I was really excited to find out that our neighbourhood would be one of the first to get the new green bin this year, since we eagerly awaited the beloved blue recycling bin for a long time.

The city's website tells us that "each home in the pilot will receive a green cart, paper yard waste bags, kitchen pail and compostable liners. Households will also receive an information package with the carts including a collection schedule...The green carts will be collected every week like blue carts."

This sounded great until I realised...hey, wait a minute, I'm already composting! All our leaves and food wastes go into one of two of the black composters we bought from the city a decade ago. It takes about a year to harvest the compost with minimal maintenance and we use the end product to build our garden soil. I still plan to continue using the composters, so what about the green bin...?

Most Calgarians don't compost and, according to the city, organics account for 60% of the landfill. Wouldn't it be nice to see over 50% less waste in the future, and the water and nutrients reused instead of trapped in anaerobic conditions where they don't break down? I reckon our neighbours can "borrow" our green bin for their yard waste, diverting even more out of the landfill.

For more information about the green bins, go to Calgary.ca/greencart

My friendly neighbour: the nuthatchThis blog is for the birds, because it’s getting to be that time of year again - the time when many of our native bird species start to look for a suitable place to nest! Chickadees, nuthatches and other birds will start to look for a nice place to build a family around mid February to early March.

If there are mature trees in your neighbourhood, especially coniferous trees, you will have a lot of birds. If you don’t live around a lot of mature trees, you can help to create extra nesting habitat for native species by putting up nest boxes.

Many birds prefer to nest in old woodpecker holes. Woodpeckers tend to be drawn to mature and dying trees, which are often removed from city properties. So if you do have an old tree, or ‘snag”, and it is not a hazard, you may want to keep it for the birds it will attract. Certain nest boxes – ones that are ‘roughed’ up and more natural looking – can also attract chickadees, nuthatches, and a range of species including northern flickers (the picture is a nuthatch who nested in our yard last year).

For chickadees and nuthatches, use a nest box made out of untreated cedar. The entrance hole should be between 1 to 1/8 of an inch in order to protect the birds from house sparrows (an introduced species that often attacks smaller birds to steal their nesting sites). Cedar should not be stained, but it is rather soft, so if you are putting up a nest box for a flicker, a box made out of plywood (paint it with a low VOC stain, only on the outside) would work better for bird that tends to “drum” on the wood. Line an inch of the inside of the nest box with dried moss and untreated wood chips so the birds can ‘excavate’ their new home the way they would in a tree.

Painted beauty - a friendly resident northern flicker

The library has a number of books on how to make nest boxes and how to make your yard more attractive to native birds (including Bird-by-bird gardening: the ultimate guide to bringing in your favorite birds--year after year by Sally Roth.)

I looked out my window on Thursday to see hundreds, maybe thousands of cedar waxwings. I usually see a small flock in March on a nearby crabapple but I'd never seen such large numbers. The photos here are taken from about 6m distance with an itouch.

The waxwings had descended on our next-door neighbours' mayday tree to eat the dried and likely fermented fruit. Further investigation found flocks of them down the entire block on every fruit-bearing tree such as Mountain Ash and crabapples. For several hours, they tossed berries around, gobbled snow off the neighbours' roof and littered the sidewalk where there are now noticeable "wine stains."

Cedar waxings (with the yellow stripe, unlike the larger Bohemian waxwings) are one of Calgary's fancier looking birds with their crests and multicoloured plumage, so it's always a treat to see them, and it's often a one-time event with no advance warning--a rave of waxwings if you will. By 5 p.m. the party was over, and all the stragglers had left.

Each year, Calgary Public Library employees round up their white elephants and hold a silent auction whose proceeds are donated to charity. In fact, there’s more to bid on than just white elephants. There are Christmas crafts, hand-knit scarves, baked goods, electronics, and a variety of other items. This year, we collectively raised and donated over $3000 to Calgary's Inn from the Cold.

In a similar vein, the staff in Central Library’s Business, Sciences and Social Sciences department holds an annual white elephant lottery. Staff purchase tickets and place them in envelopes assigned to each elephant. The more tickets you buy, the better your chances of winning the item – but it’s still a draw, so things are tense! As a department, we raised $200 and donated that to Inn from the Cold, too.

Prior to the lottery, as I rooted through my home, searching for perfectly good but unused items, I found myself thinking Who’s going to want my set of only 3, slightly inelegant wineglasses? But sure enough, someone did. And as I lugged my own not-quite-new treasure home, I thought Who would ever part with a totally wicked turtle lamp (with glowing shell!)?

If you don’t use it, need it or love it, then give someone else the chance. White elephant sales are a festive and fun way to support a cause or charity of your choice. They’re also an opportunity to reuse and reduce, and to avoid the chaos of holiday-season shopping malls.

Hope you had a great Christmas holiday!

Environmental publishing is growing like topsy, providing readers with volumes of good books from which to choose.

I certainly don’t claim to read exhaustively in this area, and there are many recent publications that are still on my “to-read” list, including Andrew Nikiforuk’s Empire of the Beetle.

But when I reflect on my reading this year, these are the titles that immediately come to mind as compelling books that helped to enlarge my understanding of the world:

Becoming animal : an earthly cosmology by David Abram - David Abram’s first book, The Spell of the Sensuous has become a classic of environmental literature. This book with equally poetic prose, reminds us of our animal senses and the elemental kinship between the body and the earth.

Goodlands: a meditation and history on the Great Plains by Frances W. Kaye. Anyone who loves the Great Plains and has ever wondered how the prairie ecosystem became so distorted should read this book. Kaye divides her time between a farmstead outside Lincoln, Nebraska, and a house in Calgary, so that she may always be close to the prairie land that drives her research.

Homegrown & handmade: a practical guide to more self-reliant living by Deborah Niemann. Plenty of us look at the environmental challenges we face and want to throw up our hands. Author Deborah Niemann suggests that instead, we get those hands to work, creating a cleaner, healthier life for ourselves and our families.

The Leap : how to survive and thrive in the sustainable economy by Chris Turner. Moving from our current unsustainable mode of life to a more sustainable model requires a great leap. Local author, Chris Turner, presents a well researched guide to recent developments which make this leap seem more feasible.

Wheat Belly by Dr. William Davis - In an age of gluten intolerance, this controversial book presents a chilling story of how through genetic modification, an ancient dietary staple has been transformed into one of the most damaging food products in today’s world.