Snowed in, called out

I got up Wednesday morning, the morning of the big snowstorm, fully intending to go to work. I looked outside and yeah, it looked bad. The road was white with packed-down ice from the few drivers who'd ventured out, and the car--well, we park right next to the road rather than on our steep driveway when it snows--the car was buried under about two feet of powder and plowed snow from the road. Still, I got in the shower and made Kat's coffee, thinking that she might still want to go to school.

I got out of the shower and woke Kat, who said the university, which NEVER closes due to snow, was closed, so why was I waking her up? At this point, I realized that we probably weren't going to get the car out of its icy tomb, and I wasn't going to work. It was just as well, because I took the day to read, from cover to cover, my Audubon guide to backyard birdwatching and feeding. What a great book! I took little notes (like the English major I am), planned some bird-friendly spring plantings (I'll blog on that closer to spring), and kept the feeders out back filled. Exhausting day! Somehow, I managed to cram a viewing of Return of the King and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in there too! I know, I know--I'm a dynamo.

Boy, did those birds eat yesterday. I read in my Audubon book that more mourning doves will come to feeders during hard snows and colder weather; I saw proof of that yesterday. As it's gotten colder this winter, I've noticed that each week, I get a couple more doves, and since the big snowfall they decided that my al fresco grill was the place to be. I had twelve birds at one time, setting a MODO record.

I also had white-throated, song, and tree sparrows; dark-eyed juncos; two female (never seen more than one a time) and one male cardinal; bluejays; black-capped chickadees; the downy and the red-bellied woodpecker; white-breasted nuthatches; tufted titmice; and one female house finch. They eat continually throughout the constant snowfall, and I filled the one hanging feeder nearest the house three times and scattered seed underneath each time. Of course, they had to dig for it only a few minutes after each time, and I tried to help them with that by digging with my boot down to the buried stuff.

I took some photos but they're not too great. Some are through the porch window, and even the ones taken outside suffer from not enough light:



Isn't he handsome? I love me some Mr. Cardinal.


This next picture reminds me of a great song:

"I'm not waiting on a lady,
I'm just waiting on a friend."

I also read in my book that unlike brown creepers or woodpeckers, nuthatches can go up or down a tree thanks to their toe structure and the fact that they don't need to prop themselves up with their tail feathers. Neat.


The marsh and backyard:



I wonder what he's thinking. Probably something like, "It's sure gonna suck to dig that car out tomorrow." My sore back, shoulders, and neck can attest to that, little sparrow.

What's that sound?

Listen! I believe I hear the short and sweet “help-me-help-me” cry of a beginning birder trying to ID sparrows!

I’ve always liked sparrows a lot, despite (or perhaps because?) my fourth grade grammar teacher Mrs. West said that sparrows were "the laziest birds," feeding opportunistically on whatever humans leave behind. I wanted to ask her why this meant the birds were “lazy”--it seemed to me that they were just taking advantage of messy humans and cleaning up after us. What’s lazy about that? Besides, sparrows are cute. I didn’t say anything aloud, however. I wasn’t much of a class talker when I was a kid, especially not in that class. She was a nice enough lady, and I really dug the way she always had a handbag and shoes to match every outfit. My favorite was this white cotton dress with pictures of little carrots on it, with matching orange pumps and orange handbag. Who has a dress with carrots on it, you know? But what kept me quiet was the fact that she was really tall and intimidating, and I was so small. She would constantly tease me about getting blown away by the wind on the playground (I was maybe three feet tall in fourth grade--maybe--I was little). This idea terrified me, so I wasn’t about to knock her theory on sparrows.

Anyway, I had a lot of sparrows at the feeders today, so I thought I’d do a little photographic study of them and try to learn more about their behavior and their markings. My sources, once I came back inside, were my Stokes’ field guide, my old Peterson’s field guide, Bill Thompson III’s Identify Yourself (Jimmy Carter did a blurb on the back? wow!), and Robert Burton and Stephen W. Kress’s The Audubon Backyard Birdwatcher: Birdfeeders and Bird Gardens.

Okay--I’ll build my confidence with an easy ID: one of the more common sparrows in my backyard, the white-throated sparrow:



I tried to capture the markings on their crowns and napes, which are quite striking:


And is this the cutest little bird booty you’ve ever seen?


So--no challenge there; that white throat patch and the yellow eyebrows make this the easiest sparrow ID for me.

White-crowned sparrows are also easy, but I didn’t see any today. Suffice it to say, I’m good on this sparrow.

