More Than Ticks on a List

This post is based on a comment I wrote on the "Speckled Hatchback," Dorian Anderson's post Bicycling for Birds blog.  One of Dorian's thoughts really struck me:

We must remember that birds are ultimately more than ticks on a list. 

 
AMEN!  This is why I consider myself more of a "bird watcher" than a "birder." It is assuredly an unfair generalization, but I view "birders" as people who are all about taking ticks on a list.  "I got the bird" and on to the next one.  I always worry when I hear about birders behaving badly, that too many people do forget this.  When we go out, we need to remember we are in danger of disrupting what that bird is doing--whether it is staking out a territory or eating and resting to recover from the storm that blew it out of its normal range. In other words, we need to respect it as another living being.  I say this despite the fact that I pretty much want to see every species of bird on the planet before mankind makes the earth uninhabitable for them. 

For me bird watching is about the joy of seeing these marvelous creatures going about their business--whether it's the Pileated Woodpecker visiting my backyard suet cage and a snag along my fence line like she did this morning, or me traveling elsewhere to see Black-legged Kittiwakes and Razorbills in their native habitat.

Word of the Day -- real this time

Last Sunday's word was made up, today's, according to dictionary.com is real:

vaulty [vawl-tee] 

adjective 1. having the appearance or characteristics of a vault; arching:

the vaulty rows of elm trees.

While the below image captures the idea of the word, I want to play with it a little.  Couldn't the word vaulty also be used to describe McKayla Maroni?

By Tim Evanson [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)],
via Wikimedia Commons

Incidental Big Year

In my first post of the year I talked about Dorian Anderson's Green Big Year in 2014 (check it out, he's continuing to blog about it!) and Noah Strycker's

Dorian's Green Big Year...courtesy of the man himself

Global Big year this year.  I think I shall do a big year too.  I shall call it the Incidental Big Year!  It could also be, the Lazy Big Year...or the little big year....What do you think?

So here are my rules: I'll go see every bird I can without breaking my duties as cat herder-in-chief,  while holding down a job and without overwhelming my spouse's sense of humor!  To the extent I can travel this year, I'll include bird walks and outings, which is not out of the ordinary.  This year, I'll make a bigger effort to connect with local birders in the places I visit. With local help I'll actually see birds I'd not otherwise see and I'll make new, and hopefully reconnect with old, friends. That last bit was one of the coolest things about Dorian's big year--his interactions with folks he met, and reconnected with, along the way.

That's it for this morning...off to herd the cats!

Word Play -- Word of the Day: "Snuffy"

In this house full of writers, we find that sometimes inventing a new word or re-purposing an old one serves as well or better than existing words to describe an action or situation. The bonus is that making up the new word scratches ye ole creativity urge.

Word for today is "snuffy." As a noun, Snuffy, just as on Sesame Street is short for "snuffleupagus." It becomes the immediate nickname for Po, our food-motivated Tuxedo cat. It is onomatopoeic for the sound that Po makes as he roots through his wet food to find the pieces of dry food that we planted to encourage him to finish the wet.  As a verb, it is the act of both placing the dry pieces in the wet, and it is the act of finding the dry pieces.  BTW for those readers who don't know, "Po" is also a nickname, his given name is "Rascal."

Bonus points: Why "Po?"

Of Big Years and Inspiration

If Dorian Anderson could spend his entire year riding a bike across the country, seeing as many birds as possible, and blogging about it, I should be able to keep a blog going for the entire year of 2015 while going about my regular life!  Too often the last few years I've allowed cat herding, both literally and metaphorically, to get in the way of blogging. Let's see how I do this year!

Dorian's Green Big Year was highly inspiring for me. He set out an audacious challenge for himself and persevered, raising awareness and money for The Conservation Fund along the way.  It impressed me how he managed to keep it up in the face of adversity--whether it was really terrible access to food, gawd-awful head winds, getting hit by a minivan, or seeing too many birds as road-kill.  Furthermore his blog was educational, both through the knowledge that he shared and even by the things he didn't really talk about during the year: the kind of preparation just on the birds alone it takes to pull off his year.  Aspects such as what the migration patterns are, whether a bird will be singing on territory or not when he passes through, and what that song or call is.

