Day 16.124: Birding in Falmouth

Yesterday's adventure took three of us to Falmouth to visit first Mackworth Island State Park and then Maine Audubon's Gilsland Farm.

The gang on Mackworth Island

Here are some of our sightings at Mackworth:

LR from top: common tern, gray catbird enjoying some of last year's sumac, eastern phoebe, baltimore oriole (3rd day in a row), yellow warbler, some of the many eider, Nashville warbler, hard not to think of Stephen King, another shot of the oriole

And here are some from Gilsland:

LR from top: chipmunk, northern flicker, veery, song sparrow, common yellowthroat, black-and-white warbler, Swainson's thrush, eastern bluebird, white-throated sparrow

Perhaps our most surprising encounter (and definitely the most dramatic) was with a pair of turkeys, who approached us along the trail, with the male trying very hard to impress the female.

Day 16.046: Surprise hawk

When we see significantly fewer birds at our feeders, we generally converge on one of two reasons - firstly that the feeders need cleaning or the contents have gone rancid or are otherwise unappealing, or secondly that there is a predator somewhere that we can't see, but the birds are aware of. Since our feeders are fairly well protected from ground-based predators, the likely culprit is a raptor.

So it was, that during a third consecutive disappointing counting day (after two days last weekend), Exile #2's attention was drawn to two crows making a fuss about something which turned out to be this:

We're almost certain that this is a red-shouldered hawk. A rather rare raptor for this area and especially so in winter. Several sources suggest they shouldn’t be here at all but Vickery says they are uncommon but regular in winter in our comer of Maine. 

Day 15.317: Late-fall bluebirds

I saw these two as I was leaving work at lunchtime on Monday. I only had my phone, so apologies for the picture quality. 

It’s unusual to see eastern bluebirds at this time of year although Vickery notes that departures have been getting later and over-wintering more common in recent years. 

Day 14.326: Old world sparrows

My go-to birding field guide is Peterson's "Birds of Eastern and Central North America". Nestled between the regular orioles and some exotic south Texan orioles is a page of "Finchlike Birds" including two that are - possibly slightly dismissively - labeled "Old World Sparrows". A couple of them visited our feeder yesterday.

I'm sure to UK readers a picture of a two house sparrows is not terribly exciting, but we don't see them very often in this corner of the new world.

Day 14.109: A slurred moaning?

How would you describe the sound in this video from our weekend visit to Wolfe's Neck Woods State Park? You may need to crank up the volume a bit (I promise no jump-scares):

We weren't at all sure what it was, but a few minutes later we saw the group of common eiders that were making it. Peterson's field guide "Birds of Eastern and Central North America" describes the males' vocalization as "A slurred moaning" - I suppose that works. Here are some of the eiders:

 I also took quite a nice photo of this merganser, but sadly I still can't work out which kind it is:

And our final bird sighting of the day was this turkey - as were leaving the park:

Day 13.072: Exile #2's Sunday Column #290

Exile #2 writes...

Despite our continued quarantine, we had a surprisingly sociable day, catching up with friends near and far through online church, FaceTime, email and such., and wishing our Mums a Happy Mother’s Day, even in the current circumstances. We spent the rest of the day in other fairly quiet pursuits: playing some music, doing a jigsaw

and in E5N1's case, racing to finish reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix so that we could watch the movie in the evening.

Day 12.291: Short walk to mushrooms

After two previous encounters, the shaggy ink caps on the trail behind the school have become almost an October legend. So, when our normal weekend walk on the weekend before Halloween was not possible because one of the bridges was closed, we had to go and see if we could find them.

And find them we did!

Actual length of walk was 4.8 miles, but the post title was more literary than literal.

Day 12.257: The tide also rises

As I mentioned yesterday, the pool near where we had parked on Saturday was filling rapidly as the tide came in as we returned to the car. In place of the cormorants, a greater yellowlegs was stalking in the shallows:

Day 12.181: Peonies at Gilsland Farm

We were surprised to see a few peonies in among the meadow plants as we started our walk at Maine Audubon's Gilsland Farm on Sunday. Later we found some more and it turns out they are a thing - although we were probably a bit late for peak-peony.

We liked these two best - the pink one won for looks, but the white one for sweet smell:

It smelled rather like the sweet rose scent of really good Turkish delight which started a Narnia-inspired conversation about what you would and wouldn't sell out your siblings for.

Day 12.114: Rachel Held Evans

Rachel Held Evans died today leaving her husband and two very young children after a very sudden illness.

It's hard to believe now, but at one time I had a small but significant social media presence and there are people - such as Rachel - who are very linked to that time both in terms of my memory and in my twitter feed which was pretty much frozen in time in early 2014 after three or four years of active use. During that time, I read Rachel's first book and we followed each other on Twitter. She helped me to see that other people were on the same journey that I was on - leaving behind a particular way of understanding the Christian faith, but trying to hold on and not lose everything in the process.

I've been reading back over my tweets to/about her over the years. I contributed to conversations about young Earth creationism and the competition to guess the topic of her second book. I followed along with her adventures with a robot baby while they were considering starting their own family.

Of course, she became a properly famous person (in certain circles at least) and continued to tweet at an impressive rate, whereas I happily settled back into obscurity. I met many of my twitter acquaintances over the years, but I never met Rachel in person.

I have continued to see her tweets whenever I opened my feed. Three weeks ago I saw that she had been admitted to hospital - she was sad that she was going to miss Game of Thrones. She never went home. It's extraordinarily sad. I suppose things like this happen every day and a family's lives are changed forever.

