First Count

The stars (and full feeders) finally aligned and we made our first official count for Project Feederwatch Monday and Tuesday.  In past years we put out a seed block for ground-feeding birds but this year we have chickens.  We didn't want the chickens to eat the whole seed block, so we didn't put one out.  Instead, the chickens run for the feeders every morning to clean up the sunflower seeds that spill on the ground.  The chickadees scold and dive at them, and the chickens -- being birds of very little brain, who apparently do not realize they are roughly 100 times bigger than a chickadee -- squawk and run away. 

Our first count:

• 1 tufted titmouse
• 4 chickadees
• 2 juncos
• 2 crows
• 1 Cooper's Hawk (juvenile) 
• 2 goldfinch
• 1 hairy woodpecker (Or "hiary", as one might find it written on the refrigerator door list)
• 1 blue jay
• 1 downy woodpecker
• 1 whitebreasted nuthatch
• 1 brown creeper
• 1 pine siskin (maybe)

The count just gives you numbers, but every number tells a story.  For instance, take the two crows and the Cooper's Hawk.  I was walking back from letting the chickens out of their coop yesterday morning.  It was about 20 degrees with a dusting of snow over crunchy, frozen ground, and the sun shone in that icy way of late fall/early winter mornings when the sky is blue and the light seems to glow through it in bands of yellow and orange.  Three of the chickens had lingered in the coop and were now racing to catch up with the flock.  (The flock was running for the feeders.)  As I walked behind the main flock, frozen waterer banging against my leg, I noticed that the crows were making quite a racket.  We have a lot of crows -- far more than two -- and they are generally quite loud.  This racket was a bit more... racketous than usual.  I looked back to see two crows chasing a Cooper's Hawk out of the yard, and one of the Buff hens huddling alone underneath a low-hanging branch of the oak tree. 

The crows ate my corn, but they do make good watchdogs... er, birds.

The brown creeper and the pine siskin are another story.

 

Katydid had run into the kitchen yesterday afternoon to write down some birds on the list.  "And I saw a brown creeper on the birch tree, Mommy!"

"Oh, wow" I said, wondering what the heck a brown creeper was.  "Wow, a brown creeper."

Fifteen minutes later we were in the front room.  (The birch trees are outside Katydid's window in the back of the house.)  Katydid was digging through her book bin for her math book when we heard a thump at the window.  "That was a bird," Gareth said.  We all peered down into the flower bed and saw a bird, wings outstretched and caught in one of our thorny who-knows-what-they-are landscape bushes.  It had a zig-zag white and yellow patterns on its wings.

"What is that, Katydid?" I asked.  "It's not a sparrow, is it?"

"It's a brown creeper," she said and ran into the laundry room to grab her coat and boots.  

     

Katydid gently freed its wings from the branches of the bush.  Then Farmerboy beat on the window inside and scared the bird so it flew a foot or so to a different part of the bush.  We were all relieved the bird was all right.  The wind was blowing so much that Katydid couldn't get a good shot with the camera, though; the branches were moving too much.

This morning when I added the photo to this blog post I clicked over to All About Birds to see if we really could identify it as a brown creeper.  The answer was: no, it was not a brown creeper.  The beak shape (as you can see) is not curved like a brown creeper's. (However, the bird she saw on the birch tree was indeed a brown creeper because she saw it "creeping".)   So what the heck was this mystery bird?  We're still not really sure, but we think it might be a pine siskin.  No other finchy type bird has yellow bands, and it was definitely not a goldfinch.  I wish I had been able to take a picture of it with its wings outstretched, but the glare in the window was too bad.  Maybe I should have taken the picture anyway!

This morning as I headed out to the chicken coop and watched the chickadees flit back and forth from the trees to the feeder, I thought about Lindsay's suggestion from the comments on this post to google bird rehabilitators.  I wondered if maybe we could get Katydid involved in learning to be a bird rehabilitator.  And then I thought, would I have known about brown creepers or pine siskins or how to identify a Cooper's hawk if we hadn't decided to homeschool? 

Probably not.  And my life would not have been as rich, and I would have felt it, even if I could never have identified what was missing.   

Comments

[Lori]

one of those posts that makes me think - ah, this homeschooling life. how sweet it is. :^)