Bird Ephemera

Landscape as metaphor

2012-02-15T12:47:00.000-06:00

Sky gray, the air tasting of impending snow. And what does that taste like? Damp, almost metallic.

Landscape as metaphor; it feels as if winter has been here forever. Nothing green: barren brown grasses across the prairie, the trees leafless against the horizon. Myself, listless. I haven't seen anything unexpected in weeks. So why am I here? Why do I do this? Because nature is the thread that secures me to the tapestry that is everything else, even when it's hard to sense that subtle tug. Because it's better than not being here.

Because...you never know. Today might be the day that something startles me. Or just the day that the meadowlark that has been wintering here on the prairie shows itself. I know it's there. I saw it at the end of December. And besides, I can hear it, buzzing to itself from the grasses.

Not working has released a wellspring of pent-up energy, as if every day that I dragged myself home, drained and totally brain dead, has now been given back to me in one fell swoop. I could walk forever. Yes, forever. I could walk to the West Coast. Or south, across Texas, across Mexico, into the rain forest. Then I could be looking for quetzals from the pinnacle of some Mayan ruins, instead of looking for a meadowlark on a brown winter prairie.

Now that I think of it, what kind of a rat bastard lays someone off in the middle of February? A time of year so bleak that it can drive people to despair even without the specter of financial ruin? Who wouldn't be depressed, with the sun hidden by clouds for days on end, as distant and uncaring as Nietzsche's dead god?

There is such an unmoored feeling to being out of work. It puts me in a dire existentialist frame of mind. L'homme est condamne a etre libre. Il se sent etranger dans un monde absurde. But instead of taking up smoking again and sitting around drinking bitter coffee and reading the works of Sartre, I'm out looking for birds. The world is a little less absurd when I'm birding, and I don't feel such a stranger in it.

I startle the Canada geese on the loop along the lake. They take flight, flashing the crescent moon of white feathers on their rumps, then skidding across the ice for a landing. Where the ice is very thin, there is a brief splintering noise and then the splash of goose hitting water.

Around town, the trees and rooftops have been taken over by starlings, all clicking and whistling as if begging for a kiss. Here in the woods, it's still the same old winter combo. Crows, woodpeckers, titmice, nuthatches. Angry blue jays, but then, is there any other kind? Chickadees and American tree sparrows everywhere, but not a junco to be seen. Has the mild winter kept them further north? Is this something that the juncos have the free will to decide?

Is it too much to ask, to want to see a flicker? Just one little flicker? Other birders have been seeing them. Must my every excursion be so resolutely flickerless? Still, something about this slate-colored day makes the wings of the nuthatches seem almost blue when they fly, a shade I only notice on days like this one, when the sky looks bruised.

A hawk glides silently overhead, by its shape, a Cooper's. A great blue heron rises, gawky and soundless, from the creek. In two or three weeks, I should start seeing changes: grackles and blackbirds and killdeer returning. Ducks in migration. An explosion of startled woodcocks at the edges of the prairies. But not now. Not yet. The land is still waiting, and so am I.

Species seen: European starling; Canada goose; American crow; ring-billed gull; black-capped chickadee; blue jay; American tree sparrow; mourning dove; downy woodpecker; white breasted nuthatch; red-bellied woodpecker; northern cardinal; house finch; eastern bluebird; Cooper's hawk; great blue heron.

From the Bird Journal, February 13, a walk at Weldon Springs.

A Memory Palace for Birds

2012-02-12T16:27:00.002-06:00

It was cold this morning. Although a bit belated, winter finally decided it was here this weekend, with the windchill factor sending the temperature into the single digits. But still...the sun was out. There was something timeless and compelling about the endless blue of the sky. No two ways about it--time for a bird walk!

I decided on the Houseboat Cove Trail at Mascoutin, along Clinton Lake, as I had not been there in a couple of weeks, but it's still pretty close to home. Since the neither entirely unanticipated nor unwelcome announcement that the Crow is out of a job, I must be more careful with the gas before hopping in the car for a day of birding. And it's better for the environment to be thrifty, as well.

Anyway, it's cold, I was out, and I was seeing birds. In milder weather, I like to take along a moleskine notebook to record all the species I see, but as I had misplaced my only mechanical pencil (the ink in pens tends to freeze on days like today), and I was loath to expose my digits to the chill, I had to rely on memory to log my birds in my Bird Journal once I got home.

To keep the birds in mind, I like to use a mnemonic device known as the Memory Palace, or method of loci. This technique, which was invented by the ancient Roman orators, is sometimes called "a mental walk." Basically, it entails visualizing a route that you know well, and "placing" items that you need to memorize at specific areas along the walk. In other words, if I gave you a list of random words to remember, you would think of ten landmarks along your familiar "walk" and stick a word at each one. By tying new information to the familiar, people are able to remember more things than they could otherwise.

When it's too cold to log birds (or I just forgot my notebook!), I turn my physical walk into a mental walk as well, affixing each species in my mind to the location where I saw it.

Black capped chickadees -- Two, on the shrubbery near the ground, to the left of the trail just after I passed the ephemeral pool that is now filled with water, but completely iced over. This area is completely birdy, but today there were just the chickadees.

American crow -- One, against the blue sky, its wings "rowing" in through the air. Mid-way down the path as it runs straight to the inlet of the lake.

Ring-billed gulls and mallards -- immediately past the bench, where the trail turns and runs along the Cove. They were all out in the water. The mallards took off in a quacking panic as soon as they saw me. The gulls, they couldn't care less.

Red-bellied woodpecker and hairy woodpecker -- one each. I saw both as soon as the trail switch-backed to the right to continue running parallel to the cove, the red-bellied on the left side of the trail, the hairy on the right. I knew the RB at once from its call, and again from the flash of its red "skullcap" as it inched along the tree; the hairy I first recognized by size--is that a robin? A blue jay? No, a woodpecker -- a hairy.

Evidence of woodpeckers

Dark-eyed juncos -- to the right of the trail, in one of the more open areas before the trail forks into the "long" and "short" walks. I recognize them by the white "V's" created by their tail feathers as they fly. They've been significantly absent on my last few birds walks, so I'm glad to see them.

The short road or the long one?

Great blue herons -- two, at least. Caught sight of them taking off to the right, in the area with all the sunken trees.

The drowned trees

Even though I've been seeing them all winter -- the mild temperatures have kept the water largely free of ice -- it still surprises me each time. I just don't think of them as winter birds. And something about them -- is it the long dangling legs? The large size? The prehistoric cries? Or just their extraordinary beauty? -- startles me every time.

There are also dozens of mallards in this area, all quacking, all panicking. In the past, this area has also yielded blue-winged teal and a lone female wood duck. Today? Mallards.

Northern cardinals -- about a half dozen, feeding on the ground to the right of the trail in another scrubby/shrubby area. In the intense winter sunlight, one of the males looked preternaturally red. I don't know if you've ever watched a fantasy cartoon with a pile of magical rubies, glowing from within? That's what this guy looked like. I mean, he was CGI red! I've never seen anything like it....

Tufted titmouse -- two of them, same area, right before the line of hedge apples. What can I say? So cute! So precious! Such crabby noises! As I was watching one of them rummaging around on a branch for his lunch, I thought: This is what's real. It felt...I dunno...kind of spiritual? What can I say? I like titmice!

Former windbreak -- a row of Osage orange

Blue jay -- one, on the left side of the trail, just a few feet beyond the titmice. There were some cardinals and juncos as well.

American Tree Sparrow -- perhaps a half a dozen, sheltering in the line of Osage orange trees, which were probably planted a while ago, when this was all farmland, probably as a windbreak.

Last but not least, a small flock of Canada geese, flying overhead right before I got to the parking lot...and then a lone American coot glanced in the water as I was driving home.

And I can still remember each one! It gets more difficult in the spring, when mixed flocks of warblers fill the trees and the list runs over fifty species. Today was just thirteen, not too hard to recall even without a Memory Palace. Of course, in the spring, I'd have my notebook with me...no fear of freezing pens, or need for gloves!

Careful what you wish for

2012-02-11T07:12:00.000-06:00

It was a beautiful sunny day. I was feeling restless and loath to spend it sitting still. As I powered up my computer at work, I thought, I wish I could be birding right now. Or working on my yard. Or just doing something different, something more active and challenging!

But as a friend of mine in the Army used to say, "And people in hell want ice water." We all have to do what we need to do, and I reminded myself that until I stop procrastinating about looking for a new job, I'm stuck with this one, so suck it up. And just to be clear about things, I don't consider myself a slacker. I actually like to work.

But this job is not challenging for either my body or my mind. Nor is it the kind of laid-back job where I can just come to work, do my eight hours, and forget about it as soon as I leave. It manages to be both boring and stressful. I have spent many hours of soul-searching to make myself practice a little gratitude until I can find something more suitable. I give myself little pep talks before sitting down at my desk. The one thing that makes it bearable was the fact that the majority of my co-workers are such awesome people.

Still, as I clicked on my electronic timecard, I couldn't help thinking, I wish I didn't have this job. You know the saying, "Be careful what you wish for?" Well, about an hour before the end of the work day on Tuesday, my boss called me down to his office. I knew something was up as soon as I saw the Human Resources gal sitting with him at the table.

"I really hate this part of my position," he said, trying to look appropriately solemn, "but I had to eliminate another position..."

I didn't even let him finish the sentence. I just couldn't contain the joy. "Thank you!" I yelled. "This is wonderful!" I got myself under control before I actually jumped up on the table and started doing a jig or any similar foolishness -- after all, I didn't want them congratulating each other on the Best Decision Ever -- and stated how after my original position was out-sourced six months ago and I was given a new one, I'd been very grateful to be given a new opportunity and had tried my best blah blah blah, but it just wasn't a great fit for me and I was relieved not to have to worry about it anymore and no hard feelings. I must admit I got some perverse glee out of stealing their thunder, too.

But overall, what I said was true. I do feel that ever since I was given my new position, I've been trying to squeeze my big square peg self into a misshapen round hole. It is a relief to be done with it. And any hard feelings are easily canceled out every time I start stewing about the latest stressful situation on my plate, only to remember, "It's someone else's problem now!"

So what does this have to do with birding? Well, in the short term, I'll have more time on my hands to bird. But it also means that I'll have to postpone my Ultimate Birding Year to another time. Luckily except for gas for birding trips and my love of gourmet food, I live a fairly frugal life, so as long as I stay put and eat cheap until I find something else, I'm not freaking out about the unemployment. This is why I don't buy new cars or McMansions!

Even more than that, it has made me start thinking about "birding" as an attitude, an expression of life, a unique discipline, a moving meditation. I want more "birding" in my life. I know that no one's going to pay me to go on a nature hike, but in a metaphorical sense, I want to bring "birding" into my next position.

Yesterday, I went on a very long walk. The sun was shining and the light glistened over the inlet of Clinton Lake that the trail snakes around. There were common mergansers and northern shovelers, both new birds for the year in De Witt county for me. The ring-billed gulls were making such a racket, if I closed my eyes and lifted my head towards the sun, I could almost imagine myself on a beach somewhere, in the summer. A Carolina wren scuttled across a log and then dropped out of sight. Woodpeckers yarked at each other and hammered on the trees. Everywhere were alarmed chickadees and scurrying nuthatches.

It's true, nobody can possibly be that happy all the time. Pretty soon I'd better find a new job and on sunny days, I'll wish I could be out birding. But in the meantime, I made the wish...and I don't take it back.

Cross Quarter Birding

2012-02-08T18:00:00.000-06:00

I would like to wish everyone a belated happy Groundhog's Day. Yes, I know that this post is coming a bit after the fact, even though my most faithful reader, my mother Sunwiggy, declares that Groundhog's Day is her favorite holiday.

"It can't be your favorite holiday," I told her. "That's just silly. It's not even a real thing!"

As it turns out, I was wrong. The beginning of February is, indeed, a real thing. But I actually kind of knew that already, from birding. Those who are aware of the seasons already know about the summer and winter solstices (longest and shortest days of the year) and vernal and autumn equinoxes (when the hours of daylight are just about even). At one point, just about everyone knew this kind of stuff, but since I recently told someone on the winter solstice, "Yeah, now the days will be getting longer!", and in response, she kind of squinted at me and asked, "Why?", I don't want to make any assumptions.

In addition to these four points of the year, there are four other days, mid-way between each: early February (between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox), early May (between the vernal equinox and the summer solstice), early August (between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox), and early November (between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice). I first ran across these many years ago as an undergrad, when I used to read about nature-based religions and then wander around in the park by my school wishing I could actually feel more spiritual out in nature. It was kind of frustrating, because I have always loved being outside, but I just couldn't make it more than that. And the four cross-quarters? To be honest, I didn't "get" those at all. They felt like random dates to me.

Fast forward a decade or two, put some binoculars around my neck, and make me too jaded to expect anything transcendent. In the early spring of 2009, I decided to bird every single weekend, instead of the occasional bird walks during migration that I used to limit myself to, because I wanted to get a feel for every subtle shift of the seasons in central Illinois. I wanted to conduct my own amateur naturalist workshop, with myself as sole participant. I'm not sure why I decided to do this, except that I had recently left one awful and challenging job only to accept another one, and I was feeling frustrated and discouraged and the one thing that always made me feel better was birding.

I noticed things, like the transition from June to July, when the birds sing less often. By the end of July, there's always that day when I go for my walk and am shocked that all the grackles and red-winged blackbirds seemed to have disappeared. I learned when and how to find lots of ducks. I learned that a day in late March is a great time to spot loons.

And on August 4, 2009, I noted in my bird journal: I could feel the season changing--the mix of birds, the bird songs, quite different even than a month ago. Did not hear a single dickcissel or blackbird. There were hundreds of swallows swooping overhead, the sound of their twitterings. Except for the aerial ballet of the swallows, everything felt very still.
Although I could pinpoint some objective signs -- the number of swallows, the lack of dickcissel song -- I really did mean that I could feel the season changing. There was something different going on. I could almost feel it seeping up from the earth into my bones.

October 31, 2009, I went to Moraine View on a chilly and sodden morning, and wrote: Was surprised to see a very ragged-looking meadowlark on my way into the park, and also a great egret.... Tons more rain this week, everything sodden. All the colorful leaves have fallen. It made me think of what I wrote in August, that in just a few days, I could feel the season turn.

Early February, 2010, I noted again: Once again, I think I feel the seasons changing. It is not just that it was a warm(ish), sunny day...something about the way the birds are acting...some preparatory thing is happening. Spring really is just a month away.

And, of course, the beginning of May needs no introduction. An explosion of warblers, the swift opening of each day into greenery and new life. May is the best time ever.

After making my note about February, it hit me: "Duh! It's the cross quarters! Early peoples considered these times of the year special because they are." A nice summary of the astronomical significance of these days can be read here, and a very humorous history of the tradition of Groundhog Day can be found on Cape May Blogger.

I was thinking all of this over during my birding trip last weekend. The birding itself was very blah -- February is such a blah month, groundhogs or no groundhogs, but I could console myself that I did notice some changes. The cardinals are singing again. The sky is rippled with flocks of migrating geese. It's the same mix of birds, but underneath it all, is movement. This is probably not the transcendent moment I was hoping for in my undergraduate days. But I do finally "get" it. There are seasons between the seasons. Everything is always in motion.

Disaster at Starved Rock?

2012-01-29T15:45:00.002-06:00

Source: Photograph by Randy Schaetzl, Professor of Geography - Michigan State University

Yesterday Greenturtle and I went up to Starved Rock State Park for the Eagle Watch Weekend that occurs each January. It's one of those things that I have come to mark the seasons by. Last year we saw an amazing number of eagles, and also hiked back into the canyons to enjoy the frozen waterfalls. Hearing the gurgle of the stream of water trapped inside the pillar of ice and marveling at the different colors and textures -- at the edges thick and white, like frozen lace, behind blue and almost translucent -- can make me feel that I have been transported into the midst of a fairy tale.

The mild winter this year has kept the water open all along the Illinois River, and thus there are no congregations of dozens or hundreds of eagles, as occurs in some years. We did enjoy a brief stroll through the canyons, where I saw year bird #65, the golden-crowned kinglet, and after lunch we browsed the tables set up in the lodge.

I'd heard rumors that someone wanted to create a sand mine somewhere in the vicinity of Starved Rock, but it was not until I spoke with a man from a local conservation group that the awfulness of what they want to do sunk in. This man had a photograph of another mine in La Salle County, and it looked terrible, a deep, ugly hole in the earth, stripped of all trees and plants, turned into a wasteland for wildlife. I couldn't find a similar photo of an Illinois sand mine to illustrate this post, but the image was similar to the one I found in Berrien County in southern Michigan, above.

And this proposed sand mine is not going to be excavated somewhere off the beaten path, either, but right along the entrance to the park. Apparently the benefit to the community will be the creation of 39 jobs in a county with a 10% unemployment rate. But the noise, disturbance, pollution to the air and water caused by silica particles and waste water runoff, and impact to the wildlife that the mine would cause are good reasons to opposed it. And when I say "air pollution," I mean something potentially deadly: airborne silica particles can cause a fatal lung disease, silicosis. Despite opposition from many local residents and environmental groups, as of today, plans for the mine are going forward.

Please don't get me wrong; I appreciate the need for employment. But even if we stick to economic impacts, not only will the property values of the surrounding area be reduced, but if the disruption, noise, pollution, etc., from the mine impact the park, which is right next door, then it seems to me that some of the two million visitors that come to Starved Rock each year will go elsewhere. Greenturtle and I usually visit the park several times a year. We've had lunch at the Lodge and in the nearby town of Utica, and I've bought wine from one of the local wineries. If you add up all the visitors who might be turned away, that could easily result in far more than 39 jobs lost over time. (I read that there are around 1,000 tourism related jobs in the area.)

This isn't the only place impacted by sand mining; Wisconsin and Michigan also have plenty. It's tempting to jump on my soapbox and continue with a long treatise on all the terrible things we keep doing to ruin our environment, but I won't. (You're welcome!) I'm just trying to remind myself sometimes people can actually come together to preserve or restore something lovely, and maybe that will happen here.

In the meantime, I did send Pat Quinn, the Governor of Illinois, a brief message:

The reason I am writing is to state my opposition to the proposed sand mine which would be adjacent to Starved Rock State Park. I love that park and visit it regularly, and I don't see how the mine can fail to impact the natural beauty and precious ecosystem so close to it. I understand the need for jobs in the area, but with over two million people choosing to visit the park, I fear that the impact over the years for the area could actually be even more jobs lost if the mine causes people to stay away. I know that I would not drive so far to get there if I had to hear the noise of machinery and breathe in the dust as I hiked. My main concern, however, is for the environment. Please help protect the park as you did to protect Plum Island from development for the eagles. Thank you.

If you love Starved Rock, please make your voice heard as well. I don't know how much good it really does, but at least it's something.

Searching for my invincible summer

2012-01-27T16:58:00.002-06:00

Eurasian tree sparrow

In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer. -- Albert Camus

I ran across that quote recently on someone else's blog, and it has been coming back to me in moments of stillness ever since. I think it is an absolutely beautiful idea and I wonder how many of us can truly claim to have an invincible summer in our hearts? Unfortunately in my case, all too often I feel that winter's chill and gray slowly seeps through my pores and renders me as frozen inside as Hans Christian Anderson's Snow Queen.

Earlier in the week I was talking to an old acquaintance, and stated that I was ready for winter to be over. She laughed. "We haven't even had winter yet!" I knew what she meant; our weather has been extremely mild, with only a couple of dustings of snow and temperatures often hovering in the thirties or low forties. But it's still winter. "I'm sick of walking my dogs in the dark," I clarified.

The fact that the sun sets by five thirty is only one of the signs of on-going winter. As I strolled the trails at Sugar Grove Nature Center this afternoon, I thought of many others:

Most obviously, the birds! Every nature walk is dominated by the triumvirate of winter birding: black-capped chickadees, white-breasted nuthatches, and woodpeckers (downy, hairy and red-bellied). A runner up would be the tufted titmouse. Don't get me wrong; I love all those species. But they consist of about 80% of my sightings on a woodland walk between late November and early March.

Winter is red-tailed hawks and American kestrals perched at regular intervals along the country roads. It's birds in flocks instead of pairs. It's the utter absence of warblers, catbirds, phoebes, pewees, orioles, and cuckoos. On a more positive note, it means a chance to see brown creepers, pine siskins, red-breasted nuthatches, unusual owls, and other winter only species.

Winter means bird chatter instead of bird song. It's the absolute quiescence of all things green. It's landscapes that look like this:

So, there doesn't need to be a foot of snow on the ground for it to be winter. And lately I've been craving catbirds, if you know what I mean.

No catbirds, but house sparrows are never in short supply.

To top it all off, January always sucks. This one has been better than some, but I woke up this morning, with three things floating into my awareness: one, my teeth hurt from being gnashed in the night; two, I'd been dreaming about taking tests and not being prepared and it's a good ten years since my last classroom experience -- and a good twenty since I got my bachelor's -- so what is up with that?; and three, even though I'd gone on some nice nature walks just last weekend, it seemed an eternity since I'd gone birding. Why do people say that time flies? This month has lasted forever. This week alone has felt like a month.

But Fridays are my half day, which I cling to except in case of complete emergency, despite having a boomer boss who thinks it is a mark of achievement that he stays and works until ten at night, and looks askance on my Gen X attitude my personal time is priceless. Not only that, but the sun was out! All morning long, I gazed towards the windows at the sun's beneficence and counted down the minutes until my longed for nature walk at Sugar Grove.

On the way out of town, I sat idling in stop light after stop light, and just as I was reaching the town limits, guess what happened?

That's right, complete cloud cover! Terminal grayness! Is this a cruel cosmic joke, or what? How bad can my karma possibly be?

Despite this hideous change of circumstance, I kept my rendez-vous with Sugar Grove, and got up close and personal with a Eurasian tree sparrow at the feeders:

But seriously, what a dismal afternoon. My shoes squelched on the muddy trail, and everywhere my eyes looked were shades of gray.

A fallen giant:

If you look closely, you can see the line where this tree was girdled by the IDNR. Several big old trees were similarly killed this way in the Grove, and for the life of me, I can't understand why they did it.

On a happier note, one of the best sounds on Earth, water gurgling over rocks:

And a reminder that, in the midst of winter, there is always the promise of spring.

And I hope, wherever you are, you have kept a trace of invincible summer in your heart!

12 Species, 11 Miles

2012-01-22T16:11:00.001-06:00

It's still January. That's both the good news and the bad news. It's good when I think of how many more winter species I'd still like to add to my Year List -- there's plenty of chances, it's still only January. But when I think of warblers and wildflowers and picnics, it's definitely bad, because those things are months away yet. It's still only January!

Today I was in the bad news part of the on-going Januariness. For one thing, I've only added one bird to my year list, wild turkey, all weekend. And since neither the weather nor my budget included wandering farther afield to look for species today, I knew I was unlikely to improve my chances. Ughh, the weather: damp, gray, drizzly. The prognosticators were calling for drizzle, freezing drizzle or rain, or even all three. Yay, my favorites.

So I thought to myself, "If I go on one of my usual walks at Weldon Springs or Mascoutin, it will just be gray and nasty and I won't see anything good, and I'll sulk. But if I don't go out at all, I'll be crabby and restless and sulk." Dilemmas!

I decided to sidestep the whole problem by going out, but with a focus on a personal challenge rather than a good species list for the day. At the end of December, Greenturtle and I discovered an 11 mile loop trail at the North Fork Access to Clinton Lake, and had walked a little ways on it, but then turned back because we had the dogs along and Greenturtle was in no mood for a major hike.

That loop trail was preying on my mind ever since, mostly because I was so curious to know where it went. Obviously, it's a loop trail, so it goes in a big circle -- but what sorts of habitats occur in the loop? Granted, the two times I walked a ways along it, I saw nary a bird, but that doesn't mean there aren't any further down. To be honest, the real reason I've been dying to walk the loop trail is: Because it's there.

OK, Loop Trail, today's the day! Since the birdiness on my previous trips left much to be desired, I set my species goal really low: 11 birds in 11 miles. Surely even the most benighted place on earth could provide that many. As the day was so hazy I could barely see if anything was in the water by the DNR station as I drove past, I decided I had picked a great day to explore something new.

I got the first two in the parking area, ring-billed gull and Canada goose, and then a crow appeared shortly after I embarked on the trail. There was one other vehicle in the parking lot, which made me wonder who I was sharing the trail with. The tracks in the snow indicated that my fellow nature-goer had a dog with them, which is always reassuring. In my mind, dogs and psychos just don't go together.

The woods were grim and moody-looking, the treetops coated with a frosting of ice, and mist curling over the water. When I gazed out past the trail across a field, the fog was like a wall. Everything felt secretive, shielded. But mostly I was amazed at how few birds there were. I saw a downy woodpecker and a red-bellied one, and a pair of white-breasted nuthatches right before I hit the third mile marker, and then the action picked up a little with some black-capped chickadees and a tufted titmouse. A red-tailed hawk soared over the frozen water.

Despite the lack of species, I was enjoying the walk. The trail wound up and down the hills along the inlet, occasionally opening to a field or marshy area. Just as I was getting bored with the upland forest environment, the trail dipped down to a low area whose multitude of downed, straggly trees indicated a flood plain. Such an interesting mix of habitats, but so few birds. I consoled myself by thinking that it's probably a very different picture in the spring and summer.

A pair of runners passed me; one of them asked if I had seen a dog. I indicated that I had not, and she said that her friend's pit bull had run off, but not to be frightened if I saw it, as it was very friendly. I hope they found their dog; it never crossed my path.

Around the five mile mark, I added the rest of my species for the day: blue jay, eastern bluebird and American goldfinch. I guessed I'd find 11 species and got 12, so not too far off. The trail led me to a short jog down a road and over a metal bridge, and then headed back for the return loop. I noticed a picnic table off to the side, and made a mental note for future reference. By future I mean, not January or its hideous brother February. Maybe glorious April, or magnificent May?

There were some interesting abandoned buildings, and a clearing in the woods, more marshy areas--a lot that I would love to spend more time investigating. Today was not the day, however, for I had barely begun the return side when the "freezing drizzle" began. Only I always had a different word for it, and that word is hail. Granted, small hail -- ice pellets instead of balls -- but they still sting!

So I picked up the pace, race-walking up and down the hills, cursing the huge swathes of trail I had to traverse in between each mile marker; but to be honest, I was nowhere near as miserable as I would have predicted. I even had to admit that I would have been much more unhappy in the midst of a 95 degree summer day -- and at least in winter, there are no mosquitoes! I tucked my binoculars under my jacket so they wouldn't get soaked, but the only birds I passed seemed to be more chickadees, downy and red-bellied woodpeckers, white-breasted nuthatches and titmice.

As I stumbled along, I thought about reading Dr. Weil's speculation in his book Spontaneous Happiness that time is rushing by ever more quickly for people because we are so caught up in technology and information. I thank birding for sparing me a lot of that. My passion forces me to slow down to the rhythm of the seasons, e.g., it's still January! And I have a bit of advice for anyone who feels that the days go by too quickly. Try walking eleven miles of switchbacking up and down trail, in the hail. I promise, time will not fly past you.

I passed another pair of trail runners (wondering as I did so, Are you people insane? Granted, I was out there, too, but at least I wasn't running up the hills!), and then, truly, before I had time to get myself into a self-pitying state of mind, the trail ended on the road a ways down from my parked car. The freezing drizzle had warmed up to just plain drizzle, and I staggered the rest of the way to my car, filled with the sense of satisfaction that only comes from really punishing oneself in the process.

And already, I can't wait to go back and explore those eleven miles at a slower, birder's pace, but on a nicer day. One with warblers and wildflowers. I'll bring a picnic.

