Megan McCamy
Our first year here on High Prairie is now cycling into the second, summer turning to fall; and when we woke to chilly fog this morning I thought, wow! already?! The year went by fast.
Last year we watched the bluebirds, grosbeaks, yellow-rumped warblers and vultures leave after the summer. Then the Steller’s jays and juncos arrived, as well as lots of fog and then snow. The snow made a stunning background for the Steller’s jays – white contrasting their brilliant blue, silence opposed to their chatter. A Cooper’s hawk also liked the jays and made a regular meal of them in a pine out front, leaving a collection of blue feathers behind. Large bands of turkeys came poking and scratching about in every clump of grass and shrub, as if they were saying ‘Where are the bugs? The bugs? Where are they? You know, the bugs?’ as they moved across the field and on to the next. The nuthatches stayed in the area over the winter, and their busy hunting in the ponderosas and oaks is always fun to watch. The red breasted and white breasted nuthatches appeared to travel together up and down the tree trunks and branches, the red breasted keeping up a steady chirping that sounds like it is saying ‘yum, yum, yum’ as it eats insects from the bark. Creepers, too, hunted the insects on the ponderosa trunks, but quieter and mostly by themselves.
When the bluebirds came back in Spring it felt like a circle was being completed. And soon enough the grosbeaks, tanagers, and vultures were back too. The flycatchers again were doing their acrobatics in the pine clearing, and the call of the Western Wood-Pewee filled the evening with the song that had been the definition of the previous summer.
The next thing we waited for were the swifts. We had seen something last summer that we wanted to check on again, to make sure we had not been mistaken. In the evening we sat with our binoculars trained on an oak snag that has a moderate sized, south facing hole. Soon the swifts were circling overhead and occasionally one would swoop down and enter the hole. Then, a moment later we saw a bat appear, coming out of the hole to drop down toward the ground at the base of the tree. This pattern was repeated: a swift would fly in, and then a bat would drop out. We assume the bats flew away to do their night hunting since we never saw any at the base of the tree. We watched this on a few different evenings, and thought it seemed like a companionable arrangement between mammals and birds to share this snag – the birds out hunting during the day while the bats slept, and vice versa at night.
Now the bluebirds are moving about in big bands again, and I wonder how soon it will be before they will be gone and the cold weather and Steller’s jays will arrive, and so the next year here will have begun.
There are no days so delightful as those of a fine October.
-—Alexander Smith