This year, another self-proclaimed bird nerd is doing a Global Big Year. Noah Stryker is starting his year off in Antarctica, and like Dorian is going to set out on a generally defined route, rather than the out and back reaction-type travel that makes up many ABA big years. Noah's premise is that birds know nothing about borders, so why should we take them into account? I look forward to following his blog this year--gaining inspiration and learning about birds around the world.

I will add pictures of both when I update this post.  Happy 2015 everybody.

...of the day

On the first day of the new year, we start all over. I ended last year with 140 species of birds in North America.While I didn't have the opportunity to start 2015 off by going birding, I did manage to  watch birds while walking two sets of cats.  Of the 18 species of commoners that I saw today, the Golden-crowned Kinglet wins as most interesting bird of the day.

Happy New Year!

Of Birds and Politics

I have spent the majority of the time on my "vacation" doing physical therapy and home exercises for my shoulder, which has been time consuming but neither exciting nor interesting; watching my backyard birds; and keeping track of the media reports--both social and old media.

First the therapy: mainly it's offset my plans for most birdwatching. I'd hoped to get out to some of the local bird haunts that are not subject to the Federal Government shutdown, like Lake Fairfax, and Riverbend Park.  Great Falls and Dyke Marsh unfortunately were affected by the shutdown. But not being able to hold binoculars to my face for very long raises the priority of the PT!

Onto the birds I have seen.  My "first of season" arrivals in the yard have started.  I've seen a White-throated Sparrow and heard the "tseeep" calls of at least one other. I've seen my first flock of Canada Geese--yes an extremely common bird, but they generally don't fly over my yard, except in the fall. And I saw a Ruby-crowned Kinglet.  I did catch a glimpse of a possible thrush with an eyering in my stand of pokeberries. Unfortunately, when I turned to grab my binoculars, it flew away.  Interestingly either a late-staying Gray Catbird has shown up, or one has stopped over from farther north. Finally, a Northern Mockingbird has started staking his claim--from both the top of my Chimney and the big Virginia Pine in front of our house.  American Crows--which form wintertime murders of thousands of birds and roost nearby have just barely started to form up in family groups. I saw 8 fly over last night.

I also had an unknown hawk come to visit. I neither saw nor heard him.  The explosion of probably Tufted Titmouse feathers near my feeding table was the tell tale sign.  The circle of life gets very sad when you've watched the prey grow up from a new fledgling.

On to politics!  Given the self-inflicted drubbing the Republicans are getting in the polls, I expect to be back in the office on Monday. According to a Wallstreet Journal/NBC poll (even Tea-baggers can't claim that this is liberal media bias) the GOP is (rightfully so, I say) receiving the blame for the shutdown. And furthermore, it is in grave danger of having opened a schism within its ranks that will take a long-time in healing.  The wrinkle here is whether or not Senate Republicans' being fed up with their lower house colleagues' shenanigans and coming up with a competing budget plan will further slow this process or speed it up.

Either way, I will endeavor to keep my blog resurrected!

Sunday Evening Bird Walk

Three of us had a nice walk on Sunday evening on the horse path portion of the Washington and
Old Dominion Trail. The temperature yesterday was pretty warm for the 6th of October. I brought my binoculars, but didn't start logging birds right away because it was so quiet and i had gotten no exercise in days. As we got closer to 630, the birds along the trail started becoming more active.  At first it was the usual dusk birds, Northern Cardinals "cheeping" and Gray Catbirds "meowing" from the stands of poke berry and the invasive honeysuckle.

When an Eastern Towhee started in with his "tu-WEE" call, things started to get interesting. As I stopped to admire the strikingly red berries on a dogwood, an Indigo Bunting  landed. I watched her eat the berries when what I thought was sparrow that I could not identify landed nearby. The bird was plain looking, with no eye-ring, no chest stripes, nor stripes on its head. It flew off before I could get a good enough look at it to make out any other distinguishing field markings. It could very well have been a female Indigo.  Then, that I fired up my e-bird App and started logging birds.

