(Host)
While watching the birds at his backyard feeder this year, commentator
Tom Slayton has been thinking about the pleasures of birding in the
wintertime.
(Slayton) A flock of about 40 robins just flew
through my backyard and has congregated under a big white pine, where
they’re poking around in the exposed brown grass for whatever they can
find to eat.
It seems a little odd to see them at this time of
year, silhouetted against the white snow. But this mild winter has
allowed these migratory birds to stick around, and people are seeing big
flocks of them all over the state.
But that’s not all. Just a
few days ago, a huge flock of 450 waxwings – the familiar cedar waxwings
and the more exotic Bohemian waxwings – scoured the streets of
Montpelier, descending here and there into fruit trees to glean the
berries, seeds, and crabapples hanging there.
And last week, I
got a good look at a northern shrike – a predatory songbird that
migrates south each winter from its far-northern breeding grounds near
the open tundra, and spends the months of deep winter in Vermont and
other parts of the northern U.S. and southern Canada. It was a handsome
bird – a natty grey and white with a black mask and tail.
And as shrikes habitually do, it sat in the tip-top of a tree, scanning the fields below it for food. It was a thrill to see.
Still,
I hope no shrike eats the brown creeper that came to my feeder a few
mornings ago, along with the usual crowd of finches and woodpeckers. It
was a lovely, shy little bird.
The fact is that while most
common songbirds migrate south of Vermont for the winter, our part of
the world is "south" for several birds of the far north. Snow buntings,
common redpolls, Bohemian waxwings, and rough-legged hawks, among
others, regularly move into our region in the winter months.
Consequently,
winter can be a pretty exciting time to look for birds. You won’t see
as many different species as in spring, but you’ll almost certainly see a
few birds that are unusual – and some that are outright rarities.
For
example, recent Vermont sightings have included a varied thrush in
Waitsfield, a flock of red crossbills in Woodstock, a redhead duck in
Windsor, and more than 3,400 other wild ducks – mainly goldeneyes, and
greater and lesser scaup – in Lake Champlain. Earlier this winter, snowy
owls were being seen regularly – they’re a large, spectacularly white
owl that looks as though it just escaped from the Adventures of Harry
Potter. Where they’ve actually "escaped" from, like the shrikes and many
other birds, is the far north – near the Arctic Circle.
What
all these winter birds tell us is that the world of nature is connected –
that we are not separate from either the Arctic north, or the taiga or
the tundra where these birds live most of the year.
"The poetry
of earth is never dead," wrote the poet John Keats almost 200 years ago.
Watching the birds of winter, I know exactly what he meant.