Birds, In the neighborhood, Seasons

It’s official

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Spring officially arrived for me today because I had two firsts – the first eastern phoebe and the first woodcock.

I haven’t managed to see any woodcock in the last few years because I never got around to looking for them. There’s certain places locally that I know to find them, but I’ve been too lazy to get in the car and drive to then stand out in the near dark and cold on the chance that the night was warm enough and windless enough to suit them and their dizzying courtship display.

Well, guess what? I had woodcock almost in my backyard this morning! Our property backs up to a small park with athletic fields and a small market and farm bordered by wet woods. I was up before the sun today because of the time change and a bird trip to the Pine Barrens. After a shower I was here in the office with the window open a little so I could hear the cardinals and robins greeting the day when I heard the first “Peeent!” from the field behind the house. I thought for sure that I had imagined it, but putting my ear to the window confirmed what I’d heard. I stepped out the back door in my robe and saw a woodcock twittering over the house. It amazes me to find these birds so close to home when for years I’ve been driving out to Sandy Hook or the fields around the college to see them.

I took a walk back to the farm this evening just at dusk and was treated to a show by half a dozen or so woodcock. What a treat! They’re fun to watch because no two birds fly alike. Some go straight up and hover at tree-top level, some corkscrew off low to the ground, and many zig and zag through the brush making it very hard to follow them with binoculars in the dying light. Sometimes one will take off or land almost at your feet.

I have to wonder how long I’ve been missing out on this! Now that I know they’re back there, I’ll be sure to listen for them at dusk.

Image from Google Images

Finding water, Seasons, Wanderings

Saturday’s rewards

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There’s this sort of game I play with myself so that I can get things done that I don’t really want to do. Most weekends it’s cleaning the house and doing the grocery shopping. Today it was a visit to the dentist and grading mid-term exams that were on the *don’t really want to do* list. So in an attempt to balance out the negative emotions involved in those two activities, I spent a few hours after the dentist wandering around a state park that I don’t often visit.

It’s a very urban park, but with a nice mix of habitats – a sample of the more southern pine barrens forest with lots of pitch pine and a dense stand of Atlantic white cedar, plus the upland hardwood forest with beech, black birch, red and white oak and old growth white pine. There’s also a fairly large bit of salt marsh and a freshwater marsh that I can admire from the Garden State Parkway at 70 mph as it passes through the park.

The trails were very wet; that was the only tangible sign of spring that I found today. No spring azures, no fiddleheads, no skunk cabbage or hint of buds on the mountain laurel or swamp azalea. It’s supposed to be very easy to find pink lady’s slippers here and trailing arbutus, but I’ll have to go back later to find those beauties when spring isn’t just in my imagination.

I came home to the stack of mid-terms happy to have had a few hours out, but disappointed that I hadn’t found more to put me in mind of the coming season. Maybe it’s just as well that I don’t catch spring fever quite so soon. There’s still six more weeks of students and papers for me to contend with.

Snapshots, Whatever

A found poem

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“Have you forgotten
that you can never
be caught
if you still
hear
trees crackling
and growling
if you can hear
the one
dit of gravel
fall over
the other
dit of gravel
in the wind,
if you can still count
the red berries
on the bushes
and divide
by the number
of birds
in the yard,
if you can recollect
that you
are descended
from some
grove
that no longer
stands,
a ground
you came from
still
run through
by El rio –
abaio rio,
the river
beneath the river
that surfaces
in the most
surprising
places?
You,
who were washed
in a magic
hearing
water
born
with a bowl
curved
inside
your belly,
there
gathering lightning,
gathering rain,
forever filling,
and forever
emptying out.
Where does
the breath go
when it is not
being drawn?”
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

I’ve put off posting this *found* poem for a few months, hoping that I might be able to first come up with the author’s name, but I haven’t been able to find any source for it. Maybe someone out there might recognize it.

I found it hanging in a coworker’s cubicle – a photocopy of the typewritten poem that was given to her on a retreat years ago. She doesn’t recall or never knew who the author was, but “The Cairn of Recollection” was handwritten across her photocopy. Searching for that as a title didn’t produce any results.
Birds, PSA

Upcoming bird-related stuff

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A late reminder that the now biweekly *Good Planets* will be hosted this Saturday by Bev at Burning Silo. Hopefully it isn’t too late to submit a photo for this weekend’s edition. The theme this month is *home* – whatever that may mean to you. More specific info is available in Bev’s post on the subject. I would love to find a bird’s nest to photograph for inclusion, but this lonely bluebird box was all I found when I went out looking for nests and woodcock late last Saturday afternoon.

