Catching Up with 2020, Part I: Trail Camera Mammals and Birds

Wow, what a blur these last few months have been. I've had very little time for outdoor wanderings since September, let alone time to share sights here. Sigh. But I have indeed been watching out for nature around our house over the last few months as best as I could, and the holiday break means I can finally catch up with sharing 2020 wildlife happenings here. Hooray!

Our trusty trail camera captured plenty of interesting animal activity in our woods even while I was stuck inside (mostly tethered to my computer), so we'll start there! Throughout most of August, the trail camera was watching a tree trunk that had long ago fallen across our woods path, and this turned out to be an incredibly productive viewpoint. A large variety of birds and (mostly small) mammals made an appearance on these mossy logs during that time. Here's a compilation of some of the best videos from this spot, featuring:

1. A Raccoon (one of several that wandered along this path in August, usually stopping to sniff the logs).
2. An Eastern Chipmunk perching on the log for a thorough grooming session.
3. The Ruffed Grouse family who showed up on the trail camera several times this summer. Here, the adult female keeps watch while the two now-nearly-grown chicks snatch up nearby seeds. I can't believe I get to see grouse foraging in our woods, and I love the soft sounds they make here!
4. A Long-tailed Weasel -- the first one we've seen on our property! -- slithering along the log in what I feel certain must be scent-marking behavior. (Mmm, weasel-scented log!)
5. A White-footed Mouse (or Deer Mouse) with its tail held high, possibly also scent-marking?
6. A White-tailed Deer munching on nearby shrubs.
7. A Virginia Opossum moving across the logs and stopping to scratch an itch.
   

At the end of August, I moved the trail camera among a few other locations in the woods, which resulted in some other interesting animal videos, including our first sightings of Flying Squirrels! (These could be Northern or Southern Flying Squirrels, but I'm not sure which.) I already knew we had Flying Squirrels on our property because I found the remains of someone's Flying-Squirrel meal in September of 2018... but this is the first time we've seen these fancy arboreal rodents whole and alive. :) White-tailed Deer were (as expected) the most frequent visitors on the trail camera during the last couple of months. This last compilation video shows a brief Flying Squirrel clip, and then three clips of deer -- a male with tiny antler spikes, a male with impressively big antlers, and some deer foraging in deep snow on Christmas Eve:

I have a bunch more sights to share over the past few months, beyond these trail camera videos -- Part II is up next!

A Change-filled Week

Wow. I think I would describe this past week as... "turbulent." With the quickly escalating world health concerns, several aspects of my work were abruptly turned on their head this week, and many people in my part of the world are facing sudden changes in their personal and professional lives. Amid all the uncertainty, I've made sure to take the time this week to go outside and marvel at the changes happening there. These changes in nature can be sudden and surprising, too, but they're also thrilling, joyous, and wholly positive. Spring is coming! So let's focus on those happier changes for a bit, shall we?

The first flowers of the year appeared in our yard this week. :) On March 10, with temperatures in the upper 60s (F), a patch of newly opened Snowdrops played host to a European Honey Bee, who must have been happy to find the only flowers around:

This is not a native plant, and not a native insect, but it's so wonderful to see flowers and pollinators again after months of winter. And Snowdrops are so whimsical, and honey bees so fuzzy, and the sunlight was so warm and sweet on this perfect spring day:

Yesterday, March 12, a patch of reliably early crocuses added their colorful blossoms to our yard:

And today, I spotted tiny blossoms appearing on our American Hazelnut bushes, the first native plants to bloom in our yard this year. American Hazelnuts have these long, hanging structures that produce pollen, and also tiny frilly female structures, all on the same plant:

I planted these hazelnut bushes in 2017, and this is the first year they've bloomed. I'm so happy to see the brilliant pink color of these female flowers, just now emerging from their protective buds:

Most other plants around here are still a ways away from flowering, but hints of life are starting to appear.... Tiny nubs have popped up above the ground where I planted Bloodroot rhizomes near the house last year, which gives me hope that I'll see these wonderful white flowers -- or at least their lovely lobed leaves -- sometime in April:
 

The bird activity is ramping up around here. Red-winged Blackbirds and Common Grackles have returned to the area, and many of our year-round species have increased their singing efforts. A pair of local Common Ravens has become especially vocal, and I have frequently seen the two of them together and heard them calling as they fly over our yard. Yesterday, they got into a dispute with another pair of ravens who must have encroached on their territory, and the four big black birds chased and dove and yelled at each other several times during the day:
 

Common Ravens are not actually common around here, so seeing four birds in the midst of a territorial conflict was pretty amazing. Here's an image of two of those four birds, flying close together either in support or in opposition, but I'm not sure which:
 

Today, I saw a pair of ravens gathering sticks from White Pine trees in the woods around our property. It seems like a nest is in the works somewhere out there, and hopefully this means there will be baby ravens later in the year.