Song sparrows are fairly easy to identify with that “stick pin” spot and streaky breast and flanks. Bill of the Birds wrote that a few sparrows have that center “stick pin” spot, so watch out for that. Still, I’m confident that I can spot a song sparrow. Here’s a couple of shots of an individual on the feeder:



Here, you can see the streaked flanks and the long tail:



So far, so good.

Next comes the American tree sparrow. I thought I was pretty good with this one, but after staring at my photos and my many field guides and bird books, I started to get a little shaky! Always over-analyzing everything. Still, I feel fairly confident about these, with their rufous crowns, gray breasts, and light breast spots:



During my post-photo-shoot study, I learned that tree sparrows have what the Stokes call a “two-toned bill--upper bill dark, lower bill yellow.” Once I’d read that, I went back to the previous photos--I think I see the dark upper and yellow lower, but today’s shots were all taken with the Nikon CP4800 on full digital zoom, through the window glass on the back porch--zooming in on their beaks just gives me a pixelated mess. So I went back through my 168 photos again, and I found some other shots where I think you can see the bill fairly well:



Jackpot--check out that dark upper bill and light (if not really yellow in this overcast daylight) lower bill!

So--three sparrows that are regular visitors to my feeders, plus the white-crowned sparrow. Of course, these are winter markings; will things look different in the spring?

Probably the neatest thing sparrows do is the way they kind scrape both feet back to pull grass out of the way to find seeds. Smart birds. And those pink feet just kill me--so cute.

There were a few other birds out there today, so I’ll show you these photos as well.

Here’s the downy performing some acrobatics on the hanging feeder:



Also in that last shot is another streaky bird I see a lot of: the female house finch. It took me a while to tell her from sparrows because she’s got that little-brown-bird-with-streaks thing going. Her body shape is different, however, and her beak is obviously finch-like. When closed, her wing feathers are really pretty from the back:


That last one features a blurry phantasm of a sparrow on its way to the hanging feeder--ghost bird!

I didn’t know that sparrows liked suet, but they do:

But now that I think about it, sparrows will eat just about anything, I guess. That suet's probably better than the french fries, pizza crusts, and other human litter they clean up.

I keep saying I’ve got to snap off some of the twigs around the suet feeder; it's messing up my shots of the feeder. Here, I’ve got great focus on the twigs, with a rather blurry background of a red-bellied woodpecker:



and this shot of a bluejay would’ve been nice, if you could see his face:


Strangely absent today were my cardinal pairs, male house finches, goldfinches, and white-crowned sparrows. I saw a couple of juncos, so that was nice--but I didn’t get any photos. I picked dark-eyed juncos as one of my top 10 most beautiful birds; they’re just so cute!

I think my favorite photos are the ones where the bird just doesn’t cooperate; one second he’s there, the next second, I get a photo of


Nice twigs.

More from Cape May

The sunset that evening at Cape May was spectacular. Kat's photos captured it beautifully:



The sunset from the shoreline; this photo below is one of my favorites; it's like one of those modern art paintings where it's just a layer of red on a layer or blue or something, but this is natural layers of beautiful intense color and texture.:






This was the last photo we took at the lighthouse:


We then went over to Sunset Beach, and we saw firsthand what the hype was all about; these last photos are mine:



What a great weekend on the coast. I can't wait to go back to Cape May in the spring or summer, when the birds will be warm and happy and breeding. Maybe in a few months I'll have another Cape May post. In the meantime, any help with those duck IDs would be appreciated! I'm wondering if maybe that one with the grayish-blue bill was a ruddy duck?

Anniversary trip to the coast

This past weekend was a memorable one in many ways. First, Kat and I celebrated our fifth anniversary on February 1, so we took a trip to Rehoboth Beach to stay at a B&B to celebrate. I knew it would be cold, but we still had a great time. It’s colder here in State College than it was out there (today in State College, it was 7 degrees, with a below-zero wind chill), and we both love the beach so much that we enjoyed it regardless of the weather.

It’s hard to believe we’ve been together for five years--that’s the longest relationship I’ve ever had. In fact, it’s almost as long as my longest job stint, six years, teaching composition and literature to college freshmen and sophomores. That’s the longest I’ve ever done one thing, at least voluntarily. So Kat and I are still going strong and looking forward to the next five years.

