All year, I have been planning a dawn sit at the highest point in the hotspot, the southwestern corner of our property beyond the Far Field fault. At this time of year, that means a 3 AM wake-up call, with American Robins just starting to echo off the pavements of Tyrone. The weather is strangely breezy after local convection t-storms smashed some areas and avoided others last night, and the thermometer is hovering around 60. For some reason, I think it will be t-shirt weather up there.
Utter silence, no cars on the road, and even the interstate has only the occasional vehicle. At the Plummer’s Hollow Bridge, the water level is 870 feet above sea level, give or take.
Dizzying
Right at 4 am, I park at the garage - 1460 feet - and start the checklist with a Whip-Poor-Will out on Laurel Ridge somewhere. Coffee, oatmeal and applesauce stuffed in the pack and I’m off. It’s windier up here and a cricket is chirping softly; as I pass the old farm dump area, a Yellow-billed Cuckoo clucks. It seems like I know both the cricket and the cuckoo personally, as they spend most of the night cluttering the NFC spectrum, along with a local Eastern Wood-Pewee, a Field Sparrow, and a Black-billed Cuckoo from over on Sapsucker Ridge.
Mountain laurel is heading toward a spectacular peak, bushes lit up by my headlamp. I reach the Far Field at 4:23 and head out along a bit of Pennyroyal Trail that circles the old, grown-up meadow aligned with the fault, before veering off to the ridgetop. A bird explodes from the barberry, and then reeps: Eastern Towhee.
The forest here at the corner of the property is towering oaks, and it’s easy to know I’m still on our property with the size of the trees and the open understory. Neighbors have cut out their woods various times in recent years, leaving thickets of black birch and logging roads, but along the crest on our side, the forest doesn’t appear to have been touched in at least a century, maybe longer.
Finally, at what seems like a property corner, I set up my lightweight backpacking chair and take a load off, just at 4:30 AM, a little over two miles linear distance from our balcony, at the dizzying elevation of 1710 feet above sea level, a gain of 840 feet. I face Sinking Valley; behind me, the lights of Grazierville, a southwestern suburb of Tyrone, twinkle 800 feet below. The interstate is less than half a mile away, and beyond that, the Little Juniata River, the railroad tracks, and Old 220 with its commercial strip.
Traffic and trains on a Sunday are so minimal that for several minutes I hear nothing but the wind in the trees, and it shows no sign of abating. The ridgeline is almost in the clouds here, and what I would guess is the moon, unseen, is providing an eerie glow. At a humid 60, it feels for all the world like the top of a Honduran cloud forest somewhere, gained after a 5,000-foot vertical climb, an island of temperate-zone forest above sweltering valleys, like places I once spent years exploring.
Mystery Chorus
As expected, the first bird I hear is the mournful call of an Eastern Wood-Pewee at 4:37, then minutes of silence again. I think I hear some distant towhees from the slash, and then before 4:45, an odd chirruping starts from the woods not far away. Soft at first, it builds, seeming like more birds are joining in. My first thought is American Woodcocks, perhaps some pre-dawn family ritual. But as the chirruping builds, it spreads all around me. Gotta be Scarlet Tanagers or a small group of late migrant thrushes, I think, but the sound just doesn’t seem right; certainly not a dawn song with which I am familiar.
For a few minutes it feels even more like a cloud forest, with murky choruses composed of species I couldn’t even begin to identify, in the days before our machinic assistants. Speaking of which, I left Merlin on to see what it came up with, and over several minutes, it claims it hears nothing except the pewee, which goes off at 4:46, 4:50, 4:57, and 5:00 AM. And then, of course: Purple Martins! I should have guessed. Score one for Merlin—credit given where credit due. The calls match exactly the ‘dawn song’ for the PUMA entry.
This makes perfect sense. We often see martins hawking insects over the mountain in summer, and they have colonies on several of the farms in Sinking Valley, a few seconds away as the swallow flies. I just had no idea they flew so early, but I suppose I should have guessed, given that swallows in town similarly begin to fly in the darkness.
(Later, I check the NFC spectrum and find their dawn song around 4:40 AM over First Field every day since late May.)
From All Corners of the Americas
After five, as the martins move off, still invisible, a predictable and easily identifiable chorus of deep woods species builds—with contributions from Pennsylvania natives, southeasterners, Mexicans, Central Americans, Caribbean islanders, and no doubt even a few South Americans. Wood Thrushes are first, then Scarlet Tanagers; an Indigo Bunting at 5:08, followed by an oak-forest American Robin and a Mourning Dove. By the quarter hour, the common Neotropical breeding warblers are starting: American Redstart, then Ovenbird, Cerulean Warbler, Black-throated Green Warbler, Black-and-white Warbler, Hooded Warbler, and Worm-eating Warbler, in that order.
A trickle of other breeding species, mostly tropical, joins in, but even without any rain I’m starting to shiver in the brisk wind, so I pull up stakes and head downslope toward the top of the thicket beyond Far Field. From the brush, towhees scatter in all directions.
