We compost, recycle papers and plastics, and limit our water usage, but one way to help the earth that never occurred to me was to recycle old underwear.
Rodale.com offers five surprising ways to recycle underwear, including cutting it up and adding it to your compost bin (only if the underwear is 100% cotton, of course!).
These tips come at a good time in our house as I just noticed a few pairs of my husband’s underwear that should be retired from active duty. Have you noticed that men will wear underwear until it literally falls to pieces?!
My great Earth Day experience yesterday was watching a hawk wing through the heavy spring snowstorm into a nesting box mounted on the third story of a town home wall across the alley from my kitchen window.
The hawk's nesting box mounted on the 3rd story of a town home wall.
Lately, in the last three weeks or so, we’ve been coming upon piles of pigeon feathers in various locations in our front and back yards. While our 16-year old cat has caught quite a few baby birds in her day, and even snagged one last summer (you go, girl!), she’s not as spry as she once was and, besides, she hasn’t spent a lot of time outside lately with all the snow. She was only 9 pounds at her peak fighting weight, and many pigeons and squirrels outweigh her to begin with, and her hunting was usually limited to baby rodents and baby birds.
A hawk pauses in our backyard tree with its prey.
So, we had assumed it was a coyote that was leaving the crime scenes as our neighborhood is built around a natural habitat corridor that weaves throughout the development and through several wildlife sanctuaries. We are several blocks in from the greenway, however, and don’t usually see those animals running down our street.
Then, last Friday, we saw a hawk clutching a hapless pigeon in his talons in the tree in our backyard and wondered where he lived. I saw another winging by down the alley shortly afterward, so I believed there was a nesting pair. Part of the mystery of the dead pigeons was solved, but where were they coming from?
Now I know. And when the snow stops falling, maybe I’ll be able to snap a picture of the birds entering this nesting box, like I spied yesterday through my window.
I applaud our neighbors for cleverly mounting a nesting box: painted the same color as their trim and so camouflaged that I have looked out the window above my kitchen sink for eight years and never noticed it. We’ve speculated on how (and when!) they hung it: Did they use a cherry picker? Did they repel down from the roof? Was it placed by the original builders? How did the hawks find it?
My husband snapped a picture on his iPhone as the hawk paused in our tree with his prey. Can you spot the big bird in our tree?
As urban homesteaders at heart, we are thrilled by the arrival of the hawks and look forward to getting the pigeon population under control.
