where are your gloves and your helmet?

The red-winged blackbirds have been audible around here for several days now, and today marks the fourth or fifth day in a row that I've heard cardinals singing their courtship songs. I've had a raven sighting or two as well, although I admit one was in Holliston and may not count as a Harbinger of Spring since I don't know how common Raven is out there.

Now that DST is in effect I'll be at the shore more often keeping an eye put for returning shorebirds, and hopefully the channel marker ospreys as well.

Went birdwatching at various points along the local shoreline yesterday and the day before. Found myself thinking at one point of the posts I've seen that compare birding to Pokemon. I'm not sure I'd really make that comparison; 'gotta catch 'em all', yes, but you can't really deploy your list against anybody else's list for lifer battles...

Maybe a bit more like stamp collecting. But you can't buy the stamps at auction no matter how rare they are and how much other people talk them up.

And also if you specialize in certain types of stamp they're all several hundred yards away and bobbing up and down during windy weather to a degree that you can't even be sure what the hell stamp you're looking at.

So maybe not stamp collecting either.

Raven is back.

I heard him croaking somewhere past my kitchen window earlier this week, but I saw him today, down by the water. Black, and huge, and a tail spread out like a spade. And GHWAAAARNK, GHWAAARNK, GHWAAAARNK. You can't mistake that voice. It was Raven.

I've been seeing eiders in the Snake Island waters the past few days, as well as some ducks that aren't normally there during summer months. Yesterday I started hearing what I'm almost positive were downy woodpeckers. And today, although I did not see the soundmaker, I heard the hat. hat. hat. sound of white-breasted nuthatches.

Day hours might still outweigh night hours but the world says autumn is beginning.

There's a monk parakeet nest about a mile and a half from where I live. Quaker parrot. Whatever, it's the same thing- green birds that originated a lot farther south, escaped from being somebody's pets, and established themselves in the wild. They build great big shaggy nests that serve as colonial homes, sometimes in buildings, often on utility poles, and this nest is one of the latter kind. It's attached to an electrical transformer and it's almost as big as the transformer unit. Two parakeets built it some time back, May of 2021; the town took down the original nest, but the birds came back and built a new one, and nobody's removed it so far.

The thing about monk parakeets is that those huge shaggy nests are pretty solidly constructed and are good shelter against temperature and weather extremes. The parakeets were able to last out the winter. And they bred. There were two in 2021; yesterday I counted seven of them.

I also encountered several people who were looking up at the nest and speculating, and talked to one of them. Wound up answering a bunch of her questions about the birds- how long they'd likely been there, where they came from (almost certainly not migrating- I've seen signs in the area from at least one person who claimed to have lost a Quaker parrot), what they did in other parts of the country where I knew they lived, would human attention bother them (ahahaha no, the nest I saw in NJ was positioned above a high-traffic two-lanes-each-way road and next to a Whole Foods parking lot), things like that. I'd just come from a shorebird observation session at the beach, so I had my binoculars around my neck, but I was wearing a plain t-shirt and a pair of leggings that look like armor. She asked me if I was observing the birds for a living. Apparently she'd seen two older women who Really Looked Like Birdwatchers some time back- they'd brought binoculars or scopes or something and they were wearing multi-pocket vests and hats- but they thought the nest was empty and they left after a little while- and she said I was more knowledgeable than them. I told her it was just a hobby and that I was in the area every couple of days for the shorebirds, I just checked on the parrots every once in a while. She asked what I did for a living, and I told her it was an IT job at a finance firm in Boston. Apparently this constituted a suitably interesting job for somebody who Really Knew About Birds.

It occurred to me on the way home that I might be 48, but she was probably about twenty years older... and that since this was purely a hobby for me, and I got into slightly overenthusiastic talky mode, it was fundamentally That One Kid At The Science Museum Who's Telling The Adults All About The Dinosaurs They're Looking At. Just, you know. Aged up a little.

Went out for a bike ride yesterday for what I think was the first time this year. 7.64 miles total. Multiple ride segments because I brought my binoculars with me and came to a screeching halt several times for bird watching. Somebody spotted a Barrow's goldeneye off Deer Island the day before yesterday and I had high hopes for maybe catching sight myself.

No such luck, unless the Hey It's Got A Dark Head With A White GOD DAMMIT BIRD HOW DID YOU NOTICE THE BINOCULARS AT THIS DISTANCE I SWEAR TO GOD YOU BASTARDS SEE ME LOOKING AND PICK THAT MOMENT TO DIVE that I saw was a Barrow's. I got one common goldeneye, though, and like eighty brants (which are small black and brown geese with a bit of white), and more eiders than I've ever seen in one place at one time (I stopped counting at 193). Also my first white-winged scoter of Weird Duck Time, which was nice.

