We’ve restarted our Early Birder Morning Walks, and Shirley Johnson (Board President and Expert Birder) led the first one. She was kind enough to provide us a list of what the walkers observed on Sunday May 12. How many of these do you recognize by sight or sound? Come on the next walk and practice!
Wood Duck
Great Blue Heron
Mourning Dove
Ruby-throated Hummingbird
Yellow-bellied Sapsucker
Downy Woodpecker
Great-crested Flycatcher
Blue-headed Vireo
Blue Jay
American Crow
Black-capped Chickadee
Brown Creeper
Red-breasted Nuthatch
White-breasted Nuthatch
Winter Wren
Veery
Hermit Thrush
Northern Parula
Blackburnian Warbler
Pine Warbler
Black and White Warbler
Common Yellowthroat
Louisiana Waterthrush
Ovenbird
Rose-breasted Grosbeak
Song Sparrow
Red-winged Blackbird
Join us next time, for an early morning ramble in the Birds of Vermont Museum’s forest and meadows every Sunday from May 12 through June 30. Enjoy the start of the day with us, birds, and other woodland inhabitants. Walks are led by experienced birders familiar with Vermont birds. Come to several walks to hear the changes in who calls and when!
Finish the walk with bird-friendly coffee at the viewing window inside the Museum.
Bring binoculars and good walking shoes. Park at 900 Sherman Hollow Road, in the Museum parking lot.
Appropriate for: Adults and older children • Free, donations welcome.
Pre-registration is helpful but not required. Call 802 434-2167 or email museum@birdsofvermont.org
Guest post by Kari Jo Spear, Photographer, Novelist, and Daughter of Bob Spear
Addict
Main Entry:1 ad*dict
Pronunciation:*a*dikt
1 : to devote or surrender (oneself) to something habitually or excessively
I sat in my health class, knowing I was doomed. I had all the symptoms: obsession, distraction, longing… I began to feel huge tears welling up inside me. Life as I’d known it before was over.
My teacher led me into the hall. “What’s the matter, dear?” she asked, putting her arm around me.
“I couldn’t help it!” I sobbed. “It’s not my fault! He made me do it!”
She looked very concerned. “Who did, dear?”
“My – my father!”
“What – did he do?”
“He – he gave me – binoculars!”
———————————————————-
It happened on my birthday. We were sitting around the kitchen table, and there were two gifts from my father before me. Both were carefully wrapped in the comic pages from the newspaper—he and Gale were recycling before recycling was popular. Two innocent packages that were about to change my life forever.
Kid fashion, I opened the biggest one first. As the paper fell away–the last moments of my youthful innocence–I saw that I held a box containing a brand new pair of Nikon binoculars.
I looked up. I’d been hoping for books.
“They’re the best,” my father said excitedly. “Small and light, but with great optics. 8×24. That means they magnify eight times the naked eye. Twenty-four is the size of the objective lens. That means they have a superior light gathering ability.”
He must have registered my lack of enthusiasm. “They’re what everybody has now,” he added.
I was pretty sure none of the kids at school had Nikon 8x24s with superior light gathering ability. He must mean his birding buddies–folks who wore mud boots year round, baggy clothes with lots of pockets, dorky hats, and were always talking about their all-important life lists.
“You’ll need this, too,” my father went on, pushing the other present toward me.
It was a book, but it wasn’t fiction. It was Birds of North America.
“Wow,” I said.
He chose to interpret that as excitement. “Figured you were old enough,” he said. He dug my new binoculars out of their Styrofoam packaging as though he was dying to get his hands on them.
“This is where you focus,” he said, like I didn’t know what the knob in the middle was for. I’d played with his binoculars when I was younger. I liked looking through a lens backward—it made everything seem really far away. My father carried his binoculars with him wherever he went. I’d never seem him use them when he was actually driving, but I wouldn’t put it past him if something for his life list flew over.
He was waiting for me to do the obvious, so I picked them up. Well, I thought, this wasn’t the end of the world. I got dragged on bird walks all the time, and it would be good not to have to stand around getting cold or swatting bugs, pretending I could see what everybody was so excited about. At least the binoculars were light, so my neck wouldn’t break. I raised them and turned to the window where a bunch of chickadees swarmed like bees around a feeder.
I looked, focused, and then—holy cow! I could see their eyeballs! And all the little feathers on their heads stood out. Their sharp beaks dug into the seeds they anchored to the branches of a lilac with their feet.
My father chuckled. I lowered my binoculars quickly. Ten minutes had gone by. Huh.
Then my father pushed the bird book toward me. “This is where you mark your life list,” he said, pointing out pages and pages of bird names in the back. Each name had a little box in front of it to be filled it.
Like I was going to start a life list. The kids at school would never let me live it down. Not that anyone knew what a life list was, anyway.
“You’ve already got a bigger one than a lot of people,” my father said, tapping his finger part way down a page. “Start here. You’ve seen Common Loons when we’ve been canoeing.”
“You mean, I can count species I’ve already seen?”
“Sure.” He pushed a pen at me.
