We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
You have probably never seen one, but this cat-sized member of the weasel tribe is not rare in New England woodlands. While famous for living on porcupines and squirrels, Fishers will eat anything they can catch (but they do not eat fish).
"Due to its alert, secretive nature and solitary habits, most people have never seen this interesting predator. It disappeared from the state by the 19th Century due to agricultural land clearing. Fishers have since made an amazing comeback, and now live in populated areas that offer mature forest habitat and the squirrels it preys on."
The White Shark (aka Great White Shark, thanks to Hollywood) is a worldwide critter of primarily temperate coastal areas. They live on fish, and marine mammals when they can find them.
They do not mind cold water or warm water, but just follow the food. Below migration patterns of White Shark in the eastern US.
Most other sharks of the Northeastern US follow similar north-south migration patterns. While never common inland, Long Island Sound hosts Blue Sharks and Hammerhead Sharks in summer months.
Why are we seeing more White Sharks in the Northeaster summers these days? Because of conservation. The US Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 has resulted in dramatic increases in the numbers of Harbor Seals and Grey Seals. These blubbery critters, which can resemble humans in wetsuits, are favorite foods.
Other conservation efforts, such as limiting the trawler harvests of Menhaden ("Bunker"), have resulted in an abundance of food for sharks, seals, Ospreys, Eagles, porpoises, and dolphin. All of those critters historically lived in the southern New England seacoast.
These birds are similar to the very abundant Sandhill Cranes, and can interbreed with them.
Sandhill Cranes are huntable and highly edible. They taste like Swan, I am told. Do not shoot a Whooping Crane. The US has an eastern flock, and the famous western flock.
With a flock this small, conservation is promising but not guaranteed.
I can hear, out my window this morning, the songs and calls of Pine Warbler, Black and White Warbler, Redstart, Red-eyed Vireo (not exactly a warbler), Magnolia Warbler, Yellow Warbler, Black-Throated Blue, Parula, Prairie Warbler, and a few more that I am not sure about.
My idea of watching the spring warblers is a chaise lounge lawn chair flat, under a big old oak tree with binocs. Preferably, a big oak near some juniper trees - which is why I planted my junipers and Japanese willows: to watch the warbler migration with minimal exertion. Let them come to you. Just wait for them to pass through the trees. Otherwise, it's a day of neck pain. Knowing their calls simplifies it: you don't have to try to see them. But plenty of them forage silently in the treetops. Especially the odd vireos.
Get out there and see these little jewels of Creation, and listen to their morning calls, as they pass by on their trip north.
I have had two or three expert birder companions in my life who had musical talent. You could take them for a hike without binocs or anything, and they would point and identify everything they heard.
Sad to say, I lack a musical brain, and my memory for bird songs and bird calls is weak and requires constant refreshment. It's funny, but some things stick to my brain like Crazy Glue and some sorts of things do not.
If birding is one of your hobbies (birding/hiking), you know that you hear far more than you can see. It's fun to see, because you get the idea of a species' habits. But if identification matters to you, sound is easier than straining your neck to find a Vireo in the top of an oak tree.
I've considered birding without ever looking at anything. Sitting on a log, say, during Spring migration and just listening for an hour or two. I know that I would be exasperated.
Can you readily tell a Rose Breasted Grosbeak from a Robin or an Oriole? And those are easy.
He or she has been skulking around my rose bushes this week. These guys are often early migrants. The rusty tail is a good field mark for this thrushy-looking thrush.
In the Northeast, we have two non-migratory thrushes which are not thrushy-looking: The Robin and the Eastern Bluebird.
The topic came up with friends the other day. Consider the speed at which some species fly (ducks over 50 mph, for example), not to mention the speeds of diving predators.
Just a couple of weeks left to get your new Wood Duck houses up, and, if you want to place your boxes in water, it's easier to do if you can walk on the ice and punch a hole to hammer a post into the shallows. That is, if you have any sturdy ice on your pond or marsh.
The males arrive to their breeding grounds in March, and hunt for nesting boxes and holes and crevices in trees before the gals arrive later in April.
