where natural history meets art
April is upon us! You know what that means: hiccuping weather. Winter today, spring tomorrow, and a whole lotta mud, especially on the roads. Drive with care, especially if you’re birding at the same time. (We recommend pulling over. I mean, really.)
What? It also means returning species? You better believe it. What’s your favorite harbinger of spring?
So this is the second time we’re posting this month’s entry, because Things Happened (not caused by us) at our host and our site had to be reset to a backup version. Anything we added or edited after that date went “poof”! Eeek.
However, we now have even more frequent backups (lesson learned!)… but I can’t remember much about February! Of course, we did keep the bird list record, so there’s that. Also, if you run a website using anything like wordpress or joomla or squarespace or such, please keep your plugins and site software up-to-date. It’s good for all of us. Go get your updates and backups scheduled and running… then get outside and check out the birds! You deserve it.
It’s pretty quiet this month for the birds, but we’ve had some great school groups and our It’s A Bird’s Life talks for 2019 started up. Continue reading “Through the Window: January 2019”
We hope you are enjoying the turning of the year, by light and by calendar. We often find winter refreshing, an opportunity for useful reflection and a chance to plan and prepare.
Can’t do that all day though, so we turn to our feeders and see who else is here. In December, that included… Continue reading “Through the Window: December 2018”
November has been a little surprising, as we’ve gotten rather more snow than usual. Puts us in mind of winter birds, instead of fall….
So which ones have been around?
October is great, because it’s the month of the Big Sit!. That’s a day when we sit around with Team Loonatics and look for birds. They do all the hard work: cooking, listing, watching, identifying. We host them and are happy. Their list of birds this year doesn’t quite match our viewing window list (below), since we can’t always see from inside what they see from outside. It’s great to see and hear them all.
Some of the more northerly species are returning! Continue reading “Through the Window: October 2018”
Let’s get ready to… MIGRATE! Every body is stocking up, either because they’re getting ready to launch themselves south or preparing for winter. Who’s getting ready? These birds! Continue reading “Through the Window: September 2018”
It was a bit of a quiet month, but we might also have been so busy that we didn’t take enough notes while indoors? Outdoors was fantastic…
Seen from the Viewing Window (or nearby) and recorded:
A warm and muggy month! Good for raising nestlings? Thanks to the sharp and patient eyes of one of our interns, we saw a few birds that are rarely spotted in our feeder area (although they can be heard in the nearby forest canopy on some of our bird walks).
Early birders continued their weekly walks this month. It’s such fun to go out with them or hear their stories afterward; each month is different. Those lists are generally recorded over on eBird. From the windows, we stick with the more well-recognized feeder and forest edge birds. Even here, there are often stories to be discovered. Continue reading “Through the Window: June 2018”