where natural history meets art
We hope your final month of 2020 was as easy and comfortable as possible, with good birding, friends near and far, and rich in love.
Decembers are often quite quiet at the Museum and this month’s bird list certainly shows it. Which ones come to your feeders?
Well, we’d hoped to be open on weekends on November, but due to more coronavirus cases, we went straight to “by appointment” only. A bit disappointing for us and (we hope) you! Still, we kept refilling the museum feeders and watched birds when we took a break from prepping the next newsletter and other behind-the-scenes things.
Which of these birds have been to your feeders?
Continue reading “Through the Window: November 2020”
Who went running in the Race Around Birds? Did you see any birds while you did? It’s a hard race they say*, and pretty tricky to bird at the same time! So we offered a walking option, and two of the walkers observed a Hermit Thrush, and three walkers spotted a Ruffed Grouse.
Take another walk this month: it’s stick season now and although activity is low, visibility through the forest is good. Or stay cozy at our viewing window…you might see some of the ones we did last month.
September’s glorious for surprising visitors to the feeders. Or near—but not at—the feeders, as the Nashville Warbler. It’s been dry, so having water source(s) near your feeders is essential.
August seems to have vanished rather quickly! Rather like the bird seed does sometimes….
On a warm day, we sometimes (though not often) see Turkey Vultures overhead at the Museum. If it rains, well, we can come in and look up anyway, practicing our identification of raptors by plumage.
And we can also look out through our viewing window…
June is unbelievably beautiful in Vermont. To add to our happiness, we have been able to open the Museum Wednesdays-Sundays, 10-4, which is so far working well. To add to the beauty of late spring around us, we’ve got a new art show, all about borders and boundaries, edges and exchanges.
Stop by to wander our trails, tour the show, and enjoy the respite offered by super-relaxed birding. What could be easier than sitting at our viewing window (or in our bird blind, or best yet, in the walk-in treehouse) and watching for birds, butterflies, and other fellow beings?
This exhibit of Eastern Phoebes nesting sure puts us in mind of spring. And spring truly is here: a bit of mud, early leaves, returning migrants.
We look forward to the days when the dangers of this coronavirus are past or at least well-mitigated, and we can offer early morning bird walks again. In the meantime, please enjoy our records from our view-through-the-window, and take a turn on our trails yourself, if you can.
Well this was not the March we expected. Admittedly, the birds here seem quite unaffected.
We did keep observing birds from our windows and cams, just with fewer human friends (in person). Welcome back, Common Grackle and Song Sparrow!
We’ve rearranged our schedules and updated some policies to deal with COVID-19. Details soon! The birds are being fed less often, and we’d already changed what and where we’d fed them. (We do that each spring anyway, because the forests in Huntington do have bears and we’d prefer only smaller mammals take advantage of what the birds leave.)
Sometimes, a month with nothing unusual is really quite comforting.
But that was just old friends who are birds! For our human friends, in February we also shared programs about Kinglets, opened up for the Great Backyard Bird Count, painted signs, installed our Little Free Library, played Wingspan at the Museum, and hopefully inspired art! Of course, you’d have to look through the window the other wayto see most of those things (or come inside).