Dawn Chorus, With Junco

It is a cold dawn with slight fog as I stand on my back patio, listening. There are many robins singing, the occasional high peal of a cardinal. They are greeting the day in their own ways, proclaiming "I am here, this is my territory, stay away unless you are a potential mate."

Singing cardinal (Margo D. Beller)

Robins are the early birds that catch the worms, but there are others in this dawn chorus that join in as more daylight comes. More cardinals, the "here, here" of a titmouse, the "oh Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody" of a white-throated sparrow now in breeding colors (his throat and "eyebrows" are a very bright white and you can see the yellow close to the eyes, an area known as the lores).

In the old days, when I walked early in the morning to the train to take me to work, I would listen to the birdsong. Some birds I could easily recognize, others I would come to learn over the course of a decade. The chatter of goldfinches, the "tea kettle, tea kettle" of a Carolina wren and the cascading warble of its smaller relative, the house wren. The "hey sweetie" of a black-capped chickadee or the raucaus "thief!" of the blue jay. It took years of searching trees and walking through the woods to learn which calls were made by which bird.

White-throated sparrow in nonbreeding coloring
(Margo D. Beller)

Now, standing still in the growing light, I hear Canada geese, the high-pitched squeal of a red-bellied woodpecker, the three-note "tzee-tzee-tzee" of a golden-crowned kinglet, the drumming against four different trees by woodpeckers proclaiming their territories. Here are the mourning dove, the fish crow, the larger American crow and the rattle of cowbirds. The slight differences in call between a downy woodpecker and the larger, nearly identical hairy woodpecker.

Once in a while there is something unusual -- a sharp-shinned hawk flap-flap-soaring overhead, a raven's guttural croak, the high-pitched "hank" of a white-breasted nuthatch. The longer I stand outside, the longer I hear another soloist come to the foreground of this chorus. For me it ends as I am going inside to warm up and get some coffee and a flicker does its long laughing call.

Spring is my favorite time of the year. The birds are noisier as they start looking for a suitable nest site and a mate. The migrants are passing through my area, heading north from their wintering grounds. Ruby-throated hummingbirds have been reported as far north as New Jersey, despite our unusually cold March and April weather. When the instinct says go, you go.

Depending on where you are located, you will hear different birds calling in the dawn or at dusk. My patch is a suburban town in New Jersey. In a few weeks, if I'm lucky, I might hear the softer songs, clicks and buzzes of the warblers and other migrant birds foraging in the treetops as the first rays of the rising sun hit that area. There are many songs I still can't identify, even after all these years.

House finch in feeder, junco at top right, female
cardinal at top left (Margo D. Beller)

One of the interesting "problems" I have is telling the difference between four different birds whose songs are very similar. What I heard the other morning as part of the dawn chorus was a small black and white sparrow with a pink bill called a junco or, to give it its formal name, a dark-eyed junco. This is a winter visitor, and in my part of the country it is only the male birds hanging around. The browner females stay farther to the south. The idea, I think, is the males can get north and find the best territories faster if they stay farther north. So they and the white-throats come to the feeders in winter and are soon replaced by summer visitors including the catbird and the chipping sparrow.

The junco's call is soft, high in pitch and musical. The chipping sparrow will call more loudly, longer and the call is not as musical. Some refer to it as "dry." To me, and this dates me, it sounds like a person using two fingers to tap tap tap on a manual typewriter keyboard, kind of mechanical. As noted, the chippy arrives around the time the junco is making ready to leave and you'll often hear their calls during that time.

Chipping sparrow in nonbreeding coloring (Margo D. Beller)

There are two other summer visitors with similar musical calls, so I have to work my memory a little harder to remember them. I don't have many pines growing around my area and I don't live near a swamp, so I have to travel elsewhere to hear pine warblers or swamp sparrows. Pine warbler song is high in pitch and very sweetly musical. The ornithologists at Cornell describe the swamp sparrow call as "a slow trill consisting of two or more pitches repeatedly sung essentially at the same time." To me it sounds like a chippy or a junco.

As problems go, trying to remember the different songs of four birds is a minor but enjoyable challenge.

On Leaves, Birds and Bears

Leaves

Out here in the suburbs it is currently leaf blower season.

I am on my back porch, looking at a clear blue sky on an otherwise perfect autumn day in November. My next-door neighbor, in his shorts and blasting music through his headphones (as I am, if you can call harpsichord Bach "blasting") is using his blower to push the leaves off the grass, perfectly demarcing the edge of his property.

When he is finished, as sure as the sun's position will change, another neighbor will take up the challenge and blow his leaves around for a while. And so it will continue all day in the "quiet" suburb where I live. (At least it's not gunshots or a car alarm - yet.)

