Tag Archives: Birds

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.

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.