What I've been reading (some thoughts on food)

2012-01-20T17:53:00.000-06:00

I decided to shake things up a bit and discuss some books I have read lately about one of my other favorite topics, food. Mostly I stick to the topic here and concentrate on birds, but in the rest of my life I am a bit of a "foodie", perhaps even a glutton, and also quite interested in eating the healthiest way possible in order to be able to bird for decades to come.

With that in mind, I shall turn my attention to Folks, This Ain't Normal by Joel Salatin. I downloaded this onto my Kindle after reading the review of it on Summer Tomato, one of my favorite food and health websites. In the book, Salatin, an organic farmer from northern Virginia, takes pot-shots at many of the problems currently bedeviling our food supply: factory farms, genetically modified crops, food shipped to us from distant lands, people not knowing how to grow or preserve food or even how to cook it.

The life of an organic farmer is not an easy one, and Salatin has choice words for those who make it even more difficult: the government, animal rights supporters, environmentalists, and the average consumer (which seems to be most of us).

What I liked about the book: I agree that our current agricultural system is profoundly abnormal and short-sighted, and the book made me think about our current lifestyle in different ways; I learned a bit about traditional farming practices; I learned even more about what small farmers have to put up with from the government, and I heartily agree that the system is terrible; and the book made me think, period. I love it when I find myself debating with an author in my mind after I've put the book down. It's the opposite of passive entertainment. The book also inspired me to get serious about composting, putting out rain barrels, etc., to make my kitchen and garden more "normal," and got me excited about planting some veggies this summer.

What I didn't like about the book: mostly, the ranting, sarcastic tone. Once in a while I'd find myself chuckling at his diatribes, but overall, I found it off-putting. I am always opposed to using words like "duh" as an elocutionary device. The other thing I didn't like was the lack of references to support his claims, especially as some sources he did mention, such as Lierre Keith and Sally Fallon, are not exactly sources I would turn to for objectivity.

If I were trying to convince someone who eats factory-farmed meats, highly processed foods, fast-food value meals, etc., to upgrade to better choices, would I hand them Folks, This Ain't Normal? Probably not as their first book on the topic. But if you're already interested in what's going on with our food supply, Salatin provides an interesting and in-your-face perspective, which I'm happy to have read.

An interesting companion piece to Salatin's book would be Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won't Eat Meat by Howard Lyman. It's an older book (2001), and towards the end a bit of a vegan polemic, but the part describing how Lyman was convinced to "modernize" his family's ranch after attending the agricultural program at his local university, and in doing so rendered the land an ecological wasteland, burdened with debt and filled with sick, stressed out animals, and probably hurt his own health as well, is a perfect example of what's just not normal about our farming practices.

Some people want to define "normal" as even further back in time, before the advent of agriculture, and think that the ideal way to live is similar to our hunting and gathering ancestors. I have found the most persuasive of these "paleo" type diets to be Mark Sisson's The Primal Blueprint, which is described in his book of the same name and also on his wonderful blog, Mark's Daily Apple. One of the things that appeals to me about his philosophy is that it goes beyond diet; exercise, rest, play, and even spending lots of time in nature (love that part!) are discussed.

I do have a confession, though. Despite being convinced by the rationale of the lifestyle, I haven't been able to make the transition to following the diet. I tried it for two weeks, felt nauseated from eating so much meat, and actually gained five pounds! And no, it wasn't muscle. Since then, I have scaled back the meat and added in some rice, and feel my equilibrium returning. I'm really enjoying cooking my way The Primal Blueprint Cookbook, though. So far I've made the Swiss chard frittata, the beef and broccoli stir fry, and the chicken and fennel stew...all delicious!

And overall, I do feel that even though I can't forgo my white rice, the book has convinced me to put the processed crap behind me once and for all, which has to be most of the battle.

Because really, that stuff ain't normal!

More views of the lake (and a bit of silliness)

2012-01-19T19:00:00.001-06:00

It's cold. Right now, as I sit and type, I feel a bit of a chill. It was even worse a half hour ago, as I was outside then, taking my dogs for a walk, which is a bit of a spectacle at the best of times, and even worse in the winter, for in addition to wishing they wouldn't bark at everyone and try to eat various disgusting things they find on the ground (thus giving me more room to say, "Wipe that coprophagic grin off your face!" than I ever expected when I thought of that phrase in an attempt to put humor into vocabulary), but I just want them to hurry up with their business, because it's cold!

Imagine this, if you will: I am holding all three leashes in one hand, so as to keep the other hand as snug as possible in my pocket (due to the extreme, hideous cold, of course), a scenario which only works when all three run along side by side like some ironic, post-modern take on Cerberus (just so you can visualize the silliness of this correctly, let me remind everyone that I have a dachshund, a cocker spaniel, and a Pomeranian). True to their usual, alas, they are all straining at the leash in three different directions, tangling up each other and myself in the process, so that I am either continually doing a sort of doggie jump-rope, or swaying in an attempt not to fall face first. For all of you who are thinking "obedience training" at about this point, I tried that with my dachshund. At the end of the first class, he lifted his leg and took a whizz on my shoe just to show me how successful the whole endeavor would be. I took him for a few more sessions before deciding to spare myself further embarrassment by home-schooling.

This has all been a bit of an unexpected detour, for which I blame a case of brain-freeze, caused by--guess what?--the cold! Since it happens every winter here in Illinois, you would think I would get used to it. Unfortunately, my complaining about it also happens every year like clockwork around this time. Well, give me six months and I'll show how well-rounded I am by complaining about the heat.

Despite these impediments, I have maintained my attempts to get the year birds. Yesterday I called in sick to work. Just for the record, I want to be very clear that I did not call in sick in order to go birding. I really did feel unwell. In theory, I aspire to be the sort of slacker who would call in sick for a chance to see more birds, but I have been too inculcated into the so-called Protestant work ethic ever to let myself get away with it.

Having already called in sick, however, and spent the morning lying on the couch watching extremely weird videos, my mind soon turned to year birds, and I decided that driving to the lake to gaze out over the water would hardly be taxing. Besides, there is only so much lying around idly that any one person can take, and just in case I face some sort of gruesome extended death-bed scenario in my later years, I don't want to waste a moment now.

So, out I went. The area between the power plant and the DNR station was full of common goldeneyes and ring-billed gulls, with a couple of hooded mergansers tossed in here and there.

I made this picture extra large because I thought I might have seen a Barrow's goldeneye in the mix, and maybe someone else will spot it too! No? Yeah, me either. Since my spotting scope was in the trunk of my other vehicle, the picture pretty much sums up how the ducks looked in "real time" as well.

And as far as a Barrow's goldeneye goes...finding stuff like that is a good reason to spend more time with more experienced birders. On my own, I'd probably never feel all that certain. I mean, the head seemed pointier and the white patch on the face seemed skinnier, but they still look pretty similar, right? On the other hand, I once despaired over how I would ever recognize a Thayer's gull if I saw one, but when I did (at least I'm pretty sure I did) Up North, I knew at once, "Hey, that isn't your normal herring gull. It's different somehow...."

I drove further down the road to Mascoutin; on my way there, I did get a wonderful look at year bird #62, a rough-legged hawk, circling overhead in Dewitt. And then on to the lake again, where what did I spy? Mallards!

Hellooo, mallards! Do you guys think I rose from my couch and risked being "busted" on a sick day to watch a bunch of you swim around? Like, haven't I seen enough mallards to last me forever, just this week?? Do you really think I need more mallards?

Attracted by all these negative vibes, an American coot swam up towards the shore.

Said the coot, "I see we have one of those hard-core twitching lister types who just can't stop and appreciate the qualities of the bird they happen to see. Well, I'll show her!"

"I'm going to get out of the water and display my supreme cootliness, not to mention my ginormous feet, to make her look twice and show her the error of her ways!"

OK, lesson learned, little coot.... You are marvelous and I will henceforth go out and admire each bird I see for itself and not for its place on my list!

I briefly considered a bit of a stroll, but didn't feel up to it; however, I saw some more nice birds on my drive home, including American black duck (year bird #63...don't tell the coot!), plus an eastern bluebird and a red-tailed hawk.

And it would have been a very nice day if only it weren't so cold!

Winter Prairie: A Meditation

2012-01-17T18:35:00.000-06:00

At first glance, the space seems barren, the grasses brown and brittle, nothing moving against the sky. It is a moment of quiescence, of held breath. Waiting. The trees look stark. This small spot of land, a tiny scrap of remnant prairie, has always been welcoming before. Now it seems empty.

Where has the past gone? How much does the land remember? The time when this homestead was populated is long past; even longer, a time when the long grasses stretched to each horizon. What will be in this spot one hundred years hence? And if this last sliver of prairie is also gone, will someone, for a moment, be shaken from their cage of glass, cement and steel, and sense the sacred force of the soil beneath them?

A flock of birds flies from the ground, like autumn leaves in reverse, as brown and white as the grass against the snow: American tree sparrows.

Like the simple man's Ozymandias, the collapsing buildings ask us to think of those who left so little of themselves behind: fragile wooden buildings, now collapsing. And yet, there is something about the curve of the path that encourages us onwards. The path is everywhere if we know where to look for it. If we want it to, the prairie in all its seasons can live inside of us.

No matter how many times we walk this path, the bridge is always yet to be crossed.

The window bangs and rattles in the wind, shaking me from my reverie. For a moment, the clatter makes me wonder if I am not alone. Does the wind count? The grass? The quiet warm presence of the wintering birds? If we just look around us, are we ever alone?

The roots of this tree must descend all the way to the pulsating core of life. Beneath the winter prairie is the promise of renewal. Behind the quietude is the noisy resurgence of spring. Every time I come here, I see something different.

This time, what I saw I did not notice with my eyes. Even blanketed by winter's silence, the ground here hums with the sacred. Every time I come here, I know that I am home.

Now it feels like work

2012-01-16T19:54:00.000-06:00

A case of the blahs

I probably shouldn't admit this, but here goes: Sometimes I don't really want to bird. Sometimes I'm kinda tired and would really rather stay home reading or even watching scary movies or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This never happens during spring migration, of course. And when it does happen, often, if I make myself go out anyway, I am soon so lost in the "birding zone" that I completely forget I was tired. Sometimes I stay home and then kick myself for the rest of the week while I am trapped inside until sunset (the worst thing about winter is that it's dark by the time I get home) because a day or two later, I'm dying to get outside, and I'm stuck at work. And sometimes I go out when I'm feeling blah, and the outing is blah, and that's all there is to it.

Not that I felt completely blah about going out this morning. I did want to see if any new waterbirds were congregating around Mascoutin, now that the weather has been cold several days. Warm water from the power plant keeps that area of the lake free of ice, and in years past other birders have seen smorgasbords of ducks, geese, gulls, all kinds of exciting stuff. In fact, as late fall became winter and I'd drive past all the Clinton Lake "hotspots," seeing nothing besides flocks of ring-billed gulls bobbing atop the otherwise unoccupied water, I'd tell myself, "Just wait until we get some ice.... Then who knows what I'll see here!"

As I drove along the country roads, the flat and unvarying expanse of the fields made me kind of sleepy. The thought of embarking on a long hike wasn't too appealing. I thought, If I could go back in time to when I was 16 or 20 and tell myself that someday I'd live in central Illinois and my main interest in life would be birding, I'd never believe it. If I also told myself that sorry, in twenty years' time I wouldn't be a rich, famous writer, either, I'd probably wonder if the intervening decades would even be worth slogging through. And yet, I'm not altogether dissatisfied with the way it turned out. I love birding. I have even developed a sense of affection for the flatlands. It would be nice to be a rich, famous writer, however. Oh well.

Luckily, before I could get too sleepy or introspective, I had arrived at Mascoutin.

Birds in the mist

I could see tendrils of fog rising from the water from several "blocks" away. This very localized weather pattern is caused by the fact that the water temperature is much warmer than normal due to the presence of the Exelon nuclear power plant (and no, I don't object to nuclear energy, as long as the reactors are kept up to the most stringent safety codes -- I actually find the power plant less offensive than the endless crops of wind farms sprouting up across the state. In fact, even a disaster such as what happened at Chernobyl is probably less damaging to the environment in the long run than, say, mountaintop-removal mining, as the very engaging book Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl by Mary Mycio describes).

I parked and walked along the causeway for a while, seeing pied-billed grebes, Canada geese, a pair of mallards, a bazillion ring-billed gulls, and some coots skulking against the shoreline.

"I am not skulking."

Don't laugh, it's a year bird:

When the highlight of your birding trip is a brown-headed cowbird, it might just be time to go home...which I did, after a brief stop at the prairie at Weldon Springs, which will be the topic of tomorrow's post.

Birding here and there

2012-01-15T14:31:00.001-06:00

After the excitement of seeing the snowy owls last weekend at Montrose Harbor, almost anything would have to seem anti-climatic, right? Of course, I had further birding adventures planned, but after adopting another dog (an adorable Pomeranian, who is curled up on a pile of cushions beside my desk as I type this), all that was canceled, and I have restricted myself to a few "nature walks" here at home in DeWitt County.

It's not just the owls that have spoiled me. There's also the weather. The winter here has been so freaky mild that the modest snowfall we received last Thursday, and a dip into normal winter temperatures, made me remember what January birding is normally like.

A moment of enchantment

Every once in a while life gives you one of those. One of the reasons I like birding is because it raises the odds of experiencing one. I have rarely felt that the world is numinous and magical and that I am the luckiest being in it because the beauty and mystery all around me has left me standing half-dazed yet entirely alive while watching TV or wandering around a shopping plaza. To be completely honest, I don't believe that has happened even once. And yet, with birding, I have an experience like that every two or three months on average.

Last Sunday it happened as I was strolling along the Houseboat Cove Trail at Mascoutin. The weather was mild, the sun was out, and I was mentally a bit restless because I wasn't seeing a lot of birds. I turned the bend before an ephemeral pool, an area which is frequently rather birdy, and saw a half dozen or so American robins flying up from the ground, Year Bird #52. With them were some cardinals and a blue jay or two. Then I heard the high keening cry of the cedar waxwing (Year Bird #53), and a whole flock of them descended around me, flying down to the leaf-strewn basin of the mostly-dry pool and back. I also heard the distinctive Ziiip! noise of the pine siskin (Year Bird #54)and noticed that they were also scratching about in the leaf litter; despite their yellow tinge, they were almost perfectly camouflaged before I started looking for them. Closer to the bank were American tree sparrows and a white-throated sparrow (Year Bird #55), and a happier person could not have existed on planet Earth than myself in that moment.

The walk rounded out nicely with some old favorites (belted kingfisher, brown creeper -- Year Bird #56). I don't know what made that moment so special. I like cedar waxwings and pine siskins a lot, but I don't feel like I'm about to dance with leprechauns around the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow every time I see them. I think it was a combination of seeing such a variety of species in a small location, such that I felt that I was actually right in the midst of it all.

The day summed up with yet another Year Bird, the Eurasian collared dove, glimpsed sitting on my neighbor's roof as I walked past the window -- and I never complain about a year bird that wants to appear more or less at my doorstep, either.

A bad surprise and a Carolina wren

Yesterday I wanted to take Greenturtle and the dogs for a walk around the backpack trail at Weldon Springs, but we decided to leave the dogs home as Greenturtle was worried about Trevor, our short-haired dachshund, getting too cold from the snow, and our new Pom has the snuffles (luckily he is going to see the vet tomorrow). It was snowing and everything had that winter wonderland sort of feel to it.

I was looking forward to looking over the bird feeders, as I am always hoping that a purple finch, red-breasted nuthatch or other rarer winter bird will be partaking, but I knew that something was wrong even before I could see them. Usually in the winter the birds "overflow" from the feeder area and fill up the surrounding space with their calls. But it was still and silent, and I soon saw why: the feeders have all been taken down. I hope this is not permanent and it's a shame if they did that because of budget concerns because I bet if they put the word out people would be willing to contribute towards the cost of the seed. I know I would. Anyway, it was always so nice to see all the birds feeding there and I was rather disappointed they were gone.

As we finished up our walk, I heard the crabby noise that only a wren can make, and turned around to see a Carolina wren skulking and scolding in the underbrush--Year Bird #58. We also heard a barred owl call once, and despite back-tracking all over the woods trying to find it, it remained silent and a "heard only bird," but since those count by the rules, he's Year Bird #59. I always feel like I'm cheating if I don't see it, though.

And now that I have rambled on for so long, I will have to save today's outing for a different post. There's even a couple of year birds in the mix so I hope you'll come back tomorrow for the rest.

New member of the family

2012-01-14T15:52:00.001-06:00

I interrupt this weekend's scheduled edition of My Ultimate Illinois Birding Year due to the unforeseen acquisition of a new family member, an adorable Pomeranian named Leo. You see, I have wanted a Pomeranian for several years, due to their extremely cute demeanor, their feisty attitude, and their all around tininess. I absolutely don't view dogs as an accessory, but I do like the idea of having a dog I could tuck under one arm and carry around if the situation warranted.

But, being a responsible-type person, at least some of the time, I decided that it would be nicer to adopt a dog in need from the local shelter rather than seek out a particular breed from a breeder, and so the first two dogs that Greenturtle and I adopted were a dachshund named Trevor and an American cocker spaniel named Raven. We got Trevor first, immediately after buying our house last May after years of living in no-pets policy apartments, and got Raven about a month later because we were afraid that Trevor was developing separation anxiety since we both have to leave him alone while we go to work. And the two became good friends, and I had pretty much decided that my canine family was complete.

And then guess what appeared at the Central Illinois Humane Society? A Pomeranian, just like I'd always wanted. This particular Pom is a four year old male named Leo.

He is super sweet and affectionate, so the only hurdle was wondering if our current dogs would get along with him. I was especially anxious about Trevor, since he often decides to hate other dogs...but not all other dogs, so who knows?

The introduction didn't start off on a good note. Trevor was barking, barking, barking, Leo seemed cowed, and Raven was just running around getting in the way like she often does. But after they were all taken to a quiet room together and allowed to sniff out their introductions, everything seemed copacetic. So Leo became dog number three! (And the last for a long, long time...I herewith promise never to be a candidate for a TV show about animal hoarders.)

So between the expense of the adoption, and the desire to spend quality time with the pack, I canceled my birding adventure for the weekend.

The rest of this post consists of gratuitous cute dog photos, at Sunwiggy's request, and since she is my most faithful reader (and my mother), I have complied. If anyone else wants more birding stuff, I promise it will be back tomorrow!

In the meantime....

Trevor seems a little depressed about having a new brother, and has been hogging my lap a lot more than usual, especially if Leo wants to sit there.

Raven, on the other hand, likes everybody, but has been showing her insecurity at the change of pack order by forgetting that she was almost housetrained. And while Leo seems like a well-behaved dog in almost every respect, he does have one bad habit...he's a nervous piddler. So now in addition to Sir Barksalot (Trevor) and the Galumphagus (Raven), we have Mr. Piddlesworth.

Is having dogs worth it? It is when they're as cute as they were in the backyard today.

Follow the leader:

Raven enjoying the snow:

Leo doing the snowplow routine:

Trevor wants to make sure I still love him best.

Sizing each other up:

Raven galumphing around:

A game of tag:

"Please play some more!"

"Yay, he wants to play!"

Leo chooses not to join in the fun:

He's like, "Really, I'm good the way I am."

Trevor says, "This is a lot of work when you're as low to the ground as I am!"

Leo even joins in for a bit:

Now Leo is announcing that he's had enough fun:

After they started looking like they were about to quarrel, I took them inside. Overall, everything seems OK though, and I know it will take a while for the "pack order" to get rearranged with a new dog in the mix. Luckily, they're all so cute I forgive them their bad habits.

If anyone has any advice about nervous piddling, though, I'd love to hear it!

Searching for snowies

2012-01-08T16:19:00.000-06:00

By way of introduction

Even non-birders know about the snowy owl irruption. Since birding is what I'm best known for amongst my acquaintances, at least once a week someone's said to me, "Hey, I thought of you when I read this article in the paper about these snowy owls coming down from the North all over the place. There was just one seen in (fill-in-the blank spot). Of course, with you being into birds and all, I'm sure you already know about it."

I have tried to be gracious and encouraging, even though as time passed it was getting to be a bit of a struggle not to sound bitter on the subject of snowy owls. Sure, they're super-cool and it's no wonder that birders and non-birders alike are interested, but it felt like everyone on Earth had seen one except me. And that was not for lack of trying, believe me.

First I drove up and down the country roads of McLean county, IL, searching for one that had recently been seen there, and dipping out, consoled myself that I had a trip to the Upper Peninsula right around the corner, and they'd been seen everywhere up there. I dipped out once again, and returned home with a heavy heart.

Was I in the process of forming a nemesis bird? Would I ever spot a snowy owl of my own?

Ooops...spoilers

I guess the question isn't as fraught with suspense as it might have been, as the photo at the top of this post shows, um, a snowy owl. So either I stole someone else's photo off the Internet to pass off as my own (mwa ha ha), or I actually managed to see a snowy owl. As far as option one goes, I'm probably an unreliable narrator, but I'm not that bad, so that leaves us with the second choice. Well, I might as well just blurt it all out....

Yesterday Greenturtle and I went to Montrose Harbor in Chicago, and saw not one, but two, snowy owls on the lake front. Hooray! And that's really the gist of this story, so you can stop reading right now if you want! But if you'd like a few more details....

The details

I knew from keeping a close eye on the ebird alerts that two snowies were still being spotted at Montrose Harbor in Chicago, so I persuaded Greenturtle to go up and help me look for them by promising a trip to the Field Museum after we'd achieved this. Either he loves me a lot or he really, really wanted to look at some dinosaur skeletons, because we woke up at four o'clock and drove three hours to the lake front at Montrose Harbor.

Despite being a dyed-in-the-wool Rural Birder (I'd call my memoirs that, except for the fact it makes me think of that skit from 30 Rock where no one understands the name of Jenna's movie; if you don't watch 30 Rock just ignore this part...but if you do, kinda funny, right?), I was excited about visiting the Big City and wondering what birds I might see.

The harbor is home to the Magic Hedge, a location that is famous in birding circles, at least here in Illinois, for its fantastic fall-out during migration. I was happy to see the Magic Hedge with my own eyes, for although not much bird activity was in evidence, I knew that I would probably make a return trip later in the year as part of my Ultimate Illinois Birding Year. The shrubbery was all cordoned off with ropes, which I assumed had been done to protect the exhausted birds when they touch down here during migration. True enough, but it seems that it's not just birders who need to be kept out. And this, folks, is one example of why I'm a Rural Birder!

Luckily, we quickly found not just one, but two snowy owls, perched on the end of a promontory along the harbor. The owls had quite a fan club gathered around, complete with some paparazzi sporting very high-end cameras waiting for them do to something photogenic. We joined the perimeter of the small group and admired them, but before we'd had a chance to get a good look, a woman jogger shuffled right past the groups of birders and ran out towards the edge of the point.

"She's going to flush the owls!" I said to Greenturtle.
"I don't think she cares," he said.

And sure enough, as she ran past, one of the owls took flight into the sunrise.

One of the birders had the guts to stop her and tell her what she had done. She pulled her earplugs from her head, shrugged, and continued on her way. She was either inconsiderate or oblivious to the fact that she had spoiled a moment for the rest of us, and I don't know which is worse.

Luckily, there was still one snowy for us to admire.

We talked for a couple of minutes with the other birders, who mentioned how the owls (both either females or juveniles by their coloration) would sometimes try to rest on the beach until they were disturbed by someone letting their dogs run off-leash. Of all the places the owls could spent the winter, is Montrose Harbor, so full of joggers, dogs-walkers and even birders really the best place they could have chosen? Will all these disturbances impact their chance for survival? In any case, the owls have been here for the past month or two, so hopefully they will be able to head back to the Arctic tundra in the spring to create more owls.

It's the kind of thought I wish I could ignore, because it's obviously much more fun just to enjoy seeing some snowy owls. It's like the niggling guilt I always feel about one of these long trips--wow, what a lot of gas to get here and back.

And on the way, I noticed yet another gigantic wind-farm that had sprung up overnight like a ring of mushrooms, stretching along both sides of the highway along the Livingston/Grundy county border. As it was dark for us both coming and going, my sense of the turbines was formed mostly by the vast forest of blinking incarnadine eyes in every direction. I dread seeing what it looks like in the daylight, as one of my favorite nature spots, Goose Lake Prairie, isn't too far from there.

What else I saw

Mergansers, and lots of them, male and female, red-breasted and common. Common goldeneyes, and a pair of horned grebes. I even got a glimpse of a black-crowned night heron hunched by the edge of a pond as we drove down Lake Shore Drive.

Illinois River Valley: Birds on Ice

2012-01-03T19:14:00.000-06:00

You know how they say not to reinvent the wheel? That's kind of how I am approaching my Ultimate Illinois Bird Year. Normally I just pick a spot that I have enjoyed in the past, or that is especially scenic, or has for some other reason captured my imagination, and off I go. I have had a lot of fun with this approach, but the birding can be hit or miss.

So this year, I am using Internet resources to go where the birds are actively being seen. Today, for example, Greenturtle and I took off work to start the New Year out with an extra day of birding. The only constraint is that it had to be within a reasonable driving distance of Bloomington, as we had some errands to run in town. Beyond that, I didn't really know where the birdiest spot would be. Enter ebird's new feature, the year alert, which informed me that some nice waterfowl had been seen at Emiquon over in Fulton County. Seriously, it sounded like a duck-o-rama was taking place along the Illinois River. I was so excited thinking about it I had trouble falling asleep last night, just like a kid before Christmas.

But first, the Soporific Highway.

That would be highway 136 heading from Heyworth to Havana. I noticed that Greenturtle was yawning and squirming in the driver's seat, and asked if he was OK. "This road always makes me sleepy," he said. Sunwiggy and I had already noticed the soporific quality of this particular stretch of road. You know what people say about driving through, say, Nebraska? Condense that essence of sameness into a fifty mile stretch, and you might be getting close.

Normally I try to keep myself alert by looking for birds along the roadside. Today, even that tactic failed me, as what I saw was: starling, starling, starling, starling, blue jay, starling, starling, starling, blue jay, starling, starling. Zzzzzzz....

The iceman came and went, apparently.

Since it was on the way to Emiquon, we decided to check out the Eagle Bluff access at Chatauqua in Mason County first. I was amazed that the river had already iced over. It's been cold for, what, twenty-four hours? And already the water is covered in ice? My heart sank. No open water means no ducks. Was I a day too late for all the fun?

Chatauqua wasn't entirely a loss, though, as I got a year bird, greater-white fronted goose, and we got to see some bald eagles eating something dead on the ice.

We stopped for gas in Havana (sadly, serious birding can be a wasteful hobby that way), and while Greenturtle went inside to pay, I perused the signs at the edge of the parking lot. A restaurant was advertising "All You Can Eat Livers and Gizzards Every Thursday" (uh, darn, it's only Tuesday!), while on the wires overhead perched some...starlings.

I was worried that my special Birding Day was going to be a bust, not to mention a waste of time and gas, but trying to stay positive. How much ice could there be?

We drove on to Emiquon. Ice...ice everywhere! Except what's that? One open area far from any convenient place to park? No matter, time to pull over to the side of the road.

The couple that birds together...squabbles

I set up my spotting scope and began surveying the tiny open area along the river. It was crammed full of ducks. Tail to beak, cheek by jowl, dozens and dozens of ducks, and more flying in every minute.

Normally, I'm a pretty jaded person. Tearjerker movies make me roll my eyes. And don't even try to hug me. But something about seeing huge flocks of birds always makes me want to cry, because the birds are beautiful and their lives are so difficult and fragile and I'm always conscious of how precarious their continued existence is, and how much more abundance I could have seen just a couple hundred years ago.

