![]() I’d already counted robins, fortunately…then just like that, the hawk took off and the wild screams followed right after him…Elvis has left the building. ![]() I couldn’t take my eyes off the hawk long enough to see exactly what the other birds were Merlin later told me “robins.” Really? I have read that robins are the birds whose warnings make all others take cover but I have never heard them so loud, in such stereo sound. Smaller birds clamored all around the whole time some were quite near the hawk, almost like groupies. I stood as still as I could, videoing that bird for over two minutes while he cocked his head, observing me (does he have a checklist, too?). I was pretty much done.Ī little farther down the wooded path, a sudden loud “screaming” of birds- an unmistakable warning of danger, as the hawk sailed by to land on a low pine branch. I added the hawk to my list as I headed back to the car, exhausted but elated with my bird inventory. And then the hawk ran-yes, ran!-into the woods. With its beak it grabbed a little snake I’d have never seen otherwise. Then a huge bird fell straight down from the sky and landed in the brush few feet in front of me.Ī red-shouldered hawk. In addition to those I noted at home, Merlin Sound ID picked up scarlet and summer tanagers, pine warblers, a Swainson’s thrush, Eastern phoebes, brown-headed cowbirds, white-breasted nuthatches, Eastern wood pee-wees, red-bellied woodpeckers and downy woodpeckers, Eastern towhees, chimney swifts, ovenbirds, and the American goldfinch. The trip to the lake yielded over thirty species of birds. ![]() The zoom on the phone can only do so much. ![]() Here’s what Merlin Sound ID (a Cornell Lab app on my phone) told me I was hearing out front and on my back deck:Īfter duly noting the ospreys, I made a note to self: Get a good digital camera ASAP. I threw on my robe and went outside to start my count as the earth swelled with bird chorus. This day, however, the dawn singer was a robin. Lately it’s been a mockingbird, which, I’ve learned, is usually a male singing while the female incubates eggs. It began when I woke up to birdsong early Saturday morning. She’s in Georgia, I’m in North Carolina, but we are birds of the same feather in countless ways, equally excited for this bird-counting day. In the common interest of science, conservation, and celebration, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology invites bird lovers around the world to count all birds seen or heard on Global Big Day and to enter this data in official checklists.Īnd so I joined Team eBird with my friend and fellow blogger-poet, Kim Johnson. It has a global outreach and is an effective tool to help raise global awareness of the threats faced by migratory birds, their ecological importance, and the need for international cooperation to conserve them. As defined on the WMBD website: World Migratory Bird Day is an annual awareness-raising campaign highlighting the need for the conservation of migratory birds and their habitats. World Migratory Bird Day, to be more precise, a global celebration occurring on the second Saturdays of May and October. It was to be a day filled with birds…more than I could even count, although I had to try. I was enchanted by birds then, and I am exponentially enchanted now, which is why I woke up so excited last Saturday. I couldn’t wait for my father to take me to the store where I’d pick out my first pet: a parakeet. Was there a childhood birthday when you woke up excited beyond description for what you hoped that day would bring? It was like that when I turned six.
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