Monday, September 15, 2014

Fowl Meadow, Blue Hills Reservation - Milton 9/13/2014

   We met at 7:30 a.m. and hit the trail about 15 minutes later, returned at 11:30 having walked the Burma Road through to 128 and back, about four miles. Present, besides me, were Tom Cosgrove, Ralph Bowman, Kathy Rawdon, Pat Donahue, Mary Lou Kaufman, and Linde Eyster. The weather was cool but pleasant. Fowl Meadow was very dry -- no water in the marsh to the right of the road heading in. Birds were scarce. The hoped for NW wind had not materialized.
   Kathy, Pat and I continued on to E. Bridgewater where the three Sandhill Cranes were waiting for us. Best bird of the day, although I thought the Broad-Winged Hawk was quite nice. We had nice looks at wood and leopard frogs.

 22 species
Canada Goose x
Turkey Vulture 1
Sharp-shinned Hawk 1
Broad-winged Hawk 1
Red-bellied Woodpecker 1
Downy Woodpecker 10
Hairy Woodpecker 1
Northern Flicker 4
Eastern Phoebe 1
Warbling Vireo 1
Blue Jay 18
Black-capped Chickadee 9
Tufted Titmouse 3
White-breasted Nuthatch 2
American Robin 16
Gray Catbird 7
Common Yellowthroat 1
Eastern Towhee 3
Northern Cardinal 1
Common Grackle 2
House Finch 3
American Goldfinch 5


Patty O'Neill


Friday, September 5, 2014

Book list form Wayne Petersen's talk

What a great talk by Wayne Peterson last night! There is humor to be had even in the telling of a tale of woe. And how about that touching finale. Read the words of  Aldo Leopold with which Wayne ended the talk and find a list of the recommended books on vanished species below.





On a Monument to the Pigeon






By Aldo Leopold, 1947

Published in A Sand County Almanac © 1953, Oxford Univ. Press
We have erected a monument to commemorate the funeral of a species. It symbolizes our sorrow. We grieve because no living man will see again the onrushing phalanx of victorious birds, sweeping a path for spring across the March skies, chasing the defeated winter from all the woods and prairies of Wisconsin.


Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons. Trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a decade hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know.


There will always be pigeons in books and in museums, but these are effigies and images, dead to all hardships and to all delights. Book-pigeons cannot dive out of a cloud to make the deer run for cover, or clap their wings in thunderous applause of mast-laden woods. Book-pigeons cannot breakfast on new-mown wheat in Minnesota, and dine on blueberries in Canada. They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather. They live forever by not living at all.


Our grandfathers were less well-housed, well-fed, well-clothed than we are. The strivings by which they bettered their lot are also those which deprived us of pigeons. Perhaps we now grieve because we are not sure, in our hearts, that we have gained by the exchange. The gadgets of industry bring us more comforts than the pigeons did, but do they add as much to the glory of the spring?


It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise.


Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark.


These things, I say, should have come to us. I fear they have not come to many.


For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun. The Cro-Magnon who slew the last mammoth thought only of steaks. The sportsman who shot the last pigeon thought only of his prowess. The sailor who clubbed the last auk thought of nothing at all. But we, who have lost our pigeons, mourn the loss. Had the funeral been ours, the pigeons would hardly have mourned us. In this fact, rather than in Mr. Du Pont’s nylons or Mr. Vannevar Bush’s bombs, lies objective evidence of our superiority over the beasts.


* * *


This monument, perched like a duckhawk on this cliff, will scan this wide valley, watching through the days and years. For many a March it will watch the geese go by, telling the river about clearer, colder, lonelier waters on the tundra. For many an April it will see the redbuds come and go, and for many a May the flush of oak-blooms on a thousand hills. Questing wood ducks will search these basswoods for hollow limbs; golden prothonotaries will shake golden pollen from the river willows, Egrets will pose on these sloughs in August; plovers will whistle from September skies. Hickory nuts will plop into October leaves, and hail will rattle in November woods. But no pigeons will pass, for there are no pigeons, save only this flightless one, graven in bronze on this rock. Tourists will read this inscription, but their thoughts will not take wing.


