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.