January

The year starts in the heart of winter, and it is a spectacular time. At its best, the world of January is cold and crisp, blanketed in a layer of snow that sparkles like diamonds in the sunshine and gently muffles the sounds of everyday life. Considered differently, January, being the coldest and snowiest month on average, is not a time for wimps. Survival requires a tolerance of both temperatures below freezing for days, even weeks, at a time and regular periods of inactivity enforced by blizzards, freezing rain, high winds, and so on. However, nothing is certain; in some years, we have brief respites of unseasonably warm weather.

Much of winter-resident life hides away, dormant or in hibernation. Inescapably, the creatures that remain active, especially the birds, play a large role in our January world—and in my essays for this month. The year starts with a treat of turkeys and bluebirds on a trip to a nearby preserve (“New Year’s Day Birds”) and ends with flocks of overwintering duck on Cayuga Lake (“Luxury Living on the Lake”). In one year, January also brought a hawk into our neighborhood, causing trouble for the small birds at our bird feeder (“With Fear and Trembling”). Much more unexpectedly, a hike in the local forest revealed evidence for active black bears that should be hidden away in their dens at this time of year (“In the Company of Bears”).

New Year’s Day Birds

How do you mark the first day of the year? I gave up on New Year’s resolutions years ago. Instead, I have developed the habit of saluting the new year by paying special attention to wildlife for the day. One New Year’s Day was particularly memorable for the wild birds.

Not that the start was auspicious. We had a lonely breakfast. Our bird feeder, in full view from our dining room table, was deserted. No chickadees or tufted titmice, no juncos or Carolina wrens, not even the usual parade of marauding gray squirrels testing the squirrel-proofing. Perhaps the neighbor’s cat was prowling about or a Cooper’s hawk was watching from a nearby tree.

We decided to visit the Lindsay-Parsons Biodiversity Preserve, a dozen miles south of Ithaca. Our nil return for birds continued. It was already two hours after daybreak, and the thousands of crows that roost overnight through the winter in the trees on the southern outskirts of the city had already left for their daytime feeding grounds. Even the usual gaggles of ring-billed gulls that haunt the parking lots of the shops and eateries in the strip mall were not evident. It wasn’t until we had traveled several miles south that we encountered our first bird of the year.

Driving around a corner, I had to brake quickly to avoid colliding with an unusual pair of pedestrians. Two wild turkeys were walking across the road in their own time, and they weren’t going to be rushed. This meant that we had a splendid view. There’s no argument: turkeys are seriously big birds; the great bulk of their body is supported by strong, powerful legs, and a ridiculously small head is perched atop a thin neck. The two birds were very similar in appearance, mostly a dullish dark brown with a pale face and thin, down-turned beak. As the birds moved, different areas of the plumage on their backs and wings glittered briefly in the hazy sunshine—the bird books call that an iridescent sheen. The turkeys dipped between the trees on the far side of the road. In a moment, they had disappeared, reminding us of how superbly camouflaged these great birds can be in their natural habitat.

Our two turkeys were probably females. If we had waited, we might have seen more turkeys, for these birds usually forage in fairly large groups during the winter. They like to scratch around for nuts, seeds, and berries on the forest floor, and they don’t say no to any snails, beetles, or salamanders that their scrabbling may disturb.

It felt very special to have the wild turkey as our first bird of the year. We don’t see turkeys very often, even though they are quite common in the country areas around here. It hasn’t always been like this. The turkey was a victim of massive deforestation for timber and agriculture across the northeastern United States—and of uncontrolled hunting. By all reports, it had disappeared from New York State by the 1840s. But times change. Farming became unprofitable, and large areas of land were abandoned. As the scrub and trees grew up, wild turkeys returned. They expanded from small populations in northern Pennsylvania and, by 1950, became established in the wild areas of western New York State. Their subsequent spread was aided and abetted by staff from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation who transported birds from their western stronghold, especially Allegany State Park, to other suitable parts of the state. Today, turkey populations are deemed sufficiently robust to support hunting throughout May and for two weeks in October, albeit with very strict bag limits per hunter.