(Since I do not know how to alt-text a link rather than an image: the link goes to birdandmoon comics' strip "The Four Seasons of Bird Watching". Elegant Songbird Spring depicts some sort of yellow-headed warbler singing on a branch. The Subtle Treasures of Summer has a small brown bird with a spotted white underbelly. Magnificent Fall Migrations has three broad-winged hawks in flight. And Weird Duck Time has three ducks with sawtoothed beaks and demented looks- a northern shoveler, which has a green head and a brown and white body and a beak well out of proportion to the size of its head, a red-breasted merganser, which has a long needlenosed beak full of teeth as well as having spiky punk-looking feathers off the back of its head, and a white winged scoter, which is a black duck with white on the back of its head, the bridge of its nose, and the base of its beak, which also happens to be three different colors, because ducks weren't weird enough to begin with.)

Went birdwatching in the back yard yesterday instead of down by the water. (No active mosquitoes at this point, or at least very few.)

Young Cooper's hawks look very majestic when they are diving from their perch somewhat above the telephone wires in an attempt to take their prey. Then they look incredibly frustrated when they find out that the neighbor across the street, who maintains two very popular feeders, also maintains a yard's worth of very thick hedges and all the sparrows know it. The hawk spent a not inconsiderable amount of time perching on the surface of one of the hedges, blinking in confusion and trying at varying intervals to figure out if it could get under the surface without getting scratched or stuck, all while the sparrows yelled at it from just out of reach. Changed position a few times too, in an effort to find an easier spot from which to make a predation attempt.

Don't know what it wound up doing in the end. After a while I left it to its efforts and went back to the backyard.

Had the pleasure of spotting a smallish yellow-green bird with some barring on the wings, and yellow-orange legs. Did some investigating in Merlin, and then checked a photo I had sent to an ornithology volunteer back in 2018. The new visitor was a female blackpoll warbler; we're in the middle of blackpolls' autumn migration. Which is one of nature's more impressive feats, because apparently- I had not known this before looking into the details of what I had just identified- the blackpoll warbler migration is not the kind where one takes off, flies as far as one can in one day, stops to eat and sleep, then flies again the next day. We are instead talking about a bird five and a half inches long, one that weighs approximately twelve grams, that takes off from the northeastern United States and then does not stop flying until it reaches South America. The ones who stop along the way stop in Bermuda or the Antilles, but either way we're talking about a bird that, once again, weighs about as much as my morning coffee- not the beverage, the actual ground-up coffee that I put in the moka pot for brewing- flying nonstop for 72 to 88 hours over the Atlantic ocean at around 27 miles an hour.

I wish the one I saw luck. We just had the Boston Marathon go pretty well up here. I hope her extended run goes even better.

Northern flickers: the bird most likely to result in a moment of "I live in Massachusetts, why the hell am I hearing the jungle movie noise?"


Kookaburras: the bird most likely to result in a moment of "I'm watching a jungle movie, why the hell am I hearing the sounds of my native Australia?"

The raven was back this morning.

Didn't see it. But GHWAAAA GHWAAA GHWAAA noises are a little hard to mistake for anything else.

We've also, as it turns out, got orioles and goldfinches in the area. The orioles have been appearing in the backyard for several days now, I think mostly because the neighbor with multiple feeders has a fruit feeder in among the seed ones. The goldfinches, I think, come to anywhere in the area that has cover and seed; I've seen them on Deer Island and in Fisherman's Bend as well as here.

Also teeny little warblers of several kinds. Sometimes I wanna thump the people who gave bird species common names upside the head- for example, whoever named the American Black Duck, which is a species that looks like a slightly browner version of the mallard*, or possibly the Ring-Necked Duck, whose neck ring is only really visible to any great degree if the duck is dead and you are a hunter or taxonomist examining the corpse. Or the American Redstart; the 'start' in the name is an old word for tail, but the 'red' on an American redstart is two patches of orange near the base of the tail, which is mostly black. And sometimes the species namers are right on the nose, because a few days ago we had a visit from what my bird guides said was a Black and White Warbler.

I could not get a photograph of one, but you may judge for yourself exactly how black and white this bird is.



*One wonders if this falls under the heading of "Black Irish" being "pale pink people who happen to have *gasp* DARK HAIR in a nation of REDHEADS AND BLONDES", or possibly "tall, dark, and handsome" meaning "six foot tall, BROWN HAIR OMG, and NO SERIOUSLY WE TOTALLY CANNOT GET OVER HIM HAVING DARK BROWN HAIR". But that's a resentment for another post.

Woodpecker outside somewhere.

Can't see it. Probably a downy. We get them on the trees around this house sometimes. Flickers, too, and I've seen two flickers in the yard within the past three days, but what I'm not hearing is the jungle movie noise they make when they vocalize. So I'm guessing downy. They're small enough to miss if I'm not looking directly at them. I'm just hearing the drumming.

Turns out the hawk that's been visiting the yard is a sharp-shinned hawk rather than a Cooper's hawk. Apparently the two kinds look super similar, to the degree that the eBird software has an entry for 'Cooper's/sharp-shinned'- that is to say 'look, it's one of the two but I can't tell which right now'. I sent several photographs I took last week off to eBird volunteers who do the database entry work and said 'this was in my backyard waiting for the chance to eat something on its way to the feeder, what am I looking at', and the answer came back sharp-shinned. So I'm good with that.

Right now the blue jays are outside yelling their heads off, the cardinals have paused their courtship song for a bit, and there are robins calling in the distance.