River’s high, rain keeps coming. We’re stuck. Clammy, robin-y nights; 40ish days.
Wednesday: Shades of Gray
Drizzle, spit, plip-plop, chipi-chipi, downpour. I can think of at least 50 words for rain in my Appalachian Spanglish, but no exhortation powerful enough to push this stationary front out to sea.
This morning’s palette is gray on grayer with the faintest splashes of blue. 38 degrees at 5:35 AM and what is becoming a highly predictable sequence of dawn chorus participants. Newbies: Yellow Warbler by 6:01, Warbling Vireo by 6:08, neither of which I have yet seen. At 6:09, I think I hear a brief bit of Rose-breasted Grosbeak, but it’s probably just the cruel mimicry of starlings. By now, I’m getting FOY anxiety and starting to hallucinate the chips of hummers and glimpse orioles, tanagers, and grosbeaks out of the corner of my eye. It’s like this every year: until I have the time to do it right, I don’t even look at lists from other local places so as not to get anxious about species that haven’t shown up here, yet have been hanging out at other people’s feeders for days or even weeks. And yet, I see the evidence anyway with what scrolls past me on my feeds. Cursed rain!
The sky is spitting at me in revenge for my incessant staring; I retreat to the porch. A Belted Kingfisher rattles somewhere down the swollen Juniata, and a lone Chimney Swift zips by. Around 6:30, there are detectable streaks of blue, a blotchy blur of azure in the clouds just above and to the west. I think. A dozen Red-winged Blackbirds, acting like it’s February, rip by in tight formation, silently. The temperature has dropped a degree to 37, and a pair of Common Ravens flap up over Sapsucker Ridge. Dawn’s over.
Thursday: Ramble
The week of rain is supposed to be winding down today, so I walk the tracks at dawn. At 5:36 AM it’s still raining a bit, but warmer, 42. There’s slightly more blue than yesterday. Not much has changed in the Gap except a detectable uptick in Wood Thrushes and a pair of gurgling House Wrens. The Wood Thrushes have been slipping through the rain storms to get here and north; I find them flying at night in the worst of conditions. Though I rarely hear them from the balcony, dozens of breeding pairs will eventually fill in the lush forests of the Gap as well as the depths of Plummer’s Hollow, and on up through much of the property. They don’t seem to have serious competition from their kind, unless you count American Robins. Among our thrushes of the deep woods, the Hermit Thrush and Veery nest at higher elevations in this part of the world; we occasionally record them in the summer, but I think they are engaged in molt migration, not breeding on the mountain. As for Swainson’s Thrushes, they don’t nest in the area at all, though late migrants can sometimes be found singing on Laurel Ridge into June.
Terra nullius is still bursting with White-throated Sparrows, skittish as always, tumbling over each other through the privet thickets in their haste to get away from me.
Return to Sunlight
A bit after 2 PM, brilliant light and blue skies lure me from my office. It has been a long time since the air temperature was warm enough to work outside, and it’s that kind of tumultuous weather, with giant cumulo-becoming-nimbus clouds and the threat of more rain, that generates updrafts and the unexpected.
I don’t have long to wait. Scanning a hole in the pile-up of cloudbanks over the Gap, I spot circling dots that resolve themselves into a half-dozen Double-crested Cormorants. Always the rarity here, they are in no hurry to get anywhere, and spiral gradually northeastward for several minutes. With them, incongruously, is an Osprey, splashing brilliant white.
Finally, a FOY! I thought I wasn’t imagining a single note back at dawn, and sure enough, a still-cryptic Baltimore Oriole is now singing his full five notes. If this is the one that stays around, it will be several days until it makes an actual appearance, to be followed by weeks of searching the roofs for bugs and vocalizing most of the day. The oriole is #147 on the Plummer’s Hollow 200, but I expect this total to rise significantly over the first big May weekend, with warm weather predicted.
Meanwhile, swifts and swallows are gathering in clouds over the confluence. Mirroring the composition of the local nesting population, the swallows are mostly Barns and Northern Rough-wingeds, with a few Trees, but no Cliffs, which I don’t think have any nesting areas in Tyrone, nor Purple Martins, which are out in Sinking Valley where people have erected homes for them. Bank Swallows are few and far between around here, and as usual, I can’t find a one this afternoon.
Swallows and Rainbows
On a quick evening jaunt to grab antenna data (not a single NFC in two days, it turns out!), I get diverted by a warbler song down-track and end up heading to the pond. Thank goodness for the overhanging limestone cliffs where our property borders the next: the dark sky lets loose a final downpour even as the setting sun lights up the west. This results in a spectacular double rainbow against which a boiling mass of swifts and swallows enjoys, it would appear, the feast of a lifetime.
I was optimistically assuming the rain was done, but it’s never done, so I’m glad for some shelter, and it’s a good vantage point to watch the swift-and-swallow cloud along with streams of European Starlings, corvids, and other birds scurrying back and forth through the Gap.
At one point, it lets up a bit, and I film a highly agitated male American Redstart that is flying about and making ticking noises at me. It is the first of at least six males who colonize the Yellow Warbler swamp and the woods around the pond. Speaking of the pond, it’s now silent and covered with scum, home to a lone pair of Mallards. The Canada Geese that usually nest here as well seem to have abandoned the location, and the only other waterfowl here this time of year is a pair of Wood Ducks, absent today but often about; they tend to nest high up on Sapsucker Ridge somewhere.