Tag: photo

We returned to the same wetland complex in Sandusky County that we visited Monday, this time circumambulating the Decoy Marsh restoration project with Ray Stewart and Drew Weber. Drew coached me through my lifer Willow Flycatcher (Empidonax traillii). We got a look at a pair of Blue-winged Teal (Anas discors)—it’s easy to focus on the crescent on the face as a field mark, but as I was showing a California birder the Peterson guide for this bird, we both realized (and observed) that the bird does indeed show a sky-blue wing. What a nice walk: full sun on the forest edge rimming the wetland, and enough twists and turns to the path that we could adjust our views of shorebirds and ducks to compensate for the sun.

We heard Trumpeter Swans (Cygnus buccinator) calling in the distance, and on the drive back to the meeting point, we found a nesting pair on a unnamed pond for an A+ look for the trip.

Man oh man, some of the robins in this part of the country have a brick-red breast; very confusing. And the Song Sparrows sing a different dialect.

On my own in the afternoon, I walked the Adam Grimm Prairie at Ottawa NWR. I did not detect the target bird for this stop (Henslow’s Sparrow [Ammodramus henslowii], which has been reported recently here), but the stop was worth it. After the crush of the Magee Marsh boardwalk, for almost two hours, I had. The. Grassland. To. Myself. At the end of my quiet walk, after working through a different sparrow ID, I was treated to the sight and sound of at least two Eastern Meadowlarks (Sturnella magna).

I spent about an hour on the Magee Marsh boardwalk (I took a long time working out a Palm Warbler [Setophaga palmarum] that for once was not bobbing its tail because it was busy preening, not foraging), and then I joined one of the informal walks that are part of the Biggest Week conference registration. Sarah Winnicki co-led a group down the Crane Creek Estuary Trail. I got another, better look and listen of the Warbling Vireos (Vireo gilvus) that are fairly regular here—an A- look, but good enough for a twitch. Even better was the look at a Gray-cheeked Thrush (Catharus minimus) skulking about along one of the dikes.

The winds picked up over the course of the morning—much more blustery than yesterday, but no crazy rainstorms in the afternoon.

No bird, plant, or habitat pictures, but this myxomycete at the entrance to the trail is quite nice.

The bridge that carries I-280 over the Maumee in Toledo is rather grand.

Tom Kashmer and Katie Andersen led a canoe trip down the sleepy Green Creek to its mouth at Muddy Creek Bay. This body in turn flows with the Sandusky River into Sandusky Bay. At the start, we found it tricky to manage the boats (I haven’t been in a canoe since I was a kid at summer camp) and see any birds. But soon we were picking up warblers and tanagers and other songbirds that we hadn’t seen yesterday.

The target bird for this trip was Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), and it was a slam dunk. We found a good dozen-plus birds, both adults and immatures, in the lowest reaches of Green Creek and over Muddy Creek Bay. But the big pleasant surprise was a quick flyover of three Trumpeter Swans (Cygnus buccinator). I’ve probably seen this bird before, but I’ve never been confident of an ID. For that matter, I’d like to have had another look at the three we saw today.

I love these old marker posts. This one along U.S. 20 is dated 1842 on its top, so it’s from the time before Lower Sandusky was renamed Fremont. I interpret it as signing 26 miles to Lower Sandusky (to the southeast) and [2]5 miles to Perrysburg (to the northwest). Most of the paint has weathered away. The only problem with my reading is that Lower Sandusky/Fremont is much closer than 26 miles at this point.

Very birdy.

That’s perhaps the only way to describe Magee Marsh in spring migration. I picked up two lifers, Bay-breasted Warbler (Dendroica castanea) and Tennesssee Warbler (Oreothlypis peregrina)—perhaps the only two that I will find this trip.

Many eyes and ears make for easy spotting, but the bouncy boardwalk and throngs of birders make birding here a little like trying to get a seat on a Red Line train at 8:30 in the morning.

The lakefront, on the other side of the huge parking lot from the boardwalk, is much more my style.

I watched Tree Swallows (Tachycineta bicolor) picking insects off the ground to carry back to the nest. I saw multiple Yellow Warblers (D. petechia): if the sight of a bright Yellow Warbler doesn’t give you a little jolt of joy, you don’t really like birds. An iridescent Common Grackle (Quiscalus quiscula) foraged in the wet leaf litter (dishwasher downpours of rain yesterday), tossing leaves aside and cocking its gimlet-eyed head like a cop looking for your dope stash.

In the afternoon, I went to a slide-show workshop by Kenn Kaufman on flycatcher ID. The talk was held at the visitor center of Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge, and who should be there in the lobby to greet me but Puddles the Blue Goose!

I got the nest box monitoring team to stand in one place long enough for Rob to take a group photo.

From my most recent report of the nest box team’s activities:

Lots of activity in the past two weeks! We have nests in 8 of the 16 boxes we are monitoring. We have often observed mixed clutches of Wood Duck and Hooded Merganser, but [we] found something new in box #60: two birds flushed from the box, one of each species. The box has a combined clutch of 14 eggs.

We expect box #67 to be hatched out by May. Box #6 did not show any change between the 29th and the 5th, so it’s possible that this nest has been abandoned. Continuing my run of dropping hardware into the wetland, box #7 needs a new quick link closure: I have some spares and I will take care of this next time.

I have new GPS coordinates for all the boxes, and I will be distributing that info.

We have several pictures of duck and merg eggs side by side for comparison, and I will get something distributed shortly.

