On Owls

The other day, on the New Jersey bird list, Susan Garretson Friedman mentioned finding a great horned owl when she was leaving her job running the bookstore at New Jersey Audubon's Scherman Hoffman sanctuary.

I write the blog for Scherman Hoffman, so when she mentioned seeing it from the "upper parking lot," I knew exactly where that was, and when she said she was joined by Mike Anderson, I knew she meant the sanctuary director.

GHO - Joe Pescatore, courtesy of Scherman Hoffman

"Our" great horned owl, she wrote - obviously a regular. The center closes around 5pm so it was twilight, allowing her to be able to see it and for Mike to follow the owl with his spotting scope. It turned out to be a male GHO, which flew to a female owl and they mated.

I was envious.

It got me thinking that at this time of year, when I used to leave my house at 5am to catch a train that would get me to work by 7am, I would hear owls calling - mainly GHOs and screech owls but occasionally barred owls ("who cooks for you? who cooks for you-all?") and barn owls.

GHOs are particularly active in January because they are mating. Susan's post was all the more interesting because I would've thought by now, in February, the owls would be on their nests (perhaps all our recent snow and ice delayed things).

I wrote about life "In the Dark" back on May 7, 2011.

Screech owl, Prime Hook, Del.  (R.E. Berg-Andersoon)

I remembered how one morning I stepped outside my front door at 4am to look at the stars before getting ready for work. I heard the distinct hooting of a GHO very close by. I walked to the driveway from my front door and there it was, a massive shape silhouetted in a nearby tree. Another GHO was calling from across the road, at the edge of the old Greystone property. Later, walking in town to the train station, another GHO called from a backyard tree.

I thought of that last night as I walked out the same front door, at 10pm this time, and listened for an owl. Nothing - no calls, no silhouette.

I came home from work once in the twilight to find a screech owl preening itself in one of my trees, and I watched it until it got too dark to see and it flew silently away.

My last owl encounter was very different. MH and I were at Island Beach State Park, and a snowy owl was sitting in the rays of the setting sun atop a dune. There have been a lot of snowy owls in New Jersey this winter, an "irruption" southward because these daytime-hunting owls couldn't find enough lemmings. For that same Scherman Hoffman blog I wrote about snowys, and how they have been seen as far south as Florida, according to one report.

I've also written about bad behavior toward owls, such as the photographer who, despite having a long lens on his camera, insisted on getting up close and personal with a pair of long-earred owls roosting at Great Swamp.

Snowy owl, Island Beach SP (RE Berg-Andersson)

My fascination with owls is no doubt fueled by the fact they are mainly nocturnal. I, like the birds I see more often, am diurnal. One forgets that life continues at night, too, even if I am not outside in it. When I encounter an owl, 99% of the time it is through my hearing, not sight. Owls can see in the dark and their hearing is 20 times better than mine, the better to hear the scurrying of rodents under 6 inches of packed snow and ice.

Hearing the owls in the deep dark of a cold January night was one of the few good things about getting up at that ungodly hour for six years and walking a mile to the train. As I write today, in my home office, the weak sun of a snow-covered and cold day barely warming me, I am wishing I was walking with the owls again.

Last night as I left the Center, I looked up and in the tree above the
upper parking lot, was our Great Horned Owl. I watched him for about 10
minutes, then he flew off, and I thought, caught another bird -- I heard
some squawk. Mike Anderson, who heard him too, was out in the upper
parking lot with the scope, and caught the actual situation, which was the
gentleman owl I was watching responding to the call of a female owl (which
I had heard) and doing what comes naturally. After that they flew off.
Pretty cool. - See more at: http://birding.aba.org/message.php?mesid=620327&MLID=NJ01&MLNM=New%20Jersey#sthash.a2UK6u6h.dpuf

Last night as I left the Center, I looked up and in the tree above the
upper parking lot, was our Great Horned Owl. I watched him for about 10
minutes, then he flew off, and I thought, caught another bird -- I heard
some squawk. Mike Anderson, who heard him too, was out in the upper
parking lot with the scope, and caught the actual situation, which was the
gentleman owl I was watching responding to the call of a female owl (which
I had heard) and doing what comes naturally. After that they flew off.
Pretty cool. - See more at: http://birding.aba.org/message.php?mesid=620327&MLID=NJ01&MLNM=New%20Jersey#sthash.a2UK6u6h.dpuf

