I was tempted to put “knot” on my bird list today, considering I’ve got one in my stomach after having had urgent server problems each of the past two days. Today it was a mailserver that decided to act up. Jack and I did manage to make it to Beech Hill by 8 this morning to help manage the free blueberry pick up there—a foggy, birdy morning it was—but within an hour I’d fielded two emergency calls from clients and had to abandon ship. Took until nearly noon, but I did manage to get the thing working again.

By that time, the fog had lifted and the sun had emerged and the day had grown warm and humid. Traffic was high as I then rode my bicycle up to Camden to make an appearance at my friend Emmet’s annual back-yard wing-ding, which was (as always) nice. In fact, while chatting on his back deck, I counted at least eight or nine birds—including a red-tailed hawk that soared lazily overhead until a kestrel suddenly appeared out of nowhere and began dive-bombing the much larger bird, which soon got annoyed and flapped away. Robin, crow, goldfinch, song sparrow, waxwing.

I rode back via downtown and out past Aldermere Farm, then pedaled to Rockland to retrieve my work mail. No particularly notable cycling sightings.

But in late-afternoon, I stepped out onto my deck just in time to see a large dark bird flit silently behind some leaves and onto the trunk of a partly dead pine tree at the north edge of the property. Didn’t get a good look, but I knew what it was and tiptoed back inside for my camera.

For close to an hour I crept about the deck and flat roof back there, taking photos of a beautiful pileated woodpecker. I watched her slowly make her way up the pine trunk, pausing at particularly fruitful patches of bark, tapping softly—softly, I think because of the dampness—yet gouging large verticle holes. After she’d reached the upper narrows, she flapped down to a low spot on the trunk of a maple maybe thirty feet away and slowly worked her way up that tree. Then she flew up into the big limbs of the huge oak overhanging me—including the limb with the nuthatch cavity in it—and poked around up there for fifteen minutes or more.

I stood quietly below, snapping photos. It was a challenge—she mostly kept to the other sides of trunks and branches or hidden in foliage—but I ended up with more than five hundreds shots. And when you take that many, you can often get two or three half-way decent ones.

While watching the woodpecker, I heard titmice, chickadees, goldfinches somewhere in the periphery.

And tonight, the waxing moon got caught in the branches of the oak tree.

Beech Hill List
Beginning at 7:45 a.m., I hiked the wooded trails—and about half the open trail.

1. Cedar waxwing
2. Black-capped chickadee (voice)
3. American crow
4. Eastern towhee (voice)
5. American goldfinch (voice)
6. Gray catbird
7. Common yellowthroat (voice)
8. Red-eyed vireo (voice)
9. Chestnut-sided warbler
10. Alder flycatcher
11. Eastern phoebe
12. Song sparrow (voice)
13. Field sparrow (voice)
14. Pileated woodpecker (voice)
15. Tree swallow
16. Northern flicker
17. American robin (voice)
18. Black-throated green warbler (voice)

Elsewhere

19. Northern cardinal
20. Mourning dove
21. Herring gull
22. Red-tailed hawk
23. American kestrel
24. Tufted titmouse

Tags: alder flycatcher, American crow, American goldfinch, American kestrel, American robin, black-capped chickadee, black-throated green warbler, Cedar waxwing, chestnut-sided warbler, common yellowthroat, eastern phoebe, eastern towhee, field sparrow, gray catbird, herring gull, mourning dove, northern cardinal, northern flicker, pileated woodpecker, red-eyed vireo, red-tailed hawk, song sparrow, tree swallow, tufted titmouse

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 6th, 2011 at 10:11 pm and is filed under Lists, Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.