Tag Archives: bird watching

Sapsucker Woods

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Well, I got up to Ithaca a week or two back. It’s a place I sometimes go when I need some quiet by myself, which is sort of a surprise, as it’s actually a very busy place.

*But I started my visit at one of the quietest places in or around Ithaca, namely Sapsucker Woods. Birders world-wide know the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which blends extremely scholarly research with resources for the backyard birder. I’ve taken part in some of their “citizen science” programs, where ordinary people use their observations to contribute to scientific study.

*I came for the woods and the trails, for the Cornell Lab maintains a (mostly wooded) 230-acre sanctuary called Sapsucker Woods. With binoculars around my neck I wandered the trails, stopping to spot the birds but mostly working on the brooding for which I’d come. Just being in the woods works wonders for me, and there are trails here that I’ve never even seen.

*Something else I’ve never seen here, to be honest, is a sapsucker. But I do run across other woodpeckers, and one of them was drumming quite close as I wandered by. I saw a yellow warbler, and even came across a couple of wood thrushes. I felt good about this because I see them so seldom nowadays, acid rain and habitat destruction having wiped out fifty per cent in fifty years.

*In the pond I spot a number of great blue herons, and a bewildering being seeming to glide along the surface without any activity for propulsion… until a head breaks the surface, and I realize with a laugh that it’s a submerged muskrat carrying a clump of reeds.

*Around the feeding station (and elsewhere) are cardinals, starlings, robins, goldfinches, mourning doves, and red-wing blackbirds. Squirrels and chipmunks zip in and out from under cover, while butterflies, moths, and damselflies flit along on the missions peculiar to their kinds.

*You can enjoy the trails on your own… they’ll even lend you binoculars… or there are activities and guided walks from time to time. Inside the center you can sit by thirty feet of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the pond (lately covered with lilypads) and the feeders.

*Whenever the space is open I like to look at the wildlife murals and painting of Louis Agassiz Fuertes. Named for a great naturalist, Fuertes became a great nature artist, and his works are always wonders. Although born much later (1874, in Ithaca), he was in many ways a successor to Audubon.

*There are also two new murals, each covering a two-story interior wall. I instantly spotted what James Prosek was doing – echoing the endsheets of the groundbreaking 1934 Field Guide to the Birds, by Roger Tory Peterson. Both artists rendered the birds in their typical settings, all in black silhouette. For those of us of a certain age, such silhouettes seem as real as the birds themselves. They conjure up wintry days spent poring over those endsheets, hankering for the birds to come back again.

*Facing this is a marvelous world map by Jane Kim, depicting one representative of all 423 living families of bird in a location at which that bird is normally found – life size! The seven-foot ostrich, the five-foot cassowary, and the wandering albatross with its 10-foot wingspan all adorn more than 3000 square feet of mural, along with much smaller birds far more prosaic to us. But ghostly images show other families that have gone extinct, some in historic times.

*Anyhow, the Cornell Lab is a jewel of our Finger Lakes region – it’s even got its own Wild Birds Unlimited store. On my way out, a deer sauntered across the road in front of me. Great place.

