Six Woodpeckers

You’ll have to forgive my being a little cocky today but in all my years of birding I’ve never had a day like Saturday.

A six-woodpecker day.

I have been known to find six warblers in a day, which is a big deal to me. I have also seen six types of sparrows in one day. But there are many more than six of these seen in this state at any given time.

The six woodpeckers commonly found in my area of New Jersey aren’t all that easy to find, particularly on the same day.

(A seventh - the redheaded woodpecker - is a southern bird that needs specific habitat to survive, in this case stands of dead trees. With the suburban penchant for cutting down any inconvenient tree dead or alive, you have to seek it in a Known Redheaded Woodpecker Location such as the Great Swamp. I usually seem them in winter.)

I was lucky enough to be in the right places at the right times, and it is this combination of luck and surprise with just enough knowledge to make identification possible that makes birding such a joy.

Three of the woodpeckers were gimmes. In the afternoon my feeders brought the six-inch downy, which was chased off by the nine-inch hairy, which was chased off by the comparably sized redbellied woodpecker, like the one here. For more on these go to http://www.allaboutbirds.org

Usually these three are all I see. But not yesterday.

I went walking early into the nearby Central Park of Morris County, once known as the Greystone property. (There is still a Greystone property but it is on the western edge and owned by the state. Where I was is now owned by the county.)

Besides the expected birds I heard the distinctive call of a flicker, a cackling “ahhhrrr.” Flickers are usually seen on the ground and are mostly brown to blend in. I couldn’t find it.

So that’s four woodpeckers.

As I headed home from this walk I stopped when I heard what sounded like the breathy “Wha-wha-wha” of the pileated woodpecker, the largest of the six. It is about the size of a crow and has a most distinctive red crest and black and white body.

These are great to see up close, like the female I saw on a neighbor’s tree, whacking away at it to scoop up the carpenter ants within.

No surprise, that tree rotted and fell over in a storm less than two years later.

If you are old enough to remember the Woody Woodpecker cartoon, his laugh and look were based on the pileated.

Anyway, I stopped and listened. It called, then it called again. I have found pileateds in Greystone before, one mere feet away. So I knew what it was.

That’s five woodpeckers.

Here is where luck morphed into transcendence.

Every winter my husband and I go through the marriage-testing experience of clearing the lower house gutters of fallen leaves. (We don’t do the higher gutters because we want to live to a comfortable old age, and any spillover comes into the lower gutters anyway.)

There I was, not long after the morning walk, holding the large, metal ladder on which MH, bad knees and all, was trying to pull out wet leaves.

Behind me I heard a whinny. Could it be? I heard it again. Yes it was! A yellow-bellied sapsucker!

“Pay attention to the ladder,” MH yelled, somehow sensing I wasn‘t giving 100 percent.

“But it’s a sapsucker!” I responded. “That’s my sixth woodpecker of the day.”

For some reason, perhaps being 15 feet above the ground, he wasn‘t as impressed. “No reckless birding! Concentrate,” he retorted.

At which point the calling bird flew from its tree next door and across the road, out of sight, allowing me to turn back and focus on not becoming a widow.

The sapsucker is a very different type of woodpecker. It has red on the top of its head, like some of the others, but distinctively on its “chin,” too. It drills small, shallow holes in trees, not to pull out insects but to draw the sap on which it feeds. This sap also draws a lot insects, which feeds all the birds. (The sap also feeds hummingbirds when they first arrive during spring migration.)

In spring these shy birds announce their territory as loudly as any other woodpecker, an activity known as drumming.

It’s a simple process: hammer on a branch (or a wood-shingled house) with your sturdy bill to loudy announce “I am here and if you are another woodpecker stay away.”

Find the right sounding board and your message will go far.

And that was the sixth. Does it make me a better birder? No, but it reminds me why I enjoy birding.

Six Woodpeckers (from Dec. 4, 2011)

(This is another in a sporadic attempt to republish old blog posts where I foolishly eliminated the link to the actual post. I did this a lot when I started this blog until I figured out you are supposed to leave the link in the headline to read the indivudl post. Live and Learn.)

You’ll have to forgive my being a little cocky today but in all my years of birding I’ve never had a day like Saturday.

A six-woodpecker day.

I have been known to find six warblers in a day, which is a big deal to me. I have also seen six types of sparrows in one day. But there are many more than six of these seen in this state at any given time.

The six woodpeckers commonly found in my area of New Jersey aren’t all that easy to find, particularly on the same day.

(A seventh - the redheaded woodpecker - is a southern bird that needs specific habitat to survive, in this case stands of dead trees. With the suburban penchant for cutting down any inconvenient tree dead or alive, you have to seek it in a Known Redheaded Woodpecker Location such as the Great Swamp. I usually seem them in winter.)

I was lucky enough to be in the right places at the right times, and it is this combination of luck and surprise with just enough knowledge to make identification possible that makes birding such a joy.

Three of the woodpeckers were gimmes. In the afternoon my feeders brought the six-inch downy, which was chased off by the nine-inch hairy, which was chased off by the comparably sized redbellied woodpecker, like the one here. For more on these go to http://www.allaboutbirds.org

Usually these three are all I see. But not yesterday.

