Eight (8). That's what the thermometer read when I left the house at 7:15 AM this morning to participate in the Christmas Bird Count for the Lycoming Audubon Society. Worse, the wind was blowing at a steady 20 mph out of the north-northwest and there were snow showers falling and in the day's forecast.
Five of us would meet in Liberty to cover a small section of Jackson Township. Ann and Martha would team up and cover one section while Phil, Gary and I would take the rest. It had "warmed" to 14 degrees by the time we started at 8:45 but the wind and snow flakes still blew.
Birds proved to be few and far between. The little ones were hunkered down in the thickets and none of the farm houses along the way seemed to have feeders out. (We only came across two that actually had some seed in them to attract birds.) Even the farm yards didn't have a lot of birds. No starlings. No finches. No woodpeckers. Few rock pigeons. Not a lot of birds at all.
Our route took us through a couple of elk farms, an organic beef farm and several wild, wooded gorges. Still, only in one area where there was still some standing corn on one side of the road and a maintained feeder on the other side, where there was a stand of hemlock and spruce adjacent to a home with a maintained feeder, and in one spot near the bottom of one of the gorges with a open running stream beneath a thick stand of hemlocks, did we find small but active flocks of chickadees, white-breasted nuthatches and tufted titmice.
The whole time we were out, the wind blew snow from the fields and/or the snow fell and flew. By the time we gathered at the Fry Turkey Ranch for lunch and to compare notes, the snow fell more steadily on the open ridge of Route 15. When we left the restaurant an hour later, there was an accumulation of 1/2 inch on the highway. And, though not very deep, that proved dangerous to at least one driver heading south over Bloss Mountain. Emergency vehicles with lights flashing lined over half a mile of the south-bound side as the errant car sat far off the roadway facing north. Once I cleared that area--at much less than the 65 mph posted speed limit--I found the snow falling less and less as I traveled north to Mansfield until there was only a very light and very occasional flurry at the Aerie. (The winds still blew, however.)
The results for the guys today:
Number of species: 14
Red-tailed Hawk 2
Rough-legged Hawk 1
Rock Pigeon 16
Mourning Dove 2
Blue Jay 1
American Crow 32
Common Raven 3
Black-capped Chickadee 22
Tufted Titmouse 4
White-breasted Nuthatch 5
Brown Creeper 1
American Tree Sparrow 6
Dark-eyed Junco 26
Northern Cardinal 1
The ladies had essentially the same species. Only the numbers changed.
2 comments:
Not bad for such a godawful day. I was envying you doing two counts but with this weather.....hmmm.....
"..hmmm..." is right. Checking the "official" list from our tabulater, the ladies saw a red bellied woodpecker and a couple of starlings.
The rest of the birds were smarter than the watchers and stayed hunkered down in some warm, windless area where food was at hand.
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