The other highlights of the walk were mostly heard: Pileated Woodpecker and a Barred Owl.  We did see a hawk of some type try to catch a Mourning Dove. It was dusk, so I only got a glimpse of its silhouette. The size differential made me think that it was a buteo of some type, perhaps a young Red-shouldered Hawk.

Forced Fall Vacation Pt 2

Day 4:  Because we had emergency  funds available, we'll not be immediately affected by the furlough--at least financially. We certainly have curtailed our economic activity--sorry Starbucks! At some point, I will go grocery shopping; it will be interesting to see what the list that my spouse hands me looks like.

Day 5:WOO HOO The House of Representatives apparently just voted to give us back pay while Speaker Bonehead tries to keep his job by kowtowing to the Tea Party.

What I did on my Forced Fall Furlough-caused Vacation

 I have long been bemused that my pursuit of a career in public service to my fellow Americans has been twisted by candidates and elected officials alike into a decision that makes me a parasite on the American tax payer.  That is all I am going to say on that because, I don't care to engage in a discussion that will just turn ugly. In what I think will be my copious amount of suddenly free time,  I figured I would try once more to resurrect my blog to pass the time, record and share some greater knowledge for others who might be in the same boat, and exercise my writing muscles because that it is what I do for a living. So here goes:

Day 1 - October 1, 2013:  Started the day with a medical appointment and rolled into work to engage in an "orderly shutdown" for four hours.  Wrapped up my performance evaluation and sent it to my boss--just in case the furlough lasts longer than the deadline for submitting.  The deadline is October 15. Given that the debt ceiling will be reached on the 17th, I have zero confidence that this mess will be cleaned up by then. (Passive voice is convenient because it allows me not to lay the blame where I believe it lies and get me into the discussion I'd rather not have.)  Cleaned up my desk (it's the office of a creative-type if you get my drift) and pulled some tertiary reading materials off the shelf that I have a personal interest in together and did some research on what my financial options are during a furlough.

Day 2 -  October 2, 2013:  Other than starting the day off with some rehab exercises for my rotator cuff, this was a totally wasted day. I felt terrible due to a touchy gut caused by the super anti-inflammatory med I'm taking. I spent the day sleeping, playing Tetris, Words- and Scramble-with-Friends. I did take the tom cats outside for their twice daily romps.  They are confused by my presence.  I felt emotionally bad that my telecommuting wife was busting her tail, while I lolled about.

Day 3 -  October 3: Woke up feeling much better after starting Prilosec and skipping the Voltarin. Started the day off discussing a bunch of issues follow from not knowing what may  looking up what the unemployment insurance options are. OPM's site makes it clear that during a furlough, government employees' unemployment benefits are governed by the state in which their facility is located.  I'm in Virginia, and VEC says I have to be out of work a week before I can file.  It doesn't look like Virginia will pay much, but by the two additional weeks pass by which time I could actually collect anything, every little bit will help.  Hell if this keeps up, 25 years of government service will seem like its been long enough, and I'll probably be checking out all of my options.

The New Birdwatching Year

Just as New Year's is a chance to change bad habits or take care of things that we've procrastinated doing in the past, it is also a chance to start anew on our yearly bird list. I use it to track changes in my backyard visitors, but also to renew my enthusiasm for seeing some of our more common visitors. This year started off with a bang.

This morning, before heading out on a casual bird walk, we peaked out at the feeders and saw a pair of Pileated Woodpeckers (1)visiting our suet station. They are amazing looking creatures! We headed off to lunch at the Old Brogue Pub in Great Falls before hopping over to the C&O canal. Today we decided to hike the eastern portion of the Billy Goat Trail from Carderock to the point where it rejoins the trail. It was a very quiet day on the river--for the birds anyway. The clouds seemed to lend a hush over them. With the time of day, we heard the typical calls of the Chickadees (2) and Cardinals(3). Among the birds we did see were the Belted Kingfisher (4), Turkey Vulture(5), Red-bellied Woodpeckers(6), a number of Canada Geese (7)(of course) and several pairs of Mallards (8). We also saw a group Golden-crowned Kinglets (9) with at least one White-breasted Nuthatch (10) and a Brown Creeper (11). I hadn't seen a Brown Creeper since the one(?) who used to visit my suet feeder stopped coming after the lovely Town of Vienna allowed the near-clear-cutting of three acres of woods to build houses on several years ago. Apparently the Brown Creeper needed those woods more than the real estate market needed the houses...but I digress.

