Chipping sparrow – ticking away the summer right under our nose

"Bully the English Sparrow, Chippy the Chipping Sparrow"
by Louis Agassiz Fuertes

Chipping sparrows have returned in spades and the trees around parks, wooded lots, and forest edge are cut by the long, insect like trill of these flat headed sparrows. A widespread New England breeding bird the Chipping sparrow is an abundant little sparrow, with crisp white eye line and copper top. They are common and comfortable around human habitation yet some how haven’t made it into the collective pantheon of back yard birds.

Described by Wake Robin as “one of the commonest and, before the advent of the English sparrow, perhaps the most familiar and sociable of our birds…” This passage was penned in 1889 less than forty years after the fateful release of English House sparrows in Central Park, NY in 1851. Whether or not the English House sparrow is at fault for overshadowing the Chipping sparrow today "chippers" are found throughout New England. Their habit of day long summer singing gives them a loud presence, and shows no sign of sibling angst. 

Listen for a long, unwavering staccato trill. Almost mechanical or insect like compared to the shorter, softer trill of the Pine warbler. Capable of sustained or shorter trills, the Chipping sparrow can also give a “rock tapping” song that is less tightly bound, but contains all the noise of its other song. Listen for these compact sparrows in backyards, parks, cemeteries, and field. 

Does the Chipping sparrow look familiar? Close patterned cousin the Tree sparrow left New Enlgnad for its Canadian breeding grounds in March.

Quiet eyes -- from Tom Brown Jr. to Hall and Oates

While Quiet eyes is not in fact a Hall and Oates song it is a strange and seldom talked about trick used by experienced bird watchers. The concept is probably familiar to athletes, skiers, hunters, and animal trackers but it happens so subconsciously that few people acknowledge it. I first learned about the concept of “splatter vision” in Tom Brown Jr.’s book, Tracker. Brown’s idea was that most people miss the story in front of them because they are actually looking too closely. Brown recommends taking in the entire scene at once by relaxing the eyes and employing splatter vision. Through splatter vision the viewer can read the landscape for signs of animal life larger than single footprints. Complete stories unfold as path ways in the grass and scenes of predator and prey in the sand. This type of viewing also lets the peripheral vision develop and the scene becomes wider and brighter.

As it is to trackers, splatter vision or quiet eyes is also helpful to bird watchers. With the migration season underway bird watchers are looking for birds that are smaller, faster, and more numerous and then, as if to mock the birdwatchers, leaves pop out and complicate the issue even further. With a strained neck, and pollen raining down into open eyes the whole scene is made comical by a chorus of noises both avian and (if you find yourself in Mt. Auburn Cemetery) human. What results is a neck-bent and watery-eyed sneezing lurch from tree to tree.

What is lost in this frantic chase is the important fact that warblers are relentlessly active. These tiny drips of yellow are in the midst of a transnational journey and are eating bugs, fruits, flies, and nectar at a voracious rate. Warblers flit through the canopy, bounce from limb to limb and turn over leaves in the understory looking for food. They are in constant movement and movement it turns out is easy to see when standing stationary using quiet eyes.

To achieve quiet eyes or splatter vision simply let the eyes go soft and unfocused and suddenly the tree canopy, an infinitely complicated interlace of leafy crowns is flattened and the eye no longer studies each branch and leaf but instead skims the scene looking for quivers and shakes. The whole landscape turns to a bowl of mint jelly, wind can be seen as waving sheets moving through the branches, bugs and airplanes flying near and far become related as tiny black specs moving in either a smooth or frenetic direction,  and the bounce of warblers in branches stands out.

Using quiet eyes is not natural and takes practice. We are trained to constantly focus and refocus on the near than far. We need to read faces, read street signs, read books, and the tiny keys on our phone, rarely do we relax our eyes and let the world pour in at once and perhaps we should.

New England warblers keep arriving – the Black and White warbler



http://jerseybirder.blogspot.com/



The tiny "zebra bird" that climbs tree trunks like a Nuthatch but has a striped black and white head and back is the latest and lovely warbler to return to New England. The Black and white warbler breeds throughout New England and southern Canada and winters in Mexico and the Caribbean, arriving earlier than many of the other warbler species. They can often be found at or slightly above eye level gleaning insects from the tree bark. Later in the season they can be seen collecting bits of moss for the nest. This habit of climbing up and down tree trunks places them alone in the family, “Mniotilta” or "moss gatherer". Watch and listen for these little striped gems of activity in the woods, along forest edge, and in parks with full grown trees. Listen for the “squeaky wheel”  song of the Black and white warbler, like a spot on the wheelbarrow that needs some oil.

My Patch - birding the "Lot"

my childhood patch now landscaped...

