Back yard nature notes

Mrs. Pileated visited our back yard this morning and brightened the overcast for a little while.

Obviously I haven’t mastered the art of photographing birds in flight. But even blurred, the pattern of coloration on the outspread wings is dramatic.

She harvested what she could, then flew away.

There is a robin’s nest in the shrub right next to our front door. Looks like we’re in for some up-close nature study, provided she doesn’t get scared away. We can look out a bedroom window directly into the nest, so in effect we have a robin’s nest-cam.

We met an ornithologist while walking around Sapsucker Pond in Ithaca, earlier this week. (That’s where we saw the hunting hawk pictured in the preceding post.) He told us about a rare sight in these parts, a yellow-headed blackbird, that he’d traveled to see the day before. The site was on our way home, so we stopped to see if we could spot it. It was, as he’d said, far across the marshy area where it was hanging out. But we did get to watch it for a bit with binoculars. I got a picture — more of a “this proves that I saw it” pic than anything else.

It belongs far out west, so it’s quite lost. What becomes of a bird thousands of miles off course? Hopefully he’ll find his way back to where he belongs; the red-winged blackbirds were hassling him. Go west, young man!

The ornithologist was gracious to us even though we stampeded his efforts to photograph a warbler. He told us about a palm warbler he’d seen at the pond, and though we never saw one that day, we did see one later in the week, in one of our usual haunts. It’s camera-shy, but lovely. I hope to get a better photograph of one before the warblers have all swept through.

The orioles are back, too, making beautiful music in the treetops. And the woodland plants are beginning to bloom. I’m only just learning their names: wood anemone, trillium, bluets, Japanese honeysuckle. Butterflies zig-zag everywhere. Ferns continue to unfurl. Except for the record population of deer ticks (we had no winter to speak of to cull them), it’s a great time to be outdoors.