I bagged one new species for my North America List: the Common Raven (12)--I've seen this guy in Ireland and the United Kingdom, but never identified him at home. Moreover, I think I saw a pair of American Wigeons: a pair of ducks in flight that did not look like Mallards, one had some green on his head and both had white patches on the wings. If the male is in breeding colors now, like the Mallard, it might be the bird, but I didn't get a good enough look to be confident enough to add him to my life list.

Other birds of the new year--and also for my backyard, include English House Sparrow(13)--of which I have scads (sigh)--American Crow (14), House Finch(15), Dark-eyed Juncos(16) and Mourning Dove(17). ( I saw 40 on December 30th in my bird feeding areas!)

A Critique of the BBC's Reading List

I received the below on Facebook from my daughter and I have to say it inspired me to both read some more of the books on the list and perhaps I'll review them as well. Meanwhile the list itself is a little...strange. That is of course assuming that it is the original list and has not been corrupted. I suppose...that I could look it up. But where's the fun in that?

The first characteristic of the list that jumps out at me is that Jane Austen and Charles Dickens' books count individually, JK Rowling's, Shakespeare and CS Lewis do not. The latter two do get double credit for one book, (Lion, Witch and Wardrobe is a subset of the Chronicles of Narnia, and by definition Macbeth is one of the complete works of Shakespeare). It shouldn't be snobbishness--because lumping Rowling with Shakespeare and CS Lewis hardly qualifies. It can't be about effort because then Shakespeare's works would definitely need to be separated as well!

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other
book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7. Wuthering Heights -- Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo



31 Read, 10 additional "started"--there are still others that I've read excerpts from. I'll not count those for now. Anyway--Happy turkey day --cause this blog is about Birds too.

In Memoriam -- Part 1

Darby was the runt of the litter. His two brothers, Gandalf and Rascal, were much bigger, but neither tom was particularly aggressive. We adopted the three of them at about eight weeks of age--not knowing that all three were actually tomcats. We only found that out after their first vet trip and also discovered that Darby was determined to be Alpha male. Day after day, he would launch himself at his brothers--attacking from behind boxes, from above while perched on the couch, even directly assaulting them from the front.

His brothers would slam him to the ground and he would immediately jump back up and attack again. They'd slam him back to the floor and stalk off--only to be bowled over yet again as this little ball of fire slammed into them. Alpha status was Darby's destiny.

Darby got sick while a kitten--his ear got infected, and of course he got really bad over a weekend when the high priced emergency clinics were the only vets open. They categorized him as a "white tiger." When we got home, he was almost immediately bestowed with his first nickname: "Tigey-wigey"--borrowing Sid the sloth's nickname for the sabretooth tiger in "Ice Age." Those nights when he was sick, he slept on my chest. He quickly adopted me as his person.

The antibiotics the vet put Tigey on gave him gas--which earned him next nickname--"Farty McFartfart." That little cat could clear out a room! As Darby got better, he developed an interesting trick. He would announce when he was about to do something we would not approve of--such as jumping into the big banana plant in the corner of our breakfast nook, our climbing the entertainment center or the mantle over the fireplace, (or the Christmas tree, or the curtains, or....). We would hear a "brrrrreeeeeee" followed by rapid paws pounding and skittering across the hardwood and tile floors. In human, we were certain he was shouting out "Kowabunga!"

Darby used to answer the phone when ever it would ring--especially as he slept on a basked full of bills and other mail that we kept on the table in the breakfast nook. We lost that battle with "Mr. T" early. Could you resist this face?