Tree Swallows say thank you to box #84 for being such nice spot to perch up on. A Brown-headed Cowbird could be heard in the parking lot on the 29th. An Osprey was fishing in the main pond on the 5th.

* * *

That’s all for us for April. Our May work day will be the first Sunday, 3 May.

The team faced down the sleety weather this morning to start the rounds of checking nest boxes.

Following such a cold February, the wetland was substantially iced over, with only the main channel of Barnyard Run free-flowing. Which meant two things: first, we got some closer looks at wintering ducks than we otherwise might have.

Second, the effort of walking up to the boxes was much easier. Most of the boxes were surrounded by firm ice (see guest photo by Kat). This also meant that we weren’t working over our heads—always a challenge for the more diminutive members of the team. It was only at the edges of open water where the ice would suddenly break through, threatening to tip the unwary monitor into the cold, cold water and mud.

The end result is that we made our tour in an hour and half No dawdling to look for birds (though we did see a Bald Eagle and a couple of Pileated Woodpeckers), no fussing with the hardware. Back to the cars before the next round of frozen stuff falls from the sky.

What we did not see, somewhat surprisingly, were any merganser eggs. Usually they get a least one box started ahead of us, somewhere in the last days of February.

This windthrown maple is having a bad winter.

Sunday was my last visit to Ellanor C. Lawrence Park, at least for the purposes of the class project. I pulled off a couple of sections of the dessicated fruiting body of my Chicken of the Woods specimen to see the remnants of the pore surfaces underneath.

One of the tools we used in the course of the class was a rough-and-ready estimate of a tree’s age, given a measurement of its diameter at breast height (DBH). Now, it’s pretty clear from the landscape (as well as what we know about the general history of the region) that the park was once a farm. I don’t have enough information to determine whether this 40 acres or so that I’ve been studying was cleared for pasture, row crops, or what have you—no matter. But we can read some of the history of the land in its current trees.

Along the stone fence line, I found the oldest trees in the patch, White Oaks about 150 years old. Away from the fence, I found Black Cherry and Red Maple trees not much younger, maybe 135 years old. So these trees germinated during the period 1864 to 1871, give or take. And this observation fits with the historical record: Centreville, Virginia was a crossroads of fighting and encampment during the Civil War, especially 1862-1862. In the first half of the 1860s, every tree on the old Walney farm would have been cut down: you’ll find nothing older here.

We can go further. I see another cohort of trees: an American Sycamore about 78 years old, a Black Walnut of 80, a Tuliptree a bit older at 89 years old. These trees would have been seedlings about 1930, sprouting in old fields ready to undergo succession. The brief history provided by the FCPA web site admits that information about when the fields were abandoned is sketchy, but it would have been some time before 1935, when the farm was sold to Ellanor Campbell Lawrence for a summer place.

Sunday I spent most of my time in the park measuring mature trees to estimate their ages. I was surprised to find 90-year-old Red Oaks and Tuliptrees, which would indicate that this patch was no longer farmed as of about 1925. I also found a small outcrop of bedrock—I’m still trying to puzzle out the geology map to understand exactly what this rock is.

I’ve spent so much interest on this bloom of Chicken of the Woods, but not on the tree that it’s growing on. It turns out that it was a substantial Black Cherry (Prunus serotina), now deadfall. You can see the dark red wood, somewhat weathered, in the image. The tree had fallen across the trail; park managers would have sawed it into several large chunks, stretching through the woods toward the east and the housing subdivision. The chunks form a line about 100 feet long and end in a tangle of former canopy branches. This was a big tree.

Third and final trip with Joe and Stephanie, this time to forests of the Coastal Plain in P.G. and A.A. Counties.

First, we stopped at Watkins Regional Park, a mile or two from Central Avenue. The park is host to some humungoid old-growth trees: a Sweetgum the size of a Red Oak, a White Oak with a circumference of 152 inches at breast height that we estimated to be 242 years old. So what did I get a good image of? This lovely Round-lobed Hepatica (Hepatica americana) (a new plant for me), beginning to hunker down for the winter.

Nature fun analogy of the trip: the branches of a Pawpaw (Asimina triloba), bare of leaves, look like an old school VHF TV antenna.

Then, east over the Patuxent River and on to the Parris Glendening Nature Preserve, where we chased butterflies two springs ago. Geologically speaking, here the early Eocene Nanjemoy Formation lies above the Marlboro Clay. While the profusion of River Birch (Betula nigra) on the clay-based bits of the Preserve is quite nice, it’s the sandy passages, residues of the overlying Calvert Formation, that are really interesting. The trees are a near-monoculture of Virginia Pine (Pinus virginiana), but down at the herb layer we have the lichen Cladina subtenuis (at left), one of the so-called “reindeer mosses.” Recent rains led to a bloom of brittlegill mushrooms (Russula sp.) (at right).

Lying below the Nanjemoy is the Aquia Formation. This Paleocene unit of sand crops out to the west of Anne Arundel County, in Prince George’s County, where it makes a recharge zone. In A.A., now deep under other geologic formations, the Aquia constitutes an aquifer.

Back to the park this past Saturday, on a rather cloudy and breezy afternoon, with Leta riding shotgun this time. Many of the trees’ leaves are down; the unexpected Partridgeberry is still holding on to some fruits. The persimmon tree at the wineberry bench was holding some of its fruits, but I found lots on the ground, too. We gave them a taste, and the consensus is that while the pulp is okay, the pucker of a little bit of persimmon skin goes a long way.

We found a somewhat ratty example of Daedalea quercina on a dead branch.