A morning visit from a Northern Flicker and an afternoon trip to Monte Sano State Park.
bird watching
A Week of Travel
I’m in Alabama this week, visiting family. The yards here are busy with birds and squirrels, and the windows are bright with changing leaves. It all makes me as happy as a basking cat.
(I would love some help identifying the unfamiliar woodpecker, above. Is it a juvenile Yellow-bellied Sapsucker?)
First Landing State Park, October 11
I woke this morning with the urge to make an audio recording of frog song. Nature seldom cooperates, when my plans are that specific, and today was no exception. Yesterday, one of the park’s small ponds was a cacophony of harsh croaks and lyrical trills. Today it was mostly silent. Here’s why:
So I have no audio to share. Instead I have sunlight and woodpeckers…
First Landing State Park, October 10
First Landing State Park is beginning to feel the onset of fall. The osprey are migrating, leaving egrets and herons in charge. Grasshoppers carry on as if winter will never come, but the butterflies know better. They’ve disappeared, along with most of the bees. (I did see something that might have been a bee, but it also might have been a fly that wanted me to think it was a bee.)
Despite these changes, summer hasn’t abandoned the park entirely. Mosquitoes still bite and squirrels still play. Crabs forage while frogs sing a frantic final chorus. Turtles patrol the shallow ponds, their backs mounded with mud so that they look like curiously mobile islands.
And the sun is still strong enough to burn if you stay out too long. Like I did today. But I have a good excuse for my over-long walk and uncomfortable sunburn. I was chasing a kingfisher…
The Wax Myrtle and Yellow-rumped Warblers
Much of the yard’s fall and winter activity takes place in the wax myrtles. (I believe ours are southern wax myrtle. Other names include Southern bayberry or candleberry.) I’ve never bothered to count, so I don’t know how many individual plants make up the barrier between our fence and the sidewalk. Enough to create a unique habitat in the yard.
More tree than shrub, the wax myrtles are distinctly male and female. Only the females produce berries. (Technically, their fruit is considered a drupe.)
The berries aren’t in high demand. Few of the yard’s visitors bother with them, which leaves more than enough for the yellow-rumped warblers that come each fall and stay until spring.
According to The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s All About Birds website, yellow-rumped warblers are the only warbler species able to digest the berries.
The warblers stay through pear-blooming time, when they spend a few weeks feasting on nectar and soaking up sunshine. Then they disappear.
Today I saw fall’s first flock of warblers flitting through the wax myrtle. For me, their arrival is as certain a sign as the Harvest Moon.
Rae Spencer 