Backyard Faeries

We moved into a new home in Connecticut in May of 2006. Immediately thereafter, webegan work on the back yard, clearing out overgrowth, tree stumps, and realigning the retaining wall. We stumbled upon a number of local faeries while working, and we and our daughter, Elizabeth, managed to capture a few before they scattered. You must have a faery's secret name in order to capture them, and obtaining it can be a daunting task. Luckily, we discovered that, for the most part, faeries are incredibly vain creatures (these are, anyway) who can (for the most part) be flattered into revealing the one thing that makes them vulnerable. We discovered this inadvertantly while making a fuss over the first faery we saw. Elizabeth and I exclaimed over her beauty, and as we continued, she kept hovering for more compliments.

After long and careful observation, we've learned a little about these tiny, ephemeral creatures, who continued to appear in our house and on our property. Native to the New Haven, Connecticut, area the Backyard Faeries we discovered have successfully adapted to living in suburbia, but also maintain their purest love of nature and Mother earth. You will find them a curious mixture of old and modern day America, as opposed to their European counterparts, whose roots lie in Old World Brittania and Celtic Ireland.

We think they'll capture your hearts just like they captured ours.

P.S. Don't worry ... any faery that we catch and bottle for a time is always let go. A select few actually choose to hang around!

Backyard Faeries
by Donna & Liz Faber
(c) January 13, 2009
All rights reserved.

Warning: It is highly recommended that you treat your faery with the utmost kindness and caution. While small and seemingly helpless in their jar, faeries own a surprisingly large amount of nature's power and can be very spiteful when aggravated. It's nothing they can help, however.

It's only their nature.