Nature Notes

Monday February 6 Strange weather the last few days. We've been having an unusually mild winter: early Friday morning it was 32F. But Saturday morning, when I got up to take Maddie out, it was a breezy -11F (-24C), with a wind chill of -28F (-33C) in Cambridge; the photo is a frosty window we passed by. In Boston, the low of -10F was a record. And by noon on Sunday, it was 50F (10C). Yikes! This morning, ice at the edges of Jamaica Pond. Lots of Canada geese hanging out in the water just beyond the ice. Maybe 50 or so common mergansers, many beautiful males with their white bellies, black backs, shimmery, greenish heads and bright red, thin, narrow bills. And the hoodies, which had numbered around 100 a few weeks ago, almost all gone, only about half a dozen left by the tiny island. A couple dozen ring-necked ducks gathered together in a single group. And the lone pied-billed grebe still there. On our afternoon walk around the neighborhood, I spotted these large, grey feathers st...

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 w...

December 2  We went to Mass Audubon's Drumlin Farm, in Lincoln, just west of Boston, to see their sheep, goats and pigs and to pick up some holiday cards at the gift shop.  Also saw their two foxes, snoozing in the mild weather in their pen.  After lunch in Concord, we walked in the town forest (ok, really some woods about half a mile from the center of town, hardly what qualifies to a Canadian as "forest"), along the Emerson-Thoreau Amble trail.  This little pond is about half way between its more famous neighbor, Walden Pond, and Concord. December 4 On an afternoon walk in Susan's neighborhood in Cambridge, saw these snowdrops blooming, confused by all the mild weather we've been having. December 5  In the afternoon, after picking up Maddie from her grooming appointment (she's at maximum cuteness), I took her for a walk in the Arb's conifer collection, where we heard an owl, maybe a barred owl, hooting right close to us.  I looked up into the nearby ...