I walked into Fox park at around 6:25am.  I did not leave until 7:35am.

Forgive this post for being entirely about birds.  There are tracks (the melting prints from happy-go-lucky dogs, mostly), there are trees (haven’t changed much since that time I covered the trees on my route), there are plants (budding beechs for the most part) and there are….  Birds!  Today is the first day of spring (albeit for the third time), and the forest was singing to celebrate.  Without further and in no order besides memory:

Crows:  Making merry and causing raucous, the crows were gurgling and grunting around with the blue jays, who actually did not have a real reason to cause tomfoolery, but did so anyway.

Blue jays:  Yelping about with cheer and a general noisiness, the blue jays are no longer saving their breath for owls and hawks.  I watched them zoom around, babbling at the top of their lungs, with absolutely zero objective concern for getting eaten, or whatever they usually are concerned about.

Raven:  At least one.  A lower burp of a sound, these may have been causing some mischief with the crows.

Mockingbird:  This one mockingbird yodels atop its thicket as I enter Fox Park.  I have observed it only speaks when people are around, making it just another attention getter.  This one has less of a vocabulary than the one near Allwell at PSU, singing “robin” and “cardinal” instead of “barn owl” and “wood pewee”- the latter two I heave heard in the same breath from the other mocking bird.

Chickadee:  DEEEE – doo!  These chickadees plan to make babies, with a call like that.

Titmouse:  PETER PETER PETER!  Peter?  Pete?  The local titmice say this a lot.  This seems to be a dialectical decision- even though all titmice are programmed with between three and four real songs, the boston titmice choose to say whaah, whaah, whaah! more than these ones do.

Robin:  So many everywhere, they are in with all stops out.  They have a truly fabulous thrush song (indeed, they are a “true thrush”- unlike the euro-asian ones, who just occupy a subfamily of old-world chats… Don’t even worry about the australian or japanese ones, it just gets worse).   The song is parsed in a almost questioning fashion, with clear whistles and swooping notes.   Easy to tune out during a walk in the woods, but amazing to really listen to.

Downy woodpecker:  Found a few at the bend in the trail closest to the houses, after exiting the wolf pine clearing.  They whinny when the call, as opposed to the single, dull “chek” of the hairy woodpecker, which occupies the same pitch.

Hairy woody pair:  Chek, Chek!  I found two hairy woodpeckers flying around upon entering the park looking for bugs.

Nuthatch:  These were hopping around the area the hairy woodpeckers were.  They like to be with the titmice and other woodpeckers.  White breasted ones in these parts, but the red breasted could still show up.  They both “honk” or ‘toot”, but the red breasted ones sound really tinny compared to the white breasted.

flotilla of golden crowned kinglets:  Yay! the fuzz-covered golf balls are at it again, with their unique, rolly-polly approach to the world.  The like to hop up a coniferous tree (the love hemlocks),  then valiantly leap into the air, but without the wings in gear.  They then stick their wings out to slow their descent, thus causing them to tumble through the air until daintily alighting on the branch below.  This way they can look cool and catch a flying bug on occasion.  This may or may not actually work out for them- they also glean insects like other passerines- but it certainly keeps they busy and happy.  They are marginally larger than an adult ruby throated hummingbird, though significantly more puffy.  They are also rather unintelligent, and get so absorbed in tumbling about in the trees approaching them is easy- requiring nothing more than knowing where they are.

I trundled into Fox Park at around 7:15 pm on 4/7/17.   The sky was overcast (as it has been for the last few days), kind of rainy/above freezing, and provided just enough evening light to let me do a proper sit spot.

There were some fantastic tracks.  I did not take any pictures, but I am fairly sure there are some extremely large dogs wandering these parts.  One issue I have been having with some of the medium sized tracks is the position of the toes.  I know there simply are not 4 bobcats and 4 catamounts wandering around my sit spot….   But these dog tracks seem to sometimes show very forward toes, which is is indicative of a cat.  Alas.

another problem I became acutely aware of is the highway.  On my way up the hill to my wolf pine, I began hearing all sorts of crazy sounds….   Animal?  Owl?  Alien?  Upon getting to the pine however, it became evident to purrs and chirps were indeed car sounds from the interstate.   🙁

I did not hear much in the way of singing, but over the last day or two, the song sparrows, cardinals, titmice, and robins have definitely been singing more than before.

To be continued…

-Jess

It was very dark when I left the parking lot variant of my sit spot, and still it still is.  Was it worth it?  Maybe.

