On Thursday, the penultimate day of summer, the balcony is just too loud to bear. In 43-degree weather with patchy fog, I chug yesterday’s coffee and stomp off to the tracks before seven AM to have a look around. The pond’s covered in duckweed, but there’s no sign of ducks (yet). Just a trickle of the common species—28 of them—before I have to rush back.
Friday is a tad cooler, and way clammier, than Thursday. I stick to the balcony, quieter today, as the fog rolls in.
For the first time in what feels like ages, a female House Finch (Fern, by chance?) flies in to a nearby wire and stares at me for a while. I had been playing a Hooded Warbler call on my phone to myself to try to match a call I had heard, so I suppose that’s what brought her in. A male sings from off in the confluence somewhere.
At 7:25 AM, the Osprey from two days ago returns, circling low over the confluence and calling. Then it heads upriver, into the fog.
The Storm
The forecast is for rain all weekend, and it’s not a bad thing since I need to get a lot of writing and editing done. I stick to the balcony again on Saturday, a good hour and a half, starting at 6:45 AM. While I was sleeping, the Autumn Equinox occurred at 2:50 AM, the latest I have ever experienced.
When I go out, northern Blair County is just northwest of the outermost rain band of Tropical Storm Ophelia, which fell to land down in North Carolina and is moving up the coast. It starts like this:
and progresses to this by 7:40:
By not long after eight, the rain sets in and goes all day and into the night.
Perhaps sensing the coming storm, and taking advantage of the quickening breezes, more birds than normal are out and about. At 6:47, a tight mass of some 40 American Crows, cawing in unison, flies fast over the tip of Sapsucker Ridge. The Carolina Wren starts up as usual (what would we do without it?), and at five until seven, a Winter Wren joins in. A second Carolina calls, followed the ticks of a Northern Cardinal.
A quartet of Common Ravens swoops in from the north to join the crows, but oddly, the ravens are dead silent. I hear that familiar chittering from far away and heave myself out of the chair, binoculars pointed straight up. A roiling swarm of around 75 Chimney Swifts is moving northward; despite the direction, I suspect this is the bulk of a migratory flock that uses Tyrone’s chimneys for awhile, particularly those ones up by the paper mill. A couple minutes later, a lone swift, perhaps a local, weaves drunkenly past the apartment.
A Belted Kingfisher is out and about as well, rattling away downriver somewhere. Then, as a Pileated Woodpecker sounds off at the edge of hearing, a pair of Fish Crows flies overhead to join the other corvids, which have moved off south somewhere in the vicinity of Grazierville or Thomastown.
At 7:20, the Osprey is back in a repeat performance of yesterday. I can’t remember migrant Ospreys calling so much in the past. Last year, one ate a fish while perched on the electric pole next to the apartment, but it never made a sound.
House Finches call and fly around and about in small groups, and one even sings while it flies. The first drop falls at 7:40 and as if on signal, 78 Canada Geese fly over from the west, skirting the treetops of Brush Mountain as usual; ten more follow on their heels, honking.
Uncharacteristically for the balcony this early in the fall, I hear a White-breasted Nuthatch, a Black-capped Chickadee, and a Tufted Titmouse. At 8:08, the species list at 25, Ophelia finally arrives, and I head off to warm my hands over a hot computer.
Dashed Expectations
I’ll have to admit that I was hoping for an interesting storm bird pushed northwestward. I’ve had visions of flamingos on the Little Juniata ever since my friend John Carter spotted the first two ever for Pennsylvania a few counties away. But the winds overnight turn to calm on Sunday morning, and the persistent drizzle keeps most of the birds down. Improbably, I hear an Indigo Bunting fly over at one point, but everything else is the same as yesterday, just in lower numbers.
At 7:57, the Osprey returns, and this time, poses obligingly on a willow branch long enough for me to almost snap its picture. Then it’s off downriver, calling, as always. For how many more days, I wonder?
After days without a hike, I am itching to get out on Sunday afternoon, so I wrap up work before five PM to get a quick walk down to the pond. It’s barely spitting now, in the 60s, and humid. There’s no blue, yet, but a few bright patches do appear. We’ve gotten more of the ocean in the last few days than we usually get all year, as Ophelia breaks into fragments.
The birds aren’t bad, considering. The first to emerge, by the defunct trestle, is a bedraggled Carolina Wren. Cedar Waxwings are out and about, and what will be one of the last Eastern Wood-Pewees of 2023 is chipping excitedly and hurling itself into the air from a riverside ash perch. As I proceed down the tracks with the Little Juniata just below to my left, a flash of white and that familiar cry: I’ve disturbed my favorite Osprey.
The pond is still deserted, and the last visions of an Ophelia fall-out surprise fade. As a consolation prize, on the way back, a fast-moving warbler=and-vireo flock moves through the treetops on the Laurel Ridge side of the tracks: Yellow-throated Vireo, Bay-breasted Warbler, Cape May Warblers, Chestnut-sided Warbler, Tennessee Warbler, and many more that shall remain nameless. Only the Downy Woodpeckers linger, as first a Northern Flicker crosses the Gap overhead heading north, then a Pileated Woodpecker, heading south.
As I’m stepping out of the way of a Norfolk Southern and investigating a “chip” from a riparian thicket without tumbling down the gravel bank, an Eastern Screech-Owl flies off toward the river from close at hand, never making a sound. It strikes me that this is the first one I’ve actually seen this year, if I recall correctly. The chip, as it turns out, is another pewee.
Later, I find out that a spot in nearby Huntingdon County has been bombarded with shorebirds. Ophelia did deliver, after all! Some of them, such as Black-bellied Plover, Sanderling, and American Golden-Plover, are species I would like to pick up via NFC which I have neglected the last few days. Tomorrow, I am going to hit the field and grab some more recordings, so fingers crossed that Ophelia may have delivered by night what it didn’t by day… (to be continued)
Postscript: The Forecast
Every year, one of the most eagerly awaited pronouncements in the northern birding world is the Winter Finch Forecast, issued by the Finch Research Network. Today, the 2023-24 prognostications dropped. For the Plummer’s Hollow 200 this is highly significant, as the hotspot has hosted most of the irruptive winter finches at one point or another, thanks to our Norway spruce, birches, pines, and other desirable trees.
Finch forecasts discuss where the food is, because northern finches are quite nomadic and move in various directions depending on the patterns of scarcity and plenty. In years where they have plenty to eat up north, they don’t have cause to come this far south, but when cone crops and other resources diminish, we can end up with some rarities.
From what I can see, we may have trouble with Evening Grosbeaks, but we are definitely due for some Pine Siskins, which have been quite scarce. I’ve not gotten either of these species in 2023. More faint possibilities are the two redpoll species and the two crossbill species. Surprisingly, “expect a moderate flight south” of redpolls. That’s enough to give a guy hope.