Ghost Turtles

David Sibley: "I saw a Cooper’s Hawk catch a Rock Pigeon a few days ago. By itself that experience is noteworthy – a Rock Pigeon is a big bird for a Cooper’s Hawk to handle – but more remarkable was the way the attack unfolded. | I was just finishing a birding walk at a local farm. Ahead of me was a small field, recently plowed, where twenty or so Rock Pigeons were foraging on the ground. Another bird was about ten feet up and flying across the field toward the flock. I didn’t give it much thought. It was just another pigeon making the sort of relaxed, floating approach that pigeons do – or so I thought. Except that when this “pigeon” got within about five feet of the pigeons on the ground it suddenly transformed into a Cooper’s Hawk!| The pigeons all burst into flight, but much too late. The hawk was already among them and knocked one out of the air in a cloud of feathers.

For two days in the week of Nov. 8, you will find me, for part of the day, sitting in the rocking chair near my back door, counting the birds visiting my feeder. Nov. 8 marks the beginning of another Project FeederWatch season. | Project FeederWatch is a winter-long survey of birds that visit feeders at backyards, nature centers, community areas, and other locales in North America. FeederWatchers periodically count the birds they see at their feeders from November through early April and send their counts to Project FeederWatch. FeederWatch data help scientists track broad scale movements of winter bird populations and long-term trends in bird distribution and abundance. | Project FeederWatch was started as an Ontario based feeder survey, begun in 1976 by Dr. Erica Dunn of Long Point Observatory. By 2014, it had grown into an international research project, co-sponsored by Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Bird Studies Canada.

"Long Point Bay on Lake Erie is a world Biosphere Reserve, putting my local hole in league with the Great Barrier Reef. Until recently, this is something I was unaware of. I grew up here in Norfolk County and have fished the inner bay since before I could walk, but I never realized its importance to the Great Lakes system. I knew there was awesome bass fishing in the summer and that we have huge migrations of waterfowl that stop in the vast marshland surrounding the bay, but never really stepped back to realize how lucky I was to live in such a diverse freshwater fishery. Although Lake Erie is the smallest of all the Great Lakes, it’s huge; it’s a Great Lake. Kayaks are small and human powered, which makes for some limitations and challenges, but the rewards can be huge! Yak fishers have to fish for whatever we can reach on any given day, or time of year. The smaller size and shallower depth of Lake Erie mean its conditions can get nasty and dangerous very quickly. I have had my fair share of outings that I would not wish upon anyone. Those experiences have only taught me to be smarter about where I launch, or what days to even consider venturing out onto the water."

Whether climate change is adversely impacting wolverines, something the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service believes is uncertain, is being challenged by a coalition of conservation groups that is suing the agency to provide Endangered Species Act protection to the small carnivores. | Earlier this year Noreen Walsh, director of the agency’s Mountain-Prairie Region, which includes Wyoming and Montana, decided there wasn’t enough evidence to demonstrate climate change was adversely affecting the species, according to a story in the Los Angeles Times. That development led other biologists outside Fish and Wildlife to speculate that politics, not science, had forced that decision. | On Monday eight conservation groups announced they would challenge that decision in court.