The turkeys were the start of a great birdy morning. We were soon walking along one of the tracks close by the beaver pond at the Lindsay-Parsons Biodiversity Preserve. The trail was covered in snow and the pond was iced over, a reminder of the bitterly low temperatures and snowfall of the previous few days. One section was edged with brush and small trees. “What an excellent habitat for small birds,” we said to each other. You bet! Nothing less than two bluebirds, a male and female, appeared as if from nowhere. I have read repeatedly that the plumage of the bluebird is “gorgeous,” and that is the perfect word. The male was close by on a branch of a leafless sapling, his head and back the most gorgeous blue, and his throat and chest a glorious orange above a shockingly bright white belly. As he flew past us toward the female, the rich blue and orange flashed, as colorful as a butterfly. The female is more subdued, the blue-gray of the head merging to a stronger blue along the back and tail, and with an orange-brown chest. We are at the northern limit of the winter range for bluebirds. Perhaps the individuals we saw were resident to our area, possibly even breeding in the preserve, or perhaps they were winter visitors that will fly north in the spring to breed in southern Canada.

The bluebirds stole the show, but the regulars—including chickadees, tufted titmice, cardinals, and American goldfinches—were also busy in the trees and shrubs. At the far end of the preserve, American tree sparrows were twittering, a higher pitch and sweeter tone than the nearby goldfinches. It always feels special to come across the tree sparrows, for they are as tough as they come. They spend the summer months in the far north of Canada, migrating great distances to and from their overwintering grounds in the United States, as far south as Arizona and Texas.

Then a merlin flew through, fast and low. Merlins are small but immensely powerful predators, but they are not reported to over-winter in our region. Probably, this individual was passing through. Nevertheless, all the small birds (up to and including the cardinals) are in danger of becoming a meal for the duration of the hours, perhaps days, that the merlin was around. Only the crows and Canada geese feeding and calling on the open meadows had nothing to fear.

We weren’t aiming for a record-breaking bird list for New Year’s Day, but we did end up with a very reasonable tally. You can never be sure of what you will encounter in the natural world, but there is always something of interest, and it’s often unexpected.

In the Company of Bears

Until this week, I could comfortably declare that I lived in a different time and place from bears: both my old life in Britain, before I moved to the United States some fifteen years ago, and my new life in Ithaca, New York.

Let’s start with “place.” If our ancestors had as little wanderlust as our near-relatives, the gorilla and chimpanzee, we would still be in Africa, and much of the land mass in the northern hemisphere, including Britain and the United States, would be inhabited by large populations of bears. The most successful of these bears is the brown bear, Ursus arctos, which almost certainly evolved in Asia. It is a big beast, weighing up to 550 kg (1212 lb) and can wander far, up to fifty miles a day. So the brown bear has spread. It went across Eurasia in one direction, reaching Britain soon after the last ice age, and across Beringia (now the shallow sea between Siberia and Alaska) to North America in the other direction. With such a broad range, it is hardly surprising that the taxonomists have been busy dividing the brown bear into subspecies of greater or lesser validity. The brown bear in North America is Ursus arctos horribilis, the grizzly, and the Eurasian brown bear is Ursus arctos arctos.

You can tell from this that brown bears aren’t especially fussy about where they live. They get along nicely in any type of forest or partially open habitat, from the frozen expanse of northern Russia to North Africa, from chilly Alaska to balmy Mexico. Well, that present tense is not strictly accurate because the last known Mexican grizzly bear (sometimes known as Ursus arctos nelsoni) was found, and shot dead, in 1976.

This brings me to the “time” of my opening sentence. If I had been born four thousand years ago, my Bronze Age life on the offshore island of Britain would undoubtedly have been nastier, more brutish, shorter . . . and shared with Ursus arctos arctos. But large numbers of humans and bears don’t mix well. Slowly but inexorably, the brown bear populations were squeezed by an unhappy combination of habitat loss, as the natural wildwood habitat of Britain was felled, and relentless persecution. Every downed brown bear translated into a lot of meat and fur, and fewer sheep and goats ending up as bear food. People did not care that bears are omnivores that enjoy plant roots, berries, and insects as much as wild deer, domesticated sheep, and leaping salmon.

