South Shore Journal

It's Official

Remember how I said recently that there are two definitive signs of spring in Marshfield, returning fish crows and the grand re-opening of Dairy Queen on Webster Street? Well, I got the call. I was sitting at my desk listening to my phone messages when David Ludlow, our property manager at the South Shore Sanctuaries, piped in with, "Tuesday morning, CVS parking lot. There are fish crows all over the place!" The next morning, on an errand to Center Marshfield, I confirmed David's sighting. Or rather, his hearing. It's easier to tell fish crows by their vocalizations than their field marks.

But we'd already had a good start to the week, with signs of spring everywhere we looked. At dawn on Monday, David and I stood in the Boxford State Forest listening, hopefully, for barred owl calls. Instead, we were treated to singing brown creepers and winter wrens. At the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge, on Plum Island in Newburyport, we watched for snowy owls, but instead came up with  our first piping plovers of the year. At Cherry Hill Reservoir in West Newbury, we were surprised by our first tree swallow of the spring. And that's a killdeer at left.

Back at the North River Wildlife Sanctuary, I took a walk on the Woodland Loop Trail and turned over a coverboard to find our first red-backed salamander of the season. We'll be counting them in May and August/September, to determine their population on our property. If anybody would like to help with this citizen science project, contact me at 781-837-9400. This project will be a blast for scout troops, if you ask me.

WIth the spring comes the quickening of the pace for naturalists. Calls have been coming in all week. Ospreys in Hull! More at the Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary! A great egret on Duxbury Beach! American kestrels and eastern meadowlarks at Daniel Webster! On Tuesday evening I gave a talk for the Hanover Historical Society on my new book, North River: Scenic Waterway of the South Shore, just out this week. On Wednesday, I chatted with the staff at the Museum of Science about their upcoming firefly project - there'll be more about that in an upcoming post - and finalized an article for South Shore Living magazine on the osprey recovery project in the region. Today, after picking out my first double-crested cormorant of the year at Studley Pond in Rockland and being startled by a pair of low-flying, migrating northern goshawks, I worked on finalizing details for this weekend's trip to Nantucket Island. Binoculars, scope, camera, eighteen layers of clothing. I'm all set for the ferry ride.

But how could I forget? When I went on my fish crow mission earlier in the week, I was warmed by one further sight, the one you see to the left. Spring has finally, officially arrived in Marshfield.

March 20 - Spring is here, believe it

There are two well-known signs that spring has officially arrived in Marshfield. Dairy Queen on Webster Street opens and fish crows return to Center Marshfield from their southern sojourn. To date, neither has occurred. In fact, it's been snowing in these last few days of winter, making it feel like spring will never arrive.

But spring is here, and I have proof.

About a week ago I was in Hull for a meeting, and had a little time to kill. I also had a telescope, so I thought I'd check out the osprey platform on the Weir River estuary, underneath the Hull Wind II turbine. Ospreys are actually due back from the south later this month, but one had already been reported in the Westport area, so I thought I'd take a chance. No luck. But, as I turned to leave, I looked beside me and saw pussy willows starting to open up their buds, as seen in the pic to the left.

That was actually sign number two. A few days earlier, while on our Friday Morning Bird Walk, we stopped at the Duxbury Bogs Conservation Area and espied a long lost sight, painted turtles climbing out of the mud and up onto a log. They've begun emerging from their winter rest and are returning to the surface to start soaking in the sun (aren't we all). That's a true sign that the seasons are a-changing.

Finally, a few days ago, I visited North Hill Marsh Wildlife Sanctuary in Duxbury to conduct another installment of our ongoing waterfowl survey on the pond. The expected suspects were there, 81 Canada geese, 2 mute swans, a handful of ring-necked ducks and a few common mergansers. The highlight, though, was a line of four wood ducks swimming along among the dead cedar trees in the distance. Wood ducks are known to not like having "cold feet," and as such are only around when they feel the temps are right, or are going to be very soon.

Other wildlife continues to show up on our doorstep, winter residents changing their behavior for spring. One of our resident wild turkeys from the past few years (they've been hanging around the North River Wildlife Sanctuary parking lot off and on since November 1, 2005) gave me a great photo op this week, going into full "I'm a bad dude" mode as I walked outside the front door. It's almost that time of year when the male flocks and female flocks break up and the sexes begin to intermingle. As such, Darryl, here, needs to practice the things that attract female turkeys, puffing himself out and acting belligerently. It's quite a sight from a few feet away.

