Clammy, hazy dawn, stinging eyes, 39. Thirty-nine?! Ten or more degrees under the average low. We’re not in the thickest of the pall, but the sun itself seems to be losing its strength. It is feeling more and more like coastal China every day—we lived east of Beijing across the sea, so a west wind meant days of miserable suffering.
Around noon, I set out on the balcony for the requisite ten minutes, which is long enough to get dizzy. There’s a slight wind, so maybe things will clear out later. The birds seem unaffected, except that the Red-eyed Vireo isn’t calling.
By three, the air has cleared and a low layer of threatening clouds hints at rain. Eighteen more minutes on the balcony, 20 species. Still no Red-eyed Vireo, but otherwise, nothing has changed. American Goldfinches are courting, active and loud, swirling about the trees and sky in pairs, males in stunning yellow and black. Rock Pigeons are up in numbers, mostly close to their mates, often touching wings, taking advantage of the updrafts that have carried the smoke away.
Amorous Activities of Waxwings
The smoke seems to be trying to make a return in the evening, but it’s barely noticeable. A Louisiana Waterthrush gleans among the stones along the banks of the Little Juniata above the bridge, calling and singing, while Common Grackles hunt up and down the river. A male Baltimore Oriole that seems to be molting feathers on its head dives closes to me in a tree over the bridge—not a fledgling yet, but more confiding than adults tend to be.
The pond remains stagnant and void of birds, though Wood Thrushes and American Redstarts inhabit its edges. The surface is choked by duckweed and water lilies, and it’s been over a month since the Mallards that apparently bred here left.
As a cloud of close to 50 Turkey Vultures circles over the quarry, the garbage train returns, but miraculously, it’s empty, beat-up blue cars but no stench. A Baltimore Oriole is doing the second half of the musician’s phrase, six beautiful notes, but not the first part. (The one by our balcony does the first five notes but not the second part.) Given how many oriole territories there are along the tracks, and the fact that we’re a quarter mile from the musician himself, I wonder if this is a different individual who has adopted the song after hearing it from the master?
American Redstart males are surpassingly aggressive down here where there seem to be overlapping territories packed into a small space that spans the tracks between the pond, Yellow Warbler Swamp, and the steep toe of Sapsucker Ridge. Two males fight in mid-air, up over the tracks, bobbing up and down as they attack each other, and then flying off in different directions. An Eastern Wood-Pewee sings from a black willow hanging over the river, an unusual location for a species that spends most of its time up on the mountain. Spooked by me, it heads back to the ridge.
Earlier, I thought I had heard that Orchard Oriole call from the swamp, so I wait a bit. Eventually, a bit after seven, he sings from the top of a silver maple in the thick of the bottomland: first-year male in Formative plumage! I certainly hope it has found a mate, because from what I have read, females tend to favor fully adult males in Definitive Basic plumage over ones like this fellow.
The Orchard Oriole moves upstream a couple hundred feet to another tree and sings a bit more, then disappears.
The final act of the day is a pair of Cedar Waxwings that has peeled off from the local flock (yes, they flock even during breeding season) to perch on a dead snag. One approaches the other, shuffling sidewise, and they rub bills: courtship behavior. I’m not close enough to tell whether he gave her an offering.
Thirteen To Go
I have finished snipping out the thousands of calls from the May night files, and there is a bin full of mysteries. Unlike last year, we did not appear to pick up an unequivocal Dickcissel, though I did see a few candidates. I will make a valiant effort to ID some of the shorebirds, then seek professional help. I can’t imagine the current 187 species for the Plummer’s Hollow 200 will grow more than a couple, though, meaning that every new species from now on will require a separate tactic to detect, and some will be sheer luck, like the Black Tern picked up at night last July.
The margin of error is quite small, and the most critical time will be the first fifteen days of November, which have been highly productive for scarce species during the day and at night. The height of the fall migration, from late August to early September, will also be key to snag Olive-sided Flycatcher, Blue-winged Warbler, and maybe even Yellow-breasted Chat.
Here’s how narrow the margin is: the species count for 2022-2023 combined for Plummer’s stands at 201. This includes several species detected only this year (Caspian Tern, Sora, Common Loon, and others), but also species missed so far in 2023 that we had already recorded by this time last year—Snow Goose, Blue-winged Warbler, Dickcissel, Common Tern, Swallow-tailed Kite). On the bright side, the year is not even half over…