Birding Lake Montgomery

 

Pectoral Sandpiper

We always called it that although you won't find it on any map, because the lake is really just a low spot in a corn field near my parent's house. It is well below road grade and probably undrainable. Thus it fills with water every spring and has since the folks bought the place when we were small. We used to skate on it when we were kids, racing down the furrows between the rows of corn stubble. 

For years we watched for the school bus out the kitchen window, and noted the interesting birds that stopped to partake of insects from the mud, and enjoy a nice handy feather wash.

Habit dies hard, and when we were working on parceling out the remainders of their lives yesterday, I stopped to peek out over the kitchen sink.

Whoa! Something brown moved at the edge of the water line.

Greater Yellowlegs

I ran through the house like an idiot, grabbing bins and camera along the way, and shouting that I had a bird.

And, oh, what a bird I had. Well, birds really. Around that humble puddle were an interesting pair of Canada Geese, a couple of amorous Killdeers, a few screaming Red-winged Blackbirds, and a Greater Yellowlegs, which is a pretty good bird for Fulton County. However,  best of all was a Pectoral Sandpiper. That one was unusual enough that I had to fill out that yellow rare bird line on eBird mobile, and he made the state rare bird alert this morning. 

Killdeer

I was kind of chuffed to identify him properly, as sandpipers are hard and I am not good at them. However, another birder found one a couple of counties to the east the other day and I decided to do a bit of studying in case by some amazing happenstance I found one.

This bird hit all the check marks, bi-colored beak, sharply defined line between streaked breast and white belly, yellow legs, faint eye-line.

I was thrilled to find such a cool bird in such an unlikely place.

I think maybe Dad sent him.

Check out the pigmentation on this Canada Goose
Such abnormalities are actually quite common and
we see several every year

Anyhow, it was my first opportunity to submit birds via the International Shorebird Survey protocol on eBird, and I did so.

I am excited for shorebird migration season and can't wait to hit the river mud flats, when and if we get the car fixed. 

Meanwhile, I learned something this week. I had been trying to learn shore birds as a group, even taking a Cornell identification course...twice...and am still confused. However, when I concentrated on ONE species at a time, albeit a fairly distinctive one, I got it right on the first try.

So, I am going to pick out likely visitors and look over photos of them carefully, and read the field marks, and try to learn them better. Here's hoping....

April Foolishness

 

Killdeer making more Killdeer

There are three Hooded Mergansers in this photo
but one of them is slapping the other in the face with
a set of wet wing feathers, while his girlfriend looks on

Bald Eagle carrying nesting material

Hooded Merganser photobomb

Goose!

It is definitely spring.....

Adventuring

 

I only see a few swans ever, but these sounded like Trumpeters

A good friend conveyed us out to Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge yesterday and what an adventure it was.

The weather was supposed to be neutral, not a lot of precipitation, cloudy, but not horrible. Turned out it snowed most of the day, sometimes quite eagerly and it was cold, cold, cold.

Which in no way dampened our enthusiasm for the banquet of birds the swamps and mucklands served up. 

Tundra Swan

In fact we found the Route 31 mucklands, of snow goose fame, without much effort at all. We were just hunting for a couple of other good places of which we were already aware, and there they were, stretched out in front of us and absolutely thronged with ducks. I get excited if I see one Redhead Duck here on our river. There were hundreds of them alone.

No Snow Blue-winged Teal

Just add snow and shake well Blue-winged Teal

I don't think it would be much of an exaggeration to say that there were a thousand Northern Pintails in various locations, three-hundred American Wigeon, Ring-necked Ducks, Scaup, at least one of which I was able to identify as to Greater/Lesser (it was the latter), Northern Shovelers, Green-winged Teal galore, Blue-winged Teal, in all their natty glory, a few Wood Ducks, Mallards and Canada Geese, of course, and a nice bouquet of Bald Eagles sending them up out of the grasses for our enjoyment. Tiny Buffleheads bobbed for minnows, accompanied by flashy little Hooded Mergansers as well.

Northern Shoveler looks a little grumpy

Oh, and both expected species of swan too, Trumpeters and Tundras scattered here and there.

What we saw

Heavily edited

The Snow Geese have mostly left the area for their northern nesting grounds, but three-hundred or so gave us a nice look arrayed across a hilly green hayfield, then a pair of Ospreys tending a nest capped off an amazing day.

The weather did not make for great photography, but the company and the ducks made for great fun. The signage in the region has been much improved, which helped us find several really good new places to observe birds. Thanks Kris for a really great time. Ralph and I shared your sammiches for supper and they were good!

If you zoom in really close
there are ducks out there...

Ducks....

Just the

 

And the Carolina Wren.....

Venus Rising

She emerges from the dark horizon and slips silently up through the trees to the east if I stand in the backyard early enough.