Yesterday I had the chance to speak at the Mass Audubon staff natural history conference at the Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary in Natick, on the topic of "21 Years of Friday Morning Birding," a statistical study of more than 47,000 check marks made on field cards on the South Shore since 1987. As I walked out the door at the end of the day, I ran into this red-tailed hawk sitting on a tree swallow box. Red-tails, as they're known colloquially, are already nesting, well in advance of many other bird species around the state.

So, yes, spring is on its way to the South Shore, despite what the snow says. Monday I'm off to the North Shore for a day's birding and then it's Nantucket for three days soon thereafter. When I'm back, it'll be time to start working on the second season of the Massachusetts Breeding Bird Atlas 2 project, a major citizen science undertaking of Mass Audubon.

And maybe, somewhere along the way, I'll find life bird number 303.

March 10 - Wild Weekend

Finding a good bird with a group of birders is a lot like being in an elevator. Everyone is really silent and faces the same way. That's why there are no really good pictures of people birding. They all look the same.

That happened to our program groups a few times this weekend. On Friday morning, we followed the tips of a couple of birders who had visited Marshfield earlier in the week and tracked down a yellow-bellied sapsucker. He almost eluded us - almost. As soon as we walked into the Cherry Hill Reservation, on Daniel Webster's old land, an accipiter, or small hawk, flew out of the trees in front of us. While the sighting of a Cooper's or a sharp-shinned hawk is always a good one, it usually means there won't be much else around for a few minutes. Coops and sharpies are bird-eaters, and the smaller birds know it. Therefore, they go into intense hiding until the all-clear is sounded. But, the yellow-bellied sapsucker could not out wait us.

We found him working on a sugar maple. We then did what we always do. We all stood and stared, admiring him for the fact that he's different form all of our usual suspects, and we moved onto the next bird. We all thought about the last yellow-belly we'd seen, and most of us remembered the first yellow-belly we'd ever seen. They're quite rare in this part of the state, but this guy seems to have found a home here, as we've located him in the same general plot of trees for two winters in a row now.

Saturday, of course, was a monumental washout. I did have a program to run in the evening, but out of necessity we moved it to Sunday afternoon. Problem was, I already had a program on Sunday afternoon.

At 1:30, Tim O'Neil, our volunteer co-leader, and I picked up fifteen teachers and drove them the length of Duxbury Beach, talking about snowy owls, ospreys, scoter ducks - all the things we were hoping to see, but didn't. The birders' worst enemy, the wind, was in full force. Our best bird sighting, three horned larks, was lost on most of the teachers I fear, but at least Tim had the enjoyment of seeing them, his first for the year. Not quite as rare as a yellow-belly, they're still a nice find.

At 3, we hustled back to the North River Wildlife Sanctuary to drop the teachers off, and I then turned and kept going down to the Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary. I met Kathy Clayton, my second co-leader of the day, and someone whom I had not seen since September 15, 2007, the day we returned form Block Island together. We had barely met before that trip started, but not only had fun with our dozen attendees, but had become fast friends by the end of it. We'll be leading a trip up into the White Mountains this summer together. But I digress.

Our goal today was a four hour walk around Daniel Webster to look for birds of prey, and, despite the wind, they did not disappoint in the slightest. We had northern harriers, both male and female, hunting for voles in the grasslands. We had red-tailed hawks coming from many directions, and a solitary rough-legged hawk soaring above the treetops to the northeast (on the way between sanctuaries I'd also seen a red-shouldered hawk). Just before dusk we heard, and then saw a northern shrike atop a shrub, a little monster known as the "butcher bird" for the way it massacres its prey. It kills cardinal-sized birds, impales them on spikes (barbed wire, or a snapped off branch of a tree) and eats until its full. It then leaves the remains impaled and comes back later for other meals until it's done with that particular food source. Finally, after the sun went down, we had a short-eared owl flying at high speeds over those grasstops evaucated moments earlier by the harriers.

The surprise of the night , though, was the first full "peent" of an American woodcock, the notice that the breeding display was about to begin. Woodcocks put on an amazing show, with whistling wings, a climb to dizzying heights, and then a tumble to the earth. We'd seen them performing their act before, but weren't expecting it for about another two or three weeks. Yet there they were, a dozen male woodcocks, some going right into their full act. Trust me, folks, that is a true sign that spring is on the way.

