Carolina, Carolina

This past weekend, my wife had a business trip down in Baltimore. While she was holding HR exercises for the feds, I spent a morning in the parks of Maryland.

I have lived in DC many years ago, but this was a new area as a birder, so I checked out the web page of the Baltimore Bird Club. Two birding sites were highlighted: Lake Roland and the Cylburn Arboretum.

After a slight mixup in driving directions, I got to the park rather late, around 9:30. Nothing remarkable (cardinals, nuthatches, mallards) at first. Although there were some tantalizing glimpses of a warbler, very very high in the trees, it was too far away by cloud-diffused light for an ID.

I spent a lot of time at Lake Roland following this guy around:

Black-capped chickadees and Carolina chickadees are virtually identical in every visible way. In behavior, black-capped are little less shy of humans, but that's not a good test in the middle of a park. The one way they can be identified in the field is by song. Black-capped chickadees, as seen all over the northeast from New Jersey on up, have a two-note song: fee-beeee. Carolina chickadees range along the eastern seaboard, south of New Jersey, and have a four-note song: fee-bee-bee-beeee.
 
The wind was roaring that day, and the chickadees apparently didn't feel like talking much. The geographic location alone might have been good enough, but it's not exactly the Deep South in Maryland, and I didn't want to take the chance. Luckily, there are some grand old houses on the border of Lake Roland, and there were some bird feeders one of the backyards.

Oh, okay. If they've got a decent food source, then I wasn't going to feel bad about a trick. The iBird app, in addition to being a handy field guide, also has bird calls. In general, it's not a good idea to use recorded calls to bring a bird out into the open: it wastes the bird's energy, which can be quite vital for a wild creature trying to forage or mate. But since there was a good food source nearby, it wasn't placing them at risk. I played feee-bee-bee-beeeeee, and two chickadees promptly popped up over the garden hedge and replied in kind.


Cylburn Arboretum is a beautiful area: a nineteenth-century mansion, well-tended arbors and gazebos and gardens. There was another mixup, having misread the posted map: I had thought it said aviary, instead I found myself between two ominously humming boxes, and belatedly realized this was the apiary. Good thing I didn't lean on them! Otherwise, nothing was out except some robins, white-breasted nuthatches, lingering dark-eyed juncos, a cardinal or two. Turkey vultures wheeled around the far edge of the forest, and on the back end of the trails, the familiar teakettle-teakettle-teakettle led me to a good look at a Carolina wren.

The Carolina chickadee is a tick on the life list. Odd to think that I ended the trip with good looks at the only two extant North American birds with "Carolina" in their names.

The Great Snipe Hunt (part 1)

For the month of April, I've set out on a snipe hunt. Wilson's Snipe, an elusive shorebird, with camouflage so effective and cryptic that they're practically impossible to spot. There's more than one reason for the old jokes about snipe hunts: one can very well end up with a big weight or a long stand.

My first stop this weekend was at Van Cortlandt Park, on a morning bird walk by Nadir Souirgi. I was hoping the recent rains would make the park into a welcoming environment for snipe, but no such luck. There were the usual spring harbingers: robins everywhere, red-winged blackbirds making a racket in the marshes, white-throated sparrows popping in and out of the undergrowth, and by the bridge leading to the Old Putnam trail, a small flock (20 or so) of rusty blackbirds:

After that, I headed over to the New York Botanical Garden. Debbie Becker has been leading bird walks at NYBG for about 20 years. She had mentioned spotting a Wilson's Snipe during the previous week's walk, the first one she had ever seen at that location.

Well, no luck there either. Debbie was extraordinarily patient and methodical in using her binoculars to scan the marshes and wetlands at NYBG, but the snipe was either lying low or had simply moved on. The wind was roaring that day, though, so he might've been simply keeping under cover. Debbie was on the hunt for more than just the snipe, though: she went through a pine grove and came back with several fresh owl pellets, and after checking several pine groves and oak stands, we came across this great look:

A Great Horned Owl, male. Unfortunately some of the group got rather over-excited, and came right up to the owl, yammering away and taking cell phone pics. Eventually the owl flushed, and then, ominously, another raptor was flushed out of the valley where the owl had fled: a red-tailed hawk. That was it. Debbie shooed everyone out of the area, not wanting to precipitate a hawk/owl duel, which could very well lead to the exhaustion and death of both birds.

Other notable birds seen were a female hooded merganser and a belted kingfisher, both in the far distance. In keeping with all the other times I've seen a kingfisher, it's a truly wild bird, and it took off as soon as people came within fifty yards.

A nice coda to the weekend was a walk with my wife, Jess, through the Loch and the Ravine of Central Park. It was late Sunday afternoon, a beautiful spring day. I had the camera along, and it just so happened that a very obliging bird came right up to me, at eye-level no less, and let me tick another bird off the picture list, a yellow-bellied sapsucker.