I went walking early into the nearby Central Park of Morris County, once known as the Greystone property. (There is still a Greystone property but it is on the western edge and owned by the state. Where I was is now owned by the county.)

Besides the expected birds I heard the distinctive call of a flicker, a cackling “ahhhrrr.” Flickers are usually seen on the ground and are mostly brown to blend in. I couldn’t find it.

So that’s four woodpeckers.

As I headed home from this walk I stopped when I heard what sounded like the breathy “Wha-wha-wha” of the pileated woodpecker, the largest of the six. It is about the size of a crow and has a most distinctive red crest and black and white body.

These are great to see up close, like the female I saw on a neighbor’s tree, whacking away at it to scoop up the carpenter ants within.

No surprise, that tree rotted and fell over in a storm less than two years later.

If you are old enough to remember the Woody Woodpecker cartoon, his laugh and look were based on the pileated.

Anyway, I stopped and listened. It called, then it called again. I have found pileateds in Greystone before, one mere feet away. So I knew what it was.

That’s five woodpeckers.

Here is where luck morphed into transcendence.

Every winter my husband and I go through the marriage-testing experience of clearing the lower house gutters of fallen leaves. (We don’t do the higher gutters because we want to live to a comfortable old age, and any spillover comes into the lower gutters anyway.)

There I was, not long after the morning walk, holding the large, metal ladder on which MH, bad knees and all, was trying to pull out wet leaves.

Behind me I heard a whinny. Could it be? I heard it again. Yes it was! A yellow-bellied sapsucker!

“Pay attention to the ladder,” MH yelled, somehow sensing I wasn‘t giving 100 percent.

“But it’s a sapsucker!” I responded. “That’s my sixth woodpecker of the day.”

For some reason, perhaps being 15 feet above the ground, he wasn‘t as impressed. “No reckless birding! Concentrate,” he retorted.

At which point the calling bird flew from its tree next door and across the road, out of sight, allowing me to turn back and focus on not becoming a widow.

The sapsucker is a very different type of woodpecker. It has red on the top of its head, like some of the others, but distinctively on its “chin,” too. It drills small, shallow holes in trees, not to pull out insects but to draw the sap on which it feeds. This sap also draws a lot insects, which feeds all the birds. (The sap also feeds hummingbirds when they first arrive during spring migration.)

In spring these shy birds announce their territory as loudly as any other woodpecker, an activity known as drumming.

It’s a simple process: hammer on a branch (or a wood-shingled house) with your sturdy bill to loudy announce “I am here and if you are another woodpecker stay away.”

Find the right sounding board and your message will go far.

And that was the sixth. Does it make me a better birder? No, but it reminds me why I enjoy birding.

Seven-Woodpecker Day

During what was literally the darkest hours after Hurricane Sandy blacked out my neighborhood, my husband and I wondered if we would be traveling on our planned vacation to North Carolina.

Sandy was only about a month ago but it seems like yesterday. We had power in two days. Our neighbors just a block away were out over a week. The power grid works in mysterious ways.

Even after the power came back on, MH and I were paranoid. We feared losing power again after the nor’easter blew through. We bought few groceries that week because, we hoped, we’d be traveling and didn’t want to stock a freezer only to lose the goods in the next storm. Even though my neighbors without power were running generators (I don’t have one - yet) I was afraid someone would plug into my outside outlet. People without power could be capable of anything, we thought.

We would look hard at people walking along our quiet side street if we didn't recognize them, wondering if they were looking for an uninhabited house to rob. Even tho’ we could put our alarm on, I am ashamed to admit we were ready to cancel our vacation - the only week I could afford to take off this year - if the rest of the area was still in the dark. We would stay and protect our home.

Luckily, it never came to that. The neighbors got their power back, the noisy generators were shut off, the mowers and blowers and chainsaws did their jobs and we went off to a barrier island of North Carolina that, unlike the barrier islands of the Jersey Shore, was not damaged a bit by Sandy.

We’d never been in Atlantic Beach before. We wanted to try a different place than the Outer Banks, where we’ve been twice. Besides the ocean and the sound, what made me choose this area were the natural areas close to where we’d be staying.

The barrier island Atlantic Beach is on is very much built up. A Sandy hitting it would do the same damage seen in Holgate, N.J. But unlike New Jersey there was plenty of public beach access areas where we could walk (and, more important, use the bathroom) unimpeded and without paying a fee.

Each time we stopped at one we saw something different and surprising. Surfers. Surf casters. On the bird end we had pelicans, willets, sanderlings and ruddy turnstones plus terns, different gulls and skeins of black scoters and cormorants.

We went to a road near the aquarium to find the Theodore Roosevelt natural area but while we found parking there were no trails. It was literally a “wildlife viewing area." What you viewed was from the road. We saw a grand variety of birds including the brown thrasher pictured here that didn’t care we had parked next to it.

We were also told by our waitress at a diner one morning about a little trail she’d seen next to the Food Lion supermarket. It turned out to be a trail running next to a creek on which the Union Army traveled down to lay siege to nearby Fort Macon. We’d never have known had we not told her we were there to bird, not fish and she had seen the sign when she parked to get groceries.

