January 2023

January 1 Walking around the pond this afternoon we saw maybe a hundred hooded mergansers, swimming and diving together in one group. Wonderful to see so many all at once.

January 4 Hoodies still at the pond, dispersed into several groups of ten to twenty; one group had a single female common merganser in its midst.  Further along, two female common mergansers diving together.

January 7  This afternoon Susan and I went for a walk at Habitat, an Audubon sanctuary in Belmont, right next to Cambridge. On our way back to the visitor center, as the sun was getting lower in the sky, we heard an owl hooting and headed towards it. As we got close, a family pointed it out to us: a great horned owl, perched high up on a pine branch, conveniently right by the trail.  We could hear a second one, too, the pair hooting back and forth, duetting; Susan soon found it in a nearby tree.  Over the next few minutes several other birders stopped by, everyone totally delighted with the pair of them.

According to the Cornell All About Birds website, "Mated pairs are monogamous and defend their territories with vigorous hooting, especially in the winter before egg-laying". Great horned owls mate and nest early in the season, laying their eggs anytime from mid-February through March.  They typically either takeover an old stick nest from another species, often red-tailed hawks, or occupy a cavity in a tree. One year, when we lived in the house on Eastland Road, Jeannie and I watched a pair of nesting great horned owls and their owlets at the Forest Hills Cemetery.  The owlets are spectacularly cute - like the ookpiks of the 1970s; you can see some images here.

Susan got a couple of photos with her iPhone.

 

And, coincidentally, this morning my friend Alison sent this photo of owl sculptures she saw in Soria, Spain today.

January 10 Walked along the Hemlock Hill and conifer paths in the Arb around 8:30 this morning, wondering if I might hear owls there.  No owls, but I did spot this owl nesting platform the Arb has installed against the trunk of one of the pines, high up.  I didn't see any sticks overhanging it, so they may not nest there, but it was encouraging to see it anyway.

January 11 For a change, we went to Mass Audubon's Broadmoor sanctuary in Natick today.  Spottted bluebirds right away, perched on nesting boxes in the meadow by the parking lot. Males with their electric blue backs and wings and fainter peach belly. Females more muted. So great to see them in the winter! Most migrate but a few stay over; Boston is at the very northern limit of their year-round range. In fact, Cornell's All About Birds bluebird distribution map, outdated by climate change, shows them wintering in Cape Cod and around Buzzards Bay, but no further north and not in Boston.

After our encounter with the great horned owls at Habitat, we asked one of the staff if there were any at Broadmoor. He said sometimes people hear and see them around the path that runs along the Charles River; this time of year they start hooting at about 3pm. We headed over there, but didn't hear or see them.

Walking along the boardwalk by the marsh, there were lots of strange, snake-like rooty things floating on the water. When we got back to the visitor center they guy at the reception desk explained that they're the rhizome roots of water lilies.  Most years, they remain anchored at the bottom of the marsh, but for some reason, after last summer's drought, they've dislodged and floated to the surface.

The marsh at Broadmoor.

The snaky water lily rhizomes.

 

A bit further along, we saw a tree recently felled by a beaver. One of the sanctuary staff there thought it had been felled in the last few days.

The beaver lodge, across from the stump.

January 12 A light dusting of snow last night, decorating these holly leaves and berries.

January 13 And this morning, it's raining and 56F (13C).  Walking Maddie early at the pond, captured this image.

Later on, looking out the kitchen sliding doors into the back yard, I saw a brown something moving around by the ornamental grasses, maybe a cat. Stepping out onto the porch, I realized it was a smallish hawk, standing on a patch of scattered grey on the ground; spotting me, it took off almost instantly. Feathers, maybe from a junco.  I was surprised that the only thing remaining were the feathers: no bones, no guts, no meat, nothing but the feathers. How did the hawk remove the feathers and leave no trace of anything else? I'm sure Maddie will be investigating next time she's snuffling around the yard.

Went over to the Arb a little after 3 to look for owls.  Just as I arrived, a hawk screeching, flying just over the treetops at the Walter Street gate. Walked up Hemlock Hill and around to Jeannie's tree, a Canadian hemlock (Tsuga canadensis 2872-98-A), next to the spot where we got married in 2004.  After she died, Ned Friedman, the Director of the Arb, offered to memorialize one of the trees for Jeannie; this is the one I chose. The Arb embossed a copper plate, like those used to identify each tree, with these words and attached it to the tree:

In memory of Jeannie Hess who shared her love of nature with her beloved wife, Lorna Gibson. Here, where they were married, they basked in the glow of their good fortune to be together and of the beauty of this place.

 

 

Bussey brook, next to the hemlock.

Went across Bussey Brook, up the main road and along the conifer path where a red-tailed hawk landed in a tree on my way into the conifers. Further along, someone had constructed a wooden "gate" with little yellow bags tied to it; it looked like an art installation, perhaps with memorial notes in the bags.