I entered the parking lot around 4:35am this morning.  After spending a while just listening to the sounds of “nature”, finishing my coffee and trying to not make sounds into what they weren’t, I gave in and decided to play some screech owl trills.  Unfortunately, an issue I have not yet addressed was beginning to get in my way for real: the highway.

Even when I play calls from my phone, I could tell the white noise from the interstate not far away was cancelling the sonorous sounds of my owls.  That part isn’t a big deal, but I know my inferior human hearing will  struggle to pick out a chatting owl even within my part of Fox Park.  The frequencies are just too similar, often exhibiting a similar timbre.  This means a sound carrying more energy (lower frequency rumbles and what not) will not only mask the weaker and more refined owl toots and hoots, but could “phase cancel” them out altogether.  Phase cancellation is obviously not a standard concern of birders, but I happened to know from recording sounds in this frequency range (lower end of a medium grand piano and acoustic guitar for example) achieving a mini “Bose noise cancellation” is quite easy.  All it takes is two sounds going the opposite direction and/or of similar magnitude or at least frequency (a  distant truck with a Jake brake and closer GHO for example and whoops! there goes the owl hoot.

I mention all this because in the ~50 minutes waffled around in the parking lot (10 degrees below freezing mind you), during which I played screech, saw-whet, and GHO, I heard lots of mumbles and whoos and blops…   …yet I can only take one seriously.  One toot, that’s all.

I had played screech, then saw-whet, and screech once more at this point.  The toot sounded much lower than a saw-whet toot, and there was just one.  It was not dainty, and had a nice conviction and resonance.  I have never been  compelled to describe an automobile this way, so I can say with good faith this was an owl.

But was it Barred or GHO?  Both make single toots in this way sometimes.  Indeed, I’ve seen it done on trips where the either owl may want to just put a small idea out there, a pleasantry maybe to the owl it listened to from a birders phone, or perhaps just to test the waters on who could call back.  For whatever reason, more than half of my hearing/visual owl encounters involved a single toot instead of a full blown dissertation of whoos and haws.

So, I will tentatively stick with the current idea this is a GHO, because my other evidence seems to support this.  As I played some GHO after the toot, I quite honestly could not listen between the cars and trucks from, say, half a mile away.   Thus, while the tooting owl was not in spitting distance of my mini encampment on a bit of ice in the parking lot, it could easily been in Fox Park or an adjacent landowner’s pine tree and I would never have known.

The saga continues…

-Jess

I slipped and slid my way into Fox park Saturday, 4/1/17 at about 4pm.  About 7 inches of snow had appeared on the ground over the last 24 hours, which (for the second time) definitely stifled and spring-like activities for the critters and what not.  Yet, the still powder-like snow was melting already.  This stuff hadn’t really had time to settle and compact, it just came down from the sky just below freezing, then bobbed above freezing at about noon and rained.  This made for perfect postholing snow.  Indeed, I saw some dogs who took it hard- leaving postholes almost 3 feet deep.

I heard some confused titmice and a lonely Hairy woodpecker over (almost) the whole time out, though a the crow crew started up yakking away just as I left.  I had really come for the tracks in the snow, but because of the rain and rapidly melting cover, I could only make out big dogs.

“Big Dog”

Here we have one of these big dogs.  things to note:

• triangle shaped claws
• very symmetrical
• creates a distinct circle-oval shape
• Can easily be broken into left, right, two leading toes and rear pad quadrants

These traits are interesting, though they get way cooler and silly when we look at the crazy, unique, and very artistically rendered “black panther” prints I found in the PSU dining hall:

I realize this is the worst iPhone-picture-while-scooping-ice-cream example, but…

…I do not think these prints are for a black panther.  I do not think they are for a dog.  These are the one of a kind “melanistic dogamount” prints!

Here we have the local catamount (cougar) vs the dog (similar to the big dog I found).

Remember, the PSU mascot is a melanistic jaguar named “Pemi”.   Jaguar prints are anatomically very similar to the puma/cougar version that is theoretically in new england, if only on occasion.   Indeed, these “uber crazy level” cats have an (average) range of about 300 square miles.   Which is 192,000 acres, if you weren’t so hot on math.  🙂

This range makes tracking a single cougar extremely difficult, and as far as I can tell, nobody has been particularly successful- thus, finding photos of actual paw prints is really, really hard, and makes the far larger melanistic jaguar prints impossible to find.  Below is a cougar paw from captivity.

