Creak and Squeak
The dawn chorus today is straining joints, banging pipes, and the insistent slapping of the American flag against its pole, over by the VFW. There’s a certain sound that overlaps with waking chickadees, an untraceable squeaking, perhaps some part of the nearest sycamore.
Wind down here is gusty; up on the ridgetops, it’s another fine day for early lift-offs. The Mallards feel it: they’re zooming this way and that by 7:11, something I haven’t seen them do in weeks. As usual, they’re coming from the area of the paper mill. Some head south, others into the Gap. Quite likely, they’re also ones that decided not to sleep at the hidden pond last evening after I flushed them.
At 7:15, Black-capped Chickadee noise, earlier than usual. A massive shape emerges from over downtown and heads toward the towers—a dark raptor that barely resolves itself into an adult Bald Eagle, already in the wind. Appropriate figure against the dramatic sky this morning, and uncharacteristically, it’s beaten the ravens.
The tannery raven is nowhere to be heard, or seen, today.
Gusts, oxygen, a few drops. The drama takes a 12-minute intermission.
Buffeted
At 7:27, the first four American Robins show up, and a starling pair three minutes later.
After 7:30, the sky is fuller than its been in awhile, flocks of starlings, robins, House Finches and House Sparrows, all moving at break-neck speed. Paradoxically, though there is an uncharacteristic amount of bird life in the air, but since everything is moving so fast, minimal time to ID. As usual, only Rock Pigeons seem really at ease with the gale.
The Cooper’s Hawk calls but today remains unseen. At 7:42, a pigeon-not-a-pigeon fights the air, and I only get a falcon gestalt before it disappears behind roofs. I intercept it heading over the river toward the train station. An American Kestrel, it turns out, which I’ve noticed on windy days becomes briefly urban. Peregrine Falcon and Merlin and both possibilities in this kind of weather, but no luck today.
At 7:56, the Bald Eagle returns from over the mountain, then as it often does, veers up-ridge past the towers, and heads on north. A robin is singing, and minutes later, church bells. The Common Raven pair emerges from behind the ridge by the towers, floating upward, parallel, no diving, no maneuvers. They continue to float up on crooked wings, straight above me, balloon-like and out of sight to the west.
Only a faintish pink line parallel to the interstate marked dawn today. The Downy Woodpecker, up at 8:06, works its way to the top of a spindly, dead tree directly in front of me. Running out of branch, it exits left. Another raven, perhaps the absent TR, is over Sapsucker Ridge.
A rainstorm sets in from the east, somehow, as the starlings and robins gather in nearby trees, noisy. In a normally silent January, it’s nice to hear robins, but I would suppose their days here are numbered as the fruit trees are stripped bare.
By the afternoon, for the first time in days, the robins are gone. I’ll see what happens on Sunday before the snow sets in. Tomorrow, for the last dawn of this 3rd sprint of January, I’ll see what is happening in the spruce grove.