Andrew Acomb

At work, I was telling someone about the subtle differences between the hairy woodpecker, the downy woodpecker, and the yellow-bellied sapsucker. It reminded me of this picture Jennifer took a couple of years ago of me holding a young hairy woodpecker. It flew into the sliding glass door on our back porch. I picked it up to make sure it was still alive. Luckily, it was just stunned. It sat in my hands for quite awhile before it flew away.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has a great article on “How to Avoid Window Collisions“. We went with the sticker method. Since then, there have only been a handful of birds hitting the door.

It has been unseasonably warm here. All the snow is now gone. Since it was so nice, I wandered around outside. I was in the backyard with literally dozens of birds flying from the feeders to the trees and back again. If your quiet, you can here them pound and crack open their seeds and peanuts in the trees above. I guess the warmer temperatures brought more of them out. Here, you see a Black-capped Chickadee waiting patiently for another turn at one of the feeders.

It took awhile, but the snow finally arrived shortly after Christmas. I found some bird tracks in a frozen bird bath in the backyard.

You might have seen some of these caterpillars over the past few weeks. It is called a Woolly Bear Caterpillar. They usually make an appearance sometime in the Fall and are commonly seen crossing roads. The caterpillar is made up of thirteen segments. Each of these segments may either be black or reddish brown in color. It is widely believed that the length of the reddish brown section can forecast the severity of the coming winter. The smaller the reddish brown section. the harsher the coming winter. Similar to Groundhog Day, people gather at Vermilion, Ohio for the annual Woolly Bear Caterpillar Festival for the winter prediction.

Project FeederWatch is a winter long survey of birds that visit feeders throughout North America. It began in the 1970’s as the Ontario Feeder Bird Survey. In 1987, the project expanded into an international survey managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Bird Studies Canada. Today, it is a cooperative research and education project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Bird Studies Canada, the National Audubon Society, and the Canadian Nature Federation.

The main goal of Project FeederWatch is to marry the interests of backyard birdwatchers with those of ornithologists who study bird populations. By making simple standardized counts of the birds in their yards and reporting them to the FeederWatch database, FeederWatchers help scientists track broad scale movements of winter bird populations and long term trends in bird distribution and abundance.

Anyone with a feeder and a small knowledge of birds can participate. Just sign up on their website and for a cost of just $15 you will receive a handbook, tally sheets, a calendar and a subscription to their newsletter. Just a couple of hours on two consecutive days once every two weeks is all it takes to count. It’s a great way to spend the morning with a cup of coffee or the afternoon with some tea. The project runs from November to early April.