But the best part of the four days we spent there was hiking Croatan National Forest. It is a huge chunk of land, many big pieces of which are given over to hunting. (There was a lot of hunting going on. We could hear the rifle shots at many of the places we stopped in our travels). Thanks to the Internet I had found a trail that was on a part of the mainland not far from us that was said to be good for birding.

I almost lost MH when he saw a sign at the entrance warning people to wear orange if they were going in.

I was not going to be stopped from going into this forest because I heard this was prime habitat for the red-cockaded woodpecker.

This is a bird found only in the south. It builds nests in living pine trees, particularly mature long-leaf pine trees. You will not find this bird in suburban housing developments. In our two visits to the Outer Banks I had sought this bird in every pine forest. The red on this woodpecker, despite its name, is quite small (if it is there at all) but the bird has a large white cheek patch that distinguishes it from its more common cousin, the downy. I always admonished MH to “look for the white cheek!” if he saw a woodpecker in those North Carolina woods. We found none.

Now I was on the doorstep and I was going in, orange or no orange. He reluctantly followed.

It helped we were on a trail that led to several loop trails and we took the inner one, figuring any hunting would be in the forest at large and thus affect the outer loop. As it turned out, we heard no shots at all. In fact, two guys and their small hound came bounding onto the trail and walked on the outer loop without a care or an orange vest.

On our loop trail we saw a lot that we expected - brown-headed nuthatch (a southern cousin of the white-breasted nuthatch seen in NJ) and many myrtle warblers - and that we did not, including a solitary vireo, a pine warbler (pictured) and an osprey, all of which left my part of NJ long ago.

But at one point I heard a rattling that sounded vaguely familiar, and that is when I looked up and found a redheaded woodpecker.

This is a very striking bird, and I have seen it in New Jersey, in Great Swamp and, one spectacular February day after a heavy snow had melted, along the linear county park near me known as Patriots Path. But MH had never seen one and each time one was sighted in NJ or NY I would rush him out on a wild bird chase. We never found it. He didn’t care but I very much wanted him to see one.

Now he had, and he understood why I had bothered.

As you can see it has a deep red head and a body of solid black and white. I had forgotten this is a southern bird, only rarely sighted in the north, usually a juvenile and usually in winter. MH must’ve shot over 100 pictures of this adult bird from various angles while I took my own pictures, including this one. We later found others.

In the meantime, we had found a pileated woodpecker, flickers, redbelly, several yellow-bellied sapsuckers and a downy. So that’s a six-woodpecker day, something I hadn’t had since last December.

But it got better. Something caught my eye and I looked to my right and there, climbing a tree, was a little black and white woodpecker with a bright white cheek.

Somehow I managed to get MH’s attention without startling the bird. I think I just called out its name. MH came running and we started snapping pictures, one of which is this one.

A seven-woodpecker day. Our 335th new bird. By the time we’d finished the loop trail we’d seen four or five more of these woodpeckers.

Most people travel to refresh themselves. If they are smart they keep their eyes and ears open and their mouths shut and learn something about the area where they are traveling instead of trying to recreate or impose on it the culture of where they’ve come from. If you’re a birder, you also go to different areas where you can see new (to you) birds.

On this trip MH and I saw a lot that was good and lot of not so good. Too many people, too many chain restaurants you can find anywhere, little respect for wildlife beyond what you could kill, not as much regional flavor (in food and behavior) as we’d hoped. But we did see a new bird in a new (to us) area.

More important, besides spending time together away from work, MH and I were able to rid ourselves of our post-Sandy paranoia. We came back to a neighborhood that was back to “normal” (with both the good and the bad that implies). While saddened that many devastated areas of coastal New Jersey continue to suffer, we were glad to be back to normal, too.

Watching the Woodpeckers

Downys will eat suet, seed or even sip from a hummingbird
feeder (both pictures Margo D. Beller)

Early the other morning I sat on the porch with my coffee, trying to wake up and hoping birds would be coming to my feeders, which I had just refilled. There was nothing for the longest time and then a male downy woodpecker suddenly appeared on the dogwood tree branch beyond the feeder pole where I keep the suet feeder and a long feeder full of sunflower seeds. Either food would appeal to it, but the bird just sat there.

Maybe was waiting for the breeze to die down so it could fly safely over without being blown off course. Maybe it saw a predator flying overhead. Maybe it saw the slight movement from me on my enclosed porch when I raised my coffee cup for a sip. Downys, the smallest of American woodpeckers, can be rather skittish.

Male red-bellied woodpecker (Margo D. Beller)

I enjoy sitting on my porch in the morning when the sun is here, especially in the aftermath of the recent powerful nor'easter that produced gale-force winds that prompted me to take all the feeders inside to protect them. I figured no intelligent bird would risk being blown into the side of the house, no matter how hungry it was.

It is too easy to ascribe human emotions to birds. So as I watched Mr. Downy - I could see the red spot on the back of its head, which the female does not have - I tried to understand the way his bird brain operates.

