APRIL IS MORE SPRING THAN MARCH

This year, April is the beginning of spring.  Outside my window, it looks like a March day, large patches of snow still in the yard, cold, breezy and dark with rain and sleet on its way.  But the calendar tells me it is April 8!  Hmm... disconnect.

But it IS spring. The spring migrants are arriving - two new ones just yesterday!  We saw a Pine Warbler, who has also graced our feeder several times today, and a Fox Sparrow (a lifer for us!).  

Pine Warbler stops by on his migration route.

Also yesterday while we were doing our usual "greet the morning" by sitting on the porch at dawn, we saw this roiling in the water of the pond.  OK... there must be something there.  We had seen a muskrat swimming the day before.  There are both common and hooded mergansers (migrants) and our local mallards, black ducks, and wood ducks, but this seemed different.  Suddenly Linda called, "Otter!"  She was wrong; not one otter, but two otters.  What are they doing?  Fighting?  Playing?  Oh... MATING!  We watched for about 15 minutes (no privacy).  

Today I was snapping pictures of the pine warbler above (all of the pix are taken through the window, thus somewhat fuzzy), and I noticed a large disturbance in the water.  (Have I said how much I love having my desk facing the pond!  Yes, it is distracting, but it is great fun!)  Back to the disturbance.  I looked and a bird came up from the splash and flew out of the water!  What is it??  I couldn't get the binocs (or the camera that was in my hand) on it, but it clearly wasn't a red-tail or a coopers, they don't dive.  Oh, it flies like an osprey!  I don't have a 100% definite ID on it, but osprey is my guess.  It got its breakfast, too! 

Let's go back to the feeder birds for a minute.  During this time of year, don't make any assumptions about what is at your feeder.  Linda saw the Pine Warbler because she took that second look -- it didn't look quite like the goldfinch it was sharing the feeder with (see pix below).  But it is close enough in appearance that with just a glance, one might pass it off as another one of the huge flock of goldfinch that empties our feeders each day.  

Pine Warbler (left), Goldfinch (right)

Likewise with the fox sparrow, which I had heard about as showing up at feeders in migration, but had never seen before!  It was just another brown bird under the feeder.  It looked a lot like the song sparrow that hangs out here, or the female juncos, or the female red-wing blackbird who eats at our feeder in the spring before the bugs she prefers are readily available.  Yeah, just another brown bird.  But... second look: it looked more reddish brown.  Hmm... Better check!

Fox Sparrow (left) Goldfinch (right)

Zooming in on that picture:

Fox Sparrow

Notice the really reddish tail and the grey.  The belly is white with the reddish-brown stripes - you can see a little bit of that striping of the underparts near the tail.  I was able see the face with the eye-stripe, yellow beak, and striped underparts, but by the time I ran downstairs and grabbed my camera, the bird had turned.  Then it flew and we haven't seen it again.  (Whoa!  I think the osprey just flew by again!  We don't usually see them in the spring, just later in the fall!)

Moral of the story: keep your eyes open during migration; the birds you are used to seeing aren't all that are there!


OH YEAH!  We think that we have a pair of swans on the pond again!!  We have been seeing one every day for the last week and we were talking yesterday about, "Sure wish it would come in with a mate."  Then I realized that it actually is time for the swans to be on the nest and this one was acting like he was patrolling the waters, not checking out the surroundings!  We think his mate has a nest in the upstream part of the pond!  YAY!  We have missed the swans for the last 3 or 4 years since one of the adults of our resident pair died.  Each year, we'd all hope for the return of swans to our pond.  Looks like maybe this year is the one!



And, one last thing - I just got a pretty good picture of a female red-winged blackbird.  If you are a beginner birder, I'm sure you've never noticed one!  Pretty good cameo, eh?  Look for the beige eye-brow and the brown eye-stripe.

Red-winged Blackbird - female

(It is snowing.)  One more confusing brown bird just landed.  The female Brown-headed Cowbird.  Easy to figure out when with its mate.  (Mourning Dove gives a sense of the size of the cowbirds.)  See the snow coming down in the picture?  Sleet, actually.

Brown-headed Cowbird female & male, Mourning Dove on right