If you have a stream or fresh water pond or marsh nearby, they will welcome your effort. Remember, there is no limit to the number of boxes you can place in or near a marsh - these birds are not territorial. I try to add one each year.
I place them on dead trees in the shallows of the beaver marsh, and nail a 3' aluminum flashing on the tree to deter coons and Blacksnakes. Some I put on a post in about 3-6' of water with a strong cement base. I always add a few inches of wood shavings on the bottom.
You can also put them in trees near ponds and marshes,
Our piece on Wood Duck here. I won't shoot a Wood Duck unless by mistake. They are highly edible, but too small. My joy is just to see them around, and my worry is just how many Snapping Turtles and egrets eat the young ones.
Three species of Asian Carp have invaded the Mississippi watershed. They are destroying the native ecosystem but, like most invasive species, there is no way to get rid of them.
I did a double-take when I passed one of these guys perched on a tree beside the highway. In winter, hawks along a highway are generally always Red-Tails, so this smaller guy's rusty chest in the sunlight surprised me.
Red-Shoulders tend to be birds of the lowlands, but in migration times you can see anything anywhere.
The teams of good guys who replaced bad wood with azic and repainted our house thought it was fun to renovate one of my wren houses too during their lunch breaks (sometimes chickadees take it, though. I don't care).
We had a major migrant wave last night. Most songbirds migrate at night. This morning, flocks of cheeping and chipping White Throated Sparrows and Juncos all over the HQ.
That's my Sugar Maple today, with dumpster and porta-potty. The dumpsters keep getting smaller, which is a good sign that we are getting to the end of fix-up.
Non-breeding plumage can be confusing with birds, most especially with warblers. If you can ID fall and winter warblers, I'd term you an expert birder.
You may never have observed one of these predatory songbirds, but it's the time of year when they come down from their tundra breeding grounds for the winter.
They look a bit like Mockingbirds, but their behavior, and a good look at their plumage and beak, makes the ID clear. They are typically seen hunting from a perch or wire over open areas.
A splendid North American bird in the woodpecker clan. Very fond of eating ants, too. Noticed an influx of them in the past two weeks and learned that they are in the semi-migratory category. Their northernmost breeders move south a bit.
There are other jays in North America, but the bold and noisy Blue Jay of eastern North America is the most familiar. Like some other bird species, the Blue Jay is not so much common as it is conspicuous.
A mystery about Blue Jays is their migration. When I lived on Riverside Drive in NYC a century or two ago I watched thousands of Jays flying south in early October, all day long, through Riverside Park. I was confused by that, because Blue Jays are wintertime residents in the Northeast.
I suspect that Blue Jays, along with other species, move a bit south but within their breeding ranges (like Robins, Red-Tailed Hawks, and others). There is some evidence that yearling birds are more likely to travel.
Thus, in wintertime, New England Jays might be Quebec or Ontario breeders, or might be local breeders. Can't tell the difference.
That's what our pal Roger's wife terms them. English Sparrow, aka House Sparrow, aka Dumpster Birds, were imported from England in the early 1800s to help clean the NYC streets of horse manure and other detritus.
Their population spread rapidly.
They are not sparrows, they are a sort of european finch. Like rats, they are highly adapted to live amongst civilization, and can never be found in woods or meadows but they like working barns.
This morning, I ripped up a large loaf of stale bread and tossed it in the driveway to do my version of Loaves and Fishes, without the fish. Within 15 minutes, the MacDonalds birds arrived. Their activity attracted a bunch of Grackles (native to North America), and then a handful of hungry Red Wing Blackbirds. A few chipmunks came out for breakfast, and finally a couple of Blue Jays. A Mourning Dove stopped by to have a taste. I fed multitudes. In 2 hours, it was all cleaned up.
Photo is a female. You can see that they have a finch bill, not a sparrow's.
Men, and some women, love these activities. I do not mean lawn-mowing, I mean meadow maintenance without grazing animals on the land. Yeah, ideally you want cattle. Have you even found a pile of snake eggs beneath a cow pie? I did, once.
