The Rest of 2022, Part III: More Birds

We're continuing an account of sightings on our property in 2022. In addition to the birds who took up residence and raised families here this year -- which I wrote about in a previous post -- we had several other birds visiting our property. Here's a sampling!

This bright male Yellow-rumped Warbler stopped by the small pond in our woods on April 30, presumably on his way to northern breeding areas:

I enjoyed watching these American Goldfinches munching on Daisy Fleabane flowers near the house on July 7:

On August 18, an especially unusual bird showed up in the yard. I'd never seen a Blue-winged Warbler x Golden-winged Warbler hybrid before, but this bird's combination of yellow cap, black eyeline, pale throat and breast, and yellow wingbars were all the right marks; this particular hybrid is apparently common enough to have its own name -- Brewster's Warbler -- although it's not a distinct species. Here are a couple of very poor (but identifiable) pictures of this fancy bird:

 

Also on August 18, some young Rose-breasted Grosbeaks perched on plant stakes on the deck:

Although this next picture is very blurry, I'm sharing it because I love seeing the fancy marks on these birds' wings, including surprising rosy patches:

This Chestnut-sided Warbler looked adorable under a Purple-flowering Raspberry leaf on September 3:

A bunch of young and/or female Ruby-throated Hummingbirds visited the potted zinnias on our deck in late August and early September. Here's one of these handsome birds perching on a stake on September 4:

I love that these flowers are big enough for the hummingbirds to put a little of their weight on the petals:

Here's another hummingbird practically perching on the petals as it drank on September 7:

 This Black-throated Green Warbler stopped on our deck on September 11:

And I love seeing Gray Catbirds (perhaps one of our residents or else another bird passing through) with Pokeweed berries; this picture is also from September 11:

On September 18, I happened to be outside while a bunch of hawks were wheeling overhead, flying together in numbers and heading south. This one picture includes three Broad-winged Hawks and what I think is a Cooper's Hawk; there were at least a dozen more hawks in the air, and soon they all moved on:

Other bird highlights this year -- without pictures -- included two new bird species for the yard: #112 was a female Common Merganser who flew overhead on May 15; #113 was a Green Heron who perched in one of the trees next to the meadow on July 16. Also, thanks to help from the amazing Merlin app's Sound ID feature, I was able to learn that I frequently hear a Northern Waterthrush calling during the summer at the back edge of our woods, which means this species probably breeds somewhere near our property.

It's always exciting to see and learn new things! I have one more batch of sights to share from 2022 before this year is over. Up next: flowers and insects!

Catching Up with 2020, Part II: Mostly Birds, Insects, and Plants

I feel so lucky to live in a place with abundant and fascinating natural variety just outside my door. Even during stretches like the past few months when I only rarely got to wander around our woods and meadow (ugh, what a sad time), interesting wildlife kept showing up right around the house, so there was basically always something cool to see. Here are some highlights of creatures and plants that captured my attention in August through December of this year!

Quite a few interesting insects showed up around the house toward the end of summer and into fall. Here's a Lettered Habrosyne (Habrosyne scripta), a super fancy moth that visited our porch lights on August 6:

Throughout August, every time I walked past a small American Witch Hazel shrub I planted in our front yard earlier this year, I would see several of the same small winged creatures perched on this plant's bare twigs. These turned out to be tiny robber flies (genus Holcocephala, I think), and I suppose this plant must have made for a perfect perch from which to hunt other nearby insects. Here are a couple of these little hunters on August 14:

And here's one of these small robber flies with an even tinier insect-y meal:

On August 21, a Giant Swallowtail -- only the second individual of this species I've seen -- stopped by to feed from the large zinnias on our deck. Even with most of one wing missing, this big butterfly was an impressive sight:

The Spicebush plants in our front yard were once again host to a few Spicebush Swallowtail caterpillars this summer. Last year, all of the Spicebush Swallowtail caterpillars on our bushes were eaten, so this year I brought two of these amazing creatures inside the house so they could munch on fresh Spicebush leaves in safety, and so I could see them grow into their awesome snake mimic costumes. Here's one of these caterpillars on August 22 -- I temporarily held open the leaf tunnel it had pulled around itself so I could take this picture:

When the Spicebush Swallowtail caterpillars were ready to pupate, they changed from green to yellow -- ah, so pretty:

The caterpillar in the above picture actually died in the process of forming a chrysalis, and I'm not sure why that happened. But the second caterpillar successfully transformed into a neat little leaf-like structure -- with rows of blue dots just like its caterpillar form -- and this chrysalis is now safely tucked away in an unheated room attached to our house for the winter. If all goes well, a butterfly will emerge from this structure in the spring:

On September 2, a White-marked Tussock Moth caterpillar (Orgyia leucostigma) climbed up the wall on the front of our house and made its cocoon right on our window. I didn't think to take a picture of this caterpillar when we first saw it wandering onto the wall -- it's a wild-looking one, but we see them fairly frequently. I was excited to have this view into a caterpillar's silken cocoon as it went about pupating:

A little over two weeks later, on September 19, the adult White-marked Tussock Moth emerged from her cocoon. It turns out White-marked Tussock Moths are a species where the females are wingless:

This female never left the remains of her cocoon, and on September 22 she laid a frothy mass of eggs right there:

And then she died soon afterward. What a fascinating glimpse into this species' life cycle.

I planted several new native plants in our front yard this year (I love being able to gradually increase the diversity of this place), and this Brown-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia triloba) became one of my favorites; here's a picture of this plant's wall of cheery flowers on August 14:

Here's one of the Common Yellowthroats that lived in our yard and meadow this summer (this picture is from August 21):

And here's a large Eastern Garter Snake that was sunning next to our driveway on August 24:

On September 27, I walked out into our meadow and woods to admire the fantastic fall colors. This was an especially wonderful year for colorful foliage! The Virginia Creeper leaves had turned a deep red, which was beautiful on smaller individual vines:

And the Virginia Creepers were even more stunning where they covered the trunks of Black Cherry trees at the edge of our woods:

Here's our house nestled between colorful ridge and meadow:

This sumac at the edge of the meadow was sporting a bizarre (yet strangely festive?) gall formed by a little aphid, Melaphis rhois (there's an aphid on the bottom of the gall in this picture):

In the meadow, goldenrods and asters were putting on a fantastic show, with New England Aster as the star. I'm so happy that these beautiful plants have made a stronghold in our meadow after we spread seeds over the disturbed areas in 2017:

A Banded Argiope spider (Argiope trifasciata) had strung a web among goldenrod in the meadow:

Here's a closer look at this fancy big spider:

In the woods, I was surprised to come across an Ovenbird. These loud little birds bred in these woods during the summer, but I expected that they would all have been gone by now. This little creature watched me quite close-up for a little while -- perhaps it was surprised to see me, too:

I love the row of tiny dark dots along the lower edge of this bird's fancy costume:

Back up at the house, I was happy to meet up with one of our Eastern Phoebes:

And I admired the blanket of asters nearby (these are two of the many species of asters on our property, and I need to finish identifying them one of these years):

On October 21 while walking through the meadow, I stopped to identify two species of insects that were making their quiet buzzy songs among the grass. Here's a Marsh Meadow Grasshopper (Chorthippus curtipennis), who was constantly moving from leaf to leaf close to the ground, pausing every few seconds to rasp both of its hind legs against its wings:

And here's a Short-winged Meadow Katydid (Conocephalus brevipennis), who was sitting perfectly still and right in the open on its dried grass stalk, but it still took me quite a while to locate the source of its sound:

In the woods, I loved seeing this Black-capped Chickadee foraging amidst hawthorn spines:

And this Yellow-rumped Warbler in its beautiful and muted fall costume was foraging in an apple tree next to our house:

Fantastically, this year has brought Evening Grosbeaks to our yard again. The last (and only) time I saw these birds before this year was when they visited us in late 2018, and I thought that could have very well been a once-in-a-lifetime event. How wonderful to get to see these amazing northern finches again! Here's a small flock that stopped by our feeder on November 18, along with the first real snow of the season:

Ah, so cool! While I was already near the feeders with my camera, I took the opportunity to photograph some of the other (more familiar, but still wonderful) birds hanging around. This Black-capped Chickadee made some dramatic poses as it worked at the sunflower seed clasped in its feet:

This American Goldfinch had the most perfect spot of white on its forehead, like a permanent resting snowflake:

And this American Tree Sparrow was (for the moment, anyway) more interested in the abundant goldenrod seedheads just behind the feeder stand than in the sunflower seeds in the tray:

I've been really happy this winter to see how much the birds -- especially the Dark-eyed Juncos and American Tree Sparrows -- have been enjoying the many wild seeds on offer in our yard and meadow. Mostly this is goldenrod, and mostly this is in places where we simply... didn't mow. (Sure, the yard looks kind of messy in places, but I'm happy to justify less yard work with more food for birds!) But some of these seeds come from plants we put there on purpose, which feels great. The mixture of native seeds we spread in the disturbed part of the meadow in 2017 included Little Bluestem, and that grass has grown fantastically, even forming lovely stands on rocky ground that probably would have been barren otherwise. I've enjoyed watching the Little Bluestem plants grow and change over the past few months, from purpleish/blue stalks in mid-August:

To purpleish/red stems in late September:

And finally to reddish/brown stalks with frilly white seedheads in mid-October:

I've watched flocks of American Treen Sparrows leaping up onto these stems and weighing them down to the ground to get the seeds. When we got nearly two feet of snow in the middle of December, it became especially clear how much the sparrows were enjoying this grass's seeds. Here's a patch of Little Bluestem on December 19, with the remains of the sparrows' feasting scattered on the snow:

I'm glad I've been able to see all these wonderful things over the past few months, but I still wish I had been outside more than I was. Ah well, we've reached the end of 2020, and who knows what the new year will bring!

Spring and Early Summer Highlights: Part II

Here's a continuation of the previous post, with more highlights from April, May, and June of this year. And it turns out I still have too many things to share, so this will actually have to be three posts, not two!

More Birds

Spring was very slow to advance this year, with freezing temperatures and occasional snow all the way through mid-May. (Our last snow was on May 12.) The migrating birds still showed up in early May as usual, though, which led to some strange sights, like this male Rose-breasted Grosbeak amid falling snow:

A flowering quince shrub in our yard bloomed fairly early in May despite the cold weather, and its blossoms were a big draw for some nectar-seeking birds. Here's a female Ruby-throated Hummingbird enjoying these blossoms on May 17:

Bare branches on another nearby shrub made great perches for little hummingbird feet in between trips to the flowers -- I love how sassy she looks in this photo:

A male hummingbird was hanging around, too, and actively courting the female. I didn't get any pictures of his fancy dives, but he was also nice enough to perch for a couple of photos in between trips to the flowering quince:

In this next picture, I love how the light bouncing off of his feathers has turned the underside of his beak red:

Baltimore Orioles were also frequent visitors to the quince blossoms; here's a brilliant male from May 16:
 

The number of bird species we've seen or heard on our property has continued to climb. Birds #107 and 108 (I still can't believe we're in the 100s!) were the two cuckoo species: Yellow-billed Cuckoo and Black-billed Cuckoo. In previous years, I've suspected that I was hearing cuckoos calling occasionally, and this year in early June I finally learned and confirmed these two species' calls. Confirmation of these species by ear was about as much as I thought I could hope for, but then a day or two afterward, both species each flew out into clear view and showed themselves. I didn't have my camera handy for the Yellow-billed Cuckoo (a bird I'd only seen once before, way back in 2011 in Connecticut), but here's a distant and partially-obstructed picture of the Black-billed Cuckoo, a totally new bird for me:

I managed to wander outside and look/listen for migrants nearly every day in May this year (a definite benefit of working from home). Ruby-crowned Kinglets were common and surprisingly loud visitors. Here's one of these cute little birds on May 1:

Black-and-white Warblers are so fancy, and I saw them fairly frequently this spring (and at least one pair has stuck around over the summer and is probably breeding somewhere out there). This male was foraging on a fallen tree in the woods on May 2:

And here's a male on May 16 showing off his gravity-defying tree-climbing skills:

These birds are gorgeous, but I think they look really strange when viewed head-on:

A flock of male Yellow-rumped Warblers lit up the still leafless woods on May 10:

A male Cape May Warbler foraged in a pine tree next to our driveway on May 17:

And on May 15 I felt extremely lucky to come across a male Black-throated Blue Warbler foraging right at ground level in the woods, and near the path. I suspect this is the closest I will ever get to one of these handsome birds, and is that not the most perfect color of slaty-blue on his head and back?
 

That's enough for now, but we're still not done catching up with spring and early summer! Stay tuned for Part III!