8/28/07 - Here are some pictures of those robins, just before they left the nest.

8/13/07 - The robins have hatched. I really should have written more about this, because every day P and I went out and checked on their progress and marvelled first at the hatching of the eggs and then at the four tiny mouths stretched skyward in anticipation of food.

One day we saw the mother picking worms out of the landscaping of the lofts across Harrison Avenue. Two minutes later we watched her drop those worms into the upturned mouths of the chicks.

They have grown so quickly. As near as I can tell, they hatched around July 27th. Today, seventeen days later, one or two appear ready to fly. Their red breasts have begun to fill in, though they're still mottled gray in a charmingly juvenile way.

It has been awesome to watch them become birds.

7/23/07 - It's been a long time since I posted here, mostly because I haven't had time to spend watching birds.

There is a robin's nest in a small tree just outside my office building. It's in a courtyard that fronts our building and adjoins the patio seating of a new and very trendy restaurant. And if you wanted to, you could just reach up and pluck the nest from the tree as you pass by. I'm hoping no one gets too curious. The female is there all the time, sitting on her eggs. I took some photos. Will try to get those up.

Walked Fresh Pond the other day with Portia and the family. Saw a cormorant perched high on a branch drying itself in the sun. Portia said she sees them up there sometimes with their wings spread wide. That must be a sight.

6/7/07 - I haven't been writing about birds much lately, which is mostly because I haven't been watching birds much lately. I saw a cormorant in the Charles the other day. I love cormorants. To me, they look like dinosaur birds, with their overhung beaks and angular, bony wings.

Also saw a sparrow pishing at a red-tailed hawk in Chinatown. I suspect the hawk had eaten the sparrow's mate or young or something. Those red-tails are assholes, and they're everywhere. We seem to be overrun by them. This is the third time I've seen one in the city, eating another bird.

I seem to have missed the spring migration entirely. My friend Portia saw a pair of Magnolia Warblers in her yard, but my feeders got no odd visitors. And I was too busy to go anywhere to see anything interesting. So I'm living on a steady diet of sparrows and starlings and doves and blue jays.

Have been thinking of starting to photograph pigeons.

5/13/07 - Just back from Vermont where I saw new birds. We went to Lake Sadawga this morning with coffee and breakfast and the sun shining over the water. I wasn't much thinking of birds, but then we got out of the car and I saw a bunch of swallows circling and diving and so I had to see what they were. A mix of bank and tree swallows as it turns out, some brush tailed, others with split tails. And I was watching them and explaining them to Owen, when I noticed a bird song, I'd never heard before, which is always very exciting because, invariably, it means a bird you've never seen before. This song was a bit like the sound computers used to make in movies before everyone had a computer and found out what computers really sound like. I walked over to the meadow beyond the boat launch, and saw three or four robin-sized birds with black faces and yellow patches at the backs of their necks. For a second I doubted what I was seeing. I have a lot of dreams in which I see new birds, and I'm always horribly disappointed in the morning when I find out it's just been a dream. So I did a double take there by the boat launch, and then tried to commit the bird's markings to memory. They were Bobolinks. I looked them up later. It's not a rare bird, at all, but I'm not much of a birder, and it was the first time I'd seen a Bobolink, and so it was thrilling for me.

And then I saw an all yellow, finch-size bird land in a tree not twenty feet away. My gut screamed Goldfinch, but there were no black markings on the body. This bird was all yellow and trilling away at a beautiful little song. A Yellow Warbler. Looked him up too. So at this point, having seen two new birds in the space of ten minutes, I was pretty chuffed. Not to mention the beautiful sun, the breeze, the honking of geese and quacking of ducks, the buzzing of Red-Winged Blackbirds and croaking of frogs.

Later, at the house, a Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher lit in the tree outside the kitchen window, a third new bird. For real.

5/7/07 - Saw a loon on the Charles today, which seemed odd to me, down by the public boathouse. Also saw a seagull chasing a red-tailed hawk over Chinatown. Very odd. My guess is that the hawk had killed the gull's mate, and the gull was trying to chase it off before it ate them too. It seemed to be working.

A pair of bluejays have, in fact, built a nest in the rhododendron outside the dining room window. Their presence seems to have pushed some of the less adventurous species away from the feeder on that side of the house. They sit sentinel in the nearby maple tree.

