A Birdy Day

Snow Geese in flightThrough the winter on the east coast, I’m happy when I see and hear a few birds in the day. There are house finches at my feeder, the goldfinch, and a black-capped chickadee or two.  And, of course, the reliable woodpeckers, the sapsucker letting out its little mew sound, the pileated cackling in the woods. These birds are like finding little diamonds in a vast landscape.

So when, on Sunday, my friend Bruce Robertson and I went out to see what ducks were coming through the valley, I was stunned by the masses of birds. Hundreds of Canada Geese congregated on the fields at Greig Farm and a flock of over 100 Snow Geese with their black tipped wings skittishly took off, circled and landed. In every direction I looked there were birds coming in or taking off. A puddle of ducks—the puddle just freshly melted ice from this interminable winter—brought me a Pintail with its elegant neck, and an American Wigeon.

An abundance of birdsAnseriformes, I thought. That is the order that ducks belong in. Bruce is teaching an ornithology class at Bard College, and I’m sitting in, learning my birds in a new way, memorizing the orders and families. It’s created some order in my learning, which has been bird by bird. Now I see that the Wigeon and the Green-Winged Teal are related, the one with a black butt, the other with a cream butt. Butt, though, is not the right word, that would be the undertail coverts.

Seeing so many birds in one day, I was intoxicated. And I am trying to decide if the abundance felt so abundant because I’m coming out of winter or if simply lots of birds are a rare thing. I have been spending my long winter evenings sitting by the fire reading the journals of Alexander Wilson, the father of American ornithology. The sheer number of birds within his travels there in early 19^th century is a joy to read of: hundreds of Clapper Rails in one day! Red-headed woodpeckers galore! If I see one of these birds I dance a jig for days.

The oft-overlooked MallardIn that jig-dancing, I often forget to admire and enjoy the more common birds—the Mallard or the Canada Geese. I don’t want to take either of these birds for granted. Hundreds of geese are rounded up near airports every year and slaughtered—to keep planes safe.  There’s a sense that there are plenty of geese out there—a few less won’t make any difference. It does. It will.

Snow Goose

As I approached the South Tivoli Bay, I heard a dramatic squawk. Two enormous birds looped and circled around each other. It took a moment for me to realize what I was looking at: an Immature Bald Eagle chasing a Great Blue Heron. It seemed like a case of teenaged miscalculation. The Heron dropped into the reeds and vanished. The eagle flew off.

Thrilled by the show, I continued snowshoeing south, following the path that meanders near the edge of the South Tivoli Bay. The Bay is wide and shallow, often freezing up before the rest of the river. Snow covered the ground and the temperatures hovered near freezing. I could see that the Bay had a thin coat of ice, gleaming in the high noon sun. There are three underpasses that lead to the Hudson River and near those underpasses stood open water. There had to be ducks nearby.

Goose bedraggled; photo by Bard student Christina BaalI arrived at a jut of land affectionately referred to as Buttocks Island. I walked out through the crevice of the island and peered south. A flock of Ring-Billed Gulls stood on the thin sheet of ice. Soon, the heron joined them, standing tall next to its shorter compatriots. I spotted the eagle in a far tree on the end of Cruger Island, perched near a mature eagle, it’s white head visible without my binoculars. The immature eagle flew over, swooping low over the gulls. They all took to the air, while the heron stood, refusing to engage in another chase.

I loitered for a while, scoping the Common Mergansers floating in the open water near the underpass. Beyond the underpass I could see the far shore of the river, the hamlet of Glasco and the Catskills, lumpy blue, in the background. It was a perfect blue-sky day, the sort of day that demands time outside.

I poked around the south side of Buttock’s Island, hoping without much hope, to see a Snow Goose there. Just after Hurricane Sandy swept through, the Goose arrived. It looked pretty bedraggled, white feathers all askew. When thousands of Snow Geese migrated through the valley this fall it did not pick up and join its cousins. I assumed it was too injured to fly. Despite this, the bird had made it through December, with frequent visits from Bard College students, eager to see a special bird. Through the fall I had grown fond of the bird, thought of it as my goose, and had resisted an urge to feed it.

The bird wasn’t there, of course. I refused to get sentimental. This was just nature taking her course. A fox or a coyote could have made it a good meal.

I continued on my way, taking the narrow path that rolls over hillocks and hugs the South Tivoli Bay. The views through the trees were long, out to patches of open water where Black Ducks floated. As I approached the mouth of the Sawkill, I heard the cackle of the Kingfisher that had been there all summer and fall. And then, to my amazement, there was my goose, idling in the open water! It shoved further out as I approached, full of admiration for its will to live.