Except for the traffic it is silent out here, although traffic is the sworn enemy of quiet, and not an early birder's best friend either.

Still, as the sky begins to blush with just the tiniest hint of apricot creamsicle, a woodcock makes his presence known and then another follows. And there you have it. Reason enough to be watching a distant planet slowly pop up among the passing jets and waning stars, even if it is colder outside than the inside of the refrigerator.

I mean, seriously, imagine having a fat sandpiper swirling around your backyard playing a tune with the wind that whistles through his wings, just barely audible over the sound of trucks and planes and trains. Imagine two of them.

The darkness melts slowly away, the buildings rising out of it as if a tide receded. Whadda ya know? They were there all along.

I learned this morning that robins seem to have a four-note contact call that they all mutter from their assorted sleeping places, somewhat as if they were clearing their throats before beginning their songs. I can tell where each one roosted last night and count them easily before the chorus begins and the voices all merge.

The Song Sparrows chime in, a Carolina Wren whinges about his tea kettle, and Venus breaks above the tree line.

And it gets too cold for this old lady. There is coffee indoors and none out here, and no more hearing of woodcocks over the raucous dawn chorus.

So I go in to partake and wonder. Is that thing I hear that sounds like screeching metal out near the wood stove, a female Barred Owl solicitation call or a nightmare neighing in the dark? I only hear it ONCE each time I go backyard owling, so I may never know...but hey, it's fun to wonder.

If you see this Fine Fellow Today

Wish him a very Happy Birthday! What a difference he has made in our lives here at Northview.

Waiting

 

Morning and evening, all of March, out before dawn and again in the thickening dark-after-dusk.

Listening.

Waiting.

Mentally cursing the endless, noisy traffic that drowns out all but the loudest sounds.

No voices raised in discordant courtship. No whistling feather-tweets of love.

Until this morning.

There was dog walking and an early Song Sparrow, commencing Dawn Chorus with a song.

Put the dog inside and sneaked back out, just for a little while.

Venus hovered on the eastern horizon as she has for lo, these many weeks. Grey clouds crept across a sinking orange moon and gathered it into the coming storm.

But hark! What twitters in the eastern sky!

The first American Woodcock of the season, proclaiming his love for all to listen.

I rejoiced at this magical note of spring, then gathered my coffee from the kitchen and sat in my outdoor office for an hour, listening for the day to begin. (Office consists of a metal lawn chair, an upturned stainless steel milk house bucket as a footstool, and something to set my coffee cup on, pointed at the best spots to see or hear birds).

It's official. Spring is really here.

This Guy

 

We found this guy yesterday at the boat launch....how I love finding banded birds, reporting them, and discovering their history.

This Canada Goose was hatched in Varennes, Quebec, Canada and banded, too young to fly, on July 14, 2014.

 I was able to get a readable photo of his band, which I reported to Band Report. I received a report almost immediately.

How cool is it that this wild bird has made 8 treks to some southern resting place and then returned, probably to some place near where he hatched? He has probably raised families there, and flown south with them all those times.

I feel lucky to have encountered him and literally thousands of others like him that don't wear their history on their necks, but are fascinating just the same. The storms have brought so many ducks, geese, and a single Pied-billed Grebe to the boat launch, that we just keep going back to check on what has blown...or flown...in.

Female Hooded Merganser

Over the past few days we have seen Gadwalls, Northern Pintails, Mallards, American Black Ducks, Green-winged Teal, American Wigeon, Common Mergansers, Hooded Mergansers, Common Goldeneye, Buffleheads, Wood Ducks, Ring-necked Ducks, one of the two sorts of Scaup, numerous gulls, the first Killdeer of the year, thousands upon thousands of Canada Geese, as mentioned, and a single Greater White-fronted Goose, that made the state rare bird report.

Can you say fun? You betcha.

Male Hooded Merganser

I Swear I Don't Drink

 

But last night the bedroom bucked and whirled like a rodeo bull. Then I woke up this morning with a big head like a split watermelon. Felt a little like those long ago days when I thought I had to keep up with the boys in all things possible and impossible...

It was, and still is, that windy. I came in from late night walkies with Mack and said, "It's so windy there are waves on the puddles..."

To which Liz replied, "Whitecaps, Mom, whitecaps."

And so they were.

After two warm days, one of them featuring all-day relentless rain, almost every vestige of a whole winter's snow was gone and racing downhill to the river. There was thunder. Lightning too.

And then came the wind.

We never lost power, as thousands did in the area, but we sure lost sleep. I feel as if I had a big night last night, a really, really big night, and I am real sorry for Ralph.

