As gargantuan bucks continue their end of days, I limit my own perambulations to the crossing-to-pond trajectory whenever the water is open. Friday is such a day, cloudy and gray, 33 with a warm-up coming. I hear a Mallard at 6:43 AM somewhere down along the river, and then a Great Blue Heron, the first in almost a month, powers by, heading upriver.
By 6:51, sparrows are ‘seep’ing and clanking around the pond, and Winter Wrens begin to talk with each other. They are quickly drowned out by a sudden chorus of Song Sparrow calls that reaches a crescendo around 6:54. At the hour, a Northern Cardinal ticks, almost imperceptibly, and then, after the sparrows taper off, one and then another Carolina Wren starts up, trilling and teakettle-ing back and forth at each other.
The pond, unfortunately, is all but empty—only a trio of Mallards are left, despite the fact that it’s melted. Nevertheless, the morning is carried by what can only be described as a late fallout of migrant Winter Wrens, which reach the improbably total of nine between the pond and the crossing.
Rain approaches, and at 7:30, eight American Crows come down through the Gap from over Tyrone, cawing steadily, perhaps on their way to the increasingly hole-y corpse buck. With a few extra minutes, I continue to the privet jungle that fringes much of our property along the tracks toward Tyrone, and currently hosts a fair number of Dark-eyed Juncos.
The rain from the Front hot on their heels, a tight flock of some 15 Red-winged Blackbirds goes past, heading east, and at the bridge, a pair of Cedar Waxwings is stirred up. Neither species is a regular around here in December. As the rain finally sets in, Winter Wren number 11 can be heard up in the cliffs of the Juniata Formation, across the highway.
Full Circle
November arrived on Saturday when we went to cut our tree in the spruce grove with the temperature somewhere in the humid 50s or 60s. First Field was still crawling with sparrows.
Not long before 3 PM, a brief sit on the balcony is rewarded with a Golden Eagle that appears to the left of the towers and never wavers as it follows the straight and narrow flight path over the Gap and down the windward side of Sapsucker Ridge, heading toward the Monongahela. A larger flock of House Finches than I’ve seen in a long time, some 50 in all, is kicked up by the warmth and breeze and rushes out of town and a Red-tailed Hawk spirals up out of hiding for a bit. The local Downy Woodpecker won’t stop calling.
On Sunday, more the need for exercise than the hope that there might be ducks on the millpond takes me down the tracks once again. I’m a bit late today, and at 7 PM, under the streetlights, as I get in the car, I can hear an American Robin singing lustily from off toward Burger King. I wonder if it’s the same streetlight-triggered one I began to hear back at the beginning of the year, long before all other birds?
Wonder of wonders, the pond is already crowded. I count 49 Mallards, mostly paired up, shoveling the mud, quacking, hissing, fighting.
And then there it is, a smaller duck, but not the Green-winged Teal of a few weeks ago. This one’s an American Wigeon, swimming placidly among its huge cousins. Last year, I first saw a single wigeon on November 18th, and it stayed with the Mallards the whole winter, whether they were here, or nearby on the river, or somewhere else. In March, it was gone, though two and then three appeared a few times in the middle of the month. And here it is again, perhaps the same bird from last year, seemingly at ease among what may be many of the same individual Mallards as last year.
On the way back, a Common Raven shows up, croaking in what seems an angry manner, alighting in the trees above the tracks, across from the cadaver. It circles widely above me, then alights again when I’m safely gone.
The Crows of Ottawa
You never know when you might end up in a Canadian Parliament office building being hammered by questions on talking birds. The capital greeted me with a fresh coating of wet snow and a long stream of Canadian American Crows on Monday; the Rideau outside my Ramada wasn’t frozen, but its many waterfowl shall remain nameless thanks to my lack of binoculars.
The members of the Standing Committee on Science and Research have the admirable task of putting together legislation addressing the integration of Western and Indigenous knowledge systems as a step toward reconciliation, a polite word for making up for several centuries of ignoring the wisdom of the folks who’ve been here for 10,000 years to the benefit of those who arrived quite recently and have a proclivity for strip-mining the soil and the sub-soil.
I joked that I couldn’t imagine ever being invited to the halls of my own government for a similar purpose. The testimony of this week’s four experts was held up repeatedly by a vote, which involved the Conservatives getting up in a huff and leaving at one point and the Liberals apologizing to us for wasting our time. In truth, there was a lot of apologizing, but eventually, we all got to say our pieces, two Indigenous and two non-Indigenous academics, painting a vision of a world in which Western science, profiteering, and politicking took a dose of humility, for once.
And Then There Were Three
I’m back at the pond by 6:54 AM on a brown-gray, freezing Wednesday. There’s no activity in the water yet, and the normal wake-up calls of cardinals and Song Sparrows are all I get a chance to hear before a long, loud locomotive flattens everything.
The train past, at 7 PM a pair of Mallards splashes down in front of me, coming from Sinking Valley and alighting facing west, toward the western end of the long pond. They preen briefly, and then swim off toward the far bank to feed. As the percussive clanks of Song Sparrows echo from all around, more ducks come in in two and threes, all from the east, all facing west. Around 7:03, the American Wigeon plows into the water flanked by four Mallards, and as I scan the growing mass of ducks along the shore, I see something much smaller among them. Perhaps it’s just a muskrat; I need to wait a bit until the light comes better.
The Carolina Wren duet starts up at 7:04, and some junco twitter erupts from the privet up on Laurel Ridge.
Finally, I spot a mud-covered shape no larger than a half-grown Mallard that can only be a Green-winged Teal. I have to wonder if it’s the same one I was seeing with this flock back in November. In front of me, two Mallard drakes get into a savage tiff, jabbing and stabbing at each other and splashing the water, fighting over rights to females, perhaps.
Back at the corpse, I see that the ravens have been ripping off its back, and a clean strip of what looks to be cartilage lies curled up a few feet away. Far above, a Golden-crowned Kinglet moves excitedly in the treetops.
Below the crossing, I watch the local flock of Tufted Titmice, Black-capped Chickadees, and Golden-crowned Kinglets move through the gully along the old railroad trestle from Scotia. These woods are now crisscrossed by the paths of a homeless—but not carless—family who carefully arrange piles of salvaged things under tarps and slowly reduce the firewood supply. Next year, the trails through the thick tangles will come in useful for catching glimpses of migrant Mourning and Kentucky warblers, and perhaps some Gray-cheeked Thrushes, again.
Hopefully these squatters will take their trash with them when they leave. Hard to believe they are staying through the winter.