Here are a few shots of a purple finch I found on this morning’s walk through the snow. Male purple finches are more rosy in color and overall more colorful (and slightly larger) than the more common house finch. Plus, purple finches are way cooler.
Tomorrow, the female purple finch.
Before it gets too far into the new year, I want to take a look back at my birding highlights from 2023. It was a good year all around with birds small and large. Thanks to you all for being a part of another year of sharing birding adventures.
Here is my annual top 10 list of birding highlights from the past year.
10. The Christmas Bird Count never fails to be a highlight of the year. Whether the birds are plentiful or not, it’s always a good day spent in the field with friends. The weather was cold, gray and damp, and the birds were fairly scarce, but our spirits remained high.
9. Along the same lines, I contributed to eBird more in 2023 than in years past. Checklists from eBird are entered into a massive database that scientists use to track bird populations. Millions of lists are submitted, so my contributions are pretty insignificant, but it all adds up. Anything to help the future of birds. Anyone can participate, regardless of skill level. Sign up through the eBird app or website.
8. I watched a flock of mallards at a park in Baltimore while I was in the city visiting my son at school. It was early in the fall duck migration, but something told me to look carefully at the dozens or hundreds of mallards that dominated the pond. Sure enough, three or four ring-necked ducks swam and rested among the mallards. Not an earth-shattering sighting, but I love my ducks and always love seeing them.
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For just a moment, I was in their world.
As I stood there I could see nothing but branches, sticks and stubborn brown leaves that refused to fall off the low trees. Then I crouched like a baseball catcher and there they were: a flock of mallards taking a midday break in the tangled trees growing out of a small pond.
Normally mallards would not make for a memorable birdwatching outing, but this time was different.
A fairly busy road was no more than 50 yards away and my car was about 50 feet away, but I felt as if I were visiting the ducks’ world. The area was thickly wooded and a dark canopy of towering branches hung over the pond’s edge, adding to the feeling of seclusion. It was as if the world was reduced to the woods, the mallards and me.
It was a neat sensation, one that I’ve experience only a handful of times before — usually in extreme northern New Hampshire.
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I wanted to do something a little different for my annual Christmas column this year.
I typically do a gift guide column, but I will keep that part of the article brief, only to say that giving someone a membership to a conservation organization, particularly a local one, is always a great gift for your birder. Material gift ideas, such as binoculars or spotting scopes, are readily available online.
For this year, I want to do something that is perhaps a bit corny, but fun anyway. I am going to break down the classic carol The Twelve Days of Christmas and relate each of the days to birdwatching in New England.
Here we go …
12 drummers drumming. My first thought was to use the ruffed grouse as it makes a drumming sound by flapping and rotating its wings in the woods to claim territory. I am, however, going to save the grouse for later. So the 12th day will be the drumming of New England woodpeckers. Hopefully the image you have of drumming is a woodpecker drumming on a tree in the woods rather than drumming on the side of your house.
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Birders are trained to find things that look out of place. It is a self-training that happens naturally over the course of many years of looking for birds.
A slight movement in the bushes likely means a bird or small mammal. That bump on a fence railing or post is probably a small perching bird taking a rest. If you are canoeing and the expanse of calm water ahead of you is broken by barely distinguishable ripples, a diving duck may soon reappear on the surface.
This gift that birders have, I think, is most often on display while driving. Most people will drive by a hawk perched on a branch along the road and not even notice it. Birders, on the other hand, see the blob in the tree from a mile away. A positive identification of the blob is made as you zoom past at 65 miles an hour. Just the other day, I noticed a bald eagle perched along a river. From the road, however, it was largely hidden by branches, but something just didn’t look quite right.
This gift is most evident when driving or walking along a familiar route. If you’ve walked a trail through the woods a thousand times, you get to know where every rock, root and upturned tree is. Anything that looks out of the ordinary is immediately noted and inspected to see if it’s a bird or animal.
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Every once in a while, birding throws a curveball.
To keep the baseball analogy going, curveballs aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Once some batters learn how to recognize a curveball, they prefer them to fastballs. It’s just a matter of seeing enough curveballs and getting enough experience with them. You could say it’s a learning curve.
In the birding world, curveballs come in all shapes, colors and sizes. That’s why they are called curveballs. I would define a curveball in this regard as any bird that looks different from what a field guide says it looks like.
Leucism is a common curveball the birding world likes to throw. Leucism is similar to albinism in that the bird appears white, mostly white, or patchy white. Robins, juncos and red-tailed hawks are birds often seen with leucism. That is not to say these birds have a high percentage of individuals with leucism, but rather if a bird with leucism is spotted in New England, it’s often one of those birds.
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New England’s ospreys left the region weeks ago for warmer temperatures in the south. That doesn’t mean, however, that they are forgotten.
The return of the osprey from dangerously low numbers is another hugely successful conservation story. Last week, in honor of Thanksgiving, I talked about the turkey reintroduction and how wild turkey numbers went from zero to goodness knows how many in New Hampshire over just the last 50 years or so. Ospreys have a similar successful conservation story.
Ospreys were at critically low numbers in the 70s and slowly started making a comeback due to conservation efforts on many fronts. The osprey population is now to the point where it is safe to say it is wildly successful.
I recall working for a newspaper in southern Connecticut in the early 2000s, and a pair of ospreys building a nest on a light tower at a local beach was literally front-page news. Ospreys hadn’t nested in that city in several decades. Now that town, Norwalk, has several dozen osprey pairs nesting in it. A similar story can be told about osprey up and down the Connecticut coast along Long Island sound. Inland osprey numbers are thriving as well.
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Here are a few more photos of the bald eagle I spotted at a rather unusual place a few weeks ago. Here’s the full story.
I have two routes to get to work each day. According to my GPS, each way takes the same exact amount of time to reach my destination.
The route I end up taking is usually a spur-of-the-moment decision right before I either go straight or take a left. Neither route is particularly conducive to seeing wildlife, unfortunately. However, one route does take me by a cemetery where I often see a large flock of wild turkeys. Sometimes that alone is enough to sway my spur-of-the-moment decision to take that route.
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A flock of birds is not always as it appears to be.
No, I am not talking about the silly “birds aren’t real” conspiracy theory. I am talking about rare, or at least less common, birds often mixing in with a flock of common birds.
A common example of this is when a snow goose is found within a huge flock of Canada geese. At first glance, it may look like a run-of-the-mill flock of ultra-common Canada geese, but closer inspection sometimes yields a less common bird, such as a snow goose, among them. Snow geese, of course, are very common in their own right, but not necessarily in New England. Therefore, when one of these bright white geese shows up among a flock of Canada geese, it makes for a good birdwatching experience.
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Birds of New England.com 