I have a couple of other sights to share from this past week that aren't really related to spring-time changes. Here's a sleek Hairy Woodpecker (a bird which has somehow never appeared on this blog before now) enjoying the suet feeder, the newest addition to our bird-feeding setup:

And the night of March 10 was warm enough that I stepped outside to take pictures of the full supermoon, first with clouds:

And then alone:

And here's one more spring-time report: Today brought my first Wood Frogs of the year. I heard them calling as I walked down the slope toward the small pool in our woods on this sunny 50-degree afternoon -- what a joyous surprise indeed! More change will be on the way now. I'll do my best to focus on the happy changes in our yard, meadow, and woods, and try not to be overwhelmed by the other less happy changes that may come our way.

Deep Winter

January and February this year have brought a few new discoveries in our yard and woods, but mostly this has been a time of familiar sights amid snowy landscapes and gradually lengthening days. I love being in a place long enough to build a sense of the familiar, to be able to feel that, yes, this is what winter is like here. And then when new creatures show up, or when I see something familiar in a new way, there's a basis for comparison -- it's nice, and quite different from a couple of winters ago when everything in this place was brand new to me.

I finally set up the trail camera that I bought about a year ago, and I've been moving it among a few spots in our woods and at the edge of the meadow. Even in just the past two months, this trail camera has already given us a greatly expanded view of our wildlife neighbors, especially carnivores who I've only rarely glimpsed before now. Here's a collection of some of my favorite videos from the trail camera so far: a young male White-tailed Deer in the snowy woods, a Coyote loping along our woods trail, a Gray Fox moving more cautiously down the same trail, a Gray Fox in the meadow (this spot turned out to be part of a particularly frequent fox trail), and what I'm pretty sure is a Red Fox passing through the meadow carrying a captured meal.

On January 7, a group of Black-capped Chickadees let me stand close by while they foraged in a fallen sumac tree:

I will always take the opportunity to hang out with chickadees. This picture looks like it's sideways, but the chickadee was just working at an angle:

A storm on February 7 left a thick layer of ice on everything. The Silver Maple buds in our front yard turned into glass-like globes:

On February 9, the ice had only just started to melt, and shockingly bright sunlight made all the trees sparkle with multi-colored lights -- I couldn't quite get my camera to capture the effect, but this photo at least gives an idea:

On February 15, an American Goldfinch posed on snow-covered fir branches:

The edge of the meadow hosted an impressive network of rabbit tracks (this is the area where the trail camera saw so many foxes go by -- watch out, bunnies):

And I admired the now mostly ice-free Silver Maple buds against a blue sky:

Another perfectly blue sky on February 22 made a striking backdrop for the bare Virginia-Creeper-covered trees at the edge of the woods:

And the sunlight lit up a few remaining seeds dangling from a nearby Basswood tree:

The more I think about it, I think February may be one of my favorite months, for its combination of snow and lengthening days. I love sunny, crisp, blue-sky February days, with a good blanket of white snow on the ground.... And February holds the first, tiniest hints of spring. In the past few days, cardinals have started singing in our yard, and a pair of bluebirds have stopped by to check out our nest boxes. I'm clearly not the only one starting to think about spring. Winter is long, but spring will come. And in the meantime, there's still the rest of February to enjoy!

Winter Solstice

Yesterday was the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. I made sure to spend some time outside yesterday to mark this event, but the weather was bitterly cold and overcast, perhaps suitably bleak given the day. Much better was today, the day after the solstice, when temperatures got into the 40s (F) and the sky was sunny and clear. From here on out, the light will be slowly returning, and being outside on this sun-filled day felt like a great way to celebrate that fact!

This is the first place I've lived where I've noticed such a vast difference in the sun's height between summer and winter. (And now that I think about it, I suppose this is the farthest north I've lived.) On summer days, the sun reaches almost directly overhead. Now, the sun barely gets above the trees. I took this picture in our meadow at around 12:30 today, and that's maximum sun for this time of year:

The sun lit up these fuzzy Virgin's Bower seedheads at the edge of the meadow:
 

A Common Raven called for several minutes from the ridge above our house and made a pass over the meadow. Common Ravens aren't actually all that common around here, and I feel very lucky that a pair of these birds seems to be year-round residents at this nearby ridge:
 

I watched some Black-capped Chickadees foraging among old seedheads on our Tulip Tree:

While a couple of noisy White-breasted Nuthatches worked over one of our old apple trees. Those rusty feathers under this bird's tail are one of my favorite things about White-breasted Nuthatches:

What a handsome bird you are, little nuthatch:

I'm hoping for more of these wonderfully sunny days in the wintry months to come, with the sun a bit higher in the sky each day!

