New River Postings (or not)

Worm-eating warbler, singing between episodes of eating worms.Gentle readers of Bill of the Birds. I am back at the New River Birding Festival, which this year has seen an infestation of bird /nature bloggers like you would NOT BELIEVE! Anywho, this makes it nigh on impossible to get any posting done for several reasons:1. There is not enough bandwidth to go around, so the connection is gone by the time I am free in the late afternoon or late evening.2.......

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Gnatty Sign of Spring

Though far away, he hears me spishing at him.On of the birds whose arrival I note each year as a solid sign of spring is the blue-gray gnatcatcher. Male gnatties come back well before the leaves are out on most trees—and just after the male red-winged blackbirds have started conk-a-reeing in the cattails. How the gnatsters find anything to eat I'll never know, but they must.I often hear this species before I see it. It has a high-pitched, sibilant......

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Haiku for Spring Beauties

Tiny white flowerlike snow on a sunny dayspring won't be deniedThese images were taken on Easter Sunday at Camp Tupper, a park in Marietta, Ohio. The hill in this last image is ceremonial mound called the Quadranaou, built by the Hopewell Indians sometime between 100 B.C and 900 A.D. Growing up in Marietta, we kids in the neighborhood surrounding Camp Tupper called it the turtle mound because it was vaguely turtle shaped. It got the name Camp Tupper......

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Birds Passing Through

Today a vesper sparrow stopped by the farm on its way north. Small and finely streaked, with that faint eyering and chestnut shoulder—it's the first one spotted here at Indigo Hill in a decade.Otherwise, spring migration here this year seems at least a week behind schedu......

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Mowing the Meadow: Part 2

Standing to watch for what I'm mowing and what I don't want to mow. When mowing the meadow I spend a lot of time standing up on the tractor foot rests so I can see down into the tall vegetation. This helps me to spot things I don't want to mow (butterfly weed, box turtles, etc), and holes or mounds I don't want to roll over. Every once in a while the wheels roll over and anthill or tree stump or rock and the tractor lurches up into the air. This......

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Habitat Maintenance: Mowing the Meadow

The meadow is left standing during the winter to provide food and shelter for birds and wildlife.One of the joys of having a chunk of rural land to call your own is that you can gaze upon it and pretend you are the lord of all you survey. One of the negatives to being such a lord is that you have to do some work to maintain that land if you don't want Nature to take her inevitable (and not always desirable) course.We own 80 acres of southeastern......

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Sky Like an Easter Egg

On a recent airplane flight, I looked out my window and saw this. It was dusk on a winter day and we were flying over the ocean. The sky was an amazing spectrum of colors from salmon pink to pale indigo. I snapped a photo out the airplane window with my pocket camera. The colors in the image reminded me of an Easter egg, so I saved the photo to share with you on this holiday weekend.I'm thinking back to dyeing Easter eggs as a kid—the small cups......

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Out There with the Birds

When we get a life bird on one of my field trip, I will force you (nicely) to do The Life Bird Wiggle.I'll be attending, trip leading, speaking and performing at a couple of upcoming birding events here in the greater Ohio/West Virginia region.The first is the North Coast Nature Festival held in Rocky River, Ohio, near Cleveland starting on Friday, April 24 through Sunday, April 26, 2009. I'm giving a Friday night talk, twice (The Perils & Pitfalls......

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Tin Roof, Rusted

I've always wondered what the heck that lead singer from the B-52's meant when she sang, or rather, shouted: "Tin roof, rusted!" at the break near the end of "Love Shack." Does it REALLY mean this?This (photo above) was the roof of the building we slept in on Mt. Kitanglad, on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. More about that adventure later. Today I am pondering these imponderable things and watching the snow come down. And what unwelcome......

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Hurrying the Seasons

Weak spring sunlight casting shadows of leafless trees on new meadow grass.It's been spring, officially, for two weeks, but it's not really spring for us bird watchers until the good spring migrants start showing up. Don't get me wrong. I LOVE the hardy early arrivers: pine warblers, tree swallows, chipping sparrows, brown thrashers. But it seems so much more wonderful when the wood thrushes, chestnut-sided warblers, great crested flycatchers, and......

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A Lifer Shorebird!

My life bird: a Terek sandpiper.I had grandiose plans to make this new shorebird's identity a mystery—to make y'all guess about what species it was. I had still images and a short video clip. I had a clever, April-Foolsy write up baking in my tiny mind. Then the problems started....First of all, I've been under the thumb of a debilitating virus/cold/disease and it's a difficult thing even to think straight. Mind you, I'm not asking for pity. I'm......

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