Excerpt from “Flight Maps: Adventures With Nature in Modern America” (1999) by Jennifer Price: “The colonists appreciated pigeons in other ways, too. They valued the wildlife and lands around them for many reasons at once. Wild pigeons were economic resources to shoot and eat and to sell. They were also a natural wonder, and an occasion for celebration. | In fact, the wild pigeons fueled the widely shared conviction that Americans could never deplete their resources. While in the 1990s, that logic may be hard to grasp, colonists perhaps would have had to summon even greater imaginative powers to envision the comparatively empty, devastated landscapes that have become so familiar to us. Six-foot lobsters in the surf, rivers swarming with salmon and covered with ducks, woods "abounding with deer, and the trees with singing birds": the abundance of North American wildlife in the 1600s and early 1700s sounds almost as biblical today as it must have seemed to European settlers (with decidedly more biblical turns of mind) who left behind Old World lands that had been overhunted for centuries, and where the upper classes held game preserves under strict control. While even the first settlers depended primarily on domestic European crops and livestock, they supplemented freely with wild game. Occasionally, when the crops failed due to drought or an early freeze, colonists relied on hunting as an essential stopgap. Reports to England seldom failed to mention the free and abundant game, or the wild pigeons: "I have seen them fly as if the airy regiment had been pigeons, seeing neither beginning or ending, length or breadth of these millions of millions." | To shoot and eat a game bird in the American colonies became a defining New World act. Think of Thomas Morton in Massachusetts in the 1620s, reporting back that he had seen a thousand geese "before the mouth of my gun," and had fed his "dogs with as fat geese there as I have ever fed upon myself in England." The geese were American. So was their easy abundance, their impressive lard-to-bone ratio, their frequent presence on the table, and not least, one’s freely held, unregulated right to shoot them. Going off to shoot pigeons or geese, and hauling strings of them back home, became activities resonant with one’s experience of daily American life. The hunt meant so much more than mere utilitarian gain. To go hunting was to tap into the continent’s bounty, to supplement the table, to exercise your skill with a shotgun, perhaps to band together with neighbors after plowing. You also expressed your rights or ideals in a fledgling polity. Hunting was at once an ecological, economic and political thing to do, a social event and a sport. It was like telling a story to yourself, about yourself. Not actually a story told out loud: the hunt was more a cultural play, a story acted out in the course of day to day living, about your relationships to birds but also to one another—a story about where you lived, who your neighbors were, how you made a living and what you believed. In the course of their encounters with pigeons—as they invested nature with small worlds of meaning—people were also doing a great deal of thinking about themselves. | You could make especially emphatic meanings with pigeons. A waterfowl hunt brought together a few neighbors, but a pigeon hunt, which mobilized an entire county, enacted a more powerfully meaningful story about the social ties that knit these rural communities together. Likewise, to bag "thirty, forty, and fifty pigeons at a shot" was practically to caricature your political claims to American game. And if settlers relied on other game animals during lean times, the pigeon hunts, when necessary, enacted a more dramatic cultural play about the weak points of the colonial economy: in 1769, during a widespread crop failure in Vermont, pigeons staved off starvation for thirty thousand people for six weeks. Above all, more than any other piece of the New World, pigeon flocks symbolized the continent’s natural bounty. The salmon, geese and lobsters inspired believe-it-or-not reports, but the pigeons’ abundance seemed quite literally biblical, like "the quails that fell round the camp of Israel in the wilderness." Eventually the pigeons’ disappearance would symbolize Americans’ rapid conversion of a landscape of abundance into one of scarcity. The pigeons would narrate that story with special effectiveness, too."

It has been an interesting 3-4 days out at the point. Before the 28th, there was very little movement for a few days. Luckily, a cold front passed through on the night of the 28th. From the 28-30 many ducks, loons, and Bonaparte’s Gulls moved through. Yesterday held the biggest highlight with an adult Long-tailed Jaeger; it’s long tail streamers still present. | Results from 9/28-2770 waterbirds: | Duck numbers and diversity were great. The list included Wood Duck (4), Gadwall (4), American Wigeon (452), American Black Duck (1), Mallard (13), Blue-winged Teal (5), Northern Shoveler (11), Northern Pintail (20), Green-winged Teal (28), Redhead (473), Greater Scaup (1051), Lesser Scaup (25), Surf Scoter (2), White-winged Scoter (7), Common Merganser (3), and Red-breasted Merganser (29). | Loons and grebes moved by in small but steady numbers. Red-throated Loon (19), Common Loon (36), Horned Grebe (18), and Red-necked Grebe (61) were recorded. | Bonaparte’s Gulls had their first push of the season. A total of 295 moved by the point. You never know what might show up with BOGU flocks but the only other species that appeared was Common Tern (2). | The evening flight was slow but three Forester’s Terns along with 31 Common Terns moved past the point.

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Seney’s list of commonly seen critters reads like a wildlife watcher’s wish list. There are excellent opportunities to view bald eagles, common loons, trumpeter swans, ospreys, sandhill cranes, white-tailed deer, and beavers. Trumpeter swans were reintroduced to the refuge in the early 1990s. Since then, they have flourished and now form one of the largest resident flocks in the Midwest. Some lucky visitors also catch glimpses of black bears, bobcats, river otters, and moose. Gray wolves are found at Seney, but sightings are rare. All told, the refuge is home to more than 200 kinds of birds, 45 mammals, and 26 fish. | The 7-mile Marshland Wildlife Drive is a must for wildlife viewers visiting the refuge. Open dawn to dusk, May 15-October 15, this one-way auto tour route is constructed on the tops of water control dikes. The route takes visitors alongside open water ponds and wetlands, sedge meadows, and through forests. These diverse habitats attract many native and migratory wildlife, many of which can be seen at close range on both sides of the auto route, and often seen in the pine stands growing along many of the dikes. The drive has three wheelchair accessible wildlife observation decks.

The Bowline is identical in structure to the Sheet Bend – in both knots a bight locks into a loop. However, in the Bowline the tying is carried out using the bight whereas in the Sheet Bend it is usual to use the loop.