Our friend Jayne at Journey Through Grace is hosting the upcoming edition of I and the Bird on 3/22 so send a link to your best bird-related post to her at blessingsabound AT mac DOT com by 3/20. Lots of us have been blogging about birds lately, so it would be wonderful to see your serious or comical (Mary!) bird blogs read by a wider audience.

The weather here in NJ has been temperamental (like most of us come March), but I’ve been pleased to note the arrival of a small flock of bluebirds at Allaire State Park and Red-wing blackbirds in the wet fields by my office. I’ve also spotted a killdeer or two, so Spring is marching northward. The Osprey should appear at Sandy Hook within the next two weeks and I’m trying to decide on a day to take off from work to greet them on their return. The Sandy Hook Migration Watch starts a week from today – if you’re in the area why not stop by and check it out!

Bunnies

3/7/07 Mid-week bunny fix

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Peeper lives in the spare bedroom behind a gate. She chews and tugs at the gate incessantly so once in a while I let her roam around the house. I’d be happier without a gate to climb over, but I worry about a fight between her and the Flemmies who live on the porch.

Dora, who passed away, used to live here in the spare bedroom, but we never needed a gate because she wouldn’t set foot outside of *her* room. The Flemmies don’t need a gate either because they hardly ever venture off the sunporch. But Peeper is a roamer. It’s strange to me how rabbits can be so much the same in some ways, yet so different in others.

On this particular day, Buddy had been sound asleep on his bed in the middle of the living room when Peeper came bounding across it and stopped to check him out. He woke up and ambled off to the kitchen window. Buddy gets nervous around the bunnies, probably because he’s afraid of doing the wrong thing and getting yelled at. Really, I don’t know why they make him nervous; he’s always been gentle and only gets yelled at for running full-steam onto the porch to bark at the mailman. That sends the bunnies to scattering in all directions and somebunny usually knocks something over in the process which just startles them worse and then Buddy gets yelled at for setting all the chaos in motion.

I snapped the photo just as Buddy had finished yawning and turned to look balefully back at Peeper and I pursuing him.

Birds

Voices in the dark

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The great horned owls in the neighborhood have been hooting a lot in the past few weeks. It seems sort of late in the season for them to be so noisy, but I don’t guess they have to worry about attracting unwanted attention if they’re nesting.

Most years the majority of their hooting is done in December and January, but this year they’ve been pretty silent, other than the occasional volley from our black locust to one of the evergreens across the street in the cemetery. I’ve always thought this to be territorial hooting between rival males working out the boundaries of their home turfs, but really, it’s all a mystery to me. That’s the thing about owls; who knows what they’re up to in the dark?

I would love to be able to find their nest or a nest of the screech owls I hear once in a while. I don’t go out looking for nests exactly, but like to keep my eyes open to the possibility of one nearby. I’m sure it’s there, hidden in the sheltering branches of a pine or in the crotch of an old oak somewhere in the neighborhood. It’s enough, really, to hear them in the middle of my suburban neighborhood. I like just knowing they’re out there keeping watch over the night as I sleep.
“All night each reedy whinny
from a bird no bigger than a heart
flies out of a tall black pine
and, in a breath, is taken away
by the stars. Yet, with small hope
from the center of darkness
it calls out again and again.”
—Screech Owl by Ted Kooser
Garden, Seasons

Late winter

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If we’re lucky enough(?) to live in a place that has four seasons to the year, then I think it must be inevitable to be anxious for each seasonal change. I’d guess the anticipation of spring is most common; however I find myself anticipating the end of summer and heat more than I do the return to that type of weather. Yet, as much as I love the cold of fall and winter, I do get to missing the garden. March is a funny month; with the equinox we think of it as the first month of spring, but here in NJ at least, the weather is anything but spring-like most days, and the garden has to wait.

Whatever else it may be, I think of March as a month of anticipation. There are good things to come, but also much to appreciate at this in-between time of year. Maybe just to convince myself to be happy at this week’s return to below freezing temps, I made a list of some of the things that, as a gardener, I enjoy about late winter. Maybe you’d like to add to it?

