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