From Brown to White

The landscape becomes so brown in late November. Although it's a mostly quiet and dormant time of the year, there are still plenty of interesting things to see. On November 25, I wandered in our meadow, admiring the wide variety of textures and shades-of-brown on the plentiful dried plant stems remaining after this year's growth. These arching goldenrod seedheads were especially fluffy and pretty:

And I love the mix of puffball seedheads and curly dried leaves on this aster:

Wider views of the undisturbed part of the meadow (the part that wasn't excavated and reseeded afterward) showed interesting patchworks of dried plants:

Red pedicels on Gray Dogwood (Cornus racemosa) shrubs at the edge of the meadow added some color among all the brown:

A few familiar winter-season birds were out and about as well. This Black-capped Chickadee was busy processing a sunflower seed and didn't seem to mind me standing nearby:

And a fluffy White-breasted Nuthatch worked its way along a tree trunk:

Hey, do you have a seed, too?

November 25th and 26th were relatively warm days, and I was surprised to see several moths -- which turned out to be Fall Cankerworm Moths (Alsophila pometaria) -- both during the day and at night under our porch light:

Here's another one of these moths that ended up in our house for a bit:

And after I saw my first wingless female moth earlier in the year, wouldn't you know it, female Fall Cankerworm Moths are wingless as well. (The moths in the above pictures are males.) Since that was the only species of moth I saw on those warm-weather days, I have to assume that this wingless moth on our porch on November 26 is a female of that species. Nature is so interesting and weird!

And speaking of insects, on November 25 I moved a log against our house's foundation and uncovered a pile of hibernating ladybugs; that's a lot of bugs, but given how many ladybugs we find in and around our house on warm days, I'm not particularly surprised to find this big of a group here:

On December 2, we got our first big snowstorm of the season. And it was a big storm, bringing a layer of ice followed by about a foot of thick, clinging snow overnight, and then more snow throughout the day. Most places around here closed that day -- including my work -- so I had some extra time in which to enjoy this transformation of the landscape into a world of white. The hillside across the valley from our house grew massive white structures (with pine trees somewhere underneath):

Here's a view along one edge of our property, with the old and nearly-collapsing shed surrounded by heavy snow:

The snow was so sticky -- and there was so little wind -- that it gained quite a bit of height even on narrow spots, and formed some interesting shapes. I especially like these fancy hats that developed on the Purple Coneflower seedheads:

Several birds were active throughout the snowy day, including this Northern Cardinal who was munching on Pokeweed berries:
 

Now that we're in December, I expect to see a lot of white landscapes for the next few months. It's definitely winter now!

Things I'm Excited About (Spring!)

Spring is coming (!) and lots of exciting things are happening:

1. A male Eastern Bluebird has been checking out our two nest boxes over the past couple of days. I would absolutely love to have a bluebird pair take up residence in one of these boxes, which are a new addition to the property as of last year. (Of course, I also love having Tree Swallows as tenants, and other birds are welcome, too, but these are "bluebird" boxes, after all!)

2. Yesterday was apparently a fantastic day for migration, because big flocks of geese were passing overhead all day. In 10 minutes in the middle of the day, I counted 500 Canada Geese flying over our house, plus a couple of Snow Geese. And I saw reports yesterday of people counting Canada Geese in the tens of thousands as they passed over the area. We even heard flocks of geese honking overhead at around 9:00-10:00 PM, times which have normally been so silent around here all winter.

3. Garden season has started! I planted some asparagus seeds indoors a couple of weeks ago (I know people usually plant asparagus crowns, but seeds turn out to be much cheaper, and you have to wait a year or more to harvest the asparagus either way), and now there are the tiniest asparaguses (asparagi?) growing in our basement. I didn't know asparagus could be so small! And tomorrow I'll plant the next wave of vegetable and flower seeds and tuck them into their cozy growing area, with lights and heat mats. Yay, plants!

4. I visited Sapsucker Woods today (at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology) and saw even more early spring sights. Beautiful Skunk Cabbage blossoms are poking up above the snow, and while I didn't clearly see whether any of these super-early spring flowers are actually open yet, I was still very happy to see these lovely speckled plants:
 

Red-winged Blackbirds have just returned to the area (like, yesterday), and male blackbirds were displaying from perches all around Sapsucker Woods's many marshy areas. These are the first Red-winged Blackbirds I've seen this year! Those bright wings are intense, especially in otherwise bare trees:
 

This male was a little more reserved, keeping his red shoulders partly covered while he puffed up and called:
 

Here's one more picture of this bird, looking handsome in between displays:
 

And we're off! Hooray, spring!