After sitting in the tree a long time, he flew to the suet feeder, took a few tentative pecks, then flew back to the tree. This suet feeder is made in a particular way to keep pests such as grackles and starlings off the block of fat - the bird must hang under the feeder. Woodpeckers do not mind that. This suet feeder has drawn downys, the larger but similar looking hairy woodpeckers and the larger-still red-bellied woodpeckers of both sexes to it.

I've seen eight types of woodpeckers, all but one of them in New Jersey. There are many more found in the American west, the desert southwest and in the higher elevations of New England. In my area, besides the three I have mentioned, the more common ones are the flicker, the pileated and the yellow-bellied sapsucker. In fact, one day in 2011 I saw all six.

Pileated woodpecker (Margo D. Beller)

There is also the redheaded woodpecker, of the same family as the red-bellied woodpecker and, like that bird, originally from the south but slowly finding suitable breeding grounds in New Jersey despite our tendency to cut down dead trees, which is where the redheaded builds its nests and feeds on bugs. It is too easy to call a red-bellied woodpecker a redheaded woodpecker because when you look at it you see the red on its head but not the bit of pink on its belly. However, when you see a redheaded woodpecker you can see why it got the name.

The pileated (pronounced PIE-leated, although I tend to say PILL-eated) woodpecker is a crowsized bird athat got its name thanks to its striking red crest (which is what pileated means, having a crest). It has black feathers and white down the face and neck. When one flies over me in the woods I never fail to be stunned by its size and beauty. When you see one whacking at a tree you can be sure that tree is filled with carpenter ants, its preferred food, and that means the tree will likely be dead within two years. (I base this on seeing a female pileated whacking at a yard tree for several mornings running on my way to the train; the tree fell over and had to be removed within two years.)

The other woodpecker I have seen was in North Carolina, a bird that makes its nest in living, mature, long-leaf pine trees, which is why its existence is more precarious than even the redheaded woodpecker. In fact, we went to the Croatan National Forest specifically to find this bird, where it is protected.

Red-cocaded woodpecker (Margo D. Beller)

Between MH and me, I think we've photographed all the woodpeckers mentioned except for the brownish flicker, which forages for ants with its long bill and longer tongue on the ground and is easily spooked, and the yellow-bellied sapsucker, which gets its name because it drills holes in trees and drinks the sap or eats insects attracted by the sap. My apple tree is girdled with little holes from a sapsucker. One year I spent several days shooing a sapsucker from the tree before all the holes could kill it.

Meanwhile, back at the dogwood, the downy continued to sit. I finished my coffee and went back inside the house. After hanging my winter coat I went to the kitchen window. As expected, there he was, on the suet feeder, eating heartily until he flew off to a different, taller tree, out of my sight. But he'll be back.

Scenes From the Drought

Today, Labor Day, is the 60th day of temperatures of 80 degrees or higher, and while a drought has not been officially declared by my home state (thanks to a very wet June), we are at the point where you can tell who has been using a sprinkler (built in or otherwise) and who has not.

What had been lawn is now baked hay. My husband has not mowed the lawn since mid-July -- which, coincidentally is when we last had a day below 80 degrees. "Pop-up" storms have been few and far between.

Lawn - Sept. 7, 2015 (Margo D. Beller)

No one cared one to two months ago. Most people - not me - apparently prefer heat and humidity to cold and snow and have really enjoyed having sunny, dry days for going to the beach, the lake or the mountains, the ballpark or just for doing nothing around the house.

But now that summer is supposedly over and school is in session, these same people are ready to do their usual suburban fall activities - mow and fertilize the lawn, buy mums and corn threshes to decorate for autumn - and they suddenly realize, hey, what happened to my lawn? Why doesn't it feel like autumn?

Whether it is hot and dry or hot and humid, without rain you have plants drying up. Even plants that are "drought-tolerant" or have deep roots need water once in a while, which I provide early in the morning as needed. Many people don't, and their dried-out, dead plants show the results.

Despite my best efforts, burnt joe-pye weed. (Margo D. Beller)

Just as the birds fled the Indonesian coast before the Christmas 2004 tsunami, my backyard bird behavior is telling me how dangerous this situation has become.

Scene 1: I have had a hummingbird feeder out all summer. I've written before that recently I had to buy a cup to fill with water and keep out the ants - itself a sign of drought - and create a moat. A few days ago I came on the porch, looked at the feeder and instead of a hummingbird a downy woodpecker was attempting to get its long tongue through the portal as the smaller hummer does. Just today, a tufted titmouse grabbed hold of the rim, leaned forward and dipped its bill into the moat. I've never seen such activity from either bird.

Scene 2: I do not put seed feeders out during the summer because birds usually can eat insects (more protein). However, with this drought, there is a dearth of flowering plants. Even where there are flowers - such as the rose of sharon - I have seen very few bees or other insects partaking of the pollen. That isn't normal.

MH knows I put out feeders around Labor Day, but last week he kept asking when they'd be going out. Ever since the bear destroyed my feeder pole, requiring me to buy a new one, I've been reluctant to put them back out, knowing I'd have to take them in every night.