{{Information |Description= {{en | paw of cougar (”Puma concolor”)}} |Source=From: No Place for Predators? Gross L PLoS Biology Vol. 6, No. 2, e40 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060040 [http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=slideshow&type=fig

Good:

• Toes are mostly in front of the pad.  This is indicative of a cat.
• Rear pad is wide, (almost) a cat trait in this example

Bad:

• Rear pad is too oval shaped.  Real cougars and jaguars have deep scallops creating three distinct parts of the pad
• THE NON-RETRACTABLE CLAWS ARE TRIANGLE SHAPED, LIKE A DOG’S CLAWS!!!

All cats have retractable, grappling-hook shaped claws.  These are rarely out and about when walking, as they are really best for catching one’s balance and slicing stuff to shreds.  They are usually seen as dots with a groove toward the toe on a paw print.  Dog claws on the other hand are designed to be a permanent part of the foot, and are shaped like a wider “V” to generally help with transport.  These are what we see, making this paw print completely and unforgivably wrong.

That concludes today’s sit spot observation.

-Jess

I entered the Fox Park parking lot at approximately 5:30, about an hour before sunrise.  32 degrees, partly cloudy, and very dark and supremely quiet.

I didn’t have to wait 5 minutes after settling into a comfortable standing position to hear the first of 2 fat clues about my  owl buddy at Fox park.  Three sonorous “whoos” reverberated across the surrounding fields and white pine trees, followed by some muffled humming and burbling over the drone from the highway about half a mile away.  What luck!  The thing to know about this scenario however is these whoos were higher pitched than “ye average” great horned owl, BUT were far from the “hawws” and other gurgles the barred owls make.

The second clue about this sound (and I heard it one more about 10 minutes later) is how a classmate recently described exactly what I heard today to me.  “It was saying Whoo!  but it was started going up, then down to some quieter sounds.”  This was heard not far from Fox Park, near Langdon Woods.  That forest has a great field used for light football training by humans, and critter hunting by birds of prey no doubt.  This is well within an average great horned owls “zone”- in fact, owls have been seen occupying a 25 mile radius of space as a residence.   That means no other GHOs are allowed to live there.  Quite territorial, and have interesting family/land relationship patterns because of the vast zones required for a proper turf.   This is almost entirely the reason the GHO is both widespread and thus “common” and essentially impossible to find, making it a treat to locate.

So, I know this pattern is very likely a GHO after two pairs of ears have heard it and agree.   So…

…Success!

As usual, after the second “whoo” and maybe 10 minutes of standing in the parking lot a sole cardinal started singing.  Then, one by one, the local crows woke up and decided the calling owl was a significant problem (they decide this every day) and started up with the tomfoolery we can expect from them.   On that laural, I was sure the owl would be silent to give the crows a sporting chance at hide and seek, so I left, after a bit more than 30 minutes in the parking lot.

-Jess

I walked into Fox park Sunday afternoon, 3/26/17, after “spring” break.  Please note, however, neither the suburbs of Boston or Fox Park have turned the ignition on the spring thing.   So, I will not provide pictures today because the view is, for both flora and fauna alike, the same as the last time I took pictures.

The weather was warmer than freezing, but there is evidence of chilly rain and wind slowly wearing away at the snow.  the Beech leaves are also having a hard time staying attached this long into the cold season.  they are rustling and falling off both because the the weather but also because we really cannot have too much longer before our warblers come through, song birds start really singing, buds and leaves ome out, etc, etc.

Let us see where the warblers are today, ehh?

Here we have the most up to date info on the Palm warblers.  If you are not used to the eBird species range map, you should click the link and get used to it.  This is the most efficient way to find where species are, assuming there are people around the areas in question to report sightings.  Here, I narrowed the time frame to this year and this month.  We can see the Palm warbler crew is still in Florida for the most part.  This is where many Palm warblers go when they go south, the farthest ones only ferrying over the Cuba.  Up the coast they go, but the leaders of the pack are not really in New England yet.

Palm warblers are an early warbler in my experience around here.  They often will be showing up as the buds on the trees begin to get serious about leaves.  They simply don’t cross the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean, unlike many of their peers.

Another early bird is the pine warbler.  They don’t really migrate much, but in the spring they wander up from the south, making for regular sightings in MA in NH.

But what about the real warbler crew?   Blackburnians!  Chestnut sided!  Well, as you can see below, they are all still singing songs in portuguese and spanish, as far south as Ecuador (for the blackburnians) right now.

Remarkable!  Both of those birds will fly between 2,000 and 3,000+ miles, just to visit us in NH!  Special indeed.

Despite the snow, rain, and cold winds at my sit spot, the anticipation for spring is getting into gear.

-Jess