Ann's Bird Blog: May 2017

Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Dickcissels Post #2

We made another trip to the farm ponds this morning. This time my battery was charged, so I got a few pictures.

Grasshopper sparrow - this is not cropped. At first I thought it was a female dickcissel.

Male dickcissel - he was a little farther away, so I had to zoom and then crop.

Singing on a beautiful spring morning.

Oh, and a couple of wood ducks that were on the farm ponds.

We are the very eastern edge for dickcissels. Any farther east, and eBird flags a dickcissel as a rare bird. Range maps also show we are the edge of the range.

Saturday, May 27, 2017

Dickcissels

Male Dickcissel

We saw three dickcissels this morning at the Dobbins Farm Ponds. At first we were thinking larks--but they were definitely not meadowlarks or horned larks. We watched two males vying over one female. I had a hard time getting one good picture - but this does identify it well. This was a lifer for Mike, and a confirmation for me - I had seen one about 20 years ago when we still lived at Great Oaks, but didn't realize at the time it was a fairly unusual bird for our area. So that made me a little unsure about the identification at the time.

How This Bird-Watching Happened

I'm always a little self-conscious and reticent about telling people that I like to watch birds. Somehow that hobby conjures up pictures of little old women in khaki shorts and boots, peering through binoculars at some little spot in the woods. Maybe wearing a pith helmet.

But birdwatching is something that really brought my husband and me together in the early years of our marriage. He was a huge hunter; I had never picked up a gun. We were very different. But we discovered that we were quite a team about birdwatching - I was the bookworm about them, and he had the outdoors knowledge to pick up sounds and motion in the woods. We kept lists and watched everywhere we went. I picked up some of his extensive knowledge about wildlife. And it was fascinating.

Even after our son was born, we still could keep up with this hobby somewhat. Our home had a great shelf feeder, directly out of our second-story bedroom window, that was about fifty yards from woods and stream. So we had great variety coming directly to our house.

After moving to Mike's hometown, the hobby waned. Two children, not a good location for much variety at a feeder, not as easy to take trips, either short or long ones. So it became an occasional thing rather than a main focus.

On our trip to the northwest, fourteen years ago, we put fifteen new species on our lists and got excited about it once again. And on our recent California trip, we got a few more.

Now that our children are gone, we're intent on watching birds again. It is still bringing us together. And we don't even need khaki shorts or pith helmets.