Hills.
Lovely, mostly sunny, chilly day. Spent much like yesterday, by me, at my kitchen table, being productive. Jack napped for much of it. Toward late afternoon, we took our usual break. Our hike break. Our Beech Hill hike break.
Bare slope.
Today we met my friend Liz and her boy Daniel in the parking lot. Jack was happy to see them (and vice versa, I’m pretty sure). A bit of wind was blowing—a chilly wind, which made for a brisk hike up. Not much in the way of bird life did we see. A couple crows, a flicker calling from down the eastern slope. Oddly, no sparrows appeared. But I scanned Chickawaukie Lake for the coots, and I spotted a little raft of them. Decided to add them to the list today. What the heck.
I did hear the chips of a couple yellow-rumps in overflight. And another chip on our way down, whose source I managed to spot, as a little warbler lit in one of the trailside birches. I got a pretty good look at it through binoculars—yellowish, dark eye-stripe—enough to identified it to my satisfaction as a south-bound palm. When it flew, it flew in a southerly direction.
Arriving back at the parking lot, I heard chickadees in the trees. The tiny sound of them always makes me want to look a little nearer, and sure enough there were a couple yellow-rumps flitting up there among them. Spotted a solitary blue jay bob away across the road. As Jack fetched a stick back in the far lot, I tracked the voice of a woodpecker that turned out to be a hairy, hammering trunk bark.
Birch.
The final bird? A brown creeper—whose call from somewhere above us I know by heart by now.
Beech Hill List
Beginning at 4:15 p.m., I hiked the open trail.
1. American crow
2. Northern flicker (voice)
3. American coot
4. Yellow-rumped warbler
5. Palm warbler
6. Black-capped chickadee
7. Blue jay
8. Hairy woodpecker
9. Brown creeper (voice)
Elsewhere
10. House sparrow
11. Herring gull
Tags: American coot, American crow, black-capped chickadee, blue jay, brown creeper, hairy woodpecker, herring gull, house sparrow, northern flicker, palm warbler, yellow-rumped warbler
