25-Mar-99 Warm front

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The rain yesterday must have come with a warm front or a south wind, because all of a sudden there are birds in Edmands Park.

On Tuesday there were some birds that I couldn’t identify up in the treetops when I bicycled through the park. They were probably chickadees, but it’s not much too early for pine, palm, or black and white warblers, so this morning I picked an old pair of binoculars off the floor of the tercel and brought them along in the trunk of my bike (that’s the thing on top of the rear luggage rack with the spare tube, tools, lock, extra batteries, a few bungie cords, and sometimes lunch.) When I drive I go past Bullough’s Pond, a block long and half a block wide, catty corner across from City Hall. Recently it looked as though there were some interesting ducks in it, so I detoured a couple of blocks from my bike route to check it out. I was hoping for hooded mergs. There were none of them, but a half dozen bufflehead, little high-contrast black and white ducks, were plenty to make the side trip worthwhile. There were lots of grackles in a tree next to the pond, too. They’ve probably been around for a couple of weeks, but I hadn’t seen any so far this year. There were a couple of mockingbirds in Edmands Park, a catbird (late in May the place is full of them), and at least eight robins. It’s very reassuring to see the familiar patterns of nature behaving as you expect them to, and it’s a vote of confidence in the Newton environment when ducks on their way from Chesapeake Bay to the tundra see fit to stop off here, seven miles from Boston and next to Mass route 30. It’s not just the calendar saying it’s spring.

Kagi finally came through with my registration number for Page Spinner, the program I’m using to edit this. At last it starts up without saying, “Please Register.”