Downy at hummingbird feeder. (Photos by David Durrant)
Around the farm some of the barn swallows have fledged two sets of young and just this week one of our pairs of bluebirds fledged its second set of young in the box mounted on our raspberry support post.
The tree swallows have left already for their trip south. One of the most spectacular bird scenes we have witnessed was the congregation of tree swallows at Parker River Wildlife Refuge last August when we were on a Mass Audubon Joppa Flats walk. Thousands of these birds gather there, feasting on bayberries before their long trip to South America. It is one of nature’s great shows to go to the refuge just before sunset and see thousands, if not millions, of birds wheeling around in unison in pulsating clouds of movement. E-mails from Joppa Flats indicate that the swallows are gathering now.
Our feeders have attracted our usual complement of birds bringing their young to teach them where the “easy” food is. The downy woodpeckers are not only feasting on the suet cakes but a couple of youngsters have taken to drinking out of the hummingbird feeder—something I have never witnessed before.
Several people have asked me about the bird with the black head and bright red bib over a white breast. This spectacular-looking bird is the rose-breasted grosbeak. In the spring we noted that we had seen a pair building a nest along the tank road in Oxbow. Though our neighbors have seen them at their feeders, we have yet to see them around here.
Great egrets on Westport River.
Earlier this summer Pam and I joined our friends Roseanne and Jim for a Mass. Audubon-sponsored kayaking trip on the west branch of the Westport River. This area boasts the largest concentration of nesting ospreys on the East Coast. We got great looks at some of the ospreys fishing and tending the young in their nests during our morning paddle. The reintroduction of ospreys in this area is a great story, one which is well described at: http://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2006/11/ospreys_nests_a.html.
We also saw great egrets and got close enough to photograph them.
On a recent trip to Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine we saw flocks of white-winged crossbills feeding on spruce cones. I was first alerted to their presence by constant chattering in a spruce grove along a dirt road. I sat down on a stone wall with my binoculars and patiently waited for the birds to emerge. I saw movement and then focused to see dozens of birds plucking cones, then opening them with their distinctly shaped bills designed to pry open the cones for seeds. This bird is a native of the northern boreal forest and will venture south in times of overpopulation or food shortages. It was an exciting sighting and a life bird for me. I had seen the Red Crossbill in Canada but never the white-winged.
On the ferry trip back to the mainland we saw storm petrels, black guillemots, and those spectacular pelagic diving birds, the gannetts. While in Maine I decided to take another shot at seeing the puffins out on Eastern Egg Rock. I took the boat out last year, but in dense fog, and did not get good looks at them. This year was better, raining but with good visibility. I was lucky to see around twenty of them, out of a reported 100 nesting pairs. This is the time of year the birds are feeding their young before heading out to the open ocean where they live. Puffins, having disappeared from the Maine coast, were re-introduced in the early ’70s in what has been a very successful program. For more info on puffins see www.projectpuffin.org.
Now is the time of year migrants start passing through our area on their way south. If you are interested in birds and would like to learn more, it would be a good time to take advantage of one of the many programs offered by Mass Audubon.
David Durrant lives with his wife, Pamela, on East Bare Hill Road at Micheldever Farm, where they run their business, Durrant Design, and watch birds—their own peacocks, chickens, and wild birds.
