These long winter days are perfect for planning your next birding trip. People have asked me, where is a good place to bird? My usual answer is: wherever you are. The nice thing about birds is that you can find them just about anywhere—in the city, the country, the Arctic, Antarctica, and anywhere in between.
Birding from your home is easiest because you can do it from the comfort of a chair. Birding at home allows you to study birds on a regular basis, with a field guide in hand to check field marks, size, and behavior. Recently Pam and I have seen at least 18 species of birds at our feeders. We have a feeder that we keep filled with sunflower hearts, a feeder with thistle seed, a suet feeder, and a platform feeder with a mix of seed for the ground feeders.
If you want to go a little farther afield and see some birds that are different from those you might see at home, there are some great spots in and around Harvard. Harvard’s many conservation areas and trails offer a variety of habitats. Get a trail guide from the Conservation Trust and start exploring. You will find woods, meadows, marshes, and ponds, all of which support different species of birds.
In Still River we have the Oxbow National Wildlife Refuge and the Bolton Flats conservation areas. These are both active areas, especially in the spring when the warblers and other migrants pass through.
To the west we have Wachusett Mountain, a good place to view hawks on their fall migration. To the east is Great Meadows Wildlife Refuge, which is great for finding water birds and spring migrants.
One of my favorite spots is the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge in Newburyport. On a warm Saturday last month Pam and I decided to spend the day exploring this North Shore area. I had heard that a sage thrasher had been seen at Salisbury Beach Park, so we thought we would try and find it. The sage thrasher is nonnative, and thus rare in this area. We spent an hour walking around the park and were unable to find it, but we did meet up with several other birders on the same quest. One can usually see snow buntings and horned larks pecking around the gravel areas, but even they must have been elsewhere. We did see tree sparrows, a mockingbird, and dozens of herring gulls, which we scanned for an Iceland gull that had been reported.
From Salisbury Beach we headed for Joppa Flats Audubon Center on the causeway to Plum Island to see what was on the list of birds seen recently at Plum Island and the Parker River Refuge. The snowy owl and rough-legged hawk had been seen and interested me, so we headed out to the Refuge. Unfortunately, our visit was cut short when we were stopped by a federal law enforcement officer who advised us that dogs are not allowed. Our dog Tetley was in the back of the car, and though we had no intention of letting her out, the officer advised us it was still a $75 offense. The ironic thing was that as we were being escorted out we passed some hunters on the Refuge with dogs!
From Newburyport we headed down to Halibut Point in Gloucester. This is a good place to see harlequin ducks in the winter, so we thought we would give it a shot. Halibut Point is a state park and the site of an old granite quarry. The area is scattered with enormous blocks of granite, some the size of a car. We clambered down to within 10 feet of the ocean.
Upon scanning the waves, we saw a raft of ducks several hundred yards away. They were too far away to identify, but after we waited awhile, the current brought them right by us, and we saw that they were harlequins. There were 26 to 30 of these distinctively patterned ducks. They appeared to dive in unison and then suddenly pop back up to the surface like corks. There was also a pair of buffleheads, easily identified by their black-and-white plumage. We watched this spectacle for several minutes, made so much more enjoyable by a pink sky in the west as the sun set.
On our way back up the trail we noticed three ducks about 80 feet out in the ocean, and although the light was getting dim, it was easy to see that they had white breasts and a distinctive white patch on the wing. We were not immediately sure what they were, but after consulting our field guides, we determined that one of the birds was a first-year male king eider and the others were females. This was only the second time I had seen a king eider. What a perfect end to a winter field trip!
David Durrant lives with his wife, Pamela, on East Bare Hill Road at Micheldever Farm, where they watch birds—their own peacocks, chickens, and wild birds.