An Assessment of Unusual Bird Activity in a Suburban Yard...or Why I'll Never Be the 'Scientist' My Husband Is

On yet another very rainy and windy May morning this week I sat on my enclosed porch with my first cup of coffee, as usual. I could hear the house wren that took over the nest box this year, the catbird, the robin, even a red-eyed vireo singing, as usual.

Then I heard something else, a sharper tone with a cadence of 2, 2, 2. That's not a catbird, I realized, that is a brown thrasher.

The Cornell Bird Lab people say brown thrashers "are accomplished songsters that may sing more than 1,100 different song types and include imitations of other birds, including chuck-will’s-widows, wood thrushes and northern flickers." The male sings a loud, long series of doubled phrases.

An unusually visible brown thrasher (RE Berg-Andersson)

They are also usually secretive, which is why I could hear the bird in my yard but couldn't see it.

This is not a new yard bird. I've heard them calling from the Community Garden area bordering the backyards of my neighbors across the street. However, this May I've been hearing a lot of migrating birds I usually don't hear in my yard - Canada and magnolia warblers, for instance - which I could identify when I was using the Merlin app on my phone.

My theory is that when the southerly winds blew warm air into my area, the migrant birds came with it. Then the weather changed. The cold winds blew from the north. Those birds that had not made it to their breeding areas hung around to rest and eat ahead of eventually continuing their journey. 

But the wind was still coming from the north and the rain was still falling hard, with flash flood warnings in my state. So after hanging around one area for a while the birds move to another, and that has included my yard. 

I made the mistake of mentioning the unusual bird activity to my husband (MH).

"You should write a blog about it," he said. "Look in your records and see if this truly is an unusual year."

Now, you have to understand that MH thinks more like a scientist than I do. It is one of the many differences between us. He is a researcher. When he wants to know about something he takes a lot of time to go through the many, many volumes he has piled throughout the house. He keeps records of weather, sports and other events in neat column rows in ledger notebooks. He can look up what happened on a particular date in a particular year in minutes.

One of many notebooks I've kept over the years.
(Margo D. Beller)

This is something I can't do. I keep records as journal narratives in my notebooks. A lot of notebooks. To find something, such as how long ago the Nashville warbler showed up in the apple tree, means I would have to skim through years of notebooks.

In doing this project I learned a lot of things, and not all of them were about birds.

First, I realized yet again I will never be able to think the way MH does. My brain just does not work that way. Second, the way I keep records is not useful. It was hard for me to read more than a page of my handwriting because I tend to write quickly before I forget details. Some people keep journals to remember. I seem to keep them to do a brain dump. Trying to read through all the scrawled words I had put down over the years made me frustrated.

Third, until recently I had been using Merlin to alert me to birds singing around me. Merlin would hear things I didn't or couldn't. So every day I would stand in the yard to find out what was calling.

Which leads to: Fourth, I can be obsessive about spring migration birding.

I learned from my scrawls that when I could, in the past, I would do most of my May birding away from home. When I was working in an office that meant going out on the weekends, or very early in the morning if I was working from home. 

Now I'm retired and that has made a big difference. I no longer feel the need to "get it in" before giving my time to others. I can bird any weekday I want. However, there are many mornings when I rise early and can't get myself going for several hours. Those times are when I sit on the porch or in the backyard with my coffee and listen to what is singing or calling around me. Over a recent 10-day period that has been a lot of birds.  

Back to my research. 

(Margo D. Beller)

Years ago MH had given me a book where I could record a week of bird sightings (see photo above), a variant of what he does with his weather and other data. So in looking at bird patterns for past years I started with this because I had crammed years of sightings onto each page and it was far easier than trying to get through over 10 years of bird notebooks.

I restricted myself to data from my front or back yard for the month of May. I noted obvious migrants, particularly the colorful, singing warblers. For most of the years there would be one or two unusual yard birds, but occasionally there would be a lot of birds. For instance, in mid-May 2016 there were three types of warblers plus a blue-gray gnatcatcher and a rose-breasted grosbeak. Unfortunately, I did not note the weather conditions for the period.