Luckily, this is my Ultimate Illinois Birding Year, so no time for tears today. Instead, I spent a good half hour squinting at the ducks through my scope, trying to make out who was who in the incredible avian jumble. Hooded merganser, common merganser, bufflehead, redhead, ruddy duck, northern pintail. More greater white-fronted geese, plus coots, ring-billed gulls, and more common goldeneyes than you could shake a stick at.

Meanwhile, Greenturtle was checking out some eagles and wanted the assistance of myself and my spotting scope.

Crow: "I'm checking out the ducks!"
Greenturtle: "You've already seen the ducks."
C: "Not all of them, they're so close together. Plus, more are coming in all the time."
G: "They're the same ducks."
C: "No, they're not. Look at that hooded merganser!"
G: "You already said hooded merganser."
C: "Yeah, but I'm admiring him. He just put up his hood."
G: "You're not here to admire the ducks! This might be a golden eagle."
C: "Fine, show me the eagle."

Stepping away from the scope to let him focus it on his bird. But as I approach....

C: "I don't see it."
G: "You kicked the scope!"
C: "I did not!"

Finally, the eagle was brought into view.

Said I, "That's not a golden eagle. It's a juvenile bald eagle."
"How do you know?"
"Errr....ummmm..." I didn't dare say that the "jizz" wasn't right. Never mind that's a perfectly acceptable birding term, it sets Greenturtle off like Beavis and Butthead when they hear the words "wood" or "erect." So instead, we spent several minutes with the Stokes guide and lengthy discussions before we agreed...no golden eagles in sight. But many juvenile bald eagles!

I like a good bird buzz, early in the morning....

So further on down the road. We pulled off at the Duck Lake road, which never has anything worth seeing...except that today it did! Many Canada geese and mallards, plus more common goldeneyes, hooded and common mergansers, and some more year birds, canvasback and ring-necked duck. Wow, this really is a duck-o-rama. It's nice to be high on birds!

Last stop

For our last stop of the day, we swung through Banner Marsh, where we saw many mute swans. That's all I ever see there, but they're reliable. If you need some mute swans, just go to Banner Marsh.

No, I lied...but really, last stop

After our errands, I went to White Oak Park in Bloomington because a couple of weeks ago I saw some cackling geese there. As I explained to Greenturtle, they look exactly like Canada geese, only about half as big. And YES, still there!!

Year List so far, 44 species in three days. OK, I'm not breaking any records (except my own), but even so...not too shabby!

And if you want to know every species that's on there, check out my new page, Year List 2012. I don't think I'll have any problems keeping it up to date.

And happy birding to you, wherever you are!

New Year's birding highlights

2012-01-02T16:07:00.000-06:00

January First

The Wetland.
Greenturtle and I are at Weldon Springs, and it is overcast and blustery. He has gone back to the car for his hat, while I look for birds. A blue jay takes off across the marsh. I see a goldfinch and a white-breasted nuthatch. Walking up behind me, Greenturtle askes, "What's that?" As he is gesturing in the direction of the nuthatch, I'm nonchalant at first, until I notice, in a tree on the other side of the road, a flock of red-winged blackbirds. I double check their red wing patches a few times just to be certain, because this species is a complete surprise to me. I've never seen them in January before. It feels like a good omen.

The Bird Feeders.
Most of the park feels like a bird-free zone, which is no surprise on such a windy day. Luckily, it is still about fifteen degrees warmer than usual; otherwise, with this wind, being out here would be a misery. But on all but the very worst of days, one can find a bit of birding happiness at a feeder. We get: red-bellied woodpecker, goldfinch, house finch, black-capped chickadee, dark-eyed junco, American tree sparrow--hey, don't laugh, it's the first of January and these are all year birds! To make it even more exciting, a great blue heron flies overhead. I really want a tufted titmouse and a downy woodpecker, too, but they don't seem to be in the mix. And the white-throated sparrow I found in this area just last week? Nowhere to be found, of course. At least the sun has come out.

The Long Bridge at Mascoutin
This is another place I've been mentally hoarding for the first of the year, a long, accessible stretch of water that's been good for birds over the past couple of weeks. But today, the wind is churning Clinton Lake into white-cap soup, so any water birds must be hiding themselves elsewhere. Despite this, we see a bald eagle flying in the midst of a hundred ring-billed gulls, so we pull over to see what else might be present. I do get a small flock of American coots, and on the return trip, a pied-billed grebe. Elsewhere at Mascoutin: ring-necked pheasants racing across the road, plus the downy woodpecker and tufted titmouse I didn't find at Weldon Springs. Greenturtle has had enough of birding for the day and announces it's time to go.

The feeders at Sugar Grove Nature Center
After lunch, I decide to try my luck in McLean County and recall that the bird sanctuary feeders at Sugar Grove are usually good for Eurasian tree sparrows in the winter. I'm also missing some other easy-peasies such as red-tailed hawk, brown-headed cowbird, and mourning dove that are usually a snap to get there. When I pull up, I'm amazed that the feeder area seems exclusively populated by dozens of house sparrows and nothing else. Then the wind gusts, sending the hanging feeders to swinging and clanking, and I think I've figured out the reason. After quite a bit of searching, I find a lone Eurasian tree sparrow in with the flock. Two mourning doves fly over head. The only other species to make an appearance are the European starling (one individual) and the American goldfinch (also one). Not really worth the trip.

The woods at Sugar Grove Nature Center
Since I am here, I decide to stroll through the woods a bit. Downed trees are everywhere, and more trees are constantly creaking overhead. The wind is so strong, it almost feels like a presence. And I do start to worry a little bit--these are some awfully thin, brittle-looking trees. What if one lands on my head? I do see a big brown bird flying silently away from me; judging by its size and shape, I think it must be a great-horned owl. But as I didn't see it's face, let alone it's "horns," I don't count it. Nothing else is moving in the woods, plus, my feet are tired. Not really worth the walk.

Centennial Park
On the way home, I stop and look out across the pond, finally seeing a pair of mallards and a belted kingfisher. Luckily they were easy to get for by now the sun has disappeared, the day has gotten colder, and I'm in no mood for tromping around.

January Second

North Fork Access Trail
Another super-windy day, and the temperature has dropped to the low twenties. I see some horned larks flying across a field, then attempt to walk the trail by the North Fork access at Clinton Lake. Greenturtle and I had walked a bit of it on an almost-balmy New Year's Eve, and I had startled a flock of common mergansers. Today, however, with the wind whipping across the lake, and no birds in sight, the walk is just a misery. I get as far as where I had seen the mergansers. Once again the lake is rough, the color of slate. No birds have chosen to shelter on it. I don't blame them.

DNR Headquarters on Highway 54
A-ha, finally some water birds. I park by the gate at the DNR office, and hurry down to look. Must be a hundred or so mallards and just as many Canada geese...but I am pleased to catch sight of a diving duck, and identify it as a common goldeneye. Actually, there are three of them. But the wind is relentless and tears of agony are streaming down my face, so time to press on.

Weldon Springs Backpack Trail
I am hoping for some wild turkeys...or eastern bluebirds...or a Carolina wren. Maybe an owl or two? The wind shakes relentlessly through the trees and my face feels like frostbite will set in at any moment. There are no birds to be found. None. Not one. I give up. Tomorrow is another day. And although I don't mean to, for I am trying to Appreciate the Now as much as possible...I start to dream of April. Wildflowers. The first migrating passerines. Sunshine. Arrrghhh!!

Can this warbler be saved? A review of Cerulean Blues

2011-12-30T17:01:00.004-06:00

I just finished Cerulean Blues: A Personal Search for a Vanishing Songbird by Katie Fallon, a book which I highly recommend to all birders and others who care about nature and conservation for reasons which I shall describe in a bit. But first, a confession. I downloaded it onto my Kindle about a month ago, read the introduction, and then skipped to other things.

It wasn't that the introduction was boring or poorly written, far from it. But the sad fact of the matter is that the beautiful little cerulean warbler is disappearing at a rate of 3% a year, the government agencies which could try to help appear to be indifferent, and one of the main reasons for the loss of its breeding habitat is mountaintop removal mining in the Appalachians. I've read some interesting books about trying to save disappearing species before, such as Spix's Macaw: The Race to Save the World's Rarest Bird by Tony Juniper (2003), Seeking the Sacred Raven: Politics and Extinction on a Hawaiian Island by Mark Jerome Walters (2006) and the story of a whole island's species (Guam) being wiped out, And No Birds Sing: A True Ecological Thriller Set in a Tropical Paradise by Mark Jaffe (1997). All of these were interesting (I especially recommend tracking down the last one if you can -- it's kind of old and has a sad ending, but it's a fascinating read), but right now I'm in no mood for a downer.

But earlier this week I picked it up again. After all, if Katie Fallon has taken the time to tell the story of an endangered warbler, then I really should learn more about it. Why "should"? Because even though it's painful to read about the damage inflicted on our world, I don't want to be like an ostrich with my head in the proverbial sand of denial, poking it out a couple of decades later to discover a polluted wasteland and screeching, "When did this happen? Why didn't I get the memo?" It's a fine balancing act, though, between caring and wallowing (for an example of the latter, The Culture of Make Believe by Derrick Jensen (2004), an exhaustive survey of what seems like every terrible thing people have ever done, and which I don't particularly recommend unless you're perusing pamphlets from the Hemlock Society and want that final incentive to take the plunge).

So I began the book, giving myself permission to quit if I started to feel too sad. Well, after the first couple of chapters, I was in no danger of quitting. Fallon is a terrific writer and an engaging narrator, and the story is more of a personal quest than a journalistic exploration, although she certainly seems to have done her homework.

She gives us a couple of chapter of historical (Wilson, Audubon, etc.) and ecological background, interviews a couple of experts, and then it's off to see ceruleans for herself, and this is where the story really picks up. She goes birding with an old friend in West Virginia, finding her first ceruleans, then hangs out with students, researchers, bird-banders, and even goes to Colombia with a conservation group to see the warbler in its wintering habitat on the slopes of the Andes.

The book has many strengths, first among them probably being the readability. Fallon is a writer and English professor, not a scientist or researcher, and this shows in both the engaging prose and the fact that she often seems to bring up the kinds of things that someone like me (imaginative birding type, not statistic-minded science type) would think of, such as this description of a male warbler appearing in response to a recording of their song: "He puffed up the soft white feathers of his chest -- perhaps to appear larger -- and buzzed viciously. He seemed totally consumed by hatred for the intruding, brazen male who must be down there somewhere...." Her response? "He's so cute!"

A weakness of some birding books and blogs is that it can be difficult work up that much enthusiasm about someone else's birding trip; at the end of the day, someone else's list of species might be impressive, but is it interesting to read about? In Fallon's case, yes it is. Her descriptions of birding trips made me want to get out and bird myself, right now, to join in some of the fun. (From the chapter about Colombia: "The life birds came almost too quickly for me to enjoy them: tropical mockingbird, yellow-rumped oriole, a slew of hummingbirds, lemon-rumped tanager, crimson-backed tanager, and scrub tanager. My senses were overloaded; I felt intoxicated by tanagers." Yeah, don't you hate it when that happens?)

Another reason to read this book is that, although she does not hesitate to describe the problems these little warblers face, such as the horrific mountaintop removal coal mines in West Virginia, she balances it out with enough cause for hope. She seems able to see the better side of people while also keeping her eyes open to all the problems we have to fight if we are going to make the world a better place for warblers (and incidentally, for us).

Mountaintop removal coal mining is absolutely horrific; in Fallon's words, "Not only is the mountain removed, but everything on it: forests, birds, bears, deer, homes, cemeteries, flowers, butterflies, streams," leaving behind a landscape that "looked as if bombs had been dropped...from the copilot's seat, I had looked down on massive brown ditches; flattened, grass-covered 'reclaimed' mountaintops; and ominous black lakes of coal slurry." In one of the more memorable passages, she describes looking down on such a mine while "a small flock of cedar waxwings...flew beyond the treetops, into the empty air above the barren hole, and, seemingly shocked, quickly turned and headed back for the tree line."

Despite passages like this, and her own bouts of sadness (not only for the warbler, but shortly before her quest began, the shooting incident at Virginia Tech, where she teaches, occurred), the overall tone of the book is absolutely not the downer I'd feared. From mentioning the efforts of conservation groups to improve habitat, even after the mining has done its worse, to describing a parade of school-children dressed like warblers in Colombia in a town by a nature preserve where they winter, Fallon manages to find the good in both the world and its people. I also love the Spanish word for cerulean warbler, reinita cielo azur," or "sky-blue little queen." Who wouldn't want to save something called that?

The book ends with some suggestions for what we can do to help the warblers, from the constructive (buy shade-grown coffee, support conservation groups, oppose mountaintop removal mining) to the sublime (learn the names of things, let nature help you heal).

Her final recommendation is one I shall absolutely take to heart: go out and find a cerulean warbler for yourself. You know what, they do nest in Southern Illinois. I think I'll have to go for it!

Highly recommended!

A two-faced time of year

2011-12-26T16:31:00.003-06:00

As the season of introspection continues, I have found myself more in the mood for long nature walks than frenetic birding expeditions, although of course I always bring my binoculars along. Regarded from without, the activity probably looks the same: I stroll along for a while, I notice something, raise my binoculars, and then after a minute or two, walk onwards. The difference is that my attention is directed more inward than usual, and that the focus is more on the walking than the birds.

But obviously, there are birds, today 26 species (my favorites being the white-throated sparrow and eastern meadowlark I saw at Weldon Spring, and the pine siskins I saw at Mascoutin, along with my perennial favorites northern cardinal, tufted titmouse, belted kingfisher and blue jay); plus, two, the siskins and a pair of ring-necked pheasants, were new species for DeWitt County.

It was a decent day for birding but perhaps an even better day for reflection. For while I ignore the "holidays" as much as I can (or at least the lock-step consumerism that the season seems to encourage), I am a total sucker for the New Year's Resolution.

I know, I know! Nobody ever keeps their resolutions, and it's pretty much a trite waste of time, and besides, why should the hopes of self improvement be limited to just one time of year? I never keep my resolutions either (unless I resolve to go birding!), and yet that doesn't stop me from trying again. I love the line in one of Florence + the Machine's songs, "I am done with my graceless heart/So tonight I'm gonna cut it out and then restart." That's what I would resolve to do if I could, but I know that extreme changes never stick. Or even if they do, one soon finds that old graceless heart back in place in all-new surroundings.

But if one can avoid setting unrealistic or rigid expectations and instead focus on a constructive amount of introspection, I do believe that an annual ritual of deciding if we are the people that we want to be, and if not, what steps we can take to get closer to our best possible selves can be worthwhile. As the two-faced Roman god of the crossroads and January's namesake, Janus, looks both ahead and behind, I like to think of where I've been and which direction I hope I'm heading.

I'm not thinking in terms of "resolutions" (which brings up memories of lapsed gym memberships and failed diets from years past) but instead intentions or goals, with the understanding that "a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"

Goal Number One: To Achieve My Personal Best in Birding. Amongst friends and family members, I've been referring to 2012 as "my Big Year," but to be honest, I don't actually expect to be the Illinois Ultimate Birding Champion. I have too many limits to my time and resources and too many other things I want to achieve to go for that, plus I don't want to get obsessed about it. But I can hope for my best year yet -- in fact, my goal is to see 255 species, which would be 80% of the A.B.A.'s total for the state (if I understand their website correctly), and the minimum number required for a Big Year. Since that's about 40 more species than I've seen in the state all total, it's still quite a challenging goal. And let's be honest, I'll get obsessed about it.

Goal Number Two: To Work on My Avian Haven, a.k.a., my yard, which is currently a wild, weedy overgrown mess chock full of invasive species (bamboo, starlings, house sparrows, English ivy, nightshade; seriously, how can a yard this size have so many "issues"?). Rome wasn't built in a day, and my backyard bird sanctuary won't be achieved in a year, but I do have some plans to add native species and bird and butterfly-friendly plants, and to remove more of the invasive stuff. I hope to be able to provide regular updates on creating better wildlife habitat (and a prettier garden!) starting in the spring.

Of course, being an over-achiever in the resolution department, I can think of a half a dozen other "goals" I plan to work on, although these are not so relevant to the theme of this blog. You know, eat right, work out, be a nicer person, cure that case of "foot in mouth disease," spend more time reading worthwhile books and less time watching episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, etc., etc., the same as every year.

Do you have any goals for the coming year? Especially any as relates to birding?

Solstice thoughts

2011-12-22T21:47:00.000-06:00

Happy Winter Solstice, everyone! Although I much prefer the summer one, for both birding and general merriment, there's at least one thing to be said for this time of year...starting tomorrow, the sunlight hours will start to get longer! And if that doesn't deserve a big woo-hoo, I don't know what does.

I apologize to anyone who checks for new posts here very often, but lately my inspiration has been in as short supply as the daylight. Luckily, there are some bright spots on the horizon, at least figuratively.

For one thing, one of my favorite days is just around the corner--January first! And not for the opportunity to make a lot of resolutions that I'll keep for maybe a day or two (although I'm sure that will happen), but because it's the one day of the year when each and every species of bird I see is a "year bird." House sparrows, hooray! Pigeons, I'm glad to see ya! Starlings, welcome aboard! And of course I hope to see a lot more as well.

Sometimes it seems like the best moment is immediately before something happens. It's like that quantum physics thought experiment with the cat in the box with a radioactive isotope. Before you open the box, it's not that the cat could be either dead or alive. It's both at once. Then you peel back the flap, the die is cast, and the cat's fate is decided. I know that Erwin Schrodinger wasn't a birder...but it's that same feeling of infinite possibility.

Or, a more mundane example, the unopened Christmas gift. When I was a kid, I was always disappointed after I opened my presents on Christmas morning. It's not that I didn't like my gifts. It's just that, although I never could have articulated it back then, it was somehow more fun before I knew exactly what they were.

Now, I get that same feeling of excitement from a bird checklist. Every January I print off a copy of the Birds of Illinois list from the Internet, and read it over several times in anticipation, lingering an extra few seconds on the species I think most likely for the location and season. Will I see purple finches? White-crowned sparrows? Rusty blackbirds? Snowy owls? Golden-crowned kinglets? Will I see them all? Until the day is over, anything is still possible.

Some people have a solstice ritual they like to keep, or Christmas traditions, or they really look forward to partying on New Year's Eve. I could never get into any of that. It's not that I don't want to, I just can't work up any enthusiasm. But as I though about it while soaking in the tub this evening, I realized that birding has become my ritual.

Maybe it sounds silly, but going back to the same places, over and over, in different seasons, weathers, moods, what have you, becomes a way to anchor myself to this particular place and moment. It grounds me, and wakes me up, and fills me with gratitude and wonder when I least expect it. Sometimes it feels almost like a prayer or a meditation.

I will wrap up this post with a quote from Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom by John O'Donohue.

Familiarity enables us to tame, control and ultimately forget the mystery. We make our peace with the surface as image and we stay away from the Otherness and fecund turbulence of the unknown that it masks. Familiarity is one of the most subtle and pervasive forms of human alienation....

This happens also with our experience of place. I remember my first evening in Tubingen, Germany. I was to spend more than four years there studying Hegel, but that first evening in Tubingen was utterly strange and unknown to me. I remember thinking, Look very carefully at Tubingen this evening because you will never again see it in this same way. And this was true.... After I had mapped out my routes through this strange territory, it became familiar, and soon I did not see it for itself anymore.

Perhaps that is what my January Birding Ritual is all about. For at least one day, I can shake off the dross of familiarity, and see each bird for itself once more.

Upper Peninsula Birding Adventure

2011-12-17T07:09:00.001-06:00

Last week I went to Michigan's Upper Peninsula to visit my parents and, more importantly, to look for winter birds. Luckily, they enjoy birding as well, though perhaps not in the "all birds, all the time" way that I do, so it wasn't a complete conflict of interest.

A note about the photos: I did not get any good bird photos on this trip, so all bird photos on this post were actually taken last February at Sax Zim Bog. All landscape and otherwise non-bird photos were taken on this trip in Michigan.

As usual, I had a mental list (if there are many species it is usually an actual list) of birds I'd hoped to see, cobbled together from recent sightings on ebird, plus those that Sunwiggy had seen herself in the past couple of weeks: snowy owl, spruce grouse, snow bunting, white-winged crossbill, and Bohemian waxwing, all of which would be "lifers." Some evening grosbeaks would have been nice, too, but since no one had been seeing them, I didn't have my hopes up for those.

When I arrived on Thursday, I had barely crossed the state line when it started to snow. As in, how do I keep in my lane because I can't see it? Welcome to Michigan! Well, that's what I get for traveling to the north in December; except for the scary driving factor, it was actually kind of nice, as here in Illinois we've had a mild year and no snow in sight.

First bird sightings: bald eagle and American crow on the drive there, plus black-capped chickadees on my parents porch and pigeons at their feeder.

Day One, Friday: To Marquette and back

The next morning, it was still snowing like crazy around Calumet, but the weather forecast reported clear skies in Marquette, so we decided to head that way. It was an exciting trip because I had never been to Marquette and my parents had not really birded there, so new things to be discovered by all.

Sure enough, we did soon leave the snow behind, and had a nice time stopping along the water to look for birds: at the pier in Baraga we saw mallards, common mergansers, and a large flock of redheads; in L'Anse, Canada geese and mallards, and at Marquette Harbor more common mergansers and hooded mergansers. I kicked myself for forgetting the camera, as the two of the hooded mergansers were very close, in the slips for boats, diving for fish with no mind paid to us, and raising and lowering their hoods with abandon.

It was quite cold, but I wanted to walk around Presque Isle Park for a bit to see if I could spot some crossbills. I had forgotten a quirk of Sunwiggy's; when it's cold, she won't step outside unless she absolutely has to, preferring to bird from the vehicle. So she wouldn't get out, not even for crossbills. "I've seen them before." This sighting was something like three years ago, but there was no changing her mind, so she got to wait in the Jeep, drinking coffee from her thermos. Luckily, my dad was willing to stroll around a bit so I wasn't all alone.

The woods were very peaceful, and away from the wind off the water, not even too cold, but the only birds we saw were chickadees and a hairy woodpecker. I did see two flyovers of noisy flocks that I determined to be white-winged crossbills, which was good enough for my list, although I definitely needed a better look. Maybe later in the trip; people had been seeing them everywhere.

On the way back, the harbor was crammed with gulls (from what we could determine, ring-billed and herring), plus the mergansers and greater scaups. Few species seen but proof of life birds in the vicinity, so not a bad start to the trip.

Day Two, Saturday: all around the Keweenaw Peninsula

On the second day, my parents decided to drive by every place they or someone else had recently seen something cool on the Keweenaw Peninsula. I especially had hopes of picking up some nice species out towards Copper Harbor, as there had been some interesting sightings there lately, especially the Bohemian waxwings my parents saw a mere week or so before.

We started with White City Park, as a small colony of spruce grouse is thought to live there. It was another cold day, so here is a picture of my parents. The reason you can't see them is because they wouldn't come out of the Jeep!

It's ironic that two people who hate the cold so much moved to a land where it's cold for six months out of the year; on the other hand, absolutely nothing was stirring at the park, so maybe they had the right idea.

We were surprised to see many huge flocks of common redpolls picking for grit or salt on the snowy roads, and a few much smaller flocks of pine grosbeaks. Even though I had picked up these species last February in Minnesota, it was a treat to see them again, especially the huge flocks of redpolls as I'd had no idea that they came down in such numbers.

Keweenaw County also produced a rough-legged hawk for us, and in Copper Harbor my dad and I strolled around a bit, where I added "blue jay" to my list of species for the trip, and heard and saw both crows and ravens -- it was fun to be able to compare them up close like that.

The only thing out over the water was a lone greater scaup.

I did enjoy the patterns that the ice made as it formed over the water.

If I hadn't gone to Copper Harbor, I would have been sad to miss it, and the flocks of redpolls and pine grosbeaks were really fun, but overall I was a little frustrated by how few species I was seeing, and how much time I was spending in the vehicle, so I announced that on the following day we were getting out somewhere and walking around!

Day Three, Sunday: Houghton and Baraga

Luckily, the weather was with me on my campaign to get out of the Jeep, as Sunday was sunny and warm, going up into the forties. Rather than be bummed out about all the lifebirds I wasn't seeing, I decided to make a game out of how many species in general I could add on for the trip, and was happy to find three purple finches in with a flock of redpolls, plus starlings and goldfinches as we explored the county. We strolled around Houghton for a bit, and then headed back out towards Baraga, which gave us some new species in the bay (red-breasted merganser, common goldeneye), and a couple of very nice surprises, such as a pair of trumpeter swans on the south end of the bay and two Thayer's Gulls in L'Anse. The gulls were especially nice as they were life birds, and as they are rather hard to identify, it was nice to have three pairs of eyes agreeing that they weren't herring gulls.

Sunwiggy actually got out of the vehicle a couple of times!

To wrap up the day, we decided to go to the Baraga Plains, hoping for gray jays, black-backed woodpeckers or a better view of white-winged crossbills. I'm a little hazy about the rules for visiting the plains; apparently the land is owned by a private company, and is actively being logged, but anyone is free to wander around if they want to.

The day was bright, the (melting) snow a glistening white contrast to the blue sky, but there were no birds. I mean, none, not even the chattering of the ubiquitous chickadees. It was as if the area was suffering a bird blight -- but hey, I got to walk around a bit, which was a nice way to round out the day. I think that if I lived up here, I would have to invest in some snowshoes, or go insane with cabin fever.

Day Four, Monday, Back to Marquette

Since we'd had the most luck finding birds along the water, for my last day, I voted for a return trip to Marquette. It was gray and drizzling for most of the day, but we did have enough of a reprieve to check out the harbor, where I saw mostly the same birds as before, plus a common goldeneye. It was fun seeing the "rafts of wintering ducks" that I've read about and never managed to find before, and we got to challenge our ID skills by such creatures as a juvenile goldeneye and female greater scaups. Another stroll through the woods at Presque Isle park revealed black-capped chickadees and a bald eagle.

By then it was starting to rain again, so after lunch I checked out a gift shop and agreed to a visit to Snowbound Books for Sunwiggy--she loves bookstores the way I love a mixed flock of warblers in their breeding plumage, and since Marquette is a two hour trip for her, it would be mean not to. And I did enjoy seeing more of the town; it seems like a nice place, and I would love to visit again, preferably in the summer.

On a non-birding note, I would like to mention several of the nice places we ate lunch or dinner during my visit; since birding can really work up an appetite, these were much appreciated: Bambu and The Library in Houghton, the former serving good Chinese food and the second a wide variety of dishes--the carne asada I tried wasn't bad but they are also a microbrewery and the Miner's IPA is excellent; The Vierling Restaurant in Marquette, where we had some good sandwiches, also a brewery but we were there for lunch so I didn't try the beer; Thunder Bay Inn in Big Bay served a good salad for lunch; and Toni's in Laurium made a decent BLT (my parents swear by the pasties, but no offense to one of the U.P.'s signature foods, that's not my thing). I'm a picky eater (or, as I prefer to call myself, a "foodie," and usually bring a picnic lunch on a birding trip; the weather didn't make that appealing on this trip, so I was glad to find some decent places to eat.

Oh, and if you're wondering the total number of species I saw -- 29. I know, not very tantalizing, but at least there were some good ones. And the next time I visit the U.P., I think I'll choose the summer months!

Ruins in the snow

2011-12-13T21:01:00.000-06:00

For those who may have wondered where the Crow has been, I've spent the last few days visiting the 'rents in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where they have chosen to spent their later years -- specifically, in Calumet on the Keweenaw Peninsula, which (as my dad would be happy to explain to you in great detail), is in the midst of Copper Country.