Before I left, I thought I'd walk up the road to the Hemlock Hill path one more time to listen for hooting. And there it was: hooting coming from up in the conifers, across Bussey Brook. Walking towards the hooting, I ran into a couple of others looking for the owls; after a few minutes we found a pair, I think great-horned owls, high up among dense branches.  Not easy to see, but there they were, hooting away.  I took a couple of videos, just to capture the audio of them hooting.

January 16  A day of wet snow, Maddie in her booties, looking like a lamb.

January 22 Walking around Fresh Pond in Cambridge, lots of interesting birds: a few hooded mergansers and buffleheads right near the parking lot. A common loon across the pond; one person we ran into said she had seen four of them.  Further around, we spotted a couple of common mergansers parked in the middle of the pond. On one edge, ring-necked ducks, redheads and ruddy ducks, all gathered together. And a single horned grebe right at the edge of the pond on the way back to the car, really great to see as they're not that common around here.

January 24 A little snow yesterday, a couple of inches, sunny today, so we went to the Habitat sanctuary in Belmont for a walk.  Not far along, heard an owl hooting, a little surprising in the middle of the day.

Lots of tall, straight pines, lovely in the snow. In the 1600s the British Royal Navy claimed Eastern White Pines in colonial New England for masts for their ships, as the forests of England no longer had sufficient tall straight trees.

January 26  After the snow a few days ago, this morning already warmed up, 53F (12C).  Walked along the Emerald Necklace to Route 9, past Jamaica Pond, Ward's Pond and Leverett Pond.  Great birding morning.  At Jamaica Pond, saw about ten common mergansers swimming near the little island and a few more mixed in with a group of about twenty hoodies and a few redheads in the little bay by the Chestnut Street traffic light.  As I got closer to them, a juvenile bald eagle, huge wingspan, mottled white on the undersides of its wings, swooped down in their midst, talons out, hoodies diving frantically.  The eagle missed, flew upwards and then swooped down a second time, hoodies diving, more splashing. The eagle missed again and flew up into a tree where it perched for a few minutes before flying off.  There are some nice photos of the mottling in immatures at the link (under "Identification"); they don't get their characteristic white head and tail until they're in their fourth or fifth year. A couple walking by at the same time saw it, too, and were just as awed and delighted as me.

At the ball field just south of Leverett Pond, where I followed a red-tailed hawk nest last spring, I saw a red-tail circling over the trees near the nest. They won't start nesting for a couple of months yet (last year, the first time I saw one of the hawks on the nest was March 14), but I'll be keeping my eye out for them.

Just Canada geese at Leverett Pond, but on the way back, through the woods, I heard several blue jays screaming. A woman was watching them, looking to see if there was a hawk nearby that they were trying to deter.  And there was - a Cooper's hawk, perched on a branch, ignoring the jays. I lent the woman my binoculars and she was very tickled - said she had been hoping that someone would come by with binoculars she could use.

Walking back around the other side of Jamaica Pond, saw a single pied-billed grebe close to the pond's edge, just floating, easy to get a good look. I always like seeing them - they're small and always look perky to me.  Breeding birds have a vertical black stripe on their grey bills; I assume this is where the name "pied-billed" comes from.  They also have cool, deeply lobed webbing on their feet, which they open to paddle forward and close to reduce drag as they bring their foot forward for the next stroke again.  And the Cornell website says, in the identification section, that they can adjust their buoyancy so that just the upper half of their head floats above the waterline; there's a photo of this on the Cornell website.  Apparently, they do this by squeezing air out of their feathers and internal air sacs (that are part of their respiratory system).

Finally, this afternoon on my walk with Maddie, we saw this dying snowman.

January 27  One of the things I've been helping Mass Audubon with is special bird-related events for the Board of Directors, Council and major donors. Today, we visited the ornithology collection at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology; if you've seen my woodpecker video, Built to Peck, the first few segments were filmed there.  The collection is amazing, the fifth largest in the world, with about 80% of the roughly 10,000 species of birds in the world.  Some of the specimens have a remarkable story behind them.  They have the first specimen of Lewis' woodpecker ever collected, on the Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-06).  George Washington's golden pheasants, given to him by the Marquis de La Fayette in 1786. A harpy eagle with talons larger than the claws of a grizzly bear.  Ivory-billed woodpeckers, now extinct.  There are some photos in this NY Times article.

To give people a sense of how the collection is used in modern research, I gave a short talk one of my projects. Namaqua sandgrouse live and nest in the desert in southern Africa.  The adults fly to watering holes to drink, but the chicks can't fly and can't get to the watering hole.  The adult males wade into the water, fluff up their belly feathers, which are able to hold water, and then fly back to the nest where the chicks run over to them and poke their bills into the belly feathers to drink; this BBC David Attenborough video shows it all. We've been looking at the microscopic features of the feathers that give rise to their water holding ability, using specimens from the MCZ.

January 29 Another mild day, 50F.  Running an errand in Jamaica Plain, I spotted these snowdrops blooming in scruffy little bit of soil next to the parking lot.