Outdoor Adventures with Gary Lee - Vol. 309
April showers bring May flowers so I guess we will have a good batch. I picked a few daffodils with many more to come. My indoor orchid cactus popped out a few blooms this week at about the same time as normal. Last year after I put it out on the porch it bloomed through August which it had never done before. Even with the big red flowers it never attracted the hummers to it. Speaking of hummers, one came to Eight Acre Wood on the third a day earlier than last year and the earliest ever. We mark that on the calendar every year when they arrive and when they leave.
It is all about birds and waterfalls this week. I went over to the Crown Point Banding Station where we are celebrating our fifth year there. One of the oldest banding stations in the United States where Mike Peterson started in 1975 with a couple of nets because a friend found all kinds of warblers feeding in the Hawthorns there on the peninsula. The hawthorns are still growing, and the birds are still stopping in to feed on the little green caterpillars that grow in their leaves. The little birds work their way through the trees and underbrush all the way to the shore of Lake Champlain. They see all that cold water with no lift and most return back through the trees rather than fly across the cold water and they try to find a way around the water going north so we get a shot at them with our nets going and coming back. We are running eighteen nets east and west through the thickets next to open fields behind the fort, right where Mike started fifty years ago with just two. Habitat has changed some in those years with many bigger trees growing up through the hawthorns and the hawthorns are much taller, but we are still catching birds. Some like the Northern Cardinal, Tufted Titmouse, Red -Bellied Woodpecker and Carolina Wren hadn’t made their move northward yet but with global warming they are there now. Some of the birds are moving north even before we get set up, so we moved our catching dates back a week this year to get some of the warblers that have been going north earlier each year.
The Yellow Rumped Warbler, which was a bird that we caught the most for several years in the hundreds, just two weeks go to just one three years ago and the Blue Jays caught were over 350 winning that race for the most of one species. Then just last year the White Throated Sparrow was the top bird numbers wise. Many years it would be a race between the Yellow -Rumped Warbler and American Goldfinch. So far this year we have not caught an American Goldfinch, and we have over fifty Yellow- Rumped Warblers and ninety Blue Jays whose numbers might not be beaten, but there are ten and a half days to go. Sometimes there might be a fall out when weather puts birds that have been flying over and not stopping in for a snack which might put fifty or sixty birds of one species in the nets in just a few hours, it does happen.
We have caught some birds this year that we may only get every five or six years. This year they have caught and banded a Sharp-Shinned Hawk, a Golden- Winged Warbler and Northern Parula Warbler with many more warblers not even heard in the thickets yet so many more should be coming through.
The station is open from daylight to dark each day, and all are welcome to come and watch us band and it is only a short walk from the Crown Point Historic Site parking area to our banding site.
Going to and coming from the banding station I always must stop and photograph the falls along the way. Roaring Brook Falls along the Blue Ridge Road was really roaring as melting snow and rainfall made it the highest that I had ever seen. The rains put more water over Death Brook Falls opposite the Golden Beach Campsite than I’ve seen in a few years also.
More bird banding at Crown Point Banding Station, but that’s another story. See ya.
Photo above: Tom Barber with a Golden-Winged Warbler
