Archive for New York
A Modest Quiz Bird
Posted by: | Comments
Here’s a somewhat more revealing view of the Chipping Sparrow frequenting our feeders the last couple of days. In my original photo of the partial bird, the bird’s small size (easily deduced by anyone who’s ever held a handful of black oil sunflower seed!) and long, narrow tail pretty much narrowed it down to Spizella. The rich, deep brown of the upperparts should have ruled out Field, Clay-colored, and Brewer’s Sparrows, and the whitish flank and pink toes eliminate American Tree Sparrow.
I actually had to play this quiz myself: the only view I’d had of the bird was its hindquarters on the camera’s display, and had to wait some time to confirm my identification of the image. My identification was confident, on the basis of the features I’ve just described, but it’s well to remember that certainty never precludes error! So we’ve been glad to have the bird linger on the porch, eating its fill of sunflower seeds and chasing the American Goldfinches from their perches.
New York: First Snow (and a Quiz)
Posted by: | CommentsOur 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?
Oneida Lake
Posted by: | CommentsSaturday, like the day before and the day after, dawned dark and wet, but Judy and Alison and I struck off for Oneida Lake anyway. The woods in Verona Beach State Park were dripping when we arrived–at first with water, and then with birds. A small flock of Black-capped Chickadees formed the core of a feeding frenzy that included White-breasted Nuthatches, Tufted Titmouses, Myrtle Warblers, a persistently singing Pine Warbler, a few Black-throated Green Warblers, and a couple of Ruby-crowned Kinglets; a dozen Cedar Waxwings stayed close but characteristically aloof from their lesser companions.
This flock also contained a single female Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, dwarfed by the pair of Pileated Woodpeckers feeding noisily in the dead trees overhead.
All these landbirds were a pleasant surprise. The lake, too, had a few birds on it, most abundant and most conspicuous among them half a thousand Bonaparte’s Gulls.
Ring-billed Gulls were common, too, and there were a few American Herring Gulls about; but I was most excited to see small gangs of Great Black-backed Gulls loafing on the sandbars.
Somehow I hadn’t expected to see them, common as they are nowadays everywhere between the coast and the Great Lakes.
Waterfowl were still scarce, with the exception of a nice raft of 200 Common Mergansers. I’m sure that will change in the next weeks as cold and ice creep down from the north!
Last of the Winter’s Redpolls
Posted by: | CommentsOn my last morning in Hamilton–a cold one!–I took Margie and Rich up on their generous invitation to drop by for a little feeder watching. The air was thin and the wind strong, but an Eastern Phoebe was singing on the nearby creek, and Common Grackles were singing and dancing from the tops of the tall conifers.
But I was there to see one species, Common Redpoll.
On Sunday I’d been so surprised by April redpolls that I hadn’t even tried to take any pictures, but yesterday I interrupted my admiration of this last of the winter’s lingerer to snap a distant photo or two. This is a romantic species for me, bound up in memory with the deep snows and cold winds of a childhood now 30 years past; to find them on a bright day in mid-April was startling, and to watch this one yesterday as it fed with American Goldfinches, Downy Woodpeckers, Black-capped Chickadees, Tufted Titmice, and Song and American Tree Sparrows was like stepping back into my early days of birding in the midwest.
Easterners
Posted by: | CommentsA large part of the allure of many North American emberizids is their restricted range: who hasn’t spent time on the southern Great Plains for Harris’s Sparrow, in the piney woods of the southeast for Bachman’s Sparrow, in trashy southwestern washes looking for Abert’s Towhee?
But for each of these local specialties, there are sparrows whose fascination is based in just the opposite, in their vast distribution over most of the continent. Song Sparrow and Dark-eyed Junco, for example, are among the commonest and most widespread birds in the Nearctic, ranging from Alaska to Florida, from California to Quebec.
But they aren’t the same everywhere.
This Song Sparrow is on territory here in Madison County, New York, singing the day away on the edge of Woodman Pond. He’s unmistakably an eastern bird, with those heavy chocolate markings–as unlike our pale reddish birds in southeast Arizona as you can imagine.
The juncos here, too, are distinctly eastern in appearance: dark and fairly uniform in coloration, the males deep slate, the females (like this one) with just a tinge of brown on the back.
This individual is a regular and greedy visitor to Alison’s millet pile; interestingly, the bird shows a single white wingbar on the left, formed by the tips of the greater coverts, while on the right wing, shown here, those spots either have worn away or were never present.
