No, that’s not my backyard.
The Audubon Society and The Cornell Lab of Ornithology are sponsoring The Great Backyard Bird Count running from today through Feb 18. Anyone can participate. All you have to do is count birds over a span of at least 15 minutes and record the number of individuals you see. This helps the Audubon Society “create a real-time snapshot of where the birds are across the continent.” You don’t even have to do it in your backyard.
I walked down to the pond by the house and watched birds from 4:05-4:35 pm. Overcast, breezy, mid-60′s. Here’s what I saw:
- 3 American crows
- 3 Northern shovelers
- 1 White-winged dove
- 2 Mourning doves
- 1 Lesser scaup
- 1 Great blue heron
- 4 Black vultures
- 1 Eastern phoebe
The phoebe and the scaup are ones I had not seen before, so I get to add a few to my life list.
Tonight was one of those perfect spring-in-Austin evenings when the air is cool, so unlike how it will be in a few months. Perfect for a trip down to the pond. I need to remember these nights when it’s 90° three hours after dark. These are the days when there’s nowhere I’d rather be.
Walking along, listening to the birds stake their evening claims, I noticed this tree that seemed to be reaching towards me in a way that made me stop to make sure it was just a tree. It was, and a nice one at that.
I walked along the trail to the dam and spent a little while watching barn swallows swoop out over the water, diving along the surface to grab insects before soaring back into the sky. Swallows are probably my favorite birds; they’re such graceful flyers and when I watch them, all grace and wonder, it isn’t long before I’m with them, oblivious to the ant mound I’m sitting on.
Less arresting than the aerobatics of the swallows, some ducks American Coots paddled slowly out in the middle of the pond, too far out to get a decent shot, so this one will have to do. I’m trying to figure out what these are, but they’re too far out for my zoom. I’ll have to go back with my binoculars this weekend.
These spring nights, when the sun sets so late, the air is cool and everywhere spring green trees and wildflowers make for perfect walking, perfect evenings, perfect…
The ducks on our pond float south for the moment. When they reach the end of the pond, they fly north to ride the windblown current south again.
All day, long and lazy, this short migration is what they do.
I’d like to offer them a beer.
