Okay, for those of you who are interested in what I’ve been seeing in my nature observations, here are a couple of my “personal observation pages” from my journal; one from morning and one from evening. Enjoy!
Backyard Naturalism – Morning
Friday, April 22, 6:30-7:30 a.m.
Happy Earth Day! I couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate than getting up early to sit in my secret spot for an hour. The time went by really fast! It was a little hard to get my “owl eyes” working that early in the morning, having had my eyes closed in slumber for the last eight hours, but they started working eventually. [Note to reader: to cultivate owl eyes, stand with your gaze resting lightly on the general area ahead of you. Put your hands straight out to the sides at shoulder height and wiggle your fingers. Bring your arms in toward each other until you can see your fingers wiggling, while maintaining your gaze straight ahead. Move your arms so your wiggling fingers are at the top and bottom of your field of vision. Practice until you can move your arms farther and farther apart – you’ve got owl eyes! This is an especially cool exercise when done with a group of people standing in a circle; once everybody’s got it, you can see every single person in the circle while looking only at the person directly opposite you!]
The triplet-song bird (it’s song looks roughly like this: ^ ? ^ ? where each carrot is a triplet whose notes follow the direction of the carrot, and the last note in the series is a single high tweet) was back in its tree singing away (I hear it almost every time I go outside now). There was also a regular song from a bird in the vicinity of the walnut tree, across the creek to the south – it had a machine gun-like stuttering call that I at first thought was an alarm, but it continued regularly, and for a while was answered by a similar call to the west, somewhere in the neighbor’s yard. It would be really nice if I could see these birds so I could look them up and figure out what to call them!
The most interesting thing this morning happened in the tree to the west, where I’ve been thinking there was a bird’s nest. I noticed there was a bird sitting on a branch a couple of feet below the “nest,” which is right up at the top of the tree. It looked like the bird’s motions corresponded to the song I had been hearing, but I couldn’t tell if it was indeed that bird. Then it took flight and disappeared down and west from me, flying behind some low trees so I couldn’t follow it. The singing stopped. A moment later it started up again, right about in the area I think the bird flew to. So one mystery solved; it was the singing bird (though I still don’t know what kind of bird). This left me to wonder: if the lump in the top of the tree was indeed a nest, was it this bird’s nest? If so, why was the bird sitting on branches underneath the nest? And why did it fly away and start singing elsewhere? (I figured it wasn’t just gathering food if it was staying stationary and singing.) I was rather perplexed. But then I saw something that made me think that maybe the nest wasn’t really a nest after all. I watched a small squirrel climb up the tree up to the nest area, then climb on top of it and poke around for a while. It just kind of sat there for a few moments, poking around, and then climbed back down the tree. Would it have done that if it had been a nest? There were no bird alarms announcing the squirrel’s presence, and the bird who had been in the tree merely continued singing from its new location and did not return. So, perhaps my nest isn’t actually a nest, though I’m not sure what it is. It definitely looks like a purposely constructed something, though I couldn’t tell what, even with binoculars.
I’ve been surprised that there hasn’t been more ground activity near my secret spot, though I don’t know what I would expect, other than maybe the neighbor’s cat. I checked for tracks or other signs of animal activity down by the creek this morning, but didn’t see a thing (which, of course, doesn’t mean that there weren’t tracks, just that I couldn’t distinguish them). While I was there, though, I managed to get a pretty good view of a bird flitting through the nutweed. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find it in the bird book when I went back to look it up. L (There’s a sketch in my journal here – the bird was basically black on top, with brown sides and a light breast, and a white cap on the head.) Its call was “chitchitchitchitchit” – a chattery sort of thing in sets of five. It was sort of similar to the machine gun-like call, but more regular in terms of number of repetitions. I was bummed that I couldn’t find it in my bird book.
Another note about lack of wildlife: apparently squirrels used to abound in this yard, but just after I moved here in January, two of the trees were cut down because they were rotting (these are the two stumps on my habitat map). These trees had formed part of a network of trees that the squirrels had used as a bridge to move from yard to yard. With the removal of two trees in a row, the squirrels can no longer cross our yard. I think this is probably the main reason I have seen very few squirrels in the yard, compared with what I would have expected for springtime. In general, I’m pretty much only seeing birds and bugs, and haven’t found any wildlife trails to put on my map.
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2 comments:
Grey squirrels build nests, so maybe that's what you were watching?
Wow, really? With little baby squirrels and everything? :P I suppose it's possible, though the squirrel was brown, not grey, and I would have thought that I'd have seen much more squirrel and less bird activity in that tree if that had been an active squirrel nest. But it's possible.
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