The Early Birder

When it is hot and steamy, as it has been in my part of New Jersey this week, it is imperative to get out in the cooler early morning if you want to do anything, in my case look for birds.

Baltimore oriole, Old Mine Road, 2020 (RE Berg-Andersson)

It was easier for me to do that in early May when the migrants were passing through, providing me with hope of finding birds I hadn't seen for a while or at all. At that point there were cold mornings and the leaves hadn't come out completely, making it easier for me to see anything moving in the trees.

Now, however, we are in June. The birds are sitting on eggs or raising families and keeping quiet. The leaves are out fully and to find birds I have to listen hard. It is more humid and the bugs are hungry.

There are more people birding now, according to the New York Times, which has published a number of articles recently by some experts telling city people now stuck at home because of the coronavirus about the birds they've been hearing and seeing. I have mixed feelings about all those potential new birders out in the field. On one hand, more noisy people in my way. On the other, maybe they'll keep their dogs leashed in natural areas and their children quiet and respectful. 

That was my hope at 10 a.m. on June 1 when a tired MH and I started our drive down Old Mine Road from its northern end in Sussex County, NJ, our first big road trip since the pandemic began. (It takes an hour to get there from our house and two hours for MH to get himself fully awake and ready to roll.)

Old Mine Road is an Important Birding Area because a large number of different types of birds come into this northern, elevated corner of the state to breed. Some of them are birds that are hard to find, including the threatened cerulean warbler, a sky blue and white bird with a buzzy call. A lot of birds call their territorial songs along this old mining road where there are abandoned structures (perfect nesting sites for wrens and phoebes), remnants of old villages and some private homes not part of the surrounding federal Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. The road was once much longer but now one end is at Route 206 in Sussex County, just before a toll bridge into Pennsylvania. The southern part of the road, in Warren County, goes through Worthington State Forest and ends near the last exit on Interstate 80 in New Jersey.

We come here once a year, the earlier the better to hear the bird chorus. We could not come here in mid-May because when the governor allowed state parks to reopen the crowds of housebound people yearning to get out were intense. So we waited until June 1, when I had taken some time off, the weather was relatively cool and dry and, I hoped, there'd be fewer people out on a weekday.

Redtail hawk over Old Mine Road, 2020
(RE Berg-Andersson)

It is frustrating, thrilling and ultimately tiring for me to be driving this road slowly and listening hard. Many of the birds are loud and easy to hear and identify - American redstart, ovenbird, red-eyed vireo. Some require me to stop and get out of the car to listen - the yellow-throated vireo or the scarlet tanager or the weesy-weesy call of the black and white warbler. We heard hooded warbler and Baltimore oriole, indigo bunting and Carolina wren. Many of the birds I find at home were also here, near the cleared land of former settlements - robins, catbirds, house wrens, chipping and song sparrows. I was amazed we ultimately heard or saw 50 types of birds.

But it could've been more, and that is frustrating. Some areas we were not going to hike into. Some birds are too quiet to hear from a moving car. Some stretches of the road had cars doing the 35 mph speed limit (or higher) while I was doing 20, forcing me to speed up to find a place where I could safely pull over. As time went on the birds went quiet as the car traffic increased. I never did hear a cerulean (although according to various bird reports from that day there could've been as many as five along the road).

This year's house wren, as close as I could get with my phone, 2020 (Margo D. Beller)

We spent five hours on the road. Once we got into the state park section the road condition deteriorated and going the mandatory 15 mph was not hard to do, unless you wanted to break an axle (which many drivers apparently wanted to do). This part of the road is where more birders tend to be, walking the road or in cars pulled off to the side. I was surprised to find the southernmost parking lot, where we'd planned to switch positions for the drive home, was jammed with cars. (It was even worse at the nearby visitor center lot at the Delaware Water Gap.) I was glad we had started from the other end but, as usual, I wished we could've started far earlier in the morning. The early birder gets the birds.

Now that it's hotter, I go out early but generally I am staying closer to home. It took longer than usual for a house wren pair to set up housekeeping in my nest box but one has finally come and the male is singing steadily in the apple tree, which is already filled with developing fruit.

Catching Up

Spring is usually a very busy period for me because birds are heading north to breed and I want to see and hear as many as I can. Now that I am on a much more flexible schedule, I was looking forward to having the time to do that.

However, this spring was not the usual spring in my part of the world.

After having a warm February we had a cold, wet March followed by a roller coaster of weather in April. Plants that had started growing too soon in the heat were stopped in their tracks by the cold. In March we had several nor'easters within a two-week period. The first brought down trees with hurricane-like winds. The second brought down 20 inches or so of wet snow that buried the early flowers and took down my protective fencing in one area.

Apple tree after the storm, March 10, 2018. (Margo D. Beller)

Even after the snow melted in March, it was too cold for me to consider being outdoors and repairing the winter damage to the garden. So I rigged the fences as best as I could to protect my shrubs from hungry deer. I hoped for the best.

In early April I'd finally had enough and went outside to survey and do some repairs. There was a lot to repair besides the fencing. Luckily, the early bloomers were still very much alive and were soon followed by the vast array of daffodils. Slowly, very slowly, the other plants started growing or, in a couple of places, not growing. Was it winter kill or did the squirrel do damage where it could get into the area? I'll have to wait and see next year.

