50,000 served

 Like McDonald's the Daily Bird New England celebrates a landmark in visitors served with its 50,000^th read. Whether you call them “clicks, visits or page views” the measurement benchmark for all blogs is the number of times a page is opened. While there is no way to know how long people linger on a page, whether 40,000 of these reads were my mom, or what change these posts have made in the lives of New England birders I take great pleasure in knowing that more and more people are tuning into the lives of New England birds. With over 100 posts since I began the blog in December 2010 I’ve completed my goal of keeping the blog going for one year. As I cycle into my second spring you may recognize some of the posts as reruns but as I work to make this a truly daily dose of birds with 365 posts you will see timely information on both old and new topics. Thank you to all the readers, birders, and friends you have kept up with the Daily Bird New England.

Happy bird watching, 

Alex

Learning bird song is like practicing your scales

February can be a cruel month. Some afternoon the sun rises up and warms the ground just enough to soften the earth into mud. Chickadees begin to mix their cheerful spring song into the backyard mix, and then just as spring giveth, winter taketh away. A hard frost, a fast moving snow storm, and all that momentum to spring is locked up again under snow banks peppered with road salt. 

To make these months (late winter to the pessimist / early spring to the optimist) even crueler is a changing of the guard in the bird world. Winter ducks begin to leave yet spring song birds have yet to return. It can be a quiet, if not totally bleak time for the New England bird watcher. 

So what to do in this quiet time? Ask a piano teacher and the answer to down time is simply... "scales". But as any great dancer, ball player, artist, or musician will tell you there is some joy to be found in practicing and February is the perfect month to begin accumulating bird song knowledge. The same way that we work to move our skills from "bird seeing" to "bird watching" we must work to move our skills from "bird hearing" to "bird listening". 

Actively listening to bird song is one of the most important and wholly under represented aspects of bird watching (there is bias even in the name). When the myriad of southern songsters return to New England to nest or layover on their way North, knowing their songs is often the only way to find them. Though May is a long way off these are the quiet months to begin practicing, repetition is key as is a good audio source. The best way to start learning is to access songs online or purchase one of the many useful audio guides. While some guides offer sounds for every North American bird, one audio guide will actually walk you through the tricks of learning common New England bird songs. Walton and Lawson's Birding by Ear has all but become the standard for learning bird song and the smart title is now synonymous with the very act… birding by ear. Now's the time to start practicing!

I will be presenting at this year's Massachusetts Environmental Education Society Conference on March 14th, 2012. This year's conference theme is Refresh: New Tools and Techniques for Today's Educators. 


The conference is open to classroom, or informal educators, teachers, and naturalists interested in learning a about what's going on in the field of "EE". It is a great opportunity to gain new curriculum ideas, or just get a chance to talk with other educators from the field. The day long conference will be held at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA.  


My session is titled, The Digital Bird Watcher: New Tools for Building Fundamental Tools. for more information about sessions or to register please click here

Top 5 Birds You Didn’t Expect to See (Until Spring) from Mass Audubon

Mass Audubon recently published this online article regrading winter birds. A very interesting read!



"Northern Cardinals. Blue Jays. American Goldfinches. You expect to see these birds during the winter. But the American Robin and the Eastern Bluebird? These fabled harbingers of spring catch many New Englanders off guard this time of year. After all, shouldn’t they be sunning themselves down south?

Not necessarily. According to Joan Walsh, Mass Audubon’s Director of Bird Monitoring, many birds that have normally flown south for the winter are sticking around, possibly due to increasing temperatures and a more readily available food source (i.e., berries)–a trend that’s been increasing over the last 40 years. And, in some cases, we humans have contributed to the number of birds seen this time of year.

Read on to learn about some of the traditionally migratory species you’re likely to glimpse outside your window come rain, shine, or snow."

Read the full article here...

Signs of Spring – the Vulture?

The Turkey vulture soars on large, up turned wings, lolling over fields and highways. Turkey vultures, so named for their featherless headed resemblance to Wild turkeys and habit of sitting on the ground to eat, are migratory in nature but winter as far north as Connecticut. They appear in Massachusetts in late February and slowly make their way north for a summer spent wavering over farm fields and eating carrion.

Designed to eat carrion (dead things) vultures have an acute sense of smell and can reportedly smell day old meat from several miles away. The Turkey vulture’s return to New England is a sure sign that things will get warmer and watching the skies for these large birds is a better sign of spring than the iconic robin, a species found year round in much of the area.

Watch for vultures flying, often in small groups of 2 to 3, on black wings that appear silver or white towards the trailing edge. They fly with wings held in a “V” shape and with a wing span of 68” are closer in size to the Bald eagle’s 80” wingspan than the Red-tailed hawk’s 48”. While both Turkey vultures and Bald eagles have large, dark wings confusion can be avoided by the vultures signature “teeter-totter” flight style. Like a kite on a string being pulled by the wind, the vulture flip-flops through the air while the eagle flies on plank-straight wings without mind of the wind. Both large birds spare lie energy to flapping and soar on rising heat thermals.

Leonard Cohen recounts a father son journey to the woods in his song, Story of Issac.

“So he started up the mountain,
I was running, he was walking,
and his axe was made of gold.
Well, the trees they got much smaller,
the lake a lady's mirror,
we stopped to drink some wine.
Then he threw the bottle over.
Broke a minute later
and he put his hand on mine.
Thought I saw an eagle
but it might have been a vulture,
I never could decide.”

Birds of the Big Show – DBNE Super Bowl edition

The National Football League has teams representing five birds: ravens, falcons, eagles, cardinals, and seahawks. This eclectic mix of mascots range from the fearsome, though tired falcons and eagles to the far less threatening cardinals of Arizona.  Since Cardinals are found only sporadically in Arizona this mascot is based less in biology than an oversight of modern, revenue driven sports and the pension for trading teams from St. Louis, Missouri to Tempe, Arizona. The Baltimore Ravens are of course a literary nod to Edgar Allen Poe’s birthplace. The raven, however is a tough, intelligent and unforgiving bird making it a far better mascot than the scavenging eagle. You won’t find a Seahawk in any modern bird book but you don’t have to go to Seattle to see one. The term seahawk is an antiquated term for the Osprey, the fish hunting raptor found throughout coastal New England. Perhaps Seattle had the huge Steller’s Sea Eagle in mind when it named it’s team. These massive birds are only found in western Russia and on rare occasion the Aluetian chain. In the end of course it not a bird but a gritty, citizen solider, lover of homeland, ready to play the game of football in britches and a three-cornered hat – the Patriot - that will trounce all other animals, minerals, and hobgoblins from the land this Sunday. Go pats.