With all that snow melt and heavy rain, our driveway is pretty much gone. I think it is the worst it has been in several years. A real shame, since he has kept it in great shape all winter. He will be out on the skid steer for hours for sure...unless of course it has frozen too solid to move, in which case our poor cars will take a beating until it thaws and dries out.

Given a choice of weather or not, I would certainly take not, at least in this instance.

All in a Summerlike Day

Common Goldeneye drake from a couple of weeks ago

Yesterday it hit 60 degrees here. It felt like summer...with an undercurrent of chill from the remaining snowbanks and river ice...just an occasional draft of ice air to remind us that the calendar did not agree with the temperature.

 I went out at daybreak (it was decidedly NOT 60 then), dug my summer "office" chair out of the snow, and spent my first official shift sitting in it, watching and listening.

Ring-billed Gull

It was wild and awesome. Throngs of assorted blackbirds hurtled by. Sparrows and finches sang with wild abandon. You could smell dirt! Winter is so sterile in that department. Aside from a now and then passing skunk, nothing smells anything but cold in winter. No flowers. No grass. No funky scent of just plain earth. 

Ring-billed Gull

Yesterday was different.

Better

We birded more than we have dared to in light of recent gas prices. Even with our good mileage little car, staying home has been the better part of birding valor. Thankfully, home gives me a pretty good catalog of birds anyhow, but I miss the river.

In spring...and fall...our Mohawk River is like a candy shop of interesting gulls, shorebirds, and waterfowl in amazing assortment.

Yesterday's highlights were a trio of Iceland Gulls, a Lesser Black-backed Gull, and five Common Goldeneye drakes.

The latter are pretty much what their name suggests, common, with golden eyes, but this set was diving and surfacing every few seconds in a whirl of something in the water, which I imagine must have been a tightly packed school of minnows of some sort. 

Iceland Gull

The swirl was big enough for all five ducks to sit right in the middle of it between dives, and also attracted a male Common Merganser, which swooped in and landed right on top of the COGOs.

The sunset was as fine as the ducks, and evening brought warm winds, that hopefully dried up the runoff river that took out the driveway...again!

Today it is back to normalish, cold, dark, and rainy, but a pair of Mallards flew right over my head, quacking wildly, before the sun was even up. So, who knows what the day might bring......?

Corridors

 

Maybe you remember days when you were shorter. When Henry Huggins was a hero and Ramona and Beezus were good friends.

When school was spaghetti in the lunchroom that you could smell all through the hungry mornings, as the scent wafted through the corridors of whatever school you attended, and mingled with the smells of ripe sneakers and blackboard chalk.

Maybe you remember too the alarms that rang out over the loudspeaker system that brought the principal’s voice into your classroom every morning somewhere between roll call and the Pledge of Allegiance.

Or maybe it came in the form of the bells in the hall.

And maybe you remember trooping out of your classroom to stand facing the corridor walls, rows upon rows of young girls and boys, awash in terror laced with ennui, hands crossed behind their necks.

If you went to school with me it was the lovely tile-lined walls of what is now one of the county buildings, but was then an elementary school, that you stared at. The scent of impending lunch was all too often tempered by the threat of looming war.

I'm sure those bomb drills of childhood were as futile as they were frightening, but last midnight when Google saw fit to awaken me with the announcement that new time zones were available to me….as if one wasn’t enough for me to sleep in….I remembered those long ago days....probably because the events we are seeing remind me of them, and not in a good way. 

Coleslaw

 

So, yesterday our good friend took me back to Fort Edward Grasslands. We had a fantastic time and saw a number of Northern Harriers, Rough-legged Hawks, a cute little American Kestrel, and assorted others. I highly recommend the area for a great birding adventure.

At the last edge of golden-orange dusk, the sky as clear as polished glass, we found a trio of Short-eared Owls, floating and fluttering above the tangled grassland. We even heard them calling.

Home again in darkness to sleep and dream of birds.

And what a weird one it was. Back hunting owls, but in a twisted dreamscape of farms and fields from childhood. Babysitting for a little boy…very little. All of us put in the back of a police car for some reason, known only to the LEO, who didn’t believe that we were just lurking after birds. After all, our phones were cool (as in temperature) and your phone gets hot when you bird. (Actually been known to happen….)

We were taken to a place where we saw dozens of owls everywhere, plus two ostriches in a fence yard near the road.

Suddenly had to change the little one's diaper. It was a bad one.

As I did so, in the distance, we heard someone calling, “Coleslaw! Coleslaw!”

Were they calling a dog with a brassica sort of name or was dinner being served?

I’ll never know because I woke up then and went downstairs. The thermostat had stuck again and the stove was going full blast.

I turned it down and stepped outdoors to listen for Great-horned Owls.

No throaty hoots drifted down from the ridge behind the house, but a gritty snow was beginning to fall.

