[Satellite image, United States and adjoining countries, about 5:30 a.m. Wednesday, December 23, 2020. Click to enlarge.]
Ever wonder why you can't see the stars? Ever wonder why there are few bears and essentially no bobcats in southern New Jersey? Ever wonder why timber wolves and mountain lions will never again come to the east coast? Connect the dots.
In the northeast/mid-Atlantic, the bright line goes from top right (northeast) to bottom left (southwest). Like this:
Boston.
New York City/Newark/Jersey City.
Trenton/Philadelphia.
Baltimore/Washington, D.C.
People, that's us seen from space. If you wander down to Florida, you'll readily find Orlando, Miami, and Tampa. This is good. The aliens will know where to aim.
With the "Great Convergence - Christmas Star" Jupiter-Saturn thingy going on, a lot of people are looking at satellite imagery hoping for a break in the clouds. The satellite imagery has a more proximal message, however.
There ought to be black bears and bobcats in southern NJ (blueberry growers may disagree about the bears). But they can't get here from their northern and western haunts, because they have to cross the (in)famous Route 1 corridor, the stretch from NYC to Philly that I, in complete agreement, also avoid.
As white-tailed deer numbers exploded in the 1980's and 1990's, well meaning people suggested re-introducing wolves and mountain lions to the east. But wolves and mountain lions don't want to come east. Wolves in northern tier states have been shown to avoid even crossing rural roads. And there's the added problem of the occasional mountain lion that fetches up and kills and eats a female jogger.
Just seeing the light(s). Living where it's dark.
K
I've bemoaned to a couple friends that we've reached a point in the year where I could do my eBird checklist before going out to visit my local patch (roughly Cox Hall Creek north to Green Creek and from Delaware Bay to about a mile inland, Cape May County, NJ), and it would be within a bird or two of being spot on. This is as much a product of having birded this patch or at least a portion of it nearly daily all this pandemic year, save some not so fun trips to the hospital.
Make lemons into lemonade, right? What better chance to not just list birds, but to observe them? So I decided to redouble my efforts in that regard, spending time with the commoners as it were, seeing how they spend their day, often starting with the pair of adult Bald Eagles which leave the hidden-away east end of Fishing Creek Marsh at dawn, usually flying over my house on their way to Green Creek Marsh and the Bay to sit in the sun and then catch a fish, and fight over it.
Today a sapsucker drew my attention, and taught me something.
[The sapsucker was feeding on Poison Ivy berries, not a surprise since this is a very popular food source for birds. What it was doing with them, however, surprised me.]
The lemons-to-lemonade thing was something I was also forced into last spring while I went blind from rapidly accelerating cataracts, and being essentially blind by May with no "elective surgeries" allowed because of the pandemic, I decided to see just how far the birding-by-ear envelope could be pushed. It can be pushed very far indeed; the experience changed me.
[The sapsucker brought some of the Poison Ivy Berries to a hole-riddled telephone pole nearby and cached them. Did you know sapsuckers cache food? I didn't until this morning.]
Sapsuckers, being beautiful, somewhat scarce, and often hysterical, are birds I usually give some time too, and this one I stayed with for about 30 minutes. It fed on Poison Ivy Berries, no surprise there, but it was also caching them in holes in a nearby telephone pole! I had no idea they did that, even though many woodpeckers do, so I looked it up in a book that is always near at hand (Ehrlich, Dobkin and Wheye (1988). The Birder's Handbook.) Sure enough:
[Read the section on diet.]
Well, I'll be darned. I love watching nature, always have, always will, and the learning is part of the prize.
Birding lately for me means, in part, sumac watching. The sumacs are excellent wildlife food plants, not the most nutritious calorie-wise perhaps (great for micro-nutrients, though) but making up for that with abundant fruit that stays on the plant, off the ground and above the snow, until it is consumed.
[Male and female Eastern Bluebirds on and around sumacs, Cox Hall Creek WMA, Cape May County, NJ December 13, 2020.]
Some biologists call sumacs "native invasives." This is stupid. Unless you've got a better idea for a field in ecological succession, or a hedgerow, leave them alone.
