UVM Ornithology Journal Post 2

Date- 2/23/2024
Start time - 17:20
End time - 18:24
Location - Green Mountain Audubon Center, Huntington VT
Weather - No precipitation, wind at 2 Beaufort scale, 40ºF, sunny but got dark
Habitat(s) - Inner woods, forest edge, wetland area- a mix of all three. Not a lot of area in each habitat, but enough to form a good amount of livable space.

Today's notes:

I went out to the Green Mountain Audubon Center in Huntington, a place that I grew up at and have volunteered and worked at for a good amount of time- it's a place very near and dear to my heart.

Hearing the saw-whet owl made me and my birding buddy stand still and then jump up and down with excitement once we realized what it was! I have never heard a saw-whet here at Audubon in all my years of frequently parading around in the woods at night, so it was very special to not only hear that but to share it as well. I think my favorite thing about birding is sharing my knowledge (and coming up with questions pertaining to things neither me nor my birding buddy(ies) can answer) and seeing people get excited about birds in the same way that I am!

Seeing especially as we went later in the day, there were hardly any birds out and about, and the fact that it was hovering around the 40 degree mark made it so that the birds didn't need to be constantly gathering food to maintain body temperature. Even the busy little chickadees were hunkered down. At the Audubon, there are a wide variety of food sources available to birds- there are lots of species of trees and a variety of different habitats. Some examples of food sources in winter include acorns, seeds, and insects in tree bark. In the summer, diets would include more berries and insects, as those are both more plentiful in the warmer months. The Green Mountain Audubon Center has lots of snags available for nesting and overnight shelter. Birds may also be resting in some of the thick evergreen canopy toward the edge of one specific clearing (Beaver Pond), or just in any branches of any trees if they are hardy enough to handle 40 degrees without additional shelter.

What's challenging in terms of snags and birds sheltering at the Audubon is that people (me) often are walking the trails during the day and dusk, which can be disruptive to birds at rest. Most of the snags were also not in areas accessible to me, i.e. in the middle of a shallow pond, so I was not able to thwack on them to check for birds. However, there are a lot of snags at the Audubon in general, so the coordination between absence at dusk, when we went, and bird occupation of those snags was most likely very strong because of the availability of those snags. Snags are important because they provide necessary shelter and nesting habitat. Chickadees, nuthatches, and woodpeckers make their homes in the snags, all of which being very common species that make up the large majority of what I see when I birdwatch here.

הועלה ב-פברואר 24, 2024 03:30 לפנה"צ על ידי laureno1