Pods and acorns found under the fallen leaves. (Margo D. Beller)

I did the same thing myself yesterday, using the blower to push the elm and maple leaves into piles that MH and I would then rake into blue tarps and dump at the curb for pickup by our town. Unlike the front yard, this is actually easy. In the front yard we have locust trees, one of which is a female tree that gets loaded with long, hard, smelly pods that must be raked down because they are too heavy for our blower. Unlike the previous week, there were few pods so I can pick them up rather than rake and strain my arms.

I was quite pleased with our effort, until I awoke this morning and saw that the wind had changed and it had brought down more pods as well as a lot of the remaining oak leaves. Being a Sunday, the infernal sound of my neighbor's and others' leaf blowers started a little later this morning, 9am instead of 7:30.

This is part of the suburban ritual. As the summer heat starts to fade it is time to pull up the annuals, mow the grass and put out mums. As Halloween nears it is time to put out pumpkins, corn threshes and take the kids to the nearest farm so they can experience something resembling rural life. Then the leaf blowers start. After Thanksgiving, start expecting snow and snowblowers clearing driveways, but sidewalks only begrudgingly.

I try to fight against this ritual as much as I can but I can't avoid the pods or the leaves that thickly mat the lawn and can do some damage if not removed. So every year we rake and every year, the day after we expose the deep green of the lawn, more leaves fall and remind us there is more work to be done and there is always more work to be done.

Like all of life's burdens that never end.

Birds

"Where are the juncos?" MH asked me the other afternoon as we were having our dessert on the porch before the light faded.

Junco (Margo D. Beller)

MH has a more scientific bent than I, and he tracks when the chipping sparrows and catbirds depart to be replaced by white-throated sparrows and juncos, which is a cousin of the sparrow. White-throats and juncos usually start showing up in October. I don't note the exact day but MH has a calendar embedded in his head and to him the juncos were overdue.

I had seen a couple of juncos one afternoon when I went to the feeders to chase off the horde of house sparrows mobbing it. The juncos flew off and I haven't seen or heard one in our backyard or at the feeders since then. I have been hearing the two-note call of the white-throat but have only seen one that took close to a week to get comfortable enough to come out of the bushes and stand on the flood wall. When I chase off the house sparrows it stays put because it is not of the house sparrow clan. (House sparrows are not really sparrows but old-world weaver birds that came along for the ride and proliferated in the new world over these many centuries.)

So I thought about it. Migration in my part of northern New Jersey had been very bad - "good" birds seen in much smaller numbers than usual, storms blowing many birds over New Jersey southward or eastward over oases such as Central Park in NYC. It could be that ever since the last bear attack I've been taking feeders in and so there is no seed available in the very early hours when I've found cardinals and white-throats and juncos like to feed.

White-throated sparrow (Margo D. Beller)

It could also be the horde of sparrows. Unlike the titmouse or the chickadee that grabs a seed and flies off, the sparrows crowd into the house feeder, fighting each other. I now have a second, caged feeder out for the other birds.

Like the unusual warmth we have had the last few weeks (when temperatures fall back to where they are supposed to be, the weather forecasters seem to treat it like some sort of calamity. "It will be 35 degrees colder tomorrow than it was today!!") that I attribute to the wacky weather patterns created by global warming, the sparrow explosion is man-made. A former neighbor kept a feeder going all year long, including the summer, and filled it with millet, a house sparrow's favorite food because it is small and easily cracked open. The abundance of food created a population explosion.

Unfortunately, that neighbor moved out and, after an initial attempt, the people who moved in use the feeder pole more for hanging plants than bird food. So this large sparrow population - which has made nests in trees, shrubs and the spaces next to window air conditions such as my neighbor's across the back yard - are coming to my sunflower seed feeders en masse.

I find myself coming out to refill the house feeder during the day or, if I am sick of the mess, taking the house feeder in, which deprives the cardinals of food because they can't fit into the caged feeder. Then I must go out just before dusk, after the other birds have tucked themselves in for the night, to allow the cardinals a last meal before dark.

So these bigger, more aggressive birds may be the reason the juncos are "late" in arriving. When the real cold comes and the snow falls and I can safely keep the feeders out all night without fearing another visit from a bear, perhaps the winter birds will finally show themselves. Desperation will make even the smallest bird fight a house sparrow.

Bears

In late October, in the middle of the day in the middle of the large county seat's large green, a large bear was spotted in a tree by a police officer. The lunch crowd was immediately ousted from the park and people started taking videos on their phones to post to YouTube. Snarky comments voiced more support for the bear than for the police officer, and comments regarding the color of the bear - black - were made both pro and con, as stupid comments will be made when you don't give your real name.