I was born too late to share my UK life with bears.

What about my US life? I would never have shared my life in the northeastern United States with a brown bear. The brown bear, or more specifically the grizzly subspecies of the brown bear, ranged widely across the west but never set up home east of the Mississippi River. In the last two centuries, the numbers and range of the grizzly have declined precipitously, eliminated from Texas (1890), California (1916), New Mexico (1931), and Colorado (1951). . . . I could go on with more state statistics, even providing you with the name of the “famous” person who made the last state kill, together with his location and details about his gun.

But the brown bear is not the only bear. The US is host to three of the eight bear species—the polar, black, and brown. It is time to bring the black bear—Ursus americanus—into the limelight.

The black bear is much smaller than the brown bear (300 kg = 660 lb at most). It is restricted to North America, and all it asks for is a varied menu of roots, fleshy leaves, berries, insects, and small mammals. Without interfering humans, it thrived in every scrap of forest on the continent. Alas, the modern distribution of the black bear is a pale shadow of its former range. It is now restricted to forests throughout Canada, along the main mountain chains of the US, and in a motley collection of other remote spots, such as the impenetrable swamps of Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana.

I moved to the US in 2008, specifically to an Ithaca that was the wrong time and place for black bears. Black bears had been extirpated from the Ithaca area more than one hundred years ago, and New York State populations were restricted largely to the Adirondacks in the northeast, the Allegany Mountains of the southwest, and the Catskills in the south. But, as I have already said, times change. The abandoned farms of the Finger Lakes region are being replaced by forest that includes, or is adjacent to, housing with garbage, pet food, and bird feeders—and the black bears are responding to the new opportunities. For at least twenty years, bear-free Ithaca has been wedged between a northern population expanding southward and a southern population expanding northward. In military terminology, this is the classic pincer formation, from which the sitting duck (the enemy, or the city of Ithaca) can be targeted from two sides simultaneously. There have been occasional reports of black bears seen here or there in our local area, but I’ve never been quite sure what to make of these stories.

So let’s go back to where we began. My opening sentence starts with “until this week.” It was this week that we went for a walk in one of our favorite haunts, Sweedler Nature Preserve, south of Ithaca. About ten minutes along the trail, I noticed a pile of wood fragments around the base of a dead tree, and portions of the trunk were torn away. If anything can be labeled as a frenzied attack, this was it! Other dead trees nearby had been attacked in a similar way, high up, low down, or scored from top to bottom. We puzzled over the likely perpetrator. A quick email consultation with Paul Curtis, an expert in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment at Cornell University, yielded this response: “It looks to me that the damage was caused by a black bear, probably trying to get at grubs in the dead wood. With the mild winter weather so far, some juvenile male bears may not be in their winter dens yet.”

This is why I wrote that, until this week, I could comfortably declare that I lived in a different time and place from bears. I have evidence that my world is different now; it has suddenly become wilder. I am living with bears.

With Fear and Trembling

We have a panoramic view of our small backyard from the dining room. Over breakfast yesterday, we admired the crisp and even snowscape glistening in the early morning sunshine, and we hoped that the temperatures would rise from the bitter –9°F (–23°C). The little birds must have burned through the calories to survive the previous night. Perhaps some of them went into torpor, allowing their body temperature to drop by a few degrees, and others may have huddled together in a tree hole for warmth. Nevertheless, these clever tricks don’t eliminate their intense demand for food at daybreak. Our winter birds don’t indulge in fat stores to endure hard times; they need a constant supply of food. You could say that they are the true professionals of the just-in-time food supply chain.

If this were any previous year, we would have enjoyed a constant to-ing and fro-ing of small birds at our feeders as we ate our breakfast. Parties of chickadees and tufted titmice flying over the fence to take a few mouthfuls and then passing on to their next food stop; a Carolina wren craning its neck to access the food; a downy woodpecker bobbing along the branch toward the suet; a junco settled next to the bottom part of the seed holder to take a morsel, consider the world, and repeat; our resident pair of cardinals flying in to sample the seeds spilled on the ground by the flurry of small birds above. Perhaps we would enjoy a special visit from a redbellied woodpecker or even a small group of pine siskins.