Meanwhile, where were the migrant birds? Reports were few in April. The lack was understandable. After all, if you are a bird that weighs less than an ounce and you meet a 35 mph headwind, you're not traveling very far, no matter what your instincts tell you.

So I concentrated on putting in new fence posts and new netting to protect the three garden areas where, in my ignorance as a new homeowner long ago, I had put some flowers and shrubs that deer find delicious, particularly when they are in bloom. I had not planned to do all three beds - one of them had been done in October and had to be redone because of the snow - and it was a long, tiring job to do that once I had weeded the beds and pulled out leaves, twigs and other debris.

Once that was done, and I recovered the use of my limbs and back, I could concentrate on the birds. Thus it was in early April and not the more normal mid-March when I saw one of the earliest migrants, a phoebe. The bird made it easy on me by appearing in my apple tree early one foggy morning while I sat on my porch.

Same apple tree, now with flowers and wren box. May 7, 2018
(Margo D. Beller)

Now it is May and the floodgates have opened. The maples, oaks, apple and dogwood trees have flowered and leafed out. Even my peppers, potted and put outside, are flowering and showing signs of production.

The birds, like the tree pollen, flooded the area at once. For instance, the day after I read a report of a house wren in a nearby area I put up the wren box. The day after that, a bird appeared to claim it. He's been singing ever since and a female is in the nest. There'll be young soon.

This has been the same with other birds. They are making up for lost time, quickly nesting and mating.

Nowadays I have the time to listen to the dawn chorus and get an idea what birds are around. I can go walking in nearby parks and find all sorts of visitors and sometimes find multiples of the same type of bird. By the rivers, there are yellow warblers hunting and calling "sweet, sweet, I'm so sweet." In the woods are red-eyed vireos with their monotonous "here I am, look at me, up here, in a tree" call. One day this week I found three male scarlet tanagers and one female in adjacent treetops (for good measure I found a male cardinal and could compare the shades of red on the feathers).

It's truly the most wonderful time of the year, when it's finally allowed to come around.

Midsummer Musings

Summer is the annual permission slip to be lazy.

-- Regina Brett

As the sun rises this midsummer morning, its light is filtered through the backyard trees, throwing patterns on the porch, where I sit on the shady end. At various times the light hits the medallion atop my bird feeder, creating a stained glass effect that is very pretty.

Stained glass effect (Margo D. Beller)

Behind me, through the opened window, I hear robins, catbirds, redbellied woodpecker, titmice and... is that a house wren? I go to the screen. Yes, that is a house wren. Perhaps it will discover the nest box now that the apple tree is done for the year and the attacks by squirrels have ended. As I look, a small chipping sparrow flies to the paving stones to search for insects. It still has its breeding red cap, but when it flies south in a month or so, that cap will have gone brown.

Every so often a hummingbird has come to the feeder but at this moment I see a downy woodpecker has discovered it too, just like last year. I go outside and chase it off, and am rewarded when a hummingbird suddenly returns, causing me to freeze so I don't spook it off. As I stand on the path by the apple tree, a family of house sparrows, several jays, a robin and at least one calling chickadee fly into one of the few trees on my property I can't identify, which is full of hanging seeds. The birds sound agitated. Is there a hawk in the vicinity or am I the cause?

I don't know. There is still a lot about birds I don't know, including why they all suddently appeared and then, just as suddenly, why half of them flew off.

Downy on feeder, Sept. 2016
(Margo D. Beller)

This is about as active as I get early on a summer morning, rising because I don't sleep well nowadays and I want to sit outside while it's cooler and do my birding by ear.

In NJ, where I live, you have to get up early - even on a Sunday - if you want to beat the traffic "down the shore" to the beaches or have a sporting competition (I can hear the crowd noise from the recreation area a mile or so away from my house) or even take a walk. When I look at the state birding list I see a lot of entries from Brigantine, one of New Jersey's premier ocean coast birding sites. But to get to Brig before the summer traffic it would require MH and me to rise much earlier than we'd like.

Years ago, when I was working in the city on a rigid schedule, on weekend mornings I felt compelled to rise before dawn, dress and rush out to a familiar birding spot so I could listen, walk and shake off the week's nonsense. Then I started working at home, still on a rigid schedule, where I could fit in walks and wandering during a long midday break. I wasn't restricted to weekends anymore.

Now, I am still at home but my schedule is far from rigid, and with all the time in the world the best I can do most mornings is creak my way downstairs to my porch chair and listen to the yard birds.

There are many reasons for preferring this. For one, it is summer and, unlike the spring migration season when I want to find the gaily colored warblers as they head north, it is harder to find birds unless you get out ahead of the heat, humidity and the mosquitoes to walk and listen. The birds, when seen, may already be starting to molt into their duller fall coloring. And, to be blunt, I am 99% sure I am not going to find any bird I haven't seen before many, many times over the years.

Once I have made my annual late May/early June trip to the northwestern part of the state, where you drive along a road and can hear hundreds of breeding birds singing their different songs at the same time - a challenge to identify, I can assure you - I can't be bothered.

Also, I am older and perhaps more than a little lazy. I'm not happy about the lack of energy but there were several times during my life when it could've been cut short and I'd have never met MH or bought this house or met many of my friends. So I can live with this alternative.

As I sit and time passes, I see more cars are now rushing about. I am in no rush, even with places to go and things to do. I know where this road leads. You do, too.