The bear, meanwhile, stayed put, and from the comments I've read most people were mighty pleased to see a bear in the middle of Morristown. It was a big story that made headlines in newspapers and on the evening news.

I heard this story and knew, just knew, that this bear was the same one that had walked into my yard on a sunny September afternoon on a Sunday when people were in their yards or strolling in the street and grabbed at my house feeder, ripping off an iron feeder pole arm, before ambling across the yard and along the next street, where I managed to see it heading north.

Black bear, 2014 (RE Berg-Andersson)

I also knew that if this 200+ pound bruin had been in the backyard of any of these people, threatening their feeders or, worse, their pets or small children, they wouldn't have been so happy to see a bear in the middle of the day in the middle of a heavily populated area.

The black bear was later tranquilized and brought down by the fire department in a cherry-picker, then taken away. However, while in the past such bears were taken to the far corner of the state, this time it was taken to a Wildlife Management Area not that far (for a bear) from where it was found.

This has happened too many times, and that is why New Jersey has expanded the bear hunt. It has become expected bear will show up on wooded hiking trails or in farms or the backyards of some of the more rural parts of the heavily populated state of New Jersey, but when they start showing up in towns and cities you know the situation is getting out of control.

The "bear people" blame suburbanites such as myself for having bird feeders and garbage pails out. They say we need more "education." I can't speak for the education level of the people watching the Morristown bear but I was quite alarmed they didn't realize this was no TV show but a wild animal loose among them.

Perhaps the state thinks the bear they removed will hang around the WMA in time for the bear hunt. Perhaps they are hoping the bear will get tired of all that wandering and stay put for a while, maybe den in the woods for the winter. But why should a bear remain in a WMA scrounging around for dried berries when it can come into Morristown on a fine, sunny day and dumpster dive the town's many fine restaurants?

Winter Birding

To everything there is a season, and that is true for birding.

Spring and autumn get all the press because that is when the warblers and other tropical migrants pass through on their way north to their breeding areas of choice, or south to the warmer and buggier areas when it is cold up here. Summer is when a lot of birders go to the shore for relief and shorebirds.

I happen to like winter birding when the leaves are off the trees, the cold is bracing and the crowds are sparse. (A lot of birders follow the birds to South America to enjoy summer there.) That doesn’t make the birding any less interesting, especially this year when the unnaturally warm winter weather prompted a lot of migrant birds to hang around a lot longer than usual.

There are lot of birds that show up in New Jersey when the cold comes on. They consider New Jersey warm enough for them, a funny concept to remember when we are shivering from what we consider arctic winds!

Some of these are regular winter visitors. The junco, for instance. This slate-gray and white little guy - and in New Jersey it is always a guy because the browner females fly farther south for the winter (perhaps the males stay farther north so they can get to the breeding areas quicker) - is a pretty reliable indicator winter is coming on.

The white-throated sparrow below is another winter regular. The male’s white “eyebrows” and the yellow spot on either side of the bill and above the eyes get brighter as the winter goes on. Unlike the junco, males and females winter together, and you will hear the high whistling “O Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody” of the males as the territorial battles begin.

There are other winter birds not as common. The American tree sparrow, for instance, with its distinctive reddish cap and bi-colored bill, gray on top and yellow below.

The rough-legged hawk is a bird of the tundra, and when winter comes on it sometimes flies south to grassland areas, even urban landfills such as the one abutting the DeKorte Park in Lyndhurst, N.J., near the Meadowlands.

Snowy owl is another uncommon winter visitor and finding one is always a big occasion. This owl is, as the name implies, very white, hangs out in the open and hunts by day, unlike most other owls. This year, among the many recorded, a snowy has been at the Merrill Creek Reservoir in Warren County, NJ, for weeks.

Winter also means ducks. The common eider and the harlequin duck are standard winter ducks at the rocky jetty of Barnegat Light. If you look on a local pond before it freezes the chances are you will find all sorts of interesting ducks including one or more of the mergansers plus ruddy, canvasback and ring-necked duck.

But just about any waterfowl is likely to show up in any unfrozen water, even along the Hudson River shoreline between Hoboken and Manhattan, which is about as urban as it gets.

As I said, one big advantage of winter birding is the leaves are off the trees. Redtail hawks are easy to see from a great distance when they sit in a bare tree, and it makes it easier to find the white-breasted nuthatch calling from a limb over my head.

But perhaps the best thing about winter birding is you don’t have to even go outside if you don‘t feel like it. If you have a feeder out - better still, many feeders holding different types of seed and suet - the birds will come to YOU as you have your hot cup of coffee on a frosty morning.

Try it and you’ll be amazed by what you can see.