Another old Farm Side

 

From December 2018.

FARM SIDE: WHAT’S THAT BIRD?

Posted by Recorder News | Dec 27, 2018 | Local Commentary, Local News, Opinion


By Marianne Friers


Over the sound of the car idling and chatter in the back seat I heard an unfamiliar call. A sort of shriek, urgent, raspy, primal. Creepy really, like something you might hear in a Tarzan movie right after the dramatic music.

Much of birding is recognizing the noises made by birds that don’t deign to show themselves to the observer. I recognize some calls but this was new. Not quite right for an owl, although they can fool you with screeches and shrieks that don’t much resemble hoots. No woodpecker of my experience ever made such a din either. Our chauffeur shut off the car and the backseat participants went silent as we listened. The calls went on and on, screams interspersed with harsh, grating bawling.

What on earth was that?

We were stopped along a small farm road in Fulton County, participating in the Johnstown circle of the annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count. The road runs through a farm where I was milking cows when I met the boss. It was good to see sturdy grain corn still growing in the secluded fields, although I am sure the farmer would like to get it harvested and stored before the snow flies.

The CBC is the longest running citizen science project in the world. All over the Western Hemisphere teams of birders, from newest beginners to the best-trained scientists, venture out during the weeks close to Christmas to count as many species and individual birds that they can. Each count circle encompasses fifteen square miles. Each participant is a volunteer.

The count was initiated in 1900 to take the place of traditional Christmas hunts wherein birds were killed competitively just for the heck of it. Frank Chapman, an American ornithologist, suggested simply counting the birds instead and a great tradition was born.

Although we haven’t participated for all…or even most…of the 118 annual counts since, our family has been a part of the Johnstown circle for most of its 37 year history. Mom and dad used to do it. This year three of their grandkids, a grandkid-in-law and first-timer to the game, and I covered the traditional Mayfield South portion of farms, city streets, mall parking lots, and wild woods.

The road we paused along has always been one of our favorite CBC birding spots, yielding good raptors, wonderful woodpeckers, and a bounty of bluebirds over the years.


We peered eagerly through assorted binoculars hoping to somehow pick the screamer out of the tangle of golden cornfield and grey woodlot, under a watery sun. Nada. Nope. Nuttin’.

I made recordings of the noises, hoping to submit them to a Facebook group run by the American Birding Association, What’s this Bird?, but alas you can barely hear the thing over the background noises.

Then a faint memory emerged from the depths of our driver’s mind. A long, long time ago, he remembered loading hay we were buying for the cows. The bales were stored in a remote barn, far from any other buildings. While he dragged bales out of the stacks to load on the pick up and take home to the girls, the owner waited nearby. Loading hay is hard, tedious work, but ya gotta do what you gotta do. He grabbed a bale and pulled it out. Yaw! A screaming, squalling bundle of fury emerged from the stack and came at him, hollering and snarling all the while. It wanted a piece of him and wanted it bad.

And it was making the exact sound we were hearing from that bird count woodlot. He escaped safely from the enraged creature thanks to the quick actions of the owner of the hay barn. Seems the attack was not an isolated incident and they were always prepared for same.

The encounter did not turn out quite so well for the furious raccoon, but when choosing sons over wild animals I am okay with that.

Our backseat complement searched Google for raccoon sounds and there it was, our wild woodland performer — procyon lotor himself.

Why a raccoon was repeatedly screaming from the edge of a wood-rimmed cornfield will remain a mystery. The land is posted against trespassing and I didn’t exactly feel inclined for an encounter like the one in the long-ago hay barn.

Over the course of the day birders in our CBC circle accounted for 4,912 individual birds of 52 species. Overall numbers were down roughly 300 from an average year, but this was attributed to an open winter allowing birds to disperse to find food away from roads and feeders.

Our carload experienced much the same phenomenon. We often tally well over a hundred Black-capped Chickadees, but found only 25, and we had to look pretty darned hard for those. That isn’t an awful lot over the 72-plus miles of road we wandered during six-and-a-half hours of driving and walking.

If the low point of the day was being bamboozled by a ticked-off mammal, the high point was a bird spotted in a distant tree near the silos on an active dairy farm. (Farms are good for birds, don’t ya know?) The roofs of those storage structures are always a reliable source of Rock Pigeons for us to count. Evidently they are also a reliable source of nourishment for the unexpected Peregrine Falcon we found. Suddenly it became my lucky day, as not only did we find a bird that was new for me in the county, but our boy gifted me a window mount for my camera from out of his spotting scope case. He had two, and thought I needed one to take over for not-so-steady hands in such situations.

On New Year’s Day, bird counters all over the world will start anew on county lists. Every species will be a new “year” species. I hope your New Year will offer as much good fun, and that 2019 will be a much better year than ‘18, which was pretty darned dismal for agriculture. Happy New Year!

Fultonville dairy farmer Marianne Friers is a regular columnist. She blogs at northviewdiary.blogspot.com.