*Guest Post by Rob Fergus*
I’ve been enjoying Mark’s daily notes documenting the Plummer’s Hollow 200 this year, and was glad to finally have a chance to join in the fun this week. After spending an enjoyable evening with his family and the Juniata Audubon Society, I joined him the next morning for the dawn vigil from his Tyrone, Pennsylvania balcony.
By the time I got out there just after 5:30am, the American Robins had been singing for over an hour already. Still an hour before sunrise, an Eastern Phoebe was singing from behind us, and birds were starting to move.
It was a pleasure to watch the skydance of the Rock Pigeons and Common Ravens, curated by Mark’s comments on the recent daily movements of the neighborhood birds. We watched three robins get into a territorial squabble in the parking lot below, a raven swoop in to grab some bread apparently left out on a neighbor’s rooftop, and a starling horn in to grab some crumbs as the raven moved on.
Jungle
To the uninitiated, the balcony might appear an unlikely birding hotspot. Overlooking a parking lot, with a utility pole and wires radiating across the view at eye level, and an interstate highway a block away, the foreground is every bit an urban or post-industrial landscape that one must look beyond to see the hardwood forests rising up the slopes beyond. The Little Juniata River is a mere hundred yards away, just beyond the parking lot, but only a twenty yard section of open water is visible from this vantage point, the rest now obscured by the green of riparian trees. The bare branches of a sycamore, and a few other notable trees, are nearby landmarks, while most of the viewing is of the distant slopes and ridges of Bald Eagle Mountain and Brush Mountain, separated from each other by the Little Juniata River water gap. The communications towers at the top of Bald Eagle Mountain provide another useful landscape marker 0.7 miles away and 775 feet higher in elevation.
Watching and listening, we pick up the distant birds moving through the gap and along the ridges, and hear the local birds as they start their day. We may have missed a few that only vocalized once or twice. A slight decline in ear birding efficiency is a small price to pay when two friends get together with so many shared interests and an endless array of discussion topics!
Loons!
But we do pretty well. Endlessly scanning the sky and ridge tops, we manage to spot a Merlin skirting the ridge perhaps a mile away. A Mallard and a Wood Duck shoot through the gap. We watch five ducks coming towards us through the gap, but the wing beats don’t look quite right, and as they approach it is soon apparent that they are migrating Common Loons. It’s amazing to realize that this species migrates such long distances overland, but most folks will never see them. However, if you are attuned to the timing of their movements, and watching the skies, you can catch them, as we did, heading overhead towards distant breeding grounds in the North Woods. It is always a good day when you see a loon! Miles and miles from any appropriate lakes as stopover habitat, we end up seeing three small groups, and two other singles, for a total of sixteen.
The Reason Birders Are Often Late
By the time Mark has to start work at 8:30, we have logged 34 species. I figure it is time to go, but as Mark steps inside I immediately hear a Black-capped Chickadee and a singing Yellow-rumped Warbler, and spy a Black Vulture over the ridge—three more species we had missed earlier! Hard to pull yourself away when there are more birds to see, so I decide to give it a little more time. No new birds appear in the next hour, so it is finally time to go. But then a Broad-winged Hawk appears over the ridge. That makes 38 species for the morning, the hawk flight is just getting started, and it would be a shame to leave now without reaching a nice round total of 40 species.
New birds are few and far between, but White-breasted Nuthatch that has been notably absent this week finally calls from down by the river, and I catch a shred of White-throated Sparrow song. The iron-cross profile of a soaring Cooper’s Hawk appears over the mountain, and the arrival of five Chimney Swifts keeps the tally rolling. By 11:00, the sun is high and few birds are moving. It is finally time to call it a day at 43 species for the morning.
One balcony, five and a half hours, two birders, 43 bird species (eBird checklist: https://ebird.org/checklist/S134256992). Mere numbers providing the barest narrative framework of the morning and only lightly hinting at the value and pleasure of the experience, the millions of individual perceptions of movement, shadows across the landscape, and the birdsong mingled with and endless bustle of highway and railway traffic.
It is still early spring on the mountains. Though many of the leaves have appeared, I was surprised as I scanned the hillsides with my scope, to find very little bird activity in the trees—just an occasional Blue Jay or Mourning Dove alighting here or there. Where were the woodpeckers? Have the roving chickadees and titmice already disbanded to individual breeding territories? Hopefully the next few weeks will bring flocks of migrant songbirds to these empty canopies and their songs will ring out across the gap and up the slopes, adding their seasonal contribution to this placeway and their allure to the balcony view of the world on the edge of this borough nestled in the heart of Appalachia.
—Rob Fergus - Wallingford, PA - Located in Lenapehoking, traditional homeland of the Unami Lenape people.