June is Family Month
If you skip below, you’ll see some notes on the last migrant stragglers, but for all intents and purposes, June is given over to the breeders, both successful and unsuccessful. For many years, we’ve been keeping careful track of the species that nest or attempt to nest in the hotspot and particularly on our property. The total number of species that have bred successfully over the years is around 90, but some of these, such as Golden-winged Warblers, are long gone. Among the other extirpated breeders are Rock Pigeons and Barn Swallows, which favored the barn when we had animals many decades ago.
Thus, bird walks in June see tons of expected species, over and over, in the same places, one week vocalizing repeatedly, other weeks lapsing into silence. Often, an at-first unrecognizable bird sits in plain view, turning out to be a fledgling, not looking too much like its parents.
One breeding species I will be checking on week-to-week is the Golden-crowned Kinglet pair in the spruce grove. I sit down and wait in the field outside the grove, and soon hear them vocalizing from the higher branches, never coming out. The chorus here, around 7 AM, is Blackburnian Warblers, Acadian Flycatchers, Common Yellowthroats, Indigo Bunting and others, and it is abruptly interrupted by the perfect Hollywood scream of a Red-tailed Hawk—made by a Blue Jay cruising in to the tips of the grove. The jay emits the call over and over, adding a bit of jay at the end until Merlin finally switches from hawk to the correct ID. Mom tells me later that Blue Jays always nest over by the vernal ponds just beyond the upper edge of the grove.
Along the west side of First Field, the House Wren has disappeared as mysteriously as it has from two other breeding locations I know of in the hotspot. I pull out song after song from the warblers nesting in the tangled woods along Sapsucker Ridge: Hooded, Cerulean, Cerulean, Hooded, Redstart, Redstart, Cerulean, Black-throated Green, Cerulean…and then something that doesn’t sound quite right. I try to record it on my phone but the free app is cheap and terrible. The bird had been up in the thick woods but now it’s singing from a nearby black locust, in plain view. Male Northern Parula! The song is not the typical one, but it’s a NOPA, nonetheless.
This warbler is one of the least common nesters in the hotspot, and at this point it’s either breeding or at least attempting to. On a good year, we might find one pair in 800 acres. When the third Pennsylvania Breeding Bird Atlas starts up next year, this will be one of the species we will try to confirming nesting for, but today, it’s best to leave it alone.
Mystery Nester Revealed
In the upper Hollow, a Cooper’s Hawk flies up to a snag, perching briefly. It was doing something in the stream, and might have been accompanied by its young, but the car blocked the view. I pull into the narrow spot along the treefall gap at the bottom of what I call ‘Hanging Hollow,’ hundreds of steep and slippery feet below where I came into the midst of thick migrant warbler flocks a few weeks ago.
With camera and tripod, the distant nest, far up in the fork of a tree branch 40 feet off the ground, easily gives up its secret this morning. An Eastern Wood-Pewee, presumably the female (or perhaps male and female, but never together) comes and goes, bringing food and sitting only for a few seconds at a time. The lichens, characteristic of EWPE nests, fooled several people on social media where I also posted the photo on Saturday; Blue-gray Gnatcatchers make a somewhat similar home. For a few minutes, I had a hard time figuring out if was a pewee or an Acadian Flycatcher, but the latter, it turns out, makes messy twig nests nothing like this expertly-woven and cemented masterpiece.
Close at hand, a Rose-breasted Grosbeak, flying up from its bath in the stream, pauses on a naked branch to shake itself dry, before continuing up through the light gap:
Back in town, Mourning Doves and Cedar Waxwings are getting more active by the day. I took the photo below last night, when the light is better. Waxwings are common visitors to the distant dead ash snag:
The Mourning Doves often perch much closer at hand:
(In my opinion, you can never have too many photos of Mourning Doves.)
Stragglers: Zeeps and Ups
During the first four nights of June, the night migrant calls diminished precipitously. Swainson’s Thrushes dropped from a May peak of thousands to hundreds and then to dozens per night and now just a handful goes over, while a couple of late Gray-cheeked Thrushes showed up on the 4th. Spotted Sandpipers and Semipalmated Plovers are still coming through, along with an occasional Green Heron (which could be a local).
What I find odd are the warblers. Around eight species—Bay-breasted, Blackburnian, Blackpoll, Cerulean, Magnolia, Worm-eating, and Yellow warblers, and Louisiana Waterthrushes (with Connecticut almost entirely in the fall), emit ‘zeep’ flight calls, which look like squiggles on the spectrum, and cannot be differentiated safely. Another seven—Ovenbird and Yellow-rumped, Tennessee, Nashville, Black-throated Green, Mourning, and Orange-crowned warblers—do ‘ups’, which are single or double (harmonized) upward lines lasting usually less than 50 milliseconds.
One of the first warblers to return was the American Redstart, back in April. So what is one doing flying over at 12:34 AM on June 2? The ‘zeep’ at 10:43 that night was quite likely a Blackpoll Warbler, which are still coming through. But what about the single ‘up’ at 12:32 AM on June 4th?
For that matter, why are there still Field Sparrows, Indigo Buntings, and Chipping Sparrows flying over once or twice a night? I doubt they are incredibly late stragglers, except perhaps the Indigo Buntings. More likely they, like a Rose-breasted Grosbeak that called twice in flight at 2:55 AM on the 2nd, are either local summer residents flying around (the FISP, as we know, is quite active at night), or maybe individuals that haven’t successfully bred or found territories.