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kingbird days May 25, 2002 |
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Today's Photos: Wild Turkey Lady's Slipper White Flower (Uh, I think Starflower) Other White Flower (some species of Clintonia - guess I'll have to check back in the fall to see what color the berries are) Today's Reading: This Year's Reading: Today's Bird
Sightings: Plum Island: This Year's Bird
Sightings: Today's Starting
Pitcher: |
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The office park where Starship Startup is has more bird life than I first suspected. I mean besides the huge flock of crows that hangs out at the enormous dirt pile up the hill from us that was evidently going to be yet another office building before the economy went bust, and besides the hordes of herring gulls that periodically desert Nagog Lake for that same dirt pile. Redwinged blackbirds nest there, so do goldfinches, and apparently so do Baltimore orioles (the bird kind, not the baseball kind.)
"Are these not kingbird days, - these clearer first June days, full of light, when this aerial, twittering bird flutters from willow to willow, and swings on the twigs, showing his white-edged tail?" -- Henry David Thoreau, June 2, 1854 Kingbird days indeed. But they aren't early. I checked my notebook from last year and discovered I spotted my first eastern kingbird on May 9. The year before it was May 7. However, Thoreau is right that they are way more showy in June. The refuge road was lined with out of town birders (you can tell by the NY, NJ, and Connecticut license plates) and their scopes looking for the latest reported rarity. Who needs a rarity, though? These are kingbird days! |
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Copyright © 2002, Janet I. Egan |
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No,
this isn't a kingbird. Yes, the turkey is still hanging
around near the Pines Trail. So anyway, I saw the first
eastern kingbird of the summer a couple of days ago when I
pulled into the parking lot at work. I got out of the car
exclaiming "eastern kingbird" to no one in particular.
This
morning I went in to the office for to run a quick test on
something (I later discovered the thing was unavailable to
test (sufficiently vague and mysterious for you?)) and
arrived to an empty parking lot and an intense bird drama. A
male oriole was harassing the heck out of a crow. Usually
blackbirds and orioles gang up on crows, but this guy was
all alone. And boy was he fierce. He dived and pecked at
that crow until he drove it to the ground. The crow got up
again and tried to get away, having lost all interest in
whatever it was that provoked the oriole in the first place,
and the oriole chased it into the woods. The redwinged
blackbirds never even budged.
Since
my attempt to get a little ahead of the deadline at the
starship was foiled, I zipped over to Concord (rude bridge,
shot heard 'round world, transcendentalists, and so on) to
Concord Bookshop because I remembered noticing they had
reprint editions of some of the Arthur Ransome books. Andrea
has requested the six she hasn't read yet for her birthday.
I gave her Winter Holiday for Christmas and she
developed a taste for the Swallows and Amazons series. La
Madre couldn't find them at New England Mobile Book Fair.
Anyway, I remembered seeing them on my last visit to
Concord, when I bought the Jane Langton books, so I figured
I had a chance of scoring at least some of the ones she
wants. Bingo, they've got 4 of the 6 she wants! Hooray! Hero
aunt handles another book emergency! 
With
books in hand, I headed back north and east, first to the