Nature comes surprisingly close

Yesterday a group of four deer strolled through my back yard--two small does and two fawns. The fawns were old enough that they've lost their spots, which seems a little early, but they clearly haven't been through their first winter.

Then this morning, right after I re-filled the bird feeder, I saw what may have been an eastern kingbird, but it came and went (twice) so quickly that I couldn't get a picture. Whatever he was, he's new, and this is the first new species I've noticed since June. Also present this morning were a grackle (who was more interested in suet), a cardinal, two Carolina chickadees, and a tufted titmouse. In the last few days I've also seen a Carolina wren or two, some mourning doves, some finches (I keep going back and forth on whether they're house finches or purple finches), some robins (they never come to the feeder, but I see them in the back yard) and an eastern towhee.

And then just a few minutes ago, a blue-tailed skink came skittering into my office. God knows how he got in here--I suppose it doesn't say much for the quality of the weatherstripping on the front door. Strange--I really don't like snakes at all, even non-poisonous ones, but lizards don't bother me. I saw a big black snake slithering through the short grass a few feet out my back door a few weeks ago, and it's fine with me if he keeps right on going and never comes back.

One more thing about snakes: Cathy tells me that most people have an innate fear of snakes. I was surprised, because I wasn't aware of my own distaste for them until I was in my early twenties, and I know lots of people (adolescent boys, particularly) who seem fascinated by them, but she's usually right about these things. The black snake in my back yard was pretty long--maybe four feet--and the grass was short enough that he was plainly visible as he sped (my Audobon book refers to the species (colubor constrictor) as an Eastern Racer) about three feet away from my bird feeder, which was full of seeds. There are usually three or four birds on the feeder at once, fussing at each other, and more sitting on nearby branches, waiting to fly in and bump somebody else off. There are two squirrels who live in a nearby tree and a chipmunk who dug his burrow about two feet from the base of the feeder. Some of all of them are almost always under the bird feeder, nibbling on seeds the birds have dropped. When the black snake passed by, though, there were no birds at the feeder, no birds on nearby low branches, and no squirrels or chipmunks darting around under the feeder. Everything was quiet. From this I deduce that all of the birds and mammals in my back yard were either the right size for a black snake meal or had nearby offspring that might be, and that the fear of snakes is not only instinctual and innate, but that it crosses species and genera.

Canada geese

Yesterday I saw a flock of seven or eight Canada geese near a pond on Weaver Dairy Road here in Chapel Hill. So many have ceased migrating and taken up permanent residence here that they are widely regarded as pests. The curious thing to wonder about, though, is why so many stopped migrating in the last fifty years. Geese in permanent residence were unknown seventy years ago, now there are large colonies in several mid-Atlantic states. Birds migrate for a variety of reasons--seasonal availability of food, inclement weather, to find breeding partners, to find nesting grounds that are free from predation, disease, and parasites among them--but my reading suggests that migration is largely instinctual. Cage a migratory bird and it will become restless and agitated when it would migrate if free. That the geese can give up their migration in a few generations, and that successive generations don't seem to feel the urge to migrate, either suggests that the seasonal migration of geese is learned.

I've heard that deer in North America once migrated seasonally, but stopped in the nineteenth century when their numbers fell precipitously due to overhunting, and that once the generation who knew the migration patterns died off, succeeding generations never took it up again.

Back Yard Bird-Watching

On June 10, 2008 I put up a bird feeder in my back yard, I live in a semi-wooded neighborhood in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with a fairly deep lot and some mature red oaks and pines. There's a large cane break that straddles my back yard and my neighbor's. It's big enough that a family of five or six deer frequently hide in there during the winter. They never seem to be around in the summer.

Since I put up the bird feeder, I've seen the following birds:

June 14, 2008

house finch (male)
cardinal (male)
house sparrow
house finch (female)
cardinal (female)

June 15, 2008

carolina chickadee (poecile carolinensis)
tufted titmouse (baelophus bicolor)

June 19, 2008

mockingbird (he was not in my back yard, but outside 1829 Franklin Street)

June 20, 2008

Carolina wren (thyrothorus ludovianus)
yellow-bellied sapsucker (female) (very strange-looking bird, and only seen this one day)
American robin (male) (turdus migratoris)

June 21, 2008

yellow-bellied sapsucker (male) (also seen just this once)
American robin (female)
mourning dove (zenaida macroura)

June 21, 2008

American goldfinch (male) (beautiful; sadly I haven't seen him since)
common grackle (quizcalus quizcula)
American goldfinch (female) (carduelis tristis)

June 23, 2008

wood thrush (hylocichla mustelina)
eastern towhee

June 26, 2008

red-bellied woodpecker (both male and female; I'd been seeing them on an off since I first put up the feeder, but had trouble identifying them)