Here's a bit of a history lesson: the Keweenaw peninsula is rich in copper, which started a mining boom in the middle of the 1800s--I'm not enough of an aficionado of the period to give a complete history, but here's a brief summery from Wikepidia.

One thing that did catch my interest as I was driving northward were the ruins along highway 26 between Houghton and Calumet.

It turns out that these are the ruins of a stamp mill -- as my dad explained, the facility was used to crush huge rocks sent down from the copper mines further up the hill, so that the rocks were turned to sand, and only the hunks of copper remained.

I enjoyed wandering among the ruins taking photos -- although to be honest, the history of the area as shown by the ruins of the stamp mill, although interesting, is not the point in time I'd chose to visit if I had a free trip in a time machine. I'd chose a century or two earlier, and hang with the French explorers, the Ojibway, and the passenger pigeons.

Besides, there's a certain gravitas to ruins; you don't necessarily want to know the facts. Sometimes it's more interesting to just wander around taking photos. OK, the past history major in me is so shocked at that statement that I take it back! It's better to know!

There used to be so much copper in the area that even the pulverized rock, post-stamping, had enough to dredge out afterward. And then, some time in the sixties, it stopped being profitable to mine for copper in the Upper Peninsula...the competition from the western mines was too great, and the mines had to go down so deep, that it was no longer worth the companies' while, and they closed up shop....

And for those of you who want to know what birds I saw Up North...I promise to share all the news on the birding front later this week!

Some thoughts on Spontaneous Happiness

2011-12-04T15:38:00.001-06:00

(And of course sooner or later these thoughts will get around to birds!)

The terminal grayness of the season has dragged on into Sunday (there was a respite yesterday afternoon...when I was busy running errands, alas), so that after a brief jaunt to the Salt Creek Wetland this morning, I spent the rest of the day huddled under an afghan, snuggling with my dogs and reading the latest book to hit my Kindle, Spontaneous Happiness by Andrew Weil.

I have been a big fan of Dr. Weil's for over a decade; in fact, it was his books Health and Healing and Natural Health, Natural Medicine that first piqued my interest in alternative (and integrative) medicine. His latest, Spontaneous Happiness, is mostly a discussion of how to alleviate the mild-to-moderate depression and other mental issues plaguing the twenty-first century developed world. Although he mentions that part of the "epidemic" of depression is actually created by the medical industry (I think that very few would argue that, especially after approval of direct-to-consumer advertising, the pharmaceutical companies have gone overboard in pushing their wares), and that the idea that one should be aggressively "happy" all the time is artificial and unnatural, he also states that more people than ever seem to be depressed. Hunter-gatherer societies, the Old Order Amish, and those in less developed countries very rarely get depressed, even though their lives are more physically grueling. Modern American cosmopolites (and those in other developed Western countries) are much less happy. Why is this?

Besides birding and nature, integrative and natural medicine, especially as it relates to mental health, is a huge interest of mine. Partly this is for personal reasons--I try not to dwell on it, but I'll be the first to admit that I'm completely neurotic, mostly suffering from various forms of anxiety, with a liberal smattering of melancholia to round it all out.

Like Dr. Weil, I find the whole biochemical theory depression and other problems (with some exceptions, such as bipolar disorder, which thankfully I do not have!) to be inadequate if not downright flawed. But if neurotransmitters aren't to blame for the problem, then what is? Here is where the topic intersects nicely with the core subjects of Bird Ephemera.

Lately my thoughts on the topic can be summed up briefly: "We're just not meant to live this way!" In fact, I've felt out of step with our society pretty much my entire life, and the disconnect has just been getting worse, to the extent that, at times, trying to squeeze myself into the current mold is almost a torment for me. And like a pendulum swinging from extreme to extreme, the more horrible I feel in my daily life, the more obsessively I turn to nature as my escape.

I was interested to see that, basically, Dr. Weil seems to agree with me. Possible culprits mentioned in Spontaneous Happiness include our heavily processed diets (I would personally rate this higher than he does, at least based on my own experience--junk foods always lead me to junk moods), too little activity and too much time spent inside, being disconnected from nature (he mentions Richard Louv's concept of "nature deficit disorder"), but Weil seems to place most of the blame on our Information Technology: information overload, the constant pull of e-mail and cell phone calls bringing work into leisure time, our responses to the non-stop demands of the news media to catch our attention by alarming us.

I can see how that would be true for people who have fallen into this trap. During the Gulf Oil Spill, I know I became more and more depressed as I plunged again and again into coverage on the tragedy. Other than stories on the environment, personally I try to avoid the news as much as possible, a strategy I've been following for the past fifteen years, after I realized that the TV news was really upsetting me over stories (such as crimes in other cities) that I had no control over and did not impact me. And I will say that I personally know people who get angry or agitated after following the news, so I agree that picking and choosing very carefully is a good step.

Other than that, although I complain a lot about my job, I am very scrupulous about maintaining my work/life balance. My cell phone is for emergencies and calls to Sunwiggy only. My e-mail is only given out to people I want to hear from. I do love to use the Internet for fun and information -- my blog, ebird, other people's birding blogs, listening to music from distant radio stations via iTunes while I do all this -- and since my depression and anxiety issues stem from times long before any of this was available to me -- in my case, I don't think that's the issue.

Not that I am exonerating technology: at work, when I've had jobs that keep my body busy as well as my mind (such as my days as a line cook in Arkansas), I was literally too busy to be depressed on the job! Since "upgrading" to better paid office work, I find that the tasks I do in front of the computer don't really challenge me, so that my mind has plenty of chance to ruminate on unpleasant things, and my body sits idle, so I don't burn off any of my restless energy. I also hate -- HATE -- talking on the phone. Hate it. And I do it all day long. So I have to say, in my experience, sedentary (boring) office work is much more depression-inducing than equally monotonous manual labor.

As a penultimate thought, I will say that Spontaneous Happiness gives short shrift to introverts. Dr. Weil states that we are social creatures, meant to live in tribes and extended family groups, and that social isolation is invariably detrimental. "Period." I honestly cannot dispute this. But...what about true introverts? I am one of the most introverted people I know. I find interactions with others outside of my immediate circle, even if they are positive in nature, to be exhausting. I honestly like to be alone. I crave it. Sometimes when my nearest and dearest decline my invitation to join me for a nature walk...I'm relieved. Not that I don't love them or enjoy their company. But I am almost never, ever depressed when it's just me and a bird, me and a plant, me in awe of a lake or a tree or the sky. Actually, at those times, I feel the most "complete."

And for my ultimate thought.... Dr. Weil cautions against spending too much time alone. And I agree. But when I am by myself in nature, I never feel alone. There is a whole world, both seen and unseen, natural and metaphysical, all around me. And the more I learn to pay attention, the less alone I feel.

Some things I forgot

2011-12-02T15:05:00.001-06:00

Here are a few things I forgot about December:

How the sense of darkness, so early in the evening, is heavy and thick, as if you could drown in it. How my hair tangles and my eyes burn and my hands chap from the dry air. How the only time I don't feel cold is right after stepping into a scalding hot bath. How the brown and taupe landscape of the autumn gives way to a grayness that seems able to actually seep inside my flesh and render my thoughts equally gray. How hard it is to get out of bed on these cold, gray mornings.

Today I drove around the countryside to the north, the stretch of road from El Paso to Gridley, hoping to catch sight of a snowy owl that was seen by some other birders a couple of days ago. I did not see the owl, and I took it personally. I saw a red-tailed hawk gliding above the muddy wallow of a farmyard, and the dark little profiles of kestrals perching on the telephone wires, against the gray wash of the sky. I saw some horned larks dashing for the camouflage of winter fields as I made an ill-conceived detour along a dirt road. But no owls.

At least it is Friday. Lately being at work has meant the inability to think any thought through to its natural conclusion. The phone rings constantly. While I am taking one call, the message light starts flashing to remind me of all those I am missing. Coworkers hover by my desk waiting for a moment to ambush me with a question. Behind me, the fax machine keeps whirring with more work flowing in. In order to multi-task, I would first have to be able to finish an actual task.

Despite a grim weather forecast for the weekend (both days overcast with a chance of rain), if at all possible I will spend as long as I can slowly wandering through the woods, letting the stillness soak down to my bones. Somehow the season only starts to bother me when I am stuck inside (or when I am not seeing owls, but that's another point).

And I remind myself that winter is not always this bleak; sometimes it is touched with its own moment of transcendence, such as I described in my Bird Journal from February 13, 2010: "Beautiful winter day, archetypal, what people mean when they praise 'the seasons' (not the weeks of misery that accompany it)--the sky so vividly blue, the snow a sparkling white expanse, trees and grasses glittering with frost.... Heard a cardinal singing what cheer and then purty purty purty, the notes so clear, the tonal equivalent of the sparkling blue/white day. It seemed the most beautiful sound I had ever heard."

But there is an eternity between that moment and this one....

A perfect Friday

2011-11-26T16:03:00.001-06:00

I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in. -- John Muir

Yesterday the weather was just about perfect for a day in Nature: sunny, not too cold, a bit too windy for setting up my scope around the lake, but other than that, I could not complain. Greenturtle's ankle was bothering him, so I headed out for a solo stroll around 9:00.

I decided to make Mascoutin my first stop, since I had not been there in a couple of weeks, and someone recently saw a purple sandpiper in the "the boat launch area" around Clinton Lake. I'm not sure exactly where that is -- the Lake has quite a few places from which one can launch a boat -- but since the launch at Mascoutin is nice and rocky, I could envision a sandpiper flitting from stone to stone there.

The wind was so fierce I decided to walk the Houseboat Cove trail first. As I walked along, I thought how similar November and March look across the land, and yet how different they feel: one the advent of winter, the other the land's first wakeful stirrings afterwards. And yet, we have the same color schemes, the leafless trees, the swathes of tan grasses in the fields; the persistent windiness of both seasons; the general sogginess of the ground; the same mix of birds (American tree sparrow, junco, chance sightings of waterfowl in migration).

I wasn't expecting much, birding-wise, from my walk, and yet, the day surprised me. It was not that what I saw was unusual for the season; the surprise was the spontaneous surge of joy the sightings gave me: a bald eagle on the wing; crows harassing a red-tailed hawk; the shockingly red hue of a cardinal against the bareness of a branch; the profile of a flicker.

The wind made the water over the lake so choppy that I was looking forward to the part of the trail where the "cove" begins, a more sheltered area where I was hoping to find some resting waterfowl. Alas, I was not the only one hoping for this: I saw an unnatural white fluttering across the lake, and raised my binoculars to see artificial ducks flapping endlessly in the wind, while a flock of decoys bobbed in the water beneath. Oh, yeah: duck hunting season. Shots cracked out, sundering the stillness of the land, and a congregation of coots scattered for safety. If the hunters were successful, at least I did not have to see it. Instead, I hurried off on the "short cut" back to the woods, heading quickly away from the cove.

I dislike duck hunting because I love ducks; that said, not only some friends of mine but also several well-known conservation-minded birders have been hunters. My feelings on hunting in general are mixed, and therefore likely to please no one. On the one hand, humans have been hunting for their supper since time immemorial, and if someone is going to eat meat anyway, I don't see why it's wrong to kill it oneself. But in the past century or so, the balance of humans and nature, and our understanding of the same, has gotten so out of whack that it affects just about every aspect of our lives, hunting included.

Rather than trying to explicate, I will simply give two examples, one from each side of the unhealthy extremes: the first, a "hunter" who complains that wolves eat too many deer, elk or moose and thus must be slaughtered, so that humans can have more of the share, without any conception of the vital predator-prey balance and what that means to a healthy ecosystem, or the fact that what we have here in Illinois -- deer with no predators, devouring the landscape in their abundance -- is the sign of a very sick balance of nature. The second, meat-eating co-workers who have criticized other employees for killing their own meat (in one case, a Nigerian man who would purchase and slaughter his own goats, in another, a deer-hunter). In the first case, the exact words were, "This is America! We don't kill the animals ourselves!" And yet this woman would go to the supermarket and buy meat from the worst abuses of factory farming....

Philosophical musings aside, I really didn't want to see any dead ducks, so I checked the boat launch area one last time for sandpipers (natch), and then drove back to the non-hunting Weldon Springs to continue my walk.

It was just such a beautiful day. I saw all my favorite "usual suspects" (titmice, red-bellied woodpeckers, American tree sparrows, dark-eyed juncos, blue jays, cardinals, chickadees) plus a few good "extras": cedar waxwings by the berries. A shy pair of fox sparrows. A brown creeper, creeping up the tree-trunks. A flock of snow geese overhead; before I saw them, they sounded almost like dogs yapping in the distance....

I walked on and on, simply not wanting to the day to end. As I decided to explore one more loop of the trail, one more bend in the road, the quote from John Muir that I know from my local Audubon Society flyers came to me in a slightly convoluted form: I thought, The way out and the way in are the same. I knew I was mangling a quote, but it still seemed important. I asked myself, Do I mean "the way out is the way in?" And told myself: NO. The way out and the way in are the same.

Maybe it was low blood sugar... All told, I was out for six hours, and walked a minimum of ten miles, and yet, it all passed so quickly, a perfect way to spend a Friday.

Today, Greenturtle and I took the dogs for a walk around Weldon Springs, and then had to do some grocery shopping. On our way into town, he mentioned a tweet about some "Black Friday" incidents involving pepper spray and tasers. At least this year no one was trampled to death.... Give me a day in nature, any time!

Primal Birding; or, the need for nature

2011-11-24T17:45:00.000-06:00

November is a good month to think about things. I've come to like the late fall season less since I've gotten more into birding because, at least for me, it's just not very exciting on that front. But in terms of going out on a nature walk, I've enjoyed this season as long as I've enjoyed being outside so, in other words, ever since I can remember.

And as I've strolled the woods and prairies recently, enjoying the antics of American tree sparrows, dark-eyed juncos, chickadees, white-breasted nuthatches, tufted titmice and a variety of woodpeckers (downy, hairy, and red-bellied for the most part), it's occurred to me how, at all times of the year, these jaunts are absolutely vital to my mental and physical well-being. I simply cannot imagine how I would survive without access to regular outings somewhere peaceful and outside, surrounded by trees, grasses, birds, wind, water. It's when I feel the most content, and how I step away from the aggravations and outright B.S. of day-to-day life, and, I must admit, distance myself from my own neurotic tendencies. Of course, I love to see the birds. But in a way, a good birding day is just the icing on the cake.

Of course, I am not the only one who feels this way. In his book The Nature Principle, Richard Louv mentions many different ways that being in natural surroundings, even highly artificial ones, benefits adults and children alike, with positive effects ranging from decreased stress to improved health (mental and physical) to greater memory and learning abilities, and many of these effects have been demonstrated in studies. Those who have been following my blog might remember that, in previous posts, I was actually kind of harsh in my discussion of Louv's book, but the reason for that was not because I disagree with the importance of the natural world for human health.

What bothered me about the book was that he pulled back from what seemed the most obvious conclusion. Instead of discussing how we humans have strayed too far from the kind of environment in which we thrive, he makes the case for a "hybrid mind" in which we post-modern people can use judicious amounts of "vitamin N" (for Nature) to become a "high-performance human" -- that is, to be more "productive" in our stressful, artificial daily routines.

It's not that I am unsympathetic to the need to make a living. Not all of us can really get "back to the land." I myself must, for the time being, spend my working days trapped indoors, forced to sit in front of a computer screen and be as "productive" as I can. I just never feel that it's a worthwhile way to spend my time. I am not a "hybrid" anything. I have always known exactly where I belong: walking in the woods. Identifying plants and birds. Listening to all the sounds around me, senses keen. My time in nature taps into something timeless and wonderful; it makes me feel alive. My time in cities and office buildings or big box stores or being stuck in traffic makes me feel, well, to be honest, less than fully alive: stressed out, anxious, bitchy, neurotic, sometimes even a little bit cut off from the world.

I have been saying for a long time, "We are just not meant to live like this!" Luckily for me, I am not the only one who feels this way; in fact, I have recently discovered several "primal" and "paleo" websites on the Internet, some of which bring up a whole range of topics such as this post about being in nature from Mark's Daily Apple, my new favorite non-birding website.

The stillness and austerity of November help push me to think about my place in the world; the contrasting hyperactivity of the "holiday season" is an interesting contrast to that inward pull, and one that I resist as much as possible. I am truly starting to loathe "the holidays" -- and it has nothing to do with hating on Christmas, Hanukkah, the winter solstice or even Kwanzaa. This has been a sacred time of year for a very long time, I'll just put it that way.

What I hate is that this has also become the peak time for consumerism, which seems to have its own holy day now, "Black Friday." I promise you that I am not about to go off on a rant. Satisfying as it may be to express one's strongly held opinions, there is nothing so tedious as reading someone else's.

I'll just sum up by saying what I'll be doing tomorrow: going birding, and for a long walk in nature, then coming home to play with my dogs and prepare some healthy food. I'll get plenty of fresh air and exercise and I won't spend a single dollar or step into a single store. And I think that's the way I'm supposed to live.

Slouching towards epiphanies

2011-11-19T19:48:00.001-06:00

He says,"It just occurred to me that your pursuit of the bunting repeats an archetypal American fable."
"What," I ask warily, "might that be?"
"Ahab's quest for the white whale. Your bunting is a pint-sized Moby Dick. And we know how that story ends."

This quote from Diary of a Left-Handed Birdwatcher by Leonard Nathan (Harcourt Brace & Company: 1996) flitted, bunting-like, through my mind a few times yesterday, after I had convinced Greenturtle to accompany me on another ill-fated search for the Franklin's Gull of Clinton Lake.

"I'm really starting to hate that bird," I confessed on our way out to the lake. "With everyone else, it's a real little exhibitionist, showing itself willy-nilly, but whenever I go out looking for it...oh no, it's nowhere to be found. And I will see that [censored] gull, one way or another!"

Tough words, but I'm no Ahab. In fact, the gusts of wind that galloped over the lake and bitch-slapped me right in the face as I tried to squint, teary-eyed from the elements, at the congregations of gulls through my scope soon had me retreating to the warm embrace of our vehicle, cursing not only the gull but the flat and windy state in which I live. To be honest, I should have known better than to try. Cold, windy days make me so grouchy and whiny that I can't even stand myself; on the other hand, since being pent up inside makes me feel the same way, days like that are a real lose-lose situation for me.

But just as there is nothing new under the sun, there is no birding mishap or conundrum that someone else hasn't experienced first, and the Left Handed Birdwatcher's tale touches on many of the recurring themes of this blog.

Leonard Nathan, a retired professor of poetry, documents some efforts made to see the (apparently elusive where he lives) snow bunting, along with some other excursions he makes with his local birding group; and even more to the point, it documents his need to understand why he needs to look for birds. The book is also studded with accounts of dreams he has of reading rare and wondrous books, filled with wisdom and beauty--books that, in the nature of dreams, are destined to fade away. In fact, birds and books seem to blend together in his mind, both being examples of his greater quest, which he explains to a skeptical friend as being a search for an epiphany.

Can birding lead to transcendence? Do egrets and epiphanies go hand in hand? In the course of the short volume, the author, through the voice of science-minded or otherwise long-suffering interlocutors, brings up some interesting points. For example, if you thought you saw a rare and wonderful water bird, and experienced the elation and even near-epiphany at viewing it, only to be told a few minutes later that it had escaped from a zoo and was therefore not "countable"...was the first feeling you had just a sham? Does the truth cancel out that "a-ha!" moment? And if so, what does that say about such moments?

In my case, I can say...yes, learning the bird was not "countable" would reverse the joy of the moment. Utterly. But then, my fascination is with the ephemeral--the seasons, the coming and going of birds, dreams, my emotions, even our lives,-- whereas Leonard Nathan seems to be searching for the capital-T truth. That's an awful lot to pin on the back of a fragile bird just going about its own business, although I really can't fault him for it. I'd like to look up from the shadows on the cave wall to see pure truth too; but as a representative of the post-modern era, I can't really convince myself that it's out there.

Another good topic for thought is a passage where he is alerted to the presence of a Connecticut warbler, goes out and sees it, and yet:

It's a rarity out here and a first for me. I'm deeply satisfied. After a good long look, I make way for others eager for the same.... So why am I suddenly discontented? Perhaps because the experience has demanded so little of me. Or because I had looked so hard at the books I couldn't get free of their pictures and saw the bird through them. It seems I have had a recognition without the shock. Satisfaction, however deep, is probably not epiphany.

I must admit, I have experienced this myself at times; for example, if I ever do see that frickin' frackin' Franklin's gull, I will heave a sigh of relief and duly tick it off my life list, but I doubt it will be on the order of an epiphany. And yet on the other hand, I have been literally moved to tears by the sight of an "ordinary" bird at an unexpected moment.

In fact, on November 14, 2009, after a deeply unexpected sighting of a pileated woodpecker at Funk's Grove in McLean County, I confided to my Bird Journal: "For that moment, felt that greater happiness could not be possible. Proof of phenomenon already noted (e.g. sandhill cranes at Goose Lake Prairie): the Spontaneous Joy of an Unexpected Bird Sighting. A different emotion entirely than the Well-Earned Satisfaction of a Worked-For Bird Sighting...."

Despite these interesting points, I have to admit that I did not find the Left-Handed Bird Watcher's account all that compelling. I felt like he enjoyed sitting around debating the Nature of Seeing a Bird with his intellectual friends more than he enjoyed going out and seeing birds. He writes poetically, but I found him a bit too high-falutin' for my tastes, and I very rarely say that.

So, is there a bird that's your personal white whale right now? And how do you expect to feel when you finally see it?

Not my normal routine

2011-11-12T20:19:00.001-06:00

I used to be terrible at Scrabble. This is because I didn't play for the points, but to try to find the most unusual or erudite word I could with the letters provided. I would ignore the opportunity to play a word like "axe" in a triple word score space because I was too busy trying to impress myself. Once I wised up to some basic strategies, I became a much better (although still not great) Scrabble-player.

Birding can be a little like Scrabble sometimes, in that I would rather seek out a ten-mile hike across a scenic landscape for only so-so birds than go out of my way to somewhere boring to get something new. But just as with my Scrabble strategies, I am revising my ways, especially as practice for next year -- which I am not calling an Illinois Big Year, as it is bound to be medium-sized at best; but, perhaps, my Ultimate Birding Year.

Case in point: this morning I eschewed my usual, pleasant rambles and instead took off to Lake Decatur, about 25 miles to the south, in order to see the red-necked grebe that people have been sighting over the past week. I had never seen a red-necked grebe, and the anticipation of perhaps doing so was, of course, appealing. But birding in Decatur? Are you serious??

I hope that the following sentences will not offend the doubtless upstanding and wonderful citizens of Decatur, IL, but all comments I had heard up to this point about the city were not very flattering. Not to mention that a glance at the map showed nothing of interest to me in either Decatur or its surrounding county (Macon), apart from the Lake and the grebes currently bobbing about on it, that is. And my one previous drive through the city, right through its industrial core on a gray and forbidding afternoon, was such that afterwards I was tempted to place cool teabags over my eyelids in order to recover from the sight.

So, did I wish to have a nice stroll somewhere grebe-less, or did I want to try for a life bird? I shall probably make hard-care birders the world over proud when I state that I decided on the grebe. And, because I really hate to drive and navigate at the same time in a strange city, I got Greenturtle to come along with me. He even programmed the destination into the GPS system on his smart phone, so that the bossy computerized voice could work my nerves telling us where to go the whole trip.

We stopped at Nelson Park, and glanced over the water, which was choppy from the wind that has been whipping over the Prairie State like mad for the past couple of days. As I tried to stroll along the water front, I decided I needed at least another three layers added to the three I already had on, and since the only birds in sight were a sullen flock of ring-billed gulls, I didn't think it was worth struggling on. To cheer myself up that our trip to Macon county had not been completely wasted, I suggested we drive to the Lincoln Homestead Park, which would doubtless have something historical on offer and maybe even a bird or two to boot. Of course I was disappointed that the grebe was not in evidence...just my luck, really...everybody else gets to see cool birds, but oh no, not me...guess I'll go eat worms.... (The downward spiral of self-pity is not pleasant to witness, is it?)

As we drove away, Greenturtle announced that he thought he had seen a grebe fly past. At first I thought he was teasing (he likes to say silly things such as that he's just seen an albatross and too bad I missed it, for example--non-birders, what can I say?), but after he turned sharply and headed back for the lake, I realized that he was serious.

He turned onto a road called Country Club Lane, or similar, on the other side of the causeway, where the water was more sheltered from the wind. I could see some birds on the water, but since it was all residential, with nowhere to pull over, how to see them? We finally pulled into the parking lot of a small business, and I pretended I did not see the prominent "No Trespassing" signs as I set up my spotting scope. When you're in a city or town, that's often the problem with any area deemed a "lake"--people like to build fancy houses around it, and then live in suspicion of anyone who ventures too close to their exclusive neighborhood. (At least, unlike Lake Sara, where Sunwiggy and I stalked a different species of grebe a couple of years ago, there were no creepy signs proclaiming "U R N our sights.")

There were more ring-billed gulls, two snow geese, several Canada geese -- and hallelujah! Not one, not two, but THREE red-necked grebes! I congratulated myself on a job well done (and kudos to Greenturtle for spotting them) and took off before anyone could wonder what I was up to.

To round out the morning, we decided to check out the Lincoln Trail park, which was a huge amount of nothing, really. Neither a historic site nor a trail, just a couple of picnic shelters along the Sangamon River. I did see a nice belted kingfisher, though.

And it's nice to know that sometimes when I go out looking for a particular bird, I might actually find it!

Fear of flying (things)

2011-11-11T18:35:00.001-06:00

I have a confession to make: I am the survivor of a vicious bird attack. Statistics tell us that we are more likely to be victimized by someone we know than a random stranger, and thus it was in my case. The feathered hooligan that attacked me -- that, to be precise, flew across the room at me and tried to pierce my eyebrow with his infernally pointy beak -- was my mother's sun conure, Wiggy. Traumatic as this encounter was, it is very unlikely ever to occur in the wild. Despite the fact that birds have an awful lot to be cheesed off about, they almost never retaliate.

But having little to fear does not prevent phobias from developing, and a fear of birds, or ornithophobia, is relatively common. I have met several people with varying degrees of it: the coworker who was terrorized by a robin that accidentally flew into her house; another who was convinced that crows were going to attack her; the woman who explained that she wasn't afraid of birds, not really, but she really hates it when they "swoop at her." In his autobiography The Urban Birder, British birder David Lindo confesses that, despite his love of birding, when he has to get too close to a bird, such as when someone wants his help with one that is injured, he feels a bit apprehensive about it, for which he blames a childhood viewing of Alfred Hitchcock's classic suspense movie, The Birds.

I suspect that many a bird phobia can be traced back to seeing this movie during one's impressionable years. Surely everyone is familiar with the plot--birds of varying species attack Tippi Hedron and other people of Bodega Bay, CA, for no reason whatsoever. I saw it as a child myself, and thought it was quite scary; a second viewing as an adult led to a huge disappointment as I realized what a silly story it really is. Birds just don't do that! At most, one might be "pinged" by a red-winged blackbird defending its young, or harassed by a goose or swan for the same reason, but whole flocks of angry birds descending for no reason?

Birds just don't behave like that. Or do they? Just for fun, I googled "birds attacking people," and found a wealth of articles, anecdotes and You Tube videos (mostly the latter) demonstrating that birds will, indeed, "dive bomb" people, usually because they are protecting their nest or, in the case of birds such as gulls, trying to snatch food from unwary picnickers. Actually, according to articles like this one, bird "attacks" are even on the rise, often because, due to loss of natural habitat, birds and humans have to share the same space, and certain species, such as crows, jays, grackles and mockingbirds, are very protective of their young.

