Archive for October, 2007
Left Field
Posted by: | CommentsI don’t think of myself as a particularly shy person, but barber-chair conversation has always come hard to me. It’s even harder now that I go to one of those cheap chain haircut places, where I’m faced with a different “stylist” every time.
The young girl whose lot it was this morning to bring order to these tresses was pleasant enough and friendly; but she didn’t much know what to do with my answer to her question about my livelihood. Scissors poised in mid-air, brow furrowed, she waited a minute and then said to me, “I think Freddy Krueger is a lot scarier than Jason. How about you?”
A New York Snake
Posted by: | CommentsThis fine little fellow was on the path at the Rogers Center last week, and only grudgingly ceded his place to the lumbering biped with the camera.
He was quite aggressive, as behooves a small and probably tasty prey item during raptor migration.
Anyone out there care to fill me in on this creature’s identity?
He was about 15 inches long and was in a slightly swampy woodland.
Di Provenz’ il mar, il suol…
Posted by: | CommentsThere are still two spaces left on our trip to Mediterranean France in April 2008, “Chirps and Churches.” We will be combining some fantastic birding in the Camargue with visits to such cultural and historical monuments as Roman Arles, the Papal Palace in Avignon, and Les Baux.
Target species include everything from Greater Flamingo to Blue Rock-Thrush, and our timing is such that we have good chances at seeing both some lingering winterers and a wide selection of breeding birds, among them “The Fancy Four”: Hoopoe, Roller, Cuckoo, and Bee-eater.
If you are interested in this expedition into one of the richest cultural and natural landscapes in Europe, please drop me an e-mail at birding@birdaz.com. But do it soon! It’s going to be a great time.
The Madison Street Impoundment
Posted by: | CommentsI was fortunate yesterday morning to get to go birding with Debbie and Harvey here in Hamilton. They showed me the best local birding site I’ve seen so far, a remnant marsh and impoundment barely 5 minutes from our place; Alison and I had glimpsed it from the road the other day, but it takes good local knowledge to figure out what’s accessible and what’s not around here!
The water levels were low in the scraped impoundment itself, a condition taken advantage of by 30-some Killdeer. They made themselves known, of course, even as we were just getting out of the car 1/4 mile away, and so did a lingering Greater Yellowlegs, which kleeped at us most of the morning; the four Wilson’s Snipe lurking on the grassy edges permitted a much closer approach. A pretty good shorebird constellation for late October in central New York; I wonder what the place is like during the peak of wader migration.
Ducks were few, but among the Mallards were a few Green-winged Teal and a pair of Wood Ducks. Canada Geese were moving around in impressive numbers, from ponds to green lawns and back; even in flight, the differences between the swan-necked and slope-headed introduced birds and the stockier, darker wild migrants are apparent.
Passerine birding was not as good as the waterbirds. A stop at the Madison Lane trail, however, produced a very sweet Eastern Phoebe, happily flycatching on what had turned out to be a beautiful Indian summer morning.
Sparrows and an Eagle
Posted by: | CommentsWhile Alison toiled away at her desk, I made another late-morning visit to the Rogers Center yesterday. I’ve decided that it’s a nice enough spot, reminiscent in many ways of the large city park in another Hamilton that served as my “home patch” for a couple of years. Canada Geese abound, and on a nice fall day the Center is heavily visited by humans, too; but there are fine out-of-the-way corners where a birder can simply bird.
I went back chiefly to enjoy again the Field Sparrows I’d seen the day before, but I found that they had moved on, whether to another hedgerow or south to their wintering grounds I can’t say. The small flock of first-winter White-crowned Sparrows was still present, though, and as I was watching them, a Vesper Sparrow flashed in and perched above me for several minutes. I assume that this is a fairly uncommon bird here, and it was great to see one in the east again.
One of the great advantages of the Rogers Center is that it is surrounded not by housing developments but by farmland along the Chenango River. A quick scan of one of the fields produced a flock of 31 American Pipits, too shy for a close approach but still enjoyable.
The edge of that field, where corn was still standing, hosted a few Chipping Sparrows, too. Slate-colored Juncos, White-throated Sparrows, and a single Swamp Sparrow filled out my emberizid list for the day.
So it had been a good and birdful walk, but with clear skies and light winds, I’d been disappointed to see so few raptors: a couple of Turkey Vultures, five Red-tailed Hawks, most of them probably locals, and a brown Northern Harrier. I knew that something had to be moving, and Alison was of the same opinion; I peeled her away from her work and we set off north of town for Lake Moraine, a place she’d visited before and warned me would be nearly birdless.
She was right about the lake proper, which harbored little more than a couple of Ring-billed and a single Herring Gull. The skies were a different matter. We were there for just a bit more than half an hour, and while it would be a severe exaggeration to speak of them ’streaming’, Red-tailed Hawks passed over at a good rate, and a big black speck flew in to become a juvenile Golden Eagle! This was Alison’s first in the east, and one of very few I’d seen at this longitude, too. Enough to turn me into a state lister.
