Eke
I’ve been itching to get up to one of my favorite spots in Plummer’s Hollow, the tangles on the southeast-facing slope of Sapsucker Ridge. Owing to a long line of environmental catastrophes, including logging (before we bought the land) and ice storms, the rich deciduous forest is patchy here and draped with wild grape vines and invasives. The understory is thick with privet, mile-a-minute, jetbead, barberry, spicebush, and witch hazel. During much of the year, food availability, cover, and warmth, with several springs nearby, means the area is a haven for songbirds and particularly warblers and sparrows.
In March and again in late Fall, hundreds of White-throated Sparrows, scores of Northern Cardinals, dozens of Fox Sparrows, and state-record numbers of Eastern Towhees bring the tangles along Bird Count Trail, Greenbriar Trail, and Ten Springs Trail alive. As December drags into January, though, the wild grapes dwindle and the throngs of American Robins and Cedar Waxwings dissipate.
Today, for the first time this year, I’m going to see what’s left.
No Dawn Chorus
I arrive at 6:38 AM; the temperature is 25 and clear, with a waning gibbous moon toward the south. No owls call.
At 7:01, the first White-throated Sparrow ‘seeps’, the second three minutes later, along with the first chips of a Northern Cardinal. A few of both these species starts to dart around in the gloom and make a little noise, which stops at 7:08. After a one-minute lull, chips and ‘seeps’ start up again and go for another four minutes, then cease. A single Dark-eyed Junco ticks at 7:16, then the first Black-capped Chickadee ‘dee-dee-dee’ two minutes later. Again the chickadee at 7:22, then two American Crows fly over my head across Plummer’s Hollow, cawing, from Sapsucker Ridge to Laurel Ridge.
It’s not exactly quiet: train noise in the clear air and the rumble of I-99 are both audible.
Activity seems to be picking up at a good pace now. A brief call from a Carolina Wren, then a Hermit Thrush higher up the ridge, a Tufted Titmouse at 7:26, a single American Robin tutting (the only one I detect here: so much for the grapes), and the first White-breasted Nuthatch at 7:28. The cardinals, which had gotten quiet, are back to chipping. Ten species by 7:30, several more than I would have by this time on my balcony. But it doesn’t last.
The second noticeable period of quiet starts at 7:31. Discounting 30 commuter starlings low overhead at 7:32, and an insistent nuthatch at 7:35, only a distant crow indicates anything’s moving. Ten minutes of silence and more—nearly an eternity at a typical dawn, but seemingly normal for January.
Even at the height of the dawn chorus in May and June, I’ve noticed these pulses of calls and quiet, calls and quiet. Everything comes and goes in waves, as they say.
Two Pileated Woodpeckers flap over me, one so close I can hear the ‘swoosh’ of its wingbeats. Neither bird calls (I do hear others later, though). A quiet tapping indicates a Downy Woodpecker somewhere around, but unlike the one by my balcony, this one did not awaken with a call.
By 7:53, the sun has climbed above Laurel Ridge and is hitting Sapsucker Ridge not far above me. As dawn opens to day, I spot an unmistakable ball high up in a Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera): one of our ravenous porcupines. A White-throated Sparrow sings once from off in the tangles, the only song I’ll hear in the woods today. I vacate the sit.
Juniata Sits on Tuscarora
If you remember from last weekend, I sat on the Laurel Ridge powerline cut, also facing east. The tangles below that post are thicker and give way to Sinking Valley farms, as ridge-forming Bald Eagle Sandstone crumbles to Reedsville Shale and then to the Ordovician and Cambrian limestones and dolomites of the lower elevations, stretching back across 50 million years to the half-billion-BC mark. Here on Sapsucker Ridge, while the southeast-facing aspect is the same, the underlying geological formation is distinct. It’s Juniata Sandstone, the last Ordovician formation, crumbly and weak, with shale patches that erode into strike hollows, like this one does, below me. Holding up Sapsucker Ridge, above me is the legendary Silurian formation known as Tuscarora Sandstone.
You Can Always Rely on the TCN
Here in January, on Bird Count Trail at least, birds are busy eking out an existence on a dwindling supply of food, not concerned with vocalizing beyond the bare minimum. When the woodpeckers are barely audible, you know it’s that deep time of winter, I guess.
Many birds have moved out of this woods, from what I can tell. The wild grapes are played out. As I saw yesterday, the robins are at the fruit trees in town. The Cedar Waxwings, which lingered into latest December, have left the area, I am almost certain.
Anyway, with woodpeckers this quiet, I’m not going to spend the morning trying to find a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker that might still be here somewhere, down where the ridge gets treacherous. It can wait a few months for its rightful place on the Plummer’s Hollow 200.
The ‘TCN’ group is always available to keep the dullest woods alive, however. Nuthatches are mostly paired up and ‘yank’-ing from here, there, and everywhere. Meanwhile, titmice and chickadees are all over the tulip trees, 75 to 100 feet up and more, probing the dried flower parts still sticking to the central spikes: seems like a fair number of samaras are still available for them. Otherwise, the only active birds are Northern Cardinals: for reasons we’ve not yet ascertained, this area is cardinal central, and even now, probably at least a dozen pairs are still around.
Anyway, it’s time to head to a more productive part of the hotspot.
The Winter Bird Crowd
Like other years, the songbird crowd in deepest winter is along the upper, northern edge of First Field. Its epicenter is a huge patch of barberry where catalpa and black locust meet black cherry, staghorn sumac, and wild grape tangle. I play a single towhee call and out pop two male Eastern Towhees!
A goal this year is to check up on these stragglers all the way through late February: the bar charts for Plummer’s Hollow are blank for this species between 8 and 21 February, the only gap all year. Do they die off or leave in February, or do they simply lurk, overlooked, until breeding season, effectively year-round residents? Perhaps these are winter residents only, different from the summer residents that begin arriving in March and making Plummer’s Hollow one of the towhee-est places in Penn’s Woods. This year, I can hopefully get closer to an answer.
Along with towhees, the usual sparrows and juncos don’t seem to have diminished much. They’re skittish: the White-throats, in particular, with nothing to be afraid of, scatter south from tangle to tangle as they always do: curious, then gone. They don’t go far: the entire group of probably still several hundred individual birds doesn’t go much beyond the powerline on a given day, I believe. That’s at most a few hundred yards. There is probably another group closer to the spruce grove, and another at the Far Field, and that’s about it. Still, I would think at least a dozen Song Sparrows, as many American Tree Sparrows, a few hundred juncos, and perhaps a hundred white-throats are here. This includes those around the main house across the field: some roost in the two house-hugging junipers, but I think the majority come in at dawn from the spruce grove and these barberry thickets.
By ten, it’s crystal clear. The weather reminds me of New Year’s, the last time I’ve seen a cloudless sky, but today, the species count is just 21 after more than four hours, whereas then, I had more than that just from my balcony, and we logged 35 for the hotspot. This 3rd sprint for 2023 is going to be a slow one, I’m guessing.