Small World, Tragic Division

After a week working in the house, I feel the need to get out when the weekend comes around. My preference is to go birding with MH -- it gets both of us out of the house and walking. Sometimes we go to places pretty far afield, depending on the bird reports I read.

Last weekend, when Saturday was a washout after a week when the temperature went from snow and  "polar vortex" to nearly summer, I was hit with a bad case of cabin fever. Unfortunately, during that week MH was hit with a sinus infection.

So I went out alone. When I do that I stick to familiar places closer to home.

On Sunday I walked along Pleasant Plains Rd., the paved - and then unpaved - thoroughfare that runs through the Great Swamp's management area. It is wide open and dry, making it perfect after a flooding rain.

Pleasant Plains Rd., Great Swamp, last winter after Hurricane Sandy (Margo D. Beller)

I was not alone. There were plenty of other people, some with dogs, walking the road although not seeking birds as I was.

On the way back up the road to my car a woman pulled over in an SUV and handed me a flyer of a missing person who had gone out for a walk Saturday afternoon and had not come back. The face and name looked familiar, but it wasn't until the woman drove off that I realized I knew this man from a previous job.

Small world.

She told me he ran marathons and had endurance, but he'd also had a liver transplant years ago and had missed an important dose of medication. I can imagine this man, roughly my age, had also had cabin fever and had left his home in a town not far from the swamp and other parks to either walk or jog, alone.

The experience gave me a strange feeling. I hadn't particularly liked the man when I encountered him at work but the flyer referred to him as a "devoted family man, Boy Scout leader and friend." Now he's gone missing and as I write he still has not been found.

I had planned to go to a couple of other places once I got back to the car, but I suddenly did not want to travel alone anymore. I went home.

You can't live your life around the fear that any moment you will drop dead, be pushed into a van or decide to jog on an icy road only to find you've fallen into a frozen pond. You just can't or you'd become a shut-in.

At the same time, there are stories that give every woman - particularly bird-watching women - pause, such as the woman raped in Central Park's Strawberry Fields. I know exactly what area she was in - it is a quiet area off the main part where all the tourists look at the "Imagine" mosaic put in by John Lennon's widow.

There are a lot of good birds there, in season. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of bad people.

It scares me that this man, a marathon runner, who no doubt expected to be home in time for a hot supper, did not make it home this time. It could just as easily have been me.

Snowed In

It was bound to happen. First, came the three inches of snow to shovel, then an arctic air mass that swept down and froze the snow into a slippery mess. Now, a major snow storm predicted to bring anywhere from five to 12 inches to my little town.

I hate winter.

My husband (MH) was glued to the Weather Channel for nearly a week before the snowstorm arrived. 

There was a time, believe it or not, when storms just happened. Now, with all the technology there are predictions, then refinements of predictions. When the meteorologists were monitoring the approach of Hurricane Sandy last year, it saved lives. With this snowstorm I am sick of all the information. Just let it snow and be done with it!

I see the bird population at my feeders triple in a day and they are in, literally, a feeding frenzy. That's how I know something bad is coming. I don't need the Weather Channel to tell me.

Cardinal pair (Margo D. Beller)

I am in a funk. After a spring, summer and autumn of running around to see birds or working in my garden, it is dark by 5 pm, it is winter and I am housebound. 

When I worked in an office that required me to take the train to get to it, I had to leave the house. I had to walk in the streets because they were better shoveled than the residential sidewalks, step around large piles of leaves if the snows came before the last scheduled leaf pickup, bundle up against single-digit wind chills and, at night, hope the oncoming traffic could see my little flashlight as I walked the streets home.

When I had a job requiring me to drive, I exchanged one group of winter weather dangers for another -- icy roads, drivers texting or talking on their phones, speed demons, and trucks or SUVs that hadn't cleared off the tops of their vehicles so the snow or ice came at me like projectiles.

I don't miss those days. 