At Rehoboth, I took some photos of ring-billed gulls, my first lifer of the trip! To the best of my rather novice shorebird identification skills, that was the only type of gull we saw. I forgot my field guides, dangit, so I was at a disadvantage until I took the opportunity to pick up a copy of Bill Thompson III’s Identify Yourself, which is a great read and a very helpful book. He noted that most of the gulls you’ll see on the beach are ring-bills, which was definitely the case for us.


Note the difference in the coloring on their heads--judging from the info on aging ring-bills in Bill of the Birds’ book, I’m guessing the one in the foreground is a third- or fourth-year, and the one in the back--well, I’m not sure. He’s completely white. Perhaps a female adult?

A fine specimen, in mid-strut. A fourth-year/adult?


The second memorable thing was that we took the Cape May-Lewes Ferry and went to Cape May--my first official birding trip! The temperature was probably in the teens out there, with a stiff breeze blowing the whole time. It was also my first time on a ferry, and it was fun. It was a very cold one-hour ride.

The ferry’s wake, looking back at Lewes, Delaware:


A little lighthouse near Lewes:


I was so tempted to pick this little phone up and yell, “Iceberg, right ahead!” like the guy in Titanic. It’s such an antique-looking device that I had to take a photo of it.


Humor in the loo.

Kat said her stall was similarly “edited.”

A bufflehead--my second lifer of the trip! These guys were all around the ferry.


Here, I think I’m seeing a red-breasted merganser. This was the best photo I got, taken while the ferry was still docked at Lewes, a protected little cove. Help?



We got to Cape May, had a rather lackluster lunch at a local eatery, then stopped at a little shop called The Bird House of Cape May. They had all kinds of birding supplies and gifts, and Kat surprised me with a Pajaro birding bag! It has seven pockets for binocs, camera, field guides, water bottle, etc.--it attaches around my waist like a big fanny-pack. I really feel like a birding bad-ass now, and I know I’ll never forget my guides again. It’s awesome.

We then went to the lighthouse and walked the nature trail at the birding center. They even had a bird blind set up at one of the ponds.

Here I am with my bad-ass bird bag; you can see the blind in the background. No comments on the chubby cheeks, please.


Did I mention it was cold?

“There are dead things--dead faces--in the water!”
"Don't follow the lights!"

I was really expecting to see some yellow-rumped warblers, especially since I know they’re very common at Cape May, but I imagine they were hunkered down out of the weather. Still, I did see a few birds on the many ponds they had out there; I’ll start with the birds I am certain of, thanks to Kat’s great note-taking; Identify Yourself; my photos; and my Stokes and Peterson’s field guides, consulted once I got home:
belted kingfisher (just as noisy out there as the one on our marsh!)
great egret (lifer)
mute swan (lifer)
American coot (lifer)
mallards
Canada goose

One of the shallower ponds was iced over, and these two mute swans were making their way through the ice, with one (the male, maybe?) clearing a path and the other (a female?) following along, impressed with her friend’s icebreaking capabilities.
You wouldn’t believe the effort this swan had to put into breaking through the ice, yet he must’ve enjoyed it or felt the need to do it or something, because they had already hewed a path through the neighboring pond before moving on to this one. Look at this crazy scene:


To the shore, finally. I wouldn’t doubt if they went on to the next pond after this. Crazy swans.


There were A LOT of ducks and other birds out there--it was hard to see them all in the darkening afternoon:


Now to the birds I’m not sure of. Admittedly, there could’ve been every single kind of duck and goose out there, but there were so many, and it was so cold and the light so poor that I was only able to isolate and note (and sometimes photograph) only a few. I’ll start with the ones I got photos of, (and apologize for the poor quality); then I’ll move on to the ones I just took notes about.

There is some kind of heron back there, right in the center of the grass line, all brown, camouflaged among the reeds. Perhaps a female great blue?


What the heck is this? There are slanted vertical stripes on his back, a white patch on his face, and a red breast. He’s not a red-breasted merganser; they look different. What is this?



As for the ones I didn’t get photos of, there were the following:
1. some sort of scaup--no idea whether it was lesser or greater, as I had no size comparison. Either way, a lifer, but not really--my ID is not complete, and I didn’t get a photo to refer back to.

2. some sort of mallard-sized and -shaped duck with white and rufous feathering. I thought it might be a female mallard because she was following a male, but I’ve never seen a wild duck that color.

3. a duck? with a black/dark back, reddish breast/underside, and a black rump. Again, no photo, but I can’t find anything that looks like him in any of my field guides.

We finally got through the salt marsh and onto the shore, and what a desolate shore it was! I'll leave you with these photos and post the rest tomorrow.