Finally got out for a little birding yesterday, my first time out in _7_ weeks!! After breakfast, Phil Floyd and I drove up to the Oxley Nature Center here in Tulsa, to look for birds if we could find any, and for dragonflies if/when it got hot(ter). First thing in the morning, the sky looked kinda stormy but seemed to have cleared some after breakfast, and it was cooler than it's been in weeks!! mid-70's, maybe, with just a hint of a breeze. Oh, to be out at 9:00 in the morning and have the temperature only in the 70's.... sheer heaven. We walked through the woods toward Blackbird Marsh, finding the ubiquitous chickadees, a few titmice, Red-eyed Vireo ("here-I-am-where-are-you? here-I-am-where-are-you?"), several flights of honking Canada Geese passing just over the treetops, and a few Downy and Red-bellied Woodpeckers. It had rained during the night altho' the trail was surprisingly dry and passable (it can get verrrrrrry muddy!), and occasionally we were showered with raindrops as the wind riffled the leaves high overhead; it was hard to tell if it was actually raining or just wet leaves shedding their water. We saw "flocks" of tiny Hairstreak butterflies at our feet (didn't have our books with us so we're not sure which species they were), as well as Tiger Swallowtails, Hackberry Emperors, and at least one Question Mark. We found a pair of Prothonotary Warblers in the woods, too, not where I would've expected to find them as they're normally over in the more swampy areas where all the dead trees are, where the Red-headed Woodpeckers generally hang out (and we didn't see a single Red-headed WP the whole morning. I wondered out loud where they were---RHWOs breed in those woods and during spring and the first part of summer, they're all over the place in there). Funny, too, when Phil asked me, "isn't that a female Prothonotary?" and I replied, "I don't know.... I'm looking at the male!" That happens to us a lot: one sees one bird, the other sees another, and it can sometimes take a few minutes before we discover we're not looking at the same bird! There seem to be lots of Carolina Wrens at Oxley this summer---we heard them calling nearly the whole time we were there, which I was glad for since their populations were devasted by the brutal cold we all suffered during the winter of 2001. Phil picked up and showed me a cicada up-close-and-personal, called (I think) a Dog Day Harvester. He said they're the more common variety; there's another Harvester that only emerges about every 7 years. They're kinda scary lookin' with wide-set black eyes and this one had a glossy black "shell," although it had beautiful translucent wings and its legs were bright teal green near the body. As we got close to the Marsh, I heard a Yellow-billed Cuckoo calling (kuh-kuh-kuh-kuh-kuh-kuh-Cowp! Cowp! Cowp! Cowp!.... I just LOVE their call!) and we found a Robin, a Great Crested Flycatcher, and at least (3) Hairy Woodpeckers "in a single pile" right overhead. On average, we only see about one Hairy for every 10-20 Downies we find, so to see 3 (and there may have been 4) Hairies in one fell swoop is awesome! Out in the Marsh, we watched a female Common Yellowthroat flitting about in the reeds as I pished, more wren-like than warbler. Also heard a male Yellowthroat singing nearby, watched several Eastern Bluebirds bug-hunting, and a White-eyed Vireo ("check-the-rear-chick!" (...so I DID!!)) called from the trees on the other side of the Marsh. Nothing at the lake except a shrieking troop of Girl Scouts---about a dozen 8-10-year-old girls and 3 frazzled mothers/guides with younger children in tow. Phil kept asking them, sotto voce, "where's my cookie? I want a cookie!" We waited nearby until they moved on and then had the lake to ourselves, but no matter how hard we scanned, we still only came up with one Great Egret far across the water. By the time we were back on the "mainland," walking along the bank of the creek that separates the marsh from the woods, thunder began rumbling overhead. I asked Phil if he minded birding in the rain and he said, "no, I love it! As long as I don't get crisped by the lightning...," so we kept on walking. We eventually came across another Great Egret and a couple Little Blue Herons and Snowy Egrets, heads hunched down between their shoulders in the shallows as the rain picked up intensity. We walked around the swamp and found 1 Western Kingbird and 2 Eastern Kingbirds perched high in the top of a dead tree, shuddering and shaking their feathers in the rain. We then headed back into the woods proper, both donning our hats (which we'd taken off in the cool shade of the trees) against the rain, and soon found ourselves near the picnic shelter building where we sought cover, altho' I was dismayed to find the Girl Scouts had also taken up residence there during the rain. They were seated around one of the picnic tables, noisily eating their lunch, so Phil and I settled ourselves on a table at the other side (with the bathroom building in between for protection from the noise of a dozen little girls shouting at each other), and sat together in companionable silence, watching the rain and now-and-then chatting quietly about this or that. Alas, after they finished eating, the little girls began chasing each other around the restroom building, and the decibel level of their noise grew in direct proportion to their excitement at their game. I told Phil, "at least they're girls; if they were boys, there'd be a lot more noise!" "Yeah," he replied, "but girls can shriek higher than boys can!" Well, he had a point there. Finally, the volume and pitch of the noise drove us back out into the rain and we tromped back to the Visitors Building and the car. We finished the morning with about 34-35 species altogether, nothing spectacular, but just the great pleasure and bliss of getting out to look for birds. It's like I've heard said before about fishing: if there were a guarantee that you'd _catch_ every fish you see, they'd call it "catching," not "fishing." (I think Bernd Heinrich's "A Year in the Maine Woods" is where I first read that remark.) And so I think it is with "birding"---the idea isn't necessarily to FIND, but just to LOOK. Finding is a bonus. ~:-D |
| FINDING MY BLISS Oxley Nature Center, Tulsa August 25, 2002 |
| (c) copyrighted by C.Browning 2002 |
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