Meet the Neighbors: the Great Horned Owl

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As most of us, in this freezing weather, rush from door to car and back again, with flaps and earmuffs and stocking caps jammed over our ears… and especially as we try to get in before dark… we don’t realize the startling drama taking place all around us. It’s mating season for the great horned owl.
Really? Now? In THIS weather!? It seems like slap in the face for Darwin. Scarcely any bird starts in even this early (let alone sooner), and the eggs are laid mighty early too – around here, often starting late in February. That cold sparse time is a mighty risky season in which to lay eggs and hatch out chicks. But all in all, the owls have been pretty successful with it. One thing they stint on, though, is nest building. They often commandeer the nest of an eagle, osprey, blue heron, or large hawk, none of whom actually need it at this time of year.
I spent five years volunteering with the Pennsylvania Atlas of Breeding Birds in the 1980s. With the commonwealth divided into 5000 equal-sized blocks we found the bird in half of them, and detected it as a confirmed or probable breeder in half of those. No doubt there would have been more, save for the inconvenience of the owls being nocturnal.
The great horned owl is “the” owl to most of us. This is the one we see pictures of, the one in cartoons, the one we conjure up in our mind’s eye and our mind’s ear. With those riveting huge eyes and those tufts that look like horns or ears (they’re neither), the great horned owl looks looks almost like a fellow human. One you won’t turn your back on, to be sure.
Even the hoo-hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo call is the stereotypical (or archetypal) sound of the owl.
Great horned owls are big birds. The chord of the wing – basically the cross-section from leading edge to trailing edge – is a foot or more. The span of the wings, though, can be well over four feet. The bird itself’s about two feet long. The span of the talons – on a single foot! – pushes eight inches when fully spread.
All this size is breathtaking, but I’m still amused to remember that lovely description by Kenneth Roberts – “one-fifth head and three-fifths bone, and the rest mostly voice.”
Those talons with their eight-inch spread exert 300 pounds per square inch when they seize something – which means that it stays seized. Their huge eyes give them excellent vision in the dark, and asymmetrically-placed ears help them bi-angulate moving prey.
Their wings are also formed in such a way, and operate in such a manner, as to minimize the sound that they make in flight – a superb adaptation for hunting.
Even so… not long after dark one night I was prowling outside the wooded edge of a quarry when I spotted a great horned owl shifting around high in a tree. I watched it (or at least its silhouette) for as long as I could (while the bird watched me).
At length the bird decided to shove off and sailed over the open field, and over me. I’d been watching the bird for some time. I knew what it was. I watched it coming. And the whoosh of its wings – however quiet they may be – still frightened me. It’s hard to explain, except to say that this is one mighty impressive bird.

The Birds We Used to Have

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Four years ago Game and Fish Magazine named our area as a November hunting hotspot… “where the ruffed grouse still reigns as the king of game birds.”
Hunters, birders, and the grouse themselves had better enjoy it while they can. In the time between 2000 and 2020 scientists are seeing our area degrade as a suitable winter range for the ruffed grouse. By 2050 it will be marginal at best, and by 2080 the explosive flutter of the grouse will be something old people tell their grandchildren about. Hunting’s a big sector of our local economy, but grouse won’t be part of it.
The National Audubon Society has completed a massive seven-year study examining a century of bird and climate records, and working up our best understanding of future trends. One of the things they’ve found is a disaster for the ruffed grouse. It will probably lose over half of its current range because the climate will make it unsuitable – without having anyplace to go.
Ducks Unlimited recently enthused about the vast flocks of black ducks, mallards, and pintails at Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge. Our region still looks pretty good for mallards (they’re very adaptable) and pintails by 2080. But black ducks would find it hard to hold on in those winters.
It’s not just game birds, either. By 2080 our area will no longer be suitable summer range for the bobolink, that lovely songbird, celebrated by Thoreau, whose flocks I’ve found on country lanes in Urbana, Bath, and Tuscarora. Gone as well will be the ovenbird, with its teacher-teacher-teacher call in the woods. Scarlet tanagers will not come to our feeders. Common mergansers who come here will be teetering right on the edge of their range.
We have already seen changes wrought in the wildlife by the warming of the world. In the early 1970s cardinals were an uncommon sight in my home town of Hope Valley, Rhode Island. They were unseen 35 miles north, where I went to college in Providence. Now they’re common sights at our winter feeders here, even farther north. It used to be that the cardinal and the mockingbird greeted you when you crossed the Mason-Dixon Line.
There are 588 native species of birds in North America. The Audubon study projects that over the next 66 years 314 will be in serious trouble because of the climate. From that group 188 species will lose more than half of their range, though with potential to gain some territory elsewhere (climate-threatened). The other 126 will suffer a net loss of over 50% (climate-endangered).
Of course, that’s ONLY looking at climate. The fact that a new range may be climate-suitable does NOT mean that it has the right food, or suitable nesting sites. And it does NOT take into account competition with other species who may also be crowding into the lifeboat.
It also does NOT take into account other changes to the range. For instance, right here in our area, look at the space south of Mossy Bank, Spencer Hill, and Harris Hill, running across the state line into Pennsylvania. It’s a high, heavily-wooded plateau, and might be suitable for any number of woodland species under new climate conditions.
BUT… what if, over the next 66 years, large sections of that forest become housing developments? What if it’s checkerboarded by gas drilling operations? What if there’s a major forest fire? What if there’s extensive lumbering?
In those cases, all the suitable climate in the world won’t matter to those woodland species. And stuff like that WILL happen over 66 years – maybe here, maybe elsewhere, maybe both.
For all our long history as human beings, we’ve had a very successful response whenever we’ve used an area past its limits: move. That worked, more or less, when OUR range and our population were small – there was always plenty more space. That doesn’t work any more. There’s noplace left to go. Our trash has caught up to us. It might be invisible, but it’s there in the air we breathe. We’ll watch the results, right outside our windows, and tell our grandkids about the birds we used to have.