Brown creeper (Margo D. Beller)

However, I do miss getting out of the house. Until the recent intense cold froze the snow from the first storm, I was walking every day for the paper, sometimes via the edges of Greystone. But in the last week, when I discovered a whole lot of people who had sidewalks "imposed" on them in the last year hadn't bothered to shovel -- does anybody get fined for not shoveling anymore? -- I have taken advantage of MH's kind offer to get the paper while he runs other errands with the car.

Ah, winter. I find it harder to deal with you with each passing year. Now that I work at home I have to balance keeping the place warm vs. the expected high cost of my gas bill. When the sun isn't shining into my office window, it never seems warm enough. The local growing season is over and I am dependent on produce grown in California or Mexico or points south, if I want to so indulge. 

But who wants a healthy salad on a cold day when a more fattening but warm bowl of soup tastes so much better?

Winter hiking (R.E. Berg-Andersson)

I can't open the windows to air out the house because of the cold, and the heat makes it -- and me -- too dry. I try to compensate with a humidifier, hand cream and a vanilla-scented candle, all of which will be put away when winter is finally over.

Were I more like the chipmunks that wreak havoc in my garden -- the only creatures not deterred by my deer netting -- I'd be under my warm quilts, curled up and asleep, working off my accumulated fat. I would let the world go by until it is warm and sunny again.

Alas, I am not a chipmunk but a human with bills to pay and obligations to keep, starting with keeping my feeders filled for the birds. They have it worse than I'll ever have. 

I know it eventually will warm up out there. It just seems to take longer to get to that point.

Home

I said last time I would write here first about my recent vacation in the "wilds" of Pennsylvania, and here it is.

MH in the snowy woods. (Photo by Margo D. Beller)

First, what is "wild" is the forest but most of what we went through were huge farm fields in small rural communities. Hunting and fishing are the reasons most "foreigners" come here, and since we do neither we spent our time hiking or driving long distances.

We picked the northeastern part of this region for its Grand Canyon. I have never been to the one out west but this one was pretty nice, too, despite the extreme cold (expected high that day was 31 degrees F) and the little bit of snow that fell overnight. We hiked one day around the rim on the west side of the Pine Creek gorge and then, two days later when the ice had melted, hiked around the eastern part. Each side is a state park.

The west one, Leonard Harrison, is obviously more set up for tourists - bathrooms, a ledge for observing. The east one, Colton Point, is at the end of a narrow, twisty road through Tioga State Forest. What few bathrooms were open were hard to find and the rim trail wasn't very well marked. Luckily, this was the day the temperature started to rise again to the low 40s so the ice had melted off the road.

Raven chasing the much larger bald eagle. (Margo D. Beller)

This was not a birding trip, per se. I had hoped we'd be far enough north to find something like a boreal chickadee or black-backed woodpecker, something you'd find in the North Country of New Hampshire. What we did find were bald eagle flying over the canyon being harried by ravens, and the smaller American crows harrying a redtail hawk. Of the smaller birds the chickadees and titmice were joined by gold-crowned kinglets, downy woodpeckers and juncos.

In fact, the most unusual birding was along a back road behind our hotel, where I walked our second cold morning (19 degrees F) before we made our way north to the Finger Lakes area so MH could finally see one. Along that road were goldfinches, large flocks of robins and, to my shock, a Lincoln sparrow that just sat there in the sun, allowing me to make sure it had the yellow on the front and the thin streaking.

Gold-crowned kinglet. (Margo D. Beller)

We also found ducks on various lakes - hooded mergansers, black ducks, common mergansers and mallards. Again, nothing we can't also see on Lake Parsippany now that the summer season is over and the boats are out of the water.

The biggest thing was we were away from home, raking leaves, losing eight hours to work. I, for one, needed the break and it was nice to have the radio on in the evenings, classical music playing as I read on the bed while MH did his own reading in the lounge chair.

