Living on the Wind

I just finished Scott Weidensaul's book from several years go about migratory birds. He is one of my favorite writers and naturalists. I've been particularly interested in hawks this winter, as there have been several hanging out in my neighborhood. Both Cooper's and Red-Shouldered hawks have been hunting in the area, sometimes lighting very close -- on the power line in front of the house or in the highest branches of the trees above our house. Just this evening, I heard a commotion and looked out to find a pair of Red Shoulders sitting together on a bare Elm branch; one of them was methodically taking apart a little mouse or vole that it had just nabbed from my front yard. Natural pest control! I don't think I've ever seen a pair so close together before.

Weidensaul's book is an amazingly detailed and lively account of the wonders of migration, spanning the entire Western hemisphere from sea bird breeding grounds off the Bering Strait to the wintering grounds of hawks and other birds on the pampas of Argentina. He follows the tiniest songbirds on their trips from North America, winging their way across the Gulf to the Caribbean Islands, Central America, and points further south. What makes the book so engaging is that Weidensaul, a federally recognized bird bander, describes first hand all the sights and sounds of the far-flung locales -- from near the Arctic Circle, where Eiders and hoary redpolls live (alongside polar bears and arctic foxes), to Veracruz in Mexico along the flightpath for hundreds of thousands of migrants, to the Platte River where Sandhill Cranes gather before finishing their migration north to Alaska and Canada.

Understanding why these birds make their dangerous journeys and how the odds are increasingly stacked against them is pretty depressing. Most of it has to do with the loss of habitat, especially contiguous forest, but also over-developed wetlands. We are probably going to lose many species, which makes me appreciate this last chance, perhaps, to live with them -- even the ones that I never get to see. It's what makes me happy to feed the birds each winter and every now and then spot a few migrants on their way north or south --cedar waxwings and golden-crowned kinglets in the fall. Most of the birds at my feeders are year-round residents, but my little white-throated sparrows arrive each winter to stay a few months before going back to New England and Canada to breed. I saw three or four this weekend, but I expect they'll be moving north soon on their journey, so I'm helping to fatten them up before they go.

Weidensaul, recognizing the fragility of so many migrating birds, ends his book with this lovely meditation on the redstart he has spotted in his woods:

What I cannot see, no matter how closely I look, is what drives this small creature, barely heavier than air, to make the journeys that it must make. I may have seen this same redstart in an acacia forest in Jamaica, among the ruins of a Maya city in Belize, or in a half-dozen other places in the tropics. I can only imagine what has happened to it in its life -- what near brushes with predators it has escaped, what storms have tried to rake it from the sky, what females have taken it as a mate, what dynasties of redstarts it has founded. What thousands of miles have passed beneath it's stubby wings, which seem so ill-suited to the task but which have carried it back here again , to this mountain, this stream, this willow thicket. Its secrets are locked in that tiny packet of a brain and muscle and instinct, a few feet away but separated from me by an immense, uncrossable distance. It knows, and I do not.

Ice Storm

Suffering through a snow and ice storm is inconvenient at best and often very dangerous, as we Kentuckians are finding out. However, aesthetically speaking, it is a wondrous thing to behold, particularly if you don't have a tree knifing through your roof and you're not freezing to death. For a day before the snow turned to ice, the birds in my backyard were obviously fueling up. All day, cardinals, house finches, juncos, and sparrows clustered around the feeders. My goldfinch feeder, full of nyjer thistle seed, usually lasts weeks. It was drained within a day and a half. Everytime I looked outside three or four would be fighting over the two perches on the tube. In the picture, two of them sit on the fence, waiting their turn, flanked by house sparrows.

A dead, brown landscape transformed overnight into a glittering, crystalline world, and the birds disappeared. Individual magnolia leaves, coppery-brown, suspend in their own glass boxes like bees caught in amber, but perfectly clear, every vein visible. A heavily beaded dogwood stands against a Wedgewood blue sky, bare barberry hedges drip with diamonds, the holly leaf's sharp points grow into claws of ice. Every surface is brilliant with refracted light and icicles lengthen into daggers and spears, dripping off every roof and gable. The first night of the storm, at 2:30 in the morning, I awakened to the first crash of limbs falling in the neighbor's yard. All night and into the next day you could stand on the porch and listen to cracking, groaning branches giving way and exploding into the surface of ice-crusted snow as if a giant beast was lumbering though a forest.

Today, it is sunny and clear, and the melting has begun. There is a continual drip, slide, crash, and sizzle. Maybe the birds will venture back out from their hiding places.

On the nest

Finally, spring seems to have taken hold. Today was sunny, warm, and breezy. On my afternoon walk, I saw a hawk circle overhead and a pair of house finches perched in a cedar bower. The red bud trees are just starting to show their fire-pink nubs, and my favorite spring wildflowers are peeping out of the grass -- tiny dog violets, spring beauties -- and carpets of heal-all and dandelion, spreading around a single row of bright yellow daffodils.

I took one turn around the pond, populated by Canada Geese in aggressive, nest-defending attitudes. I try to keep a wide berth, since I don't want to pick a fight with a surly goose or alarm the mothers quietly sitting their nests by the shoreline. One breeding pair was loudly intent on kicking another pair off their turf, necks extended serpent-like as they advanced hissing (yes, a hissy-fit) and squawking. I don't know if it's correct to say squawking, but it sounds a lot more belligerent than "honking." What made the scene really amusing were the grazing "onlooker" geese turned in attitudes expressing a Jerry Springer-like fascination with the domestic fight scene. Smaller, but no less fierce, I also saw mockingbirds chasing each other around as they vied for territory. Whew, it's dangerous out there!

I didn't see any ducklings, but only a couple of mallard pairs on the pond and one American Coot. Even though I had looked it up before, I had managed to completely forget what this "duck" is. Sooty black all over with a whitish bill, they're not actually ducks, but belong to the rail family, which is why I had such a hard time tracking it down in the first place. I don't think they're uncommon, but the office park pond is the only place I've ever seen one. I learned that their bills are not flat like a duck's but triangular like a chicken's. So maybe now that I've reinforced it in my memory, I'll be able to identify them correctly from now on.

Project Feeder Watch

To help combat the winter blahs, I decided to sign up for Project Feeder Watch, which is sponsored by the Cornell Ornithology Lab. I've put up a feeder for the last couple of years in my little, postage-stamp yard and enjoy watching the birds who come to visit. This year I'm going to count my birds and send in the data. I love watching the chickadees, finches, titmice, etc., duke it out around my feeder, or queue up on the back fence, if they're feeling courteous. Then there are the squirrels...arrrgghhh! They're diabolical--but at least I have something to distract me from the cold, gray days and the bare trees. The thing that sent me to Cornell's site was a book called Songbird Journeys by Miyoko Chu. If you're interested in songbirds, particularly their migratory behavior, this is a great book. It is always so humbling to be reminded of how much our lives are connected and intertwined with the rest of the natural world. Chu makes you think about the small things that you do (or don't do) that can affect our songbird populations, migration patterns, and ultimately their survival.