In the bleak midwinter

Here's what you get in the winter:  shrunken horizons.  When the Mystic freezes over, all the waterbirds, of whatever species, are forced into the narrowing patches of open water.  That's how you get ten hooded mergansers in a hole the size of a tea table.  The rains of the past few days may have opened up more water, but last week when it was still cold, there was an incredible profusion of birds in a bit of open water near the Route 28 bridge  -- swans and gulls and geese and coots and a half dozen species of ducks.  Worth a look (though it can be a bit murderous on that bridge when the wind is up).

Happy Halloween!

Yeah, late, but whatever. This is as good a topical Halloween picture as I have, so up it goes -- a kinglet looking both crazed and menacing. The other week there was a little migrating flock of these maniacs on the banks of the Mystic. They're a sign that winter is nigh. Practically all the summer birds are gone (still a few cormorants around as of last week), while the winter birds (juncos et al.) are beginning to move in.

The main interest in this in-between season is provided by waterfowl. On the Mystic last week I saw a number of ducks -- mallards, of course, but also a gadwall and an American black duck, plus a trio whose identity continues to elude me. Also on view, some coots and a few pied-billed grebes, though no mergansers yet.

Reflections on the century

Friends, there it is, the 100th species on my Somerville list:  the swamp sparrow. When I last wrote about the state of the species list, in February of this year, I had 71 species on the list.  At that time, I reckoned it would take me another six years to reach my goal of 100.  Instead, it took me not much longer than six months.  (And in fact, since I got to 100 with my dear friend the swamp sparrow, I've actually gotten three species more -- belted kingfisher, pied-billed grebe, and Cooper's hawk, plus eastern wood-peewee, misclassified earlier.)

So what to think about this?  Does it turn out that Somerville is actually a birder's paradise?  Even though, according to the Charles River Watershed Association, fully 77% of Somerville is paved over?

Well, the satellite doesn't lie.  There is precious little green in Somerville (and ironically enough, the largest green patch on this map has since been paved).  Here's a data point to consider:  at Mt. Auburn Cemetery (visible a bit below Fresh Pond on the lower left), there have been 218 species recorded, according to eBird.  It's nice and green there.  But it also has to be said that people -- and competent people at that -- have been looking much harder and longer in Mt. Auburn than they have in Somerville.  So forgive me if I think that 100 (or 104, really) isn't too disgraceful, given the material I have to work with.

In other words, while Somerville might look entirely hopeless from a birding perspective, it actually isn't. Its saving graces number no more than two, but they're important.

The first is the Mystic.  Degraded as this river is, and though mostly man-made in its current form, it still offers aquatic life, animal and vegetable, on which a certain number of birds depend.  And, because in Somerville the Mystic has both a freshwater and a saltwater piece, it serves two different bird populations, both of which have a large migratory component.  So as birds move south, or range up and down the coast in winter, the Mystic offers a sheltered stopover where they can rest and feed.  Further, the fringe of vegetation on the river bank, though rarely more than ten yards wide, gives shelter to a surprisingly large range of birds -- particularly various species of native sparrows.

The second saving grace is the migrant-trap effect.  Because Somerville, and the adjoining towns, are so paved, the few spots of green tend to concentrate migrants as they pass over.  This phenomenon is the secret to why Mt. Auburn sees so many species; but it's true for us as well, though to a much smaller extent. Prospect Hill, both the park and people's yards adjoining it, is the salient example of this phenomenon in Somerville.  The bike path, to a limited extent, has the same function, as does Alewife Brook.

Now, don't think I'm talking up Somerville as a birding destination.  It just isn't, particularly since within five miles of Somerville there are a number of vastly more plausible and rewarding birding destinations.  But for those of us who live here, there's something to be said for appreciating what we've got.

And what we've got, at the current hour, is 104 species.

The rowan stripped bare by her thrushes even

Around here, we see winter in and out the same way -- with thrushes.  Swainson's thrush, seen here, is not one of our usual clients.  Discounting the robins, the thrushes we see in bulk are hermit thrushes, and they tend to arrive earlier, and leave later, than other migrants.  By the time they get here -- October, mostly --  there will be no berries left on the mountain ash; the robins will have eaten them all.  This Swainson's was sharp enough to arrive before the buffet closed.  The hermit thrushes will have to eat something else.

I've seen a few other odd migrants pass through -- a redstart, a phoebe.  Keep your glasses nigh... there'll be more.

Somerville beach

It is a fact not widely appreciated, but Somerville has a bit of seacoast.  From the Amelia Earhart Dam to the T maintenance yard, a hundred-odd yards, the water is more sea than river.  How do we know?  Because the water tastes of salt, and the creatures in it are brinier than they are upstream.  Here, for example, is a Somerville hermit crab (sporting a Somerville barnacle), captured just under the railway bridge:

And so, as a coastal town, however nominally, we have a right to a certain number of shorebirds, such as the least sandpiper shown above.  But as it happens, the shorebirds are much more attracted to the mats of water chestnuts in the fresh water upstream -- a feature the authorities abhor to such an extent that they have employed mechanized harvesters to uproot it.

