New York: First Snow (and a Quiz)

Our Sunday walk to the brushy swamps of Madison Street was close to perfect: clear, bright, and a little cool–Indian summer giving way to fall.

As those blue skies suggest, it was a good day for raptors, and we were delighted to see a juvenile Golden Eagle and a Merlin, neither of them terribly common in central New York.

Passerines included the first Field Sparrow I’d seen in some time, and a good half a hundred Cedar Waxwings.

We looked in vain for the big gray ones (they should be arriving soon), but the scrutiny we devoted to the birds did turn up something at least as interesting: two members of the flock had deep reddish-orange tail tips, the tell-tale sign of an appetite for introduced honeysuckle.

And then, our walk over, the weather changed. First it was rain, then cold, and then, late yesterday morning, the drops changed to flakes, and we had our first snow of the season. Ten inches of it overnight!

And to think I could be in Tucson…. As the temperature rose this morning, it began to melt, adorning houses and mailboxes and even bird feeders with icicles, a phenomenon I’d nearly forgot about after these years in the southwest.

Happily, the snow hasn’t deterred the users of those feeders, and activity was high as we watched over breakfast.

My favorites are the White-breasted Nuthatches, a mountain canyon specialty in southeast Arizona but a charmingly confiding glutton here in the east.

With that broad black cap, short bill, pale back, and white flank, there’s no mistaking this for “one of ours” from Arizona; this is Carolina Nuthatch all the way–should the taxonomic split ever come, that is.

The snow has also brought in a few Tufted Titmice, a species we don’t see much of in this open grassy lawn that passes for a yard.

There’s something about that buzzy whine as they approach the feeders that says “winter in the east”–though I first got to know this bird at its northwestern extreme in the Midwest.

And now a quiz: what is this fine bird coming to the feeders today?