Tag Archives: Sapsucker Woods

A Walk in Sapsucker Woods

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Last Sunday after church… following the equinox, but still a beautiful summery day (albeit with bright autumn leaves)… we took a drive over to Ithaca, and visited Sapsucker Woods.

Sapsucker Woods is the wildlife sanctuary attached to the world-renowned Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Many bird watchers and bird students find it a very special place because of the association, although it’s not particularly a place for rare birds. It’s just a place to enjoy (and study) birds.

We first visited Ithaca 26 years ago, as my wife was awaiting open-heart surgery. Now she’s waiting for a pacemaker, and she wanted to make another trip.

All of the trails are good trails, level (mainly) and well-kept (with some roots here and there). They’re good to wander around on spotting birds, frogs, squirrels, and other small wildlife. They’re good to exercise on, if you want to stride out in pleasant settings. They’re very good of you have heart or balance problems. We set off on the three-quarter-mile Wilson Trail, and we started at the pond, right by the visitors center.

The center itself is closed “for the duration,” but there were a fair number of people at the pond and on the trails – all of them observing good mask discipline and distance discipline. We saw a group of two or three college-agers, a couple of separate families with young children, one three-generational family group, and several couples or individuals. It sounds like a lot, but for most of our walk we were alone in the woods.

The pond is shrunken and anemic just now, choked by lily pads and surrounded by mudflats, thanks to the drought or semi-drought we’ve been suffering. A couple of Canada geese were honking away anyhow, while nearby a small duck (maybe a black duck) ignored them on its never-ending quest for water bugs. On the island nearby, a pileated woodpecker puttered around in the leafy tops, while an immature red-headed woodpecker zipped in and out along the shore.

The pond was open to the blue sky, but a few steps away we were in a yellow wood under the forest canopy, enjoying quiet, in companionable shade. A few deer had dug their hooves in along our way, while squirrels vibrated themselves across the trail, up the trees, under dead logs, along the forest floor… sometimes all within the space of ten seconds.

The trees were still leafed out, and the colors were vibrant that weekend, but it was also the first week that leaves seemed to be falling with purpose. They were dappling the trail and the boardwalks – in a few days, they’d be covering them. Most of those that had fallen (or WERE falling) were yellow, but Joyce found some eye-catching specimens that were mostly yellow, but with green streaks along the veins.

Although the trail goes around the pond, for most of its way it loses the sight, until you come back almost to the shadow of the visitors center. The one duck and the two geese were still on the job, but now we also saw a great blue heron, perching its four-foot height on a high dead branch. Blue dragonflies zipped by, back, and away in the immemorial manner of their kind.

Milkweed had gone by, cattails were breaking open… down from both was caught in the corner cobwebs. Among the reeds and tall grasses, asters and thistles beamed out brightly in summer’s dying green. A pleasant walk. We opened the car, took a seat, and shared a peanut butter sandwich. The trail was just right, while we’re waiting for the pacemaker.

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.