Recent weeks have seen significant numbers of waders there, not just the least sandpipers, but spotted sandpipers...

and lesser yellowlegs:

Waxwings and water chestnuts

The water chestnut is an invasive species hereabouts, choking ponds and waterways like the Mystic.  It's expensive and laborious to remove, and always comes back.  But the cedar waxwings, bless their hearts, love the stuff.  It makes huge rafts, rigid enough to land on, and contains something that they go crazy for.  I have no idea what it is, whether animal or vegetable.  This last week (and maybe longer, for all I know), waxwings have been present in big numbers on the Mystic -- more than I've ever seen in one place. A hundred at least.

And speaking of the Mystic, the path that runs from the dam up to the boathouse continues to get a makeover. They've somewhat unwisely planted much of it in grass.  I guess they just love the Canada geese that much. Anyway, the other day they had the sprinklers going, and one sprinkler head drew an unusual assemblage of birds:

That's a starling at top, a robin at left, and in the middle, red-winged blackbird and a yellow warbler.  There was in fact a pair of these warblers there, which is interesting, because it says to me they're probably nesting in the vicinity -- and if so, that's the first pair of warblers I've ever known to nest in Somerville.

Carolina wren, plus a fish

Most birds I encounter here can be categorized in one of two ways:  either they live here, or they visit on a more or less predictable schedule.  The Carolina wren is one of the exceptions.  They appear and disappear erratically, mostly in summer and fall, and never in winter, though they're supposedly a year-round resident of these climes.  As to habitat, my Aubudon bird app claims "woodland thickets, ravines, and rocky slopes covered with brush."  Isn't that just Somerville in a nutshell.

Surprisingly, they're the most common wren I see.  I've seen other wrens sporadically, but it's a bit mystifying that house wrens aren't common nesters here.  After all, while we're short of woodland thickets and ravines, we do have quite a few houses.

But enough about wrens.  Here's a chickadee pretending to be a fish:

Warbler wrapup, 2013

It's now pushing July, and the warblers have been gone for nearly a month, but I've been so busy I haven't had a chance to tabulate them.

But here, finally, is what I've got -- 13 species, as follows, with the number of each sighted:

• American redstart, 2
• Black-and-white, 6
• Blackpoll, 2
• Black-throated blue, 2
• Cape May, 2
• Common yellowthroat, 12
• Magnolia, 8
• Nashville, 3
• Northern parula, 4
• Ovenbird, 3
• Palm, 1
• Yellow, 9
• Yellow-rumped, 9

All of these species are depicted in the photo mosaic above, kindly put together by my father.  (And just to fill out the grid, there are a couple of warblers in there I wasn't able to identify as to species.)  All were seen between the fifth and 30th of May, with sightings every day until the last week, where there was a gap of several days.  The common yellowthroat was our winner this year, with sightings on 12 different days.  While sightings were fairly well distributed throughout the month, May 10th represented a definite high point.  That day brought in not only a wave of different warbler species, but the catbirds and chimney swifts as well.

I expanded my field of search beyond Prospect Hill this year, to take in the Mystic, and on one occasion, Alewife Brook.  Maybe there are other areas in Somerville warblers are to be seen (the bike path, for example), but I think the Mystic and Prospect Hill are the best bets.

I take it to be the case that the fact of a warbler species appearing in Somerville testifies to the strength of that warbler's numbers in Massachusetts as a whole.  To put it another way, we don't get too many rarities here.  This year I did see two species I had never logged before (Nashville and Cape May), but the others are ones I see every year -- not exactly like clockwork, but reliably enough.

But the chief thing is that these are all migrants.  So far as I can tell, no warbler species breeds here in Somerville.  We're merely a corridor for them, a temporary place of rest.  In spring, they appear in some strength, in the fall, much less so.  Now it's summer, and things have gone quiet again.

A confusion of flycatchers

It's now almost June, and as the wheels of the migration turn, we get flycatchers. Now, flycatchers are famously hard to identify as to species, and the four (or is it three?) pictured above, all of whom showed up in my neighbor's yard today, are all confounding me in one way or another.  Start with the one on the left: what's your pleasure, willow or alder?  It didn't make a sound, so who knows?  But is it the same bird as flycatcher number four?  It could well be; the pictures were taken hours apart.

On to flycatcher number two.  I call it yellow-bellied, on the grounds that it is, sort of, but then why is its throat so white? Is that okay?  And it's the same problem with flycatcher number three.  I think it's a great crested flycatcher, but again, it's not very yellow down there, is it?

Meanwhile, I'm trying to put together an account of the warblers that went through in May.  There were still a few showing up today, so I'm entitled to a few days' grace period.  It's going to take me forever to deal with the photos anyway.

POSTSCRIPT:  Looking back at these pictures, at some months' remove, I'm now convinced that picture number one is of an eastern wood-pewee, and not an Empidonax flycatcher at all.  Meanwhile, number two does seem to be the yellow-bellied flycatcher, and number three the great crested.  I still can't make up my mind about picture number four.