We moved to the last house on a dead end street in a modern enclave amidst Tory Row, Cambridge. Our street, unlike our neighbors to both the east and west was a relatively recent development of split family houses built during the post WWII boom . Since that time each house has been bought by young families, split and re-walled into apartments, and larger residences. Had our street continued north it would have emptied onto Brattle Street and the monstrous mansions of Tory Row, but instead it ran into a monstrous chunk of undeveloped land, once part of a larger estate. What I affectionately titled “the Lot” was in fact property owned by a prosperous Boston architect that by some fate of bylaws was not allowed to develop it. “Street frontage” was the short coming and this beautiful ¼ acre of fields, fruit trees, hawthorns, and spruce sat wild and calm in the heart of Cambridge.

Our small back yard was separated from this wilderness by a low chain link fence, the links of which were spaced perfectly for a small child’s shoe. I try to remember what year it must have been when I first put toe in chain and hopped the fence. It must have taken effort, hand over shaking hand, leg flip, tender straddle, foot onto the concrete retaining wall, and then a small drop onto soft soil. I can’t imagine my mother allowing me to make this jump, let alone having the agility to have done it in my first few years of life. It must have been roughly at age seven when I made the leap.

The Lot was a wonder of nature tinged with humanity, enough to make it hauntingly fun, forbidden, and secretive. The architect, to whom the land belonged, left enormous hunks of marble and granite from some strange project left unfinished. Piles of stones, one which read, “Court House,” were stacked in the far corner adjoining an abandoned house. There were old light fixtures on posts around the field, the kind one would expect around a skating pond or makeshift ball field. There were pre-existing paths, and patches of non-native plants like crocus, blue bells, day lilies, and rhododendron. No one used the field but for an annual mowing, an older neighbor and his arthritic dog, and on occasion a homeless man who would sleep in the far corner. It was for the most part, mine.

I ran the lot one part Robinson Crusoe and one part Park Ranger. I made mazes in the grass and hid from goblins in winter snow caves. I mapped the paths and began recording the species of birds I found, which came to almost 90 before I left home. I rode my bike, shot homemade arrows, climbed apple trees, and buried pets. I took friends there, but more often hopped the fence alone after school or on summer evenings and listened to the click of bats while chewing on the mint that grew everywhere. Overtime, I moved from a childhood romance to an adolescent relationship with this piece of land. I studied the wildflowers and trees, knew where the rabbits burrowed and the Carolina wrens fed. It was a natural coming of age in the middle of Cambridge on a small chunk of land that grounded me in a love of natural history, the outdoors, and the very idea of place to this day.

Birding the “Patch”

Like “twitching” (the manic hunt to see new species of birds) the term “patch” may have its origins in the United Kingdom. Unlike “twitching” however, “patch” is a sweet term, a nod to the quilt. The quilt that covers the entire bed is in fact small pieces of familiar cloth sewn together. In this way the landscape in which we live is a quilt, too large to be fully explored. However, within this quilted world are single patches of land, the size of a park, a conservation tract, or wildlife sanctuary. These patches of land can be easily walked in a morning and prove to be chuck full of wildlife, often amidst a background of skyscrapers and elevated freeways. These little pockets of green, slivers of streams and marsh allow the urban bird watcher to escape the grinding mechanical world for deeply held breathes of calm and oxygen. Frequent visits to a small, often overlooked piece of land over the course of a season even years leads to deep learning about the area’s natural ebb and flow. Patch birding forces focus, rather than panning binoculars over Ken Burns expanses of beach and mountaintop, patch birding is like looking through a magnifying glass; subtle details appear like the location of a nest site, the scene of a kill, or fresh prints in the mud and snow.  These patches are not always sanctioned spaces and can include the forgotten and behind places that exist at the edge of the baseball field, under the highway, or along the train tracks. Birding the patch is an act of mediation, like practicing the scales or shooting a hundred foul shots. Patch birding builds skills, but is also a full experience. It is the quiet and secretiveness of being hidden by branches, and the joy of finding warblers and a thrush, flushing a woodcock and discovering an owl. Find your patch and bird it!   

Spring migration

All migratory song birds travel various distances each year. Migration is determined by the extent of both the summer breeding range (how far north) and wintering range (how far south). These distances in turn are based on food availability, appropriate breeding habitat, and competition. These migratory ranges are partially illustrated by the rainbow sherbet “range maps”  found in most every U.S. field guide. Most of these small range maps depict the U.S. and Canada and show distribution during a particular season usually defined as “winter”, “breeding”, and “year round” as represented by bands of color. These maps are useful to bird watchers as they show if a bird is likely to be around the neighborhood in a given season. What these maps fail to do is illustrate the extent and timing of migration, the smaller seasonal shifts within the “year round” area, and irruptions in which a particular bird is driven out of their normal range by a lack of important food source such as pine cones. There are several online tools that bird watchers will find useful in illuminating the full story of songbird migration as illustrated in range maps.