  • Catalogs, of course! I love to spend a weekend afternoon dreaming about what my garden might be this year and marking up the pages of my favorite catalogs with yellow sticky notes on the photos of the most colorful and unusual plants. At some point reality sets in and I order only a third of what I would really like and still don’t have a permanent place for most of it.

  • Anticipating the first weekend of spring cleanup and that first sweet smell of the earth warming up. The restlessness of spring-fever and the urge to be out of the house.

  • Winter bouquets: acorns and pinecones, red osier dogwood twigs, witch hazel, pussy willows, forsythia…

  • Freedom from weeding and mowing and plant pests.

  • Anything is possible now; everything a promise.

“Every gardener knows that under the cloak of winter lies a miracle… a seed waiting to sprout, a bulb opening to the light, a bud straining to unfurl. And the anticipation nurtures our dreams.” –Barbara Winkler

Birds

Pale Male reminder

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I’ve posted about this before, but it’s worth repeating for those of you who might not be familiar with the site. Lincoln Karim maintains a website that chronicles the life of NYC’s most famous red-tailed hawk – Pale Male. His photography is stunning and he really, really loves these birds. Pale Male is a movie star (a documentary was made about him) and he was the subject of a book (Redtails in Love). In late 2004 his nest on a swanky building in NYC was removed and destroyed by the company managing the building. After protests by NYC Audubon and many others a solution was realized to allow Pale Male to nest their again. If I remember correctly, they attempted to nest at that site in 2005, but failed. They found a new nest site on a different building in the city for 2006, but sadly failed again last year. So there is much hope for them in 2007. Things are picking up for them now, as they are busy with nest building and mating. I try to check in each day for the newest pics. Enjoy!

Marie Winn, the author of Redtails in Love, also has a blog that might be worth a look: Central Park Nature News.

Note: Image is of a woodcut designed by Marie Aey in response to Pale Male’s eviction in 2004. It’s called “St. Francis Weeps for Pale Male”.

Birds, In the neighborhood

Winter cliques

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You don’t often see a flock of chickadees and titmice without also seeing the other members of their winter clique – the white-breasted nuthatch and the downy woodpecker. The downy, being more deliberate and cautious, was much easier to photograph than the other members of the merry troupe moving through the woods this afternoon. I heard them coming, mostly the chatter of the chickadees, long before they were in sight. The only bird missing was a brown creeper, but those are hard to find locally. The downy paused briefly to inspect the bark of this birch before drifting leisurely away with the rest of his associates.

It’s thought that a mixed flock like this benefits the members in a few ways. The many eyes and ears may be better able to find predators or food. Each species is able to take advantage of its own niche within the habitat while helping other members of the flock to locate food. We see this at our backyard feeders; curious chickadees are often the first species to check out a new feeder, followed closely by titmice, and finally the more wary woodpeckers. I’ve read that downy woodpeckers use chickadees and titmice as sentinels in a mixed-species flock. I also listen for their high pitched *seeee* notes to know that there’s a hawk overhead.

The winter cliques will be breaking up before long as spring draws near and competition for territory and a mate becomes more important than the companionship of hungry friends. The demands of nesting and feeding a family must not leave time for much else. Until then, our familiar winter birds travel together and liven up the winter landscape with their whispered rumors of spring.

Birds, Whatever

A stinker

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I can’t tear myself away from the coverage of Anna Nicole’s funeral long enough to put together a proper post tonight. Instead I’ll just pass along this link to Laura at Vitamin Sea. She’s in Florida and shares Mary’s affinity for GB Herons. I think she may even call them stinkers too. Someone turned one of her very nice photos of a GB Heron into a painting and she’s sharing the finished artwork on her blog today. She also has a link to the artist’s site and there’s more nice things to peruse there. Have a look.

I took this awful photo towards the end of January; pulled off to the side of the road *a la Mary* and tried to keep the big lens from shaking too much while I hoped that someone wouldn’t crash into me. It could have been a really nice pic if I’d had a tripod, but setting that up surely would have scared him away. I love the way the telephoto lens distorted the background – too bad all my shaking also totally distorted the bird too. It hurts my eyes to look at it for too long, sort of the way looking at Anna Nicole’s pink-draped coffin all day hurts my eyes. Anyway, I’m just noticing that this guy had his pretty breeding plumes on in late January – what’s up with that?

Just me rambling about birds, books, bunnies, or whatever!