On our refrigerator is a yellow slip with a long list – all the bird species that we’ve seen on, from, or over our place just outside Bath village.
We started keeping a Backyard Bird List maybe thirty years ago, when the kids were little and we lived outside Allentown, Pennsylvania, and we still keep it up today. I tot up over 30 species on our list, without our having made any really vigorous efforts. We do keep up bird feeders in that Thanksgiving-to-Easter bear hibernation season, and we also have a little pond across the road from us.
Because of the pond, our “backyard” list includes the great blue heron, a four-foot wading bird that stalks about the pond seeking whom it may devour, then darting its spear-like beak for a fish or a frog. Great blues are beautiful and terrifying all at once.
Then, also thanks to the pond, there are the ducks: mallards, buffleheads, ring-neckeds, goldeneyes, and American wigeons. If I really spent some time with my binoculars, I imagine I’d turn up black ducks as well.
That little pond certainly gives us a head start on waterfowl and wading birds, but just about everybody in our region could add Canada geese to their own lists. These beautiful birds pass over in dozens or in hundreds. If we were sending audio files to extra-terrestrials, and we wanted one single sound to define North America, we would send the cry of the Canada goose in flight.
Where we live, we’re also treated to regular flights by flocks of rock doves… or, as most of us call them, pigeons. They fly from the barn a quarter-mile up the road to the silo a quarter-mile down. And back. Again. And again. And again.
Their cousins the mourning doves graze around under our bird feeders, content with whatever droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place below.
We put out thistle seeds, peanut halves, suet, and black-oil sunflower seed, bringing in the usual feeder crowd for our part of the country. Goldfinches come in little flocks, and we watch the passage of the seasons as their yellow plumage wanes and waxes. Tufted titmice come in small groups, while chickadees dart in and out from the foliage. Juncos, like the mourning doves, tend to stay low. So do flickers.
We get the house finch and the purple finch, the house sparrow, chipping sparrow, song sparrow, white-throat sparrow. Cardinals come in pairs, blue jays in twos or threes. Starlings, of course, may show up in flocks at almost any time. Did you know that they have a beautiful song? Every once in a while, though, they throw in a grawk, just to remind you that they’re starlings. Crows flap all around, of course.
Our suet and peanuts bring in both the red-breasted nuthatch and the white-breasted nuthatch. These cute little guys like working their way down a tree trunk upside down, hunting for bugs in the bark. They tackle the suet the same way, clinging to the cage and eating away head down.
Woodpeckers like the suet too, but they prefer to say upright. We get the downy with its black-and-white coat, and the red-bellied, with its dramatic red head. (The names were made up centuries ago, by guys who shot the birds and then studied them in dissection pans with magnifying glasses. You can’t really spot the red belly in the field.)
We’ve enjoyed some specialty sightings, too, of birds who aren’t really regulars, at least with us: the bluebird, the northern oriole, and the ruby-throated hummingbird.
And of course we have our hawks and their cousins. The kestrel is a small darting bird, and the harrier a larger creature with more deliberate movements. Both of them hover when they’re zeroing in on prey. The sharp-shinned hawk is between them in size, while the big turkey vulture soars lazily, often in big creepy flocks, sniffing out carrion miles away.
And all that’s just from the yard, with no more effort than some bird feeders and a pair of binoculars. If we put in some time after dark, no doubt we’d score some owls, while with five minutes of driving we could pick up bald eagles, osprey, swans, and wild turkeys.
Apart from kangaroos, birds and us are the only creatures that go on two feet. And they’re ALL around us! Anytime we step outdoors… anytime we look through the window… we’re with the birds. In apartment blocks… or office blocks… birds remind us that we’re only barely keeping nature at bay. Which, when you think about it, is one of the best things about our lives.
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Join us 4 PM Friday, March 7 for the illustrated talk SPRING MIGRATION: BIRDS OF STEUBEN COUNTY, by Dr. Randy Weidner — Steuben County Historical Society Winter Lecture Series, free and open to the public at Bath Fire Hall.