NJ hosts three species of sumacs bearing red fruit clusters (smooth, staghorn and winged), plus poison-sumac, which is in a different genus and bears grayish-white fruits (birds eat these too.) The ones at CHC WMA are winged. Sumacs with red fruits are in the plant genus Rhus, which means "red." Poison-sumac's apt genus name is Toxicodendron. It means "poison tree."
Among the bird species I've seen feeding on sumacs at Cox Hall Creek WMA in recent days are:
Downy Woodpecker
Northern Flicker
Carolina Chickadee
Tufted Titmouse
Carolina Wren
Eastern Bluebird (big time!)
Hermit Thrush
American Robin
Gray Catbird
Brown Thrasher
Northern Mockingbird
European Starling
Cedar Waxwing
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Eastern Towhee
Fox Sparrow
Song Sparrow
Swamp Sparrow
White-throated Sparrow
Pine Siskin
American Goldfinch
Evening Grosbeak
22 species, not too shabby. My black oil sunflower seeds don't get that many. Some of these may have been after insects or insect eggs in the fruit clusters, not just the fruit. My dream bird for CHC's sumacs is Pine Grosbeak. . .
[“Do you know if there are any owls around here?” Red morph Eastern Screech-owl.]
That was such a great opening line I may well use it sometime.
Sunday night of Thanksgiving weekend I headed out like always to chase sunset over Delaware Bay, and stopped to chat with my neighbor. An unfamiliar pickup truck rolled slowly down our street, a big new-looking crew cab Ford that I'd never seen before. I watch.
The truck drives to the end of the street, turns around, and rolls very slowly back towards us. It stops next to us. The driver seems a regular-looking guy, one with a question on his face.
"Do you know if there are any owls around here?"
Apparently I looked surprised or wary or something, because he explained, "I wanted to show my kids an owl, they're into birds, and I saw a report there are owls around here."
My heart melted a little, just around the edges, so I revealed, “Yeah, there are three or four pairs of Great-horned Owls around here, you're sure to hear them around sunset this time of year. Sometimes even before.”
"How about screech-owls? There's been some reported around here, and I'd really like to show my kids."
I notice for the first time he's got his kids in the truck, including a cute little 11ish-year-old in the passenger seat. Heart melts a little more. So I explain that that's pretty much a whistle-them-in-at-night thing, although if you look at roughly 10,000 tree holes you might find one during the day.
He looks slightly disappointed. "Yeah, there's this guy around here that sees all kinds of birds down here, unbelievable, I forget his name."
This has now become, umm, unusual. I innocently ask, “Is it Don Freiday?”
He says, "Yeah, that's the guy, I see all these reports from him online like on eBird and the New Jersey bird thing."
“That would be me,” I say.
I've never seen this man before and, understand, I'm on my bike (part of a concerted effort to drive my orthopedists up the wall), dressed like a cyclist, binoculars stowed in my pack. I fish out my card and hand it to him.
"Man, I'd like to take you to lunch sometime. We just got a place down here. There's this other guy down here, does bird banding in his backyard, I got to go one time…"
“Richard Crossley,” I say.
"Yeah, you know him?"
“Yes, we've been on World Series of Birding teams together. Really good guy. Superb birder.”
"Yeah, see, were from north Jersey, I used to go into this wild bird store, and by the way it feels like I pay more to feed birds than to feed my kids, and this guy in there kept trying to take me birding, Bill Elrick, and eventually I went…"
This is developing into a significantly crazy set of coincidences. “He took you to Garret Mountain.”
"Yeah, you know him? I can't believe there are all these birds in New Jersey. Bill goes to this place called Forsythe all the time now, seems like another great place…"
The spirit-that-moves-in-all-things is on the move once again, perhaps cutting me some slack after moving me through a divorce, job change, extended illness, a bike crash, and a Thanksgiving weekend spent pandemically alone.
I say, “Yes, Forsythe is pretty awesome, I worked there for five years. I used to say I live in the best birding place on the planet [Cape May] and work in the second-best place. Not by accident.”
Before he drives off he says, "I'm going to look you up…"
If he does, those kids are going to see some owls.