Dutifully, I filled in the box next to Common Loon. “Hey, can I count the Red-throated Loon we saw on Chincoteague?” I could remember him dragging my attention away from the wild ponies for that.
“Of course.”
I filled in that one, too, and then flipped back a few pages. “I’ve seen lots of gulls.”
“Ah, but were they Ring-billed, or Herring?”
I didn’t know gulls came in different flavors. According to the book, there were at least half a dozen in Vermont regularly!
“Burger King parking lot,” my father said. “We’ll eat there tonight and you can get two, maybe three species of gulls.”
Well, I wasn’t going to say no to French fries.
“And look! There are sparrows under the lilac. You can get two–no three–species right now!”
I had my binoculars up before I’d even realized it. When I looked down a few minutes later, my father had my book open to the sparrow section. He had a grin on his face.
Kari Jo Spear‘s young adult, urban fantasy novels, Under the Willow, and Silent One, are available at Phoenix Books (in Essex and Burlington, Vermont), and on-line at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Who hasn’t looked out the kitchen window this month and felt surprise at the sight of plump black-capped chickadees and tufted titmice on low, nearby branches? We may wonder why these birds look so fat in winter’s wind and cold. While many of their feathered neighbors head south for the months of fall and winter in response to the lack of available food such as worms, flying insects, and nectar-rich flowers, birds that live in Vermont year-round are well adapted to dealing with the cold and snow.
Birds are equipped to take advantage of certain elements in their habitat that may provide shelter. In addition, birds have the capacity to lower their activity levels and rate of metabolism to regulate body temperature and save energy. We all know that feathers are important, unique, avian structures. Not only are feathers critical to the achievement of flight, but their colorful patterning functions as a form of communication for birds of the same and other species. Just as important, feathers perform a lifesaving function in frigid temperatures. Special muscles attached to a bird’s feathers allow the bird to raise a network of feathers in creating protective air pockets that keep heat close to the body and cold blocked out. Remember that plumped up bird sitting on the clothesline in February? She is keeping warm by keeping insulated.
We often spy a bird standing on one leg with the other pulled up under its body or the bird’s head tucked under one shoulder wing. These postures are behavioral adaptations for keeping vulnerable parts of the body warm. Some birds reduce heat loss from their legs and feet by reducing blood flow to the lower legs and feet (regional hypothermia). Tendons comprise much of a bird’s foot with minimal nerve and vascular tissue so blood flow is directed to a bird’s core when it is trying to conserve heat. Arterial blood vessels pumping warm core blood mesh with veins carrying cool blood from cold extremities (countercurrent exchange), thus circulating warmer blood around vital organs.
Shivering is a phenomenon we all know from personal experience. Humans are not the only animals capable of shivering. Birds employ rapid muscle contractions to generate heat, especially during nighttime sleep.
During cold nights, many birds such as the black-capped chickadee and golden-crowned kinglet are able to enter into a state of torpor wherein they can lower their body temperature (normally about 104 degrees Fahrenheit down to about 86 degrees) to a point where they will conserve energy and stretch their fat reserves from the daily food intake (10% above normal body weight) to support them through the night.
Favorable overnight shelters must be sufficiently compact and secure to protect a bird from harsh wind and frigid temperatures. From tree cavities to low conifer canopies or tangled vines, many birds find space to survive the night, some even huddling with kin from the same species. Winter roosting boxes constructed by local bird fans show a distinct feature regarding the entrance hole. The roost box orients the opening at a lower front corner (as opposed to an entrance at the front top used in spring nesting boxes). With heat retention the primary goal for a roosting bird, simple physics and logic agree that warmer air given off by a sleeping bird will rise to the top of the box, the same area in which the bird is resting against the back wall’s wire grid. One would hope birds have been able to locate natural shelters with the same layout.
Ruffed grouse are locally-common, ground- nesting, game birds. With autumn transitioning to cooler days, the feet of ruffed grouse undergo modifications for winter. Horny, comb-like scales develop along the edges of the grouse’s toes enlarging the surface area of the bottom of the feet. This adaptation enables the bird to walk along the top of the snow and so, conserve energy. In extreme weather, ruffed grouse will dive into snow cover that is at least 10” in depth, to survive the night in their sheltering tunnel.
Observant and enterprising humans have taken a page from bird adaptations to the cold. Carving out snow caves for camp shelters, bundling up in down parkas, and strapping on snowshoes for efficient trekking all enable us to conserve energy and make the most of winter in these great outdoors.
Post by Allison Gergely, Museum Educator at the Birds of Vermont Museum. This article will also appear in Vermont Great Outdoors Magazine, a digital publication.
Guest post by Kari Jo Spear, Photographer, Novelist, and Daughter of Bob Spear
One summer when I was eight or nine years old, my father decided to give carving lessons. About a dozen people signed up, mostly teachers who knew him from the Audubon Society. But there were three people there who weren’t teachers–my mother, our eleven-year-old neighbor, and me. We met every Tuesday night in my father’s den. It was supposed to be a relaxed, casual gathering of people sitting in a circle making piles of shavings on the floor while they created a thing of beauty out of basswood as my father circled among them, offering his expert and benign advice.
