The Daily Bucket is a place where we get together and share the things we've noticed in the natural world around us. It might be that robins are building a nest in the old apple tree out back or that the crickets outside your window are keeping you awake at night or that coyote pups up on the ridge are beginning to sing with their parents every evening. Doesn't matter what it is, nothing noted is too big or too small, so please join in and tell us what is happening in your neck of the woods. Everyone is welcome. All we ask is that you give us an idea of where you're located.
Seattle. September 19, 2013.
For a bit over a decade now I've been counting birds once a week at three locations on the southwestern edge of Lake Washington, long enough that patterns have begun to emerge. Summer counts are always low, perhaps a dozen species over a day. Maybe it's because I, like Gilbert and Sullivan's Englishman, tend to venture out in the noonday sun. The birds might well be smarter than I am, resting in the shade. It might be that there just aren't that many birds to be seen in the summer, just the usual suspects - Black-capped Chickadees, Crows, Anna's Hummingbirds.
Here is this week's list, in order of sighting:
Chestnut-backed Chickadee
Robin
Crow
Anna's Hummingbird
Bewick's Wren
Glaucous-winged Gull
Black-capped Chickadee
Stellar's Jay
American Coot
Red-shafted Flicker
Spotteed Towhee
Gadwall
Double-crested Cormorant
Mallard
Pied-billed Grebe
Killdeer
Ring-billed Gull
UID Gull
The usual suspects are in that mix. That's why I call them "the usual suspects". I can count on them being there almost every week, all year round. But notice the absences. No swallows. Five Barn Swallows swooped over the lake on last week's count. This week they were gone. The Violet-green Swallows disappeared a couple of weeks ago. Both of them left right as they have every year. I probably won't even see them when I journey to LA in early November. They will have found their winter grounds far to the south.
In their place come the Coots, just three of them hustling their butts away from the shoreline as I approached. By January there will be flocks of them numbering in the hundreds at all three count locations. And Cormorants. The Cormorants seem to summer in the salt water to the west or the half salt/half fresh water mingling in the ship canal up north. I begin to look for them in mid-August. Some years they reward me early, splayed out in the sun on the summer swimming docks. This year the swimming docks have already been towed to their winter resting places. The Cormorants were perched on the pilings where the swimming docks were tied.
It was Chestnut-backed Chickadee that made me laugh out loud. His squeaky-toy voice was the first thing I heard when I started my count, made me look up in utter delight. He's early this year, usually arriving around Thanksgiving. I haven't a clue where he goes in the summer, maybe up into the mountains, but he is definitely a winter bird, and I am a winter person.
September 19, 2013. The first of the winter birds have returned.
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I'll be back around noon. Everyone is welcome to toss their observations into the Bucket. (And yes, you can remind me of this diary come December when I complain of the damp and the dark.)
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