I left Daniel Webster at 7:45 and headed for home. Over the weekend, I'd added four more birds to the year list (115 - killdeer, 116 - yellow-bellied sapsucker, 117 - American woodcock, 118 - short-eared owl), but nothing new for the life list (sigh). Still waiting for 303.

March 3 - A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to 302

Every birder keeps a list. At least one. There are some who keep several. There are state lists, there are town lists, there are lists of birds you've seen while driving mroe than 50 miles per hour, there are commuting lists, international lists, year lists, month lists, checklists for every variable of which one can think. Some people prefer to keep a mental list, others have leapt into the computer age with Excel spreadsheets, while some are surrounded by huge, shambling piles of cardstock in four-by-six dimensions.

I started birding, in earnest, about three years ago. I kept all my field cards, but didn't really start to think about the big number - the life list - until late in 2007. The life list is just what it sounds like: every species of bird you've seen in your entire life, irrespective of nation, state, town, whether or not you were driving to work when you saw it, etc. (Of course, I also have a life mammal list, a life herp list, a life wildflower list...but I digress).

So I began the process of going through the field cards back through the late fall of 2005, when I started work as an educator for Mass Audubon's South Shore Sanctuaries. There was the thick-billed murre on Scituate Harbor that winter. Glad I got that one, as I haven't seen one since. Then there was the boreal chickadee at a feeder in Plympton early in 2006, and the fox sparrow that joined it on the ground below. I've since heard boreal chickadees in Maine, and only saw my second fox sparrow this winter at a feeder in Plymouth.

There have been the chase birds, the snowy owls on Duxbury Beach, the rufous hummingbird at a feeder in Marshfield, the Swainson's hawk in the Cumberland Farm Fields in Middleboro, the pileated woodpecker in Wompatuck State Park in Hingham. And then there was the big surprise bird, the miniscule yellow rail that appeared less than a mile from our offices in Marshfield, in a marsh just off the North River. There were birders with us that day that had been at it for sixty years and never seen one.

There are the birds of Maine - puffins, common murres, razorbills, a spruce grouse and her young - and those of Nevada, like the California quail that run the streets, and the western scrub jay that invaded my wife's grandfather's backyard. There were the various birds of Arizona on last year's Red Sox/Grand Canyon trip, the white-winged doves, cactus wrens, the gila woodpeckers, and the pyrrhuloxia. There have been countless early morning owl prowls, offshore trips for pelagic species, forays to the Finger Lakes, downeast Maine, Nantucket, Block Island, up and down Cape Cod, and into and out of backyards, wildllife sanctuaries and state and national parks.

So I totaled them all up and began to count. Ducks, geese and swans? 34 species. Grebes? 3, and all of them in Massachusetts. Hawks, kites, eagles and allies? 13 (ooh, I'll have to change that). Gulls and terns? 16. Owls? 7. Hummingbirds? 5. Woodpeckers? 8. Wood-warblers? 31.

Overall? 300.

Are you kidding me?

I recounted. After just about three years of birding, I had a round, even number. The three-century mark. 300. What were the chances?

So I went home from work that day and told my wife Michelle. I said that I had included everything, even the bananaquits, frigatebirds and pelicans we had seen on our honeymoon on Tortola in th British Virgin Islands. "Right, everything," she said. "Like that black and white bird we saw on that electrical box on the way to Lake Tahoe."

What? Wait a minute! Did I check off black-billed magpie?! No. My 301st bird came three years ago on vacation.

That all became moot a few days later. On a recent Friday morning, David Ludlow, our property manager, and someone who shares many of my lifebird sightings around New England, and I led our regular Friday Morning Birdwalk. We headed for Scituate, staked out yet another feeder - on a tip from the owner, one of our regular birding program attendees - and watched as a flock of about 100 common redpolls flew in to feed on a thistle sock. There, amongst them, were two bigger, whiter birds. Hoary redpolls. 302, baby.

I had a temporary dream of retiring with 300. I thought what better way to call it quits than with a nice, round easily remembered number. But now, I'm resigned to the fact that the listing must continue to at least 500. And now I have to think about what the celebration at that point will be. One birder I know brought a can of Mountain Dew all the way to Africa to celebrate his 3000th species.

And I also have to wonder what number 303 will be. The beauty of spending so much time outdoors exploring the nature of Massachusetts is that surprises are around every corner, under every stone, hidden in the leaves of every tree. I have no idea what number 303 will be. It may come on my upcoming trip to Nantucket, to the Finger Lakes, the White Mountains, downeast, or it may just show up at the feeder outside my window at work. But I know there will be a number 303.