Instead, it turned into a pain-filled bloodbath that caused me so much trauma that I have not even carved a jack-o-lantern since.
Guest post by Kari Jo Spear, Photographer, Novelist, and Daughter of Bob Spear
When I was a little kid, I had no idea my father would one day have his own museum. I didn’t even know he carved birds. I just knew that he spent a lot of time down in his den, sitting in an old, brown, leather rocking chair with wide wooden arms, making a huge pile of shavings on the floor in front of him.
I loved the shavings. They came in all kinds of interesting shapes. Some were short and flat, some were long and twisting. No two were just alike. I would sit on the floor and make jewelry out of them — the long, curly ones made good earrings, and the shorter, curly ones could be hooked together for a bracelet. Some even curled around my fingers for rings. The flat shavings lined up to become roads or fences for my imaginary animals. And if I ever needed one of a certain shape or size, I just had to describe it, and my father would whittle off what I needed. The block of wood in his hands was not remotely interesting, not compared to the ever-growing pile of shavings. If I thought about the block of wood at all, I thought he was carving it up just to make toys for me. Continue reading “The Bird Carver’s Daughter (Part 1: The Early Years)”
Visitors often ask us what we feed the birds. We currently have several feeding locations: the ground (including up on some rocks), crabapple trees, and elevated seed and suet feeders. We also hang oriole and hummingbird feeders in summer.
On the ground, we sprinkle kernel corn and mixed seeds, to attract turkeys, sparrows, juncos, blackbirds, and others. Not only do we sprinkle this by the viewing area, but in the summer Bob scatters corn by the pond for resident and visiting waterfowl (although the turkeys appreciate it too).
The crabapple tree produces small, cheery-sized apples, which attracts grouse and many of the smaller birds who also visit our feeders. This tree is visible in the photo below, in the background behind the feeders. There are other crabapples and feral apples on the property (that’s another post, someday).
The hummingbird feeders are hung just outside the viewing window and another outside the front door, but those are removed for the winter. We usually see hummingbirds during the first week of May, and they typically leave the first week in September. We do keep the feeders up through most of September, to support those migrating from points north.
Our upper feeders hold (generally) black oil sunflower seed, sunflower chips, mixed seeds, thistle, and suet. These attract a wide variety of birds, from doves to jays, grosbeaks to finches, woodpeckers, nuthatches, and many more. We hang a jelly feeder for orioles in the summer also. Check out our birds at the feeder posts for records of what we’ve seen when (a click on those post titles will take you to the posts and any pictures as well).
Our webcam shows a few of our upper feeders; this image is from a sunny morning in November 2010.
Four Feeders (visible with web cam), food types labeled. The crabapple tree is the red-dotted one in the background behind the mixed seed feeder.
Our elevated feeders–the ones in the photo–are mounted on a 4″-diameter steel pole, 8 feet above the ground. The pole is set in concrete, and has a baffle beneath. We grease the pole every now and then. Most feeders are hung above the cross-bar part of the pole, although occasionally we will hang a feeder below.
Why all the elevated infrastructure? In a word, bears.
It is recommended that people in bear country not feed birds when bears are awake, especially early in the year when they are just awakening and are hungry after hibernation. For us in Vermont, this is roughly April 1 through November 1. However, as a Bird Museum, we also want to attract birds so visitors can enjoy them as we do, not to mention learning about and from them. Thus: tall, greased poles than black bears can’t knock over. (They have tried…)
Possibly a Rusty Blackbird (but not in fall plumage?) or Common Grackle (but that tail is too short?)
Can you help with this bird? It has features of a Rusty Blackbird and of a Common Grackle according to our research in Sibley’s and the National Geographic field guides, and our experienced birders Bob Spear and Gale Lawrence.
The photos were taken on a rainy day (October 29) through our viewing window, so they are a bit low-light and there are occasional water drops.
You can click on the images in the slideshow below to see five different pictures (including a bigger version of the one to the left).
The Christmas Bird Count isn’t the only citizen science activity that the Museum does. We do Project Feeder Watch, too. It makes for a very pleasant lunchtime: good food and a viewing window (today we saw our first Wild Turkey and Tufted Titmouse of the month). Many of you with feeders at home or work can participate. You can sign up at any time. Here’s an overview from a recent Cornell Lab of Ornithology‘s e-newsletter:
Project FeederWatch
The 2009-10 season of Project FeederWatch begins November 14, though you can sign up at any time. FeederWatchers keep track of their birds through the winter and report their tallies each week. This helps scientists track changes in winter bird populations from year to year.
To learn more and to sign up, visit the Project FeederWatch website. New participants receive a kit with a handbook, a bird-identification poster, calendar, and instruction booklet. There is a $15 fee ($12 for Lab members) to help cover the costs of materials and participant support. If you live in Canada, please visit our partner, Bird Studies Canada, or call (888) 448-2473.