Sometimes I wonder about my brain.

Books

 

And the keeping of them.

I have for the past mebbe 20 years or so done the books on an old Windows 95 computer. Our late bookkeeper (and beloved friend) set me up with Quick Books, taught me how to use the program, checked my work and did my reports for me for years.

When we lost her I did the best I could by myself. It wasn't great, but it was done. At first we took the result to a local accountant who worked with my late friend. He was terrific, as were his employees. Then he retired, they left the company, and I was on my own.

For the past two years we have taken what I came up with to another friend who is a tax wizard. She has made some sort of sense of my fumbling efforts and got 'er done.

However, each year that poor old computer has failed a little worse. Last year it ate a lot of stuff and I had to do it over, and with 20 some years of work on it, a lot of it done without my friend's oversight, there were some terrible, unfixable, mistakes on it.

This year with much trepidation I turned it on again. Found out that some of the trouble I had with it was because the old wired mouse was half dead.

Alas, though, when I opened QB three months of debit transactions were gone. The deposits were still there, as were the transfers, but nothing else.

And it wouldn't restore from backup.

So I found a free bookkeeping program online and am trying to get ready to do taxes with that. It doesn't understand that a lot of farmers use the same checking account for business and family, but I am breaking it out the best I can.

Meanwhile, yet another of Liz's ewes has lambed in a HellStorm. Twins are in the house and the dog is going nuts, while the wind screams around the rafters and drafts snake all around the rooms.

I am giving up for today, having gotten backwards to September with one of four accounts.

Better days are coming it says here in fine print. Not sure I believe it though. At least I got a good FOY bird today, a Brown Creeper at Yankee Hill, as well as refinding our neighborhood Great Scaup for the Hudson Mohawk winter species count.

It's the little things....

Wanted

 

For stealing lamb milk replacer out of the bag in the kitchen.

When asked at the crime scene, "Was it worth it?", he replied gleefully ......

"Oh, yes, yes it was! It was indeed!"

Ironing

 I grew up with ironing, a pastime that shares some letters with Iron Maiden, as well as many aspects of similar torture. BITD, my grandmas rolled freshly sprinkled clothes in baskets, mixed up evil-smelling spray starch, and treated clothing to a good flattening by fire until shirt sleeves resembled products of the local lumber yard and were about as comfy to wear.

We were feral kids, running free on the old farm the folks rented for a while, wandering over to the playground several blocks away from the antique shop, or to the various grocery stores and candy shops for bubble gum and Nehi or Royal Palm and Pixie Stix. 

Not to mention getting up to other nefarious occupations, which are probably better left unmentioned. We were often grubby, and never well-dressed.

However, when we when to school or church we were expected to be primped, polished, and.....dum, da, dum, dum....ironed.

Since Mom worked many jobs that required that she be gone before the yellow metal tube with tires showed up in front of the house with a squeal of brakes, guess who was frequently elected.

Yep, you got it.

Let us start with the ironing board, a hellacious instrument of awful if there ever was one. I was never particularly mechanical, although I can hear an engine, transmission, or the belts on a piece of machinery, and tell you right away if lubricants, or tightening, or whatever other adjustments, are required. The boss often relied on me to be his virtual dipstick and save time when getting the 5088 to the field in the morning.....hey, wait a minute...that sounds kind of insulting, but I digress.

I had a terrible time setting up the ironing board though. Taking it down, was, and still is well beyond my comprehension. However, Mom wasn't there and my brother needed a freshly ironed shirt every day. Since I liked boy shirts...and still do...so did I some days. And ties. Ties had to be ironed as well.

There were burns and creases that refused to be ironed out, because they had after all, been ironed in. There were rules. Unplug, set in a safe place, avoid at all costs while racing into hot-smelling, tidy-looking clothing that would probably be wrinkled beyond recognition before the bus pulled into the parking lot in town.

And then there was the time Mom was home and ironing frantically to get us ready for school. We were living in that tiny gas station in Auriesville, where there wasn't room to swing a cat as they used to say, let alone prepare two kids for school while a toddler of around two hustled around getting into trouble.

A Bobwhite Quail began calling down by the creek. I raced over to the window to hear better and maybe see....yeah, I was bird crazy even then. The iron was cooling on the board by said window and I managed to tip it over against my summer-bare upper arm.

The burn was impressive and long-lasting. As is the memory of same. However, kids did NOT miss school for something as trivial as a four-by-one inch crimson gouge that blistered almost instantly.

Heck no. Rub a little dirt on it and walk it off.

I have had perhaps six or seven instances of needing to iron since we moved up here to the farm. I am, not surprisingly, very careful with the iron.

However, I still can't get the board up or down without pinching my fingers. I will listen to your engine for you though, if you need me to.