Waiting for Halloween and juncos

I’m calling today’s photo my Halloween picture.  The colors are Halloween-ish, and the trees that are bare are like gnarled hands reaching towards the sky.  The weather is appropriately like Halloween, too. Clouds of all colors between white and gray race across the sky, accompanied by a blustery wind. It’s the kind of weather that brings the Rough-legged Hawks and Golden Eagles south.

Oddly, though, I have yet to see a junco.  For a while I blamed this on a busy schedule, the late dawn and early sunset. I don’t think that’s the entire story. I’ve been as diligent as I ever am in awaiting the arrival of these northern snowbirds, and I haven’t seen any yet.  I am hoping the ever-dropping temperature that’s a result of the latest cold front will bring them.  I don’t think I’ve ever gone into November without finding them. 

A few times, I thought perhaps I had seen one, with their familiar white outer tail feathers, but when I got closer or got a better look, either the birds had vanished or it had turned out to be a trick of the light.  So I remain junco-less here on the mountain for today.  I still have one more day to find them before Halloween arrives and October ends.

Gray and white

Tufted titmouse

 Snow certainly always brings birds to my feeders. And during snows the birds tend not to grab a seed and then disappear for hours. They arrive and stay for hours, hopping into a tree only long enough to eat their precious seed or wait for an opening before diving into the feeders again.

Yesterday’s snow was no exception, so I will show you two of the regular visitors to my feeders. The first is a tufted titmouse, a tiny little bird that grabs a seed and then lights on a nearby twig to eat it. When gone, it immediately returns to the feeders for a second seed and then repeats the process. I’ve always thought they must use nearly as many calories as they get from their single seed in their flights back and forth.

My second gray bird today is the dark-eyed junco, a winter-only resident from the north, who seems to view this part of the world the way people around here do a winter in Florida. Pennsylvania is south to this little bird.


Dark-eyed junco



Both the junco and the titmice are regular winter visitors to my feeders, and both are as common as chickens during winter. I still like to see them.

Yesterday I got about 6” of snow, a good amount here for this time of year. The snow is already melting. In fact, late yesterday afternoon the snow was melting and falling at the same time with the temperature at 33-34. I also found it odd to hear robins singing during the falling snow, with twittering juncos providing back-up vocals. I don’t get that one every day. Not only was the idea of snow and robins a rarity, so was the simultaneous presence of both the summer and the winter residents. March 2013 is proving to be unusual in several respects. It certainly makes me wonder what’s going to be ahead in April.

Returning to normal



Ridge Rd., Monaghan Twp., York County, Pennsylvania

In all the excitement over Hurricane Sandy, I forgot to mention that juncos have arrived in big numbers. The winter residents are now foraging all over Roundtop Mtn. and have even braved my feeders a time or two. It’s good to see them again.

One odd thing about the hurricane is that my feeder birds never went into the kind of feeding frenzy I see ahead of winter storms. Despite producing the lowest barometric pressure ever seen in the lower 48 states, the birds didn’t feed like crazy just ahead of or after the storm. The regular crew was here as they always are, but none of them fed with any greater urgency than usual, at least not to my eye.

It was really too dark this dark and dreary morning for a photo, but when I saw a momentary gleam of reddish sunlight touch the tops of the range to my north, I knew I had to try anyway. The reddish color didn’t last very long and within moments everything was gray again. Tomorrow might be the first day this area sees a bit of sun. I think everyone is more than ready for that.

Gray sky, yellow apples

At the moment I am in “waiting on the ice storm” mode. Ice storm is one of nature’s phenomenon that I would be happy to do without. Overnight, a fair amount of sleet fell, and perhaps a little snow, but the ice that is to come will be here sometime after dark today.

I have spent a good bit of my time over the past 24 hours trying to get ready for the storm. Specifically, I am readying the cabin to be without electricity for a while, since that seems to be the usual result of an ice storm. For me, readying for that event means I make sure I have plenty of water available for me and the critters. I prefer to draw water ahead of time rather than break into my sealed, emergency water.

The night before the storm I check my own food supplies and make sure I have enough food for the animals, too. I make sure the chickens are as far under the cabin as they can go and cover up the part of the pen that doesn’t fit. I charge up the cell phone. I fill up the car with gas, take a shower and wash my hair. Who knows how long it will be before power is restored if and when it goes out? In a storm as widespread as this one will be, power restoration to my cabin on the mountain is not going to be anyone’s highest priority.

So now all of that is accomplished, and it’s a matter of settling in and hoping for the best. At my feeders today, the action has been nonstop. I’ve seen more of everything than I knew visited my feeders. That pair of cardinals? It turns out there are three pairs of them, plus an extra female. The shy mourning dove? Four of them. And so on. I’ve given up trying to count juncos. There are too many of them and they are never all sitting still at the same time. It looks like a scene from Hitchcock’s “The Birds” on my back deck right now.

I can’t really see the sky anymore. It’s foggy here, or I am in the middle of a cloud. The forest grays out before I can see the sky or the mountain to the west or even my neighbor’s house. The icicles hang from the eaves, and the only color is the yellow of the apples at the bird feeder that were too far gone for me to eat.

For the moment, there’s no ice. I guess I’ll have to take that as a good thing.

Golden leaves

I'll be surprised if the lovely fall colors survive the rain that's falling now and will continue to fall tomorrow. Autumn has almost certainly been this golden before, but none of those falls are as immediate as what I see in front of me around the cabin right now. In other words, what happened in years past doesn't count for nearly as much as what's happening now.

