Time Passing

What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.

-- John Steinbeck

When I am walking in a familiar place in one season, I can't help remembering the birds I saw in the same place in another season, usually in another year.

So when I took a winter walk the other weekend in the Central Park of Morris County (but what I still call Greystone for the mental hospital that once stood there), I saw what is and what was.

Greystone administration building, razed not long
after this picture in 2015 (Margo D. Beller)

Let's start with the symbol of Greystone, the Kirkbride administration building. There was a battle over the abandoned building, which was ultimately torn down because that was cheaper than preserving it. Plans included turning it into apartments, which would've greatly changed this area with increased traffic. Now it is a wide-open field over which I've seen swallows and other birds hunting insects.

Conversely, there is an area at the outer edge of the property that was once a working farm. The structures were removed decades ago and the field became overgrown. When this area was turned into a county park a number of trees were cut down and the land cleared. Paths were cut through, intended for cross-country competitions but also used for walkers and joggers. Now the area has been replanted with different types of saplings in protective wrappings. In a decade, maybe less, this open space will become a forest.

As I walk this path in December it is cold and gray and the trees are bare, so I am thinking of what I have seen here in other seasons. Over here, a noise prompted me to look across the sapling field to find a herd of deer, including two bucks butting heads. Near the brook that runs through this field, a song sparrow was singing atop a downed tree. In yet another area, past a different field filled with blooming goldenrod and ragweed, a flock of migrating palm warblers. Here, in a tree over a field of milkweed, is a vesper sparrow, an autumn visitor, distinctive for its white eye ring.

The same area after the debris was removed, 2018.
(Margo D. Beller)

But today it is quiet and windy. I look at the tree where just a month ago I watched flocks of robins, cedar waxwings, starlings and bluebirds gorge on seeds, insects and the fruiting vines as white-throated sparrows called to each other from the field below. The tree is now bare, the birds laying low and quiet except for a couple of song sparrows alarmed by the guy running along the path with his dog. The dog wants to check me out but his owner calls to him and they continue on. Other walkers, some wearing headphones, ignore me so I am basically alone in this vast place.

I enjoy these winter walks and the solitude. Without the leaves the trees show their striking, sometimes grotesque, forms. I can see where past storms have sheared off limbs. It is easy to find the large nests of squirrels. 

Winter tree (Margo D. Beller)

But along with the starkness this time of year brings me a feeling of loss, of time passing, of death. The days are shorter, the nights longer and the year is ending. I think of friends and family no longer living. The darkness keeps me inside more than I'd like. These feelings come every year but they still hit me, sometimes in unexpected ways.

When I was here in November I noticed that many of the saplings had grown tall enough to be identifiable. This time, the leaves are down and I noticed several red cedars had also been planted. These conifers should grow much faster than the saplings, as well as provide little berries for the birds in winter. But at some point they will be overshadowed by the trees. I look at this field and try to imagine what it is going to look like. I know the landscape is going to look very different.

Saplings, November 2021 (Margo D. Beller)

For instance, the many types of sparrows I've seen in this open field are not found in deep woods and so will be moving elsewhere. This former mental hospital was altered to become a park to benefit county residents like me. But what about the birds and other creatures that were living here after the mental hospital closed but before the park was built? The wooded areas where I once found an assortment of birds are gone, cut down for soccer fields. Vultures that once roosted in trees along the main road have gone elsewhere because the area became too busy for them. 

There is good and bad to making massive changes. 

Both this area and I are changing, not necessarily for the better, and will continue to change as time goes on. Time can't be stopped. The year 2021 is ending. It has been filled with challenges, some pain but a lot of happiness. This year, in the midst of Covid-19, a lovely wedding. Next year offers the promise of a new grand-niece. Sometimes I dwell too much on the past and the future, so to stay sane I take these walks and try to stick to the present.

...And Through the Woods

When I met my husband (MH), his family was living in a town in Morris County, New Jersey. Over the years, the family has slowly migrated to central New Hampshire. 

First was MH's immediately younger brother, who had met a New Hampshire girl and eventually settled up there with her after college. Then MH's youngest brother migrated up there with his then-wife to look for a job. He also stayed and remarried after the first marriage ended. Once the grandchildren started coming, my in-laws moved to New Hampshire, too, leaving MH and me the only members of the family still in New Jersey, from which we had migrated from the city to a town not far from where his parents had lived..

Thus we've gone to New Hampshire for Thanksgiving for years as the children have grown and had children of their own. Coming from a suburb of New York City to a rural area gives me a chance to get away from work and observe a different area. I've seen the changes in this part of the state over several decades as other people have migrated up there to live either part time or full time. And, of course, I've watched the birds for ones I can't find at home.