More recently, on May 24, 2020, a new bird came to the yard - a singing bay-breasted warbler male I could easily see in one of the lower tree branches. Four years later, several birds were in the yard in mid-May including northern parula, yellow and myrtle warblers, indigo bunting, rose-breasted grosbeak and, another first, a female summer tanager - a type of bird usually found in the south but increasingly showing up in bird reports for my area.

The migrant birds would usually pass through my yard for a day or so on the way to elsewhere. That's in addition to the regulars - the crows, woodpeckers, wrens, catbirds, red-eyed vireos, finches, sparrows and others - that either stay in my area all year or end up here to breed, such as the house wren. 

Screenshot of BirdCast migration radar from just after sunset on May 1.
The brighter the yellow, the more birds.

Then I turned to what I recorded in my most recent notebook for this month. On May 2 of this year I saw on the radar there had been a big flight of birds the previous night thanks to the strong winds from the south. That day the yard had yellow, myrtle, parula, black and white and magnolia warblers. According to the NOAA weather data MH collects of Newark, NJ, the temperature on May 2 reached near 90 degrees F. No surprise that with these warblers I could also hear nearby singing rose-breasted grosbeak, chipping sparrow and scarlet tanager. On May 8 the yard hosted American redstart, yellow, myrtle, parula and blackpoll warblers. Many blackpolls, usually one of the last of the warblers I hear, passed through the yard for over a week. (I found an abundance of migrant birds in other areas, too.) 

Then the temperature went down to more seasonal levels because of a cold front and the wind picked up. May has been particularly windy, according to MH's records, with gale force winds (39 mph or more) for several days and on at least one day reaching storm force (55 mph or more) mid-month. No wonder the Canada warbler that showed up on May 17 hung around for a few days until the wind was light enough for it to continue flying north.

More recently, it has been unusually cold with a strong wind out of the east and rain - nor'easter weather, not conducive to bird migration. Nor is it conducive to sitting in the yard.

So were there more unusual birds than usual, or was I spending more time in the yard than usual with an app that let me know what I was hearing? My best non-scientific guess? Both.

The Breakup

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

(attributed to Albert Einstein, but maybe not)

Merlin and I are no longer together.

As in any relationship, when it worked things were wonderful. I opened the birding app on my phone, Merlin started, it listened, it identified what we were hearing. It was still good when I would have to restart the birding app six or seven times to get it recording.

Birding without Merlin (RE Berg-Andersson)

Thanks to Merlin I knew to look for the Canada warbler hanging around my property, a first for my backyard. Another day Merlin told me there was a magnolia warbler somewhere, and then I found the bird. 

But Merlin could also be frustrating. It would hear things I didn't, or couldn't. It would also hear things that weren't there. If a police siren sounded Merlin reported a screech owl, thinking it was hearing its whinnying call. If a mockingbird was singing, Merlin would report the various calls the bird was making as actual birds - Carolina wren, cardinal, killdeer, even an osprey. (Sometimes, in the case of the wren, the actual bird would answer.)

Then, for some reason, things came apart. Once I could turn on the app and it would work just fine. Then it started crashing several times before it would work. Did the techs at the Cornell University Birding Lab change something to make it incompatible with my old phone? Whatever the cause I would go out, hear things in the field and Merlin wasn't helping me until I could get it to work. Then everything would be fine.

I knew there was a problem but I didn't want to face it.

The parting became inevitable, however, when the app stopped working completely at Great Swamp the other day. The swamp is a very large piece of property, most of it administered by the federal government. There is a "managed" area and a "wilderness" area. I had gone to the wilderness area, not to hike in the mud but to listen from the parking area. Lots of singing birds including several types of warblers. I knew what they were but put on Merlin to hear if there was anything else. It crashed. I tried several times and it continued crashing. I thought I was in a dead zone so I shut off the app. 

Then I drove to the managed area, where Merlin had worked before. I heard a bird I didn't recognize from the lot. Merlin let me down again, and again, and again. It was taking up a lot of my time, energy and bandwidth to try to get it working so I finally gave up. 

I heard close to 50 birds in my travels, but without Merlin it wasn't the same. Not knowing that one bird ate at me for the rest of my time in the field. (All the people who showed up on a nice weekday didn't help either.)

Goodbye, Merlin (RE Berg-Andersson)

When I got home I uninstalled the program, waited, then reinstalled it. I went into the backyard. Merlin crashed again. So I uninstalled it for good. 