But I put them out, figuring it would take a few days for the birds to find them. I was wrong.

Titmouse at water cooler. (Margo D. Beller)

Within an hour I had titmice, chickadees and many, many house sparrows at the two feeders containing sunflower seeds. It took a couple of days before the thistle sock drew the attention of any goldfinches - six at one point. Until I  put the feeders out I didn't see very much backyard activity at all.

I am glad to see birds, lord knows, but it took me some time to realize that I am providing an easier way to get food than hunting long and hard for food that could be quite some distance away. That is why the female downy woodpecker has learned another unusual behavior - how to get between the bars of the caged feeder to get some seed.

I also provide water - a water cooler for smaller birds, a water dish for larger birds. In summers, even those with plentiful rain, these are invaluable. Both smaller and larger birds have come to the water cooler, the larger birds contorting themselves from a nearby branch while the smaller ones are on an attached perch. The water dish has also brought an assortment of birds as well as squirrels and chipmunks.

Scene 3: Just as there are birds crowding into and atop the feeders - particularly the huge family of house sparrows, which blocks other birds from getting food unless I chase them off - there is a large flock of birds feeding on the leavings because it is easier than fighting the crowd above. These include mourning doves, cardinals, other sparrows and even titmice and chickadees, along with squirrels and chipmunks.

With so many birds pecking at what the goldfinches and other birds have dropped, it is surprising to me that no sharp-shinned or Cooper's hawks have swooped in to catch a meal. Maybe they are sticking to the shady forest, where some areas are still green. I know I would.

Chickadee with seed. (Margo D. Beller)

There is no water, there are no flowers, there are no insects. There is only drought and what water and food I (and, I hope, others) provide. It is wrong to waste my time, energy, water and money using sprinklers in a battle to make the lawn green and long, which would mean going out (or hiring someone) to mow it and cause further heat damage to the grass, which is - after all - a plant, too.

Is this global warming, this strange dipping of the Jet Stream that has us in a high-pressure system that keeps the rain north or south of the New York metropolitan area? Is this the "new normal?" I fear it is.

I know, California has been suffering years of drought. But take a look at this list of record temperatures.

Nuthatch at caged feeder behind thistle sock. (Margo D. Beller)

According to weather.com, the record hottest summers are:

• Eugene, Oregon: Average temperature 69.5 degrees (old record 68.5 degrees in 1967)
• Lewiston, Idaho: Average temperature 76.9 degrees (old record 76.3 degrees in 1940)
• Phoenix, Arizona (tie): Average temperature 95.1 degrees (ties 95.1 degrees in 2014)
• Portland, Oregon: Average temperature 72.2 degrees (old record 69.8 degrees in 2009)
• Medford, Oregon: Average temperature 76.4 degrees (old record 74.9 degrees in 2014)
• Salem, Oregon: Average temperature 71.3 degrees (old record 69.4 degrees in 2014)
• Seattle, Washington: Average temperature 69.2 degrees (old record 67.4 degrees in 2013)
• Spokane, Washington: Average temperature 72.7 degrees (old record 71.7 degrees in 1922)
• Wenatchee, Washington: Average temperature 76.9 degrees (old record 75.6 degrees in 1958)

Pear tree showing effect of drought. (Margo D. Beller)

Other Notables: Anchorage, Alaska (3rd hottest); Boise, Idaho (2nd hottest); Tucson, Arizona (2nd hottest); Columbia, South Carolina (3rd hottest); New Orleans (5th hottest); Baton Rouge, Louisiana (4th hottest)

Even Canada's Edmonton, Alberta went through its second-hottest August in 20 years.

Of course, not everyone is so affected. For every yin there's a yang. Again according to weather.com:

• Fort Wayne, Indiana: 21.52 inches of rain (old record 18.70 inches in 1986)
• Rapid City, South Dakota (airport): 14.54 inches of rain (old record 11.90 inches in 1968)

Nuthatch, goldfinch, titmouse at feeder (Margo D. Beller)

Other Notables: St. Louis (2nd wettest), Indianapolis (2nd wettest), San Diego (2nd wettest), Tampa (5th wettest)

And as bad as August has been, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, July was worse - the hottest month since records have been kept.

President Obama recently traveled to Alaska, to focus on climate change and its effects in the short term on the indigenous population and in the long term on the rest of the world. He is the first U.S. president to travel north of the Arctic Circle.

We've seen some lovely pictures - melting glaciers and the like - but he could've made the point just as well had he come to my backyard, watched the grass and trees and plants dry up and the birds fighting each other desperately for what food and water I provide.

Survival of the Smallest

When I went outside at 8 a.m. today it was 1 degree F, minus 17 windchill. I went outside to hang two bird feeders.

We in my part of the U.S. have been suffering through a long, dangerous cold period. The snow that fell heavily at the end of last month, and which had melted to about six inches thanks to several days of temperatures above freezing, is still blanketing the yard. Deer and other creatures had started crossing the snow in their search for food.