4/18/07 - We seem to have had a false spring that brought a neat variety of birds to the feeder, but then it turned cold again and they all disappeared. I have no idea where they might have gone. South again? Lately the main action in our yard is a pair of blue jays picking dry bits off the dogwood tree to build a nest. Brittney thinks they might be putting it deep inside a rhododendron on the other side of the yard, but I haven't been able to confirm yet.

3/15/07 - Robins in profusion. Robins everywhere. They're gonna be shit-shocked when the snow starts falling tomorrow, aren't they?

We saw a flock of common mergansers on one of the nearby lakes today, just up the river from our place. I've never seen so many in one place. They're such cool birds, swimming low to the water like loons. They have the same long, pointy beak, too.

3/11/07 - The spring migration is under way in our neighborhood. This week I've seen the usual suspects, titmice, juncoes, cardinals, nuthatches, bluejays, robins, sparrows, starlings, etc. But now woodpeckers are mixing in, and yesterday I heard the call of a red-winged blackbird, a sure sign they're taking up residence along the river, where they'll be most of the summer.

Completely non-sequitur, here's a picture of a pileated woodpecker I took in the fall in Virginia, near Mt. Vernon:

3/1/07 - F wrote to say that that the mystery song belongs to the black-capped chickadee, that it's the male, and that they don't sing like that at the feeder, but only in the tops of trees in the spring. So that's one mystery solved.

Brittney and I walked down along the river today looking for the ever elusive hooded mergansers we've missed this winter and were rewarded with the aforementioned as well as common mergansers and ring-necked ducks, a species I have never seen on our little local trickle.

Here it is:

And here is the hooded merganser:

And here is the common merganser:

Also, I formulated a guess about all the gulls clustered at the ice line on the river. My guess is that the water lapping at the edge of the ice melts it, releasing bugs that the gulls eat. Gulls are lazy, but I'm probably 100% wrong.

2/26/07 - Every morning the male cardinals are perched on the highest branches in the tallest trees singing their heads off, as if directing the traffic below. I'm seeing a lot more robins now too.

Sometimes I dream about birds, usually species I've never seen before. I'm at someone's house and all of a sudden there are all these odd birds around, and I spend the rest of the dream trying to identify them and commit them to memory, sure that I'll be able to call my friend F up on the phone and tell him all about the Golden Eagle and the Grebes and the Horned Owl. Then I wake up, and it makes me sad. When I do call F he tells me about the real birds that come to his feeders in New Jersey, turkey vultures and owls and all sorts of birds we don't get here.

It gets so sometimes I can't remember which birds I've actually seen and which I haven't.

2/22/07 - I am just tuning in to bird songs, and I find I'm pretty crappy at what's called 'ear-birding.' My neighborhood is so full of popping, sputtering sparrows and starlings, that it's tough for me to pick out the other songs. I can identify the squawk of a blue jay, the hooting of a mourning dove and the sing-songy stuff that cardinals produce, but other than that I'm fairly useless.

This morning I heard a song that I couldn't identify. I was walking the dog through the hill-top college campus near our house. It was a song I'd heard many time in Vermont, but I'd never been able to find and ID the bird that sang it, so I was especially keen to figure it out this morning. But despite all the leaves being down and the sun being up, I couldn't find the bird. The dog got tired of standing in one place looking up, so I went on. Frustrated. The song was cardinal-ish in tone, but the phrases were only two notes, one high and one low. In Vermont, I've even whistled back and forth with the originators of this song, but still have never laid eyes on them. Any guesses?

Crossing the Charles on the train later in the morning, I saw a large flock of herring gulls spread along the river's ice line, some perched on the edge of the ice, others floating just on the water side. I am curious as to why they gather there. Are there also fish that feed there? Is there insect activity? It's got to be too cold, no?

2/19/07 - Walked across a carpet of pigeons in Downtown crossing this morning. I like pigeons. I know some people hate them, call them 'winged rats,' but I like them. They're a species with widely varying plumage, some of it white with dappled gray, some of it an iridescent purple. They bob their heads charmingly, scurrying around in piles of bread crumbs, almost deferential, like so many humble janitorial servants, cleaning the streets of edible garbage, or at least everything the herring gulls leave behind for them.

Strange too that I should take a shine to pigeons, who are actually rock doves, one time denizens of high cliff roosts, who now take up residence in the craggy friezes that band the roofs of the city architecture. I have trouble stirring any sympathy for other alien species, like the European Starlings the pop and whir and drive other birds away from my feeders. I once saw a Starling fighting a squirrel, and winning.