Ebird – has recently animated their extensive bird sightings database to show an incredible algae bloom of bird migration.

Watch the Northern cardinal’s near steady presence in the Eastern, Lower 48. While the Bobolink, who journeys from as far away as Argentina makes it’s summer home in New England. Compare these two species with the Blackpoll warbler who only passes through New England en route to the barren taiga of Northern Canada to breed. As the Blackpoll warbler comes from further away it arrives in the second half of May. Compare this to the Palm Warbler, who migrates from the Caribbean and Florida and arrives in New England weeks before the Blackpoll as early as mid-April.  

New England is also home to winter residents. Watch the inverted migration of the White throated sparrow that leaves the cozy confines of New England and the southern Appalachians in April for a summer breeding in Canada, only to return come September for the winter.

Listen for the drumming of woodpeckers

During this spring season of courtship and home building woodpeckers are using every auditory skill to let themselves be known. Both male and female woodpeckers “drum” on trees with their bill, mentally unharmed thanks to carefully timed muscle contractions and a malleable skull. Woodpeckers peck at trees for many reasons, digging bugs and larvae from under the bark, hollowing out a nest cavity in a rotted trunk, or as a loud, non-vocal call used to define territory, locate a mate, and perhaps challenge a foe. In this spring season listen for the short, fast burst of the Downy and Hairy woodpeckers’ drum call. Usually lasting but a second or two, this is not the ongoing jack hammer of nest site excavation, just a quick buzz of beak on wood. With patience and a lack of wind a response can often be heard tapped from further in the woods or across the park. The clear, tonal sound of the drum is no happy accident. Woodpeckers have a favorite drumming limb, often perfectly aged, partially hollow, and high in the sky. Listen for the quick drum and look for these branches as they are often revisited throughout the days and months of spring.

Who’s birding? The distribution of watchers and wealth

The results of the 2011 Focus on Feeders were published this week. Focus on Feeders is a national event, sponsored here in Massachusetts by the Mass Audubon. The project asks Massachusetts volunteers to take note on a specific day of the single highest occurrence of a given species at their feeder. This data serves as an ongoing record of winter bird distribution and provides invaluable population information about the birds of Massachusetts. It is an event worth participating in.

In reviewing this year’s result maps something besides bird distribution seemed to leap of the page, namely the correlation between household income and participation in this bird watching event. Comparing the “Focus on Feeders 2011 Participants" map with the state map of average household income by zip code (statisticians may want to plug your ears) there seemed to be some correlation. This begs the question; can bird watching evolve beyond its legacy of a pastime for the wealthy?

Bird watching’s iconic demographic the“little old ladies” with gray hair, Brahmin accents, and L.L. Bean duck boots has giving way to the “boomer” generation, recent retirees, and active adults. Educated, affluent, and mobile this new generation of bird watchers has grown the “hobby” into one of the country’s largest. It is thrilling that bird watching is thriving with growing memberships, money spent on equipment, books and travel, and participation in citizen science initiatives like Focus on Feeders. All this is wonderful news for the field of bird watching.  

What this trend also marks is a stark reminder that the field needs to push harder into mixed income neighborhoods, to work with the young, urban, rural, and all other non-Suburban in-betweens. Core values need to be reinforced. Bird watching is more than knowing when to hop a plane to Texas to see trogons and motmots. Bird watching is time spent connecting to a larger ethos, building empathy for the natural world, and moving towards a personal ethic of global conservation. Bird watching takes the individual into solitary and secluded spaces allowing for reflection and breath. Bird watching is a doorway that opens both inwards and out and should be harnessed for its real world powers of transformation. These are powerful outcomes of an act as simple as looking up. With continued education and support there is no doubt that bird watching will fill the lives of people everywhere, in a moment of global crisis this is ever more crucial.

For more on promoting bird watching to new audiences please visit David Lindo’s website, Cornell’s Celebrating Urban Birds, the Bird Education Network, and Dave Magpiong’s Fledgling Birders Institute.

Places to bird watch in Cambridge – Fresh Pond

With duck migration in full swing this is a great time of year to hang up the coat and venture out to a local pond, seashore, lake or reservoir to look for ducks. With most of the ice gone, open water shines from above and waterfowl of all kinds make their way north by literally puddle jumping from pool to shining pool. For folks stuck in the confines of Cambridge a quick trip to Fresh Pond located between Alewife Brook Parkway, Huron Ave., and Concord Ave. can turn up some great ducks. Fresh Pond itself is a glacial kettle pond that historically was used to harvest ice and is now a public drinking supply for the city of Cambridge. As a reservoir it is fenced in and closed to boating and fishing. However, the pond is rimmed with a paved walking and running trail, and lined with trees. There are decent views (even through the chain link) of all parts of the reservoir and walking the ~2 mile loop can turn up such species as Canvasbacks, Ring-necked ducks, Ruddy ducks and more.