My husband (MH) shrugged at this news. He had given up on Merlin some time ago, depending on me to identify what he was hearing. That made Merlin's failure all the more aggravating for me. "We need new phones," MH said, thinking maybe Merlin needed more than I could provide. Well, we need a lot of things but a phone is not high on the priority list at the moment.

To identify the unfamiliar bird I went back to what I would do pre-Merlin. I noted how the song sounded, then eliminated all the kinds of birds it likely wasn't. I noted the surroundings where I heard it - wet swamp. My best guess: prothonotary warbler, a bird of wet swamps I last heard in Florida in 2010. But was that what it was? It would've been nice for Merlin to confirm this for me but I'm tired of putting up with failure.

If we do get new phones, maybe I'll try Merlin again. Maybe.

UPDATE: My guess was wrong. I did not hear a prothonotary warbler. In a very different habitat recently I heard the same call and saw the bird making the call - an American redstart.  

Birding as a Competition

On Saturday, May 10, hundreds if not thousands of New Jersey residents will rise and seek out as many birds as they can find. But this will not be the usual weekend during peak northbound migration when the warblers, vireos, tanagers, flycatchers and many, many others are passing through on their way to breeding territories.

(Margo D. Beller)

This day will be the World Series of Birding, started in Cape May, N.J., in 1984 by Pete Dunne and others as a charitable competition with the aim of finding as many birds as possible in a day and collecting money based on how much is pledged per bird. The winnings go towards bird habitat conservation.

There will be teams starting off at midnight and traveling from High Point at New Jersey's northwestern tip to Cape May in the south. There will be people sitting in one place and tallying what they see and hear. There will be yet others who travel to bird specific areas, such as my home county where Great Swamp, Troy Meadows and Jockey Hollow are located. They'll compete, raise money, then report their findings on eBird in the name of "citizen science."

No thanks.

Charitable as I try to be, I tend to avoid official competitions like this. Too many people zooming around, ticking off birds on a list and trying to find more birds than anyone else. It reminds me very much of the narrative of "The Big Year," a nonfiction book (later made into a movie) describing how three guys competed to get into the record books for seeing the most North American birds in a year. 

This is not birding, this is listing.

I admit to some competitive spirit. If I look at the eBird reports for my county and see things listed in places near me, I'll go out and try to find them - strictly for my satisfaction and not to report to eBird because I don't like counting how many birds I'm seeing. Like ticking off a list without looking at the birds for more than a second and a half, counting how many robins or whatever I'm finding detracts from my enjoyment of being outside with my binoculars.

I also admit to using the Merlin app, when I can get it working, to help me hear and/or identify some of the sounds I hear if they are not familiar to me. I have to take Merlin with more than a grain of salt because it is not always correct in its "suggestions."

World Series of Birding "Big Stay" team at Scherman
Hoffman, 2012 (Margo D. Beller)

I am a Luddite compared to others. Ever since Covid got people outside and noticing the singing birds, birding has become more popular. I am seeing more people when I go out. I am reading more posts on eBird. I wonder how they are finding the birds.

They have help.

We are far beyond the time when all you needed were binoculars and a pair of eyes (and maybe a spotting scope). Besides apps like Merlin there are social media feeds where someone finding a rarity can send out an alert and 100s of people will be at the spot in a matter of minutes. Gadget technology is big, too. Hang a bird feeder with a camera on it that connects to your phone and you can get information on what you are seeing with the push of a button. Field guides? That's so last century!

Every birding organization from magazines such as Birds and Blooms to the National Audubon Society will be more than happy to show you the latest gear including camera attachments, gloves that will allow you to use your phone's touchscreen without removing them and the most effective mosquito repellent.

To me this is a bit much. As I've written before, there are limits to technology.

In years past, when I've seen Pete Dunne in the field, he has his binoculars and his decades of experience to guide him. Too many newbies think they have to become instant experts. When I see them in the field, more often than not they are holding cameras with long lenses rather than binoculars. They are going off the path, bushwhacking, destroying habitat and risking tick bites. 