We are told by economic moralists that to mourn the pigeon is mere nostalgia; that if the pigeoners had not done away with him, the farmers would ultimately have been obliged, in self-defense, to do so.


This is one of those peculiar truths that are valid, but not for the reasons alleged.


The pigeon was a biological storm. He was the lightning that played between two opposing potentials of intolerable intensity: the fat of the land and the oxygen of the air. Yearly the feathered tempest roared up, down, and across the continent, sucking up the laden fruits of forest and prairie, burning them in a traveling blast of life. Like any other chain reaction, the pigeon could survive no diminution of his own furious intensity. When the pigeoners subtracted from his numbers, and the pioneers chopped gaps in the continuity of his fuel, his flame guttered out with hardly a sputter or even a wisp of smoke.


Today the oaks still flaunt their burden at the sky, but the feathered lightning is no more. Worm and weevil must now perform slowly and silently the biological task that once drew thunder from the firmament.


The wonder is not that the pigeon went out, but that he ever survived through all the millennia of pre-Babbittian time.


* * *


The pigeon loved his land: he lived by the intensity of his desire for clustered grape and bursting beechnut, and by his contempt of miles and seasons. Whatever Wisconsin did not offer him gratis today, he sought and found tomorrow in Michigan, or Labrador, or Tennessee. His love was for present things, and these things were present somewhere; to find them required only the free sky, and the will to ply his wings.


To love what was is a new thing under the sun, unknown to most people and to all pigeons. To see America as history, to conceive of destiny as a becoming, to smell a hickory tree through the still lapse of ages – all these things are possible for us, and to achieve them takes only the free sky, and the will to ply our wings. In these things, and not in Mr. Bush’s bombs and Mr. Du Pont’s nylons, lies objective evidence of our superiority over the beasts.






Recommended Book List


Last of the Curlews / Fred Bodsworth
Wayne recommends to have a box of tissues handy


Extinct and Vanishing Birds of the world  James C. Greenway Jr.


The Carolina Parakeet: Glimpses of a vanishing bird / Noel F.R. Snyder


In search of the Ivory billed Woodpecker / Jerome A. Jackson


Bachman's Warbler: A species in Peril / Paul B. Hamel


The passenger Pigeon: It's natural history and extinction / A.W. Schorger


A feathered river across the sky / Joel Greenberg


The Auks / Anthony J Gaston; Ian L. Jones


The Heath Hen / Alfred O. Grass. Memoirs of the Boston Society of Natural History, 1928.
Published before George, the last heath Hen on the Vineyard, died in 1932!


Good reading - and by the way some members of our bird club have in their lifetime seen some of the now presumed extinct species - that would be a wonderful part two to this evening!


Christine



Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary at Sunset Saturday August 30 2014


Last Saturday we held our second Sunset walks which was co-sponsored with Mass Audubon South Shore Sanctuaries.

Our group consisted of two very interested children and 11 adults. Some participants were also members of the SSBC and some were not birders at all. We had a very slow walk all the way out to Fox Hill, stopping to look at caterpillars and some day flying moths, identifying flowers, checking out a Green Heron from the blind, admiring the board walk and learning about the Purple Martins and other aerial insectivores.



Group posing at Fox Hill – looking into the setting sun

Marshfield: Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary, Plymouth, US-MA
Aug 30, 2014 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Protocol: Traveling
1.1 kilometer(s)
Comments:     South Shore Bird Club Trip. Sunny 73F
19 species

Canada Goose  28
Wild Turkey  5
Osprey  1
Mourning Dove  13
Northern Flicker  1
Blue Jay  2
American Crow  2
Tree Swallow  50     many flying really high.
Tufted Titmouse  5
White-breasted Nuthatch  1
American Robin  3
Northern Mockingbird  2
European Starling  50     Juvenile, in two separate flock,.
Cedar Waxwing  3
Song Sparrow  1
Northern Cardinal  3
Common Grackle  2
House Finch  1
House Sparrow  6

View this checklist online at
http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist?subID=S19641403

This report was generated automatically by eBird v3 (
http://ebird.org)

After 7 pm Steven set out his equipment for Mothing and worked at it until 4 am! This list would be too long to be published here though!

Christine and Steven Whitebread