Last night as I left the Center, I looked up and in the tree above the
upper parking lot, was our Great Horned Owl. I watched him for about 10
minutes, then he flew off, and I thought, caught another bird -- I heard
some squawk. Mike Anderson, who heard him too, was out in the upper
parking lot with the scope, and caught the actual situation, which was the
gentleman owl I was watching responding to the call of a female owl (which
I had heard) and doing what comes naturally. After that they flew off.
Pretty cool. - See more at: http://birding.aba.org/message.php?mesid=620327&MLID=NJ01&MLNM=New%20Jersey#sthash.a2UK6u6h.dpuf

Groundhog Day

I have never seen the Bill Murray film "Groundhog Day" but I know the premise - you hear about it every February 2.

A weatherman finds himself living the same day over and over again. 

I would not want to relive the same day over and over again until I get it "right," whatever that is. I look at every day as an experiment. What will I do this time that is better than last time?

When you work every day and do the same thing over and over again, it isn't easy to accomplish this. When you get to the weekend it seems there is not enough time in the day.

As I write today, Feb. 2, it is 52 degrees. It feels like spring after weeks of "polar vortex." Last night I kept the heat closed and a window open, rising in the morning to find a 56-degree house. Once the heat warmed the house to a tolerable level, I shut it off and opened a few windows again, letting in some valuable moisture from the melting snow. I want all the snow gone but it takes a long time to melt the 14 inches (12+2+2) that fell from three storms within 10 days, and more is expected tonight into tomorrow.

(R.E. Berg-Andersson)

And more cold, forcing the windows shut, the heat on and my hands to return to the sandpaper they were before I opened the windows.

By coincidence, it is also Super Bowl Sunday. People say how the National Football League "lucked out" that what could've been an extremely cold championship game last weekend will be seasonable or better today. People are going to parties. They will pay more attention to the advertisements than the game because the alleged "news" reports have told them to do so. They have been told all week what an "event" this is. It has dominated the news, more so than the killings in Africa, the Middle East and even in parts of Newark.

People are "stocking up" on junk food and beer and will stuff themselves as they do on Thanksgiving -- only this "holiday" is truly secular and they can spend it with people they choose, not their relatives. They will hope to win huge amounts of money from their office betting pools.

The football game itself will be almost an after-thought.

The spectacle is the same every year, and this is as close to "Groundhog Day" as I get - not a repeat of the same day but the same events every year. If it is February, we will spend the next few Saturdays, weather permitting of course, celebrating my birthday and that of a friend - and I have a lot of friends born in February. It is like getting 3 birthday parties. That part is good.

But sitting here with the open window reminds me of another annual ritual I do not like - barking dogs and home repair noises by my more energetic neighbors (or the men they hire) and children finally allowed outside to play. The same windows that have kept in the dry, hot air that makes me sneeze and drink glasses of water also kept out the noises that distract me as I work.

Soon enough will come dog walkers (like the ones passing by now) and kids not in school and more owners with dogs in the dog park and the smell of barbeques and the roar of lawn mowers and leaf blowers.

The thought of all that happening again and again until the bitter end depresses me, like looking down an endless, dark corridor. In a sense, that is what aging is.

It is inevitable, but for now let us not go there.

Cardinal pair (Margo D. Beller)

Let us, instead, think ahead to the annual ritual of when the birds head north. Right now, my feeders have drawn an assortment including juncos, white-throated sparrows, cardinals, titmice, chickadees, Carolina wren, downy and hairy and redbellied woodpeckers. I long for the bright yellows of the warblers and to see some of the larger birds - tanagers, flycatchers, grosbeaks and ducks. I want to go out and find them on my work breaks and my weekends.

Even though I will once again be struggling with pots of vegetables and repairing the damage done by chipmunks, I want to look up and see northbound Canada geese. I want the snow to be gone. I want to complete the projects I didn't have the time or energy to complete last fall.

I want to try and do better this year.

Isn't that what spring is all about, having another chance to get it right?


(Happy birthday, Candita, wherever you are.)

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.