In honor of Rachel and our brief internet acquaintance, I offer the closest thing to a conversation we had (on Twitter in June 2011):

RHE: The bird who lives in our carport is on her 2nd round of babies for the season; 4th in the past 2 yrs. Her name's Pip. Must be Catholic.

me: @rachelheldevans that reads even better with the British meaning of bird = young woman!

RHE: @the_exile lol!

Day 11.315: Snow falling out of trees

This morning, yesterday's snow was still clinging to the trees making southern Maine a magical place. Around lunchtime, the wind started to get up and this started happening:

Tonight and tomorrow are expected to be bitterly cold so I guess the snow (on the ground at least) is here to stay for a while.

Day 11.272: Confusing fall warblers

My main bird identification book is Peterson's Birds of Eastern and Central North America. It's generally excellent, but I always dread finding myself in the section titled "Confusing fall warblers". Not all the birds in the section are even warblers, but that just adds to the confusion.  Nevertheless in attempting to identify this small fly-catching bird we saw at the weekend, I ended up in those pages.

Not surprisingly, I'm still confused.

Day 10.292: Exile #2's Sunday Column #178

Exile #2 writes...

We like to get creative, and perhaps a little geeky, with our pumpkin carving. We’ve carved cybermen, daleks and TARDISes, Pokémon and Minecraft creepers. We've covered Pac-man and Portal, and Game Theory even got a little nod last year. So, I was interested to see where we would end up this year.

I was keen to recreate a design I’d seen, where the pumpkin was carved with just four words - perhaps the most terrifying words imaginable to our resident teens..."The WiFi is down...". Instead we went for this low-stress, but fairly representative selection of the fantastic and puntastic.

Day 10.110: Exile #2's Sunday Column #154

Exile #2 writes...

A letter arrived in the mail on Saturday from Exile #3's high school. To our surprise and delight it notified us that she has been nominated by one or more of her teachers for special recognition this year, and we have been invited to an evening celebration. We are very happy for her, and proud of her efforts. Also, it will be a chance to experience another aspect of the American education system, which is always entertaining!

It reminded me that I still have books that I was able to buy with vouchers given as awards, including a well-thumbed book of piano music, and also Delia Smith's Book of Cakes. This one has yellowed with age but has a fantastic picture of Delia on the cover, sporting a bowl haircut and looking a little awkward behind a table groaning with cakes. It's worth it for that alone!

Day 9.297: How did we manage?

One last Halloween story. Before Exile #4's evening shift as a Snow Goon, she decided to make a small charitable donation to go to school in costume. Quite rightly, she thought that the other costume would not really be practical for the purpose, so she decided to go as Hermione Granger:

In order to do so, she tied her own tie (the first time she'd attempted any such thing). How did she achieve this? Well, not with any help from her parents - no - she looked up a video instruction on YouTube. Of course! How did we ever manage before?

Day 9.295: Calvin does Reformation Day

Once again, we encouraged the kids to come up with a group costume idea for Halloween (which is also Reformation Day when Martin Luther started the tradition of posting long theological thoughts on someone's wall). What they came up with was Calvin and Hobbes and one of Calvin's Snow Goons.  As usual, they wore it well and we had a very nice evening in our very Halloween-friendly neighborhood.

Based on our next-door neighbors' provisional count, numbers were down on last year at around 250, but it seemed we had a late surge after that - while Calvin took charge of candy dispensing duties.

Day 9.289: Election, winners

Today, E5N1 was serving as a worker for the school's mock election - he dressed for the occasion: smart with a hint of red, white and blue:

In other news, thanks to blog readers Deborah and Ilana for (via different routes) confirming that the readers of this blog are familiar with the literary classics by recognising that E5N1 and Exile #3 were dressed as Calvin and Hobbes. Now the trickier follow-up question - can you guess how Exile #4 will be dressed when she joins them on Monday?

Day 9.129: A shipwreck by Jane Eyre by Exile #3

I've never read Jane Eyre, but Exile #3 is studying it at the moment and one of her recent assignments was to reproduce one of the paintings that Jane describes in the book. It's probably safe to say that this played to her strengths, but she did a rather wonderful job.

The description [from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë] is as follows:

The first represented clouds low and livid, rolling over a swollen sea: all the distance was in eclipse; so, too, was the foreground; or rather, the nearest billows, for there was no land. One gleam of light lifted into relief a half-submerged mast, on which sat a cormorant, dark and large, with wings flecked with foam; its beak held a gold bracelet set with gems, that I had touched with as brilliant tints as my palette could yield, and as glittering distinctness as my pencil could impart. Sinking below the bird and mast, a drowned corpse glanced through the green water; a fair arm was the only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or torn.

Here is Exile #3's rendering:

It came back yesterday with the highest possible grade and one other comment written on the back by her teacher, "Can I keep it?" so, having given me the chance to see it and take this photo, she returned it to him today.

Day 8.349: What passes for "quiet"

I guess when discussing our Christmas plans, we probably used the word "quiet" once or twice to mean that we weren't traveling, or having a big family gathering or anything. It doesn't actually mean it was quiet of course.

We managed to chat with most of the family on Skype or Facetime and then there was all this:

Fun with a selfie-stick, novel decorations on the Christmas cake, some origami, unwrapping, toppling dominos, smashing a geode, confusion caused by mislabeled gifts and a marvelous meal.

and a number of other things.

Happy/Merry Christmas to all!

Day 8.318: Judge this book by its cover

Well, I've been feeling like I'm coming down with something which is not OK. So lets just imagine that I will be fine tomorrow and this is just an aberration. Meanwhile - what the internet does best - cute cats (E5N1 style):