Mexican wave

Many people have noted that the secondary migration is a bit late this year, like the warm weather itself.  But finally it looks as if the warblers have begun to pass through.  It would be a bit much to say the trees by the Mystic were lousy with them, but I did see a certain number this morning -- a yellow warbler, a palm warbler, and a small flock of yellow-rumped warblers, like the one above.

But in my yard, still nothing.  No sign of the catbirds, no chimney swifts.  I hope they show up before I begin to worry.

Interspecific Dating

It's hard taking pictures of birds, particularly when you're not very good at it. But sometimes things align so perfectly that you're able to come up with a shot of unbeatable illustrative power. In this instance, I was standing on a viewing platform in the Mystic (really, a disguised outfall pipe, adjacent to the Route 38 bridge), when a small flotilla of mallards heaves into view. Only one of them is not quite a mallard; instead, it's what happens when a mallard dips into a dating pool not its own. Specifically, it seems to be a hybrid between a mallard and an American black duck. T

And a week earlier, I saw another hybrid  -- quite clearly a different duck (look at the difference in the bill and the patterning of the head). It's getting to be kind of a thing, apparently.

Visitors from the Frozen North

We were recently treated to a visit from a species that breeds in Nanook-of-the-North country:  namely, the red-throated loon.  This pair, probably a plighted couple, has been right below the Amelia Earhart dam for a couple of days.  We tend to think of migration as a thing that brings us birds in the spring and sends them home in the fall.  But while we're "north" for all those birds in the tropics, we're also "south" for birds of the higher latitudes.  And like typical snowbirds, they might like somewhere a bit more balmy for the winter months.  The red-throated loon apparently ranges an enormous distance in its escape from the winter Arctic -- even as far as the Yucatan. By those lights, we're not all that far south.  And heck, lately we haven't been all that balmy.

Water Hazard

In the winter especially, I usually take a walk by the Mystic most Sundays.  Winter birding means waterfowl, and waterfowl means the Mystic.  So the Mystic offers plenty of birding interest.  But there's a disconcerting side to this.  As we well know, the Mystic is one of the most polluted and degraded rivers in Massachusetts.  And any creature like this swan that gets its breakfast, lunch and dinner from the muck at the bottom is likely to be the first to suffer for it.  This is actually the second dead swan I've seen this month.  I have no idea what's killing them, but it ain't predation.  Any bird taking fish or weeds from the water -- all the birds I spend my time watching, in other words -- are running some kind of risk.

But how can they know? It's obvious to us from the rubbish littering the banks and shallows, the conspicuous outfall pipes with their stern warnings, the industrial vistas on the lower river.  But to birds it's just water:  perfect for swimming in, perfect for hunting in, perfect for drinking.

Spring

Spring, and the birds are all a-twitter.  At least the sparrows and the house finches are.  My privet bush has been stripped nearly bare, and when this food of last resort is gone, that generally means winter is over, and something better is on offer.  I haven't seen any signs yet of migration, though I imagine some birds have already embarked on their march north.  Within a week or two, we should see some signs of it.

Here's something interesting that has nothing particularly to do with spring:  it's a ring-billed gull at the Blessing of the Bay Boathouse that looks like it's wearing a racing bib.

Well, it turns out that it's been banded as part of a DCR project to track the movements of gulls that congregate at (and foul) the Wachusett and Quabbin reservoirs.  The DCR has learned, by banding gulls and attaching GPS transmitters to some of them, that gulls roam over an extraordinarily wide area.  Here's one, for example, that spent a certain amount of time in Central and Eastern Massachusetts, before ranging south to New Jersey, and north to Lake Simcoe in Ontario.

And remember that other banded gull I posted about last year?  That one, I learned, from my friend Google, had been banded as a chick on Appledore Island, part of the Isles of Shoals off the coast of Maine.  The funny thing is that the research is conducted by a professor at Tufts, scarcely a mile away from where I saw that gull.  Clearly the bird had a score to settle.

The State of the List

I have recently spent some time -- actually, quite a lot of time -- reorganizing the species list.  Where before all the species were on one page, now they have been broken out into five separate pages (see the alphabetic tabs above).  As the number of species grew, it seemed to make more sense to break the list up.

I'm now up to 71 species (of which only five, parenthetically, are introduced species).  My next milestone is 100.   At maybe five new species a year, call it another six years.  I'm fairly certain this is achievable, though I may be said to have gotten most of the low-hanging fruit.  Still, there are a couple dozen birds that aren't the least bit rare in Eastern Massachusetts that I ought to be able to spot here in Somerville at some point.  A few more raptors, a handful of new warblers, some aquatic birds, the odd songbird, and voila.

By way of context, consider that there are just about 500 birds that the American Ornithologists' Union list as Massachusetts birds.  Consider that about a third of those are considered rare, very occasional migrants, or indeed extinct.    That leaves about 300-odd species.  Now, of that 300, a decent number -- maybe half, I'll say -- are found only in habitats we don't have in Somerville:  offshore waters, beaches, old-growth forests, marshes, swamps...

Well, actually, we have scarcely any habitat worth mentioning.  That's what gives this whole thing its blood- from-a-stone quality.  But that said, the stone has at least yielded something.  With a bit more squeezing, I bet I can get a few more drops.