Black-capped chickadee (Margo D. Beller)

Despite my best efforts, a squirrel had managed to leap high enough to grab the end of the long feeder and pull itself up. Judging by the level of seed, it ate, or dropped, quite a lot. I took that feeder inside. By the end of the day I had taken the other two feeders inside because snow was expected and the winds the next day could reach over 40 miles per hour.

And then the temperature really came down.

Today, the wind was "merely" 15 miles per hour. The birds might not come immediately to the seed and suet feeders but I know they will come, because they must. That's why I went out.

There are not many feeders hanging in my neighborhood. Multiple pairs of cardinals have shown up in my yard, either on the seed feeder or waiting their turn in the bushes. If I see a male chase off a female I know they are not a pair. Pairs sit on either side of the feeder. When the female flies off, the male follows.

Unusual birds may come to eat when they can't otherwise find food. Two days ago a distinctive male purple finch came for seed. He was a one-day wonder. I've had red-breasted nuthatches, smaller than the more usual white-breasted nuthatch, coming to the suet for weeks. These unusual birds would only be at my feeders because they can't find food in their more northern winter territories. 

The birds follow each other to food sources. If a large bird like a blue jay or red-bellied woodpecker flies to my feeders, smaller birds are sure to follow - and vice versa. The wintering juncos are among the first to the feeders in the morning, which attracts the attention of other birds.

One of them is the black-capped chickadee, one of my favorite birds. It is a bundle of energy, exploring everywhere in the search for food. Its territorial song, a descending series of notes, sounds like it is saying "Hey, Sweetie!" Its call is its name: dee, dee, dee. It is in my yard all year long, whether I have feeders out or not. 

It is a small bird that grabs a seed and then flies to a bush to pound the hull to get at the sunflower. It quickly yields the feeder when the slightly larger titmouse flies in. I usually see one, sometimes two at a time.

While my husband and I can hunker down under quilts overnight, chickadees and others are trying to find what shelter they can. They use the yew hedge. They use Spruce. They use cavities in trees. They use nest boxes. They may not even be in my yard but they come knowing there is a dedicated food source here.

According to the book I happen to be reading, "Birds in Winter: Surviving the Most Challenging Season" by Roger F. Pasquier, the priority is finding a roosting site offering protection from predators, wind, rain or snow. That site might be with others by night; by day, the bird returns to its territory.

The chickadee needs to eat enough to create fat reserves that, with puffing up its feathers, keep it warm. It eats and it also caches food in various places it can reach when the weather worsens.

Cardinal pair (Margo D. Beller)

After putting out the feeders I came into my warm house and slowly removed my many layers - boots, long hooded down coat, gloves, wool hat, wool balaclava for my neck and face. Weather like this is dangerous, especially to someone considered a "senior." Even after I put the layers away I still felt weighed down and cold, despite the furnace roaring. Winter makes me feel older than my age, and I know I can do nothing about the cold or anything else.

While I can feel sorry for myself the chickadee doesn't have time or inclination to do that. Its only worry is survival. It must eat so it can still be around when the temperature warms, the snow melts and it's time to find a mate and start breeding more chickadees. 

I should start thinking like a chickadee.

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.

Adapting to Winter

The female redbellied woodpecker flies to the house feeder, grabs a black-hulled sunflower seed, then flies the short distance to the pear tree. She climbs up the trunk with the seed in her long bill to the top of one section that has been sawed off flat. She puts the seed on it and pounds until she has broken off the hull and can then grab the seed with her long tongue.

She goes back and forth five or six times to do this as I watch from my enclosed back porch, not too close to the window or I'd scare her. Each time she flies to the feeder she dislodges a young, male cardinal who has been eying the feeder but hanging back while other birds, including two other male cardinals, fly over to get food. She has no interest in the suet feeder nearby. Today, she wants seed.

Finally, the redbelly flies off and the young cardinal flies over and grabs a seed, only to be chased off by a posse of house sparrows.

Female redbellied woodpecker (Margo D. Beller)

At this point I take on my position of omnipotent ruler and tap on the window, scaring the sparrows off and allowing the black-capped chickadees to fly in, grab seeds and fly off. A couple of them go into the upper branches of this same pear tree to grab the seed with their feet and then peck to break the hull and eat.

I've been witnessing this behavior in my backyard for the past 20 or so years every winter. Same routine, different generations of titmice, house finches, jays and white-throated sparrows.

We had a heavy snow last night, and this morning I added to the number of seed feeders because I know it is not going to be easy for the birds to find food. But if I didn't put out a feeder - and I seem to be the only one around in this part of the area hanging feeders - the birds would still find ways of surviving. They're used to it.

They do better than I do. When the snow falls, especially the heavy, wet type we had, my first reaction is to groan. I know I am going to find shrubs bent under the weight and I might find fence posts down because the snow has weighed upon the deer netting. I don't have to worry about feeding myself but I do have to worry about getting groceries in ahead of time or getting the snow plow guy over to clear the driveway before the temperatures fall again in the evening.