Looked for Merganser down on the river again this weekend but saw only geese and gulls. The river was frozen so solid that there was very little free flowing water for the birds to work for food. Maybe as it warms I'll catch a few Mergansers on their way north again, stopping for a snack or resting in the protection of our slow moving creek.

Refilled my feeders last night with the boy at my side. Loaded the recently abandoned feeders in the garden with the "finch food" that will no doubt draw sparrows by the thousand. I have in my head that I need to photograph as many sparrows as I can, so I can work on being able to identify more than just the House Sparrows, so many little brown streaked gluttons whirling about the house. Still, I'd like to be able to discern one species from another.

2/13/07 - On Sunday I took the dog down by the river to look for Hooded Mergansers. We didn't find any, but we did take a picture of one of the big Mute Swans that winters down there. There seem to be two pairs of swans living on the river this year. The one I ran into was in among a big flock of Mallards and Canada Geese. When I got close to take pictures the ducks and geese retreated and the swan swam forward as if it was in charge of protecting the rest.

Here's a picture of the swan:

2/10/07 - The big new feeder in the red maple has finally made it onto the feeding routes of the local birds. Today we had white-breasted nuthatches and tufted titmice. The nuthatches are tree-clingers, as opposed to perchers. They cling to the trunk and run down, poking and pecking on their way, letting out little squeak sounds. They bounced back and forth between the hedge, the tree and the feeder. They're flight is undulating, like the flap and glide, flap and glide. There were a pair of them there today. I crouched in a corner of the yard and took this picture:

They were pretty oblivious to my presence. Downy woodpeckers are like that too. They'll let you get within ten feet or so, which is cool.

The tufted titmice were not nearly as easy-going. This was the best snap I could get, before a squadron of sparrows bombed across the lawn and took up residence in one of the rhododendrons.

2/9/07 - There are a handful of very tall and narrow fir trees spread across the hill I live on (I really should try to figure out what they are exactly), and in wintertime these tree seem to harbor, or at least serve as safe-haven for, a wide variety of birds. I have seen bluejays, sparrows, cardinals and a red-tailed hawk all perched in a giant fir at the same time. So that's weird.

This morning, while walking the dog, I passed by one of these big evergreens and heard a cardinal singing. It was bright, bright red with dark tail feathers, and it sang a loud chew-eep-eep-eep, chew-eep-eep-eep, with what sounded to me like a high note and a matching low note in it, so that it seemed to harmonize with itself. The song was very full and almost reverb-y. Other worldly.

2/8/07 -Despite the cold, the sun has opened a 200 foot long gash in the ice on the Charles so that the slick sheet of frozen gray is interrupted by a dark blue roil of water before becoming cold and gray again. Along the edges of this hole I saw a small group of sea gulls scurrying, seemingly peering down into the water, maybe for food, not really sure.

The sparrows (and a couple of Juncos) have completely emptied the tall feeder in our dogwood tree, the one filled with "finch food." This process took three days. It seems I need to load all my feeders with white safflower if I don't want them swarmed by tiny brown gluttons.

Saw a lone Robin in a tree along Tremont Street in the South End. It looked as if it was having a rough winter, its feathers slightly unkempt and sooty. I was surprised to see it there. Would have expected it to be wintering in the South. Haven't seen one in the yard at home for months, and generally we are swamped with them in spring and summer.

2/4/07 - Dark-Eyed Juncos on the big feeder this morning (white safflower seed). Also chickadees. Sparrows continue to drain the "finch food" in the dogwood tree feeder. I have noticed that when I come to the window the sparrows will retreat across the yard to the hedge, but that if there are also Juncos at that feeder, they only withdraw a few feet before returning.

Saw a cluster of sea gulls on the ice of the Charles about mid-river, down by the dam, between the Longfellow Bridge and the Museum of Science. Seemed odd for them to be there, out and exposed on the river ice.

2/3/07 - Big beautiful blue-jay on the suet feeder in the afternoon, a male cardinal hanging back until it finished. I wish blue-jays weren't such assholes, because they sure are pretty. This is as close as I'd been to one for a while (the feeder hangs about 15 feet from the dining room window). I think the cardinal has a nest in one of the tall maples across the street along the train tracks.

Big flocks of Canada Geese and Mallards down on the Mystic. Have been looking for Hooded Mergansers, but haven't seen any for about a month. There is a pair of swans there too. I'd like to imagine they're the same pair that flew over my head the day Owen was born.