But every year is different, and this year is especially so. The entertainment for our morning breakfast was nothing more than a solitary junco and some gray squirrels chasing through the trees at the far end of the yard.

A likely explanation for the lack of interest in our bird feeders is that a natural predator has taken up residence, and our local patch has become a danger zone for small birds. The chief suspect is a Cooper’s hawk. We have always enjoyed sightings of the occasional Cooper’s hawk in our neighborhood, whether in swift and effortless flight across the yard or completely still, watching from the fence or a tree. This year, we have had one moseying around. We are sure it is the one bird; they tend to be solitary out of the breeding season, and they don’t generally travel large distances in winter. It is almost certainly a juvenile because its orange-red chest is spotted, not striped, and the bands on its long tail are brown, not gray.

Our suspicions felt vindicated this morning. At breakfast, we spotted the villain of the piece. The Cooper’s hawk swept low directly in front of our dining room window, a flash of blue-gray with pale underparts, then up and over the privet hedge to our western neighbor’s backyard.

Until this winter, our birdy neighborhood watch has kept the hawks at bay. No self-respecting hawk would be willing to endure repeated mobbing by squawking blue jays and cawing crows. Somehow, the neighborhood protectors haven’t been up to scratch this year. The consequence for our little birds is that a quick snack of Ithaca bird seed blend or a bite of suet has become an opportunity to dice with death. They are living in fear and trembling that they might end up as hawk food.

I can’t help but wish our teenage thug of a Cooper’s hawk would move on and stop tormenting our chickadees, cardinals, and other resident birds. In the same breath, I tell myself to be glad we have Cooper’s hawks, along with sharp-shinned hawks and red-tailed hawks. It hasn’t always been this way. From the early 1900s, these beautiful birds were persecuted by local farmers with increasingly accurate and deadly guns. The situation worsened in the 1950s with the widespread use of DDT, an organochlorine insecticide that disrupts the nervous system of insects. (For those who like the gory details, DDT is short for dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, and it stops the sodium channels in nerve cells from closing so nerves can’t stop firing. DDT does this to the nerves of any animal, including you and me, but insects are unusually deficient in the enzymatic wherewithal to degrade DDT before it gets to their nervous system.)

DDT was the “magic bullet” insecticide of the 1950s, and its use led to great public health achievements. For example, it eliminated mosquito-vectored malaria from Mediterranean countries, such as Italy, and southern US states, such as Louisiana and Alabama. Then evidence accumulated that the nervous system is not the sole target of DDT; reproductive hormones are also disrupted, albeit by mechanisms that are poorly understood. Alligators in Florida were found to have deformed testes and ovaries, and calcium deposition into the shell glands of birds was perturbed. The birds at the top of the food chain, the hawks and eagles, suffered the most. The thin shell of their eggs literally broke under the weight of the incubating parent.

It is thanks to the tireless work of many researchers and environmental activists that the disastrous effects of DDT became clear. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (Carson 1962) was front and center in galvanizing proper controls over the use of chemical pesticides. Carson was a truly remarkable individual: a marine biologist who worked for some years at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries and who clearly understood how the United States Department of Agriculture was hamstrung by its competing responsibilities to regulate pesticide use and promote agribusiness. Her work and the commitment of many others led to the banning of DDT in 1972 in the US. Since then, many birds of prey have made a remarkable recovery. The Cooper’s hawk now has the conservation status of least concern.

So, as I observe the juvenile Cooper’s hawk sitting perfectly motionless in the black walnut tree, watching and waiting for its next meal, I remind myself of the many people who cared enough to rescue its forebears from extinction.

Luxury Living on the Lake

There are various ways that you can live a luxurious life on the lake. I mean Cayuga Lake. Of all the Finger Lakes, Cayuga Lake is the longest, at nearly forty miles, and the second deepest, reaching more than four hundred feet in places. It is a little more than a mile wide and runs on an almost perfect north-to-south axis, with Ithaca at the southern end.