Cardinal pair (Margo D. Beller)

I walk around repairing the damage as the birds check for microscopic insects in the branches of the black locust trees over my head.  I hear the sparrows calling from the hedge and the local Canada geese flying overhead. I hear the cardinal pairs calling to one another. A few weeks ago when we had a smaller snow storm but colder temperatures there were six male cardinals in my backyard at once. Today there were three and at least two females. The pecking order - which one eats first, second, etc. - was very much in evidence because only one of the three seed feeders will allow a cardinal to comfortably sit and eat a seed.

As I get older I find myself liking everything about snow less and less. I don't like the shoveling -- it tires me and makes my back sore. I don't like knocking snow off tall hedges and getting it all over me. I don't like depending on the plow guy when there is more than 5 inches of white on the driveway. I do not like the cold at all, and that dislikes gets worse with every falling degree.

It is easy for me to complain because I am bundled in a warm coat and will be going inside a warm house momentarily and can eat when I choose to eat. The birds have to depend on the kindness of strangers - me. I can provide them seed and suet, hedges for roosting at night and, every so often, aid and protection by chasing off cats or raptors. But that's it. They are on their own in the cold and have to depend on puffing themselves up and creating a layer of warm air under their feathers. They will "sleep" in their way to conserve energy to fly and feed the next day in order to survive.

There will still be winter fatalities, just as there are always stories of humans who lose a finger clearing out a snowblower or have heart attacks lifting heavy loads of snow with their shovels.

Today, I'm not one of them. You could say I've learned to adapt, too.

Resurfacing

It is hard to believe that a month ago - Valentine's Day - my neighborhood was buried under two feet of snow from the nor'easter Feb. 1. There were several snow storms in February and we were in perpetual white all month. It was only in March the weather started to warm, culminating in one day when the temperature reached nearly 70 degrees F. Now, only the smallest bits of icy snow remain in the shady areas. 

Feb. 22, 2021 (Margo D. Beller)

With the end of the snow, some good and bad things resurfaced.

I looked outside one day and saw one yellow crocus in an area where there should've been more. I quickly yanked away a pot I had put behind the deer netting and there were the rest of them, which had come out of the ground and struggled under the weight of the pot. In a few days they recovered, and with them came some purple crocus. These flowers usually come up in February but were now making up for lost time.

In another bed, the snowdrops - another early bloomer - suddenly appeared and flowered a month late. They are sharing the area with many daffodils, my favorite flowers because of their diversity and their not being palatable to deer or chipmunks. The irises are showing signs of life, as are the rhododendron and the azeleas. The maple trees have started to flower, too.

Those are the good things. But there are also bad.

A deer (I'm pretty sure it was the same one) found a weakness in the netting and devoured every leaf of the yellow and green euonymous bushes. Best as I can figure, a deer put its head through an area not well fastened down the first time. Then, when I fixed that, it got up on its hind legs and pushed the netting down until it could reach over and eat more bushes. Finally, after I fixed that it went around to the side to get the last two it couldn't reach before.

Crocuses, March 14, 2021 (Margo D. Beller)

I went out and chopped the bushes back as far back as I could, something I'll be sure to do next autumn. (I know from experience they will grow back.) The netting has been reinforced and more poles put in to fix what the deer's actions bent. Now there is nothing that will interest a hungry deer until the sedum start to grow.

Let's go back to the good.

While I worked to cut back ornamental grasses and the butterfly bush over the past week I could hear plenty of birds singing or calling - robins, cardinals, a song sparrow, redbellied woodpecker, even one of the earliest migrants, the redwinged blackbird. Very large flocks of grackles flew over, not stopping in my area as they did last February. This morning several skeins of Canada geese were flying north. These are the wild geese, not the ones that have made their home in office parks. Those geese will fly up and around and land, knowing they are supposed to move but not knowing why. The wild geese know the frozen ponds in the north are melting.

Snowdrops (Margo D. Beller)

Now that the snow is gone and the air is warming, more people are walking, and that reminds me I have to get back to walking, too. I did not walk much on my town streets in the cold and the park trails were inaccessible to me because of the deep snow. That snow is now gone, as I discovered this morning. COVID-19 has kept many of us indoors, although we used the cold and snow as an excuse, and so it felt good to walk my favorite trail again to see and hear the birds, not all of which I could've also heard in the backyard.

Finally, now that it is easier for us all to get around, I must take the feeders in at night. It was early one morning at the end of March 2015 I opened my kitchen curtains and saw only one of two feeder poles, the other bent to the ground. I have been bringing the feeders in at night ever since except for when thick snow covers in winter, when the bears should be hibernating. (Six months later, on a warm, sunny, late afternoon, I saw a bear pass through my yard after taking down an arm of the other feeder pole as it tried to take off the house-shaped feeder.) The bears will emerge from their dens hungry and, if a male, seeking new territories. So I'm back to taking feeders in at night.

However, the need to put out feeders in the morning gets me out of bed - resurfacing, you could say - and allows me to hear the birdsong, which will only increase as northbound migrants pass through in the next month. So it's not all bad.

Defoliated shrub (Margo D. Beller)

Drills and Drumming

If there is one thing my husband reminds me every year it is that where we live in northern New Jersey is much more quiet than where we lived in Queens, NY. 

Many was the night we heard blaring radios, people in different languages shouting at each other and the occasional gunshot. 

I grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., land of car alarms, ambulance sirens and kids playing all over the street. As I was one of those kids the noise didn't bother me, it was just there. In Queens I wasn't bothered most of the time but when the fireworks would start going off in June I would get pissed off and then the gunshots would scare me.

Eventually, we left for the safer, quieter suburbs where we would have space. That is why, the longer I've lived here, what noise I hear now seems louder, piercing and unexpected.

In late February I would leave the house for my morning walk and I'd hear drumming, the sound of a male woodpecker - usually a downy but possibly any of the six types that would be around northern New Jersey - striking a tree branch to announce its availability to the opposite sex and/or defend its chosen territory.

Downy woodpecker, the smallest type in New Jersey.

That sound I don't mind.

I'm learning to tolerate the noise of barking dogs left outside on mild days and small children playing in their yards.

But with the warming temperatures at the end of March, the home projects have returned.

As I sit in my office trying to work there is hammering, sawing, drilling and other ungodly machine screeching as people add on to their houses, repair their roofs, rip up the blacktop for paving stones on their driveways.

They call this "improvement."

The borough is putting in a much-needed sidewalk on the next street, and that has meant cutting down trees and grinding the stumps, sounds I hate to hear because it means fewer trees for the birds. When they start building the sidewalks, the noise will get worse.

But it will eventually end, and since I want a sidewalk I can put up with it, albeit with difficulty.

What I can't put up with is the infernal racket of the lawn services.

I can tolerate my husband pushing our little Toro over our 0.4 acre or those neighbors, even the ones with the big lawn tractors, who do it themselves. 

But when the paid crews come in they bring huge, powerful machines making incredibly annoying noise, which means on a nice day I am rushing to close the window and put my headphones on the radio to try and block it out.

And different houses have different services that come on different days.

I don't know which I hate more, the mowers or the leaf blowers with their whiny arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr to get every last bit of nongrass debris off the lawn.

I know, I know, like the birds these guys gotta eat and they wait all winter for the first hint of warmth that allows them to hire seasonal workers and get some contract business on the account books. And there are homeowners who have waited all winter, put up with the house (only 4 bedrooms for 6 people? the nerve!) and now want to bulk up and spruce up the place to raise the property values so when the economy really improves they can sell the house for something better.

Besides, says MH, would you prefer living in the city with the salsa music blaring from the cars double-parked in front of the corner bodega and the gunshots? 

No, I don't. But I would also prefer people realize that cutting their lawns within an inch of their lives every single week and then watering them when the summer sun inevitably turns them brown is a waste of energy and resources, including water and their money. 

And that a pristine, weed-free, bug-free, worm-free, bird-free, uniform lawn is not a REAL lawn and far from natural. It's advertising that says, look at me, I have the perfect lawn. I'm better than you.

I am aware I am being unrealistic, and I can understand why I see people with earbuds stuck in wherever they go, including when they are driving, to block out the noises and distractions and provide the perfect soundtrack to their world.

That, in part, is why I go into the woods and listen to the birds. But I refuse to blare music into my ears all day from now until winter to disassociate myself from the world. 

I don't want to miss the birds singing and drumming away. They don't seem put off by man's inhumanity to nature. I must try and follow their example.

Thankful

Today is Thanksgiving. For the first time in six years my husband and I are not traveling to New Hampshire to visit his family. We will be visiting our friend in Bernardsville, NJ, instead.

There are many things for which we are thankful.

We are thankful our friend got power and heat back after Hurricane Sandy, albeit after nine days. We got ours back after two days but she refused to come to us or other friends and leave her animals behind. The day she thought she'd have to give in and go elsewhere the power came back.

We are thankful all our friends in the New York/New Jersey area who lost power for so long and had their lives disrupted are fine, and our hearts go out to those who still have no homes and/or no power nearly a month later.

MH's picure from North Carolina, November 2012. We are thankful we could get here.

We are thankful for today's sunshine, the lack of wind, the relatively warm temperature. We've had far colder Thanksgivings. We are thankful for the music of Teddy Wilson played over WKCR today. We are thankful to have a job, even if it is far from perfect, to pay the bills at a time when so many do not.

On a purely personal level, I am thankful to have MH, who among other things is a wonderful traveling companion. After a long marriage we know when to talk and when to stay silent, most of the time anyway. We make a good team in the field - he prefers his camera to the binoculars and I am the opposite, so I sight birds, call them out and he snaps pictures. Between the two of us we have lots of memories.

We are thankful we got to see many "good" birds on a week-long vacation in North Carolina we thought we'd have to cancel if the lack of power and the north Jersey gas lines continued for much longer. We are thankful we got away because in our darkest moment, literally, we weren't so sure.

On this trip MH finally saw a redheaded woodpecker, we both saw the rare red-cocaded woodpecker (I'll write more on this another time) and, most important, we had time together away from New Jersey and the trauma of the hurricane. We needed the break.

I have had a good life with a lot of good luck in it and I thank God for that. I hope it can continue for a long time.

I am also thankful I can put words together in a way that people enjoy reading, so thank you Readers.

Happy Thanksgiving.