It's still not scary, though.... In fact, most of these sites are humorous, as this video of a belligerent grackle shows. The number of people who have actually been injured by a bird is very, very small. Not that actual risk has anything to do with phobias. The very definition of a phobia is that it is a "persistent, abnormal and irrational fear," so reason has nothing to do with it.

I imagine that just about everyone has at least a minor phobia of something. In my case, it's spiders. Of course, a fear of spiders is completely understandable! They're creepy, crawly, nasty creatures just waiting to bite people while they sleep...and they have eight legs, which is at least two more than anything ought to have, and some of them are poisonous, and some are huge, and don't try and tell me that they're more afraid of me than I am of them because that is just not true! In fact, I'm getting the heebie-jeebies just thinking about them! I also really dislike heights, and looking in mirrors after sunset (don't ask), and I will no longer read any informational "health" features in magazines because they just feed my hypochondria, so if anyone should be sympathetic to a bird phobia, it's me.

Except that I am not. It doesn't matter how many irrational fears a person has; there is still nothing so risible as someone else's phobia. And thus I remind myself that birds, like all natural creatures, have an ancient symbiosis with humankind, and not always a pleasant one at that. Myth and folklore present many examples of avian-human encounters, not all of them good, although that is well beyond the scope of this post. (The chapter "Then the Birds Attacked: Avian defense and flying nightmares" in Graeme Gibson's The Bedside Book of Birds is a good start on the topic.)

Perhaps I will come back to this at a later date. In the meantime, do you have any irrational fears? I've shared all, now it's your turn!

From the Bird Journal

2011-11-11T18:13:00.001-06:00

For the past couple of years, I've logged every birding expedition, nature stroll or even exceptional day around my Work Place Pond in my Bird Journal, a habit which has added a lot to my enjoyment. Sometimes I merely list the birds I've seen and the location; occasionally I wax poetic about them. Usually it's somewhere in between. Here's today's:

November 11, 2011 -- After work birds, 2:00-3:30. Sugar Grove Nature Center
Sunny but windy and chilly
By myself

Species seen:
Eurasian tree sparrow, about ten
House sparrow, a multitude
Goldfinch, about 30
BH Cowbird, just one
BC Chickadee, five seen
RB Woodpecker, 2
Cardinal, 3 (two males, one female)
American tree sparrow, at least ten
Dark-eyed junco, ditto
Downy woodpecker, one (female)
Eastern bluebirds, four

Seen while driving: meadowlark, starling, crow, RT hawk, Canada goose

Comments:
Per young man at Nature Center, pileated was seen over by Chapel of the Templed Trees, so walked on Stubblefield trail in hopes of finding it. Many deer and squirrels, no pileated. Did find chickadees, two cardinals and a RB WP. For whatever reason, that part of the woods is never very birdy. They seem to prefer the scrubbier area across the prairie.

Feeders packed, but only four species: Eurasian tree sparrow, house sparrow, goldfinch and one lone cowbird. Seeing house sparrows and goldfinches side by side on the ground made me realize how tiny goldfinches are by comparison.

Best birding was at Imagination Grove: Am tree sparrows, more goldfinches, juncos, a cardinal, a downy WP and bluebirds, a small flock. Bluebirds are so lovely, every time.

Was last walk with current pair of hiking boots -- small holes in sides became large ones. The sun felt cold and distant and descended all too swiftly.

Have not been to Sugar Grove in months...almost like seeing an old friend again. Perhaps will try to make Friday afternoon stroll a regular occurrence.

Stillness of the season

2011-11-10T19:40:00.001-06:00

Earlier this week, as I pulled into my Workplace Parking Lot, I saw a group of crows clustered in the trees by the pond. At first I saw two...then one flew up from the ground and there were three...then another, and four. In total, there were five, perhaps six, hard to tell as they were flying around such that I never saw the entire group at one time. I wondered if, perhaps, it was the family group I had observed over the summer, as mentioned in my previous post, "Juvenile Crows and Growing Goslings ."

Other than that, it was a very still and introspective day. The sky was gray, intermittently spitting rain. One of those days when I couldn't even wish I were free to bird (free as a bird?), for the weather made the specter of work that much less dire...no point in wishing for freedom, if it's just going to rain.

Even my memory of birding last weekend was not that exciting. Despite all the cool water birds (and life-bird Franklin's gull) that other birders have been seeing around Clinton Lake recently, I have had my usual late fall/early winter not-much-of-anything birding.

Saturday I walked around Mascoutin Recreation Area's Houseboat Cove trail for a while. Mostly I saw blue jays. I headed towards the grassy area, where a large flock of red-winged blackbirds and brown-headed cowbirds were making quite the ruckus. Along the way, I also saw: American robin, mourning dove, turkey vulture, black-capped chickadee, red-bellied woodpecker, white-breasted nuthatch, red-tailed hawk, song sparrow, field sparrow, American goldfinch, dark-eyed junco, American crow, and ring-billed gull. There was also a solitary female wood duck swimming along the "cove" part of the Houseboat Cove trail.

And also the bird that made the whole trip worthwhile: a great horned owl, flying so soundlessly across the path in front of me. It alighted in a tree on the opposite side of the trail for a couple of minutes, long enough for me to get an excellent look, and then took off again, doubtless looking for a quiet place to roost until nightfall.

It is moments like this that I hope for: a sliver of time where nothing is wanting. Where I am completely satisfied, exactly the way things are. With that silent beat of wings, surprising for such a large bird, that effortless and yet ponderous movement across my field of view...there was nothing else that could be wished for. Nothing lacking. A sliver of perfection.

Stillness is November's gift. The fields are shades of brown, taupe and tan. The month begins with the day of All Saints (and then All Soul's, or the Day of the Dead) and ends with darkness. Winter is scurrying ever closer. The fall migrants are hurrying southward, and the first fall visitors just starting to arrive. Outward, everything is so still, a moment for reflection.

Inwardly, I am anything but still. The great horned owl is a moment of transcendence. The crows at work, an approximation of the same. The rest of the time, my mind is whirling, scurrying, chasing the worry of the week. I bird, in part, to escape this, to find a moment of rest, of contemplation...to experience the stillness of the season. In the presence of the great horned owl, I achieve this. The rest of the time...'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Eulogy for a wetland: by Sunwiggy

2011-11-06T10:50:00.000-06:00

Three weeks ago, when my husband and I were out for a Sunday drive, looking for snow buntings in the cemetery (they like it there), he told me that he had just taken a walk in The Scrub, and that the beaver dam was gone. So was the beaver lodge. And, so was the beaver pond.

Gone? What happened to the beavers? Who took away their dam and lodge? Why?

The Scrub is not the prettiest place to walk and bird in the UP, by any means. It's what I call the area that was formerly a railroad track, and a streetcar line, now given over to an ATV trail that runs from Calumet to Hancock. It's surrounded by former hay fields, now mostly going back to forest, and still in the early succession stages. It's wet and marshy. Birds love it. Warblers and vireos crowd into it during migrations, and some stay to nest. Redstarts love the areas of tall willows. Veeries "veer, veer, veer" from the lines of bushes. Chickadees and various species of sparrows flit and call. I guess all of this just proves that birds and humans see places very differently. I like to walk there because the birds like to nest there.

I'm sure the loss of the beaver pond won't affect many of these bird species. The creek still flows. But, oh, I can picture the resident pairs of kingbirds and kingfishers, the great blue herons, the American black ducks and mallard ducks, all of the peeps, all of the water loving and needing birds that we used to see there. I would always hush my companions and try to tiptoe as we approached the beaver pond. It's not easy to be quiet on gravel. Who knew what birds you might see before they burst into startled flight? But, always, the biggest, hold-your-breath suspense was the question: would you see one of the beavers?

The Patriarch Beaver was huge! Some of the ATVers would stop and look for him, and take photos of him, and tell each other about him. Sometimes he would sit on a mud bar, eating what looked like weeds. Sometimes he- or a littler one- would be swimming in the creek, or in one of the channels they'd made. We didn't see them often; early evening was the best time to look.

On October 30th, last Monday, I grabbed my husband and headed down to The Scrub to view the devastation for myself. We got lucky! Two trucks, marked Michigan American Water Company, were parked right by the site of the former pond. We approached the employees of the water company, and found them to be friendly and informative. (I let my husband do the talking.) The water company had been worried about a big cement water pipe that had had most of the rock materials around it washed away, because of the dam. They were concerned that a big storm would wash away the pipe itself, affecting the water supply to Hubble and Tamarack City, downstream. As the photos show, they had piled up an impressive amount of rocks to protect the pipe and it's flow.

I had to ask: what happened to the beavers? I was told that the beavers were already gone, trapped or died or wandered off, when the dam and lodge were removed. One of the workers said that he found a trap in the dam. My husband mentioned to me later that one of the customers in the gas station where he works talked about the beavers being trapped down there last winter. (But at least two had escaped; they were seen in midsummer.) So, that solved the mystery of who and why.

Richard Louv discusses in his book, "The Nature Principle", how sometimes people are afraid to care about and bond to a place, out of fear that it might be bulldozed. He points out that people need to take the risk, because you can't protect a place you don't love. But, sometimes you can't protect a place that you DO love! Still, I take his point. And, to be honest, The Scrub hasn't been destroyed as a bird habitat (except for a few birds such as herons and kingfishers). Mammals live there or travel through it, too; we saw deer tracks and coyote scat on our last visit. There have been reports of bears. It is an ATV trail, on the very edge of town, barely outside; the deer visit people's gardens up and down our street. There are other, protected places, such as the Paavola Wetland, just down the highway, for beavers and their dams. The Nara Nature Center has a sign boasting of it's beavers and their activities. But I still feel a sense of loss. Must we, humans, always be pushing out and driving away our fellow creatures that are trying to share this world with us, with our endless needs and wants?

And, just because the dam and lodge with its resident beavers was so close in to town, it could be visited by older kids on foot or bike...or an ATV. I remember a conversation with a boy of about 12, telling me about the newts he could find in a ditch. Another told me about a bear sighting! My son, James enjoyed encountering a snake on the trail; he moved it to safety into the bushes. I think we all need these meetings. Well. There's a UP saying that I hear all the time: "It is what it is." But, I think we could do better.

Birds and the imagination (or, Loplop takes flight)

2011-11-01T21:17:00.001-05:00

Today while I was shopping for groceries, I was momentarily reminded of my creative side (much curtailed these days, alas), when the song "Speed of Sound" by Coldplay was played on the overhead system. Have you ever had a song that was a shorthand message for something beyond itself--a memory, an idea, a feeling? Of course you have. Ever since traveling minstrels went around singing "Hey nonny no," or whatever it was they sang, words set to music have had an uncanny power over almost all of us.

This particular song is one of my "enigmatic signifiers" (a term I explain in a previous post, "Why Birders Bird and Listers List"), for a variety of reasons. One, it sounds wistful and lonely without being whiny. Two, it mentions birds. Three, the birds it mentions are clearly symbolic of something else, but I'm not sure what, which keeps me guessing. The birds themselves are referenced in the refrain "And birds go flying at the speed of sound/To show you how it all began/Birds came flying from the underground/If you could see it, then you'd understand."

The image these lyrics form in my mind is something I hope to work into a story--a vast flock of birds, dark birds, wheeling up into the sky until the sun is momentarily blackened, braiding the air with their flight, and with the ponderous sound of a million wings beating together.... Of course I didn't get this image from the song; rather, the song reminds me of this image, which had already formed powerful (yet ineffable) associations in my mind. Partly it brings to mind the huge mixed flocks of black birds that one sometimes sees in the fall, and the aerial acrobatics of starlings. Also, inescapably, the memory I can't possibly have, and yet feel as if I do, of passenger pigeons overhead, darkening the sky for days as they passed.

And yet the birds of this song are clearly very deep. They contain the mystery of life in some fashion, for they can "show you how it all began," like the Persian Simurgh, who roosts in the Tree of Knowledge. Most of us are oblivious, and yet if only we would open our eyes to their flight, if only we could see them, we would understand. Maybe you can see why I love this song.

With this aural prodding, I began thinking about birds and the imagination, a topic way too huge to be covered to anyone's satisfaction in a single blog post -- instead I hope to get you musing, as I have been, on the relationship between the two. Birds are prevalent the world over as mythological figures (many cultures have a phoenix-type legend, for example, and then there are, of course, Odin's Ravens, and similar messengers of the gods), and many poets have written famously about birds, such as Shelley's sky lark, Frost's ovenbird, and Dickinson's bobolink, just off the top of my head.

But I think that the ultimate union of Bird and Imagination has come about in the works of surrealism. The painter Max Ernst, for example, was fascinated by birds, so much so that his alter ego was called Loplop, the Superior of Birds. (The image at the top of this post is also by Ernst.)

Ernst stated that the figure of Loplop came about due to a confusion between humans and birds when he was a child, for his pet bird died the morning before his sister was born, a juxtaposition of events that evidently scrambled his brains forever. One of his works, a graphic novel called "Une Semaine de Bonte," showed birds as humans or humans as birds with both horrific and erotic intent.

The surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, one of Ernst's girlfriends, also seemed a bit enamored of the intersection of birds and dreams/nightmare images.

Another artist who frequently featured birds was Marc Chagall, although his works are more of a gentle dream than something uneasy or even nightmarish.

It is tempting, at this point, to try to explicate further; but that would be pointless. Either the images resonate, or they don't. But if they do, consider this just the tip of the iceberg. There is much more to say on the topic of birds and the feverish reaches of the mind.

Excellent Emiquon

2011-10-31T19:17:00.001-05:00

I wasn't sure if I would have a good birding day on Saturday or not. Due to feelings of guilt engendered by leaving my dogs behind for most of the day, I agreed to take them along on my Illinois River Valley trip...after all, I was mostly going to be looking for waterfowl, and since neither of my dogs are much for swimming, as long as Greenturtle kept them away from me and my scope, I thought I could probably see most of what was in the vicinity.

We started our trip at Chatauqua Wildlife Refuge. The area by the headquarters was disappointing (as usual...seriously, I have never, not once, seen an interesting bird there...but the dogs did enjoy walking the short loop), but the Eagle Bluff area was a total score! The water was low, filled with water birds, mostly Canada geese and green winged teal, plus some ring-billed gulls and, surprisingly, a large flock of American tree sparrows...and even more exciting was what was hovering over the water. A juvenile bald eagle and a peregrine falcon. The peregrine was not only a year bird but also an "Illinois state bird" for me, and both Greenturtle and I enjoyed watching it swooping over the water for a while.

Next stop, Emiquon. We took a quick jaunt around the NWR Spoon River access. A couple of years ago a storm felled many trees and rendered this area nigh-well impassible; now it is still a pretty rough trail, but able to be traversed. We saw a man and his son walking around the (now dry) marshy area with binoculars, but for ourselves, all we saw was a robin. Having two active dogs in tow does make looking for passerines a challenge.

Just a quick jaunt down the road was the newly established Nature Conservatory's observatory, with boardwalks and trails, and here we hit water bird pay dirt.

First things first, the coots. There had to be thousands of them. What would you call that? A cootilla? A cootitude? A cootarama? No matter the technical term, where one coot, or even a dozen, fails to impress, seeing them in such numbers is always a bit awe-inspiring. I was very grateful to Greenturtle for taking the dogs so I could peruse the waters at my leisure.

In addition to the coots, there were a large number of dabbling ducks, and you can guess who's who in this picture by the "bottoms up."

I saw more green-winged teal, plus blue-winged teal, northern pintail (year bird!), mallards, and northern shovelers. Along the trail were many sparrows, including white-throated, white-crowned, song and (year and state bird!) Lincoln's sparrow. Overall, a very successful trip.

Yesterday I had time for a stroll around Weldon Springs before the weather turned foul. The day was quite windy, and I saw few birds, but one species was another year bird, the purple finch. When I came home and logged them, I realized I was just ten species away from 200 Year Birds, which, barring the possible exception of the year Sunwiggy and I went to Texas, would be a personal record. So here's to an excellent last two months!

Durance vile

2011-10-28T19:12:00.000-05:00

All week my heart's desire has been to go out in search of birds...but, alas, I had to work. As the season shifts and the days shrink, the shackles of work grow even crueler, as the sun sets shortly after getting home.

Today was probably the worst. In the morning, the brown fields were coated with a thin layer of frost, and fog curled up from the ponds' surfaces. The sun was already starting to make the morning sparkle. And that was the last I saw of it. For the whole day.

I kept hoping I might be able to finish up my pile of tasks in time to stroll around White Oak Pond on my way to pick up Greenturtle at his workplace. But it was not to be. Instead, as I drove past, I peered out the car window and saw the water thick with birds, and how I longed to stop and stroll. But there just was no time.

At least it's Friday...two whole days to bird!

Finding Refuge in birds

2011-10-27T19:50:00.000-05:00

There are those birds you gauge your life by.

This sentence occurs in the first chapter of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams, and it convinced me that the book I held between my hands was indeed worth reading. Because there absolutely are birds that I gauge my life by. I wondered if we were kindred spirits.

As the chapter continues, the themes of the book are starkly laid out. The author describes taking a friend to see a family of burrowing owls that live by one of the bends of the Bear River on the way to the Great Salt Lake. She and her grandmother had discovered them twenty-three years before, the same year she'd received her first copy of Peterson's field guide, and watching the young owls by their burrow had become one of the things she had gauged her life by. Until that day:

About a half a mile away, I could not see the mound. I took my foot off the gas pedal and coasted. It was as though I was in unfamiliar country.
The mound was gone. Erased. In its place, fifty feet back, stood a cinderblock building with a sign, CANADIAN GOOSE GUN CLUB. A new fence crushed the grasses with a handwritten note posted: KEEP OUT.

In the wake of this discovery, the author feels rage, an emotion that she had just disavowed. Behind the anger, echoing clearly behind the words, is a deeper and more tragic emotion: a profound sense of loss. This is the introduction to the extended meditation that follows, the twin crises of the rising waters of the Great Salt Lake, and her mother's diagnosis with ovarian cancer.

The book wrestles with how to balance grieving for a natural loss (the changing bird populations as the lake rises, our inevitable mortality) with anger against what should have been avoided (habitat loss because of the surrounding city, a cancer diagnosis that might have come from environmental pollution). Through it all, the author also discusses other themes as well: how her experience of being female and being in nature dovetail, her interpretation of her Mormon faith in accordance with her feminine and nature-centered experience, the relationship with her mother as the illness progresses. The result is an essay that is frequently melancholy, often quite beautiful, occasionally controversial, and at times even profound.

Each chapter is named for a species of bird, which Williams weaves into the story as either an extended metaphor for what she sees occurring around her, or as a brief glimpse as she struggles with her mother's cancer. An example I particularly liked concerns starlings.

Perhaps we project on to starlings that which we deplore in ourselves: our numbers, our aggression, our greed and our cruelty. Like starlings, we are taking over the world....
What makes our relationship to starlings even more curious is that we loathe them, calling in exterminators because we fear disease, yet we do everything within our power to encourage them as we systematically erase the specialized habitats of specialized birds. I have yet to see a snowy egret spearing a bagel.

Despite the book's many strengths, I think the combination of themes probably limits the number of people it would appeal to. Some reader reviews I've seen criticize the amount of time spent discussing birds, but that was my favorite part. For myself, during the first half of the book, I found myself compelled to keep reading, often highlighting passages or flagging pages that especially spoke to me. That was the part that had the most about the Great Salt Lake and its natural inhabitants. But as the second part of the book dragged on... I don't want to say that the topic of her mother's illness isn't important, or worthy of reflection. Of course it is, and certainly many of the themes are relevant to the human condition, for we are all mortal. But to be honest, I personally wanted to hear more about the lake and the birds.

Overall, I would recommend this book with the understanding that it is, at heart, an essay on grief and loss, written from a decidedly feminine perspective. Parts of it are very good, and I consider reading it time well spent for the beauty of the writing alone. Williams is a poet writing prose in this work. If one is looking for something less subjective or more focused on natural history or biology, however, then this is not the book.

I will end this brief discussion with another quote that I liked so much I had to highlight it, from the chapter called "Canada Geese." (And I consider it high praise for a book if, when writing about it, I feel compelled to keep quoting the author.)

We usually recognize a beginning. Endings are more difficult to detect. Most often, they are realized only after reflection. Silence. We are seldom conscious when silence begins--it is only afterward that we realize what we have been a part of. In the night journeys of Canada geese, it is the silence that propels them.
Thomas Merton writes, "Silence is the strength of our interior life.... If we fill our lives with silence, then we will live in hope.

Sometimes we get vultures

2011-10-24T21:05:00.000-05:00

I've been having a frustrating time of it lately, birding-wise. Recently, it seems like all I find are turkey vultures. For example, this morning, I took a short walk down to the other side of Angler's pond before work, hoping to see some interesting waterfowl paddling around (it is the time for that, after all--don't the ducks know that they should be migrating south already?), and instead, all I saw were scads and scads of Canada geese. And a few mallards. On the land, it would have been nice to see some cool sparrows or a brown creeper. Instead I saw a flock of juncos. The cute dachshunds that live in one of the houses by the pond weren't even out.

And then, on the way back, I did a double take at a large, dark bird huddled on top of a telephone pole. I almost dismissed it as a crow, as they are common in the neighborhood, but it was a turkey vulture.

The vulture made me think of the ill-fated birding escapade of yesterday. I started out for Clinton Lake with high hopes, as another birder had recently seen a Franklin's gull in the area. Guess who else would enjoy seeing a Franklin's gull? That's right, yours truly. In fact, it would be a life bird. So I headed out for the lake, and set up my scope at the line of gulls by the DNR station along highway 54. There were many gulls there, four Bonaparte's and a bunch of ring-bills.

On I went, to the beach at Mascoutin. All ring bills. There was a big, fat juvenile gull that looked like it had been very spoiled by its parents, but if it was a different species, you'll never hear it from me. After squinting from gull to field guide and back again for the better part of fifteen minutes, I decided, "Most likely a big, fat juvenile ring billed." Overhead seven turkey vultures wheeled within the thermals, and I wondered what they were hoping to find, as they were circling over the water. Maybe they were just hoping for a whiff of something nice and rotten from a landward direction; their sense of smell is supposed to be extremely powerful.

The day was getting rather overcast, so I hurried on to the Marina, hoping for satisfaction there. There were no gulls at all, surprisingly enough. Overhead, I caught a very quick view of a northern harrier flying past, and, of course, more turkey vultures. I wasn't really in a mood to hike -- this was a gull quest, not a hunt for passerines, plus I was feeling lazy -- so I decided to check out the Illinois 48 bridge and the Parnell access area.

Along the way, I had to stop my car so that a turkey vulture could ponderously haul itself away from the feast of a dead raccoon in the middle of the road. I was rather enjoying the austerity of the fields in fall -- the corn mostly harvested, leaving an expanse of brown, beige and taupe stretching to each horizon. Nothing interesting at the Illinois 48 bridge (and for those not familiar with Clinton Lake, just fill in the blanks here with, "places of access to the water" -- for such a large lake, it's unusually difficult to actually stumble upon water, as the lake is shaped more like a skinny squashed finger along the length of the county than anything that one could actually drive around), so I took the turn for the Parnell Access Area.

I'd barely hastened down the road when I realized my mistake. The best way to find the Parnell access is from highway 54--from 48, the winding country roads soon dump you out in the middle of nowhere, or in my case, in a completely different county. It was getting late, and by the time I found myself again, I was so frustrated, I really wasn't that into searching for the gull anymore. How did I know it was still in residence? How did I know it was even really there in the first place? On the way back, the brown stubble across the fields no longer looked that pleasing. It seemed more like a harbinger of cold and dark months to come. Overhead, the vultures soared.

I had forgotten all about the bad luck of yesterday until I looked at my e-mail from Cornell's ebird informing me of new birds that I am missing out on. Someone else, a completely different birder, saw the Frankin's gull. At the Parnell bridge. And I have to work for the rest of the week. Does anyone ever feel distinctly sorry for themselves when these things happen? It's not a pretty character trait, but if I can't be honest in my own blog, then where can I?

And overhead, I'm sure the vultures are circling, Therefore send not to know for whom the vultures come.

They come for thee.

Have you ever wanted to do a Big Year?

2011-10-23T19:04:00.000-05:00

On the last Audubon birding trip I went on, one of the other birders suggested that I could do a DeWitt County big year, now that I have moved to Clinton, IL. It's a fun idea, but at this time, I am not seriously tempted, because that would entail focusing the majority of my birding efforts on one county, and if there's one thing I consistently crave, it's variety.

Then Greenturtle and I watched the movie. If you're reading this blog, you probably already know what a Big Year is. Just in case, the short answer is, trying to see more birds than anyone else in from January 1 to December 31 in a specific region. The Big Years most often memorialized are across the whole of North America, though the birders in the book The Biggest Twitch take on the whole world.

As the movie The Big Year, and even more so the book of the same name upon which it is based, makes clear, the whole thing is a pretty intense endeavor. It's also extremely expensive, and after one has seen the birds typical of each region, the race becomes who can find the most rarities, so be ready to fly to parts unknown at a moment's notice.

As we discussed it, Greenturtle and I agreed that even if we were independently wealthy, we wouldn't really want to engage in those shenanigans. Since he's not a birder, his response is understandable; in my case, it's because I would rather go some place brand new to me and spectacularly birdy and enjoy seeing it thoroughly than continuously race around chasing my own tail.

But as I formulated my response, a slightly different idea crossed my mind. I don't have the resources for a big Big Year and would spend them otherwise if I did, and a county Big Year feels too restrictive...but how about an Illinois Big Year? I got so excited about the idea that I even managed to convince Greenturtle to agree to join me for a year's worth of madcap birding escapades. I even took a look at some sites on the Internet to get a feel for how many birds I would have to see to make a go of it.

The American Birding Association has the number of Illinois birds at 319, if I recall correctly. On ebird, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's database, the top birders of the year usually tally up in the high 200s. Just for comparison (this is shameful, probably how many people would feel about revealing their weight), my Illinois state total has remained fairly static this year. I got a few nice new birds -- pine siskin, Forster's tern, worm-eating warbler -- but not that many, and my Illinois total is a lackluster 211.

The top birders bird a lot. They live to bird. Some of them are retired, so they have more freedom...as free as a bird, as it were. And they are good at all the tricky species. The hawks. The gulls. Don't even get me started on gulls. I see three species each year -- herring, ring billed and Bonaparte's. After racking up the Bonaparte's, I pat myself on the back and consider my gulls complete. And I mostly bird in central Illinois, ignoring two whole regions of vast birding potential -- Chicagoland and Lake Michigan to the north, and the whole of Southern Illinois. I also don't chase rarities. By and large, I'd rather go for a long hike somewhere fun and peaceful than drive two counties away to look at a purple gallinule someone saw floating in a sewage plant there.

So me, a big year? Who am I kidding? I don't have the time. I don't have the skills. I don't have the single-minded focus. Still, I'm thinking about trying it. Because the worst that can happen is that I inform everyone I'm doing an Illinois Big Year and tally up my normal 175 species for the year and slink away, pretending the hubris never happened. But the best thing that can happen is that I see tons and tons of new birds in exciting places, even though someone else is bound to see more than me. I'm still thinking it over, but it sounds like just the thing to break me out of my birding rut. (A trip to central America would probably also break me out of the rut, but driving around Illinois is a lot more feasible right now.)

Have you ever wanted to do a Big Year, even if just your home state or county? Or do you think that sounds like the kind of craziness you are better off avoiding?