Meet the Neighbors: Turkey Vultures, and Great Blue Herons

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A few weeks ago in this space we looked at the osprey and the bald eagle – two wonderful raptors with breathtaking wingspans, both of which are rapidly increasing their population in our area.
Three other common local birds also have such huge wingspans, but they’re very different from the eagle and osprey, and also from each other.
Turkey vultures are probably seen more often in our area than any other bird of prey… maybe more than all the others put together. They often form a wide V with their wings, then keep them steady as they float, glide, and drift on the thermal currents in the air. These are the same thermals lifting sailplanes from Dansville, Harris Hill, and Big Flats. Vultures scarcely ever flap their wings in flight, soaring just like those sleek lovely aircraft.
The comparison ends there. They’ve got naked heads and creepy faces, and they make ungainly lurches while on land. In the morning you’ll sometimes catch a whole treeful of them spreading out their wings so the sun can dry the dew. You feel like you’ve just crossed into the Twilight Zone.
Moreover they’re birds of prey only by courtesy. Vultures are part of nature’s clean-up crew, feasting on the dead. (They love roadkill.) From miles away their incredibly acute sense of smell detects carrion, even if only a few minutes old, and they zero in with a glide from all points of the compass. It may be gag-inducing, but where would we be without them?
When can you find them? All year round. Where can you find them? Everywhere. Curiously, they’ve congregated for many years in the northwest quadrant of Bath village, where you’ll often see two or three dozens in a kettle – a spiraling collection, circling upward on the thermals. You never seem to see them arrive, and yet they grow more numerous by the minute.
The turkey vulture has a six-foot wingspan… right at the top range for ospreys, and the bottom range for eagles.
We have two other birds with a wingspan almost reaching six foot, and one’s the great blue heron. A great blue (who seems more grey to me) is a wading bird that looks like it was put together from an Erector set. By an alien who’d heard about birds, but never actually seen one.
It stalks or strides or wades through shallow water and deep grass, often bending its long neck down and peering below. It may freeze for long minutes, waiting out its prey, then dart its spear-like beak to catch or spear a frog or fish.
These birds build large stick nests gathered close together in a rookery… a sort of arboreal apartment building for heron baby boomers. Of course they like this to be near water, and you can sometimes see these rookeries from I-86 rest stops along the Chemung or Susquehanna.
Great blue herons have long legs, long bodies, long necks, and long beaks. And broad wings with wide spans – 70 inches or so, comparable to the osprey.
So if you spot a bird with a really wide wingspan of six feet or so, here’s a little mini-field guide for our area.
White head and tail with dark body – bald eagle.
Crook in the wings – osprey.
Wings in a gentle upward vee – turkey vulture.
Broad wings, long trailing legs, neck folded back, probably flying low – great blue heron.
Flying in an organized flock, and probably honking to beat the band – Canada goose. But that’s another column, all its own.