Please understand, by “luxurious life,” I am not thinking of a luxury apartment or lake house with magnificent views over the lake. Rather, I am referring to living on the lake, getting-your-feet-wet style, as enjoyed by various birds that come from the north and stay with us for anything from a few days to the entire winter. Cayuga Lake in January may appear uninviting to us, what with the ice and the bitter wind, but, if you are born and bred in the far north of Canada, this is a balmy spot.

We have access to the shoreline at the southern end of Cayuga Lake, courtesy of two city parks: Stewart Park and Allan H. Treman State Marine Park. The birds on the lake are not unduly perturbed by the procession of dog walkers, joggers and, after snow, cross-country skiers. This means that amateur birdwatchers with binoculars, including us, and serious birders with telescopes join the merry throng of humans in these two city parks.

Recent days have been a birdy treat. A raft of ducks has taken up residence just offshore. Most of them are redheads, easily distinguished by the rich brown head and gray back of the males; the females are a dull brown. There are hundreds, maybe a thousand, redheads, all bobbing up and down on the water. Among the crowd of redheads, there are at least two other species of duck: some canvasbacks, which are a bit larger than redheads with white on the back, and scaups, which are smaller and black with white on the sides. (You would need a telescope to discriminate between the two species: the greater and lesser scaup.)

For many minutes, most of the ducks in the raft appeared to be doing nothing. Indeed, some had their heads turned back, as if snoozing gently. Occasionally, an individual rose and flapped its wings, or dived, presumably in search of food.

Then, all of a sudden, individuals at the far end of the raft started to get fidgety. They were swimming actively, initially in circles, then increasingly tending to face toward the center of the raft. A few of the uneasy birds rose up and moved closer to the center, powered by vigorous flapping of wings and furious paddling of feet. Their movement created streams of water droplets that glistened in the hazy sunshine. Soon, more ducks were on the move, more and more, until the far end of the raft was a mass of flapping wings in a shower of water. Some of the ducks left the water entirely. Most of these individuals flew fast and low for some tens of yards, then extended their legs diagonally forward as if to brace their body for the return to the water. A few rose into the sky, circled around, and returned to different locations on the edge of the raft. Their landings were splashy affairs, water skidding behind them as their forward-directed legs surfed along the water.

Then everything quietened down. We were back to normal, except that the raft had taken on a different shape. It was more rounded, perhaps more defensive. Throughout these maneuverings of the minority, most of the ducks in the center of the raft remained unperturbed, continuing to do nothing. That’s luxury living on the lake.

The great number of redheads is awe-inspiring, but the top prize for elegance on the lake goes to another bird, the tundra swan. Its pure white body, long neck held strictly vertical, and jet-black bill were on full display as a small group of these magnificent birds glided over the water. Occasionally, an individual swan upended to take a mouthful of weed. The tundra swan also grazes on winter cereal crops in a similar way to the geese, but, so far this winter, we have not seen any swans among the large flocks of Canada geese feeding on the local snow-covered agricultural fields.

The chance to watch tundra swans feels very special because the main overwintering grounds for this species are on the coast and farther south, mostly along the Chesapeake Bay and in North Carolina. But tundra swans are strong flyers, and they move around a good deal through the winter. We have a chance of continuing to see them until mid- to late April. By early May, they need to be back to their breeding grounds on tundra lakes close to the northern coast of Canada.

A close second for elegance is a resident duck, the common merganser. In recent days, there have been dozens of them on the lake. The male has a dark green-black head, brilliant white neck and underparts, and gray-black on the wings, and the female has a chocolate brown head sweeping back into a punkish crest and gray-brown body. Most distinctive of all is their bright red beak, which is very long and thin, with a downward hook—a sure sign that the merganser likes its meat. Fish, worms, shrimp, and frogs go down easily. I suspect that the main item on today’s menu is fish. That is because most of our local fish overwinter in the lake, a much safer place than the shallow, freeze-prone waters of the creeks . . . unless they meet a merganser, of course.

As we made our way through the snow at the lakeshore, we noticed the osprey platform silhouetted against the gray sky. A pair of osprey nest there every summer. It won’t be so very long before the redheads and the tundra swan have departed north and the ospreys are back, patrolling Cayuga Lake and raising their young in this city park.