Spur of the moment

2011-10-23T18:11:00.006-05:00

It's been a beautiful fall weekend. After a week of gray skies and drizzle, the sun came out, the afternoon temperatures ascended to the seventies, and the trees were a panoply of fall color. There is only one other thing I could have wished for: it would have been nice to see more birds.

Yesterday Greenturtle and I headed out a bit later than I'd hoped for, but that was OK, because I wasn't planning on a serious birding day, just a nice stroll and some quality time. Our destination was Sugar Grove Nature Center's fall festival, and I suggested we stop at Centennial Park in Heyworth as it was right along the way. I hadn't been to either place since last June, as I described in a couple of previous posts, and I was looking forward to seeing the changes of the season.

At Centennial Park, the pond was devoid of any waterfowl save a pair of Canada geese, but I did have a nice surprise--a small flock of Eurasian tree sparrows. I'd heard a rumor that they were nesting in the park, which answered a question I've wondered about from time to time -- where do the sparrows that congregate around the feeders at Sugar Grove each winter come from?

As we were strolling along, Greenturtle wondered how much we would enjoy a change of itinerary, going to Starved Rock State Park instead? I opined that I would enjoy seeing it--the canyons and dells are especially beautiful in the fall--but with the caveat that, on a day like this one, the park was guaranteed to be jam packed. It's the only park I've ever been to where the crowds get so thick that one must shuffle along the trail at a snail's pace, trapped in a crowd that feels more like the Mall of America at Christmastime. (Not that I have ever been to the Mall of America at any time. But that's how I imagine it.) The only similar thing from my experience is the crowds that gather at the top of the Grand Canyon. I have heard that other popular parks, such as Yellowstone and Yosemite, can get crazy crowded, but I've never been to either one, so I can't compare.

But there's a reason so many people like to go there, the same one that made Greenturtle and I tempted to change our plans. It's very pretty, and it's reasonable close.Like a true Sagittarius, I was open to a change of plans, and instead of going to the festival at Sugar Grove (which is nice, but we've been many times in the past and it really doesn't change much from year to year), we headed north.

There were ring billed gulls, herring gulls, cormorants, American white pelicans, Canada geese and a belted kingfisher at the Starved Rock lock. Along the trails we saw a few birds, including hairy woodpecker, ruby and golden crowned kinglets, cedar waxwings, and a brown creeper. And yes, it was packed. Since I really dislike the company of too many other people, after we had strolled around the Illinois and Ottawa Canyons, I was ready to leave. My reasoning is more phobic than misanthropic. I really, really hate the feeling of someone walking up behind me; it makes me claustrophobic. And at a birder's pace, if the trails are crowded, there's always going to be more people squeezing up behind me. I suppose it's weird, but it's just one of my (many) little quirks -- and why I have chosen to live in a small town and hike and bird in much less popular parks.

After lunch, we saw a few more species on the much less crowded river trail at nearby Matthiessen State Park, but then we felt guilty about leaving our dogs alone for so long, and headed back. A beautiful day, a nice change of pace...not that many birds.

Exploring Champaign County

2011-10-18T19:54:00.001-05:00

Sunday once again I decided to add some spice to the same-old, same-old fall birding by not only birding in a new location -- Homer Lake Forest Preserve in Champaign County -- but with a sorta new birder, my husband, "Greenturtle."

Now Greenturtle is not entirely new to the birding scene, as he has had to put up with me for the past few years. But it is only since we got him a fairly decent pair of binoculars about a month ago that he agreed to give birding, as such, a real go -- as opposed to standing around semi-patiently while I look for birds, a situation which is guaranteed to please neither party.

For our first stop, we went to Lake of the Woods State Park in Mahomet, where I had previously enjoyed the Buffalo Trace Prairie. As I recounted in that post, after strolling the prairie for an hour or two, and thinking what great habitat it would be in the right season (sometimes I suspect that, for me, "the right season" is restricted from April to June!), I briefly attempted the riparian portion, and swiftly decided that it was too hot and crowded to persist. Which means, of course, a second trip....

As it turned out, I was rather disappointed in the non-prairie side of Lake of the Woods (too manicured, and not really a lot of birds), so after an hour or so exploring the area, Greenturtle and I decided to try our luck a bit farther afield at Homer Lake Forest Preserve.

It's a nice park, certainly worth a trip if you're in the area. I would not say that it is better than closer parks -- Weldon Springs in my new home county of De Witt, or Comlara in my old one of McLean -- but novelty gives a lot of bonus points, at least for me.

Walking around the lake, we saw some pied-billed grebes and a juvenile double-crested cormorant. In the trees were mostly yellow-rumped warblers. I kept saying, "Yellow-rumps, yellow-rumps," occasionally breaking it up by their more colloquial epithet, "butter-butts." Finally, Greenturtle said, "How do you know they're yellow-rumps."Ummm...how to summarize it for a non-birder one is hoping will become a birder? "Well, they're in their winter plumage. They look a lot different in the spring. But now...kinda brown on top, streaky on the sides, and a yellow patch beside their wings and on their rumps." This led to quite the debate, as Greenturtle kept insisting that their rumps were free of yellow, and I kept asking, What, was he blind, I was looking right at it!

Finally, it emerged that when he heard "rump," he assumed I meant the vent area, whereas the yellow patch was actually on their backs, right between the wings. What followed was a long discussion of how birds are never given a good name--such as, red-bellied woodpeckers not actually having red bellies. (Don't even try to tell him they have a small red patch on the belly...no, not convincing.)

The trail soon branched out onto the prairie. It was windy, a little chilly, and not too much bird action going on until we came to a large brush pile. Dark-eyed juncos, field sparrows, white-throated sparrows, palm warblers, all in evidence....And then, Greenturtle yelled, "Dude! Look at this bird! It's got these black and white stripes on its head! Hey...it's kinda cool!"

"White-crowned sparrow," I said. And, secretly, was triumphant. Because that sounded like a bit of birding enthusiasm! And it's true, the white-crowned sparrow is a very handsome bird. But how long has it been since it was "dude!" worthy for me?

So if you can't see new birds...then see them in a new place...or better yet, through new eyes.On the way home, I suggested if that we were renaming birds, what with red-bellied woodpeckers and yellow-rumped warblers being a bit different than their names would imply, then how about calling the white crowns "snazzy headed sparrows"? Just a suggestion...

The Big Year: A Birder's Review

2011-10-15T20:36:00.001-05:00

The Big Year, a movie based on a book of the same name, came to theaters across the land this weekend, and since it is (I suspect loosely) based on the exploits of three birders in their quest to see more North American birds than anybody else in a calendar year, of course I had to see it. I brought along my husband, Greenturtle, who is not a birder but who has been putting up with me long enough that he understands the concepts.

I should state, going into this review, that I have not read the book upon which this movie is based, although I intend to, and have, in fact, already downloaded it onto my Kindle. So the following impressions are strictly based on what I saw today on the big screen, and not the book and what may or may not have actually transpired in real life. Sometimes I find it's actually better to do it that way. If I read the book first, the movie often disappoints; but done in reverse, I often end up enjoying a similar experience twice.

The movie states at the very beginning, "This is a true story. Only the facts have been changed." Just so we all know where we stand.The story involves three birders, Brad Harris (Jack Black), who works as a programmer at a power plant but is otherwise not very successful in his life, having dropped out of grad school, failed in his marriage, and being financially dependent upon his parents; Stu Preissler (Steve Martin), a wealthy executive who is trying to retire, even though the corporate world is loath to let him go; and Kenny Bostick (Owen Wilson), the current record holder for "the Big Year," a building contractor who apparently lives to bird.

Readers of this blog are probably already familiar with the concept of the Big Year--an informal competition to see as many birds as possible in one year in a given area. (Often North America but readers of birding adventure literature are doubtless aware of the fact that this can also be done in other locations or even world wide a la The Biggest Twitch. For birders of quite modest means, such as myself, one can also do a state or even county Big Year.) Suffice to say, to be tempted by the thought of a Big Year, one must be a rather hard-core, obsessively list-making type birder...not that there's anything wrong with that.The movie quickly fills all the non-birders in on the idea with a short pseudo-documentary narrated by John Cleese, then quickly cuts to the chase, and we get to see the three fellows competing for birds. Bostick is ruthless and underhanded, and woefully neglects his wife; Brad is hampered by a lack of funds; and Stu seems like a fairly normal guy whose main challenge is being pulled in too many directions.

The story is mildly humorous. The characters are mildly likable, except for Bostick, who is mildly annoying. When it comes to movies, I am usually easy to please but hard to impress, and with that being the case, I can safely say I enjoyed it but found a lot of room for improvement. For example, the birding---as a birder, there's nothing I enjoy more (outside of actually birding) than a vicarious birding experience. Well, this is a film about birders, but it is not a birder's film. We get brief depictions of birding hotspots (High Island, Attu Island), a few nice views of of good birds (the great gray owl moment brought back happy memories of seeing one at Sax Zim Bog last winter), and a character who is clearly based on the well-known Debra Shearwater and her pelagic tours. But, it's hardly Birder's Porn, although that's OK. I have Winged Migration for that. So if it's not Birding Porn, then is it a good character study of what makes hard core birders tick?

On the contrary, I would say that the lack of depth to the characters is probably the film's biggest weakness, and why all the non-birder critics who panned it just didn't understand. If you're already a hardcore birder, no explanation is needed. You know why someone would go into debt or risk their marriage to chase down birds. (Many critics seemed to feel that Bostick's hosing up his relationship with his wife to continue the Big Year was not realistic, but, in point of fact, many relationships have been strained or even ended because of a birding obsession--so, although presented a bit melodramatically, the concept wasn't that far off.) But if you are not a hard core birder, then this movie probably won't shed much light on the topic. The characters just really love birds or want to be "the world's greatest birder." Despite these short-comings, I did enjoy the movie. It was fun, not too serious, and certain scenes were quite entertaining (the gulls on Attu Island, for example). Greenturtle also said he liked it. And more to the point, he said that it made him look forward to going birding with me tomorrow, when we head back to Lake of the Woods by Champaign.

So would I recommend it? If, based on the description, you think you would like it, then you probably will. If, like many of the critics I found through Rotten Tomato, you think birding is boring (and even call it "birdwatching" without even knowing what you've done), or more properly relegated to PBS documentaries, or don't understand why on earth anyone would do a Big Year...then you probably won't.

Full Circle

2011-10-14T20:27:00.001-05:00

It was about a year ago that I became excited about the idea of exploring the nature and birds of the urban environment where I spend most of my time. I sought out every park, pond and vacant space that I could find in the Bloomington-Normal area, and carefully tallied up birds, plants and various impressions. And at the end of the day, I decided that I really am wild at heart, after all -- I prefer my nature experiences to be as remote as possible.But still, I do work in town. And since I'm stuck here so often, I'd rather seek out birds whenever possible than just stay inside. (As an aside, after moving to a much smaller town several months ago, I have to admit that the urban environment is birdier -- at least until I can finish transforming my back yard into an Avian Haven.)Today, after I got off work, I decided to explore the reaches of my Angler's Pond again, as I hadn't done so in about a month. My mind was filled with the memories of the walk around it I did last October, when I discovered a flock of white-throated sparrows scratching in the leaves, and felt as if I were in the vicinity of some mystical truth, represented by sparrows.The sparrows are back. Also, yellow-rumped warblers, robins, blue jays, and chickadees. And something unexpected--a juvenile coot, which I startled from a sheltered spot against the bank as I walked past.

It was so drab and plain, except for its snazzy white tail feathers.

Even so, I was happy to see it, as I've never seen a young coot before. I actually startled it twice -- it kept going back to the same sheltered spot. After the second stroll past, I stopped a distance away and watched it bob back for a third time, at which point I was pleased to leave it in peace.Besides the coot, there was a large flock of ducks that took off before I could identify them (they were small and had a distinctive white patch on their wings, which is all I could really notice as they flew into the distance), and a pair of mallards.

Otherwise, the pond was still, apart from ripples caused by the increasingly strong wind. Most of the trees still look green, though the wind stirred fallen leaves in every open area. I think these berries belong to honeysuckle, yet another invasive plant.

The more I learn about what I see, the more I think I should rename this blog "Things that don't belong here."

Going back to the same place again and again sometimes feels so "been here, done this." And sometimes it feels like a form of meditation. Sometimes it's a private experiment, results tallied only by me (and sometimes shared on ebird).And sometimes it's just what I do. Just because, no matter what else is going on, no matter how tempted one might be to give in to despair (e.g,, how painful to try and love the earth when it's swiftly being destroyed), the alternative is even worse. It's always better to pay attention.

Buffalo Trace Prairie

2011-10-13T20:50:00.000-05:00

The opposite of October is March. In one, the last flash of brilliance before winter; the other, the first trembling of spring's renewal. Both are perfect, each in their own way. Before I became a birder, October was my favorite--and I have to admit, it's a beautiful month.

I try to embrace the eternal present, to make repeated walks along the same trail a sort of meditation. Alas, I am driven by the quest for novelty. If I can't find new birds, I must seek out a new place in which to see the same old birds. And since this has been a rather dull month for me, birding-wise, last weekend I decided to shake things up by exploring the Lake of the Woods park in Mahomet. I had never been to the park before, so I was excited by the prospect of seeing a new place.

As good fortune would have it, the first place I parked was at Buffalo Grove Prairie. I have grown quite fond of grasslands and open skies during my years in Illinois, in no small part because so many of my favorite birds favor variation of that habitat--prairie, scrubby areas, and savannas: common yellowthroats, meadowlarks, bluebirds, sedge wrens, bobolinks, grasshopper sparrows, mockingbirds, bobwhites, sandhill cranes, red-headed woodpeckers, prairie chickens. At this time of year, I saw a bluebird (and it was even singing!) and some field sparrows, but the birds were few and far between.

The habitat looked nice, however, and I am sure that at a busier time of year, the trees and grasses would have been bursting with birds. And even as it was, I enjoyed the relative solitude and the peacefulness of being in such a pretty spot. The autumn colors were belied by the temperature, though -- mid-80s! Lovely for a day in August; in October, I always feel a bit betrayed by the return of heat. (Although consulting my bird journal showed me that early to mid October frequently plays this cruel trick in central Illinois.)

After spending about an hour wandering the fields, I crossed the street to the other side of the park--I didn't get to the "lake" part of Lake of the Woods, but the Woods themselves were quite crowded. Combined with the heat, after spying a nuthatch and a flock of robins and nothing else in the next half hour, I decided to save the rest of the park for a later day.

October prairie: a poem

2011-10-02T15:38:00.000-05:00

Fingers of frost,
the first of the year,
crisp on the mowed trail;
Traces of breath
like a ghost of the morning.
Sunlight splinters the prairie
into light and shadow,
and then a sudden burst, and
all is golden.

The colors of forbs and grasses--
mustard, ecru, khaki, ochre,
burnt umber and sienna--
no palette could approximate,
though once the subtle tapestry
touched each horizon;
and the sky, more distant than ever,
is almost cruelly blue.

And then, from somewhere
just out of reach:
the aching cry of a meadowlark.
I'd not thought to hear it again.

I composed this yesterday at Weldon Springs while waiting for the Audubon group. The birding was so-so but the company was good and often, even if I don't get the birds, when I spent time out in nature I get inspired to jot something down. Autumn used to be my favorite season but now it makes me a bit melancholy -- I hope both of those sentiments came through.

Invasion of the House Sparrows

2011-10-01T17:20:00.003-05:00

You know that old expression, Be careful what you wish for? Well, I wished for a yard that was a haven for birds, and in the past week or so, that is what I got. It seems like hundreds of birds gather in my backyard every evening, creating a cacophony of cheeps and chirrups so loud that I can hear it long before I pull up to my garage. They fly in to the bamboo forest from the four corners of the neighborhood and snuggle in for the night.

There's just one catch. Almost all of them are house sparrows. (I do have a nice cardinal family and, as I described in my last post, some injury-prone mourning doves as well. But mostly sparrows.)

I do enjoy watching them hop and fly around in the gloaming, and if I walk out towards the bamboo as they're all bunking down for the night, I can hear a wave of them taking off with a mass susurrus of wings. On the other hand, it has made me thing twice about setting up bird feeders for the winter. They'd eat me out of house and home. I haven't actually counted, but it wouldn't surprise me if there was at least a hundred of them. (Even as I write this, the sun is just starting to rise, waking up the flock into a cheerful, chirping chorus.)

But, is there actually anything wrong with having so many house sparrows around? A lot of bird-lovers can't stand them, since they are non-natives and will compete with native birds for nesting sites, especially bluebirds and, from what I've seen of house sparrow nests spilling out of marten houses, purple martens. A member of the weaver finch family rather than being a relation to our native sparrows, they were brought from England and managed to install themselves just about everywhere.

Despite their negative qualities, I find it hard to be a hater. They're still birds. It's still fun to watch them do birdy things like dust bathe, find food, and hover over their fledglings. This attitude seems to be shared by author Sally Roth, whose book Bird by Bird Gardening I discussed in a previous post. She states that "their only 'bad' behavior is being too common," and does not try to exclude them from her feeders, as that would also exclude other species she would like to attract.

As it turns out, it's more difficult to indict a species for being the direct cause of another's decline than one might think. This article by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology discusses the difficulties in pinpointing these things for certain, although it does look like house finches might be outcompeting house sparrows, for a change. In other words, a native species' decline might just as well be caused by habitat or other changes, and the huge flock of house sparrows in my backyard is the effect rather than the cause.

Intuitively, that makes sense to me. They seem to love the bamboo--another non-native species. The two invasives seem quite happy together. The native species I find in my yard seem to prefer perching in the actual trees. I'm almost certain that when I get rid of the bamboo, my yard will not seem as welcoming to the hoard.

Although I'm hoping that removing the bamboo will thin the numbers, I wouldn't want them all to go away. For one thing, even though they are so common as to be considered nuisances here in the United States, house sparrow populations have declined precipitously elsewhere. In England (which I always think of as the "home" of the house sparrow even though the Internet has informed me that they are originally from the Mediterranean), numbers have dropped around 68% percent since the 1970s, and up to 90% in London. In the Netherlands, populations have dropped so much that they are now considered an endangered species. I also found Internet sites devoted to the decline of the lowly house sparrow in India.

This is all a bit disturbing. How on earth does one kill off house sparrows, which have to be among the hardiest little creatures I can think of? Here in Illinois they are everywhere humans are--nesting in signage on big box stores and chain restaurants, hopping across the asphalt at gas stations, even landing right on my plate as I ate at an outdoor cafe. The only bird more ubiquitous that I can think of is another invader, the starling.

No one knows for certain what has caused the species' decline. Suggestions include lack of food for nestlings, lack of habitat (What? They'll live anywhere!) and nesting sites, pesticides, changes in agriculture, and electromagnetic radiation from cell phones. I just have one bone to pick with these theories: wouldn't that mean that the sparrows would be dying off here in Illinois as well? Here in the agricultural wasteland of central Illinois, we just about wrote the book on monoculture fields and pesticides -- ah, the joyous sight of crop dusters overhead! -- and the sparrows appear to be thriving.

But any decline in bird populations should be taken seriously. There's a reason for the expression "canary in a coal mine" -- birds make excellent early warning systems. And for those who shrug and say, "So what if the birds go?," well, as the miners know, as go the birds, so do we. (As a brief rant, that's one of the things that drives me crazy about people who take a "Who cares about the environment as long as we're all making money" stance--where do they think we live? "The environment" is our environment too! Excuse me. Rant over.)

As a brief example, we can look to Chairman Mao's "Four Pests Campaign" of the Great Leap Forward, from 1958-1962. Chinese citizens were exhorted to kill the four noxious pests, rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows--in this case, the Eurasian house sparrow, which was considered to steal the farmer's labor by eating the grain from the fields.

The people responded enthusiastically, shooting sparrows from the sky, destroying nests, eggs and nestlings, and chasing the birds around while banging pots and pans until they dropped from exhaustion. Someone might say, "Well, so what, it's justified if the birds were eating their food and the people were hungry?" But it turns out that the sparrows eat more than grain; they also love insects.

The "Kill a Sparrow Campaign" was so successful that they were almost extirpated from the country--and the result was a plague of locusts and other insects of such proportions that crops failed, and a famine in which 30 million people died of starvation.

So this is why I tolerate the invasion of house sparrows in my backyard. It could be worse. There could be none. However, since I have no desire to feed them, when I do get around to putting some feeders up for the winter, I will follow the advice in Anne Schmauss, Mary Schmauss and Geni Krolick's book, For the Birds, to discourage them from dining: using seed mixes with no millet or using safflower seeds only; using tube or sock feeders that they find hard to cling to; and putting up suet blocks with no grain in them. I don't want to be mean...but there's just too many to feed!

Crossed conditions and hapless doves

2011-09-29T21:19:00.003-05:00

Do you ever have a week where you feel that life is simply, well...against you? Where you start to wonder what on earth you might have done to deserve such a string of bad luck? And where, additionally, you start to feel a bit superstitious, such as wondering if you have been, in the old-fashioned way of thinking..."crossed"?

In this post I will restrict myself to lamenting about extracurricular activities, as it were, and leave aside the special depths of Hell known as my job, as that is sure to bore everyone, and besides, in these uncertain times, surely the most acceptable statement, job-wise, is "I'm grateful to have one...." ??

But, paid employment beside: Saturday, my Audubon singing bird clock is knocked off the wall and breaks. Of course I immediately went to my nearest Wild Birds Unlimited and got a new one, which I like. But...it's not the same. "My" clock is dead.

Monday...I take my dachshund to obedience school. Not only is he the second to worst dog in the class, barking-wise, but...after the lessons, he shows what he thinks of being told what to do by lifting his leg and whizzing all over my shoe. In front of everyone.

Yesterday...while walking dogs at local Weldon Springs park, my husband Greenturtle twists his ankle, resulting in a sprain and lump the size of a golf ball on the side of his foot.

Today...we learn that our property taxes are past due and somehow not calculated into our escrow account and so Greenturtle has to run around transferring money in order to pay for the "surprise," instead of resting his foot like he should be.

And amidst all this, there are mourning doves in need of help.

Tuesday, one of my dogs, Raven the cocker spaniel, somehow managed to escape the confines of the back yard, and when she finally came in response to our increasingly frantic calls, she was carrying a young mourning dove in her mouth.

I saw Greenturtle walk up to her, yank the bird from her jaws and toss it aside, and asked, as he led Raven towards the house, "Is it dead?"

"It will be," he said.

Do you know the expression, "My blood ran cold?" That's how I felt at that moment. In a way, a soon-to-be-dead bird is worse than a dead one. Because one feels no obligation to something that's dead. But something alive and injured demands help.

I walked up, and saw that the poor little thing, a mourning dove so young it still had some pin feathers, was still breathing. It was frozen with shock, missing its tail, and had some scrapes or sores on its side and bottom, but it was still alive.

I called some random veterinary clinics until I found one that had the number for a local (or, in my case, since I have moved to the boondocks, semi-local) wildlife rehabilitator. This woman agreed to take care of the young dove, but I had to drive all the way back to Normal (about 20 miles one way) and back to deliver it.

There was no debate in my mind what I had to do. If I left the poor thing out all night, it would surely die. So I gently wrapped it in an old T-shirt for warmth and placed it in a shoebox and took off.

Just as I was getting into town, it revived itself, flapped its way out of the T-shirt, out of the shoebox (which I hadn't put a lid on--OK, live and learn, but when I picked the dove up it wasn't even moving, let alone flapping!), and into the space between the seat and the car door.

When I arrived, all I could see, when I opened the passenger side door, was its butt jammed under the seat. Well, we--by which I mean, Gail the Wildlife Rehabber-- got it out and took a look. She said that although it was definitely injured, it actually didn't look that bad, and she put it in a shoe box with another injured young mourning dove, expressing the hope that maybe the two would be able to comfort each other. In fact, Raven might have actually saved its life by bringing it to me. Since the dove didn't have any puncture type wounds, and Gail suggested that Raven probably found it already wounded and just picked it up as spaniels are wont to do, perhaps I can rest guilt free about the role my dog played in the Dove's Tale.

All the while I was ferrying the dove to its destination, I just wanted it to make it there. I wanted the little thing to live, no more, no less. Mission accomplished, I wondered if I had accumulated any good karma and told myself what an important spiritual lesson that was, pure compassion and all that. If only I could drum up those sorts of feelings more often.

And then today: Hapless Doves, the sequel. Sequels are never as good as the first one, right? As I was walking towards my front door after work, exhausted and crabby after another day at the office, looking forward to an evening watching videos checked out from the library and enjoying a Dos Equis or two...BLAM! A mourning dove flew away from me and hit the neighbor's window.

I ran over to check it out. It was another young dove, perhaps even a sibling to the one I'd helped earlier...and it was stunned, flopping helplessly on the ground. Full disclosure? I thought: shit, shit, shit, not ANOTHER one! And then I gently picked it up.

It clung on to my hand for dear life (see above photo)... About ten minutes later, I managed to coax it off my hand and onto the floor of my front porch. Then I called Gail the Rehabber, who promptly called me back and explained that window strikes can break a bird's collar bone, which would explain why the dove was able to hop and scurry away from me but not fly. She offered to take it in if I could deliver it, but when I asked if I could maybe help it along myself for a few days with fresh water, rest, and bird seed, she said absolutely, as long as I kept it safe and fed, it should heal on its own within two weeks.

What a relief! I really wasn't into another late night trip into town. So now I have an overnight guest, snug in a cardboard box on my porch. (I'd originally planned to put it into a spare cockatiel cage, but Gail explained that it might get its wing stuck in the bars and even tear it off in a panic...so no cages...I mean really, who wants to see that???)

Is this the beginning of a new phase of nursing injured birds back to health? I wouldn't mind becoming a bona fide wildlife rehabilitator at some point. In the meantime, if doves could stop hurting themselves in my yard, I'd be eternally grateful!

For anyone who finds this talk of bad weeks and wounded doves too heavy, I offer, as distraction, photos of my dachshund Trevor stylin' in his new sweater:

P.S., When I called Gail today, she said that Mourning Dove #1 is still alive, doing better, and even starting to grow back some tail feathers...hooray!

Why birders bird and listers list

2011-09-20T21:32:00.000-05:00

Between work, errands and a drizzly Sunday (although I did see a year bird vesper sparrow between bouts of drizzle!), I have been thinking about birding more than actually going out to see the birds.

More specifically, I have been dwelling on the perennial question -- what is it about birding that is so addictive? And why, for so many of us, myself included, does birding become so list-driven and competitive (though, in my case, I mostly compete against myself, as I lack the time, resources and possibly the peculiar drive to launch myself into Big League Birding. Maybe someday, I think wistfully to myself...although then I'd probably have to start caring about gulls.)

I have broached this topic a couple of times in the past, such as my previous post about big lister Phoebe Snetsinger and my response to my birding buddy Sunwiggy's question about how we can get so carried away by our lists that we forget to enjoy the birds. Perhaps the question keeps coming back to my mind because if I could unlock the reasons for the obsessive, addictive nature of birding, I'd probably be on to something really deep about human nature. Or at least be a little closer to the philosopher's maxim to "know thyself." Or maybe it's just because I like to think about things; it's a sort of personal weakness. (How many times have people chastised me for analyzing a book or movie or trip to the county fair by saying, "It's just for fun, you're not supposed to think about it!"?)

As with many issues, the answers people find to the Obsessive Birding question might very well show more about their personal foibles than the birds or birders in question. For example, the Wikipedia entry on birding states that "ethnologist Nikolaas Tinbergen considers birdwatching to be an expression of the male hunting instinct while Simon Baron-Cohen links it with the male tendency for 'systemizing.'"