Assorted Winter Yard Sights

Winter is so quiet and static, compared to the riotous diversity and quick change of the other seasons. It's nice, really, to have a couple of months of white-brown-green landscapes, bare branches, and just the core wildlife regulars, so I can enjoy the silence and consistency, notice details in my environment that I've never noticed before, appreciate surprises when they show up, and celebrate even gradual change. My chart of eBird checklists on our property over the the past three months (December through February) shows only 23 species, which is fewer bird species than I might find during a single walk around our meadow and woods on any given day in May. And of those 23 species, only about 14 have appeared on our property with any regularity during that time. (If you're curious, here are the regulars: Mourning Dove, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Downy Woodpecker, Hairy Woodpecker, Blue Jay, American Crow, Black-capped Chickadee, Tufted Titmouse, White-breasted Nuthatch, Carolina Wren, House Finch, American Goldfinch, Dark-eyed Junco, Northern Cardinal.) Our regular winter non-bird creatures (the ones we've seen, anyway) are the White-tailed Deer, Eastern Cottontail rabbits, Red Squirrels, White-footed Mice (or possibly Deer Mice), and Meadow Voles. And that's it. Winter is comparatively simple, but even so, these past couple of months have brought plenty of interesting sights.

I've already posted about the flock of Evening Grosbeaks that visited our feeders in early December. Those fantastic birds stayed around for four days, and then they moved on for good. (I wonder how many years it will be before I see another Evening Grosbeak.) Just a week later, though, on December 13, we had another surprise at our feeders when a single Common Redpoll showed up:

I haven't seen a Common Redpoll since I came across a small flock of these little finches at the Connecticut shore in 2013. These birds certainly aren't common around here, and my understanding is that it's quite special to have one visit your feeder. Either way, I was delighted to meet this streaky brown-and-white creature, with its pointy yellow beak and perfect little red cap:

The redpoll seemed to thoroughly enjoy the nyjer seeds at our feeder:

While I watched the redpoll, I also had the opportunity to see one of the Meadow Voles that had taken to boldly foraging under the feeders around that time (I haven't seen these creatures outside of their burrows beneath the snow in a while, but there was a span of a couple of weeks when we saw them frequently in the open and munching on dropped seeds) -- look at this cute little rodent face:

The redpoll stayed around for a few hours and then moved on. I'm happy to host these rare northern visitors in our yard, even if only for a little while!

On the morning of January 14, a layer of ice on twigs and branches made for some amazing sights in our meadow:

By around 9:45 AM, clear sunlight (in January! amazing!) lit up the icy trees and created all sorts of interesting textures and patterns:

Perfectly ice-coated treetops made for quite a view through a telephoto lens:

Even an old spider web outside our kitchen window was beautifully highlighted by frost and sunlight:

By a couple of hours later, the sun had melted much of the ice, and this male Red-bellied Woodpecker looked very pretty in his sunlit apple tree:

The half-melted landscape was in some ways even more interesting than the fully iced version of two hours earlier:

I don't know how the sunlight melted the treetop ice on the hillside into these distinct lines, but I think the result is amazing, like wave-shaped sand on a beach:

On January 27, I wandered through our snow-covered meadow and admired the intricate patterns of dead flower stems -- many of them from seeds we planted -- against the pristine snow:

These Black-eyed Susan blooms were strangely pretty from above:

I love the graceful shape (and reddish color) of this Little Bluestem stalk:

And these Common Yarrow stalks made interesting shapes against the snow:

While walking in our woods on February 2, I came across the signs of what seemed to be a rabbit festival, with more rabbit droppings than I think I've ever seen in one area, as well as -- this is new to me -- spots of shockingly red pee:

The next day (February 3), a walk in the woods turned up a spider -- what a robust creature this must be, to be out and about in February, with snow still on the ground:

On February 17, I wandered outside under an amazingly blue sky; I love sunny February days:

This Blue Jay perfectly matched its gray-branch and blue-sky surroundings:

A Dark-eyed Junco sang quietly from within a sun-lit bush (practicing its song for breeding season?) and then emerged long enough to have its portrait taken:

An American Tree Sparrow also made an appearance:

This is such a handsome sparrow, especially against the clear blue sky:

I stopped to admire (as I do every time I pass by) the fuzz-tipped buds of this Allegheny Serviceberry tree I planted last year:

At another edge of the meadow, I was surprised to see the incredible amount of old Yellow-bellied Sapsucker holes on this very old apple tree, and just as surprised that I'd never noticed all these holes before now:

The afternoon light perfectly set off some big pine trees on the wooded ridge across the street from our house:

On February 21, a temporary thaw and bright sunlight brought out a cobweb-like tracing of snowy remnants on the hills across the valley:

As I write this on February 25, we're getting frigid winds and fresh snow, and it certainly still feels like winter. But changes are happening: the daylight is getting noticeably stronger and longer, the cardinals and chickadees have started singing in recent weeks, and I even spotted some crocus leaves emerging from the ground way back on February 10. I know that March will bring more tantalizing signs of the coming spring, and I'm excited to see what will happen during this year's more active seasons.