Day 19.099: Sunday birding

Our nature group gathered at the lovely but - today at least - rather soggy Tyler Brook Reserve in Kennebunkport. The highlight of the birding was hearing a conversation between two barred owls, but here are some of the ones we saw:

Palm warbler

Northern flicker

Northern flicker

Hermit thrush

Day 19.098: Concert

Exile #2 and I went to a concert this evening including E5N1 (and the rest of the university choir) singing with the symphony orchestra. It was excellent. I especially enjoyed their rendition of Zadok the Priest which I have also sung (many years ago). It has one of the best choral entrances I’ve ever heard. If the school posts a video I’ll add a link.

Day 19.097: No Smokin’

Spotted at the airport on our recent trip back from the UK:

Day 19.096: Posted; goats

Occasional lapses in my blog posting schedule have occurred over the years and are attributed to technical problems whether the technical problems were computer or human in nature. One such lapse happened this week. A fully written and illustrated post about our nature group bird sightings sat in draft form for 36 hours for reasons I can’t explain. You can see it now anyway. In addition to the birds, we saw a pair of goats at the farm across the road. 

Day 19.095: Special Weather Statement

This morning, I opened up the weather app on my phone and saw there was a Special Weather Statement. My experience of looking at the was something like this:

Moderate severity, threat to life or property… 

Execute a pre-planned activity…within the next hour… Wait, perhaps I should read the block of text labeled description that I skipped over…

Oh…it’s a bit foggy and I should allow more stopping distance while driving. Noted. 

Perhaps I should have read that first. 

Day 19.094: Sunday birding

Our nature group met near the Ecology School and walked the Mary Merrill Trail on Sunday afternoon. We spent a good deal of our time talking about the wide variety of trees and other plants we saw, and trying to spot spring peepers that we heard but did not see. We saw some birds too - here are some of them.

Eastern phoebe

Common raven

Black-capped chickadee

Transatlantic harmony: an American robin and a European starling 

Wood duck

Wood ducks

Hooded mergansers

Eastern bluebird

Mallard

Eastern phoebe

Red-winged blackbird

Brown-headed cowbirds

Downy woodpecker

European starlings

Day 19.093: Sparrow cross-over

Our most commonly seen backyard sparrow in winter is the dark-eyed junco. In summer they are replaced by chipping sparrows. Both are often seen searching for food on the ground. At this time of year, there is a brief period of overlap when both can be seen. This weekend's Project FeederWatch count included two juncos and our first chipping sparrow of the year.

Spring is here - even if the weather doesn't seem completely convinced of that fact yet.