As a definitely female mad birder (at least last time I took a shower, ha ha), my reaction to this statement is: huh? To be honest, I have never heard of either of the men mentioned above, and perhaps a thoughtful reading of their work would lend a more favorable opinion. But on the surface of it, I don't find either concept very useful in my quest to understand my lister's impulses, and not only because I'm not a man; I don't feel like I'm "hunting" the birds at all (although Jonathan Rosen, author of The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature admits to feeling that way at times, as I mention in my post about the different roles I take on as a birder) and I am not really sure what the "male tendency for 'systemizing' really means -- does it have anything to do with my inner meltdown if I can't figure out which warbler is which?

Closer to the answer, in my opinion, is a discussion of the drive to understand that Thelma Lavine mentions in a discussion of Hegel's philosophy:

"We are beings...who take mastery as our goal...such mastering actions (are) the examples of the principle of negation, at work in all human thought.... [T]he principle of negation and death is at work in the self's characteristic relation to objects, in its desire to negate them, to overcome them in some way, to destroy them, to incorporate them, to cancel them out of existence."

(Full disclosure: I encountered this quote while reading a collection of essays entitled Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy. I wasn't actually just sitting around and reading about Hegel.)

To be honest, I'm still pondering that one. Is birding -- at least birding of the obsessive, list-driven kind -- part of a quest for mastery? Absolutely. And about the rest of it...obviously I don't want to cancel birds out of existence; in fact, I frequently get bummed out and weepy thinking about how precarious the survival of so many species is -- but to incorporate them? Into what, myself? The sum of my understanding of things? If so, yes. Perhaps to negate or cancel the division between "myself" and "other" (birds?) If so, maybe.

An essay or two later in the Buffy anthology, I got even closer to what I'm trying to put my finger on. In a discussion of the character of Willow, James B. South mentions the concept of "enigmatic signifiers," quoting Jonathan Lear: "We are, by our natures, susceptible to enigmatic signifiers--oracular utterances, if you will--which we can recognize as having a meaning--indeed, as having a special meaning for us--but whose content we do not understand." The desires represented by the enigmatic signifier cannot ever be truly fulfilled, because, despite the power that they have over us, we will never really be able to understand them. It's a hint, a glimpse of a greater longing, a tantalizing riddle to which we'll never have the key.

When I see a bird, especially a "good bird," such as a lifer or one I don't see very often, there is a lot going on in my range of reactions. Partly it's triumph, the sheer joy of having one more for the lists. Partly it is a sort of mastery, a moment of knowing and naming and just enjoying that space. And partly it is, no doubt, enigmatic, an intersection of Self and Bird that means all sorts of things that I'll never really express because I will never totally grasp it. And it might even be considered a sort of hunt...as long as you put the word "scavenger" in front of it. Even symbolically, I could never hurt the birds.

But really, in the very best birding moments, I am not a scientist or philosopher or scavenger, or even really a birder. It's the opposite of the "male" (or, more likely, human) desire to "systemize." It's something mystical. It's the part of me that understands a quote like this, from Zen Birding by David White and Susan Guyette:

"An American Indian man, a Ute, offered his perspective about birding. Birding is an okay thing to do, he said, because it can help you get in touch with this great creation of which we are a small part. Using binoculars is okay, too, if it helps you find out who you are looking at. But once you've identified the bird, once you know who it is, put the binoculars away. 'Birds don't like it when you stare at them,' he said. 'They think you're being rude.'"

Late summer in the U.P. : by Sunwiggy

2011-09-12T19:32:00.000-05:00

Another guest blog post from Sunwiggy, my northern correspondent.

Late summer in the UP is usually a melancholy time for me. Winter seems very near now, and more and more of my feathered friends are heading South. At the age of 62, one is aware that there are a limited number of new Springs and Summers one can expect to enjoy! So, to distract myself from all of this, I've been having a more-than-usual number of birding adventures.

First up was my sewer plant expedition, undertaken with a reluctant husband and birding partner. Having seen several nice peeps posted on ebird, by a fellow UP birder, at the Atlantic Mine sewer plant, I decided to go and see peeps, too. Finding the place was a trial and a tribulation, not very conducive to marital and birding harmony, but eventually we figured it out. An open gate, with a "Danger. Sewer Plant. Do Not Enter" sign gave my husband pause, but not me. How serious could they be, if the gate was open? We proceeded down the road and came to 2 of the 4 large "ponds" we'd seen on a google map at home. These were partially surrounded by a chain link fence and more "Keep Out" signs. The smell was horrific, even for a sewer plant. I could see crows investigating something along the muddy shore. There were puddle ducks in the first pond, tipping their bottoms up and eating away. My husband said his opinion of ducks had gone down a notch. The 2nd pond was empty, and my increasingly nervous spouse insisted on leaving "before anyone sees us." At this point, I started humming the tune to "Secret Agent Man." As we bounced down the road, we passed the biggest pickup truck I've ever seen, so I guess we got out just in time!

My next trip was to the Seney NWR, our 2nd time there. I was hoping to see trumpeter swans, and boy, did I, around 60 of the refuge's resident 250 birds. Seney is a really lovely place, with all of its pools. The place is well-laid out, too, easy to grasp and get around in. We noticed a big difference from our early summer trip; the long marsh walk was silent now, with all of the singing nesting birds gone, especially the redwinged blackbirds...if you can call what they do singing! Instead, the trees were full of migrating warblers, leading to a lovely, if frustrating, time complete with "warbler neck", and much paging through the bird guides and "discussion" of which birds, exactly, we were seeing. I was thrilled as we drove slowly by the ponds to see, not only all of the swans, but grebes, Canada geese, and sandhill cranes, and 3 bald eagles. We missed seeing the osprey and the mother loon with her baby that we'd heard about in the Visitors Center.

The swans were very protective of the almost-grown-up cygnets. We stopped to admire, from the Jeep, a mother swan and a cygnet, almost giving the father swan heart failure, or so it seemed. With much thrashing of wings, he got himself airborne, and flew to his little family, where the couple greeted each other with a lot of noise and synchronized neck-and-head bobbing. Then Father interposed his large body between us and his young one, and the 3 swam hastily away.

We also took a photo of a yellow rail, so we could tease Ms. Crow by saying we had seen one, and we did! Of course, the glass case in which the yellow rail is artfully displayed is visible in the photo. The best way to see one, I've read, is to go out with a guide in the middle of the night and endure being drained dry by mosquitoes while the guide knocks 2 rocks together. This sounds, to a male yellow rail, like a rival, and he will come out of the weeds to investigate. You turn a flashlight on, quickly, and there you go, you've seen a yellow rail!

This weekend, time constraints forced me to bird right here at home, which turned out to be lucky for me! The Scrub, an old railway line turned into an ATV trail, is full of warblers and sparrows flocked up to migrate. Lake Calumet is hosting, along with all of the Canada geese, a handsome gadwall. A rough-legged hawk is here, even though he's only supposed to be here in the wintertime. We got to watch a belted kingfisher catching and eating her fishy lunch. We rescued a very large painted turtle from the middle of the ATV trail, and put him gently in the mud by the beaver pond, although my husband refused to pull the leech off his tail (and I didn't, either, shame on us!). A short drive out of town gave us a ruffled grouse by the side of the road, near 2 male peacocks, the later presumably from the little hobby farm nearby.

Perhaps the best cure for Fall sadness is just to enjoy the birds we do see more than ever, and wish the departing ones a safe trip and a nice winter vacation down there in the South. Come January, I'll be trying to come up with a way to join them! Sunwiggy

A few good birds

2011-09-11T19:54:00.000-05:00

Fall birding can be so hit or miss. I've had wonderful birding days in September, warbleriffic outings, days where getting a big species count seems almost effortless. But that's only sometimes. The rest of the time, it's more like it was for me this weekend.

There were a few really good birds. But mostly not. Mostly it was just me walking along by my lonesome.

Yesterday I drove around the county a bit, hoping to find someplace with a different mix of species than I've been getting at Weldon Springs and Mascoutin. More specifically, still hoping for sandpipers, even though they've been eluding me all year.

I did find two semipalmated sandpipers and two solitary sandpipers in the muddy creek bed by Clinton Marina, keeping company with a killdeer, but beyond that, not a "peep" out of them.

On the other hand, the Peninsula Day Use Area was interesting. It used to be part of the park system, I'm assuming, but ever since I've been birding, the road has been closed, the area abandoned. But it doesn't say "Keep Out!," so every once in a while I stop there, usually in the winter.

This was the first time I'd been there while the grasses and foliage are still abundant. Weeds and scrubby yellow flowers pushed up through a long buckle in the pavement, that ran down the middle of the road like some shrubby backbone. It was really weird when I got to the area with the restrooms and the playground, like what sort of apocalypse made everybody leave? Yeah, I know, state funding, but it still felt like something out of Planet of the Apes.

From the area by the picnic shelter all along the trail to the beach, the amount of garbage made it clear that the place hasn't really been abandoned after all. And clearly the survivors of the Peninsula Day Use Area's armageddon enjoy Bud Light and Newport cigarettes. They also left behind many wadded up plastic bags and a frying pan. Ughh...

On the way back, I saw the bird that made the whole trip to Litter Central worthwhile: an osprey soaring overhead, carrying a large fish in its talons. Yes, it's moments like this that make me keep birding....

Today, I stuck closer to home, and walked around at Weldon Springs for most of the morning. Not much to see, a couple flocks of fall warblers but not as many as I'd like. I hope someone else is finding them. I did hear a white-eyed vireo calling from the shrubs, and even caught a glimpse of it. It's loud and discordant song inspired me to compose a small poem:

Vireo Songs

The white eyed vireo
is a noisy bird.
He is assured
that when he calls
across the fields
his voice is heard.

Other vireos
are more retiring.
Almost inquiring
is the warbling's warble,
while the Bell's cheedle-cheedle
sounds self admiring.

***

So, do birds ever inspire you to compose a verse or two? On a less pleasant note, have you ever happened upon a mountain of litter while you were strolling around?

Pondering pesticides (and just saying no)

2011-09-10T17:12:00.002-05:00

"I need to talk to you! Stop!" The man jumped out of a red car and started hurrying towards me. "I need to talk to you!"

I was walking my two dogs, Trevor the dachshund and Raven the cocker spaniel, through the cemetery in my neighborhood, and had just enjoyed seeing a belted kingfisher flying off down the stream that cuts through the middle of the graveyard.

I turned around apprehensively. The man sounded so insistent. There's no rules prohibiting walking dogs in this area, and neither of them had made a "deposit" on someone's grave site, so what was the big deal? Was I about to confront the town looney?

It turned out the man wanted to warn me against walking them along the creek area.

"I had a bulldog that I used to walk along there," he told me. "One day she ingested some pesticides that were sprayed along the creek. She came home and kept licking her paws. I loved her so much--she suffered for days, then she died. So don't walk your dogs along the creek!"

I thanked him for warning me -- at least, as best I could over Trevor's barking (he can be a very bad dog that way -- we are registering him for obedience class on Monday, and not a day too late!), and pondered his words as I finished the walk.

I've been taking the dogs along that area all summer, so I wasn't too freaked out. Plus, pesticides have a distinctive, awful smell, which I didn't detect even a whiff of. Still, I did take the man's warning to heart, and although I won't stop walking my dogs in the area, I will be careful to make sure nothing's been sprayed recently. And, since I love to be a public nuisance, I'll start pestering city and county officials about it -- not that it will do any good.

I have absolutely no reason to doubt the man's story, and I appreciate that he tried to spare my dogs the same horrible fate as his. My aunt had a collie who died suddenly after she'd had her yard sprayed. And if you do an Internet search of pets poisoned by pesticides, you'll find a lot of similar tales, such as this one from One Green Generation. (I highly encourage you to follow the link to a great post -- and don't worry, it has a happy ending.)

As the above post explains, according to the ASPCA, over 30,000 pet poisonings related to pesticides are reported to the poison control center each year. That's a really big number, and I was unable to verify it, but if you include cases of pets ingesting items left around the house or garden (such as roach hotels, rodent bait, poison granules, etc.) then perhaps.... (BTW, I was a bit annoyed by a line on the ASPCA website, along the lines of, "These products are necessary to keep your garden healthy, but keep your pets away." WTF?!?)

I guess that's what annoys me most about home use of pesticides: so much of it is completely unnecessary. It's really not a big deal to pull some weeds...and if your lawn in less than perfect, seriously, so what? In a previous post, I complained about the use of pesticides on the lawn by my work place pond because of the potential impact on birds, but now that I own dogs, I have even more reasons to object!

With all that said, I can understand the temptation. After walking the dogs, I worked on clearing out the raised beds in my garden, which have been completely overgrown all summer (I wanted to see if anything worth saving popped up. In a word, no), to get ready for planting native herbs and wildflowers next spring.

As I began pulling out plants and digging in one of the beds, a swarm of ants began seething across the dirt, rushing up my legs and arms, and -- ouch! -- biting me. And these are just normal ants, not fire ants like I encountered in Georgia. So my first thought was (as I decided to work on a different raised bed for the day), "How the bleep do I get rid of these ants?"

Reading advice on the Internet -- and skipping over anything that suggests using a pesticide, as I don't want to kill any birds or poison my soil -- I have run across suggestions to use boiling water, hot pepper sauce, cayenne pepper, orange oil, grits or corn meal, and human urine. I have also read that ants are not harmful to plants so why not let them be? (Well, I'd be happy to...if they'd stop biting me!)

My experience and research today has really helped confirm, once again, that I don't want to use any pesticides or herbicides in my garden as I create my Avian Haven. But in the meantime, does anyone have any thoughts or advice about the ants?

Signs of the seasons

2011-09-09T18:54:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I like to check out the "stats" feature of blogger and see what kind of hits my blog is getting. It's especially interesting to see the query someone made that led them to my humble posts. I often find myself thinking, "That's a good one -- I wish I actually had that information on here!"

For example, one query recently asked, "What bird is a harbinger of fall?" Since I am always making notes to myself about the first time or the last time I see a particular species or hear their song or see a certain plant, I think that's an interesting question.

Obviously, my answer is entirely dependent upon my particular locale. All of the statements and observations I am about to make are applicable to my experience in central Illinois. It goes without saying that the birds of, say, Cyprus or Baja California or some Arctic land will probably be different!

Strangely enough, I don't have an exact species of bird that I would call the "harbinger of fall." Winter, yes--the dark-eyed junco. And spring--the red-winged blackbird. (A lot of people would probably root for the American robin, but since so many overwinter here, and the blackbirds show up a week or two earlier, I vote for the blackbird.) For summer, I would vote for the ruby-throated hummingbird.

But fall? Personally, I know that fall is on its way more from the behavior of birds than their arrival. Many species fall silent. The grackles and starlings form enormous flocks. Swallows group up, then disappear. All of this tells me, even if I lost my calendar, that the autumn is fast approaching

But more than anything else, the starlings put their stars on. They lose their shimmery summer plumage and put on a coat of shiny white flecks--the "star" in starling. Despite being invasive nuisance-birds in North America, starlings in winter can be a surprise if you look closely; some non-birders ask what lovely species it is.

That simple question got me thinking, and here is A Year in Birds According to the Crow; or how to know your season:

Mid-winter -- the bald eagles appear along the river ways in huge numbers. Also a great time to go look for wintering owls, not that I am ever lucky enough to see one of those!

Late winter -- if you find an open stretch of water, it's bound to have some ducks on it. Enjoy! And the cardinals start to sing.

Early spring -- the return of the red-winged blackbirds and grackles! Also, check out those migrating sparrows.

Mid-spring -- the swallows return.

The Height of Spring -- warblers, warbler everywhere. Also the hummingbirds appear, and all the breeding birds have arrived.

Early summer -- the woods and prairies burst with song as all the summer residents make their nests and sing for their territories. I especially love the grasslands, with the buzzy chorus of dickcissels, grasshopper sparrows, sedge wrens, all overlaid with the plaintive song of the meadowlark. But deep in the woods, the ethereal cry of the wood thrush has to be the most beautiful sound on the planet.

Mid summer -- OK, it's hot and nasty now, but baby birds are everywhere.

Late summer -- the blackbirds are gone. Everyone else stops singing. For a while, the birding really sucks.

Early fall -- the starlings put their stars on. Fall warblers start to trickle though.

Late fall -- migrating sparrows. The juncos come down for the winter. The ducks come through on their way back south.

And back to winter. That's the good thing about birding. There's always something to look forward to.

What bird do you consider to be the harbinger of fall? Or any other season?

A sliver of place and time

2011-09-08T19:45:00.000-05:00

Last weekend, Greenturtle and I went to Saint Charles, MO, for the day, as I am very interested in the Lewis and Clark expedition, and Saint Charles has a museum dedicated to the explorers. Overall, the trip was a bit of a letdown; perhaps I was just expecting too much. Or perhaps it was me: I have been more restless than usual lately, so that even when I am seeing one bird, or enjoying one trail, I automatically start feeling impatient for the next.

After wandering through the shops and having lunch, I wanted to check out the "Eco Park," which is part of a larger park along the Missouri River, the Jean Baptiste Point DuSable park.

It looked nice on the map...woods and wetlands, along the river. But in reality, as soon Greenturtle and I embarked on the trail, we were commenting how spoiled we are with living in central Illinois. Yes, the middle of the agricultural wasteland, so flat and unscenic, and I was feeling grateful! Because when I go for a walk here...it's largely quiet. The people are few and far between, the traffic at a distance.

At the Saint Charles park, the vicinity to Interstate, train tracks, and flyway were all too apparent, not to mention the number of other people trying to enjoy the park. It was noisy and crowded, and made me grateful to be a "rural birder." (Which makes me think of the episode of the TV show 30 Rock where no one can figure out the name of the movie one of the characters is in -- The "Rural Juror." But what else is the opposite of Urban Birder?)

Before leaving, we drove to the edge of the park, where the off leash dog areas are, and the whole area was, not only noisy with the eternal traffic of the Interstate, but nauseating from the smell of the even-closer sewage plant. And the saddest thing is (or is it the most hopeful?), in with the noise and the stench, I saw chickadees, resilient and engaging little creatures.

I'm sure this is exactly how Lewis and Clark embarked on their expedition.... And yes, I do take my binoculars everywhere!

On the way home, construction on I-55 forced us onto the back roads around the town of New Douglas, which, on such a beautiful day, turned out to be fortuitous.

We passed through many small towns, tiny collections of houses on a street or two, surrounding a central grain elevator, and then back to fields and the most gentle rolling nature of the land. No one could call central Illinois anything but flat; but further south, perhaps the glaciers lingered longer over the moraines.

Most of the towns seemed almost deserted; in at least one, I did not see one single other person or even a passing car: the slow sad death of small town America.

Midway through Christian county, we passed a cemetery. As Greenturtle stopped to take a photo of the large crucifix over the grave of a priest who passed sometime in the 1940s, I watched the wind blowing ceaselessly over the bean fields, making it ripple and shimmer, mesmerizing as the sea.

It made me think of how I have wanted to explore and bird every county in Illinois, spending a good few days in each; how I would like to travel the Mississippi from its source to the delta; how badly I want to see the prairie chickens dancing on their leks in the springtime.

Since all around me was so peaceful, why do I get so melancholy in the fall, a time of year that used to mean new beginnings? Is it a symptom of my middle years or something that happened since I learned to love birds? Suddenly, just as spring represents new life and possibilities, it seems that the autumn means...death. There, I said it. The death of the season, the twilight of the year. Next comes extinct species, cold weather...and the eventual demise of everything I hold dear. Including, sooner or later, myself. I know that in our death-averse culture, early forties is nothing, but nothing lasts forever. Eventually, the jig is up! Strangely enough, winter is OK by me...it's just the end of summer that symbolizes all this depressing stuff.

Thoughts dancing with the wind -- the expansive dreams of constricted lives -- just a moment in time at a place I didn't expect to be, and that is always a dangerous sort of moment, because it almost feels like freedom. But then of course not, there is work, bills, duty: the routine.

And every once in a while, too, I am taken by surprise, a thought that, ten years ago when I moved here, I never expected:

Central Illinois is so beautiful. And I am grateful to live here.

Labor Day Bird Off

2011-09-07T20:02:00.000-05:00

Once again, I decided to keep the central Illinois birding interesting by challenging my mother and erstwhile birding buddy, Sunwiggy, to a competition. I would go out here in DeWitt county, Illinois, and she would go to a location or locations of her choice in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and we would see who can find the most species of birds. This what I call a "Bird Off."

It's been a little weird for me changing my mindset from "McLean County Birder" to "De Witt County Birder" -- even though I've only moved one county to the south, and I'd already birded the area and thus knew my way around, it still feels a bit like birding with a handicap to be that much farther away from my regular patches.

Normally, for a "Bird Off" at this time of year, I would have hit Parklands preserve to see what kind of warbler action was going on, then zoomed further down the road to Comlara Park, and then if there was any time remaining in the day, headed for some parks on town like Ewing or Anglers.

Luckily, to balance it out, I am really falling in love with my new local park, Weldon Springs. In fact, I'm in that early stages of infatuation where one wants to be with one's beloved all the time, and so I have gone there three days out of the past four (I took an extra day off to make my long holiday weekend even longer.)

On Saturday, it was too hot to do much birding, as I described earlier; then on Sunday, I went to Mascoutin and Weldon Springs and got a decent round-up of birds, but the parks were crowded and noisy.

Yesterday, I decided to hit Weldon Springs one more time, and it was blissfully peaceful on a workday morning; I almost had the whole park to myself. Also, we're getting our first taste of fall weather, so much so that I was shivering a bit when the wind blew, a delightful change of pace.

I began with a stroll past the cemetery to the old farmstead, getting a nice handful of birds on and around the prairie (mostly in the trees around the cemetery): field sparrow; blue jay; robin; downy woodpecker; black-throated green warbler; mourning dove; chickadees; goldfinches; and a Tennessee warbler.

It did feel a little melancholy to neither see nor hear the meadowlarks, dickcissels and barn swallows that were there all summer (yes, seasons change and for some reason this always bums me out a bit even though I also enjoy it and this is something I just have to learn to deal with!), but the prairie was so beautiful that I felt a spontaneous upswelling of gratitude, well, just that it exists. And I get to go there. And I found myself making some sort of inchoate promise that I will try to do whatever I can to protect it so that the birds can return again and again.

This was very nice and spiritual, but there's no time for enlightenment during a Bird Off, so I hurried back to the loop trail around the lake, where the wetland produced the ruby-throated hummingbirds I was counting on. A bit further on, I saw a Cooper's hawk flying up towards the trees, and a veery creeping down to the water' edge to get a drink. Overall, this area wasn't too active, so I was glad to cross the road at the Schoolhouse, getting a chipping sparrow, and then heading for the Wood Chip Trail to the backpack area.

The Wood Chip Trail was awesome, as usual--I'm so glad to have found it. Today it yielded chestnut sided warbler, magnolia warbler, cardinals, and a hairy woodpecker, and at the feeder area at the end, rose-breasted grosbeaks, house finches, and a Philadelphia vireo. The vireo wasn't partaking of the seeds, just in the area.

As an aside, I love grosbeaks. These were both females, and they seemed so placid and happy. Is there such a thing as an angry rose-breasted grosbeak? I don't think so.

The longest loop of my walk, down to the Backpack trail and along Salt Creek and back, was not very productive, but it was so beautiful and peaceful back there that I didn't much care about the scarcity of birds. The loop did net me catbird, turkey vulture, house wren, redstart, crow, and titmouse, but mostly I just enjoyed the complete solitude and quiet, and reflected how nice it was to be away from city crowds and traffic. (My posts from the weekend are a little out of order, but the day before that I'd been to Saint Charles, Missouri, and that was what I was comparing it to. More on the Saint Charles trip later.)

As I completed this loop, it was almost eleven, and I only had 26 birds for the Bird Off. I knew that Sunwiggy was doing better than that, so I decided to cut the loop around the lake short, as it hadn't been that productive, and try my luck elsewhere. On my way back to the car, I got several new species: eastern wood pewee, ovenbird, white-breasted nuthatch, flicker and house sparrow. But, by then it was noon -- heading up towards the worst time to bird in a day, and so few species on my list.

I decided to head for Clinton Lake, hoping for more water-loving birds -- the lake at Weldon Springs had been completely bird free, devoid of even the pied-billed grebes I'd seen a couple days earlier -- and got a ho-hum, but still one of the list, species along the way: European starling.

I stopped at the cemetery trail by the Illinois 48 bridge, which got me a wild turkey, the second sighting of the weekend, but little else. I also realized that the directions in Sheryl De Vore's book Birding Illinois are sadly out of date. In her book, she describes this trail as being rather exciting, but it actually peters out at the edge of a cornfield before very long. Well, the book is ten years out of date now, and I got a wild turkey.

After that, the best place I could think of for more species was Mascoutin, even though I'd been there earlier in the weekend and not been that impressed. But if nothing else, I knew I could pick up ring-billed gull by the concession stand.

Indeed, a whole flock of ring bills was bobbing on the water by the beach; I also saw a phoebe perched on the fence, and some Canada geese.

And then, the Houseboat Cove trail. Somehow I ended up convincing myself that the long loop was a good idea. So far, it feels like most of the distance I travel for De Witt county birding is on my feet! Not that that's a bad thing.

The birds were few and far between (well, it was afternoon by then), but I did get some good ones: yellow-billed cuckoo, great blue heron, Nashville warbler and pine warbler. I had a lot of time to reflect as I hurried from bird to bird along the 4 mile loop, and mostly I kept wishing how I could learn more about the local ecosystems and make a difference to help the birds. It's too late on my ill-fated career path to start over for ornithology -- I know, somewhere some 40-something is doing it, but in my personal case, it's just not feasible -- but a dedicated amateur can really be knowledgeable too.

I don't know if it was my inner wisdom or just more mental babbling, but the thought came to me, quite decisively: I can make a difference and I can learn more, and the path to doing that is literally in my own backyard: my dream of an Avian Haven filled with local plants. That's one of the reasons I like to spend so much time alone in nature. It's not just about seeing great birds.

But speaking of birds...as I finished the loop (one of my toes was actually numb by then, as I'd walked about eight miles total by that point) I had 40 species but I wasn't sure that would top whatever Sunwiggy saw at Seney Wildlife Refuge up north, so I swung by Clinton Marina on my way home, as I remembered a sheltered inlet by the road there. Bingo--mallards and killdeer making themselves at home! Added to the bluebird and pigeons I got on the drive home--44 species for the day, 8 miles of trails, surprisingly little gas squandered and another triumphant Bird Off!

A change of pace (Old Union Cemetery)

2011-09-06T20:36:00.000-05:00

Normally with me, it's all birds, all the time--after all, my personal motto is, "Bird to Live, Live to Bird." But I do have a few other interests; for example, I love old cemeteries, an interest which long pre-dates the birding thing, and which I attribute to a childhood in Newport, Rhode Island, which has some really nifty old graveyards.

There are several interesting ones I've seen in central Illinois, such as the cemetery at Funk's Grove in McLean county, which includes an Irish monument; the old poor farm cemetery along route 66 in Livingston County, which is just a sad little postage stamp sized thing surrounded by fields (strangely, one time when Sunwiggy and I stopped to check it out someone had left a "Tickle Me Elmo" doll by one of the graves -- I say "strangely," for those are pauper's graves and very old ones at that); and Woodlawn Cemetery here in Clinton, which has some Civil War graves.

So when I was in Barnes and Noble the other day, flipping through a book called Weird Illinois, I was excited to learn that there is an allegedly haunted graveyard here in DeWitt county: Old Union Cemetery.

