Northern flicker.
Glorious day. Beautiful sunny cool morning. Solved the big work puzzle I’ve been dealing with since Friday. Got a nice, long bike ride in—fastest, if I might brag, of the year so far—and took my dog to Beech Hill to list up some birds. (Or smell up some scents, depending.)
Black-and-white warbler.
The little woodland species are spreading out, announcing their presences mostly with chips and one-note cries. A few songs—yellowthroat, towhee, mourning dove—but mostly sounds like the descending complaints of veeries, the sharp tchik! of a black-and-white warbler, the familiar alarm note of robins. Even the gobbles of a turkey (oddly, coming from very near a trail where we’d just walked). The filtered, angular afternoon sunlight painted the woods with stripes of black-and-yellow.
As we made the turn toward the summit field, I heard a faint, low whine coming from amid a dense, sunny thicket, just a few feet away. Jack heard it, too. We stopped to listen. The sound stopped. I took a step—and there it was again, resembling the spooky, throaty mewl a cat makes just before a cat fight. Its pitch was moderate, its volume barely audible, but there was something there, just there in the thicket. A little unsettling. But then I remembered the grouse we’d flushed a couple days before maybe a hundred yards farther up the hill. That was the sound—or something like it. A soft, subtle sound of secret warning.
We didn’t stick around. Didn’t want to bother a partridge and her brood—if, in fact, that’s really what it was. At least that’s what I told myself at the time.
Trunks.
No hint of a catbird again today. No redstart, either. In fact, no song sparrow singing from the upper slopes—although again a Savannah trilled from the grassy roof of Beech Nut. We also came upon a flicker on the trail.
Angular light, a cooling breeze, a rush in the leaves of the poplar. The chips of passerines, the gobbles of a turkey. Dragonflies, deer flies. Voices of hermit thrush and pewee from the shady lower woods.
A snapshot of a late summer afternoon.
Beech Hill List
Beginning at 5:15 p.m., I hiked the wooded trails.
1. Red-eyed vireo (v)
2. American goldfinch* (v)
3. Black-capped chickadee (v)
4. Eastern towhee (v)
5. Black-and-white warbler
6. Chestnut-sided warbler
7. Common yellowthroat*
8. Mourning dove
9. Veery
10. Northern flicker
11. Wild turkey (v)
12. Cedar waxwing*
13. American robin*
14. American crow*
15. Savannah sparrow (v)
16. Hermit thrush (v)
17. Ovenbird (v)
18. Eastern wood-pewee (v)
Elsewhere
19. Song sparrow (v)
20. Herring gull
21. Rock pigeon
22. Chipping sparrow (v)
23. Northern cardinal (v)
v = Voice only
*Also elsewhere
Tags: American crow, American goldfinch, American robin, black-and-white warbler, black-capped chickadee, Cedar waxwing, chestnut-sided warbler, chipping sparrow, common yellowthroat, eastern towhee, eastern wood-pewee, hermit thrush, herring gull, mourning dove, northern cardinal, northern flicker, ovenbird, red-eyed vireo, rock pigeon, savannah sparrow, song sparrow, wild turkey