Isn't that why one goes on vacation, to break the routine, to refresh the mind and body?

Using that definition, we had a very enjoyable vacation.

Musings

There are times I feel like the character in "Bleak House" by Charles Dickens, who runs around the country agitating on behalf of starving children in Africa while her own children are neglected at home.

I have been doing a lot of writing lately in other blogs, on a variety of subjects, at the expense of this one, my own.

One blog is that of the Scherman Hoffman sanctuary of New Jersey Audubon. One is run by a couple of women for those 50 and older, WriteSideof50. And then there are my more political observations in the Morris Plains Patch.

I am glad to be doing so much writing, even tho' I am not paid for this effort. It is forcing me to use my skills as a reporter, writer and editor for a larger public than this humble blog has received. It is forcing me to use my brain in a creative way, even as I am busily trying to keep the house running, work eight hours for a job that does pay me and rake off this week's blanket of black locust pods.

Just a few of the seeds found raking. (photo by Margo D. Beller)

The last time I wrote here, I discussed how I wanted to punch in the nose the person who decided black locusts made good shade trees. Now, several weeks and many passes with the rake later, I want to kill that person.

For WriteSide, I made raking sound rather pastoral, a metaphor for the teamwork of a long and successful marriage. MH and I go out, get in each other's way, but somehow we wordlessly figure out what we have to do to get the pods and the many, many leaves that have fallen to the curb. We work together as a team. When done, we celebrate by going out to lunch and then collapsing at home, aching.

Well, besides raking, another thing we did together today was remove leaves from the gutters - rather, he went up the ladder to remove leaves, I stood at the bottom and held the ladder to keep it secure.

One year as we were doing this and I heard a yellow-bellied sapsucker, my sixth woodpecker of the day.

This year, a flock of 13 black vultures (and one turkey vulture) suddenly appeared over our house, circling for over five minutes.

Black vulture ( photo by R.E. Berg-Andersson)

I know better - vultures eat carrion, not live men pushing leaves out of gutters - but I involuntarily shuddered. MH and I are in our 50s and not getting any younger. We are closer to the end than the beginning. I didn't want him falling and hurting himself, or worse. There will come a time when this and many of the other chores we do will have to be done by others, for a fee.

I was very happy when he was back on terra firma.

I am also happy to be traveling for the next week away from the pods, acorns, leaves, bills, job and neighbors. I am hoping to come back relaxed and refreshed, at least for a couple of days. If we see some unusual birds, so much the better.

I promise to write about them here first.

Good, Bad and Raking

Robert Frost wrote, with irony, in a poem that "good fences makes good neighbors."

In my part of town, where we are not supposed to fence the front of our properties to retain something of a "park-like setting," autumn creates an opportunity to remember just where one property starts and another ends.

The leaves fall and you will see one house with an immaculate lawn. The service has come through, many people with lawn blowers and hurricane fans putting leaves to the curb, more or less; or perhaps mowing the grass, mulching the leaves, sucking them into the bag, which is emptied at the curb. The service goes right up to the property line.

One side, pristine green. The other side, my lawn.

Good raking makes good neighbors.

My husband does one final lawn cut, crunching up the first round of fallen leaves to allow them to work into the lawn. After that, we'll be out with our rakes, blower and tarps for the next few weeks, until the town stops collecting what we put out front.

In the backyard we have the maples, elms, apple, pear and oaks shedding leaves. In the front, however, we have black locusts.

I don't know who decided many decades ago to line my street with black locusts. That man or woman could've picked the Bradford pears. These stately trees line my downtown street and perhaps yours. They bloom wonderfully in spring, the leaves turn red in fall and they produce ornamental fruit the birds eat.

Black locusts are not so nice. Their roots push up the curb and the street. The little yellow leaves fall early in autumn and get everywhere, at which point they are tracked into home and garage. The stems also fall and mat on the grass. There are male and female trees, and if you are one of those "lucky" enough to have a female tree, as I am, you have  LOTS of long black pods that must be swept off the lawn or you'll have a forest instead of a park-like setting.

