Hoping for hummingbirds

My hopes for hummingbirds in the yard that I mentioned last month were dashed. I guess that will continue to be an every other year event.

But the butterflies almost made up for the lack of hummingbirds. The Monarchs continued in good numbers through the first half of the month. After rains finally came early in September, Painted Lady butterflies arrived en masse, not just in the yard, but also all over the area. If you had any flowers, you probably saw them. There were almost small “clouds” of them sometimes as you walked past the flowers. I could get within 6 inches of them and watch them feeding at flowers. Sometimes they would share a flower with another butterfly or a bee. They would also check out anything colorful in the yard or on your clothing. I happened to lay a mallet in the grass and within a couple of minutes Painted Ladies landed on the red rubber side and the yellow plastic side to see if this was some new kind of flower. The experts say that Painted Ladies would normally be spread out over the summer but because of dry conditions they didn’t emerge until the September rains, and then all emerged at once.

The backyard birds have been the usual; no migrants, at least, that I saw in September. The most interesting was a frontyard, rather than backyard, sighting. On the second of the month, I walked into the front yard just in time to see a Cooper’s Hawk taking off from the boulevard with a hapless Pigeon. I ran inside, grabbed my binoculars, ran across the street, and located the hawk with its prey in a neighbor’s backyard tree. It moved with its prey to another tree, and then took off again, flying out of sight. I made it back home without any neighbors calling police about the “peeping Tom” or peeping John, as the case may be.

As I wondered about several years ago, do many people see hawks or falcons with prey in the neighborhood? If they do, no one ever tells me about it. I also saw a Cooper’s Hawk (the same one?) in the park on two occasions about one week later.

The hawk was one of the few unusual finds in the park last month. I generally find some migrating warblers in September but did not see any this year. The usual ducks and turtles seem to be doing fine. Small numbers of Ring-billed Gulls and Crows have made their regular fall appearance and a few Canada Geese have made short stops. I heard what must have been a very large flock of Canada Geese going south the night of the 24th.

The Great Blue Heron was on the island most of the time for the first two-thirds of the month. I saw an Eastern Phoebe on the island one day mid-month and a few Flickers at various areas of the park late in the month. Some years, I have seen many more Flickers in the fall. I may just have missed them, or they and other migrants may be later than usual this year.

One thing I did not see was a rabid bat. But one was reported on radio, TV and in the daily newspaper on September 9. The bat was found outside the park building near the northwest corner by the boat. No one was known to have been bitten by the bat. All the few bats I have seen this year seemed healthy and happy.

Back to migration. While migration has been slow through the prestigious Powderhorn neighborhood, the same cannot be said for Hawk Ridge in Duluth. An amazing 102,000-plus hawks came through Hawk Ridge on September 15. Of these, 101,698 were Broad-winged Hawks. The others were obviously much smaller numbers of various hawks, falcons and eagles. Extremely skilled and careful people do the counting. (They don’t just make things up, like some members of our Federal government do.) This number is more than twice as high as any other one-day total and way higher than they usually count during the whole fall migration (on average, a little more than 70,000 hawks). The Friends of Hawk Ridge big weekend event was September 12, 13 and 14. I hope that some of the many people at that event (from all around the country) stayed an extra day to get in on a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

I have been to the weekend events various times, but was not there this year. The events include local and national hawk experts, hawk watching, guess-the-number-of-hawks contests, hawk and songbird banding, and guided songbird, shorebird and waterfowl watching trips around the Duluth area. They try to get all the hawks to show up on that weekend, but hawks are contrarion sorts, and show up at various times in September, October and November.

On the days I have been there, there have never been more than 1,000 hawks, sometimes way fewer, but always good birding and a great time. Seeing 100,000 of any kind of bird on any day would be practically beyond imagination. Regular readers know that I am a believer in and a booster of this neighborhood, but I have to admit, for some reason, many birds prefer Lake Superior to Powderhorn.
Off on a somewhat related tangent, as I write this, I am sitting in a dark bar in Casablanca. Actually, I am on my more or less annual trip to Winter Park, Colorado. Last Saturday, I was wearing my Hawk Ridge shirt and learned that the night’s program at Rocky Mountain National Park was about hawk migration, so naturally I went. I even saw two hawks on my way to the program. The knowledgeable young woman from the Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory first talked about the environmental problems and concerns of the observatory area, which is actually on the edge of what used to be the giant prairie that stretches from much of Minnesota to much of Colorado and a lot of other states. As in Minnesota, very little virgin prairie is left in Colorado. Intensive agricultural practices and unchecked development have made a mess of most of the interrelated habitat that birds and other creatures need. I could have been at a similar program in Minnesota. We are looking at the prairie from the other side; the intensive farming practices are somewhat different, but the results are about the same, an unsustainable mess. I apologize, I know the esteemed publisher, Mr. Felien, does not want any editorializing in Southside Pride.

Back to hawks. There are many similarities between the Colorado hawk watching and counting program and the Minnesota one. Two-thirds of the way through the program, the presenter mentioned that they counted in March. I had assumed, since it was fall, she was talking about fall migration. It turns out they have hawk concentrations along the mountains in spring, while Minnesota has hawk concentrations along Lake Superior in the fall. After the program and discussion were over, I talked to the young woman, showed her my Hawk Ridge shirt, told her about our 70,000 hawks a year average (theirs is 7,000), and told her about the 100,000-hawk day. She hid her jealousy as I continued to talk about Minnesota’s situation and shared some of the successful fundraising and educational programs, such as the adopt-a-hawk/songbird program.

As I have said for several months, maybe next month I will have more local bird sightings to write about.

Comments and observations are always welcome. Send them to me, in care of the Southside Pride. Thank you.