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.