The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher
September 13, 2024
Summer leans into fall. September, it seems, is the month of seedheads. Flowers whither, grasses bleach, both pushing their future out of reach of their neighbors in one last frenetic effort to own tomorrow. Scarlet morning glory twists its vines in a stranglehold among the pods of thistle, goldeneye, and penstemon. Among the grasses, one particular grama is winning, its multitude of oat-like seeds dangling in paired rows, always on one side of the flattened stalks.
The seeds have brought the seedeaters.
Dozens of newly arrived chipping sparrows forage in the goldeneye. Feeding blue grosbeaks, lazuli and indigo buntings slake their thirst in the backyard pond. But my favorite, a harbinger of the change of seasons, is the green-tailed towhee.
This week, the chestnut-capped birds with a tail the color of asparagus began mewing from the dark, overgrown (unmown) and brushy margins of the yard. When one dipped into the fountain for a bath this morning, it was the first I’d seen since May, the usual month the birds depart the yard for high montane thickets like those in the White Mountains where I normally see them during my summer fishing trips to the East Fork of the Black River.
Today, the towhees are back. Shadow-dwellers for the months of long shadows.
Winter is coming.
Thanks for reading! Still more to come…
Just lovely, Ken. Evokes the season.
For several years I used to make yearly migrations or perhaps peregrinations up to the East Fork with a buddy of mine. He would fish and I would hike and in-between we played wiffleball. We drove down the road until there was no one beyond us and that’s where we camped. The last trip I took up there I took the girls along, while they were still pretty young. It was work and I never got a chance to break out the camera once. Good memories.