Diario de chloesardonis

For this first journal entry, I walked out from my house on the dead end road towards the trailhead for Scragg Mountain. It was 3:15 pm on February 11th, 2019. It was sunny and clear but chilly and there was a cold breeze. I bundled up and prepared to be moving slowly or not at all for an hour and a half. When I first started walking, I didn't see any movement in the trees and I didn't hear any birds calling. After walking for a couple minutes, I stopped and held still and I began to hear some Black-capped Chickadees calling. As I passed by my neighbor's house I heard the chickadee's song and started seeing movement in a tree near their bird feeder. When I got close to the feeder I started seeing a lot of darting back and forth between trees and the feeder. I cut through a field and over to the wood's edge to observe other birds around.

Aside from the chickadees that were in fairly large numbers, I saw a Red-breasted Nuthatch in an apple tree. I saw two dark-colored birds perched high in a tree and when I zoomed in on the with my camera I could tell they were European Starlings. As I was walking towards the tree they were in, I noticed a silhouette of a bird perched that looked like a Mourning Dove or Rock Pigeon and as I got closer to it, I could tell it was a Mourning Dove. I saw a second one fly out of a different tree. In thinking about flight, I was watching all the ways each species looked different in flight. When the starlings flew, they had fast wing beats and a pause, fast wing beats and a pause, which reminded me of a much less dramatic version of the woodpecker's flight, where it dropped a little in the pauses.

When I actually saw the Hairy Woodpeckers, I saw how much more extreme their version of that flight pattern was. The flight of the Hairy Woodpecker involves flapping as they fly upwards and then dropping down, flapping up, dropping down, but forward motion and slightly rounded. Compared to the European Starling, the distance between the peaks and the troughs are much bigger even if the style is kind of similar. The Starling had fast flaps with a little pause but they didn't drop down quite as significantly. This would make differentiating the Hairy Woodpecker from the other birds I observed very easy, but perhaps not as easy if I was trying to differentiate woodpeckers. In looking at the wing shape of the Hairy Woodpecker, they are not that long but they are wide, almost an elliptical wing shape. This means they are probably good at taking off fast, or rising up, but not as good at soaring. This makes sense with their flight pattern which is almost like always flying up when they are flapping and always going down when they aren't. Likely they spend time in woods and in and around trees where they don't have to go long distances but they do have to maneuver around branches. Also, the fact that they were here in Vermont this time of year means likely they aren't migratory and don't need to fly long distances.

I also watched what I think was a Black-capped Chickadee fly up really high with a lot of direction changes and fast movements. I am not a hundred percent sure of what it was but it was small and white underneath and I hadn't noticed that flight pattern before where it kept changing direction in midair for no reason that was clear to me. I'm not sure if this was a common flight pattern or just a particular individual with a reason.

I also saw a different kind of bird that was very small and it was spending quite a bit of time on the ground instead of in the trees like the Black-Capped Chickadees. I was able to get a picture of it and it was very quickly identified as the Common Redpoll.