer packs on winter fat; acorns are a big share of its fall diet
- The wild turkey swallows them whole by the cropful and grinds them inside
- The black bear, where it roams, gorges on acorns to fuel its winter sleep
- The white-footed mouse hoards them in hidden larders

Here's the clever part. Oaks don't drop the same amount each year. They boom and bust on purpose — a few lean years, then a sudden glut.

The glut is so big the animals can't eat it all, so some acorns make it through to become trees. The oak feeds the whole forest and still wins.

🌿 What you're seeing isn't a mess to rake. It's a once-a-year economy in full swing — one tree paying out to a dozen species and planting its own replacements in the same move.

10/02/2026

One of the greatest insect migrations in North America is happening over your head, and it looks like a flicker of green. 🐉
Common green darners (Anax junius) are one of several migratory dragonfly species.
The relay migration:
→ In fall, darners fly south along coasts, ridges, and lakeshores
→ They overwinter as eggs or nymphs in warm southern regions
→ In spring, new adults fly north
→ No single dragonfly makes the whole round trip. The journey unfolds across generations
What makes them incredible:
→ Dragonflies catch prey in flight with success rates above 90% in some studies
→ They can fly in all directions, including backward
→ Adults eat mosquitoes, flies, midges, and gnats
→ Nymphs (their aquatic babies) eat mosquito larvae underwater
Where to see them:
→ Coasts and lakeshores in fall, sometimes in swarms
→ Hawk watch sites, where counters record dragonflies alongside raptors
The threats:
→ Wetland loss
→ Pesticides, including mosquito spraying that kills dragonflies along with mosquitoes
→ Chemical runoff into ponds and streams
The guilt-reversal:
We spray to kill mosquitoes. Then we kill the animal that eats mosquitoes by the hundreds, for free.
What you can do:
→ Skip mosquito misting and foggers
→ Add native plants along ponds so dragonflies have places to perch and lay eggs
→ Empty standing water weekly (or use Bti "mosquito dunks," which target mosquito larvae only)
→ Report migrating dragonflies to the Migratory Dragonfly Partnership (Xerces Society)
→ Watch them at the pond this month. They're on their way
They're a generation on a journey.
Keep their runway clear. 🌊