The literary explorer will enjoy seeking the mystery, marble bench that appeared some years ago inscribed with a passage from Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando”.

New England woodpeckers and laughers continued—the Red-bellied woodpecker

The misnamed Red-"bellied" woodpecker is an increasingly common New England feeder bird. The red of its belly is only visible upon close inspection, a relic of the “bird in hand” days of ornithology before binoculars. 

The red that does pop out from this bird is the shining red that laces up the nape of the neck and onto the crown of the males. Overall tan, with a black and white back, the Red-bellied woodpecker used to be found in the more southerly states but has expanded its range slowly northwards and now spends the winter in New England, hanging from suet feeders and chasing about bare limbs. The Red-bellied woodpecker is similar in size and shape to the Northern flicker that returns to central and northern New England in early April but can be separated by the lack of facial markings and belly pattern.

Red-bellied woodpeckers make a wonderful “purring” call from the upper branches of trees. Listen for this funny noise and watch for the round head, bounding flight, and flash of bright red of these woodpeckers. 

Interested in other New England woodpeckers? Read more on the Pileated woodpecker or the subtle difference between the Downy and Hairy.

Laughter from the woods: woodpeckers, flickers, and a nuthatch

April brings an array of strange laughing, purring, and nose-honking from deep within the hard wood forests of New England. This assortment of sounds can be attributed to three of the largest woodpeckers that hammer out their summers here in New England and the breeding song of the White-breasted nuthatch. Over the next week the Daily Bird New England will illuminate the funny sounds of four species: Pileated woodpecker, Northern flicker, Red-bellied woodpecker, and the breeding call of the White-breasted nuthatch.

Woody woodpecker can’t do justice to the largest of these four birds, the Pileated woodpecker. Like a living dinosaur the Pileated woodpecker flies on huge, black and white wings and knocks oval holes into large, hard wood trees across New England. Most closely related to the extinct(?)  Ivory-billed woodpecker, these red-headed “good god birds” have the wing span of a crow and can be heard giving their echoing “laugh” or slow woodblock hammering from over a mile away. To find a Pileated is always a hunt. They have larger breeding grounds than most other songbirds and occupy larger tracts of land. Look for the characteristic square or oblong nest hole of the Pileated as well as torn up wood at the base of a tree as Pileateds are the only woodpeckers known to stand on the ground while searching for insects under the bark of a tree.

Almost like McDonalds – 10,000 served



 10,000 jellybeans                                  

This is a thank you to all of the Daily Bird’s supporters and readers as the Daily Bird has just surpassed 10,000 “pageviews”. A single pageview is counted with each visit to or click of a link within this blog. The pageview counter is a built-in feature of Google Blogger the host program of all blogspot.com websites. The counter tracks pageviews not only by day but by hour and specific post. Crossing the 10,000^th pageview is an exciting milestone and as migrants return to New England there will be more and more birds to report on, tips to share, and reasons to celebrate bird watching. I hope you continue to enjoy the Daily Bird New England, share it with friends and sign up for email notifications by entering your email in the small box to the right.

And a note to all teachers and educators: I would love to hear if you use this site in a K-12 classroom or if think it could be used as an educational tool in the classroom. For congratulations, complaints, or better still suggestions please email me at: AlexnaderJosephDunn@gmail.com  

April fools snow and a mix of April birds

These April fools snow storms are cruel reminders that spring and winter can coexist here in New England. The tulips and crocuses are up, jelly beans are on store shelves, and yet snow plows still roam the streets like rusty Scrooges stealing Christmas cheer. This strange crossover period exists in the bird world too. Watch for both Dark-eyed juncos and Red-winged blackbirds feeding side by side under feeders. Wintering Bald eagles perch like snow balls in the evergreens above lakes, and winter travelers like Common mergansers and Goldeneye fish in the open water while reluctant refugees like Eastern phoebes and Tree swallows dart about the shore. This mix of eagles at the end of their stay, migrating ducks, and early spring arrivals all coexists for a few weeks in these snow clad and drippy first days of April, a dreary though interesting mix of travelers crossing paths in the night.

Reading bird "range maps" can be like a visual timeline of arrivals and departures from New England. Blue equates to winter and orange to summer. Look for the progression of change in these maps for the species mentioned above.