The only downside to the beauty is that I get to enjoy it so little. With the ever-shortening hours of daylight, I now leave the cabin before it is fully daylight, and when I get home, daylight is already disappearing quickly. After Saturday, when we change the clocks, I will get back a little of the morning brightness, though that comes at the expense of the evening. Still, for a few weeks at least, I will end up with a bit more daylight overall, even if it is all pushed to the mornings. Your own mileage may vary, of course. As for me, I will be glad that I don't have to wake the chickens up to feed them in the mornings.

I am also hoping I will end up seeing a few more birds after the time change. That usually does happen. Right now, the birds are both not up yet and already settling down to roost during the hours I am at the cabin. I miss seeing them.

I think I forgot to mention that I saw the first dark-eyed junco of the season on October 11, which is a normal arrival time. That same day and not far from the junco I saw the first white-throated sparrow, which is a week or two earlier than my typical first sighting for them. My feeders are up but not over-used just yet. The local birds seem to be finding plenty of natural food and only make a few appearances at the feeders. That will change shortly. Once the leaves fall in earnest, my feeders will start to empy quickly.

Overnight...

Fall is happening fast! On Saturday morning I was thinking that the autumn color change hadn’t moved very much over the past few days. Then on Sunday morning everything looked different, a lot different. A couple of cool nights moved the color change along quickly. Literally overnight the color change was dramatically further along. Here on the mountain, the peak of the color change is likely still a full week away, but today I don’t think it will be much further past that.

Fall is moving in other ways, too. This weekend I saw the first dark-eyed junco of the new season and the first white-throated sparrow. For a few moments I had a junco and a robin in the same little tree, giving me momentary hope that I might photograph the two together. Alas, that was not to be. Ruby-crowned kinglets are also moving through, and over the weekend I didn’t find any chipping sparrows, though I was seeing them by the dozens just a day or so before.

Overnight temperatures are now dropping into the lower 40’s, but the days still often reach 60 for about 90 seconds in the late afternoon before dropping again. The chill of mid-fall is here, and I’m enjoying the cooler temperatures. It’s odd, but fall this year seems to be moving more quickly than usual. Perhaps it’s because the summer wasn’t a hot one, so the temperatures didn’t have as far to fall as normal. I’m suddenly feeling the rush to do my outdoor fall chores and get the cabin and the chickens ready for winter. The shortening hours of daylight aren’t helping me with my chores. I always think I will get more done than I actually accomplish. I suppose it’s like this every year, though I’m suddenly feeling more rushed than I was just a week or so ago.

Easing towards winter

The wind that has dominated here is finally easing. Yesterday was the most intense—45-55 mph winds for much of the day. I lost power at the cabin several times, each time briefly. I can’t drive up the driveway and down the lane without needing to stop at least once or twice to remove a branch too large or too gnarly to drive over.

More juncos have arrived, though still not huge numbers of them. That might well change in the next few days. Once this nor’easter clears, those little snowbirds may decide they’d better clear out of Canada and head south while the gettin’ is still good.. The Canadian robins have also arrived. When I was a youngster, these were called "woods robins." These birds are a bit larger and browner than the birds that summer here (and which left about a month ago). Down here the Canadian robins tend to stay in small flocks and often stay throughout the winter, especially if the winter tends to the mild side. They don’t hang out in fields and yards like the summer robins. They prefer woods and sometimes abandoned fields. We used to think that "woods robins" were simply summer birds that didn’t migrate, but over the years research has shown they are really Canadian robins who have migrated, and after a trip of 1000 miles or so, they have flown south.

In general, though, I see few of the forest’s animals in weather like this. They are as hunkered down as I am, waiting for the raging weather to abate. The snow that fell in the Poconos missed me. I was on the southwest edge of the storm and so got the worst of the wind instead.

It’s a bit early in the season to have what is essentially a winter storm of such strength. This year will be the first year in what seems like forever to me where there will be no El Nino or La Nina effect to warm the winter. That doesn’t hurt my feelings at all, though I reserve the right to change my tune if I’m snowed in for longer than a week.

Wildlife - urban and otherwise

I had barely sat down at the computer at work this morning when the resident red-tailed hawk flew low in front of my office window and then perched on the road light over Rte. 283, where he (a small bird) sat placidly as traffic zoomed by for a good 10 minutes.

I have seen this bird regularly in the area since my office moved here in August. Usually, he’s across the road in the wooded area behind the restaurant and the rent-a-car place. This is the first time I’ve seen him on this side of the highway, and the first time I’ve seen him perched on a light pole. I suspect that a fluttering package of plastic on the median strip is what attracted him. When I first saw the bundle, I thought it was a dead bird, with feathers blowing as the trucks, etc. pass. As I looked closer, I realized it was only loosely wrapped, thin plastic wrap, with the torn edges flapping in the traffic breeze.

On Saturday, I saw the first dark-eyed juncos of the season at Roundtop. As it's the end of October now, it's likely a few of the birds have been here for a week or more, if they headed south at their usual time, and I just hadn't seen them yet. This was a flock of 20+ birds.

With the time change over the weekend, I will now be able to walk Dog and Baby Dog, for a few days at least, without the headlamp. I'm still out before sunup, but the eastern sky glows orange and provides enough light for the walk. If I'm lucky, the leaves will fall before too long, so I'll have open sky to walk under, even if I don't have daylight.