Backyard Bird Census

Every year, the Cornell Ornithology Lab in New York and the national Audubon Society hold a Great Backyard Bird Count during the Presidents Day weekend. As the name implies, the idea is to encourage people to go outside or watch bird feeders and count how many of which types of birds show up.

White-throated sparrow (Margo D. Beller)

It is a chance for non-scientific types such as me to collect data that help the real scientists track movements of birds around the world and see which types of birds are on the increase and which are declining.

For me, it is a chance to do a census of which birds are in or calling near my house.

I am not a counter most of the time. It is enough to put "titmouse" in my notes rather than "3 titmice seen between 9 am and 9:15am." But I try to do this for the count at least one day during the four (Friday through Monday) days it's held.

I've already learned a few interesting things:

So far I've seen a marked decrease in the number of house sparrows. This could be for any number of reasons. It could be they are going to other feeders where people are using cheap millet seed these sparrows can more easily eat rather than the sunflower seeds I use, which they would have to crack open. It could be because there is a large number of house finches in the yard (I saw as many as nine at one time, all over both feeders). With all that competition there could be less incentive for the sparrows to hang around. (Although they will nest in anything including street lamps and under a window air conditioner. I know of one large sparrow flock using a row of forsythia on one street I walk on my way to the post office.)

Jay (Margo D. Beller)

I have seen no more than one or two blue jays at a time. There was a point a few weeks ago when there were as many as six taking turns hitting the house feeder, making it swing violently as they took off. Jays, like other birds, have a pecking order and if a jay comes out of turn it is swiftly forced off by another. Were those other jays just passing through?

I have seen or heard no Carolina wrens from my yard lately. These little brown and gold-fronted birds are the only wrens that will hang around my part of the country during winter - as long as they can find food. I know in past counts I've found at least one. There was one I heard during a hike and one calling quite some distance from my house one morning a few weeks ago. I am hoping the recent polar vortex didn't affect the wren population.

I have seen no juncos in the yard lately. That is another bird that will be out of the yard for weeks but then suddenly shows up in small numbers. However, the number of white-throated sparrows has remained fairly steady. Usually there is at least one I see or hear. Yesterday there were five, most of them checking for dropped seed bits under the feeder. When winter starts they tend to stay in the bushes but as the cold wears on they become a lot less shy. For instance, there is one that has made it his business to fly into the house feeder and eat there. It will not leave for the house finches and reluctantly leaves for the bigger cardinals and jays. As the winter goes on the male's white throat and the white "eyebrows" and yellow near the eyes will get so bright they can be easily seen in the dusk. This is the white-throat's breeding colors. Although white-throats have been known to remain in the New York metro area (in such places as Central Park, for instance), most will fly off to their northern breeding territories as spring approaches.

Red-headed woodpecker, North Carolina
(RE Berg-Andersson)

There is always a chance something unusual will be around to count. One year during the count, walking along a part of Patriots Path, I encountered a redheaded woodpecker, a southern bird that has been slowly moving north in its range as climate change makes the world warmer. For the redheaded, the challenge is finding the dead trees it needs for roosting. When I found it, it was noisily flying around one that was surrounded by water, just like its usual swamp (caused by the nearby Whippany River flooding). At the time, the sighting was unusual enough for my report to be questioned by the scientists, but I convinced them of my accuracy. Now, however, these birds have been found more often in New Jersey, with a confirmed nest in the dead trees of Troy Meadows.

I doubt one will show up in my yard this year but, given the increasing warmth of the world and destruction of its usual habitat through so-called development, next year is always a possibility.

Avoiding Pepe Le Pew

According to the 2019 edition of The Old Farmer's Almanac (and it is old, first published in 1792), on Feb. 24 "Skunks mate now."

Never have three little words been so obnoxious.

This means for the last week of this month my windows will continue to be kept tightly shut because there will be a very good chance of stink during the night, either between two male skunks fighting over a female, or a female skunk trying to fight off a male.

The real Pepe le Pew (free photo courtesy of Pixabay/Wikipedia)

Skunks can stink up the area at all times of year, of course. That's how they defend themselves from predators. They use two anal glands that can shoot the noxious spray up to 12 feet away. I can remember being awakened one autumn pre-dawn by the howl of a cat followed by the familiar, pungent odor of a skunk. The cat's eyes would've been stung and the skunk would've skittered off on its short legs.

The common striped skunk, made famous by the Warner Brothers cartoon character Pepe Le Pew, is the one you’ll find in New Jersey although there are 11 species, nine of them in North America. Like the house cat Pepe frequently mistook for a potential mate, I do my best to avoid skunks.

Sometimes it isn't so easy. In the dark, skunks are very hard to see. When I used to walk the streets of my town in the dark pre-dawn hours to get the train to work, skunks would cross the road ahead of me or, in one memorable case, two baby skunks turned out to be on a lawn next to me as I sensed something nearby in the dark. I walked very slowly away so as not to scare them into spraying. If you don't threaten it, a skunk continues on its way.

Skunks are solitary creatures except during the winter, when several may den together, and in the breeding season that runs roughly from mid-February into March. This is also when you’ll see - or smell - the most road-killed skunks as these nocturnal critters cross roads to find a mate and will treat your fast-approaching car as one big predator to spray.

You might wonder, what is a skunk good for in the greater ecological scheme of things? Skunks will eat the insects that otherwise destroy your plants and lawn or nest in your house: grasshoppers, crickets, beetles and wasps. They love grubs, so if you see deep holes in your lawn you can thank your local skunk. However, skunks, like raccoon and bear, will also eat pet food and garbage left outside.

(free photo courtesy of Pixabay)

That’s why skunks are becoming as common a N.J. sight as gray squirrels, and for the same reason: A well-fed skunk is a breeding skunk. After mating the young are born about two months later, with five to six, on average, to a litter. They will nurse in the den for about a month and a half.

If you presume a skunk has bred in February, the young are active by May, which is just in time for a parent great horned owl that bred in January and hatched its own young to start picking skunks off to feed them. Great horned owls are not put off by skunk smell because they can’t smell the spray.

When owl meets skunk only the smell remains in the morning.