Boids

For Jim Wolcott and his binoculars, with thanks.

Sixty-thirty, Saturday morning, and I’m out on the front porch with my coffee a little earlier than is usual for me.  Most mornings at this time the dew’s still on the furniture, but it cooled way down overnight and I guess the breeze has blown all the moisture out of the air.  Up in my browser’s toolbar, Yahoo’s telling me it’s fifty-four degrees here, although I’m not sure where Yahoo thinks here is.  But fifty-four is about what it feels like.  I’m wearing a heavy sweatshirt, my heaviest sweatshirt, the one Uncle Merlin sewed for my birthday a few years back, with the embroidered picture of Chatham Light on the back, and I can’t claim to be warm.  The chill’s not enough to drive me back inside but it’ll probably set me off on a walk soon enough.  And I know just where I’m walking to, the new coffee shop in town.  I’d be there already but they don’t open until seven on Saturdays.  They’ll have to learn if they want my more of my business.

Meanwhile, here I sit, on dry furniture, surveying our still so far empty neighborhood.   Not even the dog owners are out yet.  It’s just me and the birds---one fewer bird than there had been.  I drove off a cardinal when I took possession of the porch.  I watched him for a little while from the doorway before I came out here.  He was hopping back and forth from the tabletop to the porch rail to the gutter with no discernable purpose, looking as though he couldn’t make up his mind about the whether to stick around, as if he’d been searching for a particular house and couldn’t decide if this was the right address.  If I thought he had a real use for the porch I would have felt more reluctant to dislodge him.  I stepped out the door.  He flew off to the nearest telephone wire.  I invited him back but he flew off in a huff.

Groucho:  Don’t go off in a huff.  Stick around for a bit and go off in a minute and a huff.

Not much other interesting bird activity to report.  The blue jays are being noisy and there’s a nuthatch laughing about something, but nuthatches are always laughing about something.  And it’s not like they’re easily amused.  More like they’re mad, like scientists, march hares, hatters, and iPad early adopters mad.

“More aps!  More aps! Ah ha ha ha! Ha ha ha!”

Getting on towards seven.  Going to take the netbook with me down to the coffee shop and continue this post from there.  Hold on.

Eight-fifteen and I’m back.  Didn’t get in any writing at the coffee shop.  Owner and I got to talking.  Proof I was there on your right.  You’ll notice I brought my binoculars along.  I had half an idea I would take my coffee and head out on the rail trail and pretend I was taking part in the World Series of Birding. If I was really on Cape May and competing I’d be eight hours behind the other teams.  Some of them have been out since midnight.  You wouldn’t want me on your birding team anyway.  I’m worse than an amateur.  I’m too easily impressed by the most common species.

If I was competing in the World Series I’d walk straight into a swamp trying to get a closer look at an egret.  If I spot anything you wouldn’t normally see at your backyard feeder, a rose-breasted grosbeak, for instance, or an indigo bunting,  species real birders put on their life lists as gimmes when they start their ornithological careers, right after robins and crows, I carry on like I think I’m Darwin in the Galapagos.

Yesterday evening on the way home from picking up pizza I nearly drove us into a ditch trying to catch a second look at the red-bellied woodpecker that swooped across our path and landed on a tree by the roadside.  We have downy woodpeckers and hairy woodpeckers and flickers galore around here.  Redheaded woodpeckers tend to avoid the heart of town, but they’re out there in the orchards and mining the dead trees in the windbreaks along the pastures and corn fields.  Red-bellied woodpeckers, however, make only cameo appearances.

Still, they’re not rara avis enough to be worth breaking an axle for or, as sixteen year old Ken Mannion who was riding shotgun pointed out, splattering pizza and wings all over the car seats and ruining family movie night.

My old Audubon Field Guide, twenty-two years old now, same age as my binoculars, says that the red-bellied woodpecker is “chiefly” a Southeastern bird but it ranges farther north and “has expanded its breeding range in recent years to New York and southern New England.”  In the two decades since I bought the book red-bellied woodpeckers have done some more expanding.  Cornell University’s All About Birds website calls them “common in many Eastern woodlands and forests.”

Nine now.  Time to get the day underway.  That cardinal never came back but one of our catbirds just lit in the rhododendron and glared at me with a look that suggested that if he’d had a clipboard I’d have been written up on the spot for surfing the web on company time.

Photo of northern cardinal courtesy of Animal Planet’s Wild Bird Guide.

Comments

[Linkmeister]

The catbird probably has a tiny netbook and is writing up a blog post about you right now.

And get that coffee cup away from your keyboard!

[Lance]

Link, you're probably right, but don't you mean nestbook?

[Linkmeister]

"I refrained," he said with dignity.

[actor212]

Yahoo’s telling me it’s fifty-four degrees here, although I’m not sure where Yahoo thinks here is.

For my Delaware county house, Yahoo gives me weather in Binghamton. Which is sort of accurate, except that Binghamton is a good five hundred feet below my altitude so is usually milder and less windy, which really only sort of helps me.

And wouldn't "apps" for birds be "twigs"?

[muddy]

I tea-ed my keyboard this week. Took it all apart but it had gotten into the wiring.

There has been a lot of bird mating activity here (VT) the last few weeks. Well that, or there is some kind of war on. The mourning doves go at it in threes, slapping their wings on each others as they go from tree to tree, it is very loud and violent sounding, like hands clapping hard. I keep expecting someone (somebird?) to fall down injured. Two grackles were doing it sedately on the grass. Well, sedate in action but not in noise. There is hourly bird porn here, and I keep my pocket sized field glasses with me so that I can get a good view. Nature lover or pervert, you decide.

I have been leaving dryer lint on the porch and it always gets stolen, it makes a cushy nest. I remember when my son was in h.s. and he had very long hair that was dyed a different color every few weeks. One day when getting into the car he stopped to pull the hair out of his brush, and tossed a big wad of multicolored hair onto the driveway. In the fall I saw a nest with this multicolored wad making up a good third of the nest.

Our spring this year they say is 20 days early. But there was a killing frost on the apple blossoms, who were fooled. Time will tell if there is a crop at all. Macintoshes were especially hard hit as they are early.

But there are a lot more flowers on my strawberries than usual, and I am getting a little tired of asparagus I have gotten so much. Oh poor me.

[mac macgillicuddy]

Since we're going that migratory route, a boid with a cell phone would have a boid droid.