lucasferrier's Journal

For our birdwatching trip today, I went out with Gretchen to the intervals on cross country skis. We spent our hour and a half finding various places along the trail to look for birds. The habitat was nice and diverse, with the Winooski river providing terrain for water birds, plenty of trees for various songbirds and woodpeckers, and open fields that let us peruse large swaths of sky for larger birds. As noted in our observations, we saw plenty of interesting species, despite being loud on skis. I was especially excited to see the goldeneyes, which I barely spotted on the other side of the river. Even through binoculars, we could barely see them enough to get an ID, so I'm excited to try for find more up close.

For the assignment for today, we spend some time watching the white breasted nuthatch and a black capped chickadee. These birds are fairly similar in morphology, especially when it comes to wing structure. Both have mostly elliptical wings, and like to flit between branches in small bursts. One difference I noticed was that the nuthatch seemed like it spent more time in the same perch, exploring my traversing the tree on foot, while the chickadee spent more time flying between branches that were very close together. My guess for this difference in behavior is their difference in food sources and territory. Since nuthatches cache food and do not flock like chickadees do, they may be more inclined to stick to a specific area for foraging and food storage, while chickadees may be more likely to spend a small amount of time foraging at many different sites.

For my drawing today, I didn't have a lot of time to sit and sketch the birds that we saw. There was no feeder or anything to keep the birds in the area, and they were far away to be able to see the markings in detail. Instead, I drew one from a photo, just to get better acquainted with the markings of the bird. I couldn't figure out how to upload the drawing.