According to the local lore, this place has really creeped out a lot of people; spooky phenomena include seeing lights whizzing by, capturing said lights in photographs, and feeling a sudden extreme drop in temperature. A grave surrounded by a rusty fence decorated with a willow tree motif is supposed to be the epicenter of the bad vibes; according to Weird Illinois, one theory is that the cemetery is actually some sort of portal. So obviously, after reading all that, I had to go!

To really build the up the atmosphere, Sunwiggy's response to my e-mail that I was going to find an old supposedly haunted graveyard, complete with the link provided above, was met with considerable alarm. Just seeing the photos kind of freaked Sunwiggy out, and she admonished me to be careful. I would have taken this more to heart if it weren't for the fact that all kinds of innocuous things creep Sunwiggy out, among them, her basement (I think she just wants an excuse not to do the laundry!) and bur oak trees.

As far as I'm concerned, I have a pretty open mind when it comes to the supernatural. I (very briefly) lived in an apartment that seemed to be haunted; I have had my share of weird "what was that?" moments and even a couple of dreams that came true. Greenturtle, on the other hand, is a complete skeptic, the Scully to my Mulder, so I figured we would make a good pair. Also, I needed his help in finding the dang place, because he has a GPS and a smart phone and the directions I could find on the internet were pretty sketchy. I also brought along a pair of completely impartial witnesses, my two dogs, Trevor and Raven.

The first day we looked for it was completely anti-climatic. Though criss-crossing back and forth along innumerable country roads, we couldn't find it. After a couple of hours, we gave up, and I decided to spend more time on the Internet pinning down the location.

Today, we tried again, and met success! It was a beautiful sunny afternoon, with the first traces of fall in the air. The graves were very old, most from the 1800s. (Nobody get excited about the specks in the top of the photo; the camera needs cleaned.)

I'm afraid to say that the place didn't live up to its reputation. It didn't give me the heebie-jeebies. Not even a heebie. The dogs acted normal, too.

I strolled around with the dogs while Greenturtle took photos -- none of which picked up any weird lights, by the way. This is the area that is supposed to be the scariest.

With my ghost-hunting team:

Raven says, "I am not going near that one!"

Trevor says, "I've checked everything out. Can I have my Scooby snack now?"

For those of you who wish I'd go back to blogging about birds, I did see a phoebe in the cemetery. It's perched on the pointy headstone--you know, that tiny speck you can sorta see if you click on the photo to enlarge it.

Right before we left, I noticed a small headstone against the trees all by itself.

So, could it be haunted? Based on my trip today, I don't want to say one way or the other. Nothing remotely weird or unusual happened while we were there; but, every once in a while, I felt a little flicker, not even like the place was haunted. It just felt uneasy. However, after reading that it was haunted, and being warned by Sunwiggy, I could obviously be under the influence of the power of suggestion!

The only other thing, again inconclusive, was that the dogs didn't want to go by the willow fenced area. They didn't act scared, or whine or yelp or anything like that, but I had to literally pull them -- in Trevor's case, almost drag him -- to get him over there. Still, I have stubborn dogs that frequently don't want to go the direction I'm taking them, so I can't use that as proof of anything. Just something interesting.

Well, I'll have to go back someday and try it again, preferably with Sunwiggy!

Fizzle!

2011-09-03T17:23:00.000-05:00

Sometimes things turn out just as good as I'd hoped they be. My birding trips to Texas, for example, or a few stunning and warbleriffic "big days" I can think of. But anticipation is a two-edged sword. Thinking of all the wonders that are about to befall me adds zest to otherwise tedious and frustrating days; but then, when said wonders do not produce themselves, instead of enjoying the day I have, I end up cursing it for all that it's not. (Suffice to say I had a real issue with Christmas letdowns as a kid...no matter what I got, it never matched up to the weeks worth of anticipation I'd built up staring at the beautifully wrapped packages under the tree. I still hold a grudge against the holidays for that, but that's a whole different topic....)

In case you are wondering, all the sound and fury of my introduction signifies...a very dull round-up of birds. (And I regret that once again I'm pulling photos from my "archives"--I don't take the camera with me when I'm hoping for warblers. I never get good shots at them anyway, and the extra weight of the camera really compounds the affliction known as "warbler neck." But my apologies to the more visually oriented who might be reading this.)

The first problem--the main problem--with the day is that the horrible heat has returned! It's never a good sign when it's almost eighty degrees before I even leave the house. I know, some time next January I'll be wondering what on earth I was whining about, but right now, my sentiments are: summer BEGONE! I want afternoon temps in the sixties, red and golden leaves, a crisp coating of frost on the ground early in the morning. I want fall--and the fall of my snowy homeland of Michigan, at that. (Autumn in central Illinois is a very hit or miss affair. Sometimes we get treated to a proper one, other times it stays hot and muggy until October.)

Since I knew it was going to be a scorcher, I cut to the chase and just did the backpack loop at Weldon Springs. I thought that would be the likeliest place to find warblers without having to drive too far, and also to escape the holiday weekend crowds.

I was right about the crowds. Just as with my previous trips, the walk was very solitary, and the yellow flowers along the creek beds were still blooming. The spiders weren't too bad, either, and only a few mosquitoes.

It has been pretty dry the last few weeks, and the land has a parched feel to it: ground hard and cracking under my feet, Salt Creek low in its banks.

Alas, for all my efforts, the birds were few and far between: ovenbird, wood thrushes, red-eyed vireo, black-capped chickadees, catbirds, cardinals, one great blue heron seen at a distance in the creek; a crow, blue jays, many many robins, one field sparrow, a handful of goldfinches...you get the idea. Except for the ovenbird, the only warbler I saw was another black-throated green.

And it was hot. So I went home. It feels really wrong to spend the first afternoon of my long holiday weekend cooped up inside, with the air conditioner chugging faithfully along, partaking of my summer staples of cold beer and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Hopefully the rest of the weekend won't be this dull. In the meantime, I am dreaming of fall. Or the Arctic. How about fall in the Arctic? Let's just say that, as far as I'm concerned, this hundred degree weather has outlived its welcome!

Birding alone (being safe in nature)

2011-08-30T20:03:00.000-05:00

"Be careful when you go walking," one of my co-workers once warned me. "Don't you know that dead bodies show up in parks all the time?"

"I'll be careful," I promised, as I knew her intentions were good. And then, because for some reason it's in my nature to try to set people straight about things, I added, "And actually, people aren't murdered in the woods all that often. Statistically speaking, it's really rare."

I'm used to being admonished for my solitary ways. Well-meaning people have been trying to scare me into staying home for pretty much my whole life. Long before I started birding, I didn't think twice about walking down town to a coffee shop or a bookstore, or strolling through a park, or wandering around on my college campus, entirely by myself.

But this culture of fear bothers me. Because we are all so worried about what might happen, as a society, we lock ourselves indoors, hurrying from building to car, and don't let our children out to play. And please don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that we are guaranteed to be safe if we do go out...but that's because there are no certainties in life. Sure, I could be accosted by an axe murderer out in the woods. But it's more likely that I'll die in a car wreck, or one of my co-workers or clients will "go postal" one day and go on a rampage. My point is, if we worry too much about everything that could possibly go wrong, and curtail our lives because of it...something already has gone very wrong.

And I have to say the taking solitary walks in nature is probably one of the most rewarding activities I can think of. For example, last Sunday as I strolled through the backpack trail at Weldon Springs by myself I felt, from time to time, absolutely transcendent. It was so beautiful back in that area, with the trees curving slightly towards the trail, and banks of yellow flowers, and the occasional sighting of a good bird -- Blackburnian warbler, yellow-billed cuckoo, redstarts, hairy woodpecker, catbirds, black-throated green warblers, white breasted nuthatches.

I don't know why I crave, not just solitude, but solitude in nature, but I do. My world isn't quite right if I can't find the time to immerse myself outdoors in steady doses. On a busy work day, sitting by my Work Place Pond for ten minutes or walking the dogs through the graveyard by my house does the trick; but when I have the chance to wander for hours, all the better. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a stroll with my family or a birding group too. But there's something different about having time to be alone.

I think one of the differences is that, when I'm by myself, I almost feel like I've developed extra senses, I'm so hyper-aware of my surroundings. Instead of feeling tempted to yak to a companion, I am forced to pay attention to everything. It can feel like a form of meditation--on one level, I experience all my thoughts and recollections, since there are so few distractions; and on another, for whole moments at a time, I am able to put all that to the side and just see and hear what is right before me.

Nine times out of ten, I lose all track of time (what I think of as the "birding zone," or perhaps just more proof that time flies when you're having fun); and at least that often, I feel, coming back to the crowds, that I have glimpsed something bigger than myself.

So why are so many people so fearful? I would hazard it's a combination of reasons. For one thing, I am not sure that being alone, either in the woods or out, is natural to the human condition. For what it's worth, we are social animals, and I understand that true introverts such as myself may be a bit of a rarity. And in today's fragmented world, a lot of people are already forced to be far more solitary than they might like.

It's easy for people like me, who feel more at home in nature than anywhere else, to scoff at those who are more timid, but the truth is, up until the last couple hundred years or so, being in the woods was considered frightening. In their un-Disneyfied form, fairy tales give a glimpse of this atavistic fear; and it seems mean to judge people for still carrying it. (In other words, I think the Big Bad Wolf goes deeper into the human psyche than Walden Pond, even though my own personal experience is Thoreau all the way. People still fear and hate wolves, as an example, far more than any objective stance justifies...but the whole wolf issue is beyond the scope of this post.)

But even if I didn't like to experience Nature as a form of meditation, there are good reasons to learn to be comfortable as a solitary birder. For one thing, if I didn't enjoy going out alone, I'd have to bird a lot less than I do! Unless one's spouse or best friend is also a birder, having someone to go out with you at the drop of a hat might not work out.

Even though I am not timid, I also do try to be sensible, and here on my thoughts on both being and feeling safe alone in the woods:

For starters, I try not to go out by myself before I've scoped out the area with a buddy first. This isn't always possible -- for example, when I went to Texas on my first birding trip, I didn't have a chance to do a preliminary run with someone else -- but locally, I like to take a buddy along first. If I feel at all uncomfortable about a location, then I won't go back alone. For example, Edgar Madigan Park in Logan County isn't a place I'd do solo.

And whether it's my first trip or my hundredth to a place, I always stay observant and trust my intuition. If I see someone who's acting strange, or who just gives me a bad vibe, I'm out of there. Nothing to prove by staying! A couple of times in the past (before I started birding even), my intuition was so strong, that even though I couldn't see anything amiss or hadn't even arrived yet, I got such a strong "Don't go there!" feeling that I turned around. Even if it feels silly, I always listen. And obviously if I ever felt like someone was following me or paying me undue attention...outta there!

I also try to pick places that have a solitary feeling without being completely off in the middle of nowhere. It's easy to find a spot where, for good stretches of the trail, I don't have to trip over other people, but in the surrounding area, there are actually plenty of others around, fishing on the lake or picnicking in a neighboring grove. And I always take my cell phone.

All of this advice would be beside the point if the local parks were actually dangerous places. But here's the thing that drives me crazy: they're not. People keep themselves cooped up, won't let their kids play in their own backyard, let alone the neighborhood, act like a walk through the park was a stroll in a war zone when, by and large, none of this is necessary!

For anyone who doubts me on this, I implore you to actually look into the statistics. Unless we are in the inner city or another dangerous area, our chances of being victims of a violent crime are actually pretty low. And if someone is going to attack you, statistically speaking, it will be a family member, or someone you invited along on your hike. Sad but true.

So if someone feels that they are in constant threat of danger, my first word of advice would be to turn off the TV (or other media source). Studies have shown that the more TV people watch, the more they over-estimate their chances of being victims of a crime, probably because that's all we see on TV. News reports of isolated crimes from all over the country can affect us as though the event happened right in our own neighborhood. Of course, something bad is always happening somewhere. But statistically that does not mean that it is likely to happen to us.

I think "entertainment" can be even more damaging than news. Movies like Deliverance or I Spit on Your Grave can create very strong images of violence and victimhood, but they're not true stories. I think that stories like those do help to create a culture of fear, even if on a subconscious level. Personally, I find that if I'm feeling nervous without good cause, when I think it over, it's usually because of some piece of fiction that I saw or read. Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy movies, even horror stories, but I like to keep them supernatural or just so silly I can't take them seriously. Otherwise my mind ends up like a junk yard full of other people's crap, and who needs it?

Obviously, how cautious one feels in nature, or in life, is a very individual decision. For myself, if I never went out alone, I'd feel like I was in a prison. But a more timid or sociable person might find a solitary walk to be a torment.

But for people who don't mind it, I highly recommend a solitary stroll in nature. I think you might find, as I do, that it is one of the most rewarding experiences of all.

So, do you ever bird or hike alone? If so, have you ever had a scary experience? Do you think your nature is more social or solitary?

Weekend round-up

2011-08-29T20:22:00.000-05:00

Last weekend, true to my experience over the past few years of seeing my first fall warbler on the third weekend of August, I spotted an American redstart at Mascoutin State Recreation Area by Clinton Lake. My original plan was to repeat last weekend by birding Weldon Springs on Saturday and Mascoutin on Sunday. I like to go back to the same place for several weeks in a row sometimes, to get a good understanding of exactly how the mix of species slowly shifts over the season.

Saturday I even got up early enough to hit the trails at Weldon Springs by seven o'clock. The day is so peaceful that early, the air still cool, the surface of the lake quiet and shimmering, a few traces of dew still clinging to the spiderwebs.... Which are, of course, everywhere in late summer, festooning the trees, dangling over the trails, some a mere trip-wire of a strand, others complicated dream-catcher concoctions complete with fat bulbous spider hunched in the center.

As I focused my binoculars over the lake, spying with my little eye a flock of Canada geese paddling across the surface, an older couple came into view, power-walking around the bend. I had a brilliant thought, definitely one of my better ones. Why not enjoy the Canada geese for a few extra minutes, allowing the morning exercisers to go first, and thus hit all the spiderwebs before I get to them?

It turned out that quite a few people were out and about, jogging, fishing, or just strolling around, so luckily the actual trail was mostly web-free, allowing me to look for warblers without getting a face-full of spiderweb.

Perhaps it is still a bit too early in the season to hit the warbler jackpot, for I only came across one good mixed flock of them, which contained a black and white, a chestnut-sided, and a Philadelphia vireo. As I did last weekend, I crossed the street to pick up the Schoolhouse trail, which proved to be an absolute bust, bird-wise.

Since the warbler action was rather weak, I decided to look for sandpipers instead, and headed across the county (luckily it's a small county, so not too far) for the Salt Creek wetland. It goes along with Murphy's law that if I bring my spotting scope with me, I won't see anything I need to use it for, but if I don't, I'll be jogging back to the car praying that whatever I've spotted just out of binoculars range doesn't vacate the premises before I can get my blankety-blank scope. That's just the way it has to be.

Since not having the scope felt like the worse of two evils, I brought it along. And since I was looking for sandpipers, I slung my tote bag with my Stokes Guide in it across my back, because sandpipers are even trickier than warblers in their fall plumage.

The wetland is not shaded, and the day had grown quite warm by then. When I got to the place I'd hoped to see some peeps, I discovered that the water had receded so far that the good mud flat action was well beyond range of even the scope, although I did see many sandpiper shaped blobs scurrying in the distance, between the larger silhouettes of great blue herons. At that distance, everything shimmered a bit with the heat of the morning.

Proof of the spotting scope axiom stated above! I'd lugged it along, and nothing to look at through it. (I did try...the birds were just too far away.) Well, might as well finish the loop.

I saw two spotted sandpipers in the channel beside the trail, bereft of spots at this time of year but still obligingly bobbing their bottoms so I could easily identify them. And then a tern came into view, swooping over the wetland and making a couple of elegant dives. So bringing along all my crap wasn't a total waste of lugging power, since I could sit down and leaf through my field guide until I'd identified the tern as a Forster's tern...and a life bird at that, hooray.

But mostly it was hot and I had to lug around all my crap which, though nothing to speak of when one embarks on the trail, becomes cumbersome and tiring by the end. But, yeah, Forster's tern, that was a good sighting.

Yesterday morning, I lay in bed thinking about where to bird and remembering all the spiderwebs that I'd encountered last weekend at Mascoutin. And then I recalled how the trails at Weldon Springs were pretty much cleared out before I got to them from all the true early birds strolling past. Since I'm moderately arachnophobic, thinking of the difference between the two decided the matter for me: back to Weldon Springs it was.

I'm actually a little embarrassed about the spider thing. I mean, I'm supposed to be this all around Nature Girl, into birds and plants and snakes and bugs. I like all the stuff that other people don't, such as skunks and bats and possums. I don't even mind seeing bears and alligators (which I really have, BTW -- bears in Michigan and alligators in Texas). But spiders? I really don't like them, in a scream like a girl when I walk into a web sort of way.

I walked the same loop around the lake at Weldon Springs that I had the day before. I haven't walked it enough to get bored with it, and if nothing else, it really is a good place to exercise. There were a few good birding moments, such as the increased amount of hummingbirds at the wetlands. Someone else must have been disappointed that there weren't more of them, because the remaining jewelweed has been supplemented by hummingbird feeders. Not too many warblers, though.

I crossed the street to the Schoolhouse Trail again, this time just taking a quick stroll behind the nature center, observing how their wetland area is definitely all dried out at this time of year. I noticed a path through the trees with a wood chip trail, and peeked inward. A wood thrush hopped across the ground, which was a good sighting not only because wood thrushes are precious, but also because earlier in the year, I'd put wood thrush and yellow-billed cuckoo on ebird, and felt slightly guilty about it ever since.

The reason for the guilt was because, although I did definitely hear those two species, I didn't actually lay eyes on them, and in my mind, heard only species just don't count. Especially since they were "county birds," or first sightings for DeWitt county. I'd added them to my checklist to make it more complete, but in the back of my mind, I'd been thinking "cheater cheater pumpkin eater." Well, now I had one of the two for reals.

I was curious about the trail, but decided to skip it, because I really wanted to get into the area around Salt Creek on the backpack trail, even though this was the spot I got horribly turned around in last June.

Once I embarked on the backpack trail, what I'd done wrong before became immediately -- and embarrassingly -- apparent. The trails back there are laid out in concentric rings -- prairie loop, woodland loop, and creek loop -- each with an access point leading to the next ring. The end of the prairie loop joins right back to the start point of the trail, but for some reason, I hadn't registered that to get there, I had walked down a fairly long gravel-paved hill. So when I'd seen the gravelly hill, I'd thought, "Not that way," and begun to wander the concentric circles of the trails.

Not only did I unlock the mystery of the backpack loop, but I saw some awesome warblers, including black-throated green and Blackburnian. And, as I walked along the trail lined in yellow flowers along the creek, I also saw a yellow-billed cuckoo! My other "cheater" heard only bird in the flesh!

I was feeling so hyped by the nice birds back there and the fact I hadn't gotten even the teensiest bit lost that, on my way back, I decided to explore a new trail branching off from the return loop. For one thing, there were three bird feeders off to one side, and it piqued my curiosity as to why someone had put bird feeders up in what appeared to be the remotest corner of the park.

But maybe not so remote...there was a wooden bridge, and then a fairly steep hill paved with wood chips. As a cacophony of blue jays cried around me, I hurried up, wondering where on earth this trail would end up? Well, I didn't see the wood thrush, but it was the same trail I'd wondered about behind the schoolhouse!

The most exciting moments of the weekend? The Forster's tern. The Blackburnian warbler. The wood thrush and the yellow-billed cuckoo. Wandering through the stands of yellow flowers along Salt Creek. And realizing that four separate trails at my next door park, Weldon Springs, can all be connected into one giant eight mile loop trail! Ah, the simple things in life....

Fall warbler confusion

2011-08-28T13:32:00.000-05:00

Even though this post is about warblers, I've included a photo of a black-capped chickadee as a header. This is because one of the things that drives me crazy about warblers is that they won't stay still for a minute! I have a hard enough time getting a long enough look at them to try to identify them, let alone record them for posterity. But they frequently hang about in the same general vicinity as chickadees, and thus it was on Friday at Ewing Park, when I happened upon a nice mixed flock.

I'd already started reviewing my field guides, trying to memorize as many distinguishing features as possible in preparation for fall migration. For, as I described in the spring, I find the warblers to be downright crazy-making. And frustrating. And, they make me feel inadequate! I've been birding for several years now, and I still struggle with the warblers, what's up with that?

Case in point: I pause on the page of my Stokes' field guide devoted to the Tennessee warbler, trying to memorize the little bugger in his non-breeding plumage. A drab little guy, really. Kind of yellowy, olivey--but hey, this is good, he's got a bit of an eye-line. Then I come to the next page, which showcases the Nashville warbler, whose non-breeding plumage is also sort of drab and yellowy, olivey. But--his eye is different! It has a ring instead of a line. Very good, if only I can make sure I get a good look at the eyes...which almost never happens. I mean, they're up at the top of a tree, obscured by the foliage, moving continuously, how am I supposed to focus on the eyes??

But no problem, moving on: the orange crowned warbler. Guess what his non-breeding plumage looks like? Kind of drab, yellowy, olivey. And he has a faint sort of eye-line.

Well, that's OK, so what if three species are a little tricky in the fall? At least I can always nail the magnolia! With that yellow belly and black steaks along the sides, what else could it be? Nothing...except maybe a prairie warbler, which also has a yellow belly and black streaks along the sides, of course the head is different but not as distinguished in the fall and what if I don't get a really good look at the head? How many dozens of fall magnolias have I seen? What if one or two of them was really a prairie warbler, which would have been a life bird?

Very disturbing, moving on. The palm warbler! He's extremely drab in the fall, but luckily easy to distinguish because he pumps his tail, which the others don't do...except for the prairie, oh, and the Kirtland's. Which look similar by the way.

So there are perhaps six species of fall warblers that I can easily identify, and the rest of the time, I just make something up! Or, more likely, I scribble down a description in my notebook and later scour all of my field guides hoping to finally place that drab yellowy olivey one I saw high up in the trees, and never do, and end up feeling frustrated. Or else I have a moment of confidence, proclaim the Warbler to Self and ebird, and then spend the rest of eternity consumed by a nagging doubt: "At the time I thought it was...it really seemed like...but what if I'm wrong?"

Last Friday, as I strolled around Ewing Park in Bloomington, I happened upon a nice mixed flock of warblers. I identified an American redstart, magnolia warbler, black and white warbler, and blue-winged warbler. At the time, I was completely confident about each ID, feeling quite happy to have seen them. Yeah, warblers!

Then I got home and studied the field guide. I noticed the similarity between the magnolia and the prairie. The difference is in the head -- for one thing, the magnolia's is darker -- but how close a look did I get at the head? My ID was reduced from 100% to an 80% on the certainty scale. And the blue-winged, which was a county bird, is, I notice, rather similar to the fall plumage of the pine warbler. Not the same, obviously. But similar enough to make me question myself.

I kept both IDs as they were, because I felt sure at the time, they are "likely suspects," and well...because I always do this to myself. My life list frequently grows by several species, and then is reduced again, as I ponder and doubt and question my abilities. Am I a terrible birder or just pathologically lacking in self-confidence? Is this symptomatic of a greater problem? A sort of ontological crisis? How can I know, really absolutely know, what you are, little bird? And if I don't know, then how can I name you? Fairy tales are very specific about the power of names, and for a good reason. This momentary intersection between me and Bird is deprived of its mojo if I have no names!

A book I am reading on my kindle, Zen Birding by David White and Susan Guyette, has an excellent discussion of the perils of identification, and does not admonish us to forget about it and just enjoy seeing birds. On the contrary: "...To only appreciate birds for their beauty, or for how they make us feel, is being self-centered. We generally recognize that we cannot relate well to other people without some sense of who they are, and this applies to birds as well."

Knowing "who" the bird is can actually increase our sense of wonder about the species we see; more importantly, without a correct identification, we cannot keep track of which birds are abundant and which species are in decline. Apparently some people have assumed that house sparrows residing in the mission at San Juan Capistrano are instead the famous swallows.

When it comes to misidentification of a bird before one's gaze, White ties the problem to two of the "demons of disappointment" of Buddhist thought, one which could lead someone to identify a common bird as a rarity, and the other to identify a rare bird as something common. The former "demon" is the result of "desire for a big list," while the latter comes from "fear of being wrong."

As I suffer from both problems simultaneously, fall warbler season can be a bit nerve-wracking at times. How can we ever be certain, absolutely certain, that we saw what we thought we saw, that our experience truly is as we interpret it? This might be a giant personal issue, but in the meantime, I just want to look at birds. For the rest, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Until then, we can sit together and look for warblers.

And instead we'll see black-capped chickadees.

Angler's Pond at the end of summer

2011-08-27T12:43:00.000-05:00

As I pulled up into my Work Place parking lot yesterday morning, the lawn by Angler's pond was full of robins and starlings seeking their breakfasts. (As I remarked last winter, it seems that robins and starlings like to hang out together. Am I the only one who's noticed that? Or who thinks it's a little weird?) I also saw an eastern kingbird and -- happy surprise! -- a Baltimore oriole, the latter being a first for my local "patch" list.

The starlings had their stars on, which is the way I describe their winter plumage. Yet another indication that the season is changing! That's one of the things that I like about birding. I have never been so acutely aware of the subtle shifts of the seasons before I started actively looking at birds. The temperature still feels like summer, but the activity of the birds is so different than it was in June or July!

All of this made me itch to get outside and start birding, but first I had to work my usual half-day Friday. Ah, work. The best that can be said about it is that it keeps me from having to pawn my binoculars. But by early afternoon, all of that was behind me, and I was ready to explore Angler's pond to see exactly what late summer has to offer.

As I described in my last post, I saw some disturbing signs on the trees and gate:

I've never noticed a particular glut of cats around Angler's Pond (although one of the residents suggested I check my shoes for "goose $hit and cat $hit" when I was returning to my car, so there must be some)...and as I stepped through the gate, another thing I didn't notice was any birds. I wondered if every winged creature in the area was taking a siesta.

Still, as I'd looked over the photos I'd taken of the pond last February earlier in the morning, I found the differences between late winter and late summer to be fascinating. And yet, the "bones" of the place, the winding path and bending trees enticing me forward, the tangles and brambles making this spot in the middle of town feel so wild and fey, and the expanse of the pond in the middle--all of that remains, winter or summer.

I found myself spending more time than usual in an open area that consists of a long, narrow pond with houses along one side and apartment building on the other. Normally, this is a fairly boring area, but today it was where all the bird action was.

Walking forward was like traversing a corridor with the pond and the bushes and shrubs along its banks on one side, and the trees and fences of the houses on the other, with the whole center area an explosion of squawking robins. Many of them were still splotchy-bellied with youth:

This is probably what drew them, doll's eye, also called white baneberry:

Do I have to point out that these berries are poisonous? But apparently birds can eat them, even though they cause (according to Illinois Wildflowers) "severe gastrointestinal inflammation and skin blisters" in humans. Well, birds can eat the berries of the poison ivy plant, too...and pokeweed. I wonder how they filter out the poisons, or if it's just a quirk of the human system that we can't eat these things?

I also saw a kingbird, although looking at the photo, it doesn't seem to have the white edging along the tail. The rest of it sure looks like a kingbird, though.

Perhaps a robin's nest?

Urban birding isn't always the most scenic experience.

The last bird sighting of my outing was the humble mourning dove.

It wasn't a very productive walk, bird-wise, and by the end of it I was feeling uncomfortably warm. But I left with the feeling that this observing and documenting of each shift of the season that I have done this year is a good thing, a way of truly looking, almost a form of walking meditation at times. We're at a cusp right now, neither summer nor fall, the breeding birds becoming scarcer and the migrants just starting to trickle through. It's a very interesting time of the year.