Hitchcock in January

I've seen the grackle swarm before, January 26, 2008, - an army, sky blackened by grackles. A grackle carpet. This time they had an audience, one hawk.

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Shades of Hitchcock

There's a specific sound when hundreds, thousands of birds arrive en masse,.. flapping wings, cackles. THE BIRDS. It was beautifully quiet for a couple of hours at Tanner Spring, small birds coming to drink then darting off. Suddenly there was a change, first the sound, then the blackness. Grackles. Hundreds. Thousands. I've seen this before at migration time. It stops everyone in their tracks. You can't not gawk. A sweep of birds. A sky-full of birds. A carpet of birds. They arrive and swirl left and right, up in the air, down on the ground, like a giant seed vacuum cleaner. And it was inevitable that they'd come to the spring for some water. Little birds, beware. The gang is here. Grackles are very smart. They know that if they find a piece of hard bread they can dunk it and it will soften. But acorns don't melt. One grackle showed up with an acorn. Dunk, dunk. No help. It's very hard to take pictures if you're laughing your head off. If that grackle eventually swallowed the acorn there's no telling what its insides would look like.

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Downstairs in the garden

Autumn is so lovely. I went down this morning to look at the gorgeous colors. All was so calm. The trees are doing their thing. The groundskeepers were vacuuming up leaves. And then my world shifted....... autumn magic.

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Nibble, nibble, crunch, crunch

I'm used to seeing squirrels with peanuts. Finding them gorging on seed pods is a real treat. They were all doing it, tossing around in the dry leaves, finding pods, breaking them open, removing the beans and gobbling them down, discarding the husk. Chomp, chomp... then when full they'd go up a tree and scratch. There were hundreds of seed pods. Fat funny little squirrels putting on weight for the coming cold winter.

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An apple a day....

This can't be easy for a gull. There's no traction. But gulls will eat anything. So there was this gull perched on a rock. I was watching the bird so intensely that I didn't notice what the bird was watching,- someone about to toss food into the river. My lens yesterday was not the best for getting birds in flight. Never mind. You'll get the gist of this. The gull ate as much of the apple as it wanted and then flew north. The apple floated south in the sweeping current.

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Marathon Sunday

Marathon Sunday is the day to avoid Central Park (if you're not a runner). With no particular expectations I went off to Riverside Drive mostly to get the fresh air.

The first stop was at the area where the hawks had built their nest in the spring. A flash of red caught my eye. House finch. How nice. That was different. The autumn colors are gorgeous, but I expected no birds.

Further up the path a squirrel was hugging the side of a tree. I did a double-take. It had something in its mouth. I stared at it. It stared at me. A seed pod! I've seen squirrels eat just about everything, but never these seed pods, the same pods that the cedar waxwings like. Poor undernourished squirrels. All gorging on seedpods. Building up fat for the coming winter.

Now the day was becoming fun. What's next? That's when I spotted a mockingbird and it watched me, a young mocker. It came to the fence and sat and sat and sat. I started talking to it, "I love you", "You're so beautiful", "Pretty bird",..... then I started whistling opera. Mozart. If someone walks along and hears a bird singing "Der Vogelfaenger bin ich ja"...... it's my fault.

By now I was very happy. This was turning into a grand day. I did see the hawks soaring on high. Maybe they'll build a nest near here again. And I saw a gull eating an apple in the river. Gulls will eat anything, but apple bobbing can't be easy for a gull.

The next came as a surprise. I heard . "twee twee", the call of the kinglet. But migration is over. It's November. Obviously nobody told the kinglets, because morning and afternoon I kept seeing them, at least 12, ruby crowned and golden, flitting kinglets gorging on buglets.

I'll post more images in the next couple of days. These are just a few samples of today's joy.

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