One day a little more then two years ago, as we had Darby and the rest of our pride out back, Darby got stung in the face by a bee--his face swelled up. Of course this happened on a Sunday--so we ran to the Hope Center again. The attending vet heard a heart murmur. A trip to the kitty cardiologist confirmed that our little guy had Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy. Dr. Tyrrell told us that Darby could live out his life without feeling too much in the ill-effects department.

Wildflower Blooms

Blooming Columbine at the edge of my bird garden.

Native Eastern Plants-- Black Cherry

The Black Cherry (Prunus serotina) trees that grow along my fence line have provided a wonderful food source for a number of my backyard birds. I believe that these are what has attracted my Scarlet Tanagers, Cedar Waxwings and feeds my regular Robins, Blue Jays.
Several species of butterfly and moth like the Black Cherry as well. Unfortunately, the Eastern Tent Caterpillar is one of them. When I do get infestations, I never use pesticides because both in caterpillar and in moth form, they are food for my birds.

Weed or butterfly host plant?

Many gardeners will recognize this picture of plantain, Plantago. I have allowed this weed to remain in my backyard wildlife habitat because it provides food for the caterpillars of Buckeye butterflies and some moth species. Every gardener seems to love butterflies, yet so many do their best to eradicate almost all of the food for their caterpillars.

I learned about this weed from the book Weeds: Friend or Foe?--An illustrated guide to identifying, taming, and using weeds by Sally Roth. I have the Readers Digest version, published in 2002, the version on Amazon has a second author listed--so this paragraph may not apply to the version there. As a gardener whose ambitions are larger than his time available, and of course as an avid bird watcher, I am constantly looking for shortcuts in what I can skip in my yard and can allow to grow as food sources for my backyard denizens. This book was a godsend to me! But, I do find one major flaw in Ms. Roth's book. She does not distinguish enough between common weeds and invasive species. There are many, such as multiflora rose and japanese honeysuckle that birds and pollinating/nectar drinking insects love, but these plants that crowd out our native flora need to be eradicated if we are to help our native animal species survive in our suburban "ecosystem." See Doug Talamy's book and website Bringing Nature Home for a discussion on just how important native plant species are to our local fauna. I am by no means an absolute purist in my garden when it comes to native --and local plants--but I am slowly working on ensuring that the plants in my backyard do the most to help the animal and insect species that should be here.

Backyard Denizens

More Spring Returns

CHIK-burr, CHIK-burr, CHIK-burr

Yet another bird call that I don't recognize when the songster appears in spring. This one is especially hard for me to remember because I hadn't heard nor seen him in years. As a matter of fact I didn't expect to see my Scarlet Tanager since the Town of Vienna allowed a beautiful three acre parcel of hard woods to be nearly clear cut for eight McMansions a few years ago! I learned a few years ago at the Department of Agriculture's Facility in Greenbelt, that the Scarlet Tanager is believed to need three acres of unbroken woods for each pair. I have to say I am very hopeful that these beautiful birds are adapting to their changing environment and learning to live in hedgerows in the suburbs.

I guess the little guy remembered my black cherry trees because there he was tonight on May 19 at 7:45pm , Chik-burring away. I still didn't recognize who was making the call, but as I scooped up Cardiac Cat and carried him toward the sound, the brilliant red with black wings sitting in our black cherry tree became unmistakable. He flitted off of course well before Cardiac Cat and I could get close enough to get a picture. (We'll discuss in a later post how unsuitable the iPhone is for taking bird pictures--especially of shy ones who prefer the canopy!)

Spring Returns

I'd been hearing a song--witchety witchety witchety witch--for the last several days that, for some reason, I can never remember year to year. It wasn't until this morning that I saw my songstress--a female Common Yellowthroat. This is only the second or third year that we've had these guys visiting our yard.

Rosa Rugosa

A bloom from our hedge of rosa rugosa in our backyard habitat. They didn't do so well until we fenced in the yard a few years ago. The deer were great for encouraging the roses to proliferate. Not so much for encouraging blooms.