So as I am raking the pods down to the curb every year, I wonder if the person who decided on locusts has a few in his or her front yard and is also raking pods. I would like to meet that person, ask, "Why locusts?" (which are no longer planted in my town because of the damage they cause) and, if I'm in the wrong mood, punch him or her in the nose.

It is literally and figuratively a pain to do this every year, but there is some good that comes from all this raking. I am out of the house, using my arms and legs in much more (to me) useful exercise than lifting weights or riding a stationary bicycle. I am reacquainting myself with my lawn - I can see where the ground ivy is taking over, where the skunks and squirrels have been digging, where MH is going to need to put down more grass seed. I prefer this to paying a lawn service that mows every week whether the lawn needs it or not.

brown creeper

Raking also allows me to hear the birds. As I work, I hear the Canada geese. I look up and see about 10 flying generally north. However, I know these are not migrants. They would be heading south at this time of year, would be in a much larger group and be much higher in the sky. Still, I enjoy watching geese as they fly.
 
One year, resting from my labors, I looked up to find a brown creeper making its way up one of the locust trees, probing the crevices of its bark with its long, thin bill. Unlike the nuthatch, which climbs up and down trees with abandon, the creeper only goes up. Once at the top, it flies to the bottom of the next tree and works its way up again.

This morning as I was raking there were bluebirds - a rare pleasure - and a Carolina wren singing nearby, reminding me that soon I must bring in my plants and put out my feeders.

Winter will be here soon enough. Even with the cold and the darkness at 5pm, I welcome the respite from the garden chores.

Especially the raking.

In Praise of Carolina Wrens

Dawn, Cape May. As the first light appears at Higbee Beach, I am walking quickly up the road to where I know others will be awaiting the morning flight, that strange phenomenon when southbound birds find themselves over Delaware Bay at dawn and so turn and head north to land, in this case Higbee.

As I walk along I hear the pleasant song of the Carolina wren. In fact, I hear several.

Carolina wren, Cape May, NJ  (Margo D. Beller)

In fact, during the full day of birding my husband and I had in Cape May a couple of weeks ago, the bird we heard the most was the Carolina wren. Every single place we stopped had at least one singing, and the songs were usually different. These wrens are loud for such little birds, and after minutes of singing one song, they switch to another.

9 a.m., Morris Plains. I am walking along a street in my NJ town to the convenience store where I buy the morning paper. It is a cool morning, color beginning to appear in the maples, the first sign that summer is over and autumn is here. As I walk I listen for what birds might be around. I hear chips and cheeps and some of the familiar contact calls of the titmice and white-breasted nuthatches but the only song I hear is the Carolina wren's.

When people ask me what is my favorite bird, I always say the black-capped chickadee and the cardinal are tied for first, with the Carolina wren a close second.

The chickadee likes to poke around, isn't put off by people and has an appealing "Hey, sweetie" song. It is rambunctious and flies in small flocks, or in ones and twos. The cardinal, by contrast, is a much bigger bird, the male a bright red, the female brown with red in the crest, bill and tail. Once the young are gone you usually see pairs. They call to each other. They mate for life and in spring the male will feed the female a seed and it looks like they are kissing.

But the Carolina wren is a close second because no matter what season, it will sing. Unlike its smaller cousin the house wren, it does not leave when summer ends. Like a lot of birds formerly considered "southern" - the mockingbird, cardinal and redbellied woodpecker immediately come to mind - the Carolina wren is now a fixture of New Jersey, even northern New Jersey where I live. In fact, one year, in the west-central part of rural New Hampshire where my brother-in-law lives with his family, I found a Carolina wren investigating the overhang of his roof, perhaps looking for bugs or a possible nest site. These birds will nest just about anywhere.