A black-capped chickadee (Margo D. Beller)

MH's brother knows I am a serious birder and, considering he works at teaching people to look at, enjoy and protect nature, he always likes to test my knowledge.

So this year he asked me to guess which birds were currently coming to his yard, including his one seed and two suet feeders. One of them, the red-breasted nuthatch, is a rare visitor to my yard because I don't have the pine trees this bird prefers. I also don't get bluebirds (he has nest boxes for them). Aside from that, his visitors are what I typically get in suburban New Jersey: cardinal, chickadees, titmice, white-breasted nuthatch, song sparrows, juncos, downy and hairy woodpeckers, mourning dove, jays, robins.

But more recently he has also been visited by a Carolina wren, and after we left he told us a redbellied woodpecker came to the suet and he saw a redtailed hawk looking down from one of the trees on his property.

These were not visitors to this part of the state even 10 years ago, I believe, but, like the year-round human population here, that has been slowly changing.

Carolina wren, common to my feeder
but now appearing to the
north. (Margo D. Beller)

I recently read an interesting book, by the biologist Thor Hanson, about the effects of climate change and how plants and animals react to it. The sections of the book cover the four possibilities: adjust, evolve, move or die. When it comes to the birds, as the planet warms many species have expanded their territories northward into previously inhospitable areas. (The increase in the number of people putting out feeders when winter comes doesn't hurt either.) The birds already in those areas are faced with increasing competition for limited resources. Those birds, in turn, have to move or change the way they live in order to survive.

The appearance of a redtail near his property interests me in particular. In all our visits I've never seen a redtail in his part of the state. The more urbanized part of New Hampshire to the south, yes, particularly near the interstates where the hawks sit in a tree or on a lamp post and wait for a meal to appear below so they can swoop down and grab it. In my brother-in-law's area the more usual are redshouldered and broadwinged hawks.These birds usually fly south for the winter. What happens when they return to find redtails in their midst? Or what if this area warms enough that these birds fly south later than usual, or not at all?

Redtailed hawk (Margo D. Beller)

There are now more people on my brother-in-law's road who have either built new houses or converted their summer houses to year-end living. These people tend to be older, with children or visiting grandchildren, and are driving more luxury vehicles and trucks. As they come to the area, the forest disappears. The climate changes in subtle ways. If they put out feeders, the birds come during the winter. So do the hawks that feed on them.

Many of the common birds I see in my yard were once exclusively from south of my area: cardinal, mockingbird, Carolina wren, redbellied woodpecker. Now they are common in New Jersey. We don't think anything of it. But, as Hanson points out, climate change has slowly been prompting the flowers to bloom earlier than usual and bring out the insects, affecting what the migrating birds find when they are passing through during their long journeys from winter to breeding territories. Meanwhile, the yard birds benefit so why should they leave?

Male bobolink (RE Berg-Andersson)

The national Audubon Society believes there are nearly 400 bird species threatened by climate change and habitat devastation including 53 types of coastal birds, 69 types of Eastern forest birds and 39 types of grassland birds including the bobolink - a bird I once saw and heard in a field not far from the N.H. town where my in-laws moved. But that was many years ago. As people have migrated into areas once dominated by woods or grasslands, they have pushed out the birds that can't adapt or are forced to leave when humanity cuts down the forests, paves the dirt roads and generally warms the planet with car exhaust.

I don't know what we can do to hold back this tide, and that bothers me.

Space Invaders

Another gray morning. On my enclosed porch, my chair in the corner faces east to catch the rays of the rising sun. But the day is starting cloudy once again, with a stiff, cold wind out of the north-northwest.

As I stare out, sipping my coffee, the sky turns black. Thousands of dark birds, all heading norttheast, fill the sky, a veritable river of birds, more and then more still. I think of Audubon's description of the now-extinct passenger pigeon blackening the sky: "The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse..."

These birds, however, were common grackles.

You see them in small flocks for most of the year, but in winter these shiny, long-tailed birds mass in flocks of thousands.

Grackle flock, February 2020 (Margo D. Beller)

Why certain types of birds do this is not known. Safety in numbers? A need to keep warm? Easier to find food? All of the above?

In my area of the country, the common grackle predominates. The much larger, aptly named great-tailed grackle is a bird of the southwest. I have never seen one, but I have seen the shore-loving boat-tailed grackles when I've been on one of the New Jersey or Delaware beaches. An easy way to tell the boat-tails from the common grackles is by looking for the smaller females. If she is brown, she's a boat-tail. If she's black, she's a common.