In New England, we have become so accustomed to the pastoral sight of meadows and fields that we forget that they are not natural. These were created out of the wilderness with tremendous effort for grazing and farming. Neglect them for 5 years, and they will be beyond repair because nature wants them to become woodland again.
At the farm, we have had meadows suitable for haying or grazing, areas that require annual brushwacking (because more brush than grasses in those areas), and steeps that need scything or something similar.
These sorts of land maintenance are deeply satisfying and, with machines, deeply relaxing with a cold beer or three. No lifting, work gets done. Somebody observed that open field maintenance is like running one's hand over the curves of one's beloved.
Haying for real hay is tricky. Timing is everything. Around here, July for commercial haying. You need the hay to go to seed, and then you need to let it dry after cut before the baler. No rain. Stored wet hay can spontaneously combust in storage, or, at least, turn moldy. You know that already.
With the dairy business moving out of New England, and horses fewer and fewer, we had no market for hay. We switched to conservation mode which is a non-economic mode.
The non-economic conservation mode for open-space maintenance is based on the idea that meadow critters (meadow-nesting birds, rodents, snakes, etc) are pretty much done by late July. However, many wildflowers are at their best in July and August and the bugs and butterflies rely on them.
We recommend mowing/brushwacking non-commercial, ungrazed meadows once per year in early September or late August. Let the mowings lie. They will mostly disintegrate by April.
If you like walking paths, keep them mowed like lawns, about 8' wide paths so you can stroll around your grounds with a coffee or whisky and ceegar without getting soaked with dew or infested with ticks while bird-watching.
We had a wet meadow in a flood plain along our trout stream (with trout pool for swimming) where the grasses and sedges grew so thick that once/year was not manageable. We had to brushwack that 5 acres patch twice/year or the machine could not handle the density of the lush growth. I was sadly aware, though, that the wetland meadow critters (Wood Turtles, Leopard Frogs, snakes, toads, etc) did not appreciate that at all and I felt bad about damaging that habitat and sometimes killing them. I wonder if it might have been left well-enough alone, but it's just what we always did.
It is said that the D-Day armada witnessed a swarm of 
You have probably never seen one, but this cat-sized member of the weasel tribe is not rare in New England woodlands. While famous for living on porcupines and squirrels, Fishers will eat anything they can catch (but they do not eat fish). 
Seeing Endangered Whooping Cranes Step Through the Fog of Extinction -
thought I glimpsed a female yesterday, but today I saw a male picking weed seeds out of my lawn. If they are nesting nearby, I am delighted.
It is ramping up right now. 
I have had two or three expert birder companions in my life who had musical talent. You could take them for a hike without binocs or anything, and they would point and identify everything they heard.
He or she has been skulking around my rose bushes this week. These guys are often early migrants. The rusty tail is a good field mark for 
Just a couple of weeks left to get your new Wood Duck houses up, and, if you want to place your boxes in water, it's easier to do if you can walk on the ice and punch a hole to hammer a post into the shallows. That is, if you have any sturdy ice on your pond or marsh.
The teams of good guys who replaced bad wood with azic and repainted our house thought it was fun to renovate one of my wren houses too during their lunch breaks (sometimes chickadees take it, though. I don't care).
We had a major migrant wave last night. Most songbirds migrate at night. This morning, flocks of cheeping and chipping White Throated Sparrows and Juncos all over the HQ.
That's my Sugar Maple today, with dumpster and porta-potty. The dumpsters keep getting smaller, which is a good sign that we are getting to the end of fix-up.
Non-breeding plumage can be confusing with birds, most especially with warblers. If you can ID fall and winter warblers, I'd term you an expert birder. 
You may never have observed one of these predatory songbirds, but it's the time of year when they come down from their tundra breeding grounds for the winter.
There are other jays in North America, but the bold and noisy Blue Jay of eastern North America is the most familiar. Like some other bird species, the Blue Jay is not so much common as it is conspicuous.
That's what our pal Roger's wife terms them. English Sparrow, aka