Carolina wren at my feeder. (Margo D. Beller)

Other birds sing in the spring when they are asserting themselves, trying to draw a mate and setting up territories. But once nesting starts, the birds go silent and then it is soon autumn and most of them fly south for the winter. The Carolina wren also goes silent at nesting time, but once the young are out the singing resumes, and I've heard these little brown birds with the yellowish breast in the middle of winter.

As long as there aren't too many freezing days or too much snow, or as long as I provide seed and suet in my feeders, this bird will survive to breed another day. I don't see them as often as I hear them, but it is always a treat when I do and I am always honored when they come to the feeders.

A Legend of the Fall

It was with great shock and no small sense of accomplishment that I realized recently that I have managed to see or hear every eastern warbler except one.

I have seen the relatively common ones - black-throated green, black and white, myrtle - and the ones I see less often such as the magnolia, Blackburnian and cerulean. I've even had the really hard ones - the usually secretive mourning warbler that popped up on a fence to sing to its mate at Great Swamp, and a bright Wilson's warbler that suddenly flew in to forage over my head in Central Park. I've seen the worm-eating warbler and heard the song of the reclusive Kentucky warbler.

Black-throated green warbler (Margo D. Beller)

Most of these I saw or heard in the spring, when the trees were bare, the birds were brightly colored and they were singing to establish a territory, either for that day en route to someplace farther north or for the rest of the breeding season.

Looking for warblers during the southbound migration is much more difficult. The birds don't sing and the males become duller in color, more like the females. There are juveniles, too, and these may look even more different. And there are many, many leaves on the trees. If I see something move, it is as likely to be a falling leaf (or a butterfly) as a bird.

This is what has made it very difficult to find that final warbler, the Connnecticut.

It is large for a warbler, and has a nice big eye ring that stands out on a dark head. But it likes to skulk around in the underbrush. It is one of those birds - the rufous hummingbird is another - that often take a more easterly route south in the fall. So while there might be one report of a Connecticut warbler in New Jersey, where I live, in the spring, there are likely to be a lot more reports during the southbound migration.

The Connecticut is the only reason you will see me looking for warblers at this time of year, when the trees are leafed out and the dull birds are silent. At this time of year you are more likely to see me at a hawk watch - Hawk Mountain, Scott's Mountain, Cape May - looking into the sky for osprey, eagle or hawks.

Crowd at Hawk Mountain hawkwatch, September 2012 (Margo D. Beller)

You might even see me at the shore or a sod farm, looking for plovers, sandpipers and other unexpected migrants. At least on a sod field you can see the birds, and the ones at the shore are usually not moving around too much.

Shorebirds, Brigantine National Wildlife Sanctuary, August 2013 (Margo D. Beller)

The other day proved my point. Plus, just to make a hard job harder, I had been to the eye doctor that morning and had drops put in to dilate my pupils. Everything I saw in a sunny meadow had a corona of fuzziness, and everything I saw in the shady woods lacked detail and definition. I could still use my ears but I had to depend on MH for a description and my years of bird knowledge to figure out an identification based on size, shape and habit.

It wasn't easy.

We went to a park where a birder had reported seeing a Connecticut, and was even nice enough to give details as to where. We went there even tho' the report was two days old and the wind had come out of the north the previous night and the birds were pushing south. We went anyway because it was a sunny Saturday and, as usual, after a week of working in the house I needed to get out.

We got to the directed spot. We stood and listened. Silence. We walked up the stairs of a nearby bird blind and looked down for something skulking in the brush. Nothing.

I, a blind birder, was in a bird blind. Perfect. We did not find the Connecticut warbler that day although we saw a female black-throated blue and several black and whites.

There will be other reports of Connecticut warblers in the next few weeks, I am sure, and the experienced birders who seem to find everything at the drop of a hat no matter what the time of day or the season will see their fifth or 50th such bird. I may try once again or I may wait until next year.