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.

What's all this, now?

Birders love the strange, and here's an example.  This morning, I was out looking at winter waterfowl on the Mystic when I was brought up short by the bird above.  A black-and-white warbler?  In this season? Ridiculous!  But so it was:  a warbler busily prospecting for bugs, as if it were a balmy day in April, and not a bitter December day with a howling wind and temperatures in the upper 20s. I don't know whose cognitive dissonance was greater, hers or mine.  I do note, though, that on eBird someone logged a black-and-white in the Mystic Reservation a couple weeks ago, and this is likely the same party.

I guess I don't really understand non-migrating warblers.  What on earth can they be finding to eat, especially with the extra demands on their metabolism?  I wonder whether this one will this one continue to stick around, since she's lasted here this long, or finally take the hint.  Keep an eye out for her, if you're down by the Mystic.

Barred Owl

Isn't this adorable?  This barred owl spent the day in a tree behind Somerville High, where it got a certain amount of attention.  This particular picture was taken by my daughter's friend Celia.

Everyone likes owls.

Thrush season

Hermit thrush season came and went.  They were numerous while they were here, but their time was short.  We share with the neighbors a grapevine they're particularly devoted to.

Now it's the sparrows' turn.  The last few days I've seen flocks of white-throated sparrows, song sparrows and juncos, all eating weed seeds from the ground.  It's a fat season for them.  Here's a song sparrow. 

Not a junco

Here's a riddle:  When is a junco not a junco?  Answer:  Why, when it's a yellow-rumped warbler, of course.   But damned if I wouldn't have sworn up and down that this was a junco when I was watching it.  It was feeding on the ground like a junco, and to the naked eye at about 30 feet, it looked exactly like a junco --dark above and light below.  And besides, there were other juncos around at the time.  But you know what they say about the camera -- it adds 30 pounds, and turns juncos into yellow-rumped warblers.

I later found out from the paper that this fall yellow-rumped warblers had been seen by watchers in enormous numbers -- flocks of over a thousand.  Strange, that.  I guess they can spare one for Somerville.

Sphyrapicus varius

If there was ever an animal that needed a publicist, it would be the yellow-bellied sapsucker, whose name is basically a string of insults.  That said, the name is apt in a descriptive sense -- though the females, of which this is one, aren't quite so yellow-bellied, and in Somerville at least, neither males nor females are doing much sap-sucking.  Here they're only coming or going, and as such, I've only ever seen them in March or October.

A similar thing can be said of the Eastern phoebe.  They do well around people generally, but I guess Somerville is just a bit too much for them.  We only catch the transients, and rarely at that.