Every year, I feel determined to appreciate October and especially Columbus Day weekend – for sparrows, for fall foliage, for playoff baseball – all my favorite things, all too briefly at their peak. And this urge to cherish things has become all the more acute right now, because of the news of the big coming changes at the Cornell Community Gardens.
So I felt that this weekend’s Cayuga Bird Club walks had kind of a grand, escalating, unifying theme. Seize the moment. Seize the day. Seize the weekend. Seize the week. Seize the month. Seize the year. (We even managed literally to seize one bird – or, more accurately, Paul Anderson did, gently taking one Song Sparrow in his hand to free it from entanglement in a folded section of plastic mesh fence.) We found all nine expected sparrow species over the two days – LINCOLN’S, SWAMP, SONG, SAVANNAH, CHIPPING, FIELD, WHITE-CROWNED, WHITE-THROATED, and DARK-EYED JUNCO. Viewing of Lincoln’s was as good as I’ve ever experienced, particularly on Sunday. If you divided the site into a 3 x 3 grid, we had excellent views of Lincoln’s in all nine zones. Paul saw the DICKCISSEL on Saturday in the northeast corner, but none of the rest of us succeeded – not even after Tom Schulenberg and his friends called us over later after having found it themselves. Today, only two of us saw it. So on the whole, the glass feels about 3/4 empty with that bird, despite how exciting it is that it’s here at all. But we had other rewards, including today’s biggest surprise – a first-year BALD EAGLE perched in the lone tree in the field across the road. Both days, we also saw a single EASTERN PHOEBE, cherishing those too as if they might be our last for a while. Among our 25+ participants over the two days was my mother Johanna Chao, who saw what I believe must have been her life Lincoln’s Sparrows today. It was a special pleasure for me to hear her expressing a fresh and youthful wonder about these birds. She remarked later like a pro about the differences between them and Song Sparrows, aptly calling Lincoln’s “the princes and princesses of the sparrows.” In fact, she is sitting behind me right now, asleep in a sunlit armchair, with the Crossley Guide open in her lap to the sparrow pages. It is gratifying and inspiring and instructive indeed to see her so game to try and learn new things at this stage of her life. Carpe diem, carpe annum, carpe vitam. Mark Chao -- Cayugabirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/cayugabirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/Cayugabirds 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/CAYU.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