What they all have in common, besides their genus, is they can be pests, especially when they arrive in a cornfield, at a yard or mass along a boardwalk in large numbers. 

Female boat-tailed grackle (RE Berg-Andersson)

I've written before about the sudden arrival of literally a thousand common grackles on my lawn back in 2020, a year where we did not get much snow to keep these birds away. (As opposed to 2021, when we got too much snow.) I am fascinated by these extravagantly large flocks that appear out of nowhere, stay for a while and then leave for the next food source.

Grackles breed in northern New England, a healthy swath of Canada and into the U.S. midwest, according to the Cornell Ornithology Lab's range map. But they are found year-round throughout the eastern U.S., and that's where my New Jersey yard fits in.

These invasions in my yard generally take place in late autumn or early spring, before and after snow  covers the lawn. Grackles mass in fields and eat certain crops like corn, but in my area they can mass in parks and will eat just about anything including garbage or, in my case, bird seed. When I look through my open office shade and see one of these flocks showing up in my vicinity, the first thing I do is rush out to pull in my feeders. 

Once the feeders and I are safely back on the enclosed porch, I watch. The birds stalk the ground poking for worms, or fly into the corners (or my compost pile) where they can turn over leaves and search for insect larvae or other food. There is a loud chatter of "chuk chuk chuk" as dozens, hundreds or even thousands of birds call to family members. Then they fly to the next yard or, if I come outside, rise into the trees, continuing their chorus of "chuk" before flying off in small groups until suddenly the rest of the flock leaves.

Robin (Margo D. Beller)

Sometimes, I see fellow travelers. Robins also poke at the ground and turn over leaves for food and so join the grackle flocks, and then hang around after the bigger birds have left to find what is left over. I have seen grackle flocks include cowbirds, starlings or, rare for my yard, rusty blackbirds (named for a call that sounds like a swinging metal gate needing lubrication).

Starlings are interesting. At this time of year they also mass and you will see them flying and moving like a giant organism in the sky, almost like watching synchronized swimmers in the way they undulate as one. (Do a search for "starlings massing" and watch some of the videos to see what I mean.)  How do these individuals know to do that? I don't know.

What I do know is these invasions are another sign of approaching winter, and just as inevitable.

The Season of Quiet

During the summer I sit on the enclosed porch, look around the colorful and leafy yard and try to imagine the winter scene of bareness and gray. Now it's the opposite. I sit on my porch wearing a down coat and warm hat, my legs covered by a blanket, and try to imagine the leaves are still on the trees.

I am finally at the point in the year where the lawn services are done for the season, the town is no longer collecting leaves (which doesn't stop some neighbors from putting to the curb whatever last leaves may have fallen) and the majority of the trees and shrubs are bare. I am happy to have the quiet, but the continuing cold and grayness of many days plus the darkness at 5 p.m. make me restless, tired and, sometimes, down because my gardening is done and migration is long over. I feel shut in, and it does not help that we are close to the end of another year and there is a more contagious form of COVID-19 that affects even fully vaccinated people like me. That means another winter of avoiding people in the streets and not visiting friends or family. 

But at least there is no snow, at least not yet.

New Hampshire, November 2021 (Margo D. Beller)

To some it is soothing to have a blanket of snow on the ground, the white providing a nice contrast with the gray skies. Those who depend on snow for revenue from winter activities are very happy to have the snow. Those with the strength and energy to snowshoe, ski or snowmobile are also very glad to see the white stuff.

Not me.

It is when the snow falls that I feel my age and am at my most vulnerable. I think of last year when we had two feet of snow on our property. Will that next shovelful of snow from the back path make me breathless or have some sort of attack? How long will it take my husband (MH) to find me if I keeled over? My neighbors look after their own properties and are not inclined to help the people next door they don't know so well. We have no children or grandchildren so we hire someone to plow our long driveway. We do the rest, carefully, on the off-chance someone would want to visit. That has yet to happen.

Cardinal in winter (Margo D. Beller)

It has not been the best year for me. I look back on my health issues and am thankful I survived them and the subsequent treatments, and that MH has been here to watch over me and chauffeur me to medical appointments. I have been regaining my strength, trying to make up for lost time. But I can never be 100% again. I can't go back in time, much as I'd like to do.

So I sit bundled on the porch, refusing to confine myself to the house, watching the feeder birds, enjoying the quiet and looking ahead to the return of spring.