Shallow Water Attracts Many Varied Water Birds

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Remember that Sunday a couple of weeks ago when it was 83 degrees – two days before it snowed?
Well, I had had family members at three different hospitals that week, and one was still in, so although I NEEDED to get outside for a while, I was too frazzled and worn for hiking or anything very demanding. So instead I went bird watching in Hammondsport.
There are two places in Hammondsport to see water birds… Champlin Beach, and the village waterfront. I started out at the Beach, right on Route 54. First off, I was disappointed that the pair of trumpeter swans were nowhere to be seen. But I consoled myself.
There didn’t seem to be much around that was very interesting, which illustrated what’s probably the best rule of nature watching – keep on looking. So I watched the Canada geese for a spell, and the mallard ducks – lovely birds both, bur pretty commonplace around here. I listened to the starlings singing. Yes, they sing, and their song is beautiful. They just throw in a grawk now and then to remind you that they’re starlings. I also spent some time watching and listening to a robin sing. His “cheeriup” heralds ever-returning spring, and he hopped from ground to rock to stump like he was stage-managing the season himself. Beautiful bird, and the first one many children learn.
By then I had worked my way over by the old boat dock, and here I was rewarded by a close look at a raft of American coots. A coot is cute. It’s a fat little black bird with a white front on its bill and between the eyes. They usually travel in small flocks, and they’re diving birds. They submerge completely to grub up food, and they’re in no hurry to come back up.
I’d seen the coots hanging around as I worked along the shore, but in passing the dock I got a good surprise – several pairs of common mergansers. In coots and geese the sexes look alike, but mallards and mergansers can be identified male or female from a distance… the male merganser has a striking whitish body and dark head, while the female has a small crest. Mergansers are diving birds like coots, but they’ve got serrated bills, almost like proto-teeth.
Feeling that I was doing pretty well for the afternoon, I left the park and drove over to the waterfront. While there had been twenty or thirty coots and six or eight mergansers, I now found more coots (off to the right, away from the waterfront itself), five or six pied-billed grebes, and, down off the mouth of the flume, a common loon.
Now, loons and grebes are – guess what? – diving birds. So is the bufflehead, of which I saw a single immature paddling around by the boardwalk.
This got me to thinking. Why were five types of divers hanging around the shore in Hammondsport? Obviously they’d prefer shallow water, but what were they up to down there out of sight? Were they all after the same thing? Or did they all fill different ecological niches in the same space?
So, just for starters… coots, with their lobed feet (rather than full webs) will eat almost anything, but they really go for underwater plants, such as algae, duckweed, milfoil, cattails – you name it, really. Mergansers, on the other hand, mostly take small fish, putting those serrated bills to work. So coots and mergansers can hang out side by side (just as I’d seen) without actually competing.
Grebes, like coots, have lobed feet, but unlike coots, they go for fish. This helps explain why you often see a grebe simply disappear, then come up again a minute or two later a good distance away.
The loon too is a fish-eater, with projections or barbs on the tongue and the roof of the mouth to help along, while the bufflehead dives down to find invertebrates.
So… I’d seen coots AWAY from the swimming areas at both locations. That made sense. They want plants, and that’s where the plants are still allowed to grow. The nearby mergansers could peacefully hunt the same space for fish.
The grebes, the loon, and the bufflehead were all in the plant-barren swimming area, but in shallow water where it would be relatively easy to spot small fish or invertebrates. And they were present IN SMALL NUMBERS, which probably reflected the amount of prey available in the swimming area.
As loons drift along, they ride so low in the water that they look as though they’re sinking. Suddenly a loon will put its head into the water and go down after it. Some people have suggested that loons are an ancient evolutionary development, as their feet are set so far back that they’re scarcely any use on land. Nesting is just about the only reason loons go ashore, spending the rest of their life on (or under) the water.
Grebes, as we’ve mentioned, just sort of disappear. I never really see one go – they just seem there and gone, as though a shark has snatched them from underneath. The cute coot pulls a neat little stunt, jumping upward out of the water, pulling a 180, and diving down nose first. Both the upward and the forward movement are just about the length of the coot’s body. It’s a hard maneuver to catch, as you never know which one’s about to dive, but lots of fun to watch when you see it.
So, five different diving birds in an hour along those shallow waters, not to mention gulls, geese, duck, swallows, starlings, robins, and crows. A nice way to spend some time, and the occasion for an interesting little research project.

Backyard Bird List

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.