Pete Dunne at Scherman Hoffman, 2019
(Margo D. Beller)

I can be obsessed about birding at this time of year now that I have the time to rise most weekday mornings and travel to where I (and Merlin) can hear the birds that will soon either be gone or sitting quietly on nests. Seeing what Merlin heard and I didn't can be humbling. It makes me want to listen to the calls more often so I can learn them. In that, I am competing with myself.

So have fun with the World Series of Birding, fellow birders. Raise untold thousands of dollars. Find rarities that may be passing through the state on May 10.

I wish you all luck. But this birder will be back in the field on May 11.

Depending on Myself

It is an unfortunate fact, one I hate acknowledging, that I will no longer see 20 again. Or 30. Or even 50. 

What led me to this reluctant acknowledgement is feeling the pains in my neck and legs after taking long, slow walks outside to find the birds in my area on their way to northern breeding grounds.

Today's Merlin home screen
(RE Berg-Andersson)

Yes, it is spring migration season and every day there are different birds now coming to my feeders that weren't around over the winter - purple finches, chipping sparrows, even white-throated sparrows that may have been intimidated during the winter by all the juncos. Meanwhile, the number of juncos is down as they head north to breed.

My husband (MH) is slowing down and there are many days I can't get him to come birding with me. He is a late riser and his knees are balky. When he does consent to accompany me, he tends to lag behind and depend on me to point birds out rather than using his eyes and ears to help me find them.  

So now that I have the time to do this, most mornings I go birding alone. Until recently, though, I had some help.

I wrote last year about using the free Merlin app created by the birding people at Cornell. Along with my eyes and legs, my hearing has been declining after decades of blaring music through headphones to dull out the noise from commuter trains. The app hears things I don't always hear right away. It gives me something to look for. Yes, it gets things wrong, such as identifying the calling Canada geese overhead as the smaller, darker brant geese. It makes "suggestions" after all.

This is as much technology as I care to use when I go birding. I found Merlin to be a helpful backup -- until it stopped working.

A sighting of that rare bird, MH. (Margo D. Beller)

A couple of weeks ago MH and I went birding, I heard something, I put on Merlin. It shut off. I tried again. It shut off again. MH opened the app on his phone. It crashed. I tried opening it on my phone once we got home. It crashed again.

MH and I uninstalled the app from our respective phones. I looked on some online forums and found others were having the same problem. Had Cornell made some change so it wouldn't work with my phone? I wrote Cornell and never got an answer.

Some people suggested clearing the cache on my phone. Didn't work. I loaded Merlin on my tablet, even adding packages of bird data from way outside my area. It worked on the tablet. I uninstalled Merlin from my phone again and reinstalled it. Same problem.

MH, meanwhile, decided it wasn't worth his trying because he always birds with me and I am the more active searcher. So Merlin is off his phone.

For a couple of weeks I was back to birding the way I once did - depending on my eyes and ears, with maybe some help from MH if he deigned to go out with me. I was still finding things but the searching up and down did a number on my neck, a phenomenon birders call "warbler neck" because these little birds are always moving around high in trees starting to leaf out. 

(RE Berg-Andersson)

Without Merlin I was no longer taking off my gloves so I could carefully pull my phone out of my jacket pocket so as not to lose the list of what Merlin had picked up. I was no longer walking with a phone in my hand, looking at it every few minutes. I began to think I would only use Merlin on the tablet in places where I would really need help, such as during our annual trip to Old Mine Road where the cacophony of calls makes it hard to identify the individual breeding birds. 

Periodically I would try Merlin on my phone. Sometimes it would have trouble finding my location and then crash. Sometimes it wouldn't even get that far. 

I was resigned to depending on myself - bad eyes, ears and legs - to find birds, bothered by thoughts of what I could be missing because the calls were too faint or high in pitch for me to hear. 

This story has a quasi-happy ending. Merlin still does not work consistently. In fact, it has been about as easy to get Merlin to accompany me as MH. I've gotten Merlin to work on my phone after multiple crashes by turning the app on, leaving it alone long enough to load all the things it needs to work and then hitting the record button as a bird sings overhead. But this does not always work. I now have to be patient to use this app, and patience is not one of my usual traits.

So when it comes to technology I've been reminded it is better for me to trust the computer in my brain, enjoy what birds I can find on my own and not fuss about what I can't. 

Rebirth

This is the time of year when I am always amazed my plants have survived the winter, especially the older trees and shrubs in the backyard. The apple tree, lilacs, pear tree and viburnum are leafing. The dogwood is showing buds that will become flowers two years after half of the tree died and had to be cut down. The daffodils, after several false starts when the weather turned cold, have bloomed in profusion. Many of the irises I moved to another plot last year are growing despite chipmunks at first digging them up. 

After the haircut (Margo D. Beller)

As usual in the spring deer found a way to get through a weakness in the netting to eat some of the euonymous bushes as they started to put out fresh growth. So the fence posts were straightened and increased, the netting restrung. Before doing that I hacked the euoymous shrubs back severely. The plants are secure but now I wonder how I'll be able to do maintenance when the daffodils die back in a few weeks.

I have not dealt with putting the canna pots out front yet because we've had weather see-sawing between above and below average temperatures. With the chipmunks in mind I am going to limit what pots I put out front, including any herb or vegetable I may buy to grow.

Finally, I had to give my houseplants a haircut after leaving them untended (except for watering them) all winter. They won't go out to the enclosed porch before Memorial Day, and I plan to be very careful to monitor for any insect invasion, such as last year's fungal gnats.

Before it was brought inside for the winter in 2024.
(Margo D. Beller)

The most problematic, as usual, was the big houseplant.

You'll recall I had allowed this once-small houseplant to get so big it had become very difficult to move in winter, especially up and down the three steps to my front room. Last year I tried leaving it outside but when the wind blew it would fall over, despite its bracing. I moved it inside the porch into the corner where it would get a few hours of sun. Alas, when it got very cold the plant became very stressed. I've never intentionally killed a plant and wasn't about to start. So I brought it inside to the kitchen, but it didn't get any natural light there. I wound up moving it into a corner of my vestibule where it would get some light from the front room.

After several months a strange thing happened: Despite dim light and dry heat, it started growing new leaves for the first time in years.

First that growth was at the top, the new leaves scraping the ceiling. But then the plant started growing from the bottom. Now what to do? Well, when the top leaves started dying en masse, it was easy to decide to use my lopper and chop down what had become an unwieldy tree. With the braces that had held up the plant now gone (and used to reinforce the deer fencing) it was much easier to move the pot to the front room.

Spruce at right, watching the big plant.
(Margo D. Beller)

The other morning I told Spruce Bringsgreen, the blue spruce we planted in 2007, what I had done and why his plantmate would not look the same when back on the porch this year. Last year Spruce had watched over this plant once I moved it inside and fretted about what to do as winter approached.

"That's OK," he said. "I understand why that had to be done. Rather than kill it outright you gave it a new chance to live and grow."

True, I said, and that's what Spring is all about - rebirth.

Saving the Daylight

Daylight time, a monstrosity in timekeeping.

-- Harry S. Truman

At 6 a.m. today, as the sky started to lighten, I went outside to the front yard to listen to the birds. I've been hearing a lot of birdsong lately as the amount of daylight has increased. Once dark by 4:30 p.m., now it is light until after 6 p.m.

In the distance I heard a cardinal - no surprise here. It has been my experience that, except for robins and perhaps a mockingbird, the cardinals are the first to start singing, just before dawn. Then I heard another cardinal singing a bit closer. I went back into the house and continued out the back door. More cardinals singing. All of them are proclaiming their breeding territories for the year - No Trespassing!

NO Trespassing, says the cardinal. (Margo D. Beller)

I put out the feeders and, as I stood on the porch, a cardinal started singing from the apple tree.

A week from today, this scene will be taking place at 7 a.m., Eastern Daylight Time.

I hate Daylight Saving Time (DST). It was not created for early risers. Birders, farmers, people with early work hours - now we are either rising in the dark at our usual time or, if we tend to wake with daylight, we are rising an hour later.

People who like DST are night owls like my husband (MH) and parents who can send their children outside after supper to burn off excess energy. Next week these same parents will be pulling their kids out of bed in the dark to get them ready for school.

I used to think DST was created to allow people in the South to have extended time for evening cookouts. According to what I have read, it was created to conserve energy during World War I, first in Europe and then in the U.S. In January 1974 the U.S. enacted year-round DST during that year's energy crisis, but it proved to be so unpopular it was repealed by the end of the year. 

I prefer the early morning sun. (Margo D. Beller)

When we "spring forward" and "fall back" has changed over the years. I can remember when we turned the clocks ahead in April and turned them back in October. Since 2007 we have turned the clocks ahead the second Sunday in March - less than a week from today - and turned the clocks back the first Sunday in November (Nov. 2 this year). 

The birds, of course, don't have to worry about setting clocks ahead or back. Their day starts at first light and ends at dusk. So the cardinal will sing at the same time, but it will be an hour later on my clock.

No matter when DST happens, it seems to take place just when I finally have enough early daylight to rise and go about my business outside. Then I lose the earlier light for about three weeks. It means going out on the porch later for the sunlight. The longer afternoon light means I have to remember to bring in the feeders at a new time. 

"Gaining" an hour for a day is nice (later this year; for now I lose an hour), but I'd rather we leave the daylight alone.

Cutting the Grass

We had a warm period in late February that melted all the snow and ice, including the hazardous area behind the enclosed back porch that gets little in the way of sun. The melting allowed me to put out feeders for the first time in a week. Birds were singing in profusion and I knew spring would be here soon.

The largest of the three ornamental grasses, October 2023
(Margo D. Beller)

So would the spring chores.

There are certain plants that should be left alone over the winter, and there are plants I don't bother to cut back in autumn because it is tiring to work around, over and behind the deer netting.

Now that I have more time to go birding during the week, I have little inclination to go out on the weekend when plenty of people with kids are at the parks. So on March 1, knowing from the weather forecast the wind would start blowing and the temperature would fall during the day, I went out into the garden. 

There are many chores I do in the spring. One is digging out finished compost, which I do sporadically. (I did it last year.) Another is deadheading the plants I left standing. The most important, however, is cutting back the ornamental grasses. 

Ornamental grasses are wonderful plants. They grow tall and wide and the deer don't eat them because the leaves, at least on the type I have, are thin and spiky. But like all plants, including my beloved daffodils (another plant deer don't eat because all parts are poisonous, including the flowers), when the growing season is done there is foliage to cut back. A lot of foliage.

After a long period of dryness we had rain in November
2024 and the grass went from brown to more of a gold
color not seen well in this photo.
(Margo D. Beller)

I was not ready to start work in the garden but I knew this had to be done because eventually the daffodils and other plants in this particular area were going to start growing. The three grasses I have were pummeled by rain, snow and especially wind. The northwest wind blew hard for much of the winter, another sign of changes in the climate as the Earth's oceans continue to warm.

So I planned to attack the plants from the rear. Except I discovered behind one of them that the daffodils had started growing much earlier than usual, even before the crocus, thanks to the unusual pattern of warm weather than followed this season's very cold winter. I also found the irises I had put here after dividing the ones in the front yard were growing, too. So on this particular grass my strategy had to change. (Getting to the other two to cut them back was easier.)

I was glad to see the plants had survived, tho' disturbed by how early they had shown up. The other week I was walking along one of my usual birding areas, Patriots Path, once the ice had melted and saw a phoebe. This flycatcher, a harbinger of spring migration, should've shown up in mid-March, not Feb. 25. And yet here it was, in an area by the Whippany River where I have seen and heard them before. Now that it has become cold and windy again, will it find the food it needs to survive?

I wondered that about the yard birds, too, when I couldn't risk falling on the ice to put the feeders out (a hungry squirrel that could jump over the baffle was another factor). But they managed and were quickly at the feeders once I put them out.

The largest of the grasses before the cutting in 2024.
(Margo D. Beller)

Back to the grasses. It took about two hours to cut the three of them, the largest of them taking the most time. When I was nearly done with that one the wind picked up strong, forcing me to hold down what I had piled in a large pail for composting until things calmed down. But now you can see the growing daffodils the foliage had covered.

As for the other grass - the lawn - it is still brown from its winter dormancy. Eventually it, too, will green and grow and the area will be filled with the noise and smell of lawn mowers. For now, in the renewed cold, it is quiet out there.

Which reminds me, once again I need a spring haircut